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This is a scene that\nmust be familiar to many of our readers, for the traveller must have been\na dull and unobserving one, who, journeying between Cork and Dublin by\nway of Cahir, has not had his attention roused by its romantic features,\nand an impression of its grandeur and picturesqueness made upon his\nmemory, not easily to be effaced. Ardfinnan is indeed one of the very\nfinest scenes of its kind to be found in Ireland, and is almost equally\nimposing from every point from which it can be viewed. The Castle crowns\nthe summit of a lofty and precipitous rock, below and around which the\nSuir winds its way in graceful beauty, while its banks are connected by\na long and level bridge of fourteen arches, which tradition states is of\ncoeval erection with the fortress, and which, at all events, is of very\ngreat antiquity. On every side the most magnificent outlines of mountain\nscenery form the distant back-grounds; and every object which meets the\neye is in perfect harmony with the general character of the scene.\n\nArdfinnan is a village of considerable antiquity, and derives its present\nname, which signifies Finnan's Height or Hill, from St Finnan the leper,\na celebrated ecclesiastic who founded a church and monastery here in\nthe seventh century, previously to which the place had borne the name\nof Druim-abhradb. Of this religious establishment there are however no\nremains, as it was plundered and burnt by the English in 1179; and the\npresent castle was erected on its site in 1185, by Prince John, then Earl\nof Morton, of whom it has been remarked that he achieved nothing during\nhis stay of eight months in Ireland, but the construction of this and two\nother castles, namely, Lismore and Tiobrad Fachtna, now Tibraghny on the\nSuir, which he erected with a view to the conquest of Munster. From these\ncastles he sent parties in various directions to plunder the country: but\nbeing met by the Irish under the command of Donall O'Brien, Dermod Mac\nCarthy, and Roderick O'Conor, they were defeated with great slaughter,\nfour knights having been killed at Ardfinnan; after which John was glad\nto return to England.\n\nPrince John, however, or those under whose advice he acted, showed a\nconsiderable degree of judgment and military skill in the selection of\nArdfinnan as the site of a fortress, which commanded one of the chief\npasses into South Munster; and the castle itself was of a princely\nmagnificence, and of such a degree of strength as must have rendered it\nimpregnable before the use of artillery. Its general form, as its ruins\nstill sufficiently show, was that of a parallelogram, strengthened by\nsquare towers at the corners, and having a strong entrance gateway.\nThis gateway still remains, as well as the greater part of the walls;\nbut the edifices of the interior are in a state of great dilapidation,\nand only part of the roof of one room remains. It is stated by the\neditor of Lewis's Topographical Dictionary, but on what authority we\nknow not, that this castle belonged to the Knights Templars, and that\non the suppression of that establishment it was granted to the Knights\nof St John of Jerusalem, and subsequently to the Bishop of Waterford.\nBut be this as it may, it was preserved as a military fortress till\nit was dismantled in 1649 by that great destroyer of Irish castles,\nOliver Cromwell, who, planting his cannon on the opposite hill near the\nbridge, made a breach in the walls, which speedily induced the garrison\nto surrender. The breach there is still shown, and according to an\nold tourist the following story is told in connection with it:--\"When\nthe place was besieged by Oliver, a butcher was within the walls, who\nwhile the siege lasted could never be prevailed on to come out of the\nroom where he had placed himself; but when the breach was made, and the\nsoldiers began to storm, he took up a handspike, and defended the breach\nalmost alone for some time, and knocked down several soldiers that strove\nto enter; but finding none to second him, he retired without the least\nhurt. When the castle was surrendered, he was asked why he would not come\nto the walls before the breach was made? He replied, 'Damn them, I did\nnot mind what was doing on the outside, but I could not bear their coming\ninto the house,' as he called it.\"\n\nArdfinnan is a parish in the barony of Iffa and Offa west, county of\nTipperary, above four miles S. S. E. from Cahir, and contains about\nnine hundred inhabitants. The village itself, which extends into the\nadjoining parish of Ballybacon, contains above three hundred. It was once\na place of greater note, and appears to have had a corporation, as it is\non record, 4th of Edward II (1311), that a grant of \"pontage for three\nyears\" was made \"to the Bailiffs and good men of Ardfynan\" at the request\nof the Bishop of Limerick.\n\n P.\n\n\n\n\nPUSS IN BROGUES, A LEGEND.\n\n\nIt was about Christmas in the year 1831 that I received an invitation\nto spend the holidays with a friend who resided in a valley embosomed\namongst the loftiest of those mountains which form the boundary between\nthe King's and Queen's counties. The name of my host was Garret Dalton;\nhe held a considerable tract of land at a low rent, and by hard\nworking and thrifty living contrived not only to support his family in\ncomparative comfort, but to \"lay up a snug penny in the horn\" for his\nonly daughter Nanny, who was at this time about fourteen years of age,\nand, as her fond father often proudly boasted, \"the patthern ov as purty\na colleen as you'd find from the seven churches of Clonmacnoise to the\nhill ov Howth--wherever that was.\"\n\nGarret was generous and hospitable; his house \"was known to all the\nvagrant train,\" and the way-worn pilgrim, the wandering minstrel, the\nitinerant \"boccough,\" and the strolling vender of the news and gossip of\nthe day, were always secure of a welcome reception at his comfortable\nfire-side.\n\nAmongst the most constant of his guests was one Maurice O'Sullivan,\na native of the county of Cork. Maurice was a most venerable-looking\npersonage--tall, gaunt, athletic, and stone blind. He was about eighty\nyears of age; his white hair flowed on his shoulders, and he played\nthe Irish bagpipes delightfully. He was the lineal descendant of a\nfamily still famous in the annals of the \"green isle;\" and although now\ncompelled to wander through his native land in the garb and character\nof a blind piper, he had once seen better days, and was possessed\nof education and intelligence far superior to most of his caste. He\nwas intimately acquainted with the sad history of his country, was\ndevotedly attached to the dogmas of the fairy creed, could recite\ncharms and interpret dreams, and was deeply conversant in all those\nwitch legends and traditions for which the Munster peasantry are so\npeculiarly celebrated. Hence Maurice was always a special favourite with\nmy enthusiastic friend, who regularly entertained him at his own table,\nand who, when they would have disposed of their plain but comfortable\nand substantial meal, would treat his blind guest to repeated \"rounds\"\nof good \"half and half,\" composed of water from the spring, and the\n_potteen_ of the valley. It was night-fall when I arrived, and the happy\nfamily, consisting of Garret and his wife, Nanny their eldest girl, and\nher two little brothers, with Paddy Bawn the \"sarvint boy,\" and Ouny the\n\"girl,\" including blind Maurice, were collected in a smiling group around\nthe immense turf fire. In that day teetotalism had made little progress\nin Ireland; a huge copper kettle was therefore soon hissing on the fire;\na large grey-beard of mountain-dew stood on the huge oak-table; tumblers\nand glasses glittered in their respective places: and, in a few minutes\nwe were all engaged in discussing the merits of a large jug of potteen\npunch. All were happy; Garret talked, his wife smiled; told all the \"new\nnews\" of the Queen's county; whilst the spaces were filled up by blind\nMaurice, who played several of his most delightful national airs on his\nantique-looking pipes, whilst invariably as he concluded each successive\nlay, he would enrich the treat by some tradition connected with the piece\nhe had been playing, and which threw an indescribable charm not only\naround the performance, but the performer.\n\n\"That's a curious thing,\" remarked Garret, as the piper concluded one\nparticular rant; \"it's a quare medley, sometimes gay and sometimes sad,\nand sometimes like the snarlin' of a growlin' dog, and again exactly like\nthe mewing of a cat.\"\n\nThe piper smiled. \"And have you,\" he asked, \"never heard me play that\ntune before?--and did I never tell you the strange story connected with\nit?\"\n\n\"Never,\" was the reply.\n\n\"Well, that is strange enough; that tune is an old favourite in Munster,\nand I thought the whole world had heard of it.\"\n\n\"It never kem to Glen-Mac-Tir, any how,\" replied the farmer, \"or I'd\nsurely have heard of it. How d'ye call the name of it?\"\n\n\"_Caith-na-brogueen_--that is in English, Puss in Brogues,\" said the\npiper.\n\n\"Well,\" said Garret, \"it's often I heard of Puss in Boots, but I never\nheard of Puss in Brogues afore.\"\n\n\"Well, I'll tell you and this good company all about it,\" said Maurice,\nlaying down his pipes and wiping his forehead.\n\n\"Ay, but afore you begin,\" said Garret, \"take another dhrop to wet your\nwhistle, and you'll get on the betther with your story.\"\n\nThe piper seized the flowing tumbler again, and raising it to his lips,\ngaily exclaimed, whilst his attenuated hand shook nervously beneath the\nweight of the smoking goblet,\n\n\"_Sho-dhurtlh_, your healths, my friends, glory to our noble selves; and\nif this be war, may we never have more peaceable times.\"\n\n\"Amen,\" was the fervent response of every one present.\n\n\"Now for the _Caith-na-brogueen_,\" said Garret.\n\n\"Ay, and a wild and strange tale it is,\" said Maurice. \"However, it is a\npopular tradition in South Munster, and often when a boy have I listened\nto it, whilst my eyes, now dark for ever, would glisten with delight, and\nI would even fear to breathe lest one syllable of the legend might escape\nme.\" Then emitting a deep-drawn sigh, and again wiping his polished brow,\nhe thus began.\n\n'At the foot of a hill in a lonely district of the county of Cork, about\na dozen miles from my native village, there lived in old times a poor\nman named Larry Roche. He was, they say, descended from that family of\nthe Roches once so mighty in the south of Ireland, and some branches of\nwhich still retain a considerable degree of their former consequence and\nrespectability. Poor Larry, however, although the blood of kings might\nflow through his veins, was neither rich nor respectable; and his only\nmeans of support was a patch of barren land, which he held from that\ncelebrated sportsman Squire B----, in consideration of his services\nas care-keeper of a vast extent of bog and heath, the property of the\nsquire, and which extended far westward of poor Larry Roche's cabin. Yet\nLarry was not discontented with his situation. His father and grandfather\nhad lived and died in the same cabin; and although sometimes he might\nfeel disposed to envy the fine times which the sporting squire enjoyed,\nyet on cool reflection he would console himself with the consideration\nthat \"it was not every one that was born with a silver spoon in his\nmouth,\" and that even squire B---- himself, as grand as he was, was\non the \"look down,\" or he would not spend so much of his time wading\nthrough fens and bogs at home, but like his ancestors be lavishing his\nthousands amongst the _Sassenaghs_ at the other side of the lough, or\ndriving about on the continent. Thus rolled away poor Larry's days in\npoverty and contentment. In the shooting season his time was occupied\nin following his master over heath and hillock with his game-bag on his\nshoulder, and his \"dhudeen\" in his teeth, whilst the rest of the year\nwas spent in lounging about the ditches of the neighbourhood, chatting\nwith the crones of the vicinity about his family connexions, or the\nfairies of Glendharig, or squabbling with his good woman and his young\nones: for Larry was married; and as his wife was exactly a counterpart of\nhimself, every hour of course gave fresh cause for that bickering and\ndisagreement so often the result of untimely and ill-assorted marriages.\n\nThe only domestic animal in or about Larry Roche's cabin was a\nferocious-looking old black tom-cat, far bigger and stronger than any\ncat ever seen in that part of the country. His fur was black, he had\nstrong whiskers, his nails were like a tiger's, and at the end of his\ntail was fixed a claw or \"gaff\" as sharp and hooked as a falcon's beak;\nhis eyes also flashed by night with an appalling glare, and his cry was\na savage howl, baffling all description, and unlike any sound ever heard\nfrom any other animal. He was as singular in his habits, too, as in his\nappearance. He was never known to demand a morsel of food; and if offered\nany, he would reject it with indignation. Every evening at twilight he\nleft the fire-side, and spent the night scouring over moor and heather,\nand at daybreak would return from his foray, gaining access through\nthe low chimney of the cabin, and be found in the morning in his usual\nposition on the hob-stone. There he would sit from morning till night;\nand when Larry and Betty and the \"childre\" were chatting in a group\naround the fire, the cat would watch them intently, and if the nature\nof their conversation was such as to excite laughter or merriment, he\nwould growl in a low tone, evidently dissatisfied; but if their dialogues\nwere held in a jarring, angry strain, as sometimes happened, he would\npurr hoarsely and loudly, whilst the wagging of his tail testified the\npleasure he felt in their feuds and dissensions. The family had often\nbeen advised to make away with him, but superstitious awe or family\nprejudice prevented them; and although the whole neighbourhood averred\nthat \"he was no right thing,\" yet for the reasons I have stated his\nowners never could be induced to make any attempt to banish or destroy\nhim.\n\nOne dreary evening in October, Larry returned from his day's wandering\nwith the squire over the bleak bogs, and although it rained, and the\nwind blew bitterly, he appeared in much better spirits than was usual\nwith him on similar occasions. His wife wondered, and made more than\nusual preparations to please him. She trimmed the fire, and assisted him\nin taking off his dripping clothes, and then commenced pouring out her\nsympathy for his sufferings.\n\n\"Oh, never mind,\" said Larry; \"I have good news.\"\n\n\"Arrah, sit down,\" said Betty, \"and tell us what it is.\"\n\nLarry sat down, and putting his hand in his pocket, pulled out a\nglittering gold coin.\n\n\"Arrah, Larry, avourneen, what's that?\" asked the woman.\n\n\"Faith, it's a rale yellow boy, a good goold guinea,\" replied Larry. \"The\nsquire gev it to me, and tould me to buy a pair of brogues with it, and\ndrink his health with the balance.\"\n\n\"Och, musha! then, long life to him,\" vociferated Betty; \"and, Larry,\na-hagur, will you buy the brogues?\"\n\n\"Faix and I will,\" said Larry, \"and another rattling pair for yourself,\na-chorra.\"\n\n\"Ay, daddy, and another pair for me,\" shouted young Larry.\n\n\"And another for me,\" cried Thady.\n\n\"And another for me,\" chuckled Charley.\n\n\"Ay, and two pair for me,\" cried the black cat, speaking in a wild\nunearthly tone from the hob-stone, and breaking forth into a horrible\nlaugh.\n\n\"Devil knock the day-lights out of yez all,\" cried Larry, without seeming\nto take any notice of the strange circumstance, though his heart died\nwithin him with terror and surprise.\n\n\"Lord have mercy on us!\" faintly ejaculated Betty, signing her brow,\nwhilst all the children started up in terror, and ran behind their\nparents in the chimney-corner.\n\nAll this time the cat remained silent on the hob; but his aspect, at all\ntimes terrible, now seemed perfectly monstrous and hideous. For some time\na death-like silence was preserved, but at last Larry plucked up courage\nto address the speaking animal.\n\n\"And, in the name of God,\" he began, \"what business have you with\nbrogues?\"\n\n\"Ask me no questions,\" replied the cat, \"but get me the brogues as soon\nas possible.\"\n\n\"Oh, by all means,\" replied Larry, quite gently, \"you must have them; and\nwhy did you not ask them long ago, and you should have got them?\"\n\n\"My time was not come,\" replied Puss, briefly.\n\n\"Well,\" resumed Larry, \"to-morrow is Sunday, and at daybreak I will\nstart off to my gossip Phadruig Donovan's, in Mill-street, to engage the\nbrogues; he is the best brogue-maker in the county, and he is my first\ngossip besides.\"\n\n\"I know all that,\" said the cat, as he leaped up the chimney, on his\ndeparture to the scene of his midnight wanderings. \"Good night, Larry,\nand don't forget your engagement;\" and he disappeared through the\ngathering gloom, to the great relief of poor Larry and his terrified\nfamily.\n\nThat was a sad and uneasy night with poor Larry and his wife and\nchildren. They did not go to bed at all, but sat trembling at the fire,\nexpecting every moment that the black imp would return with legions of\nfiends to carry them away, body and bones, to the regions below. Numerous\nwere the plans proposed for getting rid of their old companion, but all\nwere rejected--some as inefficient, others as impracticable; and the\nonly point on which they could finally agree, was, that their days were\nnumbered, and that perhaps before morning their blood would be streaming\non the hearth-stone, and their souls wandering through mire and morass,\nthe prey of troops of fiends.\n\nAt last the morning dawned, and as Larry disconsolately enough was\npreparing to set forward on his journey to Mill-street, the cat jumped\ndown the chimney, and took his usual place on the hob.\n\n\"Well, I am going now,\" said Larry; \"have you any directions to give\nabout the brogues?\"\n\nThe cat did not reply, but uttered a hideous growl, which fell heavily on\nthe poor fellow's heart; so kissing his wife and children, and commending\nthem to the protection of God, he set out on his sorrowful journey.\n\nHe had not gone far when he perceived through the dim grey of the\nmorning a human figure approaching; and on advancing a little nearer, he\nfound that it was a very old man, of extremely diminutive stature and\nforbidding aspect. He wore an old grey coat and an equally old woollen\ncap, and his thin white hair descended to his knees; he was barefoot, and\ncarried a walking-stick in his hand.\n\n\"Good morrow, and God save you, Larry Roche,\" said the old man as he came\nup.\n\n\"A bright morning to you,\" answered Larry.\n\n\"How is every rope's length of you, Larry, and how is the woman and the\nchildre at home?\" demanded the stranger.\n\n\"Faix, purty well, considherin,\" replied Larry. \"But you have a great\nadvantage of me.\"\n\n\"How's that?\" said the old man.\n\n\"Why, because you know me so well, while I have no more knowledge of you\nthan of the man in the moon.\"\n\n\"Och, I'd know your skin in a tan-yard,\" said the old chap, laughing.\n\"But is it possible you don't know me?\"\n\n\"Faix if God Almighty knows no more about you than I do, the devil will\nhave a prey of you one of those days,\" replied Larry.\n\n\"Well, say no more about that,\" said the old fellow, rather angrily. \"But\nwhere are you going this blessed Sunday morning, Larry?\"\n\n\"To Mill-street,\" said Larry.\n\n\"All the ways--musha! what's taking you to Mill-street, Larry?\"\n\n\"My feet and my business,\" said Larry, something piqued at the old\nfellow's inquisitive importunity.\n\n\"You are very stiff this morning, Larry,\" said the stranger with a grin.\n\n\"I am worse than that,\" said the poor fellow; \"the heart within me is\nsick and sore.\"\n\n\"And what troubles you now, Larry?\"\n\nLarry hereupon told the whole of his strange misfortunes to the stranger,\nending with a deep \"ochone,\" and wishing, if it was the will of God, that\n\"his four bones were stretched in the church-yard of Kilebawn.\"\n\n\"You'll be there time enough for your welcome, may be,\" said the old\nchap, \"but that's neither here nor there. What will you do with the black\ncat?\"\n\n\"Och, sweet bad luck to all the cats alive, both black and white,\"\nimprecated Larry.\n\n\"That cat's a devil--a fiend,\" said the stranger; \"and more than that, he\nintends to murder you and your family this very night.\"\n\nLarry groaned and crossed his forehead, whilst the stranger's hideous\ncountenance was convulsed with half-suppressed laughter.\n\n\"Well, Larry,\" said he again, \"I am your friend, and I have power to save\nyou and yours, on one condition; and that is, that you will stop up the\nwindow in the back wall of your cabin.\"\n\n\"Faith and I'll do that with a heart and a half,\" said Larry. \"But what\ndo you want that for?\"\n\n\"I'll tell you that another time,\" said the little man.\n\n\"Go home now, and say you can't proceed to Mill-street without taking the\nwife and children with you, to leave the measure of their feet for the\nbrogues. Tell the cat also that he must come too, to have his fit taken;\nthen tie him up in a bag, and bring him with you; fasten this hair around\nyour neck,\" added the old man, at the same time extracting a single white\nhair from his head, \"and all the imps of hell cannot hurt you. But mind\nand don't open your lips from the time you leave home till you come to\nthis spot; and when you arrive here with the cat, sit down and wait the\nevent.\"\n\nA thick fog now suddenly rose, and the old man was hidden from the sight\nof Larry, who, greatly overjoyed, returned to his cabin to execute the\norders he had got, and was met by his wife, who was trembling for his\nsafe return, but did not expect him sooner than night.\n\n\"Musha! Larry agragal, you're welcome,\" she exclaimed; \"and what in the\nname of God turned you back?\"\n\n\"I am coming for you and the gorsoons; you must all come to Mill-street\nto have your measure taken for the brogues.\"\n\n\"And must I go too?\" asked the cat.\n\n\"Faix you must,\" said Larry; \"if natural Christians couldn't be fitted\nwithout bein' on the spot, it's hard to expect that you could.\"\n\n\"And how am I to travel?\" he asked.\n\n\"In a bag on my back,\" replied Larry. \"I'll whip you through the country\nlike a dinner to a hog, and man or mortal shall never be the wiser, if\nthe brogue-maker keeps his tongue quiet.\"\n\n\"I'll go bail he will,\" said Puss, \"for I'll kill him the very night the\nbrogues is brought home.\"\n\n\"Lord have mercy on him!\" ejaculated Larry, his heart sinking within him.\n\n\"Pray for yourself--may be you want mercy as well as him,\" said the cat.\n\nThe preparations were soon completed, and the cat being put into the bag,\nLarry tied the mouth of it firmly with a piece of cord, and then slung it\non his shoulder; and after acquainting his wife with his adventure with\nthe old man on \"Moin-more,\" he departed, whistling the air of \"Thamama\nThulla.\"\n\nHe soon gained the spot where he had parted with the old man, and looking\nround and perceiving nobody, he sat down on the green fern, still holding\nthe bag which contained his terrible fellow-traveller.\n\n\"What stops you Larry?\" asked the cat.\n\nLarry, recollecting the old man's injunction, spoke not, but continued\nwhistling.\n\n\"Does anything ail you, Larry?\"\n\n\"Whoo, hoo, phoo, hoo--Thamemo Chodladh.\"\n\n\"Is Betty and the childre to the fore?\"\n\n\"Thamemo Chodladh.\"\n\n\"Bad luck to you and your 'Thamemo Chodladh,'\" cried the cat.\n\n\"That the prayers may fall on the preacher,\" said Larry to himself.\n\nThe cat now began to make desperate efforts to escape from the bag,\nwhilst Larry redoubled his exertions to detain him. His attention,\nhowever, was soon arrested by the cry of hounds, and on looking westward,\nhe perceived, rapidly approaching over the morass, a big black man\nmounted on a black horse, and accompanied by a numerous pack of black\ndogs.\n\n\"Ochone,\" thought Larry, \"now I am coached of all ever happened me. Here\nis the chap's black friends coming to rescue him, and they won't leave a\ntoothful a-piece in my carcass.\"\n\n\"Let me go, Larry,\" said the cat, \"let me go, and I'll show you where\nthere's a cart-load of gold buried in the ground.\" But Larry remained\nsilent, and meantime the horseman and hounds came up.\n\n\"Good morrow and good luck, Larry Roche,\" said the black equestrian, with\na grim smile.\n\n\"Good morrow, kindly, your worship,\" said Larry.\n\n\"Is that a fox you have in the bag, Larry?\"\n\n\"No, in troth,\" said Larry, \"though I believe he is not much honester\nthan a fox.\"\n\n\"I must see what it is, any how,\" said the sable horseman, with a\ngesticulation which convinced Larry at once that he was the fellow whom\nhe had seen before.\n\nSo Larry opened the bag, and out jumped Puss, and away with him over the\nbog like a flash of lightning. The wild huntsman hallooed his dogs, and\nthe pursuit commenced, but the cat was soon surrounded and torn to pieces.\n\n\"Now,\" said the horseman, \"I must bid you farewell;\" and off he went;\nand then Larry returned home with the happy tidings, and the squire's\nguinea was spent in the purchase of sundry bottles of \"Tom Corcoran's\"\nbest potteen; but we must do Larry the justice to say that his agreement\nwith the old man was punctually performed, and the back window stopped as\neffectually as mud and stones could do it.\n\nA few nights after, Larry was aroused from his sleep by the merry tones\nof bagpipes at his fire-side, and getting up, he perceived the kitchen\nilluminated with a bright, reddish glare, whilst on the hob-stone he\nsaw, snugly seated, the ever remembered little old man playing a set of\nbagpipes, to the delightful tones of which hundreds of little fellows\nwith red caps and red small-clothes were capering about the floor.\n\n\"God bless the man and the work,\" said Larry, \"and warm work yez have ov\nit this hour ov the night.\"\n\nThe little fellow hereupon set up a shout, and rushing to the door, flew\nthrough it, one of them striking poor Larry a box on the right eye, which\nblinded it.\n\n\"Goodnight, Misthur Larry,\" said the piper; \"and how is your four bones?\nand how is the good woman that owns you?\"\n\n\"Och, no fear at all ov the woman,\" replied Larry; \"and as for my bones,\nthey are well enough; but, faith, my right eye, I believe, is in whey in\nmy head.\"\n\n\"Well, it will teach you how to speak to your betters in future,\" said\nthe little piper; \"never mintion the holy name again, when talking to the\n'good people.'\n\n\"But, Larry, listen: I'll now tell you why I wanted you to stop up your\nback window.\n\n\"You must know that this cabin of yours stands on the middle of a fairy\npass. We often come this way in our wanderings through the air in cold\nnights, and often we wished to warm ourselves at your fire-side; but as\nthere was a window in the back of your cabin, we had not power to stop,\nbut were compelled to pursue our journey. Now that the window is stopped,\nwe can come in and remain as long as we wish, and resume our journey\nthrough the door by which we enter. We pass this way almost every night,\nand you need never feel in the least apprehensive of injury so long as\nyou let us pursue our pastimes undisturbed.\"\n\n\"I'll be bound me or mine shall never annoy one of yez,\" said Larry.\n\n\"That's a good fellow, Larry,\" said the little chap; \"and now take those\npipes and play us a tune.\"\n\n\"Och, the devil a chanter I ever fingered,\" said Larry, \"since I was\nchristened.\"\n\n\"No matter,\" said the little fellow; \"I'll go bail you'll play out of the\nsoot.\"\n\nLarry \"yoked\" on the pipes, and lilted up in darling style a merry tune,\nwhilst the old chap was ready to split with laughing.\n\n\"What's the name of that tchune?\" said Larry.\n\n\"_Caith-na-brogueen_,\" replied the fairy piper; \"a tune I composed in\nmemory of your escape from the cat; a tune that will soon become a\nfavourite all over Munster.\"\n\nLarry handed back the pipes; the little man placed them in a red bag,\nand, bidding his host \"good night,\" dashed up the chimney.\n\nThe next night, and almost every following night, the din of fairy\nrevels might be heard at Larry Roche's fire-side, and Larry himself was\ntheir constant companion in their midnight frolics. He soon became the\nbest performer on the bagpipes in the south of Ireland, and after some\ntime surrendered his cabin to the sole occupation of the \"good people,\"\nand wandered with his family through all the Munster counties, and was\nwelcome and kindly treated wherever he came. After some time, the cabin\nfrom neglect fell, and offered no further impediment to the fairy host in\ntheir midnight wanderings, whilst Larry followed a life of pleasure and\npeace, far from the scene of his former perils and privations.\n\nThe cat, of course, was never seen after; but the peasantry of the\nneighbourhood say that the screams of the infernal fiend, mingled with\nthe deep howlings of hell-hounds and the savage yellings of the sable\nhunter, may be distinctly heard in horrid chorus amongst the fens and\nmorasses of the broad Moin-more.'\n\nThus ended the strange tale of Maurice O'Sullivan, who in addition to\nthe unanimous applause of the company present, was treated to another\nflowing tumbler of the barley bree, which he tossed off to the health of\nthose who, to use his own words, were \"good people\" in earnest--not fays\nor fairies, however, but the hospitable folks of Glen-Mac-Tir; adding at\nthe same time that he was resolved to gratify the lovers of legendary\nlore with another of his wild Munster tales on the following night.\n\n J. K.\n\n\n\n\nITINERANT GOLDSMITHS OF INDIA AND SUMATRA.\n\n\nIn the production of beautiful specimens of mechanical art, much more\ndepends upon the natural taste and ingenuity of the workman than upon\nthe completeness and perfection of his tools. To those who are not much\nacquainted with the mechanical arts, this may sound somewhat like a\nself-evident proposition; yet it is far, very far indeed, from being\nconsidered such by European mechanics in general, and by our own in\nparticular. So commonly is the blame of clumsy workmanship laid upon\nthe badness or the want of tools, that an anecdote is related of a man,\nwho, upon being spoken to by a friend for having committed numerous\ngrammatical errors in a letter which he had just written, cursed his\npen, and asked his friend how he could be so excessively unreasonable\nas to expect him or any man to write good English with such a wretched\nimplement!\n\nTo such a degree of excellence has the manufacture of mechanical tools\nand instruments arrived in these countries, that a British mechanic would\nbe utterly astonished could he but behold the process of manufacturing\nvarious articles in the East; such for example as the shawls of Persia\nand Cashmere, the carvings in wood and ivory of China, the extraction\nof metal from the ore in the same country, by which malleable iron\nis produced fit for immediate use, and of the finest quality, by a\nsingle process; and, not to tire by enumeration, the productions of the\nitinerant goldsmiths of India and the island of Sumatra. These last excel\nin filagree work, for which they are celebrated, far exceeding even the\nChinese in its extraordinary delicacy; yet their tools are ruder than\nthose of the Indian goldsmith of the continent.\n\nWhen a Sumatran goldsmith is engaged to manufacture some piece of gold\nor silver work, he first asks for any little piece of thin iron--a\nbit of an iron hoop will answer his purpose--and with this he makes an\ninstrument for drawing his wire. The head of an old hammer stuck in a\nblock of wood serves for an anvil; and for a pair of compasses he is\ncontented with two old nails tied together at the heads. If he has a\ncrucible, good; if not, a piece of a broken rice-pot or a china tea-cup\nanswers his purpose. His furnace is an old broken _quallee_ or iron\npot, and his bellows a joint of bamboo, through which he blows with his\nmouth. If the work be heavy, and the quantity of metal to be melted\nconsiderable, three or four sit round the furnace, each with his bamboo,\nand blow together. It is only at Padang, where the manufacture is carried\non extensively, that the Chinese bellows has been introduced. The art of\nwire-drawing not having been considerably improved upon since the time of\nTubalcain, the Sumatran method differs little from the European.\n\nWhen drawn sufficiently fine, the wire is flattened by beating it upon\nthe anvil, and when flattened, it is twisted by rubbing it upon a block\nof wood with a flat stick. Having twisted it, the goldsmith again\nflattens it upon the anvil, and it is then a flat wire with serrated or\nindented edges, suitable for forming leaves or portions of flowers; these\nhe makes by turning down the end of the wire with a rude pincers, and\nthen cutting it off; this process is repeated until he has a sufficient\nnumber prepared for his work. The pattern he has drawn on a piece of\npaper or card, to the size and shape of which the intended piece of\nworkmanship must correspond. If the work is to be formed upon a plate\nof gold, he cuts the plate to the shape of his pattern, and proceeds\nto dispose the various bits of foliage, assorted according to size,\nand adjusts wire of various thickness for the stems, tendrils, &c.,\nfastening them temporarily together, and upon the plate, with the sago\nberry, called _boca sago_, which they reduce to a pulp by grinding upon\na rough stone; and a young cocoa nut, about the size of a walnut, forms\nthe ointment-box for this gelatinous preparation. When the work has been\nall placed in order, the operator prepares his solder, which consists of\ngold filings and borax mingled with water; this he strews upon the plate\nand applies to the several points of contact of the finer portions of\nhis work; and then, exposing the whole to the action of the fire, in a\nfew moments the soldering is completed. But if it is open work, he lays\nout the foliage and other parts upon a card or thin bit of soft wood, and\nattaches them together, as before described, with the pulp of the sago\nberry, applies the solder to the points of junction, and puts his work\ninto the fire as before; the card or wood burns away, the solder unites\nthe parts, and the work is completed; but if the piece be very large, the\nsoldering is done at several times. When the work is finished as to the\nmanufacturing part, it is cleansed and brightened by boiling it in water\nwith common salt and alum, or lime juice; and when the goldsmith wishes\nto give it a fine purple colour, he boils it in water with sulphur. The\nbeautiful little balls with which the Sumatran filagree work is sometimes\nornamented, are very simply made. The maker merely drills a small hole\nin a piece of charcoal, into which he puts some grains of gold dust, and\nupon exposing it to the fire, it runs into a perfect ball.\n\nAt finishing plain work, however, it must be confessed that the Sumatran\nand Indian goldsmiths fall short of the European; but if the latter excel\nin this, which may be considered the lowest department of the art, they\nare, despite their improvements and the superiority of their instruments,\nvastly inferior in the elegance and delicacy of the finer parts.\n\nThe Sonah Wallah (which signifies in Hindoostanee \"the gold fellow\"),\nor itinerant goldsmith of India, is far better supplied with tools and\nimplements of his trade than the Sumatran; and being thus a step higher\nin the grade of civilisation, he exhibits evidences of his advance in\nrefinement by being such a confounded rogue, that it is almost impossible\nfor _even his European employer_ to detect him, or prevent him from\npilfering some portion of the metal consigned to his ingenuity. The Sonah\nWallah may be hired for half a rupee (a little over a shilling) a-day,\nand, like the tinkers in these countries, he brings his implements with\nhim. These consist of a small forge, to the edge of which are attached\nseveral iron rings, which may be turned up over the charcoal to receive\nhis crucibles; a tin tube to blow through, a pair of slight iron tongs, a\npair of small pliers, a hammer, a couple of earthen saucers, and a rude\nanvil consisting of a piece of flint secured in a rough iron frame. The\ngold usually presented to him for working is the gold mohur, a coin worth\nabout 32s. sterling; this coin he places in a crucible with a little\nborax, to make it fuse the more readily; and having fixed the crucible\nin one of the rings, and lighted the charcoal under and around it, he\nblows with his tin tube until the metal is melted, when he practises a\ntrick of his trade by throwing in a small quantity of nitro-muriatic\nacid, which causes a sudden expansion or slight explosion, by which a\nportion of the metal is thrown out of the crucible into the fire, from\nthe extinguished embers of which the rogue separates it at a convenient\nopportunity; and lest his employer should try to detect him by weighing\nthe material both before and after working, he uses a copper rod for\nstirring the contents of the crucible, a portion of which rod melts and\nmingles with the gold, and so compensates for the deficiency in weight,\nor at least so nearly as invariably to escape detection, although it is\nmore than probable that an instance seldom or never occurs in which they\ndo not defraud their employers of a portion of the gold put into their\nhands. The fact is, that their admirable skill so completely compensates\nfor their knavery, that few would think of questioning too closely, for,\nrude and simple as are their tools, they far exceed European workmen in\nthe production of delicate and intricately formed trinkets; their small,\ntaper, and flexible fingers more than supplying the place of the numerous\nvarieties of implements which the mechanic of Birmingham or Sheffield\nfinds indispensably necessary. Indian chains of gold and silver have been\never celebrated for the beauty and complication of their structure; and\nalthough the Sonah Wallah may be considered to excel particularly in this\nbranch of his art, yet he still must be admitted to surpass, or at least\nequal, the European even in the manufacture of finger rings, bracelets,\nand armlets.\n\nMuch of the superior ingenuity of the Indian goldsmith may be\nattributable to the division of the people into castes or sections, by\nwhich fundamental law the same profession is carried on by the same\npeople or family through countless generations; the Shastra, or code of\nHindoo laws, forbidding the mixture of the castes, or interference with\nany business or profession not carried on by their progenitors.\n\nThere are four integral divisions of the people. The first caste, the\nBrahmins, are said by the Hindoo scriptures to have issued, at the\ncreation, from Brahma's mouth; and being thus the most excellent and\ndignified, are set apart for the priesthood and legislative departments\nof the state. The second, the Cshatryas, are said to have issued from\nBrahma's arms, and to them is committed the executive--these consequently\nform the armies. The third caste, the Vaisyas, are said to have proceeded\nfrom Brahma's thighs; they are the merchants, and consequently amongst\nthem are to be found some of the wealthiest men of Hindostan. The fourth\ncaste, called Soodras, being said to have issued from the feet of Brahma,\nare considered the most ignoble and degraded, and to them are left all\nmechanical arts and servile employments, as being beneath the dignity\nof the superior castes. Amongst the Soodras, consequently, are the\ngoldsmiths; and as the different professions form a sort of minor castes\namongst the greater ones, the same business is transferred from father to\nson; and all the powers of the mind being directed undistractedly to the\nsingle object, pre-eminence in that line is naturally to be expected.\n\n N.\n\n\n\n\nBARNY O'GRADY.\n\n\nBehold me safely landed at Philadelphia, with one hundred pounds in\nmy pocket--a small sum of money; but many, from yet more trifling\nbeginnings, have grown rich in America. Many passengers who came over in\nthe same ship with me had not half so much. Several of them were indeed\nwretchedly poor. Among others there was an Irishman, who was known by\nthe name of Barny--a contraction, I believe, for Barnaby. As to his\nsurname, he could not undertake to spell it, but he assured me there was\nno better. This man, with many of his relatives, had come to England,\naccording to their custom, during harvest time, to assist in reaping,\nbecause they gain higher wages than in their own country. Barny had\nheard that he should get still higher wages for labour in America, and\naccordingly he and his two sons, lads of eighteen and twenty, took their\npassage for Philadelphia. A merrier mortal I never saw. We used to hear\nhim upon deck, continually singing or whistling his Irish tunes; and\nI should never have guessed that this man's life had been a series of\nhardships and misfortunes.\n\nWhen we were leaving the ship, I saw him, to my great surprise, crying\nbitterly; and upon inquiring what was the matter, he answered that it\nwas not for himself, but for his two sons, he was grieving; because\nthey were to be made _redemption men_; that is, they were to be bound\nto work, during a certain time, for the captain, or for whomsoever he\npleased, till the money due for their passage should be paid. Although I\nwas somewhat surprised at any one's thinking of coming on board a vessel\nwithout having one farthing in his pocket, yet I could not forbear paying\nthe money for this poor fellow. He dropped down on the deck upon both\nhis knees, as suddenly as if he had been shot, and holding up his hands\nto heaven, prayed, first in Irish, and then in English, with fervent\nfluency, that \"I and mine might never want; that I might live long to\nreign over him; that success might attend my honour wherever I went; and\nthat I might enjoy for evermore all sorts of blessings and crowns of\nglory.\" As I had an English prejudice in favour of silent gratitude, I\nwas rather disgusted by all this eloquence; I turned away abruptly, and\ngot into the boat which waited to carry me to shore.\n\n * * * * *\n\nI had now passed three years in Philadelphia, and was not a farthing\nthe richer, but, alas, a great deal poorer. My inveterate habit of\nprocrastination--of delaying every thing till TO-MORROW, always stood\nbetwixt me and prosperity. I at last resolved upon leaving the land of\nthe star-spangled banner; but when I came to reckon up my resources, I\nfound that I could not do so, unless I disposed of my watch and my wife's\ntrinkets. I was not accustomed to such things, and I was ashamed to go\nto the pawnbroker's, lest I should be met and recognised by some of my\nfriends. I wrapped myself up in an old surtout, and slouched my hat over\nmy face. As I was crossing the quay, I met a party of gentlemen walking\narm in arm. I squeezed past them, but one stopped and looked after me;\nand though I turned down another street to escape him, he dodged me\nunperceived. Just as I came out of the pawnbroker's shop, I saw him\nposted opposite me; I brushed by; I could with pleasure have knocked him\ndown for his impertinence. By the time that I had reached the corner of\nthe street, I heard a child calling after me; I stopped, and a little\nboy put into my hand my watch, saying, \"Sir, the gentleman says you left\nyour watch and these thingumbobs by mistake.\"\n\n\"What gentleman?\"\n\n\"I don't know, but he was one that said I looked like an honest chap,\nand he'd trust me to run and give you the watch. He is dressed in a blue\ncoat, and went towards the quay. That's all I know.\"\n\nOn opening the paper of trinkets, I found a card with these\nwords:--\"_Barny_--with kind thanks.\"\n\n\"Barny! poor Barny! An Irishman whose passage I paid coming to America\nthree years ago. Is it possible?\"\n\nI ran after him the way which the child directed, and was so fortunate as\njust to catch a glimpse of the skirt of his coat as he went into a neat,\ngood-looking house. I walked up and down for some time, expecting him\nto come out again; for I could not suppose that it belonged to Barny. I\nasked a grocer who was leaning over his hatch-door, if he knew who lived\nin the next house?\n\n\"An Irish gentleman of the name of O'Grady.\"\n\n\"And his Christian name?\"\n\n\"Here it is in my books, sir--Barnaby O'Grady.\"\n\nI knocked at Mr O'Grady's door, and made my way into the parlour, where I\nfound him, his two sons, and his wife, sitting very sociably at tea. He\nand the two young men rose immediately, to set me a chair.\n\n\"You are welcome, kindly welcome, sir,\" said he. \"This is an honour I\nnever expected, any way. Be pleased to take the seat next the fire.\n'Twould be hard indeed if you should not have the best seat's that to\nbe had in this house, where we none of us ever should have sat, nor had\nseats to sit upon, but for you.\"\n\nThe sons pulled off my shabby greatcoat, and took away my hat, and\nMrs O'Grady made up the fire. There was something in their manner,\naltogether, which touched me so much that it was with difficulty I could\nkeep myself from bursting into tears. They saw this, and Barny (for I\nshall never call him any thing else), as he thought that I should like\nbetter to hear of public affairs than to speak of my own, began to ask\nhis sons if they had seen the day's paper, and what news there were.\n\nAs soon as I could command my voice, I congratulated this family upon the\nhappy situation in which I found them, and asked by what lucky accident\nthey had succeeded so well.\n\n\"The luckiest accident ever _happened me_ before or since I came to\nAmerica,\" said Barny, \"was being on board the same vessel with such a\nman as you. If you had not given me the first lift, I had been down for\ngood and all, and trampled under foot, long and long ago. But after that\nfirst lift, all was as easy as life. My two sons here were not taken\nfrom me--God bless you; for I never can bless you enough for that. The\nlads were left to work for me and with me; and we never parted, hand or\nheart, but just kept working on together, and put all our earnings, as\nfast as we got them, into the hands of that good woman, and lived hard\nat first, as we were born and bred to do, thanks be to heaven! Then we\nswore against all sorts of drink entirely. And as I had occasionally\nserved the masons when I lived a labouring man in the county of Dublin,\nand knew something of that business, why, whatever I knew, I made the\nmost of, and a trowel felt noways strange to me, so I went to work, and\nhad higher wages at first than I deserved. The same with the two boys;\none was as much of a blacksmith as would shoe a horse, and the other a\nbit of a carpenter; so the one got plenty of work in the forges, and the\nother in the dockyards as a ship-carpenter. So, early and late, morning\nand evening, we were all at the work, and just went this way struggling\non even for a twelvemonth, and found, with the high wages and constant\nemploy we had met, that we were getting greatly better in the world.\nBesides, the wife was not idle. When a girl, she had seen baking, and\nhad always a good notion of it, and just tried her hand upon it now, and\nfound the loaves went down with the customers, who came faster and faster\nfor them; and this was a great help. Then I turned master mason, and had\nmy men under me, and took a house to build by the job, and that did; and\nthen on to another; and after building many for the neighbours, 'twas\nfit and my turn, I thought, to build one for myself, which I did out of\ntheirs, without wronging them of a penny. In short,\" continued Barny, \"if\nyou were to question me how I have got on so well in the world, upon my\nconscience I should answer, we never made Saint Monday, and never put off\ntill to-morrow what we could do to-day.\"\n\nI believe I sighed deeply at this observation of Barny's notwithstanding\nthe comic phraseology in which it was expressed.\n\n\"And would it be too much liberty to ask you,\" said Barny, \"to drink a\ncup of tea, and to taste a slice of my good woman's bread and butter? And\nhappy the day we see you eating it, and only wish we could serve you in\nany way whatsoever.\"\n\nI verily believe the generous fellow forgot at this instant that he had\nredeemed my watch and wife's trinkets. He would not let me thank him as\nmuch as I wished, but kept pressing upon me fresh offers of service. When\nhe found I was going to leave America, he asked what vessel we should go\nin. I was really afraid to tell him, lest he should attempt to pay for my\npassage. But for this he had, as I afterwards found, too much delicacy of\nsentiment. He discovered, by questioning the captains, in what ship we\nwere to sail; and when we went on board, we found him and his sons there\nto take leave of us, which they did in the most affectionate manner; and\nafter they were gone, we found in the state cabin, directed to me, every\nthing that could be useful or agreeable to us, as sea stores for a long\nvoyage.--_Incident in a Tale entitled \"To-morrow,\" by Miss Edgeworth._\n\n * * * * *\n\nDECISION OF CHARACTER: HOWARD THE PHILANTHROPIST.--In decision of\ncharacter no man ever exceeded, or ever will exceed, the late illustrious\nHoward. The energy of his determination was so great, that if, instead\nof being habitual, it had been shown only for a short time on particular\noccasions, it would have appeared a vehement impetuosity; but by being\nunintermitted it had an equability of manner which scarcely appeared to\nexceed the tone of a calm constancy, it was so totally the reverse of any\nthing like turbulence or agitation. It was the calmness of an intensity\nkept uniform by the nature of the human mind forbidding it to be more,\nand by the character of the individual forbidding it to be less. The\nhabitual passion of his mind was a measure of feeling almost equal to\nthe temporary extremes and paroxysms of common minds; as a great river,\nin its customary state, is equal to a small or moderate one when swollen\nto a torrent. The moment of finishing his plans in deliberation, and\ncommencing them in action, was the same. I wonder what must have been the\namount of that bribe in emolument or pleasure that would have detained\nhim a week inactive after their final adjustment. The law which carries\nwater down a declivity was not more unconquerable and invariable than the\ndetermination of his feelings towards the main object. The importance of\nthis object held his faculties in a state of excitement which was too\nrigid to be affected by lighter interests, and on which therefore the\nbeauties of nature and of art had no power. He had no leisure feeling\nwhich he could spare to be diverted among the innumerable varieties of\nthe extensive scenes which he traversed: all his subordinate feelings\nlost their separate existence and operation by falling into the grand\none. There have not been wanting trivial minds to mark this as a fault in\nhis character. But the mere men of taste ought to be silent respecting\nsuch a man as Howard: he is above their sphere of judgment. The invisible\nspirits who fulfil their commission of philanthropy among mortals do not\ncare about pictures, statues, and sumptuous buildings; and no more did\nhe, when the time in which he must have inspected and admired them would\nhave been taken from the work to which he had consecrated his life. His\nlabours implied an inconceivable severity of conviction that he had _one\nthing to do_, and that he who would do some great thing in this short\nlife must apply himself to the work with such a concentration of his\nforces as, to idle spectators who live only to amuse themselves, looks\nlike insanity. His attention was so strongly and tenaciously fixed on\nhis object, that even at the greatest distance, as the Egyptian pyramids\nto travellers, it appeared to him with a luminous distinctness as if it\nhad been nigh, and beguiled the toilsome length of labour and enterprise\nby which he was to reach it. It was so conspicuous before him that not\na step deviated from the direction, and every movement and every day\nwas an approximation. As his method referred every thing he did and\nthought to the end, and as his exertions did not relax for a moment, he\nmade the trial, so seldom made, what the utmost effect is, which may be\ngranted to the last possible efforts of a human agent; and, therefore,\nwhat he did not accomplish he might conclude to be placed beyond the\nsphere of mortal activity, and calmly leave to the immediate disposal of\nOmnipotence.--_Foster's Essays._\n\n\n\n\nKISSING OFF SAILORS.\n\n\nAn Irish Guineaman had been fallen in with by one of our cruisers, and\nthe commander of his majesty's sloop the Hummingbird made a selection\nof thirty or forty stout Hibernians to fill up his own complement, and\nhand over the surplus to the admiral. Short-sighted mortals we all are,\nand captains of men-of-war are not exempted from human imperfection.\nHow much also drops between the cup and the lip! There chanced to be on\nboard of the same trader two very pretty Irish girls, of the better sort\nof bourgeoise, who were going to join their friends at Philadelphia. The\nname of the one was Judy, and of the other Maria. No sooner were the poor\nIrishmen informed of their change of destination, than they set up a\nhowl loud enough to make the scaly monsters of the deep seek their dark\ncaverns. They rent the hearts of the poor-hearted girls; and when the\nthorough-bass of the males was joined by the sopranos and trebles of the\nwomen and children, it would have made Orpheus himself turn round and\ngaze.\n\n\"Oh, Miss Judy! oh, Miss Maria! would you be so cruel as to see us poor\ncrathurs dragged away to a man-of-war, and not for to go and spake a word\nfor us? A word to the captain from your own purty mouths, and no doubt he\nwould let us off.\"\n\nThe young ladies, though doubting the powers of their own fascinations,\nresolved to make the experiment. So, begging the lieutenant of the sloop\nto give them a passage on board to speak with his captain, they added a\nsmall matter of finery to their dress, and skipped into the boat like a\ncouple of mountain kids, caring neither for the exposure of ancles nor\nthe spray of the salt water, which, though it took the curls out of their\nhair, added a bloom to their cheeks, which perhaps contributed in no\nsmall degree to the success of their project. There is something in the\nsight of a petticoat at sea that never fails to put a man into a good\nhumour, provided he be rightly constructed. When they got on board the\nman-of-war, they were received by the captain.\n\n\"And pray, young ladies,\" said he, \"what may have procured me the honour\nof this visit?\"\n\n\"It was to beg a favour of your honour,\" said Judy. \"And his honour will\ngrant it too,\" said Maria, \"for I like the look of him.\"\n\nFlattered by this shot of Maria's, the captain said that nothing ever\ngave him more pleasure than to oblige the ladies; and if the favour they\nintended to ask was not utterly incompatible with his duty, that he would\ngrant it.\n\n\"Well, then,\" said Judy, \"will your honour give me back Pat Flannagan,\nthat you have pressed just now?\"\n\nThe captain shook his head.\n\n\"He's no sailor, your honour, but a poor bog-trotter; and he will never\ndo you any good.\"\n\nThe captain again shook his head. \"Ask me anything else,\" said he, \"and I\nwill give it you.\"\n\n\"Well, then,\" said Maria, \"give us Phelim O'Shaughnessy.\"\n\nThe captain was equally inflexible.\n\n\"Come, come, your honour,\" said Judy, \"we must not stand upon trifles\nnow-a-days. I'll give you a kiss if you give me back Pat Flannagan.\"\n\n\"And I another,\" said Maria, \"for Phelim.\"\n\nThe captain had one seated on each side of him; his head turned like a\ndog-vane in a gale of wind. He did not know which to begin with; the\nmost ineffable good humour danced in his eyes; and the ladies saw at\nonce the day was their own. Such is the power of beauty, that this lord\nof the ocean was fain to strike to it. Judy laid a kiss on his right\ncheek; Maria matched it on his left; and the captain was the happiest of\nmortals. \"Well, then,\" said he, \"you have your wish; take your two men,\nfor I am in a hurry to make sail.\"\n\n\"Is it sail ye are after makin'? and do ye mane to take all these poor\ncrathurs away wid you? No, faith; _another kiss and another man_.\"\n\nI am not going to relate how many kisses these lovely girls bestowed on\nthe envied captain. If such are captains' perquisites, who would not be\na captain? Suffice it to say, they got the whole of their countrymen\nreleased, and returned on board in triumph.\n\nLord Brougham used to say that he always laughed at the settlement of\npin-money, as ladies were generally either kicked out of it, or kissed\nout of it; but his lordship, in the whole course of his legal practice,\nnever saw a captain of a man-of-war kissed out of forty men by two pretty\nIrish girls. After this, who would not shout \"Erin go bragh!\"\n\n\n\n\nANCIENT IRISH LITERATURE.\n\nNumber 5.\n\n\nThe specimen of our ancient Irish Literature which we now present to\nour readers, is one of the most popular songs of the peasantry of the\ncounties of Mayo and Galway, and is evidently a composition of that most\nunhappy period of Irish history, the seventeenth century. The original\nIrish which is the composition of one Thomas Lavelle, has been published\nwithout a translation, by Mr Hardiman, in his Irish Minstrelsy; but a\nvery able translation of it was published in a review of that work in\nthe University Magazine for June 1834. From that translation the version\nwhich we now give has been but slightly altered so as to adapt it to the\noriginal melody, which is of very great beauty and pathos, and one which\nit is desirable to preserve with English words of appropriate simplicity\nof character:--\n\n\nTHE COUNTY OF MAYO.\n\n I.\n\n On the deck of Patrick Lynch's boat I sit in woful plight,\n Through my sighing all the weary day, and weeping all the night.\n Were it not that full of sorrow from my people forth I go.\n By the blessed sun, 'tis royally I'd sing thy praise. Mayo!\n\n II.\n\n When I dwelt at home in plenty, and my gold did much abound.\n In the company of fair young maids the Spanish ale went round--\n 'Tis a bitter change from those gay days that now I'm forced to go,\n And must leave my bones in Santa Cruz, far from my own Mayo!\n\n III.\n\n They are altered girls in Irrul now, 'tis proud they're grown and high,\n With their hair-bags and their top-knots, for I pass their buckles by--\n But it's little now I heed their airs, for God will have it so,\n That I must depart for foreign lands, and leave my sweet Mayo!\n\n IIII.\n\n 'Tis my grief that Patrick Loughlin is not Earl in Irrul still,\n And that Brian Duff no longer rules as Lord upon the hill,\n And that Colonel Hugh Mac Grady should be lying dead and low,\n And I sailing, sailing swiftly from the county of Mayo!\n\nFor the satisfaction of our Gaelic readers, we annex the original Irish\nwords:\n\n\nCondae Mai\u0121e\u00f3.\n\n Is ar an loingseo Phaidi Loingsi\u0121 do \u0121nimse an dubron\n Ag osna\u1e0b ann san oi\u1e0bche is ag sior\u0121ol san l\u00f3\n Muna mbei\u1e0b gur dalla\u1e0b minntleacht is me a \u1e03\u1e1fad om \u1e41uinntir\n Dar a maireann! is mai\u1e6b a chaoinfinnsi condae Mhai\u0121eo.\n\n An uair a \u1e41air mo chairde bu\u1e0b \u1e03rea\u0121 mo chuid oir\n Dolainn lionn Spaineach i gco\u1e41luadar ban og\n Muna mbeidh s\u00edor ol na gc\u00e1rtai san dli\u0121 bheit ro l\u00e1idir\n Ni a Sant\u00edcr\u00fas a d\u1e1f\u00e1cfainn mo \u010bna\u1e41a f\u00e1n bh\u1e1fod.\n\n T\u00e1id gadai\u1e0bni\u0121e na h\u00e1ite seo ag eirgea\u1e0b go \u1e41\u00f3r\n Fa \u010bnota\u1e0ba is fa hairbag gan tra\u010bt as bh\u00facla\u1e0ba brog\n Da mair\u1e1fea\u1e0b damsa an iar-u\u1e41aill do \u1e0beanfuinn d\u00edobh cianach\n Muna mbei\u1e0b gur \u1e6bagair dia \u1e0bam bhei\u1e6b a gciantaibh fa bhron.\n\n D\u00e1 mbei\u1e0b Padruig Lochlainn ma iarla air iar-u\u1e41aill go foil\n Brian Dubh a chlia\u1e41ain na \u1e6bighearna ar \u1e0bu\u1e41ach-\u1e41oir\n Ao\u1e0b dubh mac Griada 'na choirnel a gCliara\n Is ann niu bhei\u1e0b mo \u1e6briallsa go condae Mhaigheo.\n\n * * * * *\n\nCAMEO-CUTTING.--This art is of great antiquity, and is pursued with most\nsuccess in Rome, where there are several very eminent artists now living.\nCameos are of two descriptions, those cut in stone, or _pietra dura_,\nand those cut in shell. Of the first, the value depends on the stone, as\nwell as in the excellence of the work. The stones most prized now are the\noriental onyx and the sardonyx, the former black and white in parallel\nlayers, the latter cornelian, brown and white; and when stones of four\nor five layers of distinct shades or colours can be procured, the value\nis proportionably raised, provided always that the layers be so thin as\nto be manageable in cutting the cameo so as to make the various parts\nharmonize. For example, in a head of Minerva, if well wrought out of a\nstone of four shades, the ground should be dark grey, the face light, the\nbust and helmet black, and the crest over the helmet brownish or grey.\nNext to such varieties of shades and layers, those stones are valuable in\nwhich two layers occur of black and white of regular breadth. Except on\nsuch oriental stones no good artist will now bestow his time; but, till\nthe beginning of this century, less attention was bestowed on materials,\nso that beautiful middle-age and modern cameos may be found on German\nagates, whose colours are generally only two shades of grey, or a cream\nand a milk-white, and these not unfrequently cloudy. The best artist in\nRome in _pietra dura_ is the Signor Girometti, who has executed eight\ncameos of various sizes, from 1\u00bd to 3\u00bd inches in diameter, on picked\nstones of several layers, the subjects being from the antique. These form\na set of specimens, for which he asks \u00a33,000 sterling. A single cameo of\ngood brooch size, and of two colours, costs \u00a322. Portraits in stone by\nthose excellent artists Diez and Saulini may be had for \u00a310. These cameos\nare all wrought by a lathe with pointed instruments of steel, and by\nmeans of diamond dust.\n\nShell cameos are cut from large shells found on the African and Brazilian\ncoasts, and generally show only two layers, the ground being either a\npale coffee-colour or a deep reddish-orange; the latter is most prized.\nThe subject is cut with little steel chisels out of the white portion\nof the shell. A fine shell is worth a guinea in Rome. Copies from the\nantique, original designs, and portraits, are executed in the most\nexquisite style of finish, and perfect in contour and taste, and it may\nbe said that the Roman artists have attained perfection in this beautiful\nart. Good shell cameos may be had at from \u00a31 to \u00a35 for heads, \u00a33 to \u00a34\nfor the finest large brooches, a comb costs \u00a310, and a complete set of\nnecklace, ear-rings, and brooch cost \u00a321. A portrait can be executed for\n\u00a34 or \u00a35, according to workmanship.\n\n * * * * *\n\nVENETIAN PAVEMENTS.--A most beautiful art may be mentioned here in\nconnection with the last, I mean that of making what are termed Venetian\npavements which might advantageously be introduced into this country.\nThe floors of rooms are finished with this pavement, as it is somewhat\nincongruously termed, and I shall briefly describe the mode of operation\nin making these, but must first observe that they are usually formed\nover vaults. In the first place, a foundation is laid of lime mixed with\n_pozzolana_ and small pieces of broken stone; this is in fact a sort of\nconcrete, which must be well beaten and levelled. When this is perfectly\ndry, a fine paste, as it is termed by the Italians, must be made of lime,\n_pozzolana_, and sand; a yellow sand is used which tinges the mixture;\nthis is carefully spread to a depth of one or two inches, according to\ncircumstances. Over this is laid a layer of irregularly broken minute\npieces of marble of different colours, and if it is wished, these can be\narranged in patterns. After the paste is completely covered with pieces\nof marble, men proceed to beat the floor with large and heavy tools made\nfor the purpose; when the whole has been beaten into a compact mass, the\npaste appearing above the pieces of marble, it is left to harden. It is\nthen rubbed smooth with fine grained stones, and is finally brought to\na high polish with emery powder, marble-dust, and, lastly, boiled oil\nrubbed on with flannel. This makes a durable and very beautiful floor,\nwhich in this country would be well adapted for halls, conservatories,\nand other buildings.--_The Civil Engineer and Architect's Journal._\n\n * * * * *\n\nHow destitute of humanity is he, who can pass a coarse joke upon the\nemblem of unfeigned sorrow.\n\n * * * * *\n\n Printed and published every Saturday by GUNN and CAMERON, at\n the Office of the General Advertiser, No. 6, Church Lane,\n College Green, Dublin.--Agents:--R. GROOMBRIDGE, Panyer Alley,\n Paternoster Row, London; SIMMS and DINHAM, Exchange Street,\n Manchester; C. DAVIES, North John Street, Liverpool; SLOCOMBE &\n SIMMS, Leeds, JOHN MENZIES, Prince's Street, Edinburgh; & DAVID\n ROBERTSON, Trongate, Glasgow.\n\n\n\n\n\nEnd of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Irish Penny Journal, Vol. 1 No.\n44, May 1, 1841, by Various\n\n*** ","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}} +{"text":" \nalso by nathaniel mackey\n\nFiction\n\n_Bedouin Hornbook_\n\n_Djbot Baghostus's Run_\n\n_Atet A.D._\n\n_Bass Cathedral_\n\n_From a Broken Bottle Traces o_ _f_ _Perfume Still Emanate: Volumes 1\u20133_\n\nPoetry Books and Chapbooks\n\n_Four for Trane_\n\n_Septet for the End o_ _f_ _Time_\n\n_Outlantish_\n\n_Song o_ _f_ _the Andoumboulou: 18\u201320_\n\n_Four for Glenn_\n\n_Anuncio's Last Love Song_\n\n_Outer Pradesh_\n\n_Moment's Omen_\n\n_Lay Ghost_\n\n_School o_ _f_ _Oud_\n\n_Eroding Witness_\n\n_School o_ _f_ ___Udhra_\n\n_Whatsaid Serif_\n\n_Splay Anthem_\n\n_Nod House_\n\n_Blue Fasa_\n\nCriticism\n\n_Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing_\n\n_Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews_\n\nAnthologies\n\n_Moment's Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose_ , with Art Lange\n\nRecordings\n\n_Strick: Song o_ _f_ _the Andoumboulou 16\u201325_\n\n_for my cousin_\n\n_Kenneth Ray Kahn_\n\n# Late Arcade\n14.IX.83\n\nDear Angel of Dust,\n\nDjamilaa brought a new composition to rehearsal today. It's called \"Sekhet Aaru Struff,\" a title that immediately, as you can imagine, got my attention, alluding, as it does, to my own \"Sekhet Aaru Strut.\" Putting \"struff \" in \"strut's\" place, it alludes as well to the piece from which it borrows the term (if it can be called a term), Johnny Dyani's \"The Robin Irland Struff \" on the _African Bass_ album he did with Clifford Jarvis a few years back. I'm inclined to say it pointedly alludes to both, albeit its \"point\" would appear to be a diffusion of point, an advancement of blur (with overtones of slur) tending to dislocate point. What, that is, was Dyani getting at with \"Robin Irland\" if not an ambiguation of \"Robben Island,\" a pointedly malaprop version bordering on slur? And doesn't \"struff \" go on in the same vein, subjecting \"stuff,\" \"strut,\" \"straw,\" \"fluff,\" \"bluff \" and any number of other phonically related words to an ambiguating fusion and diffusion, upping the ante on the already indefinite \"stuff \"? Djamilaa perhaps had this in mind. Perhaps she meant the replacement of \"strut\" by \"struff \" as an ambiguating move, a deflationary tack perhaps.\n\nHowever much the replacement of \"strut\" diffuses and deflates a certain self-congratulation at the titular level, however much \"struff \" does indeed mess with \"strut,\" does indeed mush it up, taking the wind out of the sails its apparent pleasure with itself could be said to be, I say \"perhaps\" because the music itself does anything but diminish or deride. \"Struff \" notwithstanding, it conveys no loss or ratcheting down of dimension, no lack of majesty. It's better, perhaps, to simply say a certain modesty obtains, a shying away from the presumption self-nomination can't but entail. \"Struff \" wants to lighten up, walk lightly, outflank if not entirely break free from such presumption.\n\n\"Sekhet Aaru Struff's\" light tread compounds a sense of light as trepidatious gait with a competing sense of light as bouyancy, a saltatory \u00e9lan nowhere more notable than in the bounding figure Aunt Nancy sustains on bass. Atop and to a degree at odds with the bass's throb-inflected walk, I pursue a more tentative approach on trumpet, the trepidatious advance adumbrated by \"struff's\" unraveling of \"strut's\" edges, a frayed, fraught excursion bereft of any but ad hoc assurances. Drennette steps away from the traps in favor of bongos and conga for this piece, peppering and otherwise abetting Aunt Nancy's bounding figure while helping propel and punctuating the piece on other fronts as well. Djamilaa herself plays synthesizer, though \"presides on\" would be a more accurate way to put it, so fully does she avail herself and the piece of a sense of ultimacy, majesty and moment, an incumbent cosmicity or an abiding ethereality the synthesizer is famously able to impart.\n\nThe most unusual aspect of the piece's instrumentation is that Lambert and Penguin don't play their horns, assigned instead to something Djamilaa variously terms extended voice (nodding to Meredith Monk), prepared voice (nodding to John Cage) and amended voice or (further accenting her own intervention, underscoring her nodding to no one if not herself) amended mouth. Each is given a text to read, excerpts from a chapter of the _Chapters o_ _f_ _Coming Forth by Day_. Lambert's is taken from Chapter XV, \"A Hymn of Praise to Ra when He Riseth in the Eastern Part of Heaven,\" which mentions Sekhet Aaru toward the end: \"Let him mingle among the Heart-souls who live in Ta-tchesert. Let him travel about in the Sekhet Aaru, conformably to thy decree with joy of heart\u2014him the Osiris Ani, whose word is truth.\" Penguin's is taken from Chapter CX, \"The Chapters of Sekhet Hetepet,\" which concerns arrival in Sekhet Aaru and living in the city of Sekhet Hetepet, e.g., \"Let me go forward. Let me plough. I am at peace with the god of the town. I know the water, the towns, the nomes, and the lakes which are in Sekhet Hetepet. I live therein. I am strong therein.\" Lambert recites first, then Penguin.\n\nBy extended voice, prepared voice, amended voice or amended mouth Djamilaa means that Lambert and Penguin each clamp three clothespins to their lips for the piece, two of them clamped to and hanging down from the sides of the upper lip, one of them clamped to and hanging down from the middle of the lower lip. The aim is to alter their elocution, to pidginize, as Djamilaa puts it, the papyrus of Ani. She instructed them not to let it stop simply at that but to assist the aleatory work done by the clothespins (or, as she sometimes terms it, the amendments) by furthering it, consciously recasting the text, at the point of enunciation, as universal patois, idiosyncratically conceived. \"Think of Pharoah's 'Japan,'\" she exhorted. \"Think of the long line of scat behind it. You could do worse than think of Slim Gaillard or of Clark Terry's 'Mumbles,' to say nothing of all the vatic chatter outside the music.\"\n\nLambert and Penguin wondered if Djamilaa was serious at first (Aunt Nancy, Drennette and I wondered as well), especially when Penguin noticed the sentence \"Behold my mouth is equipped\" in the text he was to read, at which point he started laughing and, sure it was all a joke, said to Djamilaa, \"Okay, you got us. Touch\u00e9.\" Djamilaa, though, looked at him as if she had no idea what he meant. Quickly enough, we all saw that indeed she had no idea what he meant. She was nothing if not serious, though she did allow, responding a bit later to a question Lambert raised regarding \"amendment as endowment versus amendment as obstruction,\" that the tactic might be viewed as a bit quirky. \"But who says quirky can't be serious?\" she rhetorically asked.\n\nLambert and Penguin, then, approached their parts (in many ways the linchpin of the piece) with all due seriousness, holding any impulse to ham it up, go tongue in cheek or in some other way play for comic effect at bay. Each adopted a damped inflection, whisperlike but a whisper less in volume than tone, conspiratorial\u2014open, even so, to exhortative, declamatory moments now and again. The clothespins did their job of detour, inhibiting certain habits of pronunciation while enabling alternatives, conducing to a pestered, repercussive manner of speech that did indeed, thanks to the synthesizer's choric hints and empyrean laminates, seem the issue of a pidginizing \"celestriality\" (to use Alan Silva's term), universal patois. I need to stress that this wasn't arrived at quickly, that there were a number of false starts and a good deal of trial and error before Lambert and Penguin found the right vocalic balance and blend, the requisite pace and restraint to make it work.\n\nAs I've noted, Djamilaa extracted a lush but buried oratorio from the synthesizer, interred, if one could so say it, in the firmament, a streaming advance and a sheeting sweep thru the heavens. Solemnity and moment, neither untouched by requiem, were hers to maintain, universal bounty both mourned and extolled. Swell had to do with it, as did surge, emanation, pulse\u2014pressed amenities it was all one could do not to be borne away by, however much (yet all the more) one felt allied.\n\nAs for my part, it especially fell to me, as I've already said, not to be borne away, to offer an astringent bounding bass and universal bounty could be qualified by. Counterpoise and parry were typically my lines' relation to Lambert's and Penguin's readings, moments of convergence not altogether absent. Moot sublimity, all such rally was earned assurance's emptying out, a hollowing out. Incertitude vied with assurance, earned assurance hallowing hitch, hesitation, sputter's recondite remit. Lambert and I or Penguin and I, as were the trumpet and I, were each the other's hollow extension.\n\nWe played the piece a good number of times, even after we finally got it down (especially after we finally got it down). I'm enclosing a tape of the best version.\n\nAs ever, \nN.\n19.IX.83\n\nDear Angel of Dust,\n\nWe played a gig at the Comeback Inn over in Venice night before last, a place on Washington about a third of the way between Lincoln and the canals that's been around for about ten years. I heard Joe Farrell there five years ago. We were pretty surprised to get the call, our stuff being more outside than what they normally book. Evidently it had a lot to do with last year's Kool Jazz Festival, a lineup called \"New Directions in Sound and Rhythm\" that most folks in town still haven't gotten over\u2014some in a negative way, some positive, as appears to be the case with the owner of the Comeback Inn. It was an unlikely lineup for a Kool Jazz Festival, especially one here in L.A., a bit like an invasion from Chicago, the AACM side of Chicago: Muhal Richard Abrams, Anthony Braxton, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Air, Lester Bowie's From the Root to the Source, Leroy Jenkins's Sting, Roscoe Mitchell's Sound and Space. Also on the bill were James \"Blood\" Ulmer, the World Saxophone Quartet, John Carter, Laurie Anderson and the Nikolai Dance Theatre. Though we had mixed feelings about this kind of music being presented under as commercial an imprimatur as Kool (Aunt Nancy at one point claimed to wonder if the balloons would begin emerging as smoke rings), it was all rather beautifully anomalous, inspiringly so, nowhere near business-as-usual. One funny thing we've heard is that the night Laurie Anderson, Leroy Jenkins's band, the Art Ensemble and the Nikolai dance troupe performed at the Santa Monica Civic more than a few people showed up expecting to hear Sting the rock singer. Anyway, the owner of the Comeback Inn specifically mentioned the Kool Festival. \"It really opened my ears,\" Lambert told us he told him when he called, going on to joke, \"It might've even grown me a new pair.\" He went on to say he'd been meaning to get in touch for a while and asked if we'd play there some night. Lambert said yes and they decided on a date.\n\nIt's a small restaurant with not much in the way of a stage, just a spot in one of the corners where they clear away a few tables. It was no great shakes, but a number of friends showed up and it all went well, with a few moments here and there that more than simply went well. Penguin took an alto solo on \"The Slave's Day Off,\" for example, that had Aunt Nancy, draped over the bass like a rag doll, sustaining a rafters-rattling walk that belied her rag-doll diffidence, a walk whose lowest note repeatedly served as Penguin's moment of truth. Repeatedly, Aunt Nancy's walk's furthering pulse notwithstanding, Penguin, with a broken gait and ghost timbre recalling John Tchicai, took stock of the wherefore of going on, assaying, it seemed, every reason not to. A rummaging hover, low to the ground it seemed, the horn's low-register audit, Hamlet-like, left no dissuasive stone unturned. Repeatedly, Penguin pulled free of such hover by way of an angular but oddly damped move into the middle and upper registers, refusing to posit such ascent as triumphant (\"flat\" refusal, lateral dispatch), a resolution of the quandaries by which he was beset. Repeatedly, he offered no resolution, as though resolution could only be false, the more false the more triumphalist, the more false the more defeatist as well. It was some of Penguin's headiest, most heartfelt playing ever, a mesmerizing insistence upon and abidance in a third way that wasn't just a middle way, a hypnotic hum, hover and run of a solo that didn't so much finish as fade, beg off ending, beg off going on, Penguin pulling away from the mike playing less and less loudly. As I've said, there were other moments as well.\n\nArguably, however, the gig's aftermath upstaged the gig itself, its most eventful moment occurring afterward, as though a time lag of some sort were in effect. Drennette, that is, tells us that two balloons followed her home (as she puts it) after the gig. She says that yesterday as she was unpacking her drumset, setting up to practice, they emerged as she lifted the lid to the parade snare's container. Before she took the drum out of the container, before she even reached in to take hold of it, a balloon floated up out of the container, emerging from under the slightly lifted lid as though the opening effected by the lifting were the container's mouth. The balloon, floating just above the opening, contained these words: _Too funky. Too forward. So rude the way o_ _f_ _the world, too crude. The nerve o_ _f_ _him to come on that way, slick-chivalric. \"Be my queen,\" he said. \"Let my face be your throne. I'll lick your pussy, I'll snif_ _f_ _at your ass-crack.\" So crude a way to put it, so rude the way o_ _f_ _the world._ It hung there a while and then vanished, at which point a second balloon floated up out of the container and hung just above the opening. Inside the second balloon were these words: _\"You oughta not be so funky with it,\" I should've said, semisung, Aretha-like, mock-operatic, and would've said, semisung, Aretha-like, mock-operatic, had I only thought o_ _f_ _it in time. Instead, I stood speechless, taken aback._ It hung there a while, just above the parade snare's container's opening, and then vanished.\n\nDrennette says the balloons (the first one in particular) remind her of the X-rated balloons that emerged from the dancers' fists during our record-release gig at The Studio back in February, the emergence our recourse to a 4\/4 shuffle meter brought about. She can't help surmising, she says, that the two balloons might be tied to a somewhat similar moment during our second set at the Comeback Inn, a passage during \"Tosaut L'Ouverture\" in which Aunt Nancy touched ever so lightly upon a 4\/4 shuffle, not so much committing unequivocally as alluding to it. In response, Drennette resorted to an obliquely stated backbeat, bordering on tongue-in-cheek, a manner of statement that had it both ways, both advancing the backbeat and beating it back, holding it at bay. It was a passing moment, not at all drawn out, but Drennette says it was that moment, she's convinced, that passage, that gave rise to the balloons in the parade snare's container. That they hid and followed her home, she says, rather than emerging right there during the gig (no balloons appeared at any point during the gig) adds a new wrinkle to this whole balloon phenomenon that we need to think seriously about.\n\nDrennette went on to say, as we talked about this during rehearsal, that she noticed a certain concord (as she put it) between the leverage she and Aunt Nancy had applied to the backbeat and the 4\/4 shuffle and the casting of the first balloon's X-rated material in quotes, to say nothing of the explicit distancing from and disapproval of that material the balloon expressed. She wondered if, consistent with this, the balloons' delayed emergence doesn't bespeak reserve, a sense of restraint, modesty even, albeit the business of hiding away and following her home does have, she can't help feeling, a sinister side. Or does the delay, she went on to speculate further, have to do with the speechlessness or the inability to immediately respond, the being less than quick on the uptake, to which the second balloon confesses? What also strikes her, she went on to say in an outrush of questions and thoughts that made it clear how deeply the balloons had gotten to her, is that the balloons appear to have a sense of history, so unmistakably, in this instance, harking back to an earlier emergence.\n\nA good amount of discussion ensued, none of us quite sure what to make of this new development but each of us, notwithstanding, venturing a comment or two, a question or two, a surmise or two. Lambert, for example, led off by all but asking Drennette, whose manner was ponderous, weighty, bordering on distraught, to lighten up, noting that it wasn't the balloons' sense of history he was struck by but their sense of humor, especially the second balloon's reference to Aretha's \"nasty gym shoe\" ad lib on the _Hey Now Hey (The Other Side o_ _f_ _the Sky)_ album. Aunt Nancy, on the other hand, agreed with Drennette regarding the rapport between levered backbeat and 4\/4 shuffle and the balloons' recourse to quotation, adding that the use of the conditional tense appeared to her to have to do with this as well. Thus, things were off and going.\n\nMuch got said during the discussion but we all continue to give this new development thought. And though much got said, not everything that might've been said got said. Djamilaa mentioned to me later that she didn't bring it up, for obvious reasons, but there seemed to her to be a strongly personal element to the balloons' manner of emergence and their content both, that it seemed they wanted to say something about Drennette or even that Drennette wanted to say something about herself: putatively hard-ass Drennette, putatively repercussive Drennette, Drennette Virgin. \"'Slick-chivalric,'\" she said, \"rhymewise and otherwise, has Rick written all over it.\"\n\nMore anon.\n\nYours, \nN.\n24.IX.83\n\nDear Angel of Dust,\n\nMore balloons last night. It was during the John Coltrane Birthday Concert we took part in at the Century City Playhouse. The folks at Rhino Records organized it and a good number of bands played. The usual suspects from around town were there: Badi Taqsim's trio, the Boneyard Brass Octet, SunStick and the Chosen Few, Horace Tapscott's quintet. Bobby Bradford and John Carter came in from Pasadena, Roberto Miranda came in from the Valley. It was a marvelous event. Weatherwise, what had been a beautiful day turned into a beautiful evening, somewhat on the warm side, a touch of Indian summer, but unusually clear, sparkling, a bit of burnish left over from the day. Most of the musicians hung around outside when not playing. One could still hear the music and it was nice to see and talk with folks one hadn't seen in a while. We milled around in front, some of us strolling a block or two up or down Pico. Badi Taqsim and I stood gazing thru the fence at the Rancho Park Golf Course at one point, talking about recent bookings at Hollywood's Catalina Bar & Grill. Anyway, we played a couple of pieces, \"Sun Ship\" and \"Sekhet Aaru Struff.\" It was our first public performance of \"Sekhet Aaru Struff \" and it was during this piece that the balloons emerged. It was actually, to be more precise, during a section toward the end of the piece that was a bit of a detour, a turn toward rumba initiated by Drennette.\n\nWe'd been talking about rumba earlier in the day, listening to and talking about an album by Totico y Sus Rumberos that came out a couple of years ago, so the turn Drennette initiated didn't entirely come as a surprise. Their rendition of \"What's Your Name?,\" the old doo-wop hit by Don and Juan, had especially caught our attention, getting us going on the mesh between doo-wop's mellifluous come-on and rumba's courtship mimetics. Exactly how apt or effective a mesh it is was what we discussed, opinions ranging from endorsement, even outright rave, a claim that the merger isn't only beautiful but long overdue and that the piece is the best on the album by far (Penguin), to reservations regarding the advisedness of literalizing what's otherwise more subtle, productively so, otherwise more dynamically understated (Drennette).\n\nIt wasn't entirely a surprise, then, as I've said, when Penguin came to the end of his recitation and Drennette began to beat out a guaguanc\u00f3 rhythm on the conga, not only beating out the guaguanc\u00f3 but singing a lalaleo or diana, the introductory song-syllables \"ana na na ana, ana na na ana,\" which in fact made the detour less jarring, contributing to and thereby continuing Lambert and Penguin's theme or thread of universal patois. Soon after finishing the lalaleo, however, she sped things up, switching from guaguanc\u00f3 to giribilla, a more strictly musical, nonmimetic form that has been called the bebop of rumba variations.\n\nAunt Nancy was the first to respond to Drennette's detour, letting the bounding figure go and imitating, in the bass's upper register, a segundo's giribilla pattern. Djamilaa's synthesizer turned its interred oratorio into a chorus answering Drennette's lalaleo, a bank of antiphonal echoes Djamilaa granted galactic reverb, intergalactic reach. I temporized for a few measures before letting my sputters give way to a golden run worthy of Chocolate Armenteros, but it was Lambert who most decisively responded to Drennette's detour. Removing the clothespins from his lips and putting them in his coat pocket (the clothespins, by the way, had drawn laughter from several people in the audience when the piece began but they'd gotten used to them and quieted down), he picked up his tenor, put it to his mouth and motioned for me to pull back.\n\nLambert began by going back to the sputter my golden run had come out of, blowing a barrage of expectorant bleats and pops not unlike an attack of hiccups. Beginning there, he indeed never left, thriving on what sounded like obstruction even as he ran the gamut from belly laughs at the horn's low end to a wistful quizzicality in the upper register that at times took him to the spoons. More than Totico's \"What's Your Name?\" he appeared to have Frank Lowe's \"Broadway Rhumba\" in mind, rummaging around the horn as though it were a hot potato or a goose's neck or as though it were a clothespin pinching his tongue. He sustained a blustery tone, bursting, it seemed, with things to say, albeit more things than could be said it seemed. It was during this solo that the balloons emerged, the first of them lifting heavily up out of the bell of the horn bearing these words: _An Egyptian rumba she said it would be, abstract, angular, undulant, pulse beaten out on a salted cod box, an Egyptian giribilla she said it would be. No BaKongo cloth kicked in a circle, no guaguanc\u00f3, no lifted skirt edge, no not being caught by the vacunao. A giribilla, no euphemistic vaccine, she said it would be, an Egyptian rumba, ardent, austere._\n\nFollowing the first balloon's emergence Lambert took a more confidential tack, sputtering as before but as if under his breath, resorting to the sotto voce forage he pursues to such resounding effect. It was a more gauzy sound but one with which he parsed not a whit less, having no less recourse to angles, inversions and reversals, breaking _rumba_ apart, it seemed at points, and by turns putting _ba_ before _rum_ and putting _rum_ before _ba_ , an Egypto-Caribbean conjugation having to do with soul (spirits' bearing on soul, soul's bearing on spirits). It was at one such point that the second balloon came out of the horn bearing these words: _\"Isis to his Osiris, I dreamt he stayed inside me all night, forever, stiff, unyielding,\" she said. \"Damsel in distress, dread virgin, I lay scared stiff. Isisn't to my own Isis, stif_ _f_ _but not unyielding, I lay afraid, flat as a board beneath his weight.\"_ The balloon disappeared when Lambert, put upon by a strain of quizzicality stronger than any that had come before, paused ever so slightly. When he resumed playing the third balloon floated up from the bell of the horn bearing these words: _\"I lay afraid but unafraid, feigning frailty,\" she said, \"stiffness answering stiffness, yielding even so, faux fragility stiffening him throughout all eternity. Stif_ _f_ _intruder I welcomed in and regaled with my own stiffness, he likes it when I start of_ _f_ _stif_ _f_ _and begin to loosen.\"_\n\nAfter the third balloon's emergence Lambert stepped back from the mike, let the balloon vanish and put his tenor back in its stand, the audience applauding loudly. Drennette ever so subtly blushed, as though the balloons had peeped her heart of hearts, but she held her head higher than before, her back straighter than before. She let go of the giribilla pattern, Aunt Nancy returned to the bounding figure, I came back in on trumpet and we took the piece out, the audience applauding loudly still.\n\nAs ever, \nN.\n[Dateless]\n\nDear Angel of Dust,\n\nHotel Didjeridoo would have none of it. Hotel Didjeridoo, the once towering, long since fallen cathouse of wide repute I dreamt ages ago, reluctant object of the Resurrection Project's announced intentions, would have none of it. Strain as I might, it refused resurrection. The news the Hotel had fallen flew like bullets overhead, insisting I lay low, insisting I stay down. The news the Hotel had fallen continued to be news. My low reconnoiter had barely begun, the bullets cried out. No way was it to be risen up from in a hurry, no way hurried out of, no way made an edifice of. All such architectural conceit had long since been made moot. Limit-case dispatch \u00e0 la Braxton's contrabass clarinet, low reconnoiter knew nothing if not crawl space, crablike sashay (if it could be said to be sashay) tending toward and touching on collapse. It knew nothing if not limbo's antithetic arc.\n\nBullets indeed flew, announcing and reannouncing the Hotel had fallen, insisting and again insisting I stay down. \"Lay low\" it seemed I heard and indeed I did. Hotel J\u00edbaro the Hotel appeared to have become in its demise. \"Aylelolaylelolay\" chimed inside my head. A glossolalic launch long the custom in Puerto Rico, it was an odd scrap, a bit of caroling debris, a curious run or recourse to non-, post- or pre-sense lyrics I was nothing if not taken aback to hear inside my head. \"Aylelolaylelolay\/lolaylelolelolela,\" it ran and repeated, a talismanic loop whose repeated \"lay low\" I could no way ignore. It threaded its way thru the fabric the bullet barrage apprised me of, the accompanying quatro's wincing ping as piercing as a Portuguese guitar, needlepoint address I drew back from but welcomed (bittersweet pinprick, bittersweet vaccine).\n\nIt was an odd bit of music to be visited by while under fire, but on a certain level, the social fabric one heard so much about shown to be what it was, Puerto Rican scat's admonitory \"lay low\" made perfect sense, an involuntary reflex insisting stay down if one were already down, duck if not. Admonitory duck, moreover, bordered on earth-diver duck, a foundational drop or a compensatory plunge rendering save-oneself and save-the-world one and the same, bite of dust and beakful of mud one and the same. One lay on one's belly, having hit the dirt, bullets whistling overhead, one's j\u00edbaro serenade woven into the guns' ongoing report. It all made perfect sense.\n\nHotel Didjeridoo, I had to accept, would have no rebuilding, no rebirth. A thread running thru the proverbial social fabric, \"lay low\" said let the proverbial dogs lie, what was done was done. Even so, as I lay I stood ready to ring changes on syllabic largesse, \"aylelolay's\" unraveling rope a noose I sang or sought to sing my way out of, the fait accompli Hotel Didjeridoo resigned itself to. Or was it syllabic duress, a rope I ran the risk of choking up on if not dangling from? I rolled over and lay on my back baying at the moon, \"aylelolay\" my coyote howl. Caught feeling, fraught sonance, \"aylelolay\" culled a rapport harking back to what some said were Muslim roots, a derivation (or so, at least, I had heard) from _ilaha illallah_ , not unlike bullfighting's _ol\u00e9_ (I had also heard) harking back to _Allah_.\n\nHotel Moro it might well have been and was, \"lay low's\" metathetic remit a reminder of Lole Montoya's voice. Husky, full-throated, the hull of a boat I lay on my back looking up at, it bore tidings from Egypt, Mohamed Abdelwahad's \"Anta Oumri\" and \"Wdaret el Ayan\" segued into out of \"Sangre Gitana y Mora,\" an incendiary sunship scorching the water I lay under.\n\nStill, I stepped forward and blew\u2014stood up, stepped forward, took horn to mouth and blew, \"lay low\" notwithstanding. A bugling flutter and flex it was, the feather I could be knocked over by rousing me even so, requiem and reveille rolled into one. Brass but ever so inward (so cracked a wrinkle of sound as to risk erasure), it raised a hand, it seemed, all the same, hailing the ship's hull in the water above. Incendiary boat all the more inveterate rebuff, Lole's voice I would chase forever, its brass equivalent not quite to be arrived at. I would chase and be forever outrun.\n\nI resisted making much of \"low lay,\" the obvious play on jazz's reputed bordello roots. Lole's voice was a bit of husk in my throat, tightening it, constricting my airflow, choked-up endowment could it be said to be an endowment, poignant, unappeasable, possessed. I blew to be its equal or, short of that, to etherealize it, bodily husk an abidance never to be gotten free from, blow though I did as though I could. Brass, that is, was a way of getting by or going on. It afforded what solace it could, its by no means moot condolences. I had recourse to a coyness recalling Miles, the face-behind-a-fan retreat or seeming retreat heard on \"Circle,\" demure but not without design (\"See how that sounds, Teo\"). It turned away from the ship's hull overhead, a blush or the beginnings of a blush burgeoning inward, a breathy spread of guile and regret. It was anything but \"aylelolay\" but not unrelated, nothing if not its compunction or its qualm.\n\nIt occurred to me it might also be Hotel Mita, \"aylelolay's\" Puerto Rican provenance bearing again but in a slant manner. The ship's hull was a message on high, \"el mensaje de alto\" sung about by the Rondalla del Templo de Mita in San Juan, the song's mention of Noah no doubt the connection, its \"Como los tiempos de No\u00eb vino el esp\u00edritu\/anunciando que viene destrucci\u00f3n\" resonating with Hotel Didjeridoo's fall. I brought this to bear upon the horn, put it into the horn as though the horn were the proverbial pipe, my blush or my beginnings of a blush combusted, nothing if not the Rondalla's heartrending chorus. \"Amigo, ven y oyes la v\u00f3z de Dios,\" I said with my breath as well as under my breath, a smoked insistence I parried against the boat's unreachability, smudge and buff's newly made amends.\n\nHusky, haggard, Lole's voice I already knew I would chase forever. The Rondalla's call I now knew I would chase forever, equal parts cry and confection, sweet smoke circling skyward. The sea I saw myself laid low in held me up, the ship's hull caulked as if coaxed into the water, insisting I blow my horn. I felt a salty-sweet buttress or brace whose rough accompaniment said, not outright saying it, stand tall.\n\nI stood underwater blowing my horn, an Aquarian undulance inflecting each note. I blew as though aided by synthetic strings, a synthesizer's air of impendence, a watery element all its own. Urge and emanation rolled into one, doused alterity of an astral sort informed each note, a star having fallen into the sea and set it boiling, each new insinuation bugling no end. That star was none other than the sun, warily ensconced in Lole's Atet boat, the ship whose hull her voice was. The morning boat's fall or its failure to lift (if either, against all odds, was what it was) stirred the bottom of the sea and sent waves everywhere, roiling with insinuation, the very blush or beginnings of a blush I blew like smoke out the bell of the horn.\n\nThe mixed-metaphorical premises on which I stood\u2014smoking water, undersea buttress, \"lay low\" vantage\u2014turned my legs to rubber, propping me up even so. Bubbles came out of the bell of the horn, smoke bubbles, bubbles that were in fact balloons. Each balloon bore a message as it rose toward Lole's boat but burst when it got there, raining down bits of script, the words that had been inside. Gone up in smoke, such bits as _I caught myself_ came floating down, water more like air than water, such bits as _letting myself lean back before catching myself_. A note-bearing bottle as well as a comic-strip balloon, each bubble as it burst blessed my undersea launch with incongruous ash, burnt bits of script consecrating my intonation, the words or the would-be words I bruited on high. \"All this in the wake of Lole's boat,\" I said to myself, \"the merging of hull and husk I'll forever be outrun by.\" It was a vow, a benediction even, a mandate I afforded myself. \"Lay low\" auspices notwithstanding, running after would never stop.\n\nMy horn wanted nothing if not to announce liquidity's advance beyond rectilinear form, the stiff amenities undulance and curvature so luxuriously annulled. Such amenities bend and slur would have nothing to do with (or would, were they to, only by way of contrast), just as Hotel Didjeridoo, root brass or root embouchure, would have nothing anymore to do with architectural conceit's dream of rise and rebirth. Hotel Didjeridoo, I reminded oneself, would have none of it, nor would Lole's metathetic morning boat, mixed-metaphorical ash ran in whose wake, burn and rescinded script rolled into one.\n\nThe morning boat's fall or its failure to lift was in fact a refusal. Lole's voice would allow no likeness. Stout reluctance I thought to call it, willed unwillingness, husk none else than a containment, heartfelt holding back. The boat sat taunting me, teasing me, flat on the water it seemed\u2014flat but holding all there was of arc or ascendency, hold and hull nothing if not the same.\n\nWater wet the horn I blew underwater. Wooing the boat's hull overhead, I imagined myself aboard ship, stowed away in the hold but aboard it even so, none other than the smoldering sun. It was a doused Osirian sun I saw myself as, adamantly of a piece with the smoldering horn I blew, the wet trumpet's blare an upsurge of bubbles ascending the sky the sea whose floor I stood on had become. Still, the boat stood me up in more senses than one. Each bubble, before it burst, gave me something to reach for, a note-bearing boat inside a boat-bearing bottle, the rendezvous of seed with husk Lole's boat's hull promised, destiny's proverbial date. Each bubble, having burst, left me dateless.\n\nDatelessness notwithstanding, burst bubbles notwithstanding, I rallied, a hip variation on first call coming out of the horn, a bugling whose call was to carry on. Stingy-brim strut woven into a mustering charge, it was nothing less than a gauntlet hitting the ground.\n\nWhat it was was that one horn wasn't enough, one voice not enough. There was something crowded about Lole's voice, precisely what one meant by husky. It was as though, no matter how subdued a turn her voice took, some indefinable something or a multitude of such were jostling for space. It was all she could do to contain strains that would otherwise undo the tenuous-accord-cum-strenuous-contention husk held in check.\n\nEven from below I could see the boat bulged with voices, some stowaway, some aboveboard. It bore more than one voice, however much Lole's voice might've been the voice that fueled and kept it afloat, much as the smoldering sun it bore might've been no more than a smoke-filled bubble, burning-boat-bearing bottle inside an incendiary ship. To see it so cried out for a larger conception, a new perspective, Donald Byrd's recording of that name coming quickly to mind, only to have its eight-voice choir rejected as too pat or predictable for what was called for here. Voice (\"chorality\" or \"choricity\") needed to be more diffuse or more dispersed, more constituent strain or pervasive surge as in the sort of emic or seemingly emic effusion, aqueous or atmospheric, a synthesizer might provide.\n\nI stood ready to acknowledge this need and, indeed, almost before one knew it, I already had. The bulging boat swollen with voices would be ratified beforehand, if the performance now underway became part of the antithetic opera (theoretic opera some called it) of which for a while there'd been so much talk. A quote I had not only long savored but knew might one day prove useful popped into my head as I continued to blow bubble after smoke-filled bubble. Should the underwater, boat-wooing performance come to be included in the opera, the quote would serve as Aquatico-Solar Epigraph #1:\n\nOsiris represents the Nile and the Sun: Sun and Nile are, on the other hand, symbols of human life\u2014each one is signification and symbol at the same time; the symbol is changed into signification, and this latter becomes symbol of that symbol, which itself then becomes signification. None of these phases of existence is a Type without being at the same time a Signification; each is both; the one is explained by the other. Thus there arises one pregnant conception, composed of many conceptions.\n\nIsis to the epigraph's Osirian _mise en ab\u00eeme_ , I quickly resorted to circular breathing, a tack whose underscoring of reciprocity verged ever so lightly on rotundity as well (swollen belly and swollen boat rolled into one).\n\nStingy-brim strut had come a long way, a diffuse, omni-voice dilation or solution absorption knew no way to constrain. No more than a mere hint of oratorio, no more than a mere hint of chorale, it furthered an aqueous consort of carolings coincident with the medium itself\u2014coincident but not by that to be contained or ingested, an attenuation beyond (while residing within) liquidity's confines. Liquid's exhalation of gas was what it was like if not outright amounted to, an exhalation that oddly wafted within even as it wafted while standing in wait beyond. Such wafture, multiple, immanent, extrapolative, was nothing if not the quantum stride (not only soulful in addition to quantum but quantum only insofar as it numbered soulfulness among its attributes) called for by stingy-brim strut and begun by it to be put into play.\n\nNonetheless, neither \"aylelolay\" nor \"Mensaje de Alto\" had been left behind, each a standing rope song's promise of ascent made a signpost of sorts I repeatedly made note of and, in so doing, made listeners make note of as well. A firemen's pole if not a laminated snake, it could hardly not also expostulate descent, bearing senses of emergency, alarm and even frantic dispatch, its croonfulness and reassurance at the strictly musical level notwithstanding.\n\nIt all went to insist again that Hotel Didjeridoo would in no way countenance easy elevation, that it would have no truck with facile rebirth or rebuilding. Hotel Didjeridoo would have none of it, as its three alternate names (J\u00edbaro, Moro, Mita) and its unstated but implied potential for even more names had meant to make clear, \"lay low's\" and\/or Lole's blown smoke's amity with \"lo alto\" not to be taken as other than the qualm or qualification it assuredly was.\n\nAmbient accompaniment, water maintained pedal-point armature, fluviality, surge and subsidence, light oratorical wax and recess. Stingy-brim strut's Osirian posture stood on friendly terms, it all but went without saying, with standing itself, obfuscating Osiris's coexistent rapport with recumbency, recline, supination. It was this blown smoke's ascendancy made clear.\n\nSo I bent my knees and squatted, continuing to play, not missing a note. I leaned back a bit, letting my ass rest on the seafloor, horn still in hand, continuing to play. I lay back farther, the back of my head coming to rest on the seafloor, my back flat against the seafloor, still not missing a note, continuing to play. I extended my legs until they too lay flat on the seafloor, horn still in hand, horn pointed upward.\n\nAside from the fact that I was breathing and not lying perfectly still, moving my arms and fingers to play the horn and keeping time with my right foot, I lay like a mummy, not only not missing a note but playing my heart out, serenading and seducing (would-be seducing) the boat overhead.\n\nSincerely, \nDredj\n30.IX.83\n\nDear Angel of Dust,\n\nI'm writing about yesterday's letter. It was written, as you no doubt saw right away, during a cowrie shell attack. The attack seems to've been brought on by a chain of associations or a train of thought that began with me reminiscing about my early childhood in Florida. I was particularly nostalgic about conch fritters, which I vividly remember though I haven't eaten any since we left Miami when I was four. Was that enough to ignite the conch component of the cowrie shell attacks, the new, scalpel-edge wrinkle that seems to've motored recent attacks even more than the cowries themselves? Or was it my recollection of a family fishing trip when I was three, the incident everyone still laughs about, my uncle reeling in a fish, whipping the line back in a high arc, and me, standing farther up the bank in back of him, getting hit squarely on the head by the fish on the end of his line?\n\nWhichever, if not something else and if not both, it got me going. Whether conch-implied incision or fish-upside-the-head wallop, something seemed intent on underscoring depth, subaqueousness, river if not sea. It seemed to merge with a watery, \"oceanic\" sense I'd felt while playing \"Sekhet Aaru Struff \" the day before (albeit not so much felt as felt surrounded by perhaps), a sense I couldn't quite shake of being underwater, cosmic or not if not earthly and cosmic both. Was yesterday's letter Dredj's attempt to convey that sense? Garbled attempt I'm inclined to say, so brimming with matters not particularly germane to \"Sekhet Aaru Struff \" the letter seems to me to be. Or are these departures from point the very \"point,\" the diffusion of point I touched on in the letter that accompanied the tape? So maybe it's not so much a garbled as a \"struffy\" attempt?\n\nIn any case, call it Dredj Alley, for it was an alley Dredj ducked into before it became a body of water whose floor he was on, an alleyway just off the beachfront in Venice, I'd go so far as to say, up from which one looked out from a flat filling up with sharp Shostakovian light. From House of Dredj to Dredj Annex to Dredj Alley, the attacks appear to be on an anti-architectural course, a course of architectural undoing, Hotel Didjeridoo refusing resurrection, insisting solidity and solubility hold hands. \"Sekhet Aaru Struff \" or not, Dredj descried hand holding hand, hand on hand, held hands holding his writing hand.\n\nA light attack, it lasted only a day.\n\nAs ever, \nN.\n4.X.83\n\nDear Angel of Dust,\n\nI wouldn't say I'm taking a page out of the balloons' book, that I'm trying to beat them at their own game. Aunt Nancy suggested as much but I don't think that's it. No, this new thing I'm trying goes back to a story Yusef Lateef tells about the days when he was in Mingus's band, a story I was deeply struck by when I first heard it, a story I think about from time to time. Yusef says there was a composition on which he was to solo and that Mingus, rather than writing out chord symbols for him to improvise against, drew a picture of a coffin, that it was this that he was to base his improvisation on. A friend of mine once joked that Mingus simply meant that if Yusef messed up the solo he'd kill him, but I've long been intrigued by and attracted to the idea of getting musical information from a picture and it's this that led me to a certain experiment with my latest composition. Braxton's diagrammatic, pictogrammic titles and the solo concert of his I caught a couple of years ago, the scores for which looked like pen and ink drawings, nonfigurative but drawings even so, had a role as well.\n\nThe new composition is called \"Fossil Flow.\" I wrote it thinking about oil spills, the increasing number of them and the damage they do. Just this year there've been two massive ones: in February, the Nowruz Field platform in Iran spilled 80 million gallons of oil into the Persian Gulf; in August, a Spanish tanker, the _Castillo de Bellver_ , caught fire and spilled 78 million gallons off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa. I was thinking about the distant past (prehistoric apocalypse, collapse or catastrophe) achieving fluidity, the oxymoronic play between fossil and flow of such dimension as to put the present at risk. It's as though it were the dinosaurs and the mastodons' revenge, prehistory's grudge against what came after, a brief against preservation or containment, fossil solidity, an entropic brief against past and present keeping their places. It's as though, Dredj-like, I saw solidity's hand and solubility's hand, gripped though they were by one another, holding history's hand, leading the way as it broke. Or was it, oil and water notoriously not mixing, solidity's hand and insolubility's hand? I'm not sure it matters. Recalling the rationing and the long lines at gas stations a few years ago, I saw dependency's hand and depletion's hand take solidity's hand and (in)solubility's hand's places, presided over by an entropic sun.\n\nMuch of the piece is written out but I'm trying something new, something of a built-in improvisation approach, by leaving gaps at various points in everyone's parts, gaps of a certain number of measures (which varies) marked by the words \"Wild Card.\" The latter refer to a drawing and text with which each musician is provided, an 8\" x 12\" posterboard \"card\" on which he or she is to base what he or she plays at that point. I'm enclosing one. As you can see, the \"card\" consists of a drawing, captioned \"Molimo m'Atet's Figurehead Consoled on the Revival Bench,\" beneath which is a brief paragraph. I struggled over whether or not to include the latter, fearing it might be spelling things out too much, taking away from the suggestiveness of the drawing. I decided in favor of keeping it, realizing that it adds a suggestiveness of its own, that words, regardless of how much they point or specify, can't altogether escape indefiniteness or inference, that, indeed, specification has a way of being shadowed by implication. What, for example, is to be musically made of the fact that the figurehead's ribs show, simply enough, in the drawing but also show, in an augmented, not so simple way, in the words \"visible, as were the planks of the ship's busted hull\"?\n\nI'm also enclosing a tape. Let me know what you think.\n\nYours, \nN.\n\n.\n\n_Molimo m'Atet's Figurehead Consoled on the Revival Bench_\n\nAn oil tanker had run aground farther up the coast and broken apart. Brothers in black before they knew it, B'Loon and Djbouche washed ashore with the news of the spill. People gathered on the beach to help clean up and help rescue seabirds, oil and tar stuck to their feathers from alighting on the water or, standing or prancing on the shore, being caught by the tide. Bright sun and blue sky notwithstanding, the spill cast a pall over everything and everyone, not least of all Djband, who, likening themselves to a ship, the sun boat of Egyptian belief, felt as though they too had run aground. Epitomizing the \"boat-bodied lightness, light-bodied bigness\" one of them had once extolled, the female figure gracing the prow of the ship they took themselves to be (the goddess Maat, some said) stepped away, walked ashore and sat down on a bench facing the sea, head down, dejected, ribs visible, as were the planks of the ship's busted hull. Impromptu patron saint of shipwreck, ad hoc angel, Dredj immediately sat down beside her and put his arm around her, offering comfort, consolation, recondite sun, as if to look to and be lit by eclipse were the only amenity.\n8.X.83\n\nDear Angel of Dust,\n\nMany thanks for your letter. I appreciate your comments on \"Fossil Flow,\" your reaction to which, I have to admit, I was nervous about. Yes, you heard it right. \"Stratified extinction,\" as you say, does pervade the piece, a tributary distinction between extinction and exhaustion woven in. I'm impressed by your picking up on the \"Wild Card\" sections of each band member's playing and what about the drawing and\/or text informs how he or she plays. Drennette says you're right that the abstract bench Dredj and the figurehead sit on (and, by implication, the abstract revival available to them) particularly caught her eye and especially spoke to her, giving rise to the stroked, retreating figure she has recourse to with brushes that you note a couple of minutes into the piece (not unlike, she agrees, sand pulled away from the shore by a receding wave). You're also right that the \"welter of double-reed hustle\" Penguin and Lambert get into on oboe and English horn, respectively, the outbreak of metaphysical sweat with its needling or drilling insistence as if to answer a spiritual-materialist clot begging to be cut thru, is one of the places where two players' \"Wild Card\" sections coincide. And your surmise that Penguin's choppy, shenai-like drone has to do with a focus on the apparently oil-toed and oil-fingered extremities on the drawing's right side agrees with his account; a meditation, he calls it, upon those extremities' \"tarpit premises.\" Likewise, Lambert's barking, dilated, alto-sounding complaints derived, Lambert says, from an impulse born of both pictorial and textual cues, an impulse to \"occupy ribcage arena,\" as he puts it, those cues being exactly the depiction of and the reference to the figurehead's ribs that you suggest animated his playing at that point.\n\nNothing much else to report. Just a quick thanks for your letter.\n\nAs ever, \nN.\n10.X.83\n\nDear Angel of Dust,\n\nPenguin seems to have been heartened by the subtle blush the balloons brought to Drennette's face at the Century City Playhouse. It came up as he and I were talking today. \"Lambert got it right,\" he said. \"Or should I say the balloons got it right? They blew the whistle on Drennette's fake reticence, ripped away the blas\u00e9 front she puts up. With all that stuff about the balloons following her home, all but about being stalked or maybe outright about being stalked, she got it right as well, auguring a muse of pursuit and pursuit's engine or draw, reluctance, a ruse of rebuff, a prude poetics.\" He paused a moment, savoring the thought. \"There was more to that blush than met the eye,\" he resumed. \"Her heart's blood flew to her head.\" It seemed it flew to his as well, for he paused again, subtly blushing at the conceit before going on. \"The balloons not only blew the whistle,\" he then went on. \"They let the air, so to speak, out of an inflated self-regard. They all but burst with Drennette's recondite desire to be found out, contested, caught by lordly science alone.\" He subtly blushed again, inwardly balked, twin to the balking inwardness that was more than met the eye, the prude interiority he took to heart and took heart from, the soul whose mating twin he'd be if he could.\n\n\"Just like Lambert likes to say about the griot,\" Penguin said when he took up speaking again, gazing into the distance as if what he was going to say came from afar, \"the balloons, bless their hearts, have a big mouth.\" He no longer subtly blushed but again he paused. \"Drennette's a little bit off,\" he said when he spoke again. I took him to mean more than he said. I took him to mean the balloons call interiority out, their mouths, insofar as they can be said to have them, open in awe at Drennette's abscondity, her becoming all the more an object of pursuit by not being all there. He sought leverage it struck me. He'd have made B'Loon's wan smile a satchel mouth. He'd have pried B'Loon's wan smile open, ransacked it, anything to get next to Drennette. Confirmation came at once. Penguin repeated, \"Drennette's a little bit off,\" adding, \"but the balloons would have none of her not-nearness. They would abide by nothing short of not-nearness beginning to see its end, not-nearness beginning to be sashay.\"\n\nI could not have seen Penguin more clearly. I saw him in nothing if not namesake light, hallowed by eponymous aura: ripped, wingless bird, wind-afflicted, flightless, devout. \"The balloons would know Drennette otherwise,\" he said, \"knowing her by her being a little bit off no longer enough. They would have her no more than two bows' lengths away, no more than an atom's breadth away. The balloons would be her throne and her footstool.\" He was quietly raving, caught in a low-key agitation, a game of hide and seek (hers with him, the balloons' with the band), gnostic stranger, grounded bird.\n\nStill, he would aver what was yet to be seen, given heart by the balloons' intimations. He now spoke explicitly of himself, changing the course it had seemed he was on, contrasting himself with the balloons. \"I, however, would know her by her distant footfall, footsteps down a dark hallway, a rustle outside my door.\" I'd all along taken the balloons to be a stand-in for himself and I continued to see them that way though he now employed them as foil. He fell silent and I remained silent.\n\nI had said nothing all the while Penguin spoke and it seemed he expected as much. It was a run of pure devotion, a poem, a paean, an oath.\n\nYours, \nN.\n26.X.83\n\nDear Angel of Dust,\n\nDay before yesterday we drove up to Santa Cruz to play the Kuumbwa Jazz Center again. It was three years ago we first played there. It was good to venture north again and again we took 101 and then 1 where it branches off from 101 at San Luis Obispo. The coast was a feast of blue sky and blue water again, radiant sun and reflected sun's radiant sparkle on water. It was a feast we could hardly take our eyes off. Sunlight and sea lay hypnotically to our left all the while we put Morro Bay, San Simeon, Carmel and Monterey behind us.\n\nWe got going early in the morning, early enough to get to Santa Cruz by late afternoon. It was still dark, in fact, when we left L.A., so we pulled into Santa Cruz well in time for the sound check, the longer route we took notwithstanding. It turned out we got there with time to spare, which time we decided to burn by visiting the lighthouse. We walked around on the pathways and the sidewalk and the grassy field surrounding the lighthouse, watching the surfers, the bicycle riders, the skateboard riders, the Frisbee throwers. Waves crashed on the rocks. Wind wafted salt.\n\nThe smell of salt addressed us again as we stood outside Kuumbwa later that night between sets. The air smelled heavily of the sea, prompting Aunt Nancy to note \"a coastal piquancy\" she said demanded we play \"Fossil Flow\" during the second set. She couldn't help, she said, catching a recondite whiff\u2014imaginary, she admitted, but all the more insinuative being so\u2014an oblique hint of oil threaded thru the marine bouquet the night air wafted. \"I can't get those rigs off my mind,\" she said, referring to the oil platforms off the Santa Barbara coast we'd driven past in the morning, the site of a huge oil spill in 1969.\n\nIt was hard not to see the sense it made. The specter of the derricks had followed us up the coast, shadowing the sea and the sun's gleam and shimmer, dark prospect under an otherwise bright fa\u00e7ade. \"Fossil Flow\" couldn't have been offered an apter setting, salt itself auguring future affliction, imaginary though the smell of oil might've been. The piece is one that wants to put pressure on flow, indemnify furtherance, bestow auspice and omen upon the undulacy it works. Ominous undulance had already, to an extent, come into play, a suppositious wave and waft Aunt Nancy picked up on mixing oil and salt. Bass player to the bone, she sensed a deep throb, eventual ache, dark unction, a waxing of promise and foreboding that was doubly on the tip of her tongue\u2014oil she could almost taste, calamity she all but announced. It seemed all the more fitting that \"Fossil Flow\" begins with her playing a three-note ostinato.\n\nThere was no way not to see it made sense. We decided we'd end the second set with \"Fossil Flow,\" a fitting end not only to the set and the gig but to the day, a fittingness Lambert would accent by switching from English horn to tenor for this rendition, more deeply resonating with dark unction. Flow, the more we thought about it, cut more than one way, not spoilage or spill alone but excursion. We had, after all, driven up the coast. We had, after all, enjoyed it. There was a principle of nonexemption we grew apprised of, automotivity a fluid aspect itself: we were part of the flow, in on the flow. (I remembered the Buick Dynaflow my uncle had been so proud of back in the fifties. I thought of Ray Charles mentioning a Dynaflow in \"It Should Have Been Me.\") Enjoyment lent undulacy a lilt unction wanted in on. This was the truth we both averred and would keep at bay.\n\nWe played \"Tosaut L'Ouverture\" next to last. When it ended we went right into \"Fossil Flow,\" not waiting for the applause to subside, not announcing it. We came on with a slow lope led by Aunt Nancy's pensive, three-note ostinato on bass, a descending figure whose rotundity of tone edged over into omen, apprehension, foreboding, robust as it otherwise was notwithstanding. A table of sorts was being set\u2014implicative, dark but brightened by the bit of shimmer Drennette's ride cymbal worked in, the calm, confident way she kept time. Djamilaa took up with that bit of shimmer when she came in on piano five bars in, starting out with a subtly happy-hand garnish that had something of glimmer and gleam to it and a prance aspect as well.\n\nThe horns, when Lambert, Penguin and I came in, stating the head on tenor, oboe and cornet, respectively, had an unprompted sense of aside, sotto voce not so much as reaching out from it, doing so with annunciative blare. Call and cry factored in as well, as also did no small amount of tartness, a ribald arrest of all one thought one knew, knowing the pensive lope it was. It seemed we wanted to say something about moment and simultaneity, moment's dismay at simultaneity's largesse, its doling out, moment's dismay at sequentiality's parsimony; it even seemed we had already said that something. This was in large part, insofar as we already had or possibly had, the work of Djamilaa's tolling chords and her solemn, sometimes grumpy left hand. Chorded ploy contended with chorded plenitude, sequential disbursement pressed and vied with by both. How to both unbraid simultaneity's bounty and give it its due, unpack to the point or brink of undoing, was the question we were called to confront in our solos.\n\nThe first to solo, Lambert was all business. He restated the head, grudgingly it seemed, put upon by quizzical misgiving, pestered by qualms. Calling to mind, in that regard, the solo Joe Henderson takes on McCoy Tyner's \"Contemplation\" on _The Real McCoy_ , he allowed himself a certain hesitancy, opening gaps in the head's articulation, not so much a stutter as being repeatedly given pause (albeit stutter, sputter even, was obliquely the case). Bellow and beguilement volleyed, haloed by complaint at every point. Caught in a related quandary, Drennette beat the parade snare as though beating back tears, choking up on the stick and holding it at midpoint, swiping\u2014rare vulnerability, rare admission, rare forthrightness, a clipped, cutting pleat, cropped egress.\n\nI stood to Lambert's left, looking over his shoulder. When he got to the \"Wild Card\" gap within the head's elaboration it seemed it was the oil-drop extremities in the drawing that caught his eye, the figures' oil-drop hands, toes, fingers and feet. Working changes on classic teardrop tenor, he built on Drennette's choked-up admission but also brushed it aside. A parodic, moanlike drop to the lower register picked a bone with lachrymosity and, by implication, unctuosity as well. He would have nothing to do with suspect suavity, he declared by way of a more forthright return to the horn's middle octave, no matter the oil on his and everyone else's hands. It was a beautiful boast, made all the more so by his maintenance of a sober, unflustered tone worthy of Dewey Redman, a soothing, unhurried\u2014did one dare say suave?\u2014uptake or attack.\n\n(No, one dared not say suave. What might've seemed so or one might've said seemed so was in fact a heuristic roughness Lambert plied and parlayed into scoured sobriety, sensibility abraded, a bumped entitlement or sense of entitlement tending more than one way.)\n\nDrennette saw that her choked-up address of the parade snare no longer held sway. She returned her hand to the base of the stick, took the rim of the ride cymbal between the forefinger and thumb of her left hand and began to slowly mark time, the stick's tip hitting the cymbal with a tolling insistence Djamilaa quickly joined in on, repeating a single note in unison with it. Together the two chimed, Djamilaa's \"tallywise\" limpidity (one-two, one-two, one-two...) auditing and all the more endorsing the ride cymbal's understated ring. They too now bore the figures' oil-drop extremities in mind. It seemed they especially wanted to say something about digits, counting, and what it was they said or wanted to say Lambert agreed with, moving to the high end of the horn while remaining sober, keeping calm, as if to give them his blessing, say their tolling rang true.\n\nLambert allowed his solo to end there, a light, breathy peal floating above cost, consequence, toll. It floated above but not free of toll, telling, in its unperturbed way, of debts paid and debts yet to be paid, soberly tolling but no less tolling than Drennette and Djamilaa's ritualistic audit. It lay there a beat and a half, a thin, breathy peal whose remaining aloft ritual audit implied but quickly drew back from, Aunt Nancy, whose repetitive pluck had become part of it, announcing a new direction by pulling out the bow and proceeding to play arco. She gave the bass a cello's Orphic swell, fraught songfulness and fret, a teetering on the edge of elation she let sweep thru the \"Wild Card\" gap she stepped into, treading gingerly as though her toes were dripping oil, her feet soaked in oil.\n\nAunt Nancy bowed with a wincing resonance, as though the bow were an exposed rib\u2014as though, indeed, it were _her_ exposed rib, as though she were the see-thru masthead whose ribs the \"Wild Card\" drawing apprised us of. She bowed as though coaxing the bow across the strings at points, a jittery luxuriance given uncommon reach, uncommon albeit reluctant reach. Drennette peppered Aunt Nancy's resonance and reach (plumb resonance and reach) with rapid-fire outbursts on the orchestra snare, sanctified, spasmodic, pentecostal hammerings \u00e0 la Sunny Murray.\n\nDjamilaa had all but fallen silent, serving up chords every now and then, a more slowly doled out tolling meant to recall what had gone before. This left Aunt Nancy all the more at the mercy of Drennette's infectious pepper, a fact or effect eventually made evident by the percussive tack she resorted to. She came to a point where she lifted the bow and tapped the strings with it, letting it bounce lightly on them, much as Ron Carter does on \"Barb's Song to the Wizard\" on Tony Williams's _Lifetime_ album, a piece, a passage and a technique Aunt Nancy had excitedly turned us on to ages ago. Here she took it further, sustained and stayed with it to an extent barely broached by Carter's jagged innuendo. Rickety buildup grew possessed of growl and grumble, an aroused rattle and would-be rafter shake amassing senses of emergence or at least emergency, rummaging for voice, viability, ground.\n\nThe bow was a mallet, the strings a throaty dulcimer, Aunt Nancy's fingers, thumb and wrist exquisitely schooled. Though she made it seem the bow simply bounced, no aspect of touch or attack went without thought, throaty dulcimer by turns a croaking cimbalom, by turns a raspy santur.\n\nIt became clear, though, that the strings were neither dulcimer, cimbalom nor santur, that the masthead's exposed ribs were the focus of Aunt Nancy's solo, that the strings were indeed those ribs, vertically though they lay, the fact that the bow was itself a rib notwithstanding. Indeed, Aunt Nancy's rib-on-rib address accented intimacy and consolation, exactly the embrace the drawing shows the masthead held in, Dredj's embrace\u2014rib-on-rib contact, rib-on-rib caress, rib-on-rib assumption of Dredj's counsel. Here, however, rib crossed rib and was let percuss upon rib, a fact that not only accorded with but in part conveyed the disconsolate tone of Aunt Nancy's solo, the worked arousal refusing to be put to rest it so starkly was.\n\nEventually Djamilaa fell completely silent and Drennette soon followed suit. Aunt Nancy's solo was now exactly that, Djamilaa and Drennette having bowed out as if to suggest the bass's taut strings had to do with tautology, the solo's disconsolate temper with self-induced or self-digested ordeal, self-conducted ordeal\u2014a suggestion to which, given the way Aunt Nancy's bass revved its own ennui, the way she ransacked it for sound, there was more than a grain of truth.\n\nAunt Nancy played alone and was all alone, played along with being alone, left alone, \"all alone in the world.\" She allowed a hint of self-pity in, part parodic host, part woebegone orphan, not unrelated to Lambert's recasting of teardrop tenor. More specifically recalling Carter, she put the emphasis even more on _rev_ , letting the bow ride and bounce on the strings with new and old verve, new and old volatility, mimicking or mining automotivity's old and new dream. A Model T on a bumpy road the bow might've been, so loudly did brake and sputter vie with flow.\n\nAunt Nancy played for all the world to know she stood alone, for all the world to know we all, no matter rev's would-be amelioration, stood alone, as though flow itself stumbled, stuck. Sputter never spoke more eloquently but even so she would not be done with fluidity, full-bodied arco, letting the bow glide between bouts or outbursts of coughlike exhaust, Carteresque bow-bounce. Such answering fluidity was nothing if not outright elegy, forthright lament, Aunt Nancy allowing the bass its low-throated moan. She spoke from nowhere if not from the heart (ribcage apse, alcove, atrium), no way if not on two fronts, both fronts, deep throb and bow-bounce both.\n\nPoint made, she put the bow away and went back to playing pizzicato, plucking the strings with chill serenity, ritual aplomb. She stood with her back straight, addressing the strings with a churchical assurance, churchical rectitude, as patient a fingerwalk as there ever was. She closed her eyes, exuding meditative calm, each ascending run seeming to say, \"Alas,\" each descending run whispering, \"Amen.\" Abidance was the overall note she struck, if there could be said to be an overall note she struck.\n\nDjamilaa had left the piano to pick up one of her guitars. As the audience applauded Aunt Nancy's solo she began to play, pointedly chiming in on strings. She started off in what initially struck one as a Spanish vein but as she went further along one recognized a Malian or Guinean provenance, a _guitare s\u00e8che_ excursion (it was an acoustic guitar she picked up) whose ambulatory rhythm feasted on recurrence. It sought to make its home in a reverberant ping a shade beyond the upbeat, a treble chime not so much home as haunt but beckoning as though haunt could make heaven home. Indeed, treble chime verged on going out of bounds, off scale or off record, verged on heaven itself, rang heaven's bell.\n\nAunt Nancy picked up on Djamilaa's Mande invitation and replied, playing the bass like a big guitar (rhythm guitar to Djamilaa's lead, bass to Djamilaa's treble), whereupon Djamilaa, gratified to hear her call responded to, shot her an appreciative glance and began to sing. Together they plied a Malinke roll built on repetition, the chords fraught with a certain drama or an inference of drama (false drama perhaps), an inkling, inference or sense Djamilaa took pains to fend off, paradoxically furthering, in so doing, the very inkling, inference or sense it was her one wish in life (or so it seemed) to hold at bay. A buoyant bout with quicksand, were such possible, her voice took solace in its ability to declaim while being taken out, courting hoarseness to extol its testificatory prowess. Rescue was only what witness one could manage, were there rescue at all, and witness, were there, would suffice, it seemed she said or sang more than said or made singing say. Witness or no witness, her singing summoned words like _aria_ , _recitative_ and _recital_ only to say that they fell short, failed when what was really real was afoot, that exactly that, the really real, was afoot. Strident, abrasive, bent on scouring the air itself if need be, her voice built with a certain insistence toward something none of us, her included, could name, imprecatory at points, complaint piled on complaint, coax plied with complaint.\n\nDrennette joined in with a repeating figure that marked the strong beat on the high hat, setting it up with a tap on the bass drum, the barest percussive presence one could want. The three of them effected an ictic, riverine amble, Djamilaa's treble chime, as time went on, arriving a lengthening shade late, a hitch or a gimp or an eddy in the flow. It brought to mind, for me at least, the \"Wild Card\" drawing's abstract bench. It sat one down and it gave one pause, giving one to reflect on water's indifferent flow, time's indifferent flow. One sat on a bench on a bank overlooking the Niger.\n\nLengthening shade suggested the drawing's black sun had caught Djamilaa's eye, the river's consolation an intricate mix of solace and complaint. The river's destination was there by inference, the salt air that had nipped our noses complicating time's occult remit. Lambert, Penguin and I picked up on this and instinctively bowed our heads, letting Djamilaa, Drennette and Aunt Nancy's amble have its way with us as waves or rapids might. Shade-late arrival's beneficiary, Djamilaa's treble chime gathered extrapolative reach. Eking out a summons or a receipt that would be the chime's equivalent, her voice every now and again leapt, its timbral bound and embrace as raw-ribbed as Aunt Nancy's bow-bounce had been, a miraculous mix of stridency and grace.\n\nLambert, Penguin and I now lifted our heads. Carried in or carried out, we stood athwart all emollience, amenity's reset, lengthening shade's limp a new boon nonetheless. Listening to Djamilaa, Drennette and Aunt Nancy, one heard again and saw again, as though for the first and final time, that sound was the inner skin of things, the other side coming over, inside turning out. A fool's errand it might've been to see it so but one saw it so. It was ground we'd been over before, ground we'd go over again, ground that somehow never got old.\n\nAs Djamilaa's voice began to trail off, letting us know she'd had her say, the audience began to applaud and Lambert and Penguin glanced at me and nodded to say the floor, so to speak, was mine. I put the cornet to my lips and began with a run meant to recall Aunt Nancy's Model T on a bumpy road, eventually stating the head with a hesitancy aimed at recalling Lambert's grudging address as well. I stood with my back straight but churchical rectitude wasn't what I was after, at least not to begin with. Gaps and crackle made their way out of the horn, more \"ahem\" than \"amen.\" Indeed, sputter might've been my middle name for all anyone knew, so hard-won was any articulacy (or seemed so at least).\n\nI say \"seemed so\" because sputter was more than sputter. It was an archarticulacy, fraught with meaning, \"meaning\" meaning \"wanting to say.\" It wanted to bear on exhaustion, eventual eclipse, fossil fluency's abject eloquence, black sun. It wanted to find fulsomeness in hemorrhage, bumpiness, unable not to know it fed on exhaust, extinction, fumes. Sputter was double-jointed. Wanting was to say.\n\nI stood with my back straight, parsing, repeating, teasing out the slowgoing unfolding of black sun. My not aiming for churchicality notwithstanding, there must have been something of it to the way I made my way. Lambert, that is, bowed his head and lightly put his left hand on my right shoulder, a deaconly hand (mock-deaconly perhaps), as if to say, \"Take your time, son. Take your time.\"\n\nI took my time. It took all the calm I could muster not to be caught up in fossil fluency's depth and dilation, not to be carried away. I offered myself every caution not to resort to barrage, the Gatling-gun spray of notes I'd have bugled had bump's double joint had its way. I picked my way as though I walked in a minefield. A novice at a typewriter hunting and pecking, I pecked at sound and the possibility of sound. Aunt Nancy, Djamilaa and Drennette picked up on my cautious tread and lent themselves to it, letting their riverine amble subside. We no longer sat or stood on the bank of the Niger. Time dissolved into an aroused momentariness peppered by random event or invention\u2014bass interjection, drum interjection, guitar interjection\u2014isolate, asymmetric, intermittent, each a law to itself it seemed. It wasn't that time stood still but that time twitched, a volley of quivers that went for how long no one could say, trumpet, guitar, bass and drums each other's ricochet, no less random even so.\n\nAfter however long it was, Djamilaa put the guitar down and went back to piano. She played a series of chords at the low end of the keyboard, a slow tolling that was a call to order, ominous and wistful at the same time\u2014one-two, one-two, one-two again, a two-beat rest between each pair of chords, a space Aunt Nancy noticed and filled with a two-note descending ostinato. Drennette heard the call and went from sticks to brushes, applying a tight, circular stroke to the parade snare, stirring the pot. The three of them laid down a midnight creep that brought \"Mood\" on Miles's _E.S.P._ to mind.\n\nI took my mute out of my coat pocket and put it into the bell of the horn. I blew a needle of sound that rayed out as it went thru the air, a tremulous ribbon whose advancing edge was a vibrating blade. It wasn't that sputter had been seeking this, that obstructed speech ironically or fittingly found its voice in the mute. Sputter, I've been saying, spoke. Djamilaa's call to order, moreover, calling randomness to a halt, was itself random. There was no reason for it to flow out of what preceded it and equally no reason for sputter to be said to have evolved into mute fluency. What happened happened. It was as simple as that. Sputter had spoken no less than mute fluency now spoke.\n\nNo less had sputter called flow obsolete (fossil flow indeed) than the mute bestowed fluidity and focus (mute fluency). I not only blew, as the old saw has it, from my diaphragm but set my collarbones abuzz with a sense of yet more remote origins, a faintly remembered myth involving clavicular spillage I'd read about ages ago in some Dogon lore. I vaguely recollected a creational aspect to it, something to do with Amma's collarbone marrow spilling out. My sound thus had an occasional raspiness at its edges, escaping or expiring breath a constitutive leakage. My collarbones hummed and from time to time knocked, shook like radiator pipes in winter. Part leak, part letting off steam, it was a sound I let the valves tease out, expelled or expired breath conducing to a theme of extinct heat.\n\nMore immediate, though, was the impact of what had now caught my attention in the \"Wild Card\" drawing, the wishbone above the masthead's ribs. It was this that my collarbones vibrated in affinity with, humming like sympathetic strings on a sitar. No matter how whimsical or wistful, I couldn't help noticing, it was a wishbone as black as the sun, as though to acknowledge wish's role were a dark admission, which in fact it was. The fact that it was was a fact I couldn't get over, though I made my peace with it by way of a Dixonian recourse to flub effects, extenuating breath into what gave sound to my exasperation. Nothing could've been more slick than our midnight creep but Bl'under blew with me now and again. Mishaps would occur, I said or let Bl'under say, wish otherwise though we might.\n\nDinosaurs and birds popped into my head, the thought of them having wishbones in common. The wishbone struck me now as an emblem not necessarily of extinction, a harbinger of ostensible extinction evolved into flight. A furcula technically speaking (Latin for \"little fork\"), it was eponymously the fork in the road leading toward one or the other. Where there's a fork there's a chance I told myself, admittedly wishful but not, I hoped, overly so.\n\nIt was a quick train of thought, feather and scale. Almost before I knew it, the horn emitted a Bowie-esque ratchet of sound, a careening squib that had a Dixonian contour as well, shades of _November 1981_. Feather outran scale, run reigning supreme, skid's indigeneity to squib newly audible, flight's tangential drift. Drennette went back to sticks to keep flight in line, upping the tempo after an onslaught of rolls that announced a new-day disposition tending toward all-out sprint (scale train, feather train). Scale to Drennette's feather, I lagged ever so slightly, a syncopic microbeat behind the beat, an ever so exactingly maintained messianic stagger, the gap, looking forward, saving grace turned out to be.\n\nAunt Nancy jumped on the new tempo right away. The fingers of her right hand scurried back and forth across the strings, those of her left scurried up and down. It was an avian pulse if there ever was one. She bore down, biting her bottom lip as she played, as though the pulse, the proverbial bird in hand, would fly away were she not to or did indeed, from moment to moment, fly away, notwithstanding she did. The flying, flown altercation she laid under it all gave the music wheels if not wings, legs and feet if not wheels. Djamilaa prodded us with pianistic chirp.\n\nHearing the buildup and sensing we'd soon crescendo, Lambert and Penguin took up their horns, Lambert his tenor still, Penguin soprano now rather than oboe. They saw me my wishbone wager and raised me a ribcage crown, blurting out the head with cairologic urgency again and again, four times in all. We played more loudly with each iteration and peaked on number four, whereupon I took the horn from my mouth and stepped back from the mike as Lambert did likewise, Djamilaa, Aunt Nancy and Drennette pulled back on the tempo and took the volume down to a whisper and Penguin, as the audience applauded my solo, embarked on his.\n\nIt was clear why Penguin had switched from oboe to soprano. He made a point, it seemed, of putting the oboe's pinched, eked-out sound aside, its inturned embouchure aside, opting for a soprano sound as open as a duck's cry, open as all outdoors. It was an openthroated sound \u00e0 la Steve Lacy, with no tightness or constriction to it, resounding of nothing if not laryngeal openness, nothing if not esophageal openness, nothing if not, in a word, flow. He seemed intent on saying something about acceptance, something about flow bearing on depletion, departure, fluidity's eventual arrest. It was a duck's cry but without its frayed perimeter, the firm inside part of a strand of spaghetti cooked al dente.\n\nDjamilaa, Aunt Nancy and Drennette continued at whisper level as Penguin started off. It was an unrushed, riverine amble they found their way into, Djamilaa now reprising on piano the Malinke way of knowing she'd earlier offered on guitar. Penguin's accent on flow they backed up and embroidered with a subtle, sotto voce roll extolling furtherance, a felt, otherwise fugitive equation of brightness and time.\n\nFor all its accent on furtherance and flow, there was an elegiac strain woven into what Penguin played. The horn was somehow buoyed by sadness, a deep, thoroughgoing sorrow so abstruse it could only turn sanguine, moan though it otherwise did.\n\nThe river, in other words, was back and along with it the lachrymosity Lambert and Drennette had earlier touched on or choked up on. Silly as it seemed, one couldn't help thinking of Julie London singing \"Cry Me A River,\" especially if one had, as I had, seen the movie _The Girl Can't Help It_ as a kid in the fifties. That she sings it as a specter haunting Tom Ewell especially came back to me now, conducing or contributing to a theme of payback and retribution I'd have sworn I heard coming out of Penguin's horn.\n\nPenguin repeatedly had recourse to an E-flat pedal in such a way as to suggest conscience and also to say (or at least to imply) that he too, as I had in writing the piece, wondered if prehistory's grudge against the present were at work. The horn cried a river of regret, disbursing mixed-emotional strains of remorse and recrimination, as though evolutionary succession exacted dues, which evidently it does. Not since body first met soul had confession so wed complaint. It was a cry surmising gnostic entrapment, thug gnosis, the most accusatory mea culpa one would ever hear. Retributive spill was our fault but no less retributive it seemed he said, fossil fluidity's ominous underside. That it was our fault was not our fault it seemed he said.\n\nI took my cornet up again, put it to my mouth and offered punctuation, endorsing Penguin's theme of demiurgic sting with a braid of mordents around E-flat. It was no more than punctuation, no more than a quick, ratifying run, but I too admitted fault while claiming fault to be a setup, I too took sublime umbrage.\n\nPenguin shot me a glance, an appreciative gleam in his eye, going on as though newly fired up, made all the more adamant by my corroborative run. Newly adamant or renewing its adamance, his tone blended _accepting_ with _incensed_ , a tendency toward trill making its way in or having made its way in, a descending trill bottoming out into drone recalling Jo Maka, the Guinean soprano saxophonist. There was no way this would've been accidental. The river was back, decidedly so, running with quaint strain, uncustomary hustle.\n\nHearing her Mande insinuation expanded on, Djamilaa took to singing again or, to be more exact, semisinging, humming a song from Upper Guinea, \"Toubaka.\" A few words from the song's lyrics emerged from her humming now and again, but mostly what she did was hum, a one-woman chorus commenting on Penguin's solo. She sang or semisang from a position of elderly repose, wise, as the expression goes, beyond her years. All weight, all ministry, all measure endowed her voice, an endlessly calibrated \"alas,\" an extended sigh. Penguin now shot her an appreciative glance. Her voice was drenched in time.\n\nThe river had come around again. Malinke ambit had come around again. Penguin blew beyond the horn, the river's quaint strain and uncustomary hustle prompting him to heave an arc of implied intonation not unlike a fisherman casting a line. This arc was Dredj's arm around the figurehead's shoulder, the feature of the \"Wild Card\" drawing that had most caught Penguin's eye, an extrapolative embrace whose coo and consolation he now beautifully brought to bear on the horn. His new recourse to diaphragmatic oomph aired a light-bodied bigness or a big-bodied lightness, his eye also caught by the figurehead's thoracic largesse.\n\nIt seemed all we could do to contain ourselves. We stood poised on a precipitous edge it seemed. With the merest abrupt move we'd erode or evaporate, the figurehead's thoracic transparency suddenly at large. All we could do, it occurred to Lambert, Aunt Nancy, Drennette and me at exactly the same time, was hum. All we could do was catch, as it were, Djamilaa's choral contagion and hum \"Toubaka,\" which is what we did, the four of us easing into it, joining her, an antiphonal consort of sorts, a chorus beyond her chorus or, all of us having heard the version of \"Toubaka\" done by Les Ambassadeurs Internationaux, chorus to her Salif Keita.\n\nIt was an immediately soothing hum, a sonic lozenge at the roof of the mouth apportioning balm. Humming drew us back from the edge. We stood stout again, lodged resolutely where we stood, readymade remit, the fossils we'd eventually be. Hum's vibratory dispatch came into collaborative play with solidity's transit. It was nothing if not flow's disclosure once and for all, an aggrieved emollient.\n\nThus it was that aggrievement and approbation ran as one. So it was we sang, if it could be said we sang, or, if not, semisang with our teeth clenched. Peal and ping rang from the keys under Djamilaa's right hand as we hummed, as poignant as a Guinean guitar. Penguin worked and worried the arc Dredj's arm inspired, a breaking wave, he'd have had it, as it broke, less a wave than a trace, audible to an imagined ear alone. The river and what it went out to were back.\n\nPenguin leaned back a bit, mentally and physically both. He let himself be caught by the cushion of sound our humming had become, so relaxed he became all breath, all respiration, resorting to circular breathing as the music peaked. Circularity said it all it seemed he said, \"What goes around comes around,\" \"Where there's a wheel there's a turn\" and so forth, Malinke furtherance a dream of empathic escort come true. Breath was a ball rolling atop our Malinke hum, a wheel buoyed by and rolling on water, wind roughening water.\n\nThe ball or the wheel gathered momentum and the music sped up, Aunt Nancy's bass advancing a jump-up rumble as Drennette's high hat hissed, hum nearly brimming over, a collective croon. There was more and more swell to it, more and more lift as well. We rode a low-spoken undulance, borne or abetted by Penguin's extrapolative surmise.\n\nJust as it had as I ended my solo, the music crescendoed as Penguin ended his. Djamilaa, Aunt Nancy and Drennette again took the volume down to whisper level as the audience applauded. All the while we continued humming\u2014quietly so, at whisper level as well. Once the clapping subsided an insinuative quiet obtained, an almost ominous calm. Penguin now joined our humming, the six of us ever so low-key yet stalwart, savoring the impromptu vibration humming had brought, the low-key visitation humming had become.\n\nIt was a soothing song our humming amounted to. A lullaby it might've been except its unremittingness roused us. We hummed possessed of alarm and assurance, an agitant mix whose intensification varied inversely with the tempo at which we hummed. We gradually, that is, hummed more slowly, curiously building intensity while winding the piece down, agreeing, without having to say so, not to return to the head. We instinctively and collectively knew that this was the way it should end\u2014not so much end as fade.\n\nAunt Nancy, Djamilaa and Drennette eventually let their instruments go silent and we all continued humming a cappella. Here and there a few people in the audience picked up the tune and joined in, humming along with us, but it would be a stretch to say we set the entire crowd humming. Still, an infectious vibration seemed to affect everyone. When our humming finally subsided the audience sat silent for a while as though entranced, as though unaware the piece had ended or taken by surprise that it had, lost in thought. We felt we knew what they felt. Applause was beside the point. Yet when they snapped out of whatever it was they were in they rose from their seats and gave us a standing ovation.\n\nWe too were affected by the reading we gave the piece. I'm not sure I can say exactly how but even now it stays with us. How long I've gone on about it is a measure of that no doubt but I'm not sure I can more precisely pin it down. I will, though, mention something we've been wondering about. We couldn't help noticing and now can't help reflecting on the fact that, fossil fluency's extremity notwithstanding, no balloons emerged during the performance. Could it be that the \"Wild Card\" drawing was preemptive? Could it be that the drawing, conceding to caption as it does, inoculated us? Could it be that \"Molimo m'Atet's Figurehead Consoled on the Revival Bench\" kept the balloons at bay by rendering them redundant? Elated over the performance though we were, we began to wonder not long afterward and we still wonder.\n\nAs ever, \nN.\n30.X.83\n\nDear Angel of Dust,\n\nNo, it's not that the balloons have gotten into our heads. We're not Maxine Brown, we're not singing \"All in My Mind.\" The problem is that it's not that. It's that the balloons are actually out there and evidently they have a mind of their own. They dwell, as I've said before, in a deepseated impulse toward caption, a deepseated captivity they seek to leaven with whimsicality\u2014true to themselves, unable to help themselves, insouciant, insecure. They body forth inflated claims to translatability only to beg off or betray them, burst as balloons at times do. Sometimes they renege before the fact, backtrack in advance, decide not to show up. Sometimes they make themselves known by their absence, a conspicuous reticence one would need to be dead not to notice. But who knows? Maybe even then one would see or sense it, pick up on it somehow. We know they show up camera shy when they do show up. Could the difference between alive and dead be only that shyness?\n\nI've been listening to \"Autumn Leaves\" on the _Miles Davis in Europe_ album, a record I cut my teeth on as a teenager. The vibratory blade Miles uses the mute to make sound into amounts to a balloonlike adjacency, an off-to-the-side reticence or recoil I can't help hearing as recondite presence and manifest absence's mix or mating dance. What but the implications of that sound could so be there but not there, what but the balloons' adjunct agenda, the occult itinerary none but they seem to know but that, possibly, not even they know? Miles's recourse to flutter early on in his solo might be heard as onomatopoeic by some, the \"sound\" of autumn leaves, falling leaves. I tend to agree but I take it further. We hear the sound, in hearing it so, of a concession to caption, the hovering fall oblique afflatus turns out to be. We hear that concession's glide into an offhand rumble, a sly glide that will agree to caption only to nudge it toward refractoriness, as if _caption_ and _captious_ were somehow kin. This, moreover, comes of a sound that could not be more introvert, more introspective. Shy sound. Sly.\n\nI'd say don't get me started but you've gotten me started. Listen, then, if you will, to the hover-and-dip, hover-and-dash dexterity Miles brings to that flutter, a not quite flight-of-the-bumblebee \u00e9lan and agitation, buzz the recondite balloons' masquerade. Falling leaves' equation with not-quite bee flight is nothing if not a fractious caption, a lateral feint bursting with drift and flotation, border on tissue paper and comb though it does, nothing if not wind-aided cascade. That he can go, soon after that, from Gatling-gun staccato to quasi-whimper is what I mean by feint, drift and flotation, a tremulous resolve to be to the side or get to the side of besetment.\n\nNot as blatant as Dizzy's ballooning cheeks, Miles's autumnal bob and weave imparts a balloon salience nonetheless, a balloon detour from Dizzy's overtness and extroversion, a balloon extenuation or, to use Duke's term, extension. I can imagine listening to this track thirty or forty years from now and still finding it fresh, the advent of my own autumnal prospect lending it all the more relevance and resonance, a time-capsule bubble or balloon loaded with decades of what won't tell itself but does, caption after caption donned and auditioned only to be cast off.\n\nLet me know what you think.\n\nYours, \nN.\n\nPS: I left out the good news. We've been invited to play at the Detroit Institute of Arts in January.\n6.XI.83\n\nDear Angel of Dust,\n\nOnce again it will have come to nothing. Again we will have sat exchanging thoughts on what was to be. Again we will have heard music, albeit not music so much as music's trace, music's rumor, pianistic breakdown as an archetypal he and she gazed out drapeless windows. What stayed with us will have been a wincing, distraught right hand backed by a grumbling left on an abject keyboard, a right undone or done in as much as backed by a disconsolate left. We will have stood and stretched as gray, wintry, late afternoon light filled each window, a wounded look on what lay outside and on our faces as we looked out on it. An archetypal he and she alone but for the music, aloof to each other even but each the music's intended, we will have so seen ourselves but no sooner done so than drawn back. Something found in a wrinkle, something found in a fold, it will have been this that set our course and put us on it, collapse and come to nothing though it would.\n\nSo I thought, at least, earlier today at Djamilaa's. What will evanescent splendor have come to I wondered as she stood at a window and at one point leaned against the window frame, her left arm raised, her left hand touching the curtain rod. She stood that way only a moment but the way she stood highlighted her long beauty, lank beauty, her long arms and legs a miracle of limbs. For an instant something jumped out at me and at the same time jumped inside me, a mood or a mix of elation compounded with dread. I saw what so much rays out from and relies upon, however much it shook me with apprehension: lank intangible grace, nonchalant allure, love's modest body. It was the news of the moment but yesterday's news as well, something aspect and prepossession seemed intent on saying. What that something was, as Penguin would say, more than met the eye, but it did nonetheless meet the eye. My heart leapt and my stomach dropped.\n\n\"Leave it alone,\" Djamilaa said, demure as to what was at issue but sensing my mood.\n\n\"I wish I could,\" I said.\n\nThe right hand on the keyboard prompted me perhaps, apprehension of any kind its mandate, apprehension of any kind's fraught base. Thought's ricochet played a role as well. Momentary angst was its immediate heir, an ungainliness of thought in whose wincing retreat one felt elation well up and right away subside. Fear of being caught out, knowing no way not to be caught out, factored in as well.\n\n\"Things are that way sometimes,\" Djamilaa said, laconic, blas\u00e9, unperturbed.\n\n\"I know,\" I said. \"Things are always that way.\"\n\nIt had to do with angles. The piano's legs buckled for an instant and rebounded, then they buckled and rebounded again. The right side of the keyboard crumpled. The hand that played it crumpled as well. Had they been glass they'd have shattered, besetting one's ears, by turns bodily and cerebral, with sharp, intersecting planes rolling Duchamp's descending nude and Picasso's weeper into one. But they were not glass, however much the keyboard's keening ping made it seem so.\n\nDressed in a light cotton shift whose hem touched her ankles, Djamilaa stood caught between bouts and volleys of agitation and arrest, her lank beauty all the more lank finding itself so caught but unavailable all the same, it struck me, not to be lastingly caught. A lack of lasting hold or lasting capture pertained to the music plaguing our heads, mine maybe more than hers but hers as well, a music it seemed we each heard with a distinct incorporeal ear or perhaps together with a shared incorporeal ear.\n\nDjamilaa again offered generic solace, oblique as to what was at issue still, so compellingly we both felt it. \"Not always,\" she said. \"But their effect when they are is to make it seem that way.\"\n\n\"Yes, I guess so,\" I said.\n\nThe music itself seemed an oblique telepathic dispatch, however much it appeared woven into textile and skin tone, the music of Djamilaa's bare arms and bare neck emerging from her cotton shift. It obtained in her skin's lack of lasting hold and in the wrinkles and folds of her shift. Had she said, \"Fret not thyself,\" I'd have said, \"Amen,\" but we were beyond that now, the music insinuating itself, issueless issue, the nothing it let it be known it will have come to, the nothing that had never been. It wanted to keep convergence at bay.\n\nIt plied an odd, contrarian wish but it was moving and emotive all the same, anti-intimate while inviting intimacy, anti-contact while acknowledging touch. It plied an aloof tactility, love's lank tangency, verging on emotional breakdown but brusque, pullaway catch or caress.\n\nIt was an actual music we heard and let have its way with us, Paul Bley's \"Touching\" on the _Mr. Joy_ album. No way could we say title told all.\n\nAs ever, \nN.\n14.XI.83\n\nDear Angel of Dust,\n\nYes, that one has \"Nothing Ever Was, Anyway\" on it, as do several others. It does appear, as you say, we let \"Nothing Ever Was, Anyway\" infiltrate \"Touching,\" title not telling all notwithstanding, title not telling all all the more. But there's an asceticism to Bley's playing that comes across no matter what the title. Djamilaa's been thinking about that, wondering about that, drawn to it a lot of late. It's not that less is more, she likes to say, nor that nothing is all, nor that nothing, as Ra says, _is_. All those ways of putting it only let sensation in thru the back door, she likes to say. No, it's not about that. It's not as recuperative as that, not as categorical. It's an angled attrition, banked extenuation, she likes to say.\n\nIt's as if, when she speaks this way, she'd come to me in a dream and vice versa, each of us the other's wished-for rescue, each the other's wariness as well. It's not unlike what sometimes happens when we play. One becomes the extenuation of oneself and the emanation of something else, someone else, ghost and guest arrivant rolled into one. What is it or who is it steps in at such moments? It could be anything, anyone, one senses, but the hollow one's evacuation puts in one's place appears to afford strangeness a friendly disguise. One's fellow band members pass thru that hollow, step into it, relieving the brunt of an attenuation one might otherwise be unable to bear. It's something like what Roy Haynes must have meant by saying that playing with Trane was \"like a beautiful nightmare.\"\n\nCome to as in a dream, yes, a dream dreamt on a rickety bed, springs creaking, home like as not an illusion of home. To speak was to bank one's breath within angular precincts, wall intersecting wall's proprioceptive recess one's being there had become. Stereotactic as well, one touched upon aspect, facet, crater, protuberance, grade finessing grade, tangency's wont.\n\nAs ever, \nN.\n6.XII.83\n\nDear Angel of Dust,\n\nI was trying to call back time. The time I was trying to summon I'd in fact found distressing at the time but I was trying to bring it back nonetheless. I put two records on the record player, Etta James's _At Last!_ and Bobby \"Blue\" Bland's _Two Steps from the Blues_ , records that had been staples during the time I sought to call back, certain Sunday afternoons when I was a kid and my mother would play them again and again. She would usually have played Mahalia Jackson and the Five Blind Boys of Alabama in the morning, music that I heard as pretty grim, going on about a life beyond life as it did. That by itself was enough to pervade the house with a heavy mood, a mood Bobby and Etta not only kept going but took deeper come afternoon. I understood\u2014or felt, if not exactly understood\u2014that theirs was an even more somber church.\n\nIt was always as if time had stopped. The music and the mood brought everything to a standstill, causing me the kind of unease I'd later read Melville write about suffering during calms at sea. The music or the need for the music seemed to come out of a suspended state of some kind\u2014not only to come out of it but to usher us into it, if or as though we weren't already there. But we were already there and always there it said or made it seem. That we were, the sense that we were, hung heavily over everything.\n\nThe music and the mood took my mother to another time and place, it seemed, a time and place given over to reflection as it touched on regret. She'd sit nursing a drink, a sad, distant look on her face, beset by some deepseated sorrow. It was a sadness I couldn't keep from getting to me, a disappointment she appeared to feel not only with her own life but with life more generally, a disappointment that boded well for no one's prospects. She'd stack the two records, listening to the first side of one followed by the first side of the other, then turn them over to hear the two other sides and when they were finished turn them over again, start over again. She'd play them again and again\u2014two, three, four, five or six times. It was hard to miss the mood or what it meant. It hung heavily over the house and over the afternoon\u2014heavily over the world, it seemed. When I went outside to find my friends and play, it went with me.\n\nIt was the same when there were people over, when my mother sat not alone but with company, one or both of my aunts, a friend or a neighbor or a few. When they got to drinking and talking loud and laughing, with Etta and Bobby in the background, they couldn't fool me. I knew it was a ruse. I knew adult life was no fun, life was no fun. Neither my apprehension of the arrest underlying it all nor my distress was diminished by their festiveness. I knew Bobby and Etta were the truth.\n\nThose afternoons, whether sullen or festive, filled me with desolation and dread. It's odd I'd want to retrieve them, but I did. Day before yesterday, Sunday, I played the two records. I hadn't listened to them in ages. Right away they brought those afternoons and all the feelings they were filled with back. I'd forgotten how many of Bobby's songs are about crying, forgotten the reliance on strings throughout Etta's album, forgotten the poetics of plea winding thru both. It was a world of adult longing the two albums conjured, a world of desperate affirmation where there was affirmation, one of dejection more often. I listened to them repeatedly just as my mother would, putting side one of _At Last!_ on the turntable, followed by side one of _Two Steps_ , then side two of _Two Steps_ , followed by side two of _At Last!_ , then starting again with side one of _At Last!_\n\nI didn't set out to write a new composition when I did this, just to see if the music could return me to a certain mood and moment, just to relive, if I could and to whatever extent I could, my mother's blue Sunday afternoons. I did indeed call back time, did manage to recapture or be captured by those earlier afternoons, desolate and dejected as they were. It's almost as if I so succeeded in doing so, fell so deeply into that early apprehension and dread, that I had to write my way out of it, come up with a piece that, touched as it couldn't help but be by Etta, Bobby and my mother's blue Sunday distress, would take it to another place. In any case, I started the piece on Sunday, finished it yesterday, and we took it up today at rehearsal. I'm enclosing a tape. I call it, as you can see, \"Some Sunday,\" meaning to draw on the utopic senses given to Sunday by Etta's \"A Sunday Kind of Love.\"\n\nThe title echoes Duke's \"Come Sunday\" of course, but it was actually Monk's \"Children's Song\" I was thinking about, the rendition of \"This Old Man,\" the traditional English nursery rhyme, that he plays on the _Monk_ album. I wanted a folk song-sounding or a children's song-sounding phrase repeated on piano throughout, a simple, \"childlike\" melody built on an emphatic key variation. Djamilaa, as you'll hear, delivers on that in a big way, drawing out the phrase's evocation of childhood by seeming at times to take a learner's tack, a beginner's tack, mock-awkwardly \"losing\" the time only to regain it. Drennette's reliable conga throws that all the more into relief.\n\nPlease pay close attention to Lambert. He's the lead voice throughout on alto, Penguin on bari and me on trumpet offering choral support. Lambert's sound on alto tends toward tenor, without, of course, being tenor. I wanted that. \"Bruised bell,\" I leaned over and whispered into his ear right before we hit. He got a gleam in his eye and he grinned. As you'll hear, he brings out the hollow the horn ultimately is, exacting a haunted, harried sound recalling John Tchicai somewhat. He plays hurt, I like to say. Hurt in his case, however, gathers an extrapolative whimsy, a wistful \u00e9lan holding heaviness at bay, hailing some Sunday, soon come.\n\nAs ever, \nN.\n17.XII.83\n\nDear Angel of Dust,\n\nJust as I'd begun a letter to you Djamilaa showed up. The doorbell rang just as I'd finished the first paragraph. _Once again_ , I'd written, _we will have stood in a drapeless room filling up with light. I will have held her close, held her tightly, my chest against her shoulder blades, my arms around her waist. We will have held hands looking into a mirror, her left in my right. Once again we will have imagined a life to come, a slice o_ _f_ _time we looked in on, looked like we looked in on. Once again_ _I will have held off breathing deeply, not daring to take in the smell o_ _f_ _her hair and her neck. I will have had none o_ _f_ _night's mare riding me, none o_ _f_ _her my horse. The aromatic incubus will not have been let in._ The doorbell rang and I got up and went to the door and opened it. There she stood.\n\nIt was as though a balloon had turned itself inside out, a gloved hand ungloved itself unassisted, by itself, script gotten itself big and delivered itself both (vain presentiment, vacuous portent) right at my door. Djamilaa stood there, in one of her nothing-ever-was-anyway moods I could tell. She gave me a light kiss on the lips and came in.\n\n\"Would you rather love or write a love song?\" she asked right off. \"Play free jazz or be free?\" There didn't seem to be much question or much choice. I laughed, hoping she would as well, but she only stared at me, the nothing-ever-was-anyway look now indisputable. She'd been listening to piano trios again I could tell.\n\n\"Have a seat,\" I said, not really needing to, not buying time so much as rejecting the questions. It wasn't even that so much. The questions, I knew, were rhetorical. Djamilaa had already been about to sit down on the couch and she sat down on the couch. She audibly exhaled, looked up at me in an almost moist-eyed way and laughed, a nothing-ever-was-anyway lilt of a laugh that nonetheless turned the sides of her mouth down. I sat down next to her. I touched her right hand with my left and took hold of it.\n\nLooking away but with the sides of her mouth turned up again, she asked, \"Would you rather celebrate the Beautiful One or be the Beautiful One?\"\n\nIt appeared she'd read my thoughts and was alluding to a piano trio that wasn't, Cecil Taylor's bassless trio. I shrugged it off and said, deadpan, \"Djamilaa, the Beautiful One Has Come,\" as she was indeed that, all of that, all the more that the more the nothing-ever-was-anyway look undercut surface allure, a demure, dissenting look that gave her close-to-the-bone beauty all the more depth.\n\nDjamilaa turned back and looked at me but held off speaking, as close to a Mona Lisa look on her face as I've ever seen on anyone. For some reason, I thought of Andrew Hill's triplet-laden \"Laverne,\" the mix of hurry and restraint he works into the head, the almost muzzled way the horns announce it on the quintet version on _Spiral_ , Chris White's bass gallop on the trio version on _Invitation_ , etc. For a moment I couldn't shake the way the horns, even as they play in unison, break the line between them, breaking bread it seems, a by turns beaked and bleary nudge, a drawn-out, busily punctuated nudge.\n\nWhen Djamilaa spoke again I couldn't hear what she was saying. I was thinking about the almost perky uptake Ted Curson imbues the head with on certain edges, as though gesturing toward an audience that isn't listening as though they are. I was thinking that music is a way of going out of our way not to speak as we otherwise would. I could see Djamilaa's lips were moving but what she said I couldn't hear, whatever it was drowned out by the quintet version of \"Laverne\" in my mind's ear.\n\nI was thinking about the first time I heard it, recalling it coming on the radio in the car. I was remembering it coming on as I turned off Beverly onto Spaulding. I remembered pulling to the curb and stopping to listen, so taken with it was I from the very first note. I was caught up wondering what the word or words would be for that opening triplet and for the way of stating it the horns have, caught up trying to figure that out, wondering whether \"quip,\" which had just occurred to me, fit, wondering whether \"sotto voce quip,\" which occurred almost immediately after that, fit better. Djamilaa's lips were moving but I couldn't for the life of me make out what she was saying, caught as I was between cerebral quip and corporeal audition. She might well have been casting a spell. \"The carnal ear,\" she might well have been saying, \"heareth nothing. The carnal tongue speaketh not.\"\n\nOr was it that the horns' curt buzz and crackle took the words out of her mouth I wondered, her carnal teeth, gums, lips and tongue all the more inviting or alluring even so, their nothing-ever-was-anyway stolidity daring one to hungrily have at them hoping to prove otherwise. I found it was all I could do not to lean forward and press my mouth to hers, testing its philosophic pout, its meaty but reticent fullness, its nothing-ever-was-anyway remoteness and detachment, abandonment and containment rolled into one. Her mouth was nothing if not the muzzle my mouth cried out to be quieted by, clutched and covered by, music, muse, mute and removal all rolled into one. I wanted only a moan to come out of my mouth and her mouth were any sound to come out at all.\n\nI was wondering whether \"the meeting of quip and quizzicality\" did the horns justice when Djamilaa's eyes locked on mine. I could see that she saw they were fixed on her mouth. Mine met hers and then they went back to her mouth, its fullness and potential generosity, philosophy notwithstanding. I was in Duke's prelude zone (kissical buildup, kissical prelude), not without reason to think she was there too.\n\nEven so, the horns were still in my head, deep in my head, some gregarious animal's nuzzling snout it now seemed. When Djamilaa stopped speaking, finished with or simply breaking off what she'd been saying, I moved ever so slightly toward her, still not having heard a word she said. She moved her eyes off mine and to my mouth for a moment, returning them to my eyes while moving ever so slightly toward me. We leaned and moved our faces toward each other. I could feel the breath from her nose on my upper lip, our faces a couple of inches apart, her feeling mine as well.\n\nWe were in Duke's prelude zone, both of us now, kissical runup. Oddly, though, holding back was all and all was hesitancy, hover, an aromatic, haptic swell welling between us, pure draw, pure impending, willed and rested, ripening restraint. The word \"prance\" had come into my head as one that might possibly get at how the horns acquitted themselves, the equestrian way they had of bounding between triplets. It was exactly then that something else came in that I had no way of knowing from where or to whom it might be addressed, me or Djamilaa, if not both, or, for that matter, about what. \"Hold that thought,\" it occurred to me to say, unexpectedly, out of the blue, looking straight into Djamilaa's eyes, her breath my breath, our noses now touching. \"Hold that thought,\" I found myself saying, pulling back as I did. \"Save it for the gig tonight.\"\n\nDjamilaa pulled back as well, nonplussed, her Mona Lisa look back in place. \"Yes, you're right,\" she said. \"It would only have added up to nothing.\" Her eyes were on mine but it appeared she looked at something in back of me, some remote something I wouldn't have otherwise known was there. How was it her nothing-ever-was-anyway look or \u00e9lan cast or captured something I wondered, the \"Laverne\" horns having at me still, their prancical nudge not affected by my pulling back. Nonetheless, we were no longer in Duke's prelude zone.\n\nIt turned out we did indeed hold whatever thing or thought that moment amounted to or that Djamilaa, at least, did, the remote something she saw in back of me the thing or thought it perhaps came down to for her. We did indeed take that something or that thing or thought, whatever it was, to the gig that night, last night, or at least Djamilaa did. We played the Blue Light Lounge in Long Beach again and during the piece that was the evening's highlight, \"Book of Opening the Mouth,\" Djamilaa stole the show.\n\nDjamilaa's show-stopping solo was all the more unexpectedly so, coming on the heels of a solo by Lambert that none of us envied her having to follow. If it could be said, that is, that anyone or anything had stolen or stopped the show up to that point it would be Lambert and the solo he took. It is, after all, his tune. He knows whereof it speaks and of whom it speaks and, pardon the pun, he ate it up. Following the statement of the head, on which he plays tenor, my solo on trumpet and Penguin's solo on soprano, he switched to sopranino (one-upping Penguin?) and built from a back-to-basics tack (if not a back-to-before-basics tack) to mount a thick disquisition on light, namesake light, the very light the venue we found ourselves in wants to credit itself with, blue light.\n\nLambert, that is, to begin, confined himself to a series of grunts in the horn's lower register, an expectorant tack that offered minimal musicality, bent, it seemed, on redefining musicality, if not discarding it altogether. He picked a bone with any sense of the pure and the proper, shoving these concepts aside and announcing himself done with them. He announced himself done with conceptuality itself even, down to his last nerve it seemed he said. The accent was on strain, exertion, the labor light exacted, effort, fraught sublimity, wrought remit.\n\nIt was as if someone had asked what sound itself was and he was intent on that inquiry, a starting-from-scratch tally and test meant to take inventory, an audit of all it might be at base. He grappled with the rub the thought of primacy subjected him to, taking to it as to a bath of ashes, dry but droll holdout against all odds. One wanted to be a duck sometimes he led us to infer, cracking us up as he did so, grunt gone over into quack before we knew it, Donald Duck ripe with complaint. Was it a way of warding off the balloons, we wondered, beating them to the punch to keep them at bay, no words coming out but the thought of comics or cartoons clearly there, the concept of cartoon broached only to be laughed at, conceptuality itself a joke, a cartoon?\n\nThe crowd at the Blue Light couldn't have been hipper. They saw Lambert's cartoon quack, cracking up, cackling, then raised him a hue and cry, a back-to-before-basics tack that had many of them up on their feet, pumping their fists, yelling, egging him on. Lambert heard them, their back-to-before-basics ratification both a boon and a caution. Could a critique of conceptuality be other than conceptually endorsed he wondered, a quandary he could only, could anything be done with it, find a way to let flow, not find a way out of, which is exactly what he set about doing, egged on indeed, a recourse to long tones and trills the way he now went. He was now looping the loop, threading the needle, even squaring the circle could such be done. He was now, in a word, _piping_ , the mouthpiece and reed sheer birdsong, prodigal chirp tugging the floor out from under everything, majestic chirp announcing and annulling all advent.\n\nThe Blue Light, under Lambert's tutelage, became a live huddle, everyone wanting to know what sound was. We were all, band and crowd alike, bent on hearing blue light's call, the namesake sonance Lambert let us know was out there, insistent what we heard wasn't what it was.\n\nLambert held the horn high, a bird on a branch, a bird on a wire, a bird bent on infinity worn out by infinity, a bird piping loudly as it flew. There was something weary to what he played, infinity's blue redoubt, a sense of having come to be daunted by endlessness, bask and abide by and celebrate it though he did. There was, that is, just the right touch of caution, a rind of complaint not inconsistent with the earlier accent on strain. This, one knew, was the meaning of his recourse to circular breathing, the long run of which he chose to take the solo to its crescendo with, conserving and exhausting breath both. The crowd met that crescendo with a bounding round of applause, some of them shouting out their approval (\"Yeah, that's it!,\" \"Tell it!\" and the like), some putting their pinkies to the sides of their mouths and whistling, high-pitched, piercing whistles that were something like answering the sopranino in kind.\n\nIt was, as I've already said, a solo none of us envied Djamilaa having to follow, but she took the challenge in stride and took her time and went on, as I've also already said, to steal the show. It wasn't so much a solo she took as a walk over hallowed ground, the closer walk so long sung about in gospel torn a new ken. Right off the bat she made reference to the Paul Bley stuff she's been listening to a lot lately, the teasing, tangential way she had with it a remove or two or three away from straight quotation. A valedictory caress one couldn't help calling it, as if having distilled what there was to be gotten from it she bid it lovingly and lightly goodbye, all angle, all approach, all asymptote. By turns it was \"Closer\" one could've sworn one heard traces of, \"Nothing Ever Was, Anyway\" whose ghost one felt a nudge from, \"Mr. Joy\" whose prance and whose prod one took to have hold of her, \"El Cordobes\" one would've given an arm to have her come right out and play. Farther on it was \"Touching\" one was all but sure took the floor out from under one, \"Seven\" the run whose collapse made one wince put one in mind of, \"Turning\" whose faux dissolve accosted one's ear.\n\nI can't emphasize enough that none of these tunes got anything near explicit statement. Indeed, soul to explicit statement's body, the tack Djamilaa took was one of ever so remote adumbration, the ghost of a chance body might be were it, she led one to ask, anything at all. The remote probabilistic wraith all assertion came down to she ran thru a sieve of abstraction, all tune or even tone an extrapolation of aspect only the blind might see. Thus it was one saw in the sense of thought more than heard \"Seven,\" \"Mr. Joy\" and so on, blindly saw in some jigsaw way that crossed over into hearing's near equivalent, listening-for, the closest one would come but still short of outright hearing, teasingly near and far both.\n\nHow close Djamilaa got to the Paul Bley tunes was also how far away she got from \"Book of Opening the Mouth,\" so far, in fact, her solo seemed like another tune or like a tune inside Lambert's tune, a new tune or a detour of a tune I indeed couldn't help calling \"Djamilaa, the Beautiful One Has Come.\" It also gave rise to something we've never had happen before. It was as she was wringing what sounded like the last possible drop from her say-it-without-saying-it allusion to and distillation of \"Open, to Love\" that it happened, the audience breaking out into loud, uncontrollable applause, yelling, stamping their feet and pounding on tables, some of them rising to their feet as they had during Lambert's solo, all of it so loud and raucous and all of it sustained so long it required Djamilaa, Aunt Nancy and Drennette to stop playing, the way we've heard it done on those Om Kalsoum albums where after one of her unbearably beautiful runs the Egyptian audience goes crazy and she and the orchestra have to pause for them to settle down again.\n\nWhether it was a conscious homage to Djamilaa's North African roots or something the audience just couldn't help or both, it was, as I've said, something that's never occurred before. The three of them stopped playing and the ovation went on for a while after they did so, the audience, it seemed, pleased with the acknowledgment of their acknowledgment and the worked-up, wounded state they were in. It was as if they'd been begging for mercy and were pleased and relieved to have gotten it and could now quiet down, which they began to do. Once the ovation had completely died down and those who'd been standing were back in their seats Djamilaa, Aunt Nancy and Drennette started up again, their closer walk across hallowed ground picked up where they'd left off, Djamilaa's Paul Bley extract or extrapolation taken up long enough to be played against the next detour she took.\n\nThere was, that is, a strongly pronounced contrast when Djamilaa moved from Paul Bley to Bill Evans, to whom she's also been listening a lot lately. Radically changing her tack, she alluded to two of the tunes on the _Explorations_ album, \"Haunted Heart\" and \"Elsa,\" ever so nimbly quoting from one and then the other, a wisp of outright statement in each case that maintained her theme of ghostliness nonetheless, linking the two, an anonymous haunted heart lamenting some Elsa. Listening, one found oneself haunted by the ghost of \"Elsa\" and by that of the tune's eponym as well, mere wisp though it was notwithstanding, a wisp it was all one could do not to be lost in, so thrown one felt oneself to be. One couldn't help it. It was a wisp that would have none of being done with, a wincing, knee-weakening lilt it was an achievement not to fall over listening to. I for one, for the moment, renamed each and every person I'd ever loved Elsa, so put upon by the ghost of what, Djamilaa had set us up to feel, never was, anyway.\n\nI also can't emphasize enough that Aunt Nancy and Drennette were models of co-conspiracy throughout, disbursing supplement and surmise alongside support. Aunt Nancy's bass waxed as the moment called for and ebbed as the moment called for, singing thru the gaps as Djamilaa's chiming touch hung in the air, an aroused \"amen\" or a bemused \"alas\" in which all possible sense, all apprehension, seemed tied up in a single note or a quick strum (throb and drop, it almost goes without saying, a never not available resort). For her part, Drennette would not let it be forgotten that the drumset commandeers light, cymbal shimmer and cymbal ping plied with water-wristed aplomb, so brightly the mind's ear's eye could only squint. She had a way of letting the side of the stick's tip roll with its metal address, a lingering ride or regard one heard as tambourine-like, tenor to tambourine's alto or soprano, baritone sometimes, bright even so.\n\nThe lamented Elsa was every loss, every lost hope, the charm gone from a charmed life. Elsa was the \"was\" that would've been had anything ever been, the \"is\" the \"was\" receded from as well. An elapsed albeit echoing recess, Djamilaa made clear, was also what Elsa was, a \"was\" we'd reminisce as though we'd been there, a \"was\" we'd spend forever not returning to.\n\nThe audience again got loud and went wild in the Egyptian style, interrupting in the Egyptian style, literally stopping the show again. Again Djamilaa, Aunt Nancy and Drennette stopped playing and waited until the audience settled down to resume, picking up where they'd left off, Djamilaa reiterating her precept or prognosis regarding Elsa as elapsed, echoing recess. Elsa, she again made clear, now driving it across with all the more force, was a \"was\" we'd reminisce as though we'd been there, a \"was\" we'd spend forever not returning to.\n\nIt was a solemn prognosis Djamilaa laid out and she laid it out with a steady hand, tremulous truth no disabler, threadbare hope (if not lost hope) no hitch. Indeed, she let a certain stateliness accrue to solemnity or insisted it accrue, her last allusion and quotation, the one she began to end her solo with, coming from Federico Mompou's _Songs and Dances_ , the opening strains of No. 9, a closer walk mingling near with far, the processional gait won by stoic resolve.\n\nDjamilaa had sat slumped over the keyboard \u00e0 la Evans while expounding on Elsa but with the Mompou she straightened her back and lifted her chin, sitting up with model posture as if to illustrate stoic resolve. Aunt Nancy straightened up as well. She no longer draped herself over the bass but stood erect, her head high and her eyes, when they weren't closed, on the horizon. Drennette did so too, her back ironing-board straight as she rode high on the drummer's stool.\n\nAunt Nancy went from wincing throb to mini-walk, swell to wincing stepdown, a Scott LaFaro reference that kept Elsa close by, but only until Djamilaa drove the Mompou home by humming it as she played, Drennette a muted waltz meanwhile on the high hat. A slow tolling, a slow noting of what one goes thru, prepared the way, toll a tally of cost and a chiming decree rolled into one. It seemed it said gait would be gate, an opening, as they eventually went from Mompou back to the head. Gait was indeed gate as they did so\u2014which is to say, trite though it is to put it so, they _swung_ , solemnity's unexpected boon or behest, closer walk nothing if not strut.\n\nIndeed, they swung swing itself, swing so perpendicular to itself it sprang, spring the fey sense one had of it, a buoyant sway and a bit of swag, vintage Elmo Hope. The head, that is, was now a recombinant bounce Djamilaa worked and kept working, a host of collateral chatter among the fingers of her left hand. It all had a way of leaning back even as it sprang, not in posture so much as the actual sound, an acoustico-implicative stride at a slight angle, ambling yet relaxed, laid back. It had a way of bounding, even so, with namesake hope, all-out expectancy, Drennette's high clamor on the cymbals ladling release.\n\nThe Elmo Hope vibe was Djamilaa's nod to the audience's North African salute it occurred to me, oblique but necessarily so. I leaned over and said so to Penguin, who was standing next to me. He agreed and, grinning, added, \"If she quotes from 'Stars Over Marrakesh' they'll go crazy again and I'll be out of here.\" He put his hand out when I laughed. I slapped it and turned my hand over and he slapped mine.\n\nDjamilaa neither quoted from \"Stars Over Marrakesh\" nor needed to. She continued bearing down on the head, with not only collateral chatter but collateral clack, a nothing-ever-was-anyway bent and burr brushing everything aside. She, Aunt Nancy and Drennette did indeed speak of deserts crossed but that wasn't the point. Lambert, Penguin and I, given the nod by Djamilaa, came back in, ending the piece with three unison restatements of the head and a stop-on-a-dime return to silence.\n\nThe crowd again responded in the Egyptian manner, clapping, standing, stomping, whistling, shouting. It was a full five minutes before we were able to begin the next piece.\n\nAs ever, \nN.\n13.I.84\n\nDear Angel of Dust,\n\nWe're in Detroit. Got here around noon after an early flight from L.A. It's the first time in Detroit for all of us. After getting settled in the hotel and resting up a while we went out to take a look\u2014see, as Rahsaan would say, what we could see. We walked around quite a bit and took the bus for longer distances, anxious to see all we could. It's hard to say, hard to sum up what it all adds up to, could it be said to add up to anything. What it was was random vantages, random veils, no such disclosure as we think a first-time exposure to a city might yield. Detroit was there but not there. Or was it we were there but not there, vantage indissociable from veil, red-eyed as we were? I quickly found the expectation to see and say something about Detroit an irritant, any summing up or desire to sum up an affront. Yes, the monumental architecture seems to cry out for comment, the massive, no-nonsense rectilinearity of the General Motors Building bent on eliciting reverence or ridicule. (Penguin went so far as to call it \"their new Parthenon.\") The contrast between that blatant a claim on eternity and the auto industry's recent troubles makes cultural critics of us all, not to mention the charred, burnt-out neighborhoods, the abandoned houses overtaken by vines and other growth, the naked foundations, the empty lots. Yes, that all the more obvious contrast would appear to put words in our mouths, easy words moreover, no matter how stark what they report. Yes, them that's got, mostly white, mostly keep getting while them that's not, mostly black, mostly don't. This is axiomatic American cud we could chew for days and do chew, chewing or not.\n\nWe strolled, at one point, up Woodward Avenue over to the Detroit Institute of Arts, where we'll be playing. It was beautiful, quite the promenade, with lovely buildings on both sides of the street, the Institute, perhaps, the loveliest of them. But likewise, once inside, yes, the huge Diego Rivera frescoes, the homage to industrial Detroit he painted in the early thirties, all but jumped out and took hold of one's tongue, tempting one to wax on about a discrepant relation to what one saw outside. The contrast between epic, heroic dimension and postindustrial diminution came easily to one's lips\u2014too easily, all too easily, I thought. I found myself resisting the very observations I'd have made, something about them seeming too pat, too obvious perhaps. I had the sense there was an opaque Detroit, a recondite Detroit, a secret Detroit such observations don't even scratch the surface of. I bit my tongue.\n\nIt's not that any of that isn't true, not that easy sociologizing isn't true, probably more true the easier it is, not that that may not be the job society does. It's not that it's not true but that everyone already knows it and is maybe, at some level, okay with it. What, I was asking myself, does waxing on or waxing at all about it mean or do? Meanwhile, all the musicians that've come out of here and all the music that's come out of here are really staggering, really, as we like to say, saying something. If I named Howard McGhee, Tommy Flanagan, Betty Carter, Geri Allen, the Jones brothers (Elvin, Hank and Thad), Yusef Lateef, Julius Watkins, Ron Carter, Milt Jackson, Paul Chambers, Barry Harris, Louis Hayes, Alice Coltrane, Pepper Adams, Kenny Burrell, Donald Byrd, Lucky Thompson, Charles McPherson, Lonnie Hillyer, Sippie Wallace, Hugh Lawson, Frank Foster, Sonny Stitt and J. R. Monterose, I'd just be getting started, even without getting into gospel folk like Reverend C. L. Franklin, blues folk like John Lee Hooker, R&B folk like Aretha Franklin and George Clinton, rock and roll folk like Hank Ballard and Bill Haley, pop folk, Motown, etc. At the same time, I both care and don't care that they came from here. Music is always elsewhere.\n\nAfter DIA, we took a bus down Woodward to go to Greektown. At one of the stops a man who I'd say was in his mid-sixties got on. He was wearing a rumpled brown suit that had seen better days, a white shirt that could've used washing and dress shoes that were run down at the heels. His hair was an unkempt, salt and pepper Afro, matted down on one side from having been slept on it looked like, his chin and jaws covered with salt and pepper stubble, in need of a shave. He headed for the back of the bus after getting on, muttering something under his breath and making a point of looking at each passenger he passed. His eyes were bloodshot and one could smell that he'd been drinking but he had a kind of elegance about him all the same, no matter his legs were a little shaky and he bumped against the edges of the seatbacks as he made his way down the aisle. He gave off the sense that, like his suit, he'd seen better days. After he and the other new passengers were seated and the bus began to roll again, one heard, coming from the back of the bus, his muttering slowly gain volume, reaching the point where one heard him say, a bit slurred but loud and quite intelligibly, \"None of y'all don't know _nothin'_ about this!\" He repeated this again and again, pausing between repetitions as if to let it sink in throughout the bus or even, perhaps, to assess and be newly schooled by it himself. \"None of y'all don't know _nothin'_ about this!\" he said again and again, his voice raspy, gruff, burning like whiskey.\n\nThe rest of us turned to look toward the back of the bus, one or two at first and then more and more of us, all of us eventually staring at him as he continued to announce, \"None of y'all don't know _nothin'_ about this!\" (Every now and then he phrased it, \"Don't none of y'all know _nothin'_ about this!\") He sat alone on the back seat of the bus, dead center, head up, back surprisingly straight given the wobbliness of his walk down the aisle, feet planted flatly and solidly on the floor, legs a little bit akimbo, hands on his knees. He stared back at us, panning the bus, intent on making eye contact with each and every one of us it seemed, something of a taunt, a challenge, a dare in the look he gave us. \"None of y'all don't know _nothin'_ about this!\" he kept insisting, sometimes \"Don't none of y'all know _nothin'_ about this!\"\n\nIt never became clear what he meant by \"this,\" whether it referred to his condition in some micro or macro way (his tipsiness or his general disrepair, respectively), to a more general state of affairs, to life itself or to who knows what, but his vehemence, if nothing else, communicated, his adamance, if nothing else, had a kind of articulateness, the direness or the extremity from which he spoke was affecting and true. \"The dead are dying of thirst,\" I thought, figuring him as a drunken Dogon elder chiding us for negligence or disrespect, for having fallen arrears on dues or debts owed the dead, owed history, a breach of ritual observance, ritual recall. It struck me that \"this\" was nothing if not the entire edifice, possession built on and put in place by dispossession, the disrepair of the socially dead. I thought this and I saw it all in a snap, a flash, but, no matter the truth of it, the historical and present-day relevance or resonance of it, I almost immediately lost patience with myself, guilty as I was of a deeper negligence, a deep non-observance of the hidden-in-plain-sight rite we were being offered, the initiation into not knowing the man in the rumpled suit invited us to. The simple fact was that he was right, we didn't know. We didn't know who he was, we didn't know what \"this\" was. All we knew was that there he was, announcing we didn't know, accusing us of thinking we knew but not knowing. \"None of y'all don't know _nothin'_ about this,\" he declared again and again.\n\nEveryone in the bus looked at him for a while, a long while. The bus driver glanced up at his rearview mirror from time to time, checking out what was going on in back. It had started off with everyone being a little on edge, wondering what this would lead to, apprehensive as to what it would lead to, but after a while it seemed pretty clear that his mania, if mania was what it was, consisted solely of confronting us verbally and with his bloodshot gaze, that the always possible threat of violence didn't apply. He kept to his own space, clearly defined in the middle of the backseat of the bus, and his hands never left his knees\u2014no flailing of arms, no gesticulation, not so much as waving a finger. What little violence there was, if it can even be called that, was confined to his face, a grimacing wince it got from time to time as he registered the effort it took to apprise us of our not knowing, a certain exasperation, bordering on exhaustion it seemed, with having to do so, with our not knowing and with our not knowing we didn't know. Once it was established that he was no danger, that he posed no threat, everyone in the bus relaxed. Everyone eventually turned away from staring at him and went back to what they'd been doing before. Drennette, Lambert, Penguin, Aunt Nancy, Djamilaa and I all looked at each other and rolled our eyes. There was a group of teenagers nearby who covered their mouths and giggled. The man in the brown suit, unfazed by no longer having everyone's attention, continued his tirade, his rant, his apprisal of our not knowing, \"None of y'all don't know _nothin'_ about this!\" After a while it simply blended in, background noise, of a piece with the conversations going on in the bus, traffic noise from outside and whatever else came into earshot. At the fourth stop he stood up, went back to muttering, made his way shakily up the aisle and got off the bus.\n\nI have to admit I found myself a little shaken, no matter nothing untoward had broken out. It wasn't even the possibility of violence so much as that I somehow felt singled out. He didn't look my way any more than anyone else's while he spoke and when he did make eye contact with me he didn't linger as if it were especially me his words were intended for. The fact that what he said, what he kept insisting, what he kept repeating, agreed so much with the way I'd been thinking, the random vantage being the random veil, is what shook me. It seemed he spoke from some unreachably occult place, a cautionary voice after my own heart, chastening and affirming me at the same time.\n\nThere are other things I could go into about our first day in phantom Detroit but I won't. We ended up leaving a diner last night, for example, when the waitress told Lambert he'd have to remove his skullcap, the kufi he was wearing. No way was that going to happen. We all just got up and left without exchanging a single word. We just glanced at each other and got up and left.\n\nI'll try writing again while we're here. Our gig's tomorrow night.\n\nAs ever, \nN.\n16.I.84\n\nDear Angel of Dust,\n\nWe got back from Detroit yesterday. I'd have written again while we were there but it was all pretty whirlwind and we were going nonstop. The excitement our being there generated kind of took us by surprise. It all culminated in the gig at the Detroit Institute of Arts, the turnout for which impressed us\u2014not just the number of people who showed up but the mix. It wasn't just the usual crowd of artists, intellectuals, college students, college dropouts and so on, but what Sly would call \"everyday people,\" working folks who after pulling a nine-to-five came out to check us out. There was a range of age groups as well, teenaged to middle-aged, with some seniors here and there as well. We're not used to that, this sort of wide-ranging cultural appetite, especially amid so much that's down, depressed. Anyway, besides the gig at DIA, we did an interview and performed in the studio at WDET, the hip radio station that's not far from DIA, and we hung out a lot with some of the town's up and coming musicians, Griot Galaxy, A. Spencer Barefield and others, who took us around. There was lots to see but at the same time nothing to see, a deep sense of hollowed-out prepossession I couldn't get rid of. It wasn't just all the burnt-out or boarded-up houses and buildings or all the empty lots, the stretches that were destroyed in '67 (Destroyit some took to calling it) and simply left that way, but something else, something more to do with me perhaps. I did feel my forehead thicken from time to time. I barely staved off a cowrie shell attack.\n\nIt may have had as much to do with time as with space, not just being in Detroit but being half a month into 1984, the ominousness of the date taken from it by it getting here, as they say, without incident, failing to live up to its portent. Is it that or is it that it arrived, rich with incident and portent, seventeen years early if not more? This was the question that had me teetering toward a cowrie shell attack, the teasing sense of anticlimactic arrival on the one hand and before-the-fact arrival on the other. I couldn't help hearing Yusef Lateef's \"1984,\" the title track from his 1965 album. It came on strong, piped into my head \u00e0 la previous cowrie shell cuts, the abrupt, keening onslaught the track opens with showing no mercy. The whistling, the whining and the moaning quickly followed, ventilated by the dicelike tumblings on the piano, the ad hoc bass and drum acrobatics. It was all I could do to ward off a fullblown attack, having to do so more than once.\n\n\"1984\" was a gremlin, an imp, it so kept coming at me. It seemed it insisted I appease it, a poltergeist, an offended ghost. It seemed the only way to do that would be to meet it head-on, so during the sound check I suggested we add a new piece to the program, one that \"would honor one of Detroit's own,\" as I put it, \"while getting some other business taken care of too.\" I told the band it was Yusef Lateef I was referring to and that the piece was \"1984,\" something I wanted to work up our own version of, more a variation on it than a rendition, as much a departure from it. I told them about the sense of anticlimactic arrival I was beset by, the possibly before-the-fact arrival that also occurred to me, the repeated threat of a cowrie shell attack. I wanted to call our piece \"1948\" I announced, explaining that it was in that year that Orwell finished his novel and that he arrived at the title by having the last two digits trade places, a numeric anagram. I went on a bit about the arbitrariness of it, the concession to happenstance, the default on prophecy of something so often taken to be prophetic. I said something about the year not mattering, dates not mattering, something about the warning the book issued pertaining to no particular date, no particular time, but to all time, to every passing moment, something about hollowed-out prepossession holding all time, all futurity, hostage. I was on a run, a roll, prolix but both impelled and impeded by the sense that I hadn't yet said what I meant to say, that maybe there was no way to say it. I spurted, sputtered, cleared my throat, rambled on. It was Aunt Nancy who finally bailed me out, offering a phrase that both summed up and opened up what I'd been getting at, trying to get at. \"We get it,\" she said demurely, ever so low key, as I stuttered reaching for a word. \"We get it,\" she said, demure but decisive. \"Moment's omen.\"\n\nTo make a long story short, one of our hosts at DIA got hold of a copy of _1984_ and we listened to the track a few times, putting some ideas together as to how to both refer to it and take it somewhere else. We definitely wanted to retain its aleatory, strung-out, far-flung sense of space and its various recourses to vocalization, though we couldn't, we knew, use exactly the same instruments. Penguin came up with the idea of bringing Hendrix into the mix, reminding us of \"1983 (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)\" on the _Electric Ladyland_ album, whose line \"Oh say can you see it's really such a mess\" he said he especially had in mind. \"I like the way it messes with 'The Star-Spangled Banner,'\" he said, \"sort of the same way he did on the guitar.\" So we decided we'd each intone that line at some point in the piece, doing so hand-over-mouth, muffling it \u00e0 la Yusef's whimpers and moans. And so on. Everybody came up with ideas. We ended up changing the title, scrambling it further and calling the piece \"1489.\" \"Right before Columbus,\" Lambert pointed out. \"You land somewhere by mistake and tell the people living there it belongs to you. 1984 was around long before 1984. There've been a lot of 1984s.\" So we added \"1489\" to the set list and to our book.\n\nThe other news is that the balloons showed up again. It wasn't during \"1489\" but a piece we did later in the set, \"The Slave's Day Off.\" It was during the solo Drennette took, a solo that began with the drumset seeming to collapse, come apart, the sort of thing Dannie Richmond would do with Mingus's band to mark a tempo change. Drennette came out of that collapse, that mock breakdown, with a figure that was all feet\u2014clipped hisses, that is, on the high hat, hortative thumps on the bass drum. The first balloon emerged at once, slipping out between the two cymbals of the high hat as though they were lips. It bore these words: _I lay on my bed on my stomach, my head on my pillow, the sheet and the cover tossed aside. The sun rose, lifting the hem o_ _f_ _my gown, warming the backs o_ _f_ _my legs and my rump, bathing the bed in light._ The balloon, it seemed, harkened back to \"The Slave's Day Off's\" inception on Venice Beach\u2014the rollerskaters, the cellophane jumpsuits, the publicized privates. When Drennette put sticks to snare the first balloon disappeared from the high hat and the second emerged from the center of the snare, bearing these words: _I felt him looking at me, his eyes on my shoulder blades, the small o_ _f_ _my back, my waist and my hips, tailstruck, I could tell, though I couldn't have cared less. He abruptly had at me, nose up my ass as though nothing else in the world mattered. He acted like his life was at stake._\n\nLambert, Djamilaa, Penguin and I looked at each other. The balloons appeared not only to be reaching back to the very roots of \"The Slave's Day Off \" but to be related to the X-rated balloons that followed Drennette home after the Comeback Inn gig a few months ago. The second balloon vanished as she went to the sock cymbal and came back to the snare with a series of rolls and paradiddles, whereupon another balloon rose from the center of the snare. It bore these words: _What was the point I lay there wondering, reticent, unresponsive, letting him have his way with my cheeks and the insides o_ _f_ _my thighs, his lips and his tongue all over them, rummaging my ass-crack as well. No moans escaped my throat, no sound at all. Bored, blas\u00e9, I lay silent, unmoving, no grinding the bed, no lifting my ass to his face. My reluctance worked him into a fever, my reserve egged him on, as though he wanted what he wanted not to be wanted._ When Drennette turned her attention from the snare to the tom-tom the balloon disappeared and a new balloon rose from the tom-tom bearing these words: _He kept at it, head up my butt, ostrichlike. My ass and loins were his North, the Gourd he drank from and followed, my \"back door\" the place the sun would shine someday. Someday, evidently, had come, though I could not have cared less._ A few snickers could be heard among the audience.\n\nDrennette kept at it on the tom-tom when the balloon disappeared, doling out a string of slow rolls. She played more softly as well, as if whispering, confiding, as though she herself was taken aback by what she went on to disclose. After three measures the fifth balloon emerged, rising from the tom-tom, bearing these words: _The world about to blow up, all he could do was bury his head in my behind, begging off. It wasn't his he said or it seemed he said, the world wasn't his. Muddy Waters was on in the background, \"That Same Thing.\" That same thong he might as well have said_. More laughter rose from the audience, a little louder, more widely dispersed. Drennette worked the bass drum pedal as the balloon disappeared, a hurry-up insistence it fell to her left hand to learn from, which it did, quickening the tempo and passing the lesson along, both it and the right raising the volume over the next few measures, whereupon a new balloon emerged, this one from the bass drum: _Ripe with reticence, bottom-line romance, open-secret sex, the world was neither to be had nor held. He held me instead, my midriff and trunk some kind o_ _f_ _surrogate, sweet respite no matter how moot it was to me._ No laughter greeted this balloon. The audience had grown somber, all ears, all eyes, absorbed. As the balloon disappeared a wistful sigh could be heard here and there.\n\nDrennette took the volume back down, the hurry-up thumps on the bass drum a subdued patter she bought time with while putting the sticks down for brushes and then working the snare, all rub and stir. A new balloon, the seventh, rose from the snare, bearing these words: _What i_ _f_ _it was otherwise his nudging nose and tongue demanded. What i_ _f_ _governance were his it seemed he asked with each inhalation, each lick, each whiff, a new earth it was his to rule borne by the funk between my cheeks. What i_ _f_ _my ass were a field his nose and tongue plowed, forty acres worth, what about that it seemed he wanted to know._ When the balloon disappeared Drennette left the snare for the ride and sock cymbals, applying the brushes with a malletlike or hammerlike address that crescendoed as the eighth and last balloon lifted off the sock cymbal bearing these words: _Planet Squat it seemed it all came down to, a dispatch, a dismissal, world without weal without end. World to be done with, done over, long wallow, world to so make it with me would remake._ The balloon disappeared and the solo ended. The audience erupted with thunderous applause and the rest of us came back in.\n\nIt was easy to see what the balloons had to do with \"The Slave's Day Off,\" especially coming in a set that included \"1489,\" but it was also clear, to Lambert, Aunt Nancy, Djamilaa and me, and to Penguin as well perhaps, that they had \"Penguin\" written all over them, the reference to another flightless bird, if nothing else, giving it away. As if that wasn't enough, Drennette, as we were leaving the stage, Penguin told Lambert and me later, looked back at him and said, \"Nice gig, eh, Ostrich?\" and quickly, smiling, corrected herself, \"I mean, Penguin.\" Was it a come-on or a critique, he asked Lambert and me, maybe her way of getting back at him for the time he called her Djeannine.\n\nIt was indeed a nice gig, a nice visit, the audience receptive and especially excited that the balloons appeared, some of them thanking us after the concert for having, as they put it, brought them along.\n\nYours, \nN.\n18.I.84\n\nDear Angel of Dust,\n\nWe've been thinking about the expression a few people used after the concert in Detroit: \"Thanks for bringing the balloons along.\" Lightly spoken it may have been albeit sincere (they all smiled with a gleam in their eyes as they said it), but it got us thinking about doing exactly that, literally that. What if, we started wondering, we showed up for a gig with a big bag of balloons, not comic-strip balloons but literal balloons, rubber ones, the kind you blow up, and gave them out to the audience before we hit, one or more to each member of the audience, instructing them to use the balloons in whatever way they could to accompany the music, contribute to the music? \"It's an idea that has a lot going for it,\" Aunt Nancy, who was the one who suggested it, remarked, going on to elaborate that it would not only, potentially at least, break down the distinction between audience and band, listener and performer, observer and participant, not only add further indeterminate elements to the music as we listened for and responded to the audience's input, but also, perhaps, work as a \"prophylaxis\" against the comic-strip balloons. The word was her choice, \"not unadvised,\" as she herself pointed out, \"given certain connotations and the balloons' recent X-rated content.\" She said this without looking at Drennette, with no need to look at Drennette. We all knew what she was getting at. Drennette herself laughed and quipped her approval, \"Prepared ensemble meets visual pun.\"\n\nWe're wondering what approach an audience would take. Blow the balloons up and rub them? Blow them up and let the air out? Blow them up and pop them with pins? Blow them up, put them on the floor and stomp them? Leave them uninflated, stretch them tight and pluck or strum them? Leave them uninflated and snap them? Blow them up and thump them? All of these? All of these and more? We wonder but we also worry that were we to do this we'd be acknowledging the comic-strip balloons too explicitly, identifying with them, no matter how playfully, making them a trademark, inviting the audience to think of us in relation to the balloons first and foremost, making them a calling card of sorts. Is irony lever enough to fend off what could look like endorsement? And what if the comic-strip balloons themselves got the wrong idea?\n\nWe wonder if it's a risk worth taking. What do you think?\n\nAs ever, \nN.\n22.I.84\n\nDear Angel of Dust,\n\nThanks for writing back so quickly. I shared your letter with the rest of the band. We agree that a balloon is nothing if not captured breath. That it contains or seeks to contain something too inchoate to be contained we also agree. That the comic-strip balloon and the literal balloon, the rubber balloon, have that much in common we see as well. We agree that using containment (would-be containment) to open things up is a kind of coup. That putting the audience's will or wish to containment literally in their hands carries an element of poetic justice has also occurred to us. That it carries an element of poetic license as well has occurred to us too. The tradition of balloons as a sign of ceremony does recruit color, as you say, to the binding of breath, much as music does. We couldn't have said it better, except we'd maybe keep going and say balloons are in a sense already music, a ritual disbursement of caught or constricted breath meant to consecrate, even where it borders on asthma (if not especially where it borders on asthma), the blessing breath is. If asthma can be thought of as a wildfire, we'd say, balloons are a controlled burn. They marshall caught or constricted breath intimating breath's possible extinction, festive recruit's cautionary aspect or address. Balloons are also, we'd go on to say, chromatic festivity's dark tone, dark temper, so much depending on sacks of air. We'd want festive lightness given a gravity of sorts, each audience member holding a balloon as though it were his or her own lung.\n\nWe'll see what happens. We're more inclined to give it a try after getting your letter, more of a mind it's a risk worth taking. It's a moot question at the moment, however, as we don't have any gigs in the offing. As I've said, we'll see what happens.\n\nAs ever, \nN.\n[Dateless]\n\nDear Angel of Dust,\n\nI woke up remembering these words: _I plucked a plywood harp strung with fishing line, a crude instrument with rattly strings, a blunt instrument. No angel, I struck out at the world with it, disbursed its screw-loose harmonics (i_ _f_ _they could be called harmonics) with a heavy hand, pure payback._ I awoke with them on my mind and tongue, mouthing them as I came out of sleep, under my breath as it were, muttering them close to my lips, tongue and teeth, a recitation by heart were there ever one. I remembered them from the dream I'd had, a legible, indelible burst within the dream, not unlike the balloons that on occasion visit our music. A balloon's balloon I'm tempted to call it, a cyst inside the balloon my dream was.\n\nIt was a dream in which I was back in school, junior high school. I had put off doing the project for my \"Music Appreciation\" class until the last minute, not getting going on it until the day before it was due. The project was to build a small musical instrument of some sort, either modeled on an existing instrument or invented. I'm not sure why I procrastinated, which was unusual for me, but my guess would be that my prior experiences with school assignments that involved building something, a science project on electromagnetism, a historical shadowbox, a terrarium and so on, did it. Such were among the times growing up without a father got to me most, as the best projects were always those done by kids whose fathers, with their well-appointed workshops and garages, all but did the projects for them. A girl in \"Music Appreciation\" the previous year had turned in a harpsichord that was much talked about and that went on to win a prize at the county fair.\n\nSo it must have been a kind of dread, a kind of trepidation, that kept me from getting to the project until the very last day, dread, trepidation and, the balloon within the balloon was telling me, anger, resentment. When I did get around to getting started on the project I rummaged around our garage, not with much idea of what I was looking for or of what I intended to make. I found an old sheet of plywood and I saw that we had a hacksaw, with which I proceeded to cut out a piece in the shape of a bass clef. It turned out we had some fishing line, a few spools of various grades, a can of silver spray paint and a packet of small nails. I spray-painted the piece of plywood I'd cut and once it was dry I cut several lengths of fishing line and used the small nails to secure them to the inner curve of the piece of wood, tapping the nails all but all the way in and tying the ends of the lengths of line around them. I'd made a harp.\n\nIt was a harp mainly to the eye if not in name only. I didn't pay much attention to how it sounded, just making sure the strings, the lengths of line, were pulled tight enough to make a sound when plucked. I made no effort to tune them. The thought never occurred to me. It was a perfunctory effort but, if I'm reading the balloon within the balloon right, subliminally more than that. I wanted it to visually signify harp but otherwise flaunt the meagerness of the resources available to me to make it, my absent father at the fore. Its rattly, measly, make-do sound was pathetic, an orphan sound I meant at some level to rub the teacher's nose in, the school's nose in, the world's nose in. The would-be elegance of the silver paint job only made it worse, more flagrant, an obvious compensatory move that highlighted how shoddy the harp was.\n\nAll this went on in the dream as it had when I was a kid in junior high. I turned the harp in the next day. It was one of the least impressive projects turned in, but when my teacher, Mrs. Keene, who was typically very stern and severe, took it up and examined it, as she did right there in front of the class for each and every project turned in, she plucked the strings and generously commented that several of them did indeed emit some of the notes of the scale. I was only more embarrassed and set emotionally awry by this though. She was also saying, without saying it, that most of the strings did not, which was true. No matter the harp had accomplished its subliminal mission, I was upset as she stood there plucking it.\n\nIt was at this point that the dream deviated from what had actually occurred that day when I was a kid. No, it's not that a balloon bearing the words I woke up reciting emerged from the harp as Mrs. Keene plucked. It was a little more subtle than that. What happened in the dream was that as Mrs. Keene continued to pluck I felt pressure against my forehead, exactly in the area where the cowrie shell attacks and the bottle cap attacks have occurred in the past. The pressure was intense and, reaching to touch the area, I felt it was made by extrusions of what had the feeling of type, as though the typebars or the typeball of a typewriter banged outward from inside my head, causing reverse-image letters to rise on my forehead. My fingertips were oddly fluent in the reverse reading the imprints on my skin required. It was as though I were a blind person reading braille and I did so preternaturally fast. I ran my fingertips across the text and there it was: _I plucked a plywood harp strung with fishing line, a crude instrument with rattly strings, a blunt instrument. No angel, I struck out at the world with it, disbursed its screw-loose harmonics (i_ _f_ _they could be called harmonics) with a heavy hand, pure payback._\n\nWhen Mrs. Keene stopped plucking the strings the text went away and my forehead went back to being smooth, at which point I awoke with the words of the text on my mind and my tongue.\n\nSincerely, \nDredj\n6.II.84\n\nDear Angel of Dust,\n\nThank you for writing back. I appreciate your response to Dredj's letter, which, as you guessed, was written during a cowrie shell attack, though maybe I should call it a reverse-image text attack. All the other hallmarks of a cowrie shell attack were there, but the protrusions on my forehead felt, as in the dream, like raised reverse-image letters rather than cowrie shells. You also noticed, I was happy to see, the conversation the letter seems to be having with the balloons that emerge from Aunt Nancy's \"Dream Thief \" solo on _Orphic Bend_ , all that business about the cigar-box guitar. Yes, there seems to be some dialogue going on about absent fathers, makeshift amenity and string, as though the first were the third attached to the second, obligatory dues, anacrustic obbligato, something gone before saying but not without saying. You're also on point asking what dialectical residue accrues to fishing line's advance over straw, not to mention the other stuff you bring up.\n\nThe implied or potential chat between Dredj's fishing-line harp and Aunt Nancy's cigar-box guitar wasn't lost on the other members of the band. \"It's as though the two played a duet,\" Penguin said at one point as we were discussing the dream at rehearsal. I'd brought up the cowrie shell attack, the reverse-image text attack, at the very beginning of rehearsal, still caught up in its resonances and its resistances even though it had been a light, shortlived attack as these things go. \"Why would an embarrassing incident from junior high school come back with so much force?\" I asked early on, a little bit rhetorically but not entirely so. I really did want the band's input into the process of decipherment and decoding, even recoding, I'd begun. We ended up talking for a long while, everyone pitching in, putting his or her two cents in, and it was Penguin who first brought up the relevance and apparent relatedness of the cigar-box guitar. \"They might as well be cousins,\" he remarked of it and the fishing-line harp before noting their implied or potential duet or dialogue. Everyone immediately chimed in, saying the same had occurred to them, Aunt Nancy's not the least among the ratifying voices, \"Yes, that's the first thing that struck me about it.\"\n\nWhen I said recoding I meant exactly that. Drennette, after we'd been talking a long while, suggested we leave off talking by translating our talk, letting our talk extend into and take the form of a piece of music, \"Dredj's Dream,\" which we would collectively compose, partly writing it out and partly, having done that, adding to what we'd written as we played. We all thought it was a good idea and Drennette went on to stipulate that we at no point allude to or in any way sound like either of the pieces the title brought to mind, \"Monk's Dream\" or \"Sonny's Dream.\" She admitted, as she put it, that it would be especially hard to stay clear of Sonny Criss's piece, given its bottom-heavy propulsion's affinities with Mingus's _The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady_ , thus providing an opportunity to say or to suggest something about an L.A. sound, but she insisted it was a temptation we would have to resist. I'm not all that sure we'd have found echoing or alluding to Monk or to Sonny so tempting or that we'd have otherwise gone that way, but we agreed to the proviso and got to work.\n\nWe decided that if we alluded to any other piece it would be our own \"Dream Thief \" and we did end up doing so. It was as if Dredj were the thief in question, the dream of the fishing-line harp siphoning aspects of the dream of the cigar-box guitar, just as we now channeled or alluded to certain melodic and harmonic elements in \"Dream Thief \" with an intermittent, subsidiary line running thru \"Dredj's Dream\" that bore roughly the same relationship to \"Dream Thief \" as Abdullah Ibrahim's \"Sotho Blue\" does to Oliver Nelson's \"Stolen Moments,\" Abdullah upping the ante on \"stolen\" paralleled and upped further by the act of \"theft\" we made \"Dredj's Dream\" guilty of.\n\nYes, the line says or insinuates, we fish our premises, extend our precinct, our province, advance what sonorous catch we can. Still, we wondered if a more literal fishing line might not have a place in the piece, short lengths of it cut and tied around the strings of Aunt Nancy's bass \u00e0 la Cageian \"preparation.\" We agreed it did but the \"line\" Aunt Nancy ended up using was less literal than gestural, a symbolic substitute or simply a substitute, as there was no fishing line handy. We were rehearsing at Lambert's apartment and there was none there. Lambert, however, scrounged around and found some twistie bag ties in the kitchen. He offered them to Aunt Nancy and she tied some of them around her bass strings, a substitute for fishing line that could be seen or said to signify fishing line. Symbolic or not, the twistie bag ties, at the literal level, the aural and the tactile level, intrude and obtrude in a rattly, screw-loose way, in a manner not inconsistent with Dredj's fishing-line harp.\n\nThese are only a couple of the elements that went into it. After a spate of brainstorming, trial and error, disagreement, agreement, happenstance and what have you, we worked it out. It's funny that a few times, going thru it, one or another of us couldn't help referencing \"Monk's Dream\" or \"Sonny's Dream\" in the course of soloing, something, as I've already said, I'm not sure would've occurred had Drennette not brought it up. Prohibition carried the power of suggestion it seems. In any case, we ran thru it several times after pulling it together.\n\nNone of the takes were as good as we'll eventually make it. For one, we're wondering what it would sound like with actual fishing line and we intend to get some. I'll hold off sending you a tape, but \"Dredj's Dream,\" collectively composed, definitely goes into our book.\n\nYours, \nN.\n16.II.84\n\nDear Angel of Dust,\n\nI dreamt I wandered in a maze, some sort of shopping mall it seemed, obliquely reminiscent of South Coast Plaza, the mall built on lima bean fields in Costa Mesa, the town right next to the town I grew up in. It was my birthday and I was there to meet someone, \"a certain someone\" as I put it, a special someone. I knew the sadness I'd see her struggling with would stir me, the struggle, to be more exact, more than the sadness, a struggle she and I would share. I knew her pouty, dry, slightly chapped lips would cry out to be wet by a kiss, the long, wet kiss my mouth was nothing if not made for. I knew it was that that my lips and tongue were there for, my teeth as well. I knew the bordering on bite our teeth would bring to the kiss was as much what we were there for as the press of lips and the meeting of tongues. I knew she was there somewhere in the maze, in the mall, though we'd forgotten to say exactly where in the maze or in the mall we'd meet when we arranged a few days earlier we'd meet.\n\nAs I walked about looking to see her, peeking into this or that store I could recall her liking, stopping at this or that bench we'd sat on before, this or that fountain we'd stood in front of, looking to find her but not finding her, her presence, a diffuse albeit palpable air, a presiding sense, suffused and pervaded everything, as though, there but not yet found, she was all the more there. At the same time, there was the sense of her as ultimate find, ultimate fit, the \"one and only\" of love lore, of course, but not only that. There was a sense of some long-sought attunement having been come to, a nestling sense of ordainment, rest, no matter not having found each other yet. It wasn't some hackneyed business of her being with me though not actually so or not yet so, but it was. She was there as I looked, everywhere I looked, not in the way of thirst proving water's existence, not patly in the looking itself. She was there not so simply as that, though it can, in another way, be put simply: she was the dream.\n\nEvery so often during my waking life I'd glimpsed or gotten an inkling of agency and occasion run as one. In the dream it rayed out, sustained as never before. Her palpable air was nothing less than aura, a guiding sense that all was well, all would be alright, our not having decided exactly where we'd meet notwithstanding. She was there with me already and I was there with her already. An inner glow, an inner warmth, welled up in me at the thought. It was a thought I knew the dream dictated, the dream an expansive medium I knew now as at no time before. All this was true and of her it was true. She was as close as my breath, more near than my skin.\n\nI came upon her in an odd room I couldn't recall ever having been in or ever having seen in the maze or the mall we were in. It was an open room, a pizza parlor or maybe a beer joint, with a wide entrance that wasn't a mere door but a whole wall pulled away. She sat around a table with a small group of people, engrossed in the conversation going on among them but my \"certain someone\" nonetheless, thru and thru. I knew this more viscerally than ever before and she knew it, though she didn't so much as look up from the conversation. She knew while not appearing to notice I was there, my \"certain someone\" to the bone, her not appearing to notice I was there notwithstanding.\n\nShe finally did look up and acknowledge me standing there at the entrance. She excused herself from the table and got up and walked over to me. She took my right hand into her left hand and she kissed me on the cheek, turning me away from the pizza parlor or whatever it was and beginning to walk out into the maze or the mall. She looked into my eyes and smiled. A jolt of sorrow shot thru me.\n\nWe had gotten our wires crossed it seemed. She was surprised to see me there she said and when I mentioned our arrangement to meet, my birthday and so on, she said we had left it hanging, with no follow-up, and she'd gone ahead and made other plans. I asked, \"What now?\" She explained that she couldn't simply up and leave her friends, the people at the table in the open room, and that she needed to get back to them. She hugged me and said happy birthday and turned around and walked away. I awoke with a sense of malaise that bordered on devastation, an extremely heavy sense of malaise, and with an even heavier sense that something was awry, that things didn't exactly add up or didn't exactly fit.\n\nLater in the day, still bothered by the dream, I told Djamilaa about it, how much it had me disconcerted and how much it puzzled me. I went on and recounted it for her. After hearing it, she sucked her teeth and said, \"Don't worry. It wasn't yours. You were dreaming someone else's dream. That was Penguin dreaming about Drennette.\" She would say no more.\n\nI haven't had a chance to talk with Penguin but she said it so summarily, said it with such utter finality, confident to the point of dismissiveness, I can barely imagine she might be wrong.\n\nWhat do you think?\n\nYours, \nN.\n17.II.84\n\nDear Angel of Dust,\n\nI got a chance to talk with Penguin and I asked him about the dream. He says yes, he has dreamt it, more than once in fact, but he wouldn't go so far, he says, as to say it's about Drennette. The \"certain someone\" in the dream when he's dreamt it, he says, looks nothing like Drennette and doesn't, in the way she speaks, walks, carries herself and so on, resemble Drennette. \"Anyway,\" he said emphatically, \"I haven't dreamt that dream in a very long time. I dreamt it two or three times, the last about five or six months ago. Since then it seems to have gone away or been put away, like a tune a band retires from its book.\" I was struck by the analogy. He too, as soon as it left his lips, appeared to be struck by it, pausing as if hearing an echo of it, giving it further thought. \"How strange,\" he went on to say, \"that it popped up again, not to mention getting dreamt by someone else.\"\n\nWhy me? He couldn't help wondering nor could I. Is it my listening to his going on about Drennette, his bending my ear the way he so often has, my sitting still for it? Did that do it, did that open me up in some way? Did that in some way make me a surrogate or a host? \"It's not about Drennette,\" he shot back when I asked out loud. \"Of course not,\" I said, not wanting to make an issue of it, and went on to wonder, again out loud, what order of dream transfer it was we were dealing with, dream theft, dream contagion or what. Neither Penguin nor I could help recalling Dredj's dream, its roundabout exchange with \"Dream Thief,\" ideas of dream transit, dream transport, crowding in on us. Was Dredj the connection, we wondered, the conduit, Penguin's dream's way into my sleep? Yes, that was it we agreed.\n\nWe no sooner agreed than Penguin looked at me and said, \"Getting back to Drennette, whom it's not about, or getting back, I should say, to it not being about Drennette, I need to say about 'a certain someone' that she's the one we have that we don't have or the one we had that we don't have, the one we have by not having, that we have to have without having. You being new to this, I need to tell you she's the one whom to have would be not to have, to have let slip away in a presumption of having.\" He stopped as though winded by what he'd said, as though it were an hour-long speech he'd finished. I found myself set back, silent, not knowing what to say, and when he gathered himself again, got his wind back, he said, simply repeating himself, \"I tell you this because you're new to it.\" He paused a beat before adding, \"I haven't dreamt that dream in ages.\"\n\nI wasn't sure anymore. I thought maybe I'd agreed too soon, settled on Dredj as the connection too quickly. Maybe, to begin with, \"Why me?\" isn't the question. What if Lambert dreamt the dream too, like the time the three of us dreamt the Djeannine dream? Maybe this was us dreaming a collective dream again, staggered instead of dreamt at the same time, and if Lambert hasn't dreamt the dream, could it be that he just hasn't dreamt it _yet_?\n\nIt may turn out to be inconclusive, I know, but I need to speak with Lambert and I'm going to speak with him next.\n\nAs ever, \nN.\n18.II.84\n\nDear Angel of Dust,\n\nA quick note to say I spoke with Lambert. I didn't recount the dream or go into particulars. I simply asked had he dreamt of \"a certain someone,\" figuring he'd know what I meant if he had. (I didn't want his dreaming the dream, if he hasn't yet but goes on to dream it in the future, to have been influenced by my telling it to him.) He had no idea what I meant. \"A certain someone? Meaning who?\" he asked. I told him he'd have known if he had. I told him he must not have and that I'd leave it at that, except that if he eventually does dream it he'll know it and to let me know if he does.\n\nSo that's it for now, the upshot being it's up in the air, still up in the air. What exactly my dreaming the dream signifies we won't know until we see whether Lambert dreams it too, which could take a while. At what point, if he doesn't do so soon, do we decide he most likely never will? The five or six months it took between the time Penguin last dreamt it and the time I did? More than that? Nine months? A year? We'll see I'd like to say but I'm not sure.\n\nOtherwise, not much is up. We did venture up to Hollywood the other night to a place on the Strip called Club Lingerie, a pop music spot that's been there about ten years, though it's not a place we normally frequent or had even been to before. What took us there was a one-night gig by Ronald Shannon Jackson and the Decoding Society, a band we've heard on records but not live. It was a chance we couldn't pass up, no matter how incongruous the venue seemed to the music or to the way we, at least, hear the music, though on further reflection it made a certain amount of sense, given labels like \"free funk\" and \"avant-funk\" that've been applied to it. Anyway, I'm not sure the Club Lingerie crowd was quite ready for what Jackson and his band brought, not sure they knew what hit them. I can't exactly say we were ready or that we ourselves knew what hit us.\n\nFor one, even though we'd heard some of their albums\u2014 _Eye on You_ _,_ _Street Priest_ _,_ _Mandance_ _,_ _Barbeque Dog_ \u2014we weren't prepared for how _physical_ they got live and in person, how _physical_ the music got. To begin with, the place was packed, teeming with bodies and body heat before a single note was hit, and then when the band began to play it came on _strong_ , _loud_ , _hard_ , the guitar amps and the PA system turned up to peak volume it seemed, ear-splitting volume, an impact or effect aided by the piccolo range Jackson likes to compose in (something Ornette pointed him toward, we've heard), the timbral ping the music typically rings with. It made one's head ring, one's bones and body ring, subject to an avant-primal assault bent on recalling the word _avant-garde_ 's military roots it seemed, a ringing the club's occasional recourse to strobe lights further assisted. You _felt_ the music at least as much as you heard it.\n\nClub Lingerie, our initial senses of it notwithstanding, proved in many ways to be the perfect venue. A young, beautiful, hiply dressed crowd filled it with glamour and gams, miniskirts on the waitresses and on many of the patrons as well, making for a sexy ambience that was lent further sexiness by the very name of the club, its conjuration of chemises, teddies, babydolls, g-strings, corsets, garter belts and stockings, shelf bras and the like. It was Hollywood to the core, Frederick's of Hollywood in another guise, all the more congruent, by virtue of that, with the physicality of Jackson's music, the bodily press it put on, its purveyance of a bodily aromatics the word _funk_ attempts to get at. We knew nothing, the band instructed us, the way it got physical, the way it came on, if we ignored the sexiness of sweat, the wet working-out of beauty's mandate.\n\nIt would have been impossible not to pick up on all of this. Indeed, Penguin, during the break between sets, remarked that the Decoding Society's brand of funk seemed \"exquisitely its own, high-end and, exactly as has been said of it, avant-funk.\" He went on to liken it, wincing a bit as he spoke, as if the extremity of the figure gave him pause, to \"an ever so uric whiff coming off the crotch of a pair of silk panties.\" It was, though, a figure Aunt Nancy not only agreed with at once but went further with. \"Pee and perfume,\" she said simply, \"piss and perfume.\"\n\nI mention this outing because we appear to've uncovered the origins of the 4\/4 shuffle that visited us a year ago at The Studio and once again, in a bit of a teasing, attenuated form, at the Comeback Inn in September. Why we'd never noticed it before will always be a mystery but there it was in Jackson's music, the 4\/4 shuffle, in one of the pieces they played that night, \"Man Dance\" it seemed at the time, though it might've been \"Shaman.\" Drennette was the first to notice, leaning over our table and all but shouting to be heard above the music, \"You hear that? It's the 4\/4 shuffle.\" We all picked up on it eventually, buried as it somewhat was beneath an extended shiver the horns maintained.\n\nOn our way out of the club, after the second set ended, it all came back to Aunt Nancy, who had introduced the shuffle during the gig at The Studio, that a couple of Cecil Taylor records, _3 Phasis_ and _Live in the Black Forest_ , made while Jackson was in the band, had probably been her subliminal prompt. I gave both records a listen earlier today and I could definitely hear it, on the second side, as it turns out, of each record\u2014the second half of _3 Phasis_ and what's a bit like the same piece under a different title on _Live in the Black Forest_ , \"Sperichill on Calling.\" It seems to me, in fact, to epitomize the difference Jackson made in Cecil's band.\n\nIt was reassuring to hear the shuffle come up in Cecil's music, to hear it could be avant without the funk. It relieved us of some of our qualms about it, our fear of a certain concession to pop. We enjoy the Decoding Society and we had a good time at Club Lingerie, but we wouldn't want our music to go as far as they go in that direction. The venue and the music did fit, as I've already said\u2014the glamour, the sexual glitz, the not so oblique appeal. Lambert summed it up as we were leaving: \"I'm surprised the balloons didn't show up.\"\n\nYours, \nN.\n27.II.84\n\nDear Angel of Dust,\n\nAs Lee would say: Boy, what a night! The owner of the Comeback Inn called Lambert earlier in the day and said it was his wife's birthday, that he wanted to do something special for the occasion and he was wondering if we were available, wondering if we'd be willing to play. He said something about coming back to the Comeback Inn or coming back into the Comeback Inn, Lambert told us, with or without a straight face, he added, he couldn't say, seeing as they were on the phone. Be that as it may, Lambert went on, he answered yes and they settled on the money and what time we'd be there. Talking about the gig after Lambert let us know, we decided it might be a good time, as good as any at least, to try handing out balloons to the audience, the idea I wrote you about a few letters back. There'd likely be balloons decorating the place for the occasion anyway, so why not? This would give us a kind of camouflage Penguin pointed out, doing so without saying why he thought we might need it, a potential nit the rest of us chose not to pick. We agreed it was all the more reason to give it a try.\n\nI'd actually grown to be a little reserved about the idea since I last wrote you about it, more and more coming to see it in relation to the night I sat in with the Crossroads Choir, the \"Only One\" balloon the audience kept afloat during \"Body and Soul.\" I had already been there it seemed, been there and done that it seemed. I already knew the participant quantum that contained air in the hands of an audience could be, in their hands or just outside them, either way. Would it be a return to that I wondered, knowing in particular I wanted no more of the halfway-around-the-world romance I had recourse to that night, no mere mention even. At some level I knew there was no reason to think the balloons would bear such baggage but at another level they seemed as bound up with it as the \"Only One\" balloon had been that night. Warmed-over romance I called it, dismissing it with a sneer, haunted, even so, by the possibility that an equally warmed-over social romance, a stale albeit yet to be achieved romance of collectivity, took its place in what we thought the balloons might do or what I thought they might do. Did I want us to revisit the \"Only One\" balloon, revise it, in some way pluralize it?\n\nJust thinking about it, problematize it though I did, conjured a musical motif whose contour had the feel of having come the way my way out of my qualm would track and retrace, a bent-winged bird of a motif my lips veritably itched to work out on a mouthpiece, reed or brass no matter, a lick-driven theorem concerning the one, the two and the many. (Listen, to hear what I mean by lick-driven, to Wilber Morris's \"Miss Mack\" on his _Wilber Force_ release or to Dewey Redman and Ed Blackwell's \"Willisee\" on _Red and Black in Willisau_.) Could a lick be said to grow legs or a motif to grow them for it, that's what what I heard sounded like, what the motif I had in mind would do. I heard a symphonette of sorts, a micro-symphonette wound up in a four-bar motif whose unwinding one would never complete, return to the tonic no matter, the one, the two and the many each only more active the more apparently moot.\n\nThere would be or might as well have been, that is, an \"Only Two\" balloon and there would be or might as well have been an \"Only Many\" balloon, \"only\" by turns a valorizing claim to singularity ( _one_ two, _one_ many) and a dampening, a disclaimer, putative singularity disavowed ( _merely_ two, _merely_ many). Two would be one only as the many would be one, a social predicate or a political prerequisite I'd advance with an austere pucker (it more and more appeared to be brass I had in mind), an austere pucker free of all recourse to recollected sex\u2014as though, I wanted to say, one \"wet\" one's lips with dry ice, as though what would again have been touted as closure came off as cosmetic arrest.\n\n\"Marginal center,\" I said instead, as much tonguing the eventual mouthpiece as muttering it to myself. I meant no more than to stencil a self-correcting wobble, sonically rendered or regraded warble, a slaptongue sputter as high as the horn would go. So it was I not so much overcame as incorporated the reservation I'd come to feel. I was ready for whatever lay in store at the Comeback Inn, as were the rest of the band.\n\nWe got there a little before 8:00 as Lambert and the owner had agreed, having set up and run thru a sound check late in the afternoon, left and come back. Not as many tables had been cleared away as when we played there in September (they were expecting a larger turnout), so the space in the corner that served as a stage was even tighter than before. It reminded me of the time in the late sixties I went to hear Sun Ra at Slugs', the twenty-piece arkestra packed onto and spilling off of a stage that appeared to be the size of a dining table, two at most, \"Space Is the Place\" given a whole new meaning by the cramped quarters they issued the music from. I thought it a miraculous negotiation of shrunken premises. I thought back and thought something of the same would be required of us, nowhere near twenty pieces large but backed into a corner somewhat.\n\nWhen we got there the place was already full, every table taken, every seat as well. There were indeed balloons decorating the room, lining the door we walked in thru as well as the walls inside, balloons of all colors. Of more than one size, some were strung along the walls where they met the ceiling, some from ceiling to floor where one wall met another. The mood was upbeat, festive, people ready to party, most of them friends of the owner and his wife we assumed, some already doing so. This, I have to admit, gave us misgivings. We don't consider festivity to be exactly our thing and we began to wonder had it been a good idea to accept the gig.\n\nPenguin was the first to say it. \"I'm not sure about this,\" he said once we got to the storage room that served as our green room. \"I'm not sure about playing for a birthday party,\" he went on. \"I'm especially not sure this is the gig to try passing out balloons, despite what I said earlier about camouflage. Too much chance of them taking it the wrong way.\" He went on in this way for a bit and the rest of us admitted we had the same apprehensions. Aunt Nancy, however, having allowed she felt exactly such qualms, went on to say that we were there and that there wasn't much else we could do but go on with it, play (\"The show must go on,\" she even said), make the most of it. She got the look of hard thought on her face just before asking, \"Remember the time we played the Scarab and someone yelled out 'Uterine hoofbeat!' as we played 'Bottomed Out'?\" With the exception of Drennette, who wasn't yet in the band when we played that gig, whom we hadn't, in fact, even met, we all nodded yes. Aunt Nancy went on to say it was up to us to set the tone, to darken festivity or strike a note of dark festivity, that it was exactly the understanding of birth bound up in the \"Uterine hoofbeat!\" cry we needed to bring to bear, that the run of apocalyptic beat, repercussion and possession thereby implied (the Four Horsemen allied with Haitian vodoun) was ours to introduce, a complicating note we would insist accrues to each natal occasion, the owner's wife's no exception.\n\nWe all knew what she meant. It was a dread, gnostic note she was insisting on, birth as an issue of misconception, conception itself as an issue of misconception, dubious arrival into a miscreant world. Dubious cause for celebration, dubious or at best ambiguous cause for celebration, birth, we needed to insist and get them to see, was a bottoming out, a slippery descent down what she said was \"the chute of incarnation,\" bodily being a forfeiture of immaterial essence, bodily being material exile, detour. She suggested we open with \"Bottomed Out.\" We agreed and then decided the other pieces we'd play. She rolled coach, cheerleader and gospel diva into one, exhorting, just as we went out, \"Let's wreck this place!\"\n\nSo it fell to Penguin to set the tone, \"Bottomed Out\" opening, as it does, with him solo. He more than rose to the occasion\u2014natal, dark, anti-festive in one swipe\u2014or I should rather say he descended to it, more than descended, taking the baritone to his mouth and muscling a low B-flat from it, a call to order calling for close attention, dialing the party atmosphere down. Most of the patrons heeded his call, ceasing to speak and turning their attention to the music, though there continued to be something of a buzz at several tables, conversations carried on with lowered voices and with not so low voices now and then, an outburst of laughter rising out of the buzz.\n\nAs always with his entrance into \"Bottomed Out,\" Penguin plied a \"Lost Generation\" line or allusion, a reference to and a reabsorption of Sonny Simmons's piece, only here he freighted it with something new, something we hadn't quite heard before, the very dread, gnostic strain or insistence Aunt Nancy had prompted us with, primed us with. He parsed a certain seepage in the horn's low register, a low-to-the-ground if not below-the-ground shuttle or shift, stealing away from concept or conception. Reconsideration proposed as concept, conception as misconception, the triplet-laced line he pressed or pursued equated lost generation with generating loss. It was nothing if not the unbottoming of birth, a caveat so severe, so categorical, it uprooted all track not in some way sealed by trepidation. No one yelled \"Uterine hoofbeat!\" and no one would, but uterine tread, uterine trot, uterine gallop were very much with us, there not all that long after Penguin started playing, low buzz notwithstanding.\n\nPenguin worked his low-to-the-ground or below-the-ground shuttle or shift into a medicinal sweat, the all-out shimmy or shake of a body possessed, a hatching pool of heat. He shook as though powered or possessed by the keys of the horn, shook in such a way as to make the horn rattle. Each key was a peyote button, shriven cactus toughness, a bitter, withered vestige his finger could almost taste.\n\nWith the advent of all-out shimmy or shake the crowd turned more attentive. The few tables at which conversation had continued fell into silence, everyone's eyes and ears turned toward Penguin, whose pooling hatch turned out to be more feint than shimmy or shake. He now had them exactly where he wanted them, where we wanted them, and it was at this point that Aunt Nancy, on congas, and Drennette, on bat\u00e1 drum, joined in, the implied, immaterial hooves (vodoun horses, lucum\u00ed horses, santer\u00eda horses) more palpably afoot. Aunt Nancy and Drennette's drumbeats were hits to the head, kicks to the head, horse's hooves intent on awakening any who remained inattentive, alerting all to the uterine bottomlessness they trod.\n\nPenguin let the triplet figure go and let himself be lifted by the uterine carpet the congas and the bat\u00e1 drum rolled out, the uterine precinct or premises we were now on or in made all the more obvious, to any who somehow hadn't noticed, by Drennette sitting slightly gap-legged with the latter on her lap, its pinched midriff looking anything but pregnant notwithstanding. The bat\u00e1's hourglass shape intimated nothing if not time, birth's inauguration of which and the ravages and wear brought with it \"Bottomed Out\" would be intent on one bearing in mind. Penguin not only rode this awareness or admission but rode it out, leaving the horn's lowest register for a climb into its highest, a raised eyebrow and a rocket launch rolled into one. He ended his climb with a squealing, roll-with-it peal of acceptance that grew falsetto-like, a peal he held for sixteen measures before coming back down.\n\nIt was as if only after making all this clear, clearing the way in a sense, only after the natal, dark, anti-festive note had been struck, could anything approaching festivity be indulged. Penguin's approach was to calibrate his peyote-button plea or appeal as longstanding romance, returning to the bottom of the horn to recall Ronnie Cuber on Eddie Palmieri's \"Yo No S\u00e9,\" an approach whose low annunciativity and quizzicality rolled into one, whose namesake agnostic tone if not timbre, was nothing if not the foot in the door locked-out festivity needed. Someone in the crowd shouted, \"Alright!\" It was on.\n\nThe rest of the piece, indeed the rest of the evening, would prove to be a standoff, sometimes fluid, sometimes tense, between a will or a willingness to party and the music's more austere demands. Penguin dangled his Cuberesque salsa riff, his bolero riff, long enough to let the audience know it was there, no more than a passing taste to let them know romance and festivity were a part of our repertoire, withheld, whenever withheld, neither out of inabiliity nor disinclination but in the interest of a larger design, a certain rigor and recognition. Having served up that taste, he fell back into his triplet-heavy quandary, kicked and had at by the congas and the bat\u00e1 he made it seem, a thrashing bob and weave outmaneuvering would-be assault, as though, knowing every reason to despair, he chose not to. By way of a stoptime pivot opening like velvet stage curtains, he went again to Cuber's matinee-idol suavity and sagesse, not only not despairing but dancing instead. There was no shout of \"Alright!\" this time. The audience could sense he simply visited the salsa motif. They knew he was not there to stay. Indeed, he was again plying his triplet-laden qualms before long and back to the salsa motif not long after that. It was this back and forth he now lingered with, limning the contours of the mixed-emotional occasion he took birth to be.\n\nAunt Nancy and Drennette chose to linger as well. Not so much underneath what Penguin played as around it, they built a serrated, bentlegged amble founded on an aspect of godly limp, a gallop true liquidity accrued to, horses at ocean's edge it seemed. The bat\u00e1 rang with echoic reach, a watery, concussive lilt it was all one could do to keep one's feet upon hearing, a sweet-wood sonance, water notwithstanding. One found oneself asking, \"Maple? Cedar?\" The congas meanwhile plied a bass tack, lengthier legs than those the bat\u00e1 stepped with, a deeper, asymmetrical step taken twice for each the bat\u00e1 took. Anyone familiar with lucum\u00ed and santer\u00eda recognized the interplay of congas and bat\u00e1 as the pattern consecrated to Yemaya, the orisha of the sea and of motherhood. Aunt Nancy and Drennette sought to season if not in some way temper Penguin's mixed emotions it seemed, advancing a more accepting, celebratory take on birth, mixed in its own way though it was, acknowledging the saltiness of birth.\n\nAunt Nancy was nothing if not the mother and the mistress of mixed possibility. Each conga leg stepped into a hole, a giving way of ground if not the ground being lower than expected, foot missing a rung or a stairstep thought to be there, a giving out of leg or an extension of leg. The tone she'd insisted we set she thereby deepened, an exemplum she invited the audience to ponder, peel back.\n\nThe audience did exactly that. The introspective space Aunt Nancy's \"drop step\" apprised one of they now occupied. The low buzz gone, they sat silently, caught up in the music, attentive to every inflection, caught up in thought. Each of them listened closely, brows furrowed in some cases, visibly given pause by Aunt Nancy's leg-in-a-hole polymetrics.\n\nAs always in \"Bottomed Out,\" Penguin pled a certain weakness, a watery-kneed insecurity of limb he called out for support from. Drennette and Aunt Nancy offered that support, the cane or the crutch or the ushering arm around his waist he cried out he needed, but this went only so far. It came to be time for Djamilaa, Lambert and I to join in, which we did, odd as it sounded or seemed, with a waltz-like figure not unlike Billy Harper's \"Cry of Hunger,\" a cradling, chorusing, to-the-rescue riff that was anything but without bottom. Djamilaa was on piano, Lambert played tenor and I played trumpet, offering a unison statement of the line that we repeated again and again, Penguin, recalling Shepp's version of \"Frankenstein\" on _The Way Ahead_ , growing more distraught each time we played it.\n\nIt was as though rescue, would-be rescue, only made Penguin more aware of his predicament, more painfully aware of his predicament. He thrashed and bellowed, fought as though caught in quicksand.\n\nI'd been wondering how the owner and his wife were taking to the new tone we set, festivity's hallowing-cum-harrowing, Penguin's predicative distress. I caught a glimpse of them out of the corner of my eye as Lambert, Djamilaa and I bore down on the cradling rescue riff, spotting them over to the right toward the back of the room. I could've sworn I saw the owner's wife blow us a kiss. It might only have been me, I'm not sure, but, not only that, even more than that, it seemed all the souls there'd ever been and all there'd ever be sat in bleachers looking down at the stage we stood on, poor excuse for one though it was. It was as if the Comeback Inn had turned into a stadium and a Renaissance memory theater rolled into one, elastic locality suddenly on the ascendant. It seemed as though the Comeback Inn had become a balloon, an inflated premise that was more than one premise, a gradually pneumatic enlargement equating place with play as well as play with proliferation, locality and prolixity rolled into utmost palimpsest.\n\nThis was only a glimpse ahead to what was to come it turned out, a sideways glance lasting only an instant might it be said to have lasted at all. But for an instant (if it was, if that's what it was) the bleachers climbed toward the heavens in a flash exposing us all to the sky, soul seated beside soul, soul seated above and below soul, souls packed in, piled high.\n\nAhead somehow lay to the side I noted to myself, there though not yet there, eventuality's lateral outpost, festivity's debt or dispatch. No sooner did the thought arise than I put it away, though to say the thought was taken away might be more exact, swept along as everything so abruptly was. Penguin's opening gambit gave way, that is, to a tricky ensemble section\u2014key changes, tempo changes, dotted notes, double-dotted slurs. Whether we'd really been blown a kiss or it only seemed we'd been blown a kiss one could've wondered but that was now moot. The audience was obviously with us, the owner and his wife included. The steeply ascending bleacher seats, briefly glimpsed and gone, had made it clear everyone was all in.\n\nOur tonal reset, our setting a new tone, had not only taken but taken well and we were on our way. Lambert and Djamilaa took terse, meditative solos, rousing in each its own manner, each an understated tour de force, and the one I took wasn't bad either. At the conclusion of \"Bottomed Out\" there was a hearty round of applause. Two people, in fact, stood up to applaud, so taken with what was only, we'd make sure they'd see, the beginning. We had the house in the proverbial palms of our hands and we were just getting started.\n\nThe mood was more mindful now, not averse to festivity but in touch, even so, with all that would give it pause, the wages whereby festivity would have to be won, had had to be won. We were ever, the tone we set insisted, at a point of having reason to despair but also, having looked at it, seen it, stared it in the eye without blinking, at a point of winning reason to rejoice. It was nothing if not a note of hard-won festivity we struck.\n\nWe now felt less uncertain about handing out the balloons. We and the audience were now on the same page we felt, closer if not all the way there in any case; the balloons would not be taken the wrong way. It wasn't, though, that we had a particular way in mind we wanted them taken, only that they not be confused with those decorating the room, that musicial purpose and decorative purpose not be confounded. We were pretty sure but we'd see, we'd wait and see, make sure the new tone persisted. That being the case, we'd hand the balloons out before our final number.\n\nHaving opened with one of our older pieces, we played one of our new ones next, \"Dredj's Dream,\" following that with another new one, \"1489.\" We then went back to the older part of our book for \"Opposable Thumb at the Water's Edge\" and then to another newer one, \"Sekhet Aaru Struff,\" to end the first set. Our intensity grew with each piece, as did the audience's attentiveness, a kind of absorption drawing all of us in. It grew more and more clear, more and more certain, that this was the night to hand out balloons. It grew all the more so when, the \"green room\" such as it was, we stayed out and mingled with the audience between sets.\n\nEveryone we talked with had something hip to say. \"When I closed my eyes during 'Dredj's Dream' I saw a shade-late incision of light\" was only one of the interesting comments we got. When Djamilaa and I overheard a man in his thirties remark to Lambert, \"It was like the music admitted to time only to suspend it, put birth on hold only to know it all the more, take us back to it. We all were the very thought of life again,\" she whispered in my ear that she was struck by how much it sounded like something I'd write in a letter to you. It did, I had to admit, nodding my head and made to wonder had our correspondence crept into the music, seeped into the music, so seeped in it put words in our listeners' mouths. A woman with dreads wearing a UCLA sweatshirt did say to Aunt Nancy that \"Sekhet Aaru Struff \" was \"a beautiful woman's face conjugated into limnings of stride and striation, an implied walk compounded of structure and stroll.\" Others, on the other hand, were content to let it go with \"You guys kicked ass, mucho ass,\" \"You really tore it up\" and the like. Still, I wondered.\n\nThe mood was good, fun but not frantic, a festive sense being somewhat low-key made more abiding. The party vibe was definitely still there. Drink flowed freely and food abounded of course. Laughter was no stranger of course. The balloons on the wall, of course, did say something about lightness and color, something about pneumatic provision, the tenuous, necessary containment of aerobic endowment. The music had let no one forget the balloons were breath's bounty, an always tenuous bequest.\n\nWe played five pieces for the second set, as we had for the first, opening with a newer one, \"Fossil Flow.\" From there we went to something we hadn't played in a while, Shepp's \"Like a Blessed Baby Lamb,\" then to a couple of our older pieces again, \"Aggravated Assent\" and \"Tosaut Strut.\" We decided we'd put matters in the audience's hands in more ways than one, performing another older one, \"Drennethology,\" as the ostensibly last number, reserving \"Some Sunday\" for an encore should they demand one. It would be right before this encore, were there one, we'd hand out the balloons. The chance of there not being one, of the audience not demanding one, was a snowball's in hell we felt. We would do what we could to make sure.\n\nThe level of intensity we left off on at the end of the first set we started on to begin the second, starting out as on fire as we'd been and building to be more on fire. \"Fossil Flow\" got its best reading yet, punctuated by a number of what Rahsaan would call bright moments, setting the stage for yet even more. Indeed, there were more such moments in the pieces that followed than I can go into other than sketchily, mentioning one or two to represent them all. Lambert, to mention one, soloed on \"Like a Blessed Baby Lamb\" in a way that went off-script or perhaps pre-script, working an expectorant, self-excavating vein worthy of Joe Henderson at his five-o'clock-shadow best. It seemed he proposed a radically articulate clearing of the throat, a veritable book of clearing the throat upping the ante on his \"Book of Opening the Mouth.\" It was as though such clearing were no longer preparatory to speech or as though, better, it were prior to being preparatory to speech, as though such clearing constituted speech\u2014or, if it were indeed preparatory, it remained adamantly preparatory, promising an arrival preparation preempted, endlessly prior, endlessly proto-, a seeming endlessness packed into a four-minute solo, a four-minute string of ahems. Throat-clearing took the place of talk in a gruff serenade insisting thus would its book be, talk not arrived at as such, talk already there otherwise. Less expository than agonistic (exposing nothing, that is, if not exposition's insecure ground), the solo purveyed a beautifully possessed hemming and hawing, expectorant scratch attenuated by namesake bleat. It culled a particular tension and it kept the audience on the edges of their seats, an expectant stress it offered, in the end, no release from, simply ending mid-hem (or was it mid-haw?) as Lambert backed away from the mike. The audience, finding themselves more negatively capable than they'd have otherwise thought, burst into wild applause, as though declaring themselves to be the release the solo had so impeccably withheld. Aunt Nancy, who followed, was more than a few bars into her solo by the time they settled down.\n\nDjamilaa, to quickly mention another, brought an inrush of Eastern undulation into \"Aggravated Assent,\" quoting from Gurdjieff and de Hartmann's \"Reading of a Sacred Book\" behind Penguin's alto solo. Giving Gurdjieff and de Hartmann's austere Central Asian modalities a more southerly, Persian bent, she drew from another recording I know she listens to a lot, Nasser Rastegar-Nejad's _Music o_ _f_ _Iran: Santur Recital, Volume 2_. She teased out the slightly mallet-like attack one hears in \"Reading of a Sacred Book,\" the ringing hammer held in check but held, one clearly hears, nonetheless. She held it less in check, moving over into what it hovers on the edge of, reminding us the piano does deploy mallets while exacting ictic, hammering runs that brought nothing if not the santur to mind. She did more than simply accompany the solo, daring Penguin, with a jabbing persistence reminiscent of Monk, to ride the swell her tremulous left hand kept advancing. It had a way of building and backing off a bit and then building and backing off a bit again, potentially going on that way forever. She plied an Ibrahimic reach into the center of the earth that was also a stairway to the stars. It oddly amalgamated climb and cascade, a watery stairway made of watery cloth Penguin bounded upon more than outright rode, an unrolling rug or an unwinding scarf he trod securely on, an escalating splash after his own heart it seemed. It was after everyone else's too it seemed, so effortlessly did the other four of us work behind them (Lambert and me riffing under Penguin's lead), so far forward did the audience, holding its collective breath one sensed, lean and let themselves be hit by the aggregate hammer it all, for the moment and, for a while, moment to moment, turned out to be, all but unbearably beautiful, borne up and out and all the more enduring we irrevocably knew. \"Quantum-qualitative\" doesn't even come close.\n\nLet these two suffice. What I most want to get into is how things went when we handed out the balloons. The audience did indeed demand an encore when we finished or ostensibly finished with \"Drennethology.\" They applauded loudly, whistling here and there and here and there shouting out an \"Oh yeah!\" They rose to their feet as we bowed and they remained standing as we made our way back to the \"green room.\" We walked single file, carrying ourselves as we'd agreed beforehand we would, our bodies given over to a stolid rectitude. Their eyes followed us into the \"green room\" and we closed the door once inside, at which point the applause grew louder. We let it go on for a while, the whistles and the shouts escalating, and then, each of us grabbing a package of balloons from the box we'd brought them in and ripping it open, we opened the door and went back out. They were still standing. Each of us, as we'd agreed beforehand we would, took a different route back to the performing area, handing balloons out to the audience as we did.\n\nEveryone had quieted down and sat back down by the time we made it to the performing area. Lambert stepped to the mike and explained why we'd handed out the balloons, instructing the audience to each use the balloon as he or she saw fit to contribute to the music, a new piece called \"Some Sunday\" we were about to play that I'd written. He made a point of not suggesting how they might use the balloons, saying nothing about blowing the balloon up and letting the air out, blowing the balloon up and rubbing it, stretching the balloon and twanging it without blowing it up, blowing the balloon up and thumping it, stretching the balloon and snapping it without blowing it up, blowing the balloon up and popping it with a pin, blowing the balloon up, putting it on the floor and stomping it, etc. He simply suggested that they join in as they saw fit when he gave them the sign, which would be him raising his right arm and quickly bringing it back down. He would indicate when they were to stop, he explained, by making the halt sign with his right hand.\n\nWe started the piece off with Djamilaa, unaccompanied, repeating the folk song-sounding, children's song-sounding phrase on piano, a vamp-till-ready we let go on for a while. Djamilaa gave it just the right beginner's touch, a sometimes heavy left hand that bordered on losing the time and did in fact lose it now and again, only to quickly regain it. Pointedly unpolished, mock-awkward, \"amateur\" by its own lights, it made me think of Don Cherry's remark that too many people make a religion of professionalism, a not very satisfying religion he'd found, and there was indeed something reminiscent of his piano work on the _\"Mu\"_ date about Djamilaa's playing. This was all the more apt by way of entrance into a piece we had invited the audience to take part in, as if to say it was okay to be amateurs, okay to be other than polished or professional, okay to be rough and ready, even more rough than ready. Poignancy took the place of polish in Djamilaa's vamp, as if to say, reiterate and insist we're all beginners when it comes to love, especially the Sunday kind Etta James sings about, not to mention the millenarian, great-gettin'-up-Sunday collective love we all so badly want.\n\nIt was as if it were the childhood or even the infancy of some new order she was auditioning and it wouldn't be going too far to say that Drennette's conga beats, when she finally came in, making the vamp a duo, were, threaded into everything else they were, the \"patter of little feet.\" They made it echo in our heads, the remote broadcast of some ideal order yet to come, a conceptual impendence one ached and winced and almost wept on hearing. (Had I looked out and glimpsed an audience member or two wipe a tear from his or her eye I wouldn't have been surprised.) The conga-laced piano vamp advanced a nascent ascendancy of all any heart could want. It grew stark in the stitched iterativity it moved by way of, rhapsody met with impediment, pendency's boon and bequest.\n\nDjamilaa and Drennette reasoned against reason it seemed, played as if to placate a ghost. The vamp jumped and ran, a run of lost and rewon time that rayed and rippled, nothing if not a swell and then nothing if not a subsidence, done again and again as though it would never end. Its echo grew more and more inscriptive, an introspective \"letter to the world\" one wrote without intending to, sound all instinctual plea, appeal or epistle, a recess all proprioception fell into.\n\nJust at the point where it began to appear the vamp would really go on forever the rest of us came in. Lambert's alto jumped out with an elliptical whimsy he might've floated away on were it not for the bottom Aunt Nancy's bass and Penguin's bari put under us all. He went from whimsy to bittersweet anthem in no time at all, a march-worthy solemnity and lilt reminiscent of Jesper Zeuthen's solo on \"To Alhaji Bai Konte,\" one of the cuts on _Brikama_ , the new Pierre Dorge album we've been listening to a lot. I put the mute on my trumpet, a quivering blade I wielded or wove underneath and inside the line he laid down, a needling thread abetting the aspirate cloud he plied. March-worthy though it was, we kept to the near side of march, Aunt Nancy's bass unpredictable and volcanic even as it proffered, along with Penguin's bari, what bottom there was. Scott LaFaro's collateral chatter, the eruptive, side colloquy he used to go at in Bill Evans's trio, seemed to be her model, her muse, a kicking up she sprung us away from march meter with, fall into a groove though we otherwise did, grumble and go.\n\nLambert wasted no time getting the audience involved. At the top of a run one would say put butterscotch in bittersweet's place he took his right hand from the horn, raised his arm and quickly brought it back down, continuing his high flight or flotation with his left hand on the spoons even as he did so, putting bittersweet back in its place as a consequence, intended or not. The audience responded on cue, addressing the balloons in every way we'd imagined they might. Some blew their balloons up and let the air out, some blew their balloons up and rubbed them, some pulled their balloons taut and twanged them without blowing them up, some blew their balloons up and thumped them, some pulled their balloons taut and snapped them without blowing them up, some blew their balloons up and popped them with pins, some blew their balloons up, put them on the floor and stomped on them and so on. It made for a loud, raucous noise, a not unjoyful noise though not always joyful, a devotional sound or song even so.\n\nWe found ourselves lifted, oddly buoyed by what amounted to a balloon choir, an additive chorus by whose cacophonous ledger we were called to account. As we looked out at the balloons being rubbed, popped, twanged, emptied of air, snapped, stomped on and so forth, we couldn't help feeling we were being arraigned even as we were being apprised of a corroborative seam or support. That seam, we heard as well as saw, heard even more than saw, paraded haptic amenities before us, audiotactile grip and grain we were called out to chorus and carol with or against in turn. Rise and arraignment rolled into one, the audience's balloon valences broke thru to a vein of strike, stretch, kick, scratch and scour that offered accompaniment and discontent in like measure, deepseated grievance and regret one would've sworn railed against birth itself. What were we doing where we were and what were they doing where they were were only the simplest of the queries they involved us in.\n\nI stole a glance at Djamilaa and saw that she sat at the piano in the most royal way imaginable (regal straightness of back, regal litheness of arms, regal groundedness of rump, regal fingertip \u00e9lan), a way of abiding balloon arraignment we could all learn from I felt. She continued with her mock beginner's tack, a \"tentativity\" at times that cried out for support, coronation's darling or doll though she clearly was, royal command and recourse though one knew she had access to. What we were doing where we were was what they were doing where they were she made it clear, no matter she sat enthroned, Queen of Soon-Come Sunday, for we all sat enthroned, whether we sat or stood, we where we were, they where they were, Queen or King of Soon-Come Sunday.\n\nI stood straighter, having stolen that glance, and I noticed that others must have stolen one too, for not only did Penguin, Lambert and Aunt Nancy stand straighter, not only did Drennette sit at her drumset straighter, but everyone in the audience now sat or stood straighter. We all found ourselves draped in regality and rectitude, the odd, unexpected bequest balloon arraignment bestowed on each of us, the surprise endowment the pressure it put on birth blessed us with.\n\nMeanwhile, Lambert kept in mind the \"bruised bell\" instruction I gave him the first time we played the piece. Neither bittersweet nor butterscotch had anything to do with it now, or, if either did, only in the most angular, at-many-removes way, a warm sound that was as wounded as it was warm, a wounded sound that was as warm as it was wounded, reception and incision, warmth and wound, run as one. Bruised bell met balloon arraignment with a whimsicality or quizzicality \u00e0 la John Tchicai that, atop Djamilaa's iterative piano, made one beat back tears. Balloon valence, it said, was nothing if not feeling's inflated premises, felt no less for real, felt no less intensely, no matter now known as such. He picked and played off strike, stretch, kick, scratch, scour and so on at will, inflated premises' match at every turn, mixed emotions' match at every turn, a wincing, tangential feint titrating woundedness and warmth over every array.\n\nWe had decided beforehand that for this rendition of \"Some Sunday\" Lambert would not be the only one to solo, that he'd be followed by Penguin, me and finally Drennette with a drum solo before we went back to the head. Before ending his solo Lambert took his right hand from the horn, extended his arm toward the audience and made the halt sign. He went on playing as the balloon choir subsided and the remainder of his solo, albeit continuing the bruised bell vein he'd been working, sounded as if launched by the balloon hubbub it left behind.\n\nLambert went on for another minute or two, followed by Penguin, me and Drennette. Shortly into each of our solos Lambert gave the audience the sign to join in, later giving them the sign to stop, having himself been given a nod to do so by the soloist. To begin to end what's already a very long letter, I'll let it go at saying that Penguin and I both acquitted ourselves well, negotiating the briar patch balloon arraignment tossed us into with Brer Rabbit-worthy aplomb. Penguin was indeed magisterial, working a bass vein he posed as foil to Lambert's high flight or flotation, a baptismal, often abyssal plunge that even the balloons went under with, but what I want to get to is what happened during Drennette's drum solo. It was during her solo that the comic-strip balloons emerged.\n\nI should note that the audience more and more warmed up to their role the further we moved into the piece, that they more adeptly addressed the balloons and that each of them brought something more like a plan to his or her contribution. With each successive solo, they grew more attentive not only to what the soloist was doing but to the rest of the band and, best of all, to each other as well. Some of those who twanged their uninflated balloons and some of those who snapped theirs could be seen coordinating their respective attacks, not only relative to one another but with an eye and a ear toward Aunt Nancy's bass, an eruptive amen corner that kept stride with her as best they could. Some of those who rubbed their inflated balloons did so with increasing finesse, eking out, in some cases, sounds not unlike those made by a cuica, running the gamut between moan and squeal, whine and whimper, as they advanced a patient, melodic parsing adumbrating the soon-come Sunday we attested to. Some of those who thumped their inflated balloons and some of those who stomped theirs increasingly waited for just the right crescendoed-into moment, a bomb atop a bomb they kept their eyes on Drennette to calibrate. Others, however, especially those who popped their balloons with pins, eschewed coordination, opting for a randomness and surprise tantamount to an irreverent \"boo,\" asymmetric occurrence an end in itself.\n\nIt amounted, oddly enough, to the brer patch I wrote you about a year ago, a divinatory field advancing peppered accord, peppered kinship claim. What we were doing where we were and what they were doing where they were made for a tenuous, precarious connection, an on-again, off-again mesh. We were in sync and out of sync by turns, balloon choristers with or without balloons. Balloon-advanced brer patch extended a multiplex field freighted with a feel for polyrhythmicity, vibe-societal strike, stretch, kick, scratch and scour. What we were doing where we were and what they were doing where they were was that.\n\nThe audience appeared to be enjoying itself as well, more and more so as we moved further into the piece and they more confidently found their way. Some shouted, \"Alright!\" Some shouted, \"That's it!\" Some shouted, \"I hear you!\" Some, without shouting, beamed in such a way as to loudly announce a certain delight, a certain attunement, their faces lit with the glow they felt fitting into the mix. Engagement registered on the faces of others in different ways, intense concentration or deliberateness in some cases, closed-eyed, trancelike absorption in some cases, lips moving as if counting or mouthing lyrics in some cases, head bowed reverently in some cases. I caught a glimpse of the owner and his wife and saw that they fell into the beaming group, a big, toothy smile on each of their faces as, respectively, they thumped and rubbed the balloons they held in their hands.\n\nPenguin ended his solo shortly after nodding to Lambert to give the audience the halt sign, which Lambert did. The balloon choir fell silent as Penguin continued his low rove, capping off his low rove with a rummaging run in the bari's lowest register. It was a breathy but oddly subaqueous creep whereby he went foraging on the ocean floor, the rival of any octopus the way his tone seemed to spread and to reach and to scurry, covering ground one would never have imagined it could. The solo ended with a climb to the horn's upper register one semiheard and semisaw, the wistful run of notes a string of bubbles rising to the surface, balloons rising to the surface one semithought. We all fell silent as these final notes floated away, all except Drennette, whose turn it now was to solo.\n\nDrennette's opening gambit was unprepossessing enough. She sat with the conga to the right of the parade snare, the conga held at a slight angle in a stand that allowed her to play it while seated at the drumset. Indeed, this allowed her to address either the conga or the drumset or both the conga and the drumset, the latter being what she began her solo by doing. Back straight, head high, Queen of Soon-Come Sunday, she sat with the drum stool turned somewhat to her right, having put away the stick she'd been using in her right hand while continuing to strike the orchestra snare with the stick in her left. She began beating the conga with her right hand, drumming on the orchestra snare still, tip of stick and palm of hand dealing in timbral shadings it appeared to have become her sole purpose in life to inspect and allow us to hear. Everything slowed down. She struck the orchestra snare, letting the sound hang in the air until it faded, then she slapped the conga, doing the same with the sound it made. She went back and forth that way between orchestra snare and conga, insisting we hear not only distinctions between the two but subtler distinctions between different deployments of stick and between different deployments of hand. It was a low-key start for a drum solo, sublime testing or sublime tinkering though Drennette conveyed it to be.\n\nA beginner's tack to the max, Drennette's minimalist outset was, as I've already said, an inauspicious, unprepossessing start. No one would've guessed it would be during her solo that the balloons would emerge. I'm not suggesting flamboyance has at all to do with whether or not the balloons appear. We're not sure what does and I'm not saying that. But, thought of in relation to the eventfulness of the balloons emerging, her opening gambit appears almost pointedly uneventful, certainly, if nothing else, a pointed withholding of the virtuosic display drum solos are famous (or infamous) for. In any case, there appears to have been some occult or in some other way recondite hydraulics whereby legibility of the sort the balloons deliver accrued to deferred buildup.\n\nA deferred buildup was exactly Drennette's tack, beginner's or not, a buildup she invited the audience to join her in. She gradually worked the parade snare and the cymbals into her left hand's repertoire while adding heel, fingertips and even fingernails to her right hand's address of the conga's head, moving on to ever more complex combinations, ever more multifaceted patterns. \"Take your time,\" Penguin encouraged her at one point, which she did, slowly bringing a wider range of timbres, rhythmic motifs and tempi into play. When it got to where she'd set the table to her satisfaction, laid out the repertoire she sought to activate, she gave Lambert the nod and he gave the audience its cue.\n\nThe balloon choir came on strong, an aggressive onslaught of pent-up energy let loose, more aggressive than what Drennette had in mind, too loud\u2014so much so she took her right hand from the conga and lowered it, whereupon the audience took the volume down. What she wanted, it gradually became clear, was a quiet, accretional field of haptic intensities, a quiet, slowly quickening submission to an accretional muse, aggressive given time as well as loud given time. Accordingly, not as many balloons were popped, either by pins or by being stomped on, as during the earlier solos, many more now being twanged, snapped and, especially, rubbed. What aleatory knocking is to the opening section of Marion Brown's \"Afternoon of a Georgia Faun\" aleatory tug, touch and rubbing were to Drennette's balloon-assisted sonic field, an abiding, aleatory patience allowing what would accrete to accrete, what would accrue to accrue.\n\nRub, as I've said, was the address of choice for the majority of the audience, an address ranging from quiet, caressive strokes to longer, more cuica-sounding moans made by pulling the thumb along the length of the balloon. Rub's predominance accorded with Sunday love's eroticism, suggesting, as it did, epidermal touch, epidermal regard, epidermal warmth. It was clear to everyone that rub, in its multiple senses, applied, epidermal flare well within its range of implication, epidermal friction well within that range as well. Obstruction, difficulty, abrasion, complication and all related meanings along that line were present as well, notwithstanding Sunday love's utopic promise. Everyone, it was clear, brought his or her own experience to bear, from felicitous meow to saturnian groan, not to mention all the gradations between.\n\nRub indeed ruled. A composite, aggregate apprehension, it truly moved, animated by Drennette's increasingly propulsive recourse to the full complement afforded by the drumset\u2014cymbal shots, paradiddles, bass thumps and such, played with as well as against the conga beats her right hand steadily put forth, she herself on occasion trafficking in rub by pushing the heel or the edge of her hand across the conga's head, scraping, scrubbing, sliding. Again, briar and burr had as much to do with it as purr, a divinatory field haptic amenity two-handedly drove.\n\nConductor as well as Queen of Soon-Come Sunday, Drennette took her hand from the conga every now and then and lifted it, palm facing upward, cueing the balloon choir to take the volume up. It all grew louder over time, more intense over time, collateral repercussion and pop increasingly part of it, a few more audience members popping balloons with pins, a few more popping them by stomping on them on the floor. When the volume and the intensity neared their peak, Drennette pulled her right hand from the conga and took up the drumstick, turned a bit to her left and addressed the drumset full-tilt, all-out, as formidable a display of power drumming as one could want, quantum drumming.\n\nIt was with this step or this quantum step that the comic-strip balloons began to emerge. They did so, when they did, not from Drennette's drumset but from the balloons the balloon choir held, from each and every one of them in fact, whether rubbed, plucked, popped, stomped, twanged, snapped, whatever. The sound had reached a fever pitch, the rich cacophony of a philharmonic orchestra warming up, squealing, keening, groaning, squalling, when the first set of balloons appeared. They arose from each and every balloon choir balloon, all of them bearing the same inscription: _By whatever birth was, back at some beginning, I lay on my back unable to see past my belly, legs up, legs bent, legs open, knee on either side o_ _f_ _my belly barely visible. I'd been riding a horse I thought was a bicycle, a bucking horse I was thrown by. I lay on the ground bleeding. I lay bleeding on asphalt, meaning it must have been a bicycle I rode. I lay bleeding in the dirt, meaning it must have been a horse I rode._\n\nAunt Nancy, Djamilaa, Lambert, Penguin and I looked on, taken aback. We all looked at one another, perplexed, all of us, that is, except Drennette, who kept on drumming, looking out at the balloon choir, nonplussed\u2014in fact, with a gleam in her eyes and a grin on her lips that seemed to say she knew something we didn't. The audience, the balloon choir, seemed also to be taken aback, albeit, following Drennette's lead, they pressed on, unperturbed, balloon arraignment engaging their energy and their attention all the more. The sound got louder, more complicated, more intense. Balloon valence was now balloon-on-balloon valence.\n\nThe first set of balloons disappeared, followed, a few measures later, by another, each bearing these words: _Unprepossessed, my horse told me get off, get a life. It bucked and reared up and threw me to the dirt, threw me to the pavement, a bicycle I did a wheelie on. Thrown off, unsure where I was, was it asphalt or dirt I was on, unsure what it was I'd been on, I lay on my back, a ballooning belly's dispatch, I lay bleeding. My lips bled, blood I took to be a kiss._ Balloon-on-balloon valence made for a thicketed feeling, a thicketed field, a density of atmosphere the Comeback Inn could barely contain, a thickness of air. A hothouse compactedness reigned, implication and legibility at once at odds and in league with each other. This was deferred buildup's bequest, nothing if not hothouse complication.\n\nThings had sped up. When the second set of balloons disappeared another quickly followed, inside each of which were these words: _Sweet rotundity. Fecund recess. Ride had been all there'd been, ride was all I wanted. Thrown off as to where I was, what I'd been on, my long legs straddling my horse, my long legs pedaling, I lay on my back riding mysel_ _f_ _hard, I lay on my back giving birth to myself. My ballooning belly took the place o_ _f_ _the hill I'd begun to climb, the hill at whose base my bicycle's pedal broke, at whose base my foot slipped from the stirrup, causing my horse to buck and rear up._ Aunt Nancy, Djamilaa, Lambert, Penguin and I looked at one another again, taken aback all over again. The balloons appeared to be channeling Drennette's bike ride with Rick, the concussive spill she says taught her percussive spirit. Their apparent equation of spill with birth especially caught our attention we all agreed later, as did their confounding of the bicycle with a Haitian vodoun horse.\n\nTaken aback notwithstanding, we urged her and the balloon choir on, the five of us a rooting section now, offering such exhortations as \"Drive it!\" and \"Take it out!\" Drennette did exactly that, putting together a run of rolls that were to a drummer what circular breathing is to a horn player, the rolls a set of uroboric wheels balloon arraignment and balloon-on-balloon valence rode for dear life, the balloon choir doing all it could to keep up, straining to keep up, hothouse compactedness bringing sweat to many a brow.\n\nThe moment the third set of balloons disappeared Aunt Nancy yelled out, \"Kick it!\" Drennette, with a flurry of thumps, was all over the bass drum pedal, almost, one thought, as though it were the broken bicycle pedal come back to life. This took things up a notch, a notch no one, the balloon choir least of all, knew was there, though, well before they knew it, that's exactly where they were. The rubbing was much louder now, riddled with screeches and squeals, and the popping accelerated, aleatory detonation taken to a new high. It had gotten to the point where the poppers, whether stomping or wielding a pin, worked in pairs to speed the process up, one person inflating the balloon and then handing it to the other to pop. The proverbial mine field, brer patch could not have been more explosive.\n\nIt took a couple of measures for the fourth set of balloons to emerge. They bore these words: _A flood ran down the far side o_ _f_ _the hill, blood gushed at its base. I lay on my back bleeding between my legs, legs bent, legs up, legs open, the lips between them bleeding, blood I knew could only be a kiss, a kiss boats bearing a message were afloat on. They floated leaving the hill behind, each o_ _f_ _their sails having the same thing written on them: \"Tell my house it's hot in here.\" So spoke my sailor boy, hot to be with me, my sailor boy who was all but back, due back on Sunday, a Sunday that couldn't come soon enough._\n\nWhen the fourth set of balloons disappeared the fifth emerged: _I tore mysel_ _f_ _to be whole, tore mysel_ _f_ _to possess myself, no matter how unprepossessing, no matter how unprepossessed. I lay thrown off better to know what on was, my host part horse, part bicycle, house hot church, house heat's ashram, house blood's hot retreat. I lay thrown off better to get back up, sit sweating deep in yogic labor once up. My sailor boy more me than I was, blood lotus, I lay, legs uncrossed, recuperating. I lay percussing, I lay getting ready to sit, repercussing, I lay repossessing myself._\n\nBalloon arraignment, all said and done, kicked as hard as Drennette did. The inscriptions' ballooning belly took balloon valence to another power, balloon-on-balloon-on-balloon valence, a run of introjection tending outward. The sound hit like aspirated static by now, an unremitting rush the balloons rode like pneumatic surf. They kept emerging, a sixth, a seventh, an eighth, on and on, ringing changes on _birth_ , _blood_ , _lay_ , _sit_ , _house_ , _horse_ , _kiss_ , _hill_ , _bicycle_ , _legs_ , _lips_ , _labor_ , _sweat_ , _heat_ , _boat_ , _belly_ , _possession_ , _percussion_ , _lotus_ and the like that would never, it seemed, end but did. The final set of balloons bore these words: _Having been thrown off taught me what on was. I found mysel_ _f_ _on the far side o_ _f_ _my ballooning belly, blood-soaked, smothered with kisses. When I sat up I sat on having been thrown. I made a throne o_ _f_ _having been thrown, having been thrown the throne I sat on, lotusheaded, legs crossed, Queen o_ _f_ _No-Show Sunday, my sailor boy's home but to be gone._ Drennette, shortly after these balloons emerged, nodded to Lambert to give the audience the halt sign. He did so, whereupon they stopped on the proverbial dime, the balloons disappeared, Drennette soloed a few more measures and then nodded for us to come back in, which we did, restating the head to end the piece.\n\nThe audience was on their feet right away with a loud standing ovation. Most of them simply clapped but some shouted, some whistled and some went at it on their balloons again. They all knew, as did we, that something phenomenal, even by balloon standards, had occurred. The ovation was long as well as loud, more heartfelt, I thought, than any we'd ever received before. The experiment, we felt, had succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. Many a thought was provoked and many a question raised, thoughts and questions we were quick to discuss on our way from the gig.\n\nAs to what we made of the evening's events, I'd have to say it's too soon to say more than what I began by saying: Boy, what a night! Drennette, for example, insisted, right off the bat, that she didn't, as we thought she might, know anything we didn't know. We'll be talking about it for days I'm sure. I'll let you know what comes of it.\n\nAs ever, \nN.\n3.III.84\n\nDear Angel of Dust,\n\nIt turns out a writer for one of the local alternative papers, _Santa Monica Weekly_ (Aunt Nancy calls it _Santa Monica Weakly_ ), was at the Comeback Inn the other night. He wrote it up and his review (I guess you'd call it) is in the issue that just came out. The balloons, not surprisingly, get most of the attention, beginning with the headline: \"The Molimo M'Atet Makes Peace With Its Balloons.\" He expands on this right away, opening with an assertion that he's always sensed \"a certain keeping of the balloons at bay\" in our public statements as well as in comments acquaintances of his who happen to know us recount having heard us make in private conversation. Why this is, he goes on, he's never quite been able to figure out, though his guess would be, he ventures to say, that what he would term \"a confusion of artistry with austerity\" wouldn't let us come to terms with \"the bid for attention the balloons can't but be augurs of.\" He allows that there might well be something noble about this, something valiant about our \"holding out against easy acclaim, commercialism, sensationalism and the like.\"\n\nHe devotes a good deal of space to describing the d\u00e9cor at the Comeback Inn Sunday night, detailing the arrangement of the tables, the location and dimensions of the performing space, the lighting and so on, saving the balloons lining the door and strung along the walls for last. Referring to the balloons as \"a foretaste of what was to come,\" he notes the range and variety of their sizes, colors and shapes before announcing that Sunday night marked \"an epochal transition point in the band's career to date.\" By this, he goes on to explain, he means that \"on this particular gig, at this particular place, on this particular night,\" we made peace with the balloons, \"came not simply to bear but to embrace them.\" He resorts to metaphor in his reiteration of this point, referring to our \"d\u00e9tente\" with the balloons, our \"extending an olive branch\" to them, our \"smoking the peace pipe\" with them.\n\nHe delays going into exactly what he's referring to by this even while admitting some readers may already, by way of the grapevine, have \"gotten word of the goings-on\" he'll in a moment get to. He then proceeds to discuss the music we played, the music the two sets were comprised of, addressing it piece by piece, saying a little about each, on the whole positive, albeit not without the obligatory quibble (\"Fossil Flow\" could've been longer, \"Bottomed Out\" shorter and so on), but quickly and not with a great deal of detail, saving a more sustained, more lingering approach for the encore, the balloon-assisted version of \"Some Sunday,\" the \"goings-on\" he delays going into while being anxious to go into. Once he gets to that, that is, he takes his time, carefully narrating our return to the performing area, recounting the passing out of the balloons with great attentiveness to who covered what part of the room, repeating Lambert's instructions verbatim. This, the passing out of the balloons, he announces, \"the peace overture, the peace offensive,\" was our epoch-making move.\n\nHe goes on to spare no hyperbole, pull no rhetorical punches, peaking, I think, when he calls it our \"come-to-Jesus moment.\" He waxes patronizing, paternalistic and psychoanalytic rolled into one, praise notwithstanding, writing that it's us coming to terms with our need for attention, \"getting beyond a conflicted desire to reach a wider audience.\" Having dwelt on this a while, he caps it off by saying \"their nobility of abstention, their nobility of abeyance, is hereby moved on from in favor of a greater nobility, that of diving in, joining the fray, putting the hay on the ground where the horses can reach it.\" He then turns to the encore itself, the music itself, the balloon-assisted \"Some Sunday.\"\n\nFirst off, he writes, he has to \"confess to being one of said horses,\" to \"admit to having joined in and fully enjoyed it.\" He goes from this to a detailed account of \"Some Sunday\"\u2014Djamilaa's long lead-in, Lambert's, Penguin's, Drennette's and my solos, and especially the balloon choir's participation. He's happy, he writes, to have been \"a participant-observer,\" from which perspective, he admits, he \"can't but have experienced it all in a special way,\" a special way he's not sure, try as he will, he can do justice to. We next read a good deal about him choosing how to address the balloon (he decided to rub it), the challenges of hearing oneself while hearing the band and the other balloon players as well, his and the other balloon players' \"gains in confidence and competence\" as the piece moved along, his and the other balloon players' \"delighted surprise\" when the comic-strip balloons appeared.\n\nHe has nothing but praise for our \"decision to embrace the balloons and the audience both in one bold stroke,\" calling the passing out of the balloons \"not simply the turning of a corner but collectivity's deep dream come true.\" Not only did we open ourselves to the balloons \"more wholeheartedly\" than ever before, he writes, we \"tapped a live, open vein of musicianship in the audience one wouldn't otherwise have known was there.\" He himself, he adds, despite having no prior musical experience, \"discovered a resident, recondite prowess the band and the balloons apprised one of.\" He crescendoes to this conclusion: \"In making peace with their balloons the Molimo m'Atet made them our balloons. May they long let the balloons take us all higher.\"\n\nIt was Aunt Nancy who phoned and said, \"We've got a problem.\" She was the first to see the review and she quickly gave each of us a call to alert us to it. She said we should pick up a copy of the latest _Santa Monica W-e-a-k-l-y_ (she spelled it out) and we'd find a review of the Comeback Inn gig. She gave us the gist of it but again insisted we each pick up a copy and read it. She said she considers the problem the review makes apparent a crisis, a crisis calling for what she termed an emergency summit. She insisted we meet at Gorky's a few hours later to discuss it, which we agreed to do.\n\nGorky's is a place we go to from time to time, either all together or in smaller groups, an all-night cafeteria downtown on Eighth Street that opened two or three years ago. It's gotten to be a bohemian caf\u00e9, a hangout for artists, catering to and something of a creature of the loft scene downtown, featuring cheap food, coffee and beer, an interesting clientele, live music (usually not much to our liking) every now and then. Anyway, we all went out and got copies of the _Weekly_ , read the review and headed there, Lambert the last to straggle in. Our feelings were mixed, as you can imagine, both individually and as a group. It is, after all, a positive, at points ecstatic review, lavishing praise upon us and the music in multiple ways, and we ourselves consider the experiment a success. The pitch of the praise, the assumptions underlying it and the framing of it, though, confirm our reservations about the balloons.\n\nAunt Nancy could hardly wait to talk about it and she got us going as soon as Lambert arrived, not waiting for him to get food and drink as the rest of us had. Her being the one who came up with the idea of passing out the balloons may have had something to do with her sense of urgency but the review was something we all felt we needed to air our thoughts about. Queen of nothing if not irony, she spoke for all of us by saying, to kick things off, that what bothered her was the reviewer's literal-mindedness, \"a kind of tone-deaf earnestness that misses our mock literalness or mocking literalness, our mixed-emotional 'embrace' of the balloons.\" This was a risk we knew we were running we reminded ourselves, Lambert going on to point out that the prophylaxis the literal balloons were to perform turned anaphylactic in the reviewer's hands. \"The balloons embody their own self-critique,\" he said, \"a hedge against what they otherwise embody, advancing legibility as an inflated claim. The reviewer misses that.\"\n\nWe went around on it for a long while. Djamilaa, for example, said she resented \"the condescension, the turning of something we did into a command or a mandate to do it, an after-the-fact mandate or an after-the-fact command, as though the reviewer were somehow in charge.\" Drennette, for another, talked, as Aunt Nancy and Lambert did, about what the reviewer missed, taking up his trope only to qualify it, torque it, saying that \"if it was an accord it was a sideways accord we came to with the balloons or they came to with us.\" After a pause of only a beat she added, \"It was, after all, No-Show Sunday's throne they put us on.\" Penguin, to give yet another, agreed. \"Not to mention,\" he said, \"the horsecycle,\" at which we all laughed.\n\nWe kicked it around, as I've already said, for a long while, got more and more into the ambience at Gorky's and went off on tangents. We got off track and went on tangents quite a lot in fact, as more and more food and drink came to the table. We ended up hanging out for a few hours and we had a good time. There was no live music, so it was easy to talk, to hear and be heard. A couple of painters came over to our table at one point, saying they recognized us and that they were big fans of our music. We all shook hands and they stood chatting with us for a while. Frank (their names were Frank and Ren\u00e9e) said he listens to _Orphic Bend_ while he paints, that it's become for him what _Kind o_ _f_ _Blue_ was for painters during the sixties. He said he's in fact working on a painting called \"Orphic Bend\" and he'd like us to visit his studio and see it when it's finished. We exchanged contact info and they went back to their table.\n\nWhat we'll do next we didn't decide. Hold a press conference? Issue another press release? Never pass balloons out again? We don't know.\n\nYours, \nN.\n[Dateless]\n\nDear Angel of Dust,\n\nDjamilaa and I awoke with a balloon between us. It lay in the space between our pillows. She sat up and stretched, her light cotton nightie exposing her close-to-the-bone shoulders, her dimpled elbows and her elegant, outstretched fingers a true boon above her head. She yawned. I followed suit, yawning as I sat up and stretched. It was as we turned to each other, smiling, and said good morning that we noticed it, the balloon nestled between our pillows, a third head or an extra pillow bearing these words: _I walked around inside a mall where I was to meet a certain someone, music deeper in my ear the longer I walked. The someone I'd come to see wasn't there. A strong wind blew the roo_ _f_ _off and the stores were suddenly booths. The music inside my ear visited booth after booth, a late arcade it kept me wandering in all night._\n\nThe smile left Djamilaa's face. \"I see you've been at it again,\" she said.\n\n\"Been at what again?\" I asked.\n\n\"Dreaming about a certain someone,\" she said.\n\n\"Not necessarily,\" I said, immediately noticing how weak it sounded and how weak it was but having said it before giving it any thought.\n\nDjamilaa got out of bed and stood up, her back to me. I couldn't help looking at her ass, whose bottom half her nightie left exposed. I gave a thought to the workings of the carnal plan, the carnal setup, the carnal eye, her ass's magnetic draw. I stared as though her pendant cheeks and the cleft between them proffered a magic exit from all that was fallen and profane, fallen and profane though they themselves were thought to be. \"Denial makes it worse,\" she said, sitting back down on the bed, looking over her shoulder, her ass no longer exposed.\n\n\"I'm not denying,\" I said, \"I'm complicating. Didn't you say it was Penguin's dream, not mine?\"\n\n\"That only makes it worse. Your thing for a certain someone has to be pretty strong to have to go thru channels.\"\n\n\"A certain someone is no one,\" I said, more confident now, \"No-Show Sunday's bequest.\"\n\nThe balloon disappeared as I spoke, an evaporative remit appearing to confirm the disendowment I noted, a certain someone's inveterate nonchalance, chronic no-show, the someone one could only not know, nearly know.\n\n\"I'd like to say, 'Well, now that you put it that way,'\" Djamilaa said, \"but I won't.\" She stood up again, her ass's redolent cleft exposed again, carnal provision posed, it seemed, against disendowment, an immaterial musk filling the air clouding my mind if not the air, an imagined musk where there was no musk, all the more intoxicant not being one. I wanted all the more, that is, to whiff the musk that was, press my nose to Djamilaa's ass's redolent cleft as to an actual rent in time (chronic rift, crack in the cosmic egg), the rending of time whose proffered exit took me out.\n\n\"What if I were to swoon?\" I said, syncope's famous last words it turned out. I spoke them as I succumbed to a rush and fell forward Djamilaa told me a few seconds later when I came to. She was beside me now, in the middle of the bed, cradling my head in the crook of her arm, my head against her breast. My face was close to her cleavage, another cleft, my nostrils wide with the overnight smell on her skin, the morning musk I love so much.\n\n\"I was teasing,\" I said, nose between her breasts, nuzzling her cleavage, her close-to-the-bone beauty all over me, the cracked cosmic egg's repair. The heady smell of her skin kept my nostrils dilated. \"A certain someone,\" I whispered, \"is no one but you, you know. The balloon was right between your pillow and my pillow. It was no more my dream than yours.\"\n\nThe smell of Djamilaa's honey-based lotion joined by overnight sweat suffused her nightie, a light, penetrant funk my nose filled with and would've followed to the end of the earth. I wanted its translation more than the musk itself perhaps but words fell teasingly short when it came to capturing it. I imagined a work of audiotactile sculpture that would, her light funk's pheromonal embrace rendered equal parts haptic and sonic. I semiheard, semitouched an atomized, ambient advance one would apprehend as a cystic self-equation cut or carved out of capric dispatch. Djamilaa's goatlike beauty, that is, assailed my inner eye, my inner ear and the fingertips of my inner hand, my overt nose's introvert accomplices, her long-faced forbearance a boon given over to study, aesthetic remit.\n\nDjamilaa-the-Muse was in full effect, Djamilaa-the-Beautiful-One-Has-Come in full effect. The sweat-accented, honey-based lotion smell took me in as much as out, a mustiness of cleft and contained space and a cystic attar opening a faintly beckoning realm. I whiffed and whiffed again and again a remote, redolent beacon broadcasting intimately from afar, a synaesthetic transfer tendering mustiness as light, light funk's multiplied import. There was a deep inwardness, awayness and nearness her smell reposited, inwardness, awayness and nearness rolled into one.\n\nIt was a nearness as near as I'd ever know but somehow, nonetheless, not available, an everlasting no-show allure a certain someone or a certain no one was known for, not to be known otherwise, an awayness as near as any I'd ever know. The reticent, so-near-so-far sound of a French horn might be its aural analogue.\n\n\"Well, now that you put it that way,\" Djamilaa said, \"I agree. Yes, here we are, two no-shows, erstwhile no-shows I'd say, two certain someones who might also be no ones, each the anyone the oneiric arcade parades all night.\" Her voice was low-pitched and husky, a kind of catch in it as though lemon and honey might be in order. The faint suggestion of the latter, combined with the sweat-accented smell of her honey-based lotion, took my inner frenzy further, a would-be match for her synaesthetic beacon's far cry.\n\nI sat up, pulling away from Djamilaa's cleavage, catching, as I did, a whiff that came up from farther down, a more pungent waft coming off her loins and what lay between them, a less light, more penetrant musk rising from the hair that lay there and what lay under it. Oboe, English horn or bassoon to her sweat-accented honey-based lotion smell's French horn, it pierced my nostrils and pervaded my thought to a degree that threw me farther atilt. Oboe, English horn or bassoon, I wasn't sure which, as it may have been all three blown as one or blown in unison, a chorusing call or cry of come-home or come-hither, home's far reach and provenance, inner frenzy's far reach and rule. I was nothing if not such reach's vassal, low-lying musk the principality I swore love and loyalty to.\n\n\"I'd like to write something,\" I said as Djamilaa slid to the edge of the bed and stood up again, her ass's redolent cleft synaesthetically broadcasting again, \"not simply a musical piece but something that would be that plus what visual artists call an installation.\"\n\nDjamilaa was standing and she turned around to face me. The carnal plan, the carnal provision, the carnal setup occurred to me again as the tuft of hair between her legs below her nightie's hem caught my eye, so casually, nonchalantly there it furthered my inner frenzy a bit more.\n\n\"Audiotactile sculpture I call it,\" I went on. \"I want the listener to be able to step into the piece. I want it to be a step taken off a ledge to be unexpectedly caught by a pocket the air offers, a pulverous nodule cut into empty space. I want it filled with streaming powder, uniformly blown powder perhaps, powder the listener leans into as it catches him or her, coming toward him or her like tactile, particulate wind. I want it to hit like a dry, particulate emission propelled from an enormous aerosol can. I want it to feel caressive and custom-fit, pointillistically tensile and precise, an enveloping provision of support. I'd like to call it 'Copacetic Syncope.'\"\n\nSo I spoke at the time. If I had it to do over, I'd add that the streaming powder would have a rushlike quality to it, as though it were the inversion or, more exactly, the inverse mold of a swoon or a keeling over, convexity to the swoon's or the keeling over's concavity, concavity to the swoon's or the keeling over's convexity, the music's haptic equivalent custom-fit.\n\nDjamilaa stood listening as I spoke, her pubic hair's visibility incidental and moot if she were aware of it at all. She was attentive to what I was saying but she also seemed a bit distracted, as though on her way somewhere else or to something else. When I finished she said, \"Sounds good.\"\n\nDjamilaa sniffed the air a couple of times, having caught a whiff of something it seemed. She lifted her right arm, turned her head to her armpit and sniffed it. She then lifted the hem of her nightie to her nose and sniffed it, her belly and the full extent of her pubic hair visible as she did so, offhandedly, nothing if not blas\u00e9, me further atilt even so, especially so.\n\nAfter she let her nightie back down she looked at me and said, \"I need a shower.\" She turned around and headed for the bathroom.\n\nSincerely, \nDredj\n13.III.84\n\nDear Angel of Dust,\n\nYes, another cowrie shell attack. All the fuss about the balloons must have brought it on. The balloon-on-balloon visitation and valence at the Comeback Inn gave us lots to think about, the unpredictability of the comic-strip balloon appearances, the anaphylactic effect passing out the literal balloons possibly had, the balloons' apparent channeling of Drennette's bicycle ride with Rick, their dystopian tweak of \"Some Sunday's\" great-gettin'-up morning expectation not the least of it. Then there was the simpleminded review in _Santa Monica Weekly_ , which not only gave us more to think about, more worry, but generated some controversy as well. This week's issue carried a few letters to the editor that were written in response to the review, ranging from ringing endorsement to variously critical, the latter complaining that the reviewer \"drank the Kool-Aid\" at one end of the spectrum and that he got us all wrong, praised us for all the wrong reasons, at the other. Not to mention the queries, comments and opinions of friends and acquaintances. All the buzz, the balloons again upstaging the music, must've gotten to me.\n\nIt was as Djamilaa and I sat in bed talking about the balloons the other morning that it hit. I'm not sure it was anything in particular she or I said that set it off so much as the overall strain of having to think and talk about them so much, simply that of having to think and talk about them at all perhaps. In any case, that's what we were doing when I began to feel a tightening in my forehead, the usual sign of the onset of an attack. I had just said, \"There can be no adequation,\" but, as I've said, I'm not sure that's what triggered it. Whatever the trigger, cumulative or momentary, the attack chose to assume what I've come to think of as its classic form\u2014the shattered shells embedded in my brow, the packed or compacted transparency everything seemed encased in, Ornette's \"Embraceable You\" piped into my head and so on\u2014though not without some of its more recent features.\n\nDjamilaa says it was clear to her right away what was happening, that after announcing, \"There can be no adequation,\" I broke off speaking, went sort of blank and when I spoke again asked for pencil and paper, which she got up and got for me. For my part, I felt I sat at Dredj's desk, Dredj's hand had hold of mine. What I wrote was the letter you received a few days ago. The attack subsided, thanks to Djamilaa's presence and care I think, a few hours later, with no need for a trip to the ER or a hospital stay.\n\nI like Dredj's \"Copacetic Syncope\" idea. I can't promise to deliver on the audiotactile sculpture part but I'd like to write something with that title, something along the lines suggested in the letter. For one, it put the sound of the French horn in my head so indelibly I haven't been able to get it out. The ring it has or the reminder it gives of a faraway haunt, a faraway hunt, a faraway homing, won't let me be. I'd want French horn to be a large part of the piece. Ideally there'd be three or four of them, a French horn choir chorusing the harmonic equivalent of \"What but that solace, that but what other solace,\" repeatedly plying that qualm, that claim. Going at it ourselves, we'd have to make do with Penguin on bassoon and me on flugelhorn (barring a crash course on French horn) chorusing behind Lambert's tenor. The inflectional weave and the harmonic wrinkle that would encode \"What but that solace, that but what other solace\" of course remain to be worked out, as does pretty much, I'll admit, everything else. But Dredj got me going and \"Copacetic Syncope,\" I guarantee, even if I do have to take a crash course on French horn, is on its way.\n\nDredj's evocation of Djamilaa's exposed ass and pubic hair (just happening to be there, just happening to be devastating) keeps at me, a vulgar, vulnerable regard the French horn's muted howl would harken back to, a retractive sound as of a world more near than far but not enough with us. I wonder if what he means by \"a pulverous nodule cut into empty space\" is a compensative step one takes wishing it were otherwise, a would-be, wished-for presence or plenum that, would and wish notwithstanding, conduces to dust\u2014an aggressive, propelled, propellant dust fitting one like a glove. I see root people convening at water's edge, low boat-hauling voices deep in their throats and lungs, \"There can be no adequation's\" rejoinder. Or is it a reconvening, a round or return whose recursive charge obeys Dredj's \"enveloping provision of support's\" mandate? I see gopher holes eaten into atavistic ground. I hear \"What but that solace, that but what other solace\" beaded on a thread Penguin's bassoon lets hang, lets dangle, love's don't-get-me-started reluctance and woo.\n\nAs ever, \nN.\n16.III.84\n\nDear Angel of Dust,\n\nThank you for your thoughts on Dredj's \"late arcade.\" I'm not sure I see it the way you do. In fact, I'm sure I don't. I even think I'd like to see it that way, but I don't. I don't hear a lament for times past. I don't read the roof blown off the mall as a critique of the present, \"a redemptive critique hearkening back to sturdier social relations,\" as you put it. Dredj was getting at something deeper than that old chestnut. We tend, I think, to forget that the annals of the past are not the past. We confuse the felicity of the book, the felicity of the museum, the felicity of reminiscence itself with a lost felicity actually lived in the past. It's too easy to throw rocks at the present, too easy to make fun of the mall. Dredj, I'm sure, was up to something else.\n\nWhat that something else was I'm not sure how to say. He said the music went deeper into his ear the longer he walked. He said the stores turned into booths after the wind blew the roof off the mall. The wind, he seems to say, converted the mall into a bazaar or a Renaissance faire, which does imply a reversion to the past, I admit, but he goes on to say that the music in his ear kept him up all night, kept him visiting booth after booth, which I'm not convinced is necessarily a happy situation. What's a late-night, insomniac promenade offering temporally remote solace, the sought-after someone lost, but a lament for the present, nostalgia for, if anything, the present, a dismissal of past amenities (if that's what they were) as irrelevant, insufficent, moot? This is the present dressed in past accoutrements only to emphasize they don't apply.\n\nHe said, in fact, that it was the music in his ear that visited booth after booth. Did he mean that the music traverses compensatory ground, that the music is a consolation prize or that it seeks to be, that it shops, as in olden days and vainly it would seem, for the thing that would deliver solace, consolation, compensation? Again, that's not, it seems to me, a categorical felicity. A certain someone not present, the present itself not present enough, seems a lament for the present, not the past, a post-expectant lament borne by see-thru auspices, inertial everydayness's return. The balloon bearing \"late arcade\" was a third eye (a fifth eye really) that lay between Dredj and Djamilaa, shared by Dredj and Djamilaa, a shared, post-expectant arraignment of any such trappings of the past as booth and bazaar. It augured a necessary appeal to the ordinary, the everyday, the unspectacular abidance I'll continue to call post-expectant.\n\nUnspectacular notwithstanding, \"late arcade\" works deeply allied with \"copacetic syncope\" I suspect.\n\nYours, \nN.\n18.III.84\n\nDear Angel of Dust,\n\nWe couldn't resist any longer. We've thought of issuing another press release following the _Santa Monica Weekly_ review but we kept deciding against it. We can't respond every time someone gets the music wrong we've told ourselves ever since putting the first press release out. But Braxton's advice or idea or insistence that one has to provide the terms for understanding one's music, develop a language listeners can learn from and deepen their listening thru, has long spoken to us as well. The hubbub surrounding the balloons' most recent appearance, given the spark the _Santa Monica Weekly_ review gave it, finally got to us and we decided another press release, a second postexpectant press release, was in order.\n\nEnclosed you'll find a copy. It was a group effort, everyone contributing input (you'll notice we went with Aunt Nancy's insistence we use her coinage _Santa Monica Weakly_ ), and I think it pretty much speaks for itself. We were a little surprised, in fact, to find ourselves speaking with such authority and, at points, so didactically about something we're so bewildered by. It's as if the review's easy presumption of knowledge nudged us into knowing by not knowing, a position of knowing that would acknowledge not knowing.\n\nIf you have any thoughts I'd love to hear them.\n\nAs ever, \nN.\nPOST-EXPECTANT PRESS RELEASE #2\n\n_Santa Monica Weakly_ got it all wrong. It wasn't a matter of making peace with the balloons. No one knows them better than us\u2014no one, that is, knows better than us that they're not to be known\u2014and our experience has been that no peace is to be made with them. Legibility, we know, is an inflated claim, the very claim, were it that simple, the balloons embody. But it's not that simple. The balloons are a hedge against that which they otherwise embody, ostensibly embody. True self-critique or disingenuous dodge, they are not to be bargained with or bartered with, either way. We intended the literal balloons not as a peace pipe, an olive branch or a peace offering but, as one of our members put it, a prophylactic. That they turned out to be anaphylactic proves our point.\n\nWhat _Santa Monica Weakly_ fails to note (or only, at best, implicitly notes) is that the balloons are a bluelit brigade freighted with our wildest wishes, a wildness or a wilderness of wish we sought to bring the audience abreast of at the Comeback Inn. It wasn't so much about the balloons as about them, which is to say about us, our shared arraignment of a hope hoped against hope, the knock, hard albeit soft, of what would not (could not) be. _Santa Monica Weakly_ fails to note that a low throb knocked at our door and we let it in, a faint beat that was nothing but anaphylactic willingness, wish and fulfillment, the fullness of which we knew to be fleeting, secret, discreet.\n\nWe also notice no mention is made of the gig's occasion, the Comeback Inn's owner's wife's birthday, which seems to us infinitely more relevant than the peace accords the _Weakly_ wants the gig to have been. It seems to us that what we had, what can be said to have summoned the balloons, was something of a return to initial premises, premises to which nothing speaks more resonantly than birth. We who make the music remember that the balloons' inaugural appearance two years ago in Seattle burst with intimations of pregnant air, pregnant wind, pregnant swell, a ballooning remit lodged in alternate ground we term wouldly. What but the airiness of natal occasion's commemorative occasion gets at wouldliness, the nothing-if-not-that-and-so-nothing event or eventuality the balloons not only announce and inure us to but are, thinly contained pockets of air that they are? Who remembers birth? What could be more wouldly than birthdays? One commemorates an event one can't remember but at which one was present, the event with which being present began.\n\nThe implications of \"No-Show Sunday\" need not be belabored we thought but the _Weakly_ 's unalloyed jubilation makes us think otherwise. We still don't mean to belabor them so much as point the main one out: Sunday never comes or, better, was there but not there. The _Weakly_ 's Sunday might've been all there but ours both was and wasn't, a tale of two Sundays, a tale of two sets of balloons. Literal meaning aside, \"two\" signifies noncontainment, a default on the very containment the _Weakly_ 's read would have. We find the review wishful, painfully unaware of itself, not the arraignment or the ironic fulfillment of wish our passing out the balloons was intended for. We again stress that it was a birthday gig, a meditation on birth, wouldly pregnancy, wouldly wind, an endlessly blown wish to wrap walls around wouldly breath. Unimpatient expectancy, we've come to know, is a lesson one has to be long on learning. The _Weakly_ would move into the mansion without a single brick being laid. The _Weakly_ would have it all too quickly.\n\nThis is what we must do, this is what we ever so slowly, ever so gradually, ever so painstakingly, all but asymptotically approach: 1) Commit to a fast of not reaching, commit as though fast and feast were the same. No easily presumed arrival will do, no easy applause. 2) See that it has to do with finitude, that \"it all has to do with it,\" as Trane said of something else, this wanting to have arrived once and for all, a wished-for arrival the band dallies with by way of the balloons but also knows the dangers of. See that dalliance and danger are the balloons' two bodies, an escaped kingship or queenship whose throne would-be arrival seats us on. See too that wouldly breath keeps both at bay. 3) Come ever more deeply to know that shape is tactility at a distance, balloon curvature a boon at whose behest we bend away from capture, our own as well as theirs, which is both good news and bad. Good and bad apportion, as worth or negative worth, respectively, wouldly weave, wouldly welter.\n\nThe balloons are dispossessed lungs, inspiration less objectively drawn than objectified, a fix or a fetish made of something we know to be fleet, fluid\u2014\"peace,\" were such to be had, beyond any and all patness, which is nothing if not the balloons' exact proffer. Bicycle and horse rolled into one, the balloons are the gift horse whose mouth we scrutinize, possibly a Trojan horse. We don't trust them, never have, never will. We will continue to keep our distance, B'Loon's ingenuous look notwithstanding.\n22.III.84\n\nDear Angel of Dust,\n\nIt seems like forever since I last wrote you though it's been only a few days. I don't mean to be dramatic but I can't help saying everything has changed. Watershed, turning point, call it what you will, the Comeback Inn gig, with its array of repercussions (the _Santa Monica Weekly_ review, our \"Post-Expectant Press Release,\" Dredj's visit), appears to have prompted the change. To say we've turned a corner puts it too mildly. Gone over a cliff is maybe more like it, a precipitous plunge into what only a falling leaf might live to tell about, some stark incumbency upon us now to be that leaf, brake short of shooting star, falling star, burnt-out star. But maybe it's just me. Maybe I load it with weight only to be bogged down. Maybe weight, a possible anchor, speaks too persuasively now, not so much weight as counterweight, a would-be, wished-for antidote against floataway onset, the across-the-board leavening balloon epiphany apprised us of\u2014backed up or gone back to, for me, by Dredj's translation of body-and-bone solidity into floataway musk, evanescent nearness, the fleet funk Djamilaa's nightie dilated his nostrils with. I keep wanting to say, \"Just let me get next to you,\" some running plea or some lover's prayer (would-be lover's prayer) running from King Pleasure to Tower of Power, as though nextness or nearness were the always asymptotic falling short it's motored by.\n\nA copacetic plummet I'd call it except I wonder what rubs off and what sticks to have put it so. This chasm I feel to have opened up between then and now, before and after, the cliff we went over and the chasm we fell into, stretches time to where I'm not sure when I last wrote you though I know I wrote you only days ago. Is it that all nextness or nearness got spirited away by some quantum turn we took, not only Ellison's bit about seeing around corners but cornering a certain claim, a charismatic \"no-show\" claim the balloons admonished us with but would, even so, package and contain and commoditize? I feel my head bent sideways even as I ask. It's not so much a chasm or a canyon I see as a gray morning, misty coastal fog on a downhill street going toward the ocean, a foggy morning prospect in as ordinary a place as Long Beach or San Pedro, if not ennui a diffuse being-at-loose-ends in a small harbor town. Such would be the tone poem I'd write, copacetic plummet downing the ante on Dredj's \"Copacetic Syncope.\" The bumpy logic it would move by evades me at the moment but that's neither here nor there, much less the point of this letter.\n\nMore than one person has told me I have an old soul. Maybe that's what this is, the jostling around of what the Rastas call \"anciency,\" but also more. I'd repeat _prospect_ only to say _peril_ , repeat _peril_ only to say _pearl_ , repeat _pearl_ to imply an irritant ploy whereby time doubles back to audit itself. Some dislodgement intervenes between pebble and ointment, a secreted sheen whose girth and gap we come in time to summon. To have gotten one's head around that, as the saying goes, may well be what time's work is, all it is, all so near nothing nearness can't but be the wall we fall arrested by. A qualitative audit I'd call it, head turned, head gone to or gotten to and so on, arrivance's matte perfume.\n\nMaybe all I mean is that it all feels thicker, portentous, packed with variability so immense it's not at all evident where to begin. I don't remember feeling this way ever except maybe the moment I turned to music as what I'd do with my life. Is this a new beginning, a new life, _la vita nuova_? Thick time, heavy time, the weight shadows carry could shadows carry weight, is what this is, I think, a ponderous vamp-till-ready perhaps. Of the Comeback Inn gig and what it opened up I'd say _cloak_ only to repeat it, repeat _cloak_ only to say _cloth_ , repeat _cloth_ only to say _knotted_ , meaning by that a dense traffic of shade let loose, all accent, bend and inflection, a quickened and quickening membrane it fell to it to flow thru. Whatever corner we came to would turn to take us in, whatever edge we came toward come to meet us. This was the Comeback Inn gig's bequest, a fund of confidence if nothing else, no matter whatever outer misgiving.\n\nSo we hold tight, sit tight in our perch, a risen prospect nothing if not misgiving affords. Call it vigilance. Call it a sensed imminence. We sit bumped up in some way we can't yet specify, an effect of the bumpy logic we'd make music of and will. No, it's not just me. Something real is afoot.\n\nPlease forgive this. It may strike you, I know, as more a mood than a letter, a mood piece or a pep talk to myself, the working out of a mood, the working thru it.\n\nYours, \nN.\n2.IV.84\n\nDear Angel of Dust,\n\nI woke up with a pounding headache this morning. A repetitive, riverine figure had at my head from inside my head, a sawtooth guitar lick of nine notes, each ever so often let linger with a postulant twang. Such twang sought both entry and release it seemed, a complicated order of induction it cried out for. The river it rode ran dappled by sunlight, a slow promenade so white with sun it forced one to shut one's eyes. I looked on with an inner eye more ear than eye, the procession of pocked whiteness an auditive report blind witness made sing. A benign headache I hasten to call it, benign and low-key. It bordered on but pulled up short of a shattered cowrie shell attack.\n\n\"Twang\" may be the wrong word. A cross between fishing line and piano wire, a point or a ping somewhere between the two, might be a better way to put it. Whatever it was, it wanted to light out at some damped oblique angle, ringing but all the while reined in, no toll if not exacted of itself, dues and destination rolled into one. In that way it was like everything else, a universality it modestly proferred, a sense of itself as not exempt it advanced with exact restraint. Light's late arcade I was tempted to call it, a deferred arrival portended or carried by the cave or cathedral voice it was the accompaniment for\u2014crystalline, echoic, slightly husky at points, rounded by an encounter with collapse.\n\nIt was Milton Nascimento's \"Cais\" come to haunt me, a friendly ghost, the ghost or the trace of what was already a ghost or a trace, the benign guitar lick in league with a benign organ surge. I put it on last night, not having listened to it for what felt like ages, and found that, having listened to it once, I put it on again and, having listened to it twice, put it on again and, having listened to it a third time, put it on again\u2014on and on like that, listening to it over and over, until I'd listened to it I don't know how many times. Something about it got to me, spoke to me all over again as though for the first time, as though when I heard it ages ago I heard it without really hearing it. It did this again and again.\n\nIt wasn't that when I listened to it ages ago I wasn't really listening. It was more a matter of time having been taken out of alignment, a jutting shelf I stood on listening anew, not merely more but entirely such a matter of time staggering or having staggered. Time waits was the last thing I'd have thought I'd ever say but I did. \"Time waits,\" I whispered, all but under my breath. \"Bud was right.\"\n\nOr was it that \"Cais\" itself waited, lay in wait, held back or held some of itself back, only to have at me all the more later, years later that would seem like ages later? Was the shelf or the shift in alignment the song's eponymous pier, nothing if not Milton's invention (\"Invento o cais,\" he sings\u2014\"I invent the pier\"), the pier one would let go and go forth from? Was it, to go maybe a little further, anything but a shelving of itself time, in the song's guise, tabled itself on? \"Cais\" lay in wait or \"Cais\" crept up on me all these years that have come to feel like ages\u2014crept and continues to creep on conga beats, benign conga beats I hear as padded feet. It launches an invented love (\"Invento o amor,\" he sings\u2014\"I invent love\"), an invented sea (\"Invento o mar,\" he sings\u2014\"I invent the sea\"), an invented path (\"Tenho o caminho do que sempre quis,\" he sings\u2014\"I hold to the path I've always wanted\"), an invented boat (\"E um saveiro pronto pra partir,\" he sings\u2014\"And a boat ready to leave\"), all of which, separately and as a whole, I'm tempted to call love's late ark, love's late arcade, love's last arcade perhaps.\n\nCome legless to the sea I'm tempted to say. I'm tempted to say love's last arcade might be its first, come to such extremity one's back at some beginning, again the beginner one is when it comes to love. Such, at least, I'm led to say by the pounding, the piano ostinato that breaks in toward the end of \"Cais\" and on which it fades, Milton singing wordlessly alongside. It takes me back to Djamilaa's beginner's tack on \"Some Sunday\" at the Comeback Inn, back to my very conception of the piece, its mock-awkward loss of time and its folk song-sounding recovery of time, the verge upon a children's song or a child practicing it treads. \"Cais\" goes even further, the piano ostinato recalling \"Chopsticks.\"\n\nWhere that leaves me I'm figuring out. The pounding, I insist, is benign. Is it a prompt to revisit \"Some Sunday\" or the advent of a new composition? Is it perhaps a combination of the two, a sequel to \"Some Sunday\" I might call \"Another Sunday\" or \"Some Other Sunday,\" in the tradition, titular at least, of James Baldwin's _Another Country_ , Gary Bartz's _Another Earth_ , Jimmy Lyons's _Other Afternoons_ , Grachan Moncur III's _Some Other Stuff_ and so on, not to mention Arthur Herzog and Irene Kitchings's \"Some Other Spring\"?\n\nThe \"Chopsticks\"-like pounding driving my headache took me back to another Nascimento piece, \"Pablo,\" whose piano ostinato is even more like \"Chopsticks\" than the one on \"Cais.\" I got out the two versions I have, the Portuguese version on _Milagre dos Peixes_ and the English version on _Journey to Dawn_ , and I've been listening to them, both of them confirming the sense of lost time, lost and recovered time, I took to be at issue in \"Cais.\" \"Pablo\" takes it even further, making a more explicit reference to childhood in both versions: on _Milagre dos Peixes_ , the song is sung by a young boy; on _Journey to Dawn_ , Milton sings it with a boyish falsetto and is joined by a children's chorus halfway thru.\n\nI remember one of my college professors critiquing Dostoevsky's use of children in his work (Polya in _Crime and Punishment_ , Ilyusha in _The Brothers Karamazov_ , Matryosha in _Demons_ , etc.), calling it barefaced, blatant, unabashed. He'd probably say the same about Milton but I find myself wanting to be exactly that, wanting to find a place for a child singer or a children's chorus in \"Another Sunday\" or \"Some Other Sunday\" (whichever it turns out to be called).\n\nSometimes you have to go for the jugular. Sometimes you have to show circumspection the heel of your hand. Sometimes, put upon by dilatory compliance, you have to shove more than suggest. Especially under threat of No-Show Sunday, you have to shout.\n\nAs ever, \nN.\n17.IV.84\n\nDear Angel of Dust,\n\nIt seemed if I could only 1) angle at the exact amount of incline, 2) lard lead-in with absence in the most parsed and plotted manner possible, lace or load it in such fashion as to make tread trepidatious, the ground trepidatious, trepidation the ground itself, 3) titrate touch in such a way as to build while disbursing twinge, verge on twinkle perhaps, 4) coax or connive, eke sound out, so situate twitch or its adumbration as to extenuate love's least integer, so reside within extenuation as to mitigate timbral collapse, 5) wring the notes as much as play them, _wring_ fully in league with an implied play on _toll_ , twist each note as though it were cloth and the drop squeezed out of it both, 6) placate momentum's demand while recruiting an abiding pocket, a cyst or an insistence indigenous to suasion or swell, 7) confess to a certain dismay or admit my impatience, pound against time until the beat wore ragged, 8) ply layers of waywardness, an annunciative ken peppered with and paced by hesitancy throughout, an arrhythmic hitch cognate or conjugal with nothing if not rhythm, 9) be at large in a twilit fallback, relaxed albeit beset by combinatory chagrin, fallen shade's fluency and fount, all would be right with the world.\n\nAll would be right, at the very least, I thought, with the solo I was at the beginning of. By combinatory chagrin I meant a sense I've gotten in dreams, the sense of returning to a place I've been to before, dreamt of before, dreamt I've been to outside of dreams before, as though to dream was not to make up scenery but to traverse and revisit stable terrain, actual ground and what's built on it, this or that house, this or that room inside. These houses give off the feel of a combination of houses, places I've lived or visited given an odd yet familiar aspect, teasingly familiar but not to be precisely placed. Something about the approach to one of these houses might suggest the promontory to a friend's house in Pasadena while, once inside, the stairway to the second floor would recall, ever so faintly, that of the flat I lived in in Oakland and so on. One of these rooms might seem compounded of the living room of our apartment in Miami when I was a child, the library cubby I studied in when I was in college and more. It's as if all the aspects, facets and features of these places were bits of glass in a kaleidoscope, subject to changing arrangement and permutation while maintaining a sense of real premises, real provenance, more than simply concocted, more than merely dreamt-up.\n\nChagrin, though, in that, coming upon or coming into these places, I always feel I've forgotten something I meant to remember. These rooms, halls and houses appear to be part of some mnemonic practice, a memory theater of the sort Frances Yates writes about perhaps. I despair each time that I've lost the key that would unlock the familiarity I sense but can't entirely call forth, the legend that would mete out place and punctuality, dispel the tease or taunt of what appears partly \"on,\" partly \"off.\" In some of these dreams I feel like a ghost in the Winchester House, combinatory largesse only so many stairways and doors that lead nowhere. I feel toyed with, the Bible's \"In my Father's house are many mansions\" brought to mind, a trickster's pitch.\n\nSo it was with the notes and sonic tactics at my disposal at my solo's outset. Even so, I wanted to step onto such oneiric ground and into such oneiric housing, have my solo be the means of doing so or even be such ground and housing, my own such instructed tenancy and tread. I wanted to be like the man spoken of in my antithetical opera, \"both hands tied, trying to build a house with his voice while sitting on a cot in his jail cell.\" I wanted my solo, by the time I was done, to say what Rick Holmes used to say on KBCA, \"We have built!\" I was bent on a masonic outcome for my chagrin.\n\nThis was during a gig at The Studio we finished a few hours ago. We were playing \"Like a Blessed Baby Lamb.\" I was on soprano. We'd recently played it at the Comeback Inn and we go back to it now and then at rehearsals. We've played around with different instrumentations, different ways of voicing it, and Lambert wanted to give one of the new ones a try at the gig\u2014him on tenor, me on soprano, Penguin on alto clarinet, Aunt Nancy on violin, Djamilaa on harmonium and Drennette on tablas. How to open up and open out from the gruff stamp Archie put on the piece and how to work the time in a way that keeps to a certain signature drag (as though tar were stuck to the soles of our shoes) but keeps to it otherwise is what we've been asking. How to get gruff stamp and signature drag to coexist with Eastern sinuosity and cut is what we've been asking.\n\nI was the last to solo. The order was Lambert, Aunt Nancy, Penguin, Djamilaa, then me. The violin and the harmonium did exactly what we had in mind. Aunt Nancy and Djamilaa lent signature drag a vectored swell, a diagonal swell, an upward and onward tending, tumescent lilt. (\"Lilt\" puts it too lightly. It was nothing short of hallowed what they brought to an essentially profane wager, titular lamb notwithstanding. \"Lift\" says it better, \"coronal lift.\") They gave it a keening, devotional air, Drennette's tablas adding duly acute prance, due traction. This they did without speeding up the tempo, turning signature drag into Baul-Bengali saunter.\n\nDjamilaa's solo had drawn us into a sacred cave, drawn us in and drawn us in effigy on its walls. It was a crystal cave, a sphere rayed out in all directions like fireworks exploding, shooting radii the spokes of a ball that would swell and contract, the harmonium's bellows lungs and hallows both. Things had gotten religious, as in fact, Djamilaa implied or insisted, they always are. She had taken the title's wager to heart. When she finished and the applause died down, the ground I found myself on, the cave I found myself in, gave me pause. I stepped into my solo with a phobic, philosophic tread, a duly fearful tread.\n\nI tend toward Pharoah's way of playing soprano. I like a little constriction in my sound, long on shading, not the tabula rasa sound we were taught was the goal. I like a nasal burr or a nasal buzz along the edges, a bit of abrasion. The soprano's ability to glide, the auto-pilot sense it can fall into, needs to be guarded against, as does its ability to soar. Room has to be made for creak and squeal, subdued crackle, a ducklike sotto voce, not without an R&B twinge. Pharoah tends to glide and soar more than I felt was called for, so it was Wayne's ictic, foraging way on \"Dindi,\" which, as you know, I've never gotten over and will never get over, that was more the tack I took. It was a more grounded sound I sought or at least a sound that sought to be grounded, a sound that felt its way, even groped its way, seeking ground.\n\nDjamilaa's harmonium had subsided to a carpetlike lowing, ecumenical seep and support. Aunt Nancy's violin was a holding action, airborne glimmer if not watery glare atop distant asphalt on a summer day. Drennette's tablas partly kept time, partly bought it, marking it no matter which, a pinged, ringing press or appeal that tolled an announcement of dues accrued. I stepped cautiously into this coven or cave as though barefoot on a bed of hot coals, tread nothing if not trepidation and vice versa, hesitant from heel to toe, tentative, testing. I temporized for a few bars before what I've come to call the Nine Golden Precepts, the desiderata I listed above, came to me in a flash. I repeat them here for emphasis:\n\n_THE NINE GOLDEN PRECEPTS_\n\n_1. Angle at the exact amount o_ _f_ _incline._\n\n_2. Lard lead-in with absence in the most parsed and plotted manner possible, lace or load it in such fashion as to make tread trepidatious, the ground trepidatious, trepidation the ground itself._\n\n_3. Titrate touch in such a way as to build while disbursing twinge, verge on twinkle perhaps._\n\n_4. Coax or connive, eke sound out, so situate twitch or its adumbration as to extenuate love's least integer, so reside within extenuation as to mitigate timbral collapse._\n\n_5. Wring the notes as much as play them, wring fully in league with an implied play on toll, twist each note as though it were cloth and the drop squeezed out o_ _f_ _it both._\n\n_6. Placate momentum's demand while recruiting an abiding pocket, a cyst or an insistence indigenous to suasion or swell._\n\n_7. Confess to a certain dismay or admit my impatience, pound against time until the beat wears ragged._\n\n_8. Ply layers o_ _f_ _waywardness, an annunciative ken peppered with and paced by hesitancy throughout, an arrhythmic hitch cognate or conjugal with nothing i_ _f_ _not rhythm._\n\n_9. Be at large in a twilit fallback, relaxed albeit beset by combinatory chagrin, fallen shade's fluency and fount._\n\nAfter temporizing for those few bars, I went on, I can say without bragging, to make good on all nine.\n\nI'm not saying this was the best or the most dazzling solo I've ever taken. There's something about the Precepts coming to me the way they did, incumbent upon me all of a sudden as if I took dictation, a suddenly scribal providence or at least provision on the tips of my fingers, on my lips, teeth and tongue, on my diaphragm and in my lungs, that made it get to me and stay with me, still stay with me, to such an extent I haven't been able to get to sleep. Was it the suddenly scribal providence or provision or was it Djamilaa sitting on the floor crosslegged and lotuslike before the harmonium, dress modestly pulled over her knees, covering her open thighs, that did and does it? Was it the unquenchable glimpse I closed my eyes and imagined I got of what lay under her dress, the bulge of hair beneath cotton or silk, such fit I felt exhorted by, rich beard and lift and betweenness, that did and does it? Was it that the harmonium seemed as much incense holder as axe, the ecumenical seep and support it disbursed as much musk as music, the very floataway musk Djamilaa's nightie dilated Dredj's nostrils with? Was it that I could've sworn I sniffed it wafting from under her dress, a newly mixed Vedic neroli, an infusive attar, an infinitely penetrant perfume? Was it this that did and does it?\n\nIt was all these things. Djamilaa is my muse and will always be, the someone I need and will need on my bond, as the old song says. She led and leads me thru love's long-tenured bazaar, love's late arcade. Whatever probity, whatever duly theophobic tread, theophanic tread, I acquitted myself with (and my solo did, I know, do nothing if not that), I owe to her inspiration. The Nine Golden Precepts themselves, I'm sure, were the work of her inspiration. Even now, going on five in the morning, I feel I can't but be longer with it.\n\nThe Golden Precepts readied my way. Such bearings as they gave me gotten, I left off temporizing with an annunciative, almost airless flutter, a fledgling, asthmatic burst whose asthmaticity rhetoricially asked how to speak of things of which one does not speak. Aunt Nancy, Drennette and Djamilaa knew this to be rhetorical, understood it as a preamble to doing exactly that. We would indeed speak the unspeakable Drennette affirmed with a run of karate chops to the tablas, shunting my almost airless flutter along. Aunt Nancy and Djamilaa were likewise all horizontality, Aunt Nancy with a series of tonic-tending bowswipes, Djamilaa with a sirening ride of the harmonium's high end.\n\nThat played or that said, I told myself, \"Take your time.\" I let my embouchure go loose as I played the first seven notes of the head, cutting it off as if interrupted by a better option than mere completion, had at or put upon by some lateral enchantment. Aunt Nancy's bow was that enchantment, as commanding as Cupid's arrow, picking up and repeating the first five of those notes, identification, if not identity, up to more than identification. Djamilaa meanwhile settled into a low-lying, mist-on-the-moors creep, a droning amble ever close to the floor, the stage floor it made feel earthen, rolling earth. Drennette had increasing recourse to the heels of her hands on the tablas, coaxing a fat sound out of them, all reach and rotundity, itself a rolling aspect as well, fat wheels we rode.\n\nMy loose embouchure caught air and the vibrating reed was a drill or a jackhammer against my teeth, bodily abidance's dues, I meant to insist or insinuate, nothing more. Djamilaa, who knew my mouth as no one knew my mouth and whose recondite musk had my nose open, at once caught my insinuation. She answered with a skein of sound, a ribbon of sound, still close to the earthen floor, bodily abidance's reap or condolence. She pulled it from the harmonium's bass register, a grumbling, organlike run Alice Coltrane would've been proud to call her own.\n\nThe Nine Precepts ushered me along, Djamilaa's undulance under cloth an abiding bond and trust, rolling bulge, rolling fit, rolling traipse I felt furthered by, a whiff-quickened wraith of myself chasing myself. Robert Johnson's hellhounds were a walk in the park up against the chase I gave myself, a counterintuitive, slow-tempo chase I now tightened my embouchure to ante up on\u2014eked-out advance, eked-out inveterate lag, eked-out inconsequence.\n\nI took my time. My sound opened up, unpinched, not the zero degree at which the horn extends the esophagus without seam or serration, the sound Oliver Nelson, for example, gets on soprano, but less given to the pulverous fray around its edges I started with. Dust off a moth's wing was there to be heard even so, but less of it, my sound as open-throated as it gets. It was cool, collected, not entirely without strain but backing away from it, pointedly announcing a parting of ways with it. I thought of when I was a kid and of my mother's friend Mary who'd always say, when things were getting to her, \"I can't be strainin'-up here,\" which was always exactly what she was doing. Everyone called her Strainin'-up Mary. Strainin'-up soprano was the horn I blew.\n\nThings were getting to me. The coven or the cave I'd been inducted into or stepped into played briar patch to my Brer Rabbit, no place I more wanted to be. Announcedly not strainin'-up, I remained calm and collected, my backing away from strain belied by moth-wing dust though it was. Even as things got to me in what was at bottom a good way, my response above bottom was nothing if not mixed. Cool and collected as I was, I played scared, wanted to be scared and grew scared of the very place I wanted to be, feet shod, so to speak, in theophobic, theogonic tread. Djamilaa, Drennette and Aunt Nancy, my three witches, were divinatory and divine in laying down, ladies though they were, the brer patch it was now incumbent on me to traverse.\n\nI couldn't be strainin'-up but I was ever so detectably strainin'-up, moth-wing dust my boon and my betrayal. Strainin'-up Mary was to me as Trane's Cousin Mary had been to him or as Horace Tapscott's Drunken Mary had been to him, a makeshift Madonna or a makeshift Magdalene or a third, entirely makeshift muse for the occasion. Cauldron Mary I wanted to rename her, a fourth, faraway witch in league with the three with whom I played, but Drennette, sensing this it seemed, gave one of the tablas, which might as well have been my head, a resounding slap. I stood by tradition and stayed with \"Strainin'-up.\"\n\nHorace's Mary was more than a passing thought. Strainin'-up Mary was known to have a drink or two or three throughout the day. \"Drunken Mary's\" head seemed exactly the groove to \"Like a Blessed Baby Lamb's\" tongue, so I paired it now with the full first ten notes of the latter's head, a joint or a joining I parsed out using Horace's tipsy waltz time approach. This gave it as much jaunt as our slow tempo could accommodate. We did so without at all speeding up.\n\nI bleated lamblike, reminiscent of Wayne's \"Dindi,\" a connect-the-dots tack with which I stated the two heads, conjugated the two heads, all the while observing the Nine Precepts to the letter. Djamilaa's bellowing hallows put me in churchical stead, though Aunt Nancy's wicked bowswipes and bowsweeps were yet another matter, as were Drennette's crescendoing tabla slaps, not to mention a certain way in which I scared myself. My tipsy traverse of the brer patch was, by turns and at times concurrently, god-fearing, goddess-fearing, witch-fearing, propriophobic, whichever as the case might be.\n\nStrainin'-up Mary showed me the way. She magnified and illumined the way the Nine Precepts had made ready. I staggered, bounding laterally and at times diagonally between lamblike bleat and capric slur, Djamilaa's goatlike beauty a heady brew aligned with Strainin'-up's unsecured walk. I stole a peek at her seated at the harmonium. She shot me a grin. Undulance under cloth, I couldn't help noticing, had nowhere near subsided. \"Waft be thy name,\" I hummed into the horn, a recourse to heteroglossic traipse Djamilaa met with harmolodic tryst, sounding organlike again, Larry Young meets Ornette.\n\nDrennette was all fingertips now, digital dispatch and acrobatic display, a boon to my every capric slur. I walked sonically cool and collected even so, incongruous capric aplomb. Had I been walking nonsonically I'd have turned sideways and dragged a leg, harked back to a dance we did when I was a kid called The Stroll, a dance that danced us as much as we danced it, a dance I've never been able to shake. Thus the slur, the slide away from collectedness, its merger with incongruous aplomb.\n\nAunt Nancy picked up on Drennette's fingertip attack and went from arco to pizzicato, from swipe and sweep to pinch and pluck. Djamilaa picked up as well, now dispensing staccato runs as if at the wheel of a car, pumping the brakes. The ground we crossed was all the more a brer patch now, bristling with divinatory aspect and pop, divine, prestidigitator snap.\n\nBrer patch was hopping ground, a dense arena rocked by ricochet, detonation, ignition. Vex and revisitation ran side to side, to and fro. I lowered the horn and pointed its bell at the floor, bent over the way I've seen Miles bend over, listening for a certain sound. I was still all lamblike bleat and capric slur, at the brer patch's mercy it seemed I was told later, coaxed, baited and beset by prestidigitator bristle, pinch and pop. I wanted a hollowed-out sound if not a hallowed or haloed sound, moth-wing dust mixed and congealed with ambient humidity, for all its airborne humors a conical or cylindrical wrap of paste.\n\nA conical or cylindrical compress applied to the open wound the air itself now was, the sound I wanted was buoyed by Aunt Nancy, Djamilaa and Drennette's brer patch rotunda, churchical girth I tried in vain, straining, to get my arms around. Churchical girth would not be gotten around, not be embraced but at a distance, an ever so discreet hydraulics of approach it demanded, mandated. The sound I wanted was the sound I went down and got, bent over, horn pointed at the floor, an expectorant howl, no longer cool, collected, an expectorant croon that brought up a shake-the-rafters descent into the horn's low register, a rafters-rattling landing on the horn's lowest note.\n\nThe sound I wanted, not quite knowing I wanted it, was the sound of the shaken rafters, the rafters rattling. I now saw what I wanted, that this was the sound I wanted, the highest rafters of a wooden palace rattled by the note I hit and held, wood rubbed to a sheen by oneiric return and revisitation, another strangely familiar house I dreamt I was in. I didn't open my eyes and I didn't need to. I knew we were in that house, that palace. I kept holding the note (holding on, as Bobby Womack would say), doing so with circular breathing. Aunt Nancy, Djamilaa and Drennette kept their plucked and popping rotunda alive and played louder now. I knew we were in that house, that place, that palace.\n\nThe audience had begun loudly applauding as I held the note and the rotunda popped and bristled, Pharoah's \"Let Us Go into the House of the Lord\" having nothing on our stringent, less unctuous approach. I didn't open my eyes and I didn't let go of the note as Lambert and Penguin came back in, restating the head over my sustained note and the brer patch rotunda, only for us all to stop on a dime at head's end. We had built.\n\nAs ever, \nN.\n3.V.84\n\nDear Angel of Dust,\n\nDrennette called Penguin on the phone last night about an hour after rehearsal. Balloons had followed her home again, she told him, just like back in November, stowed away in her drumset. After getting home she went to unpack and set up the drumset to practice some more, she said, and, just like before, balloons emerged when she lifted the lid to the parade snare's container. They floated out of the container before she could reach in to take the drum out, rising up from under the lifted lid just like before, as if out of the container's mouth. She sounded upset, Penguin said, telling Lambert and me the story this afternoon.\n\nDrennette had called Aunt Nancy and then Djamilaa but neither answered. She then called Penguin, she explained, shaken by the balloons having shown up again and needing to talk with someone. What made their appearance this time especially creepy, she went on, was that they didn't disappear into the air after a while the way the balloons usually do but hung there, above the parade snare's container, instead. They had emerged one by one, the first bearing these words: _I tread lightly, ever so lightly, in my approach, feet an awkwardness I'd be done with i_ _f_ _I were able, so badly I want mysel_ _f_ _unsoiled and off the ground, free o_ _f_ _the ground and o_ _f_ _contact with the ground. All for you, I'd be entirely o_ _f_ _the air, all for you, treading lightly, light itself. Footless were it mine to decide, I come to your window, a ripple in the breeze, tread o_ _f_ _wind at your balcony, you my belov\u00e9d._\n\nThe first balloon hung there, Drennette told Penguin, moving to the side to make room for the second when it floated up but still not going away. The second bore these words: _Not to mention heat. Doesn't it go without saying that heat brings me and I bring it, light not lacking heat and heat not lacking light, a harmattan rippling the entirety o_ _f_ _air I'd aptly be? I come to your balcony bearing heat, a nuzzling breeze at your neck. I carry your perfume into the surrounding air, belov\u00e9d broadcast, happy to have in the least lifted it, the subtlest waft I'd be._ The second balloon took its place next to the first, hanging there above the parade snare's container, hanging there still, Drennette explained to Penguin, even as she spoke with him on the phone, as did the third.\n\nThe second balloon had moved over to make room for the third when it floated up out of the container. The third bore these words: _All aspect and approach I'd be, beauteous tread not quite arriving. An awayness infinitesimal but palpably felt I'd be, could airy entirety be said to know touch. So it is I come to speak o_ _f_ _touch, prime among the unmentionables, gone without saying or scared away by saying, so it is I come not to speak o_ _f_ _touch. I pledge fealty to that which remains unshown or, shown, unspoken-of, unmentionability's own, liege and lief. No matter what I mention, more remains unmentioned._ It took its place and hung there, Drennette told Penguin, the last to emerge she concluded after waiting a while and seeing no fourth balloon float up.\n\nPenguin had a kind of laid-back ease and assurance that's not quite like him as he spoke to me and Lambert. \"I could tell from her voice she was upset,\" he said. \"She asked, 'Don't you think that's weird?' to which I replied, 'Yes, very weird.' Saying yes appeared to bond us in some way, as though I'd uttered a secret password for admission to a guild or a lodge. She spoke more softly now, almost secretively, her voice a little lower and a little huskier than usual, her mouth closer to the receiver's mouthpiece it seemed. 'No telling what could happen,' she said, almost whispering.' I answered, 'Yes, no telling what could happen.'\"\n\nDrennette again made the point, Penguin said, that none of the balloons had gone away, that the three still hung in the air above the parade snare's container, hung there as though staring at her she went so far as to say. \"'It's eerie,' she said,\" he said. \"'I've tried closing my eyes and opening them again, thinking maybe they'd be gone when I opened them, hoping they'd be gone when I opened them, but they were still there. I've tried leaving the room, going to another room for a while and then coming back, hoping they'd be gone when I came back, but they were still there when I came back.'\"\n\nPenguin went from laid-back to bursting when he got to this point, bursting to tell us what she said next and what happened, much more his uncontainable self. Her voice was still low and intimate, he said, he and she still members of whatever guild or lodge or secret society he'd been admitted into. We were at Lambert's place, drinking beer. Lambert interrupted to ask if Penguin and I would like another, to which we both said yes, and when he came back from the kitchen with three fresh beers Penguin continued.\n\n\"'They stare at me like stalkers, these three,' she whispered into the phone, her voice husky but vulnerable too,\" Penguin told us. \"Like I said before, I could tell she was upset, though it's not like her to show that kind of thing and she tried to make herself sound nonplussed and merely observational even when saying things like 'No telling what could happen' and 'It's eerie.'\" He fell silent, took a sip of his beer and gazed out Lambert's living room window, taking in the scene outside, the tops of palm trees and the sky mainly, as though the key to what happened next lay somewhere in the clouds. Lambert and I held our tongues.\n\n\"Then suddenly, after she said that, the thing about the balloons looking at her like stalkers, she paused a moment before saying, in a tone and with an inflection I've never heard her use before, her mouth even closer to the phone's mouthpiece it seemed, 'That's why I called you.' After saying that, she paused again, ever so slightly, then asked, her voice not as low now, girlish, 'Can you come over?'\"\n\nPenguin fell silent again and gazed out the living room window again, again as though looking for an answer in the clouds, taking one sip from his beer and then another and then another. Lambert and I held our tongues again but Penguin's silence lasted longer this time. Finally, when it looked like he'd never speak again, I asked, \"Then what happened?\"\n\n\"I went over, of course,\" Penguin answered, immediately falling silent again.\n\nThe silence hung there for a while and then Lambert asked, \"And then what happened?\"\n\n\"I'm not the kiss-and-tell type,\" was all Penguin would say, gazing out the living room window at the tops of palm trees and the sky.\n\nWe drank more beer as the afternoon wore on, a lot more beer, and all three of us got pretty loose. No matter how loose he got and no matter how much Lambert and I pressed him, Penguin would only say about what went on after he went over to Drennette's, \"I'm not the kiss-and-tell type.\"\n\nYours, \nN.\n6.V.84\n\nDear Angel of Dust,\n\nPenguin and Drennette haven't shown any sign that anything happened. Since him telling me and Lambert about her calling him up and asking him over we've been looking to see if there's anything new in their way with each other. I can't say that anything has changed. They still go about their business as before. Last night at rehearsal Lambert even called up \"Drennethology,\" thinking maybe there'd be some blush or some other such telling sign or perhaps a more passionate approach to the piece by him or by her or by both, a new emotion brought to it. No such difference. They were nothing if not businesslike, cool technicians to the point I thought their coolness might be a sign that something had happened. \"Maybe what happened is that nothing happened,\" Lambert said later as he and I talked after rehearsal. \"Or maybe they're trying to hide the fact that something did,\" I said right away.\n\nTime will tell. In the meantime, I'm still wondering how to make good on Dredj's \"Copacetic Syncope,\" struggling with how to make good on it. The squint I was beset by during a cowrie shell attack way back comes back of late, conducing to a Rasta koan or equation, faraway French horn filiating Far-Eye trombone. Processionality's call summons a fetch and a furthering, a fromness (Rico, _Man from Wareika_ ) and a forwarding (Rico, _That Man Is Forward_ ) so-near-so-far reticence gets or doesn't get but won't gainsay, all the sway of gathered cloth folding it in. I know what Dredj means by so-near-so-far, which leaves all the more to be said for so-far-so-far. Squint wants to sing something we see best at a distance. I squint and I can barely see, blown particulates' blind beneficiary, _musk_ 's near rhyme with _dust_ the refrain I'd ply, caroling dark but chorusing light.\n\nIt's not that I've decided to add a trombone, much less that I've decided on reggae telemetrics, much less the hurry-up sound of ska. I'd like that sense of going somewhere but I'm not sure I trust it. I like the diffuse, frustrated reflectivity brass imposes on Far-Eye reach, more audible in the strainin'-up sound of French horn than on trombone but a shared come-so-far-to-say-it sonic inheritance nonetheless. Brass familiarity, brass familiality, is maybe all I'm getting at, a strained familiarity or a strained familiality announcing exodus or exile in the case of either horn. It was, after all, \"I can't be strainin'-up _here_ \" Strainin'-up Mary used to say.\n\nAs ever, \nN.\n11.V.84\n\nDear Angel of Dust,\n\n\"It's not,\" Penguin was saying, \"that I don't like a woman whose eyes take you in and take you deep, so deep you think you'll drown, you'll never get out. I'm not saying sparkle that far down in her eyes doesn't dazzle, dark though the mascara might make it, a highlight heteronymically come to the fore.\" The three of us\u2014him, Lambert and I\u2014were in Lambert's car, heading to Dem Bones, a barbecue place in Westwood we like. Lambert and I were in front. Penguin sat in the back seat. We'd been going along quietly when out of the blue he began talking. Lambert kept his eyes on the road and I kept looking straight ahead as well. \"It's not,\" Penguin continued, \"that I don't like a woman the shape of whose nose is nothing if not divinatory signage, the harbinger of heavenly form, that I don't like a woman whose lips are full and whose mouth pouty, that I don't like her mouth brimming with teeth and gums, protruding toward a kiss it forever invites or anticipates.\"\n\n\"Who said it was?\" was on the tip of my tongue but I let it stay there, sensing Penguin was in a certain space we shouldn't intrude on. Lambert appeared to think likewise. We both kept quiet and kept our eyes on the road.\n\n\"I'm not saying there were no balloons there,\" he continued, \"that she lured me there under false pretenses. It's not that it wasn't exactly the way she said on the phone, not that the three balloons weren't still there, hovering above the parade snare's container, inscribed with exactly the words she had told me, read to me, over the phone. I'm not saying I didn't blink my eyes and then close my eyes for a while, as she had, to see if they'd go away, not saying they went away and were not still there when I opened my eyes again, just the way she had said it had been with her. No, I'm not saying that. That's not what I'm saying. No way was it that the wine she offered wasn't good, great in fact, exactly my favorite white, sauvignon blanc, chilled just right to go with the oysters on the half shell she also offered.\" He paused, savoring the memory of the oysters and wine it seemed to me. Lambert and I remained silent. I looked out the window at a particularly nice row of palm trees, lost in that somewhat until noticing Penguin was speaking again.\n\n\"What I'm saying isn't that I don't like the kind of incense she likes,\" he was saying, \"those green neroli sticks the Vedanta Society sells, the ones that have a kind of funkiness to them, a kind of bootiliness or bootiness to them. I don't mean that the smell of that smoke, mixed with that of the scented candles she had burning, the smell of perfume on her neck and a very slight waft of sweat, didn't almost take me out. No, I'm not saying that.\" He paused before continuing, \"It's not that I don't like standing pelvis to pelvis with arms around each other, that thrusting and grinding pelvis to pelvis isn't for me. I don't mean to say I don't like the feel and taste of her tongue, her tongue feeling and tasting my tongue. No, I'm not saying there was anything not to like about her tongue groping and my tongue groping back, anything wrong with the kiss getting deep and slow and a little bit sloppy. I'm not saying that.\" He paused again, caught up in his own thoughts it felt like, gazing blankly out the window I would've sworn. Lambert and I continued to hold our tongues, continued to keep our eyes straight ahead.\n\n\"I'm not saying,\" Penguin said when he resumed speaking, \"that I don't welcome the rotundity of pendant hips in the palms of my hands, that I'm averse to holding her with one of my legs between hers and one of hers between mine. It's not that a pinched waist and a generous, low-hanging ass don't speak to me. No, that's not what I'm saying. No, I'm not saying that. It's not that I'm immune to her nipples hardening against my chest, that her nipple pressed hard against my tongue, stiff between my teeth and lips, doesn't get to me. That I don't like her teeth and tongue on my earlobe and her low, husky voice issuing coarse demands and crude encouragement, whispering sweet endearments as well, is most definitely not what I'm saying. I'm also not saying I don't like the thick hair between her legs or the feel of it against my thigh, that I don't like the wetness of what's underneath it wetting my thigh.\" He paused.\n\nLambert and I continued to think it was best not to speak or to turn our heads and look at him. Lambert kept his eyes on the road and I mostly did so too, though I did turn my head and look out the window from time to time. We were coming upon a Carpeteria store on our right as Penguin left off speaking, the company's trademark Aladdin's lamp\u2013style genie looming twenty feet tall atop the store. Grinning, turbanned, holding a large roll of carpet above its head, it never fails to catch my eye and it did so again this time. I turned my head and stared up at it as we passed.\n\nIt felt like Penguin was gathering his thoughts, deeper in thought. When he resumed speaking he began by saying, \"It's not that I don't like a woman who likes to be gone down on.\" When Lambert and I heard this we both had the same thought. Lambert kept his eyes on the road but I turned my head to look at Penguin as the two of us said at the same time, \"Careful, man. You're telling us way more than we need to know.\" I left it at that but Lambert went on, \"Don't tell us something you're gonna regret telling us.\"\n\nPenguin's eyes were on the road ahead and did not meet mine. As far as I could tell, he hadn't so much as given the genie a glance. He had an intent look on his face, as though he spoke not on a need-to-know but a need-to-tell basis. \"It's not,\" he went back to what he'd been saying before we broke in, \"that I don't like a woman who likes to be gone down on from behind, her ass cleft recruiting one's nose as one's tongue slips between the lips between her legs. I'm not saying I mind her turning over after a while and lying on her back, pulling me up between her legs and on top of her, reaching down and sliding me in. No, I'm not saying that.\" This was a far cry from \"I'm not the kiss-and-tell type,\" so far from it he might as well have been blowing a horn, blowing the oboe, the high boy, the high would, piping for all heaven, earth and hell to hear, no matter he spoke softly, calmly, self-possessed, giving an all too graphic account of what had gone on between him and Drennette. Had balloons begun to emerge from his mouth I wouldn't have been surprised.\n\nI turned my head and looked forward again, went back to looking straight ahead. There was no stopping him I could see. I looked out the window. We were on Santa Monica now, the street Dem Bones is on. \"It's not that I mind being told it feels good and to keep doing it,\" he continued, \"that I've got a big one, a really hard one, a really stiff one and I know how to use it, that she likes the way it fills her, that between her legs is where I belong. No, it's not that. I'm not denying the word 'big,' the word 'hard' and the word 'stiff' never sounded so good, that they never wielded more magic.\" No, there was no stopping him. Words, it was clear, were his high horn, theirs the horn's piercing, penetrant cry. \"It's not that I don't care for her gripping my hips while I'm between her legs,\" he was now saying, \"spreading my cheeks to finger my ass before bringing her finger up to my nose for me to sniff. No, it's absolutely not that. I'm not saying I've got anything against her asking, while doing that, 'Why are we so smelly?' in her you've-been-a-bad-boy voice. I'm not saying that at all.\"\n\nLet me be clear that there was nothing the least bit lascivious or salacious about the way Penguin spoke. He spoke with absolute sobriety and equanimity, not exactly dispassionately but collectedly, even as the events of which he spoke built, crescendoed and peaked. \"It's not,\" he said, \"that I don't like it when her body tightens and it all begins to build to the release we've been moving toward, that I don't like the way her body spasms, bucks and quakes while she tightens her embrace of me and I tighten mine of her, that I've got anything against the feeling of something from deep down and inside being drawn out of me, some inmost extenuation, my very self maybe, not that I'd rather she not moan and, shortening my name to 'Pen,' quietly call it while this goes on.\"\n\nPenguin didn't stop there. He paused but he didn't stop. He became all the more sober, somber even, certainly serious, meditative, solemn I could feel. I took my eyes from the road and turned and looked at him there in the back seat. As he began to speak again he tilted his head like a bird, looking askance at some new conundrum it seemed, aggrieved and quizzical at the world's illogic. \"What it is,\" he said, \"is that the Drennette all this happened with wasn't Drennette, that it happening, necessary no doubt, was insufficient. The Drennette I did all this with and who did all this with me wasn't her. The kissing and the caressing, the whispers and the getting wet, the wafting and the thrusting and the squeezing, the muscle contractions and the getting wetter yet were not the utmost her I wanted, the utmost her I still want, the inmost her it perhaps is I long for and that I still long for.\"\n\nHe fell silent. His eyes hadn't met mine when I turned to look at him and they still didn't meet mine. Had he been talking to us or to himself I wondered and so said nothing. Lambert, however, eyes ahead and on the road still, cleared his throat and spoke up, speaking from hard experience it appeared, delivering a hard-won truth. \"Beauty does that,\" he said, \"especially outer and inner beauty combined, exactly the sort it is Drennette has. It makes us see things. It makes us see what can't be touched. It hawks the intangible. No matter how material, no matter how palpable it seems, no matter the low-buttocked angel a rung or two above us leading the way it appears to be, it can't be touched. Tread lightly. Don't go thinking you can grab it, have it, hold it. You can look but ultimately you can't touch.\" It was a sobering thought.\n\nPenguin, less rather than more sober on the heels of Lambert's remarks, spoke with barely damped passion. \"But she was right there,\" he said in a sotto voce cry, \"me pressed up against her, her pressed up against me, there but not there, me in her arms and she in mine but not there, not the\"\u2014he paused, chasing a thought, reaching for a word\u2014\"Drennethological Drennette I so wanted and still want. I was surrounded by water but thirsty, thirsty in the middle of the sea. Beauty was indeed water spiked with salt, water I could look at, not drink. Proximity, tangibility, was the bait on beauty's hook.\"\n\nPenguin fell silent again, lost in thought it seemed, at a loss as to where what he'd said left him. He came out of it quickly and at last his eyes met mine. He turned his head and looked toward Lambert, whose attention was on pulling into an empty parking space that, luckily, was almost directly in front of Dem Bones, just a few spaces farther up from it. It was clear to me that, no matter whether Penguin had been talking to himself or to us earlier, it was to us he'd been talking this last little while and that from us he wanted a response. Having looked toward Lambert, he looked back at me, but I myself was at a loss, unsure how to take up with what I was still afraid he'd later regret having told us.\n\nMet by my silence, Penguin looked back toward Lambert, who by this time had pulled into the parking space, backed up a little, gone forward again straightening out the car, backed up again a bit, turned off the engine and begun to open his door. He looked back over his shoulder at both of us and said, \"We're here. I'm hungry. Let's go eat.\"\n\nYours, \nN.\n15.V.84\n\nDear Angel of Dust,\n\nI don't doubt that what Penguin intimated happened in fact happened. It's not that he made it with an imaginary Drennette, as you say, but exactly the opposite. Wasn't that his complaint, that the Drennette of his dreams, his \"Drennethological Drennette,\" remained unavailable, not to be known corporeally, impervious to bodily embrace? Wasn't his complaint that he didn't\u2014couldn't\u2014make it with the utmost or the inmost her, the very her of her, the her that, ostensible contact notwithstanding, could only be conceptual, only apprehended by the mind or the imagination? Wasn't his complaint that the gulf between carnal capture and conceptual embrace persisted, unbridgeable, driving a thirst that would not and could not be quenched? Didn't he say he's beset by an ethereal buzz or an immaterial vibe with only bodily address to try reaching it with, an address not only necessary but compelled, yet insufficient?\n\nAnyway, to answer your question, no, the conversation didn't go much further in that vein after we got out of the car at Dem Bones. Penguin tried to pursue it but Lambert and I discouraged that by moving on to other things. \"You'll work it out,\" I told him, which was the last we said of it. Penguin, I'm sure, knew to begin with it wasn't something we could help him solve. He was just getting it out, letting it out. He didn't bring it up again.\n\nThe other shoe sort of dropped at rehearsal earlier tonight. Drennette, who doesn't often compose, brought in a piece called \"Lapsarian Surfeit,\" a piece she'd written, she told us, just in the last few days. Lambert and I looked at each other, wondering was the title, \"fallen excess\" put otherwise, a reference to what Penguin told us had gone on. Drennette, to a certain reading at least, was backing away from what had happened, parallel to but different from Penguin backing away, if that's what it was. I wasn't sure, however, that's what it was, in either case. I wasn't sure falling short of a metaphysical wish is a backing away, that a built-in default can be called backing away. The case with Drennette, I thought at first, seems more a matter of moralistic recoil but it soon occurred to me that \"lapsarian\" might refer to such a falling short, not necessarily to a fall or to the Fall. Where that left matters I wasn't sure except to say that the title was anything but self-evident and that even \"surfeit\" might be defying its face value to say something less about excess per se than about incongruity or incommensurability, a lack of adequation or a lack of congruency that is, to put it colloquially, \"too much.\"\n\nSo I say sort of dropped as I might also say sort of another shoe. It wasn't clear what to make of the title, jump to an easy conclusion though Lambert and I were guilty of doing. Neither coming in with a composition nor the title of the composition seemed particularly loaded for Drennette. She was her usual self, as was Penguin. Only when she told us the instrumentation did anything happen that might've had implications. This was that when she said the piece called for Penguin to play baritone Penguin thought a while and then asked could he play oboe instead. Lambert and I looked at each other again, thinking the same thought I'm sure. Were we reading too much into it to wonder whether Penguin felt a judgment implied by his assignment to the low-pitched horn, that he too felt the piece might have to do with what had lately transpired between them, that he sought to reverse that judgment as well as reverse the fall or the falling short they'd undergone by way of recourse to the higher-pitched horn? Perhaps so, but when Drennette stood firm and reiterated that the piece called for him to play bari he put up no further resistance. He let the matter drop and said okay, he'd play bari.\n\nThings went uneventfully otherwise. We got the hang of \"Lapsarian Surfeit\" pretty quickly and we ran thru it several times. Penguin delivered a full-throated sound that betrayed not the slightest hint of reticence or misgiving. He brought Charles Davis's playing on \"Half and Half \" on Elvin Jones and Jimmy Garrison's album _Illumination_ to mind, both titles possibly relevant and obliquely allusive to his and Drennette's recent tryst I couldn't help thinking, not to mention the circular, running-in-place, treadmill motif \"Lapsarian Surfeit\" shares with \"Half and Half.\" I may have been reading too much into this I'll admit, but you can see, I'm sure, why Lambert and I wondered might more be going on than met the eye.\n\n\"Uneventfully\" overstates it perhaps. There were moments during Penguin's solos when he dug into that deep, guttural, expectorant sound Fred Jackson gets on Big John Patton's \"The Way I Feel.\" He thrashed and cursed and spat, a study in frustration, a beast caught in a tarpit, a Sisyphean or Tantalean ordeal one couldn't help feeling had implications beyond the business at hand. That Drennette, during these moments, upped the ante, veritably bashing and more loudly attacking the drums and the cymbals, driving, goading, testing and taunting Penguin, did nothing to negate that feeling. They were moments worthy of Elvin and Trane.\n\nWhatever the source or the array of sources, \"Lapsarian Surfeit\" adds a gruff, gravelly page to our book.\n\nAs ever, \nN.\n18.V.84\n\nDear Angel of Dust,\n\nI saw what seemed an immense crystal encasing the extent of the known world. \"See how far it stretches,\" a demure voice in back of me advised. \"See how much there is of it, the it you'll have traversed always.\" I wondered why \"always\" and how that would work and was it true, wondered had \"Some Other Sunday\" found me, wondered was I its muse or it mine. I wondered about the sound of the future perfect. It seemed it offered a child's-eye view of it all, magisterial in the sweep and the eventuality it afforded, the world it made one feel one could afford. \"Some Other Sunday's\" day had come at long last, the song's day and the song's awaited day at last begun. \"Some Other Sunday\" I knew the title would be, \"Another Sunday\" not even close.\n\n_Prospect_ and _promontory_ were two words that crowded my thoughts, an alliterative consort I heard caroling long and wide. What was it that issued from the ground, I wondered and wished, whatever its contour, what if not a chorusing reward all hope abounded with, hope though it might be, all the sayers concurred, against itself? I was no sayer or I sought not to be at least, say given to what \"Some Other Sunday\" held in abeyance, on its way toward me if not yet there. A tree trunk's uplift embroiled us I saw. Sound's reconnoiter was what faces were front for.\n\nAll sense of limit fell away as the initial notes came in. A children's chorus's trill was what vertebrae were, a twinge whose gamut strung light across the tree's timbral recess, tweak attendant on tweak attendant on tweak attendant on tweak, all done automatically, all within skeletal reach.\n\nMy back loosed its bone and it sang, a quiver notes were tipped in, of but athwart the tone world I translated, \"Some Other Sunday's\" ruse its reason, tunefulness's rise and regret.\n\nI sat up straight as my back burned and smoke lay at the top of my neck. This is why we do this I thought, my last thought before \"Some Other Sunday\" was finally there.\n\nAs ever, \nN.\n20.V.84\n\nDear Angel of Dust,\n\nDjamilaa told me Drennette told her and Aunt Nancy all about it. This was after Drennette, who's not one to write much, showed up last night for the second rehearsal in a row with a new piece she'd written. The title, \"Rick's Retreat,\" raised Lambert's and my eyebrows, albeit Penguin, when she announced it, remained neutral, nonplussed, allowing not the slightest facial expression or any change in body language. Lambert and I couldn't help wondering was this finally the other shoe, truly the shoe \"Lapsarian Surfeit\" only sort of was. Djamilaa and Aunt Nancy weren't struck so much by the title, knowing nothing at that point of Penguin and Drennette's get-together. They took note, Djamilaa says, of the fact that Drennette had brought in a second new composition so close on the heels of the first. Something had to be up, she says, and they wondered what. It was to find out that they suggested the three of them go for a drink after rehearsal, a drink and a little \"girl talk.\"\n\nThey took note as well, no doubt, of the tenor and tone of the piece. Lambert and I certainly did. Title notwithstanding (or, more precisely, title the flipside of what it announces, title inverted, title reversed), it brims with advance. Moreover, it brims with a distinctly military advance, march meter, a decidedly martial thrust in which Drennette's drumming plays a conspicuous part. After opening with a 7\/4 march figure introduced by the drums alone, it settles into a peculiar structure allotted in thirteen-bar segments in which it returns to the march figure throughout, alternating five bars of 7\/4 with eight bars of 4\/4. The piece brings the rhythm section to the forefront, Djamilaa serving up tall, resolute chords, Aunt Nancy gone well beyond walking to indeed be marching on bass. It reminded me a little of Horace Tapscott's \"Lino's Pad,\" which came out on one of the _Live at Lobero_ albums two or three years ago, except the drums are much more out in front than they are there. It has Penguin, Lambert and me on soprano, clarinet and cornet, respectively, the head something of a round or a catch. It has us not so much playing as piping, blowing with a certain fierceness, blowing like Furies, blowing as if to clear the air, blow something away.\n\n\"Rick's retreat,\" it almost goes without saying, seems another way of saying \"Drennette's advance,\" a way of militantly saying it. The bearing on this of what recently went on between her and Penguin could hardly not occur to Lambert and me\u2014or, for that matter, to Penguin as well. Lambert and I wondered was this her way of saying the memory of Rick had been exorcised, that her tryst with Penguin had blown the memory of Rick away, swept it away. It certainly seemed so, an appearance borne out by what Djamilaa told me later.\n\nDjamilaa says they were a little hungry and decided to go to Caf\u00e9 Figaro and that, once there, they talked about this, that and the other before getting to Aunt Nancy asking Drennette what had brought on the burst of writing she's been doing. \"I don't know,\" Drennette said at first, \"it's been like ice melting, a glacier retreating.\" She hesitated a moment but then she wasted no time, as Djamilaa puts it, getting to the heart of the matter. \"I think it all goes back,\" she said, \"to a certain someone we call Penguin. I've lately gotten to know him in a way I never knew him before. I'll go so far as to say I never knew a certain someone we call Penguin at all until now and that a certain someone we call Penguin never knew me.\" It was odd, Djamilaa says, the way she referred to him, but she continued to do so throughout the conversation. She never simply called him Penguin but referred to him as \"a certain someone we call Penguin,\" perhaps even (there was no way of knowing, Djamilaa says, though the way she said it and insisted on repeating it made it seem possible) \"A Certain Someone We Call Penguin.\"\n\nI was struck by how differently she and Penguin have reacted. While Penguin despairs of there being a Drennette he can't come close to, an auratic or a supplemental Drennette that's more than meets the eye and that sensory perception can't reach, a \"Drennethological Drennette\" not even carnal knowledge knows, she exults over them now knowing each other, at last knowing each other, insisting that before such knowledge they didn't know each other and perhaps couldn't have known each other. Did this make her a true romantic or an epistemic sensualist I wondered as Djamilaa told me all of this. Djamilaa says it didn't take much coaxing to get all the details of her and Penguin's \"breakthru night\" (Drennette's words) out of her. They sat huddled at their table, she says, leaning over their food and drinks like grand conspirators, no detail and no particular too intimate for Drennette not only to relate but to relate with great relish, blush somewhat though she did.\n\nI won't say I never knew \"girl talk\" could get as graphic as Djamilaa tells me theirs got, only that it surprises me Drennette engaged in it at all, let alone enjoyed it and, it appears, encouraged it, so stalwart, no-nonsense and all she comes across as. When I mentioned this to Lambert he said, \"I'm not so surprised.\" He then went on to add something I think I understand though I'm not entirely sure. \"It's the reticent ones you have to watch out for,\" he said, \"the needle-in-a-haystack types.\" Anyway, Djamilaa says Drennette did repeat that the recent writing has to do with a kind of thaw, the retreat of a glacier she admits to be Rick or her feelings for Rick, a complicated figure that also had \"glacial retreat\" referring to her feelings toward men after her breakup with Rick, so that the thaw was in part her \"glacial retreat's retreat.\" She made no bones, Djamilaa says, about attributing this to Penguin and their get-together the other night. \"A certain someone we call Penguin,\" she said, changing metaphors, \"completely flushed Rick out of my system.\"\n\nDrennette's kiss-and-tell account, according to Djamilaa, was indeed long on metaphor as well as intimate detail, anatomical detail, graphic action, graphic mise en sc\u00e8ne, a \"rich mix of registers,\" as she puts it, that had them going from smile to giggle to loud laughter more than once, shushing Drennette and telling her to stop. \"We left no door closed. There was no door we didn't enter, no door we didn't go in thru. We left no depth unplumbed,\" Djamilaa says she said at one point, pausing to look them in the eye, the beginnings of a grin on her lips, \"no orifice unexplored,\" whereupon they broke out laughing and ordered another round of drinks.\n\nSo we would seem to have confirmation now, were such needed. This thing is definitely afoot, afloat, going or stopping where, as the Temptations would say, \"nobody knows.\"\n\nYours, \nN.\n25.VI.84\n\nDear Angel of Dust,\n\nLambert wore a long, heavy overcoat steeped in sound. Sadness was the coat he wore. It was a cloak of sound like Stanley's \"Walk On By,\" the weight of a tear and a warlock's come-on athwart complaint. It was time walking by, time walking on, with which, for the first time, he was reconciled, with which, for the first time, he was okay. Time's bouquet was the bitter beer we all drank it seemed he said, the first and forever church of hardheadedness reconvened. He was there, if not for that, he said, for nothing. It was heavy but light as a tear at the same time.\n\nNow and again he got to a point where his intonation got away from him (or so, at least, it seemed, so, at least, it sounded like), a ragged, frayed edge of sound or a collapsing core of cloth, a hoarse extenuation he could only let have its way. He told us later that out of the blue his affection for Marvin Gaye's \"Stubborn Kind of Fellow\" when he was a teenager came back to him, a recollection of walking to school and hearing it on his transistor radio. It was the part where Marvin's voice breaks and goes hoarse that came back to him he told us, the lines \"Oh, I have kissed a few,\/I tell you, a few have kissed me too,\" the pleading way his voice gives out and recovers, gives out and comes back to itself on the word \"too.\" It wasn't so much his intonation getting away from him as it was it sounding like that, him having it sound like that, him imitating or trying to imitate Marvin's momentary loss of voice, his fleet, pleading hoarseness, the rough tenuity it for a moment falls into. It was nothing if not the stubborn, mind-made-up ministry his hardheaded church was or would eventually be known for.\n\nI took up my tenor and joined him. We were a two-horned bellowing beast, avowed monophysite twins whose affray was love's last recourse. Death was in the house one could hear, neither of us not with its chill on our breath. We spoke with a quake in our voice. I almost immediately contracted Lambert's hoarseness, a rough tenuity I found my intonation, like his, intermittently fell into. A contagious rash it might've been, so raw, so abraded, so sensitive to touch we winced as we played. While I wasn't aware at the time of Lambert's Marvin Gaye reminiscence, I was struck by one of my own, not of Marvin Gaye but of Dionne Warwick, whom Lambert's Turrentine cloak had brought to mind. It wasn't \"Walk On By\" but \"I Say a Little Prayer\" that came back to me, a certain weakness for which I found I couldn't help confessing, a weakness for the perky Burt Bacharach brass that punctuates it. Something very bright and upbeat and optimistic about Bacharach's use of brass, even on a sad song like \"Walk On By,\" where a burnished underglow speaks resolve, has always gotten to me. It seems to arise from or reach out to a utopic horizon, all the more so in a song like \"I Say a Little Prayer,\" bordering on na\u00efve in the bounding felicity it announces having arrived at, reporting prayer where there's exactly no need for it.\n\nThis was the recollection that hit me as Lambert and I bellowed and brayed. It wasn't at all that I tried to get that sound on tenor but that the very impossibility of doing so and the analogous impossibility of the simple felicity and resolve, the simply happy life it celebrated, ever being arrived at goaded and got to me. Cognate with Lambert's hardheaded, mind-made-up abrasion, it occurs to me in retrospect, was my own stubborn lament for what I knew and will always know to have been impossible from the start, damned or doomed from the start, impossibility perhaps the crux of its appeal. I bellowed and brayed and cursed the simple accord Bacharach's perky brass wanted one to believe was available, the damned auratic resolve and felicity it teased one with. I bellowed and brayed and cursed myself for having taken the bait, blew as if to blow away my weakness for what I knew and will always know is only a cartoon kind of happiness, an ad man's happiness, the unlikely accord I simultaneously confessed my sweet tooth for.\n\nBacharach's perky, burnished brass was a dangling carrot I chased and I blew to disavow my chase, a guilty pleasure I damned and disowned my indulgence in. It was an odd way to go about playing, an odd motive, as though reed envied brass almost, an insinuation Lambert would have fumed had he known he blew complicit with, stubborn kind of preachment and\/or mind-made-up appeal in league with perk, albeit a disavowed attraction to perk. The very thought of it induced a lightness, a lightheadedness, that threatened to spirit me away, a floataway loss of weight I was all but lifted by, an infectious balloon blurb or blip I needed, I knew, to find anchorage against.\n\nI found recourse in Aretha's cover of \"I Say a Little Prayer,\" which opportunely popped into my head. I told myself to keep my ear on the prize, the prize being Aretha's deep churchical bite and benediction, the gravitas her low gospel chords, rolling gospel chords, bestow on her version from the very outset\u2014no brass, no bounce, no perk, just piano. Her voice's cutting dip into tenor, bottoming low from the outset, likewise proved an answer to perk, nothing if not the anchor that would steady my way.\n\nAretha's remembered hums and moans kept bubbly lift at bay, champagne brass's floataway auspices held in check. Lambert and I had gotten low and we stayed low, rummaging the horns' low register, grazing black, piquant soil it seemed, the lips of our tenors' bells nuzzling loam. Lambert's tortuous \"too\" enlisted my low-lying \"prayer\" exactly where memory and sentiment met, albeit unbeknown to us at the time. We purveyed a run of rapid-fire, quick-trigger ignition allied with hiccuping rhythmic relay that brought Trane and Pharoah on a piece like \"Leo\" to mind we were told later. That we got there via deeply rooted pop reminiscence unbeknown to each other made it all the more post-expectant, all the more the quantum-qualitative increment it was.\n\nThis was during Lambert's solo on \"Sekhet Aaru Strut\" at Onaje's last night, a solo that at one point hit me in such a way I just jumped in, unexpected, unplanned, we two \"soloing\" at once. Everyone says it was the high point of the night.\n\nI felt a corner of some sort had been turned, some sort of lesson learned, another in a long line of lessons come upon. I felt we learned something very important, very new and very subtle, something so subtle I can't exactly say what.\n\nEnclosed is a tape. Let me know what you think.\n\nAs ever, \nN.\n29.VI.84\n\nDear Angel of Dust,\n\nThere's a review of _Orphic Bend_ in the latest _Cadence_. We didn't expect it to get any such attention, so this comes as a surprise. It's the first review it's gotten. The reviewer we neither know nor have heard of, but he seems to know the music and he has positive things to say. It's not that there's not the inevitable quibble here and there, but he does hand out a great deal of praise. One would definitely have to call it a good review. Indeed, friends are congratulating us, calling it a _rave_ review. We don't go that far, happy though we were to see it, and even if it were a rave we'd want to draw back, not get too excited.\n\nAs it turned out, we were surprised not only by the review but by our consumption of it, the elation we initially felt upon seeing it, caught out or caught offguard by how happy we were to see it, how greedily, at first at least, we ate it up. It was as though it was this that we put the album out for, as though we recorded it to be reviewed, written about. There was not only the question of why we were so invested in being reviewed and in what the review said but a certain disappointment, both with such investment and with our elation's failure to live up to expectation, simply on its own terms and on the face of it, an expectation that, post-expectant as we'd have been or thought or wished ourselves to be, we didn't know (or simply hadn't admitted) we harbored. But we did, or had, and it was by that expectation that even our elation, on its own terms and on the face of it, was found wanting. Thus it was that elation mixed with or morphed into letdown. Happy wasn't happy enough. And even if it were, we weren't sure putting out a record to have nice things said about it, written about it, was what being a band amounted to.\n\nThe review, then, gave us pause, became the reason or occasion to ask, late to be doing so though it was, why we play. \"It's not about reviews,\" Aunt Nancy emphatically said as we were discussing this at rehearsal. \"It's not even about aboutness. It's not about being-about.\" It was a thought we needed no time to reflect on, no time to digest. We all understood what she meant, all of us in our heart of hearts having long wanted exactly that, only that, to play not for the sake of what could be said but athwart it, play without claim or caption, advancing (if advancing anything) being-in-and-of-itself, self-evidence, hub and horizon rolled into one. We countered claim and caption, coupling or conflating claim and caption, because of the elephant in the room in the review, the reviewer's reference to balloons emerging from his copy of _Orphic Bend_.\n\nIt was odd the way we tiptoed around the balloons at first. The review bringing them up made for mixed feelings, if it didn't indeed bug each of us outright. It was our fear of them upstaging the music again. The reviewer's recourse to them as a self-crediting tack, boasting or bragging it seemed, made matters worse. Critical authority seemed to be at stake, visionary credentials even. Such were the insistence and relish he reported having seen the balloons with. Even so, we were slow to get around to it. Perhaps it was all too obvious, going, as they say, without saying. Perhaps we were loath to admit mention of the balloons bothered us, loath to admit anything in a review, least of all that, wasn't just water on a duck's back.\n\nThough we were slow to get around to the balloons we did get around to them. Not long after Aunt Nancy said it wasn't about aboutness, Lambert ventured an equation of claim with inflation, aboutness with inflation, aboutness with would-be containment, cover. \"Reviews are balloons,\" he summed it up by saying. We laughed, relieved it was out in the open. But once the subject had finally been broached we found we felt no need to belabor it. It was enough to know we all knew it was on the table. We briefly kicked it around and went back to rehearsal.\n\nI'm enclosing a new installment of my antithetical opera, a new after-the-fact lecture\/libretto called \"B'Loon's Blue Skylight.\" I won't say it was inspired by the review but had the review not appeared it wouldn't have been written.\n\nAs ever, \nN.\nB'LOON'S BLUE SKYLIGHT\n\n_or, The Creaking o_ _f_ _the Word: After-the-Fact Lecture\/Libretto (Djband Version)_\n\nDjband bumped into B'Loon at a newspaper vending box. One of the local weeklies featured a review of Djband's album _Orphic Bend_ , a review whose author took pains to announce that balloons had emerged from his copy of the three-record release, doing so not only during the bass solo on a cut called \"Dream Thief \"\u2014about which, he pointed out, there'd been a good deal of chatter on the underground grapevine\u2014but at a number of other points as well. The reviewer took no small amount of pride alongside the pains he took to make this announcement, as though the balloons' appearance, multiple as it was and occurring at points on the recording not reported by others, bestowed a mark of distinction, made him elect among the elect, confirmed his acuity and taste.\n\nThe newspaper vending box stood on the corner of Melrose and Fairfax, across the street from Fairfax High. Djband, spotting the title _Orphic Bend_ in the subhead of the front-page review, had opened the door to the box, taken out a copy and read the review, looking up dismissively when finished and humphing, \"He thinks it's about him.\"\n\n\"But it _is_ about him,\" an inner voice or an inner B'Loon reminded Djband, \"as much about him as about anyone. Why not? Isn't the music for and about each and every listener, there to have made of it what any set of ears can make of it, there for nothing if not laissez-faire audit? Anything goes.\" The inner voice paused and on deeper reflection allowed, \"Well, no, not anything. But where to draw the line is always an issue.\"\n\nThe review was filled with such wording as \"insofar,\" \"as it were\" and \"as if,\" the language of qualification disqualifying language itself. So it was, the review suggested, the balloons fled language while carrying language, bearing it to more auspicious precincts, Djband's music and any other music, all music. \"Music,\" it said at one point, \"is language in exile, exile exponentially borne\u2014that is, owned up to, lived up to.\" The review went on and on about the balloons, not so much about the reviewer, when it came down to it, as about B'Loon (though the reviewer had no way of knowing the balloons' avatar's name). It waxed alliterative and assonantal regarding \"the balloons' d\u00e9tente between containment and contagion, forfeiture and fortitude,\" as though, in so accenting sound, it sought or asserted its own balloon status, inflating its recourse to sonorous air, \"aeriality,\" sonority's infection or effects. \"Sound,\" it went so far as to say, \"is the deep, not so deep tautology of _is_ , its flipped ipseity,\" obliquely alluding to Oliver Lake's _Life Dance o_ _f_ _Is_.\n\nDjband wasn't sure what to make of such pronouncements. Using language to question language seemed only a roundabout self-regard. \"He thinks it's about language,\" Djband grumped, \"that old chestnut, no more than the balloons by another name. He might as well have called it l'anguish. He thinks it's about the balloons.\" The review got on Djband's nerves, further mixing mixed feelings about the balloons. Could the intersection of two metropolitan avenues be called a house, B'Loon, a mixed blessing, was in the house.\n\nDjband had been out of sorts to begin with, one of its members having awoken from a troubling dream. Aunt Nancy had dreamt an onslaught of Santa Ana winds dried out her skin, leaving her face, neck, legs and arms ashy. When she went to put lotion on, she dreamt, squeezing the tube nuzzling the palm of her hand, rather than a drop of lotion, albeit looking like one, what came out was a maggot. She immediately awoke, shocked by so brusque a reminder of death. She'd gotten up on the wrong side of the bed and been in a funk all day, Djband's other members, having been told the dream, in it with her.\n\nThe lotiondrop maggot continued to spook Djband, a Creaking of the Worm compounding ricketiness with unguent, omen with unctuousness. Djband couldn't help imagining an abruptly desiccated, husklike maggot, a stiff chrysalis rustling in the wind, no longer lotionlike. Knowing it meant skin would lose its luster, flesh be feasted on by worms eventually, Djband wondered what it meant regardless, wondered against knowing, not wanting to know. Knowing but not wanting to know what it came down to, body a balloon of skin with guts inside, \"An offal thought,\" Djband inwardly quipped, at odds with and wanting to make light of the unsettling truth.\n\nAunt Nancy broke away and spoke. \"It's not so much it all redounded to me. I'm not saying that. It's not even it was me it had to do with,\" she said. \"It was anyone's palm, everyone's palm, the lotion came out on. It was anyone's arm, everyone's arm, the worm would eventually eat. It's not that I'm the only one whose head a sword hangs over. No, I'm not saying that. Not even close.\" She then took two, maybe three steps back, blended back in. \"No, not even close,\" Djband agreed.\n\nDjband staggered along what seemed an exhaust wall, automobile and bus fumes attacking eyes, nose, mouth and throat. A white sedan darted in front of a bus in time to make a right turn from Fairfax onto Melrose, black smoke pouring out of its tailpipe as it sped up, black smoke pouring out of the bus's tailpipe as well. \"We'll all die together, choke together,\" Djband announced.\n\nIt was too much, as though, playing Monk, Djband forgot Monk's chuckling grunt, his wry wink. There was none of Monk's extreme right-hand hammering, his making the piano his toy, \"Sweet Georgia Brown\" turned \"Bright Mississippi.\" It was in fact the contrary, as though \"Epistrophe\" had been renamed \"Entropy,\" so doleful the note, so to speak, Djband repeatedly struck.\n\nIt didn't help that the review described \"In Walked Pen\" as \"Monk salad,\" a phrase that, meant as a compliment from all indications though it was, got on Djband's nerves. It deliberately mixed its message Djband couldn't help suspecting, hearing overtones of \"tossed,\" \"thrown together,\" \"hodgepodge.\" At best it was merely clumsy. It came off, in any case, in Djband's reading, as flip, too offhand, too casual, assuming unearned familiarity with Monk and Djband both. \"Why not talk about a worm on a lettuce leaf as well?\" Djband muttered all but inaudibly. \"Why not say, 'A worm nibbled away at the romaine,' make an adage of it?\" This was what Djband would have none of, a balloon of attitude meant to say, \"I'm in the know,\" a balloon inflating itself at \"In Walked Pen's\" expense, Monk's expense, trivializing \"In Walked Pen,\" trivializing Monk. \"'Monk salad' my ass,\" Djband added.\n\nThus it was there was much to be annoyed about. The need for an answering salve or an answering salvo couldn't have been stronger. Neither much appealed to Djband however. A letter to the editor taking issue with the review was anything but the water-off-a-duck's-back aplomb Djband liked to think it was an exemplar of. Salve, at the same time, couldn't help but recall lotion, couldn't help but conjure, in so doing, the lotiondrop maggot, the last thing Djband wanted a reminder of.\n\nDjband turned its head to the right, looked over its right shoulder toward where the sound it suddenly heard seemed to come from. It was a rattling sound, as of bamboo slats knocking against each other. It was the sound of actuality falling short of expectation, the sound of a gap between ideal or imagined reception and actual reception, a discrepant rattle (discrepant rub) the review's nondelivery of ideal audition helped arise and resound.\n\nIt wasn't, Djband insisted, that there's a hearing one's mind's ear hears, a hearing that can only be virtual, a hearing no manifest hearing lives up to. This could be argued and it had often been argued but it wasn't what was going on here or it wasn't, were it at all going on, all that was going on. Indeed, Djband quickly admitted, it was in part what was going on, which was that three sets of hearing obtained: a) the hearing one in the act of composition or performance imagines, b) the hearing that in fact takes place, and c) the distance or disjunction between the two, audibly manifest now in the form of a rattling as of bamboo slats, a veritable Creaking of the Heard.\n\nWas it that all reception, all audition, was flawed, inevitably a fall from the imaginal hearing one thought to hear and one hoped would be heard as one penned a piece or executed a run? Or was the Creaking of the Heard a veritable Creaking of the Herd, reception no inevitable fall but instead the outcome of herded audition, corralled by such would-be pundits as the review's author? These were the thoughts that ran thru Djband's head.\n\nYes, the latter was the case, Djband went on. It wasn't that reception was simply herded however. No, worse than that, it was _hearded_. _Hear_ 's past tense's past tense, _hear_ exponentially past, hearded hearing was multiply removed from the present, someone else's having heard presumed to be one's own. It's bad enough to presume to have heard with one's own ears, Djband reflected, worse to allow someone else to have done so for you.\n\nThe rattling sound made it clear _Orphic Bend_ had been hearded, the review's corral evidently made of bamboo. Clunky wind chimes it occurred to Djband it sounded like, not at all graceful, not subtly insinuative, clumsily intrusive instead. \"Clunk salad,\" Djband muttered under its breath, putting water-off-a-duck's-back aplomb aside for a moment, answering the review in kind.\n\n\"I want a big, bodacious onslaught of sound,\" Aunt Nancy had stepped forward again and was saying, \"sound enough to beat back dream thievery, lotiondrop-maggot sleight of hand, an advent sound.\" She stepped back, blended in again, having had her say. \"Yes, exactly,\" Djband agreed, \"a big, bodacious advent sound.\" The contrast with rattling bamboo couldn't have been more stark.\n\nDefensive, water-off-a-duck's-back aplomb notwithstanding, Djband was an ectoplasmic wall, a stone wall even, petrified by the specter of death. Either way, it was a wall from which its members might occasionally emerge. Up to this point Aunt Nancy was the one who had done so, soloist or soloistic, as though performing a piece rather than standing before a newspaper vending box.\n\nFor the moment time was an ancillary matter, not to be disregarded nonetheless. Tacit statements of tempo implied or insisted that point or presence might be other than outright, recalling something Mingus wrote about a leaky faucet in the liner notes to one of his albums. Djband knew itself to be there more as an aggregate shake or as an aggregate shiver than as corpuscular stump, a street corner symphony of mean provenance and prospect, time's \"will tell\" a window impendence blew thru. It could hear itself no matter the time and the place, time nothing if not a suspended platform by turns made less than it was and made more than it was, a bevy of don't-care notes and a preterite soapbox.\n\nSo Djband stood bunched at the \"will tell\" window, the arthroscopic, worm's-eye glimpse into hearded audition the vending box had become. It heard itself beside the hearded rendition of itself the review purveyed, beside the rattling bamboo that was the gap between the two as well, the latter's lapse or its falling away from the former, along the rickety would-be joint between the two. Hearded audition's noncoincidence with Djband-as-it-heard-itself was only to be expected, Djband reminded itself or consoled itself, even scolded itself, angry at itself to have caught itself out expecting better.\n\nA car's horn caught Djband's attention, a Toyota Corolla cut off by a Jaguar XJ-S changing lanes. The driver pounded the hub of the steering wheel and shook her fist as the Jaguar darted in. Oddly, it blended in perfectly, a staccato garnish to the music Djband would have been playing had it been playing, a defenestrated ragtag pomp.\n\nAll advent flew thru the \"will tell\" window. All admonition stood streetside awaiting it, a cautionary wall Djband did its best to embody or at least evoke, an admonitory shingle if nothing more. Warning both stood and ran, a cathartic _r\u00e9cit_ audition sought to be door to, time's indiscreet relay. Djband had seen it all. Warning stood and would always do so, it said and saw, knowing \"always\" to be the dangerous word it was but daring it, ran and would always run.\n\nDjband pasted a poster on the bare wall it was, the bare shingle, the wall or the shingle it took itself to be. The poster bore After-the-Fact Caveat #1:\n\nTime, perfect or syncopated time, is when a faucet dribbles from a leaky washer. I'm more than sure an adolescent memory can remember how long the intervals were between each collision of our short-lived drip and its crash into an untidy sink's overfilled coffee cup with murky grime of old cream still clinging to the edges or a tidy rust stained enamel sink that the owner of such has given up on the idea that that maintenance man is ever going to change the rhythm beat of his dripping faucet by just doing his job and changing that rotten old rubber washer before time runs out of time.\n\nMusicians partly come into the circle of various blame which encompasses much more than leaky faucets, rotten washers, or critics. Wow! Critics! How did they get here?\n\nI know. It's Freudian. Faucets and old rotten washers. The innocent audiences that are sent in the direction of premature musicians\u2014critics who want to play and some who play and study at music and can only encompass soul-wise and technically about someone else what they themselves can comprehend.\n\nIt was none other than the passage from Mingus's liner notes to _The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady_ that had crossed Djband's mind earlier, could \"earlier,\" down this corridor in which time, faucet leak notwithstanding, was ancillary, be said to matter\u2014no less dangerous, if so, than \"always.\"\n\nShingle more than wall though neither shingle nor wall, it was a sandwich board the poster was pasted on, not a shingle or a wall Djband was but a sandwich board Djband in fact wore, Mingus's admonitory note gracing both boards, back and front, counseling passersby both coming and going. It was a long, detailed message for a sandwich board. Printed in large letters, it barely fit.\n\nDjband had clearly let its water-off-a-duck's-back aplomb fall by the wayside, answering the review with the sandwich board, fighting back, answering \"Monk salad\" with Mingus. It was clearly involved, clearly invested, to the point of uncool even, the ensemblist equivalent of a sandwich man, anything but blas\u00e9, nothing if not caring, standing on the street advertising its message. Djband laughed at itself, realizing that insofar as to bear a message was to be a balloon it had become a balloon, balloon and sandwich man both, both rolled into one. Djband had not only bumped into B'Loon but become B'Loon, pressed and possessed by the spirit of caption and contention, the former manifestly, the latter more implicitly, bearing on which and whose caption fit. The review itself, one saw clearly now, was nothing if not a caption, nothing if not a balloon, nothing if not a message-bearing bauble, the bane of Djband's proprioceptive audition. It happened quickly, in a flash, balloon and sandwich board bound up as one.\n\n\"Myself When I Am Real,\" Djband reminded itself right after it laughed at itself, Mingus's title more to the point than ever before. A pointed mix of aim and arraignment, \"Myself When I Am Real\" said it all, could any five words be said to've said it all.\n\nDjband turned toward where the sound of another car horn came from and saw the driver of a Mazda GLC headed west on Melrose give a thumbs up, in approval of the Mingus quote it was clear. How the driver so quickly read so long a text Djband couldn't say but happily nodded to acknowledge the approbation. The sandwich board was making a difference already.\n\nDjband turned sideways between the boards, lifting its arms, elevating the boards as though they were wings. It was now Lambert who stepped forward and spoke. \"I want a straw to fall and fill up with air and float,\" he said. \"I want float to be what unlikeliness does. Due to itself or in spite of itself, I want that to be what goes on, float's new leaf turned over, float's new reign and regret.\" Djband agreed, echoing, \"Float's new reign and regret.\"\n\n\"Whatever comes up,\" Lambert continued, \"it will beg the question it costs itself\u2014float lure, float intended, float intransigence. Reed a wet stick in my mouth, I want more, flutter-tongue abandon's new almanac, float's lush life begun.\" Djband agreed and took up the tailend of what Lambert said, repeating, \"Float's lush life begun.\"\n\n\"Float nothing if not a barge I'd be borne along on,\" Lambert continued, \"I want each lick to incubate what float would be.\" Djband agreed again and repeated, \"What float would be.\" Lambert stepped back and blended in again.\n\nThe sandwich board had brought an element of reduction in, Djband brought down to the reviewer's level, fighting fire with fire, balloon with balloon. Lambert's invocation of flight or flotation thus arrived right on time, albeit flotation, Djband was well aware, carried a balloon suggestion one could hardly miss. Still, lift and levitation won out over balloon rut, balloon mire, the bone \"float's new leaf \" picked with \"Monk salad\" notwithstanding, that bone the very filled-up, floating straw itself perhaps.\n\nMore no doubt than perhaps, Djband decided, embarrassed, underneath it all, by the sandwich board, needing to make a move. Disambiguating float from what balloons do was that move, float's association with balloons its new regret. Float's new reign was nothing if not a resolve to overcome inflation, nothing if not a bone proffering puncture. It remained a willingness to abide by high jive, high jubilation, a resolve to reside on high even so.\n\nTo say that at exactly that instant Djband smelled roses would be going too far. Roses did come to mind and they did so in a flash, their characteristic perfume no doubt bound up in the thought but not to the point of Djband actually smelling them. L.A. was way more than a stone's throw from Pasadena but Melrose might as well have been Colorado Boulevard on New Year's morning, so large did Lambert's barge now loom, float parting company with balloon.\n\nIt was a visual not an olfactory image, an address of the mind's eye, not the mind's more distant nose. Djband saw Lambert's roses-bedecked barge for an instant, easing down Melrose, Lambert atop it waving to the crowd. Yes, it was New Year's morning, float's new day begun, float's new leaf turned over, float's new reign and regret.\n\nFor only a moment were such premises afoot, parade premises. The moment they arose they subsided. Melrose was back to being itself as on any other day, Djband a sandwich man pacing the sidewalk, a modest parade if it could even be said to be that\u2014no barge, no float, no roses. No sandwich board either, Djband quickly decided, lifting the sandwich board over its head and lowering it to the sidewalk, propping it against the newspaper vending box.\n\nRained-on parade was the theme but Penguin, stepping forward, would have to do with it only ostensibly, obliquely, bending away from it as what he had to say built. \"I want a front-row seat at the Apocalypse,\" he said. \"No,\" he said, quickly correcting himself. \"I meant to say at the Apollo, James Brown on his way up, in his prime.\" \"In his prime,\" Djband chimed in and Penguin went on, \"I want to have lost someone or to sing and scream and shout as though I had. I want shout to mean to run around in a circle, led by immanent splendor's allure.\"\n\n\"Immanent splendor's allure,\" Djband agreed and echoed and Penguin continued, \"I want the rump of the cosmos in front of me, barely up against my nose or a bit farther away perhaps, all but in touching distance, infinitesimally out of reach. I want to call out to it, calling it Regenerate Rose Reborn.\" Djband echoed and agreed again, \"Yes, Regenerate Rose Reborn.\" Nose wide with cosmic whiff, cosmic what-if, Penguin stepped back and again blended in.\n\nBefore Djband could do what it would do next, Drennette stepped forward, cosmic vamp and commanding virgin rolled into one. \"Yes, do remember,\" she agreed and exhorted, \"how the smell of the cosmos's behind pervades all extension, how the smell of cosmic loins penetrates all space.\" \"Penetrates all space,\" Djband thought to echo and agree but quickly thought better of it, remaining silent as Drennette, noticing the withheld echo and agreement but not needing it, continued, \"Do remember how these two smells enter your nose and take hold of your scrotum.\" It was a footnote, a blurb, an outburst, a balloon. Djband withheld echo and agreement again. Drennette stepped back and blended in.\n\nDjband reeled and staggered, all but overcome by wafted cosmicity, up-from-under pitch and posteriority, belt and bouquet. It was a ploy, a feinting play on exhaustion, even so. Drennette, Penguin, Aunt Nancy, Lambert, Djamilaa and N. were each only a face on the wall Djband was, the wall Djband affected it was, the exhaust wall it earlier staggered along but now steadied and took inside itself. Immured against hearded audition, a wall against rained-on parade, Djband took a stand and stood tall against critical caption, the review's upstart balloon, cartoon acuity.\n\nWhat Djband would have done next had briefly been put on hold by Drennette's impromptu boast (which is what, underneath it all but not so underneath after all, it all was). Reeling and staggering standing tall, it did now what it would have done next. It issued a collective, composite swipe of sound aimed at wiping the slate clean, a return to pre-caption premises, an airy gesturality or gist it wanted to say was what life itself is, an airy gesturality or gist gotten or gotten at by nothing quite like music, albeit to say so, to go from wanting to say, was to tie up with tar-baby balloon, tar-baby boast, as though Drennette had simply jumped the gun.\n\nDrennette had in fact jumped the gun. That there was a gun to jump tempered Djband's recoil from cosmic waft. Reeling and staggering standing tall as though she'd held a finger out to be sniffed, a finger it knew underneath it all was coming, Djband issued a funky-butt, low-register burst, Mingusesque, a second swipe of sound, going the other way. This was also, it seemed it wanted to say, what life itself is.\n\nSuch expounding upon life, oblique though it was, attracted a crowd. Passersby stopped and looked on. They stood a short distance away, staring at Djband, able to read its thoughts evidently. They heard the music Djband inwardly rehearsed evidently, nodding their heads, popping their fingers, patting their feet. Yes, this was life, they seemed to agree, the what-is of it.\n\nDjband knew there was no wiping the slate clean but made as if to do so anyway. Accretion was all, it knew, whatever would-be cleansing wipe a further murk or mucking up, palimpsestic supplement, palimpsestic struff. In this case, funky-butt struff spoke directly to the claim of a \"d\u00e9tente between containment and contagion\" the review advanced, agreeing with it only to complicate or contaminate it, wipe running one with swipe in more ways than one. Palimpsestic add-on plied boast on boast, waft on waft, whiff, what-is and what-if rolled into one.\n\nPalimpsestic struff was nothing if not infectious. Several of the onlookers who'd gathered began to dance, squatting low to the ground at points, letting their asses graze the sidewalk. Reveling in rump cosmicity, they delighted, they let it be known, in having asses, delighted that there were asses to be had. Close to declaring ass what-is's what-if, they drew short of that, lifting skyward from the squat's low point with a pelvic thrust, saying something like what they begged off saying. Lee Morgan's \"The Rumproller\" had nothing on what they did or on the music they heard or thought they heard Djband rehearse.\n\n\"I want not to have seen it all,\" Djamilaa stepped forward and said. \"I want not to have seen this movie before.\" \"Not to have seen this movie before,\" Djband agreed and repeated, part antiphonal add-on, part set-aside. Djamilaa paused.\n\n\"I want,\" Djamilaa went on after pausing, \"the clean slate I know we can't have. I want the meat of our being here truly met, true meet's tally, no mere funky-butt largesse.\" Djband agreed and repeated, \"No mere funky-butt largesse.\" Djamilaa's advancing meat, meet and romance (cosmic tail, cosmic tale, cosmic tally) went on with her saying, \"I want the rose's perfume where pendent cheeks meet, funk sublimated upward, astral crevice, crease.\" Djband not only echoed and agreed, \"Astral crevice, crease,\" but added, \"Ass as in astral, amen.\" Djamilaa stepped back, again blending in.\n\nThe more booty-invested of the dancers, hearing Djamilaa's admonition, dialed it down. A couple of them stopped dancing altogether, stepping back into the crowd, content to nod their heads, pop their fingers, pat their feet.\n\nThe now more precisely calibrated serenade made it crystal clear that Djband was no Parliament, no Funkadelic, no Zapp and Roger\u2014crystal clear even as it grew to be pearl opaque, for the review, irritant pebble to Djband's oyster, was coming to be accreted over, contained, gotten over, a tribute to palimpsestic add-on, palimpsestic struff, stick-to-itiveness. The music grew to be pearly smooth as well as pearl opaque, much less bumpy than funk.\n\nIt was now a precisely telepathic serenade, the heard rather than hearded audition every band so deeply wants. Sensing this, Djband saw no further need for the sandwich board and picked it up from where it lay propped against the newspaper vending box. N. stepped forward to flip it inside out so that Mingus's words no longer showed and then stepped back and blended in again. Djband again propped it against the newspaper vending box. The blank sides of the two boards glared in the sun.\n\nThe crowd of onlookers had grown larger, all of them nodding their heads, popping their fingers, patting their feet. Looking out at Melrose, Djband saw that traffic in both directions had slowed, drivers and passengers looking over at the goings-on around the newspaper vending box, Djband telepathically holding forth, the onlookers looking on. They too, the drivers and passengers, looked on, nodding their heads, popping their fingers and (Djband imagined rather than saw but couldn't have been more certain) patting their feet.\n\nParade was back. The cars, vans, buses and trucks proceeded at parade pace, not so much cars, vans, buses and trucks as floats, titrating, ever so exactingly, the ideal roost and repose Lambert had adumbrated earlier.\n\nParade was indeed back, as much on the sidewalk, it turned out, as on the street. Emerging from the opening between the two boards of the sandwich board was none other than B'Loon, out in the open for everyone to see\u2014the eyelashes hovering above the head and brow, the poorly defined limbs and extremities, the wistful, noncommittal mouth and all.\n\nB'Loon, small at first but steadily inflating, grew to be as big as the giant balloons at a Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, rivaling Superman, Kermit the Frog, Snoopy and the rest, floating high above the sidewalk, lifting.\n\nEveryone stared into the sky at B'Loon drifting higher. The crowd of onlookers on the sidewalk stared skyward, as did those in the cars, vans, buses and trucks, leaning out their windows and bringing traffic to a stop. Djband as well stared skyward. Was B'Loon's lift mere exhibition or possibly more, possibly exorcism? It was hard not to wonder.\n\nB'Loon floated higher and higher. Heads tilted farther back and hands became visors as B'Loon drifted higher, everyone more and more straining to see as the image got smaller. Less visible the farther away it floated, B'Loon soon couldn't be seen at all. Thus B'Loon exited the house the intersecting avenues could be said to be.\n\nFor a long time after B'Loon floated out of sight everyone kept looking into the sky. The crowd of onlookers on the sidewalk stood staring skyward. Traffic remained at a standstill, those in the cars, vans, buses and trucks continuing to lean out their windows looking up into the sky. Djband continued looking up as well.\n\nEveryone went on staring into the sky, lost in thought. It had all been only a bubble, a moment in the sun, a quick boon, barely embraceable, blown up to be let go.\nCopyright \u00a9 2017 by Nathaniel Mackey\n\nAll rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.\n\n_Late Arcade_ is volume five of _From a Broken Bottle Traces o_ _f_ _Perfume Still Emanate_ , an ongoing work. Volumes one, two, three and four are _Bedouin Hornbook,_ _Djbot Baghostus's Run_ , _Atet A.D.,_ and _Bass Cathedral._\n\nSections of this book have appeared in _Amerarcana: A Bird & Beckett Review_, _Blues for Smoke, Conjunctions_ , _Current Musicology_ , _Fence_ , _Floor: Poetics o_ _f_ _Everyday Critique_ _,_ _Golden Handcuffs Review_ , _Hambone_ , and _Women & Performance: A Journal o_ _f_ _Feminist Theory._\n\nThe author would like to thank the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, whose award of a Fellowship for the year 2010\u20132011 contributed to the completion of this book.\n\nManufactured in the United States of America\n\nFirst published as a New Directions Paperbook (NDP1368) in 2017\n\neISBN: 9780811226615\n\nNew Directions Books are published for James Laughlin\n\nby New Directions Publishing Corporation\n\n80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011\n\n# new directions presents\n\n## A Simple Story\n\n## by Leila Guerriero\n\n## translated by Frances Riddle\n\n**Obsession and mastery in their purest states: the story of one dancer's attempt to win the biggest contest of his life.**\n\n## Contents\n\n 1. Also by Nathaniel Mackey\n 2. Title Page\n 3. Dedication\n 4. Late Arcade\n 1. 14.IX.83\n 2. 19.IX.83\n 3. 24.IX.83\n 4. [Dateless]\n 5. 30.IX.83\n 6. 4.X.83\n 7. 8.X.83\n 8. 10.X.83\n 9. 26.X.83\n 10. 30.X.83\n 11. 6.XI.83\n 12. 14.XI.83\n 13. 6.XII.83\n 14. 17.XII.83\n 15. 13.I.84\n 16. 16.I.84\n 17. 18.I.84\n 18. 22.I.84\n 19. [Dateless]\n 20. 6.II.84\n 21. 16.II.84\n 22. 17.II.84\n 23. 18.II.84\n 24. 27.II.84\n 25. 3.III.84\n 26. [Dateless]\n 27. 13.III.84\n 28. 16.III.84\n 29. 18.III.84\n 30. POST-EXPECTANT PRESS RELEASE #2\n 31. 22.III.84\n 32. 2.IV.84\n 33. 17.IV.84\n 34. 3.V.84\n 35. 6.V.84\n 36. 11.V.84\n 37. 15.V.84\n 38. 18.V.84\n 39. 20.V.84\n 40. 25.VI.84\n 41. 29.VI.84\n 42. B'LOON'S BLUE SKYLIGHT\n 5. Copyright\n\n## Landmarks\n\n 1. Cover\n\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}} +{"text":"\n## THE CHASE\n\n## DIRK PITT\u00ae ADVENTURES BY CLIVE CUSSLER\n\nTreasure of Khan\n\nBlack Wind\n\nTrojan Odyssey\n\nValhalla Rising\n\nAtlantis Found\n\nFlood Tide\n\nShock Wave\n\nInca Gold\n\nSahara\n\nDragon\n\nTreasure\n\nCyclops\n\nDeep Six\n\nPacific Vortex\n\nNight Probe\n\nVixen 03\n\nRaise the Titanic\n\nIceberg\n\nThe Mediterranean Caper\n\nKURT AUSTIN ADVENTURES BY CLIVE CUSSLER WITH PAUL KEMPRECOS\n\nThe Navigator\n\nPolar Shift\n\nLost City\n\nWhite Death\n\nFire Ice\n\nBlue Gold\n\nSerpent\n\nOREGONFILES ADVENTURES BY CLIVE CUSSLER WITH CRAIG DIRGO\n\nSkeleton Coast\n\nDark Watch\n\nSacred Stone\n\nGolden Buddha\n\nNONFICTION BY CLIVE CUSSLER AND CRAIG DIRGO\n\nThe Sea Hunters II\n\nClive Cussler and Dirk\n\nPitt Revealed\n\nThe Sea Hunters\n\n## THE CHASE\n\n## CLIVE CUSSLER\n\nG. P. PUTNAM'S SONS\n\nNEW YORK\n\nG. P. PUTNAM'S SONS \nPublishers Since 1838 \nPublished by the Penguin Group \nPenguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. \u2022 Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) \u2022 Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England \u2022 Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) \u2022 Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) \u2022 Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi\u2013110 017, India \u2022 Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0745, Auckland, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) \u2022 Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa\n\nPenguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2007 by Sandecker, RLLLP \nEndpaper map and illustrations by Richard Dahlquist \nAll rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author's rights. Purchase only authorized editions.\n\nLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data\n\nCussler, Clive. \nThe chase \/ Clive Cussler. \np. cm. \nISBN: 978-1-1012-0758-1 \n1. Bank robberies\u2014Fiction. 2. California\u2014History\u20141850\u20131950\u2014Fiction. I. Title. \nPS3553.U75C47 2007 2007017291 \n813'.54\u2014dc22\n\nThis is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.\n\nWhile the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.\nTo Teri, Dirk, and Dana\n\nNo father was blessed with more-loving children\n\n## THE CHASE\n## Contents\n\nGHOST FROM THE PAST\n\nTHE BUTCHER BANDIT\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\nTHE CHASE QUICKENS\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\nChapter 31\n\nChapter 32\n\nChapter 33\n\nChapter 34\n\nChapter 35\n\nChapter 36\n\nChapter 37\n\nChapter 38\n\nChapter 39\n\nChapter 40\n\nChapter 41\n\nChapter 42\n\nChapter 43\n\nChapter 44\n\nChapter 45\n\nChapter 46\n\nChapter 47\n\nChapter 48\n\nChapter 49\n\nChapter 50\n\nUP FROM THE DEPTHS\n\n## GHOST FROM THE PAST\n\n##\n\nAPRIL 15, 1950 \nFLATHEAD LAKE, MONTANA\n\nIT ROSE FROM THE DEPTHS LIKE AN EVIL MONSTER in a Mesozoic sea. A coat of green slime covered the cab and boiler while gray-brown silt from the lake bottom slid and fell off the eighty-one-inch drive wheels and splashed into the cold waters of the lake. Ascending slowly above the surface, the old steam locomotive hung for a moment from the cables of a huge crane mounted on a wooden barge. Still visible under the dripping muck, beneath the open side window of its cab, was the number 3025.\n\nBuilt by the Baldwin Locomotive Works of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 3025 rolled out of the factory on April 10th of 1904. The \"Pacific\" class was a common large-sized, high-drive-wheeled steam engine that could pull ten steel passenger cars long distances at speeds up to ninety miles an hour. She was known as a 4-6-2 because of her four-wheeled truck in the front, just behind the cowcatcher, the six massive drive wheels below the boiler, and the two small wheels mounted beneath the cab.\n\nThe crew on the barge watched in awe as the crane operator orchestrated his levers and gently lowered old 3025 onto the main deck, its weight settling the barge three inches deeper in the water. She sat there almost a minute before the six men overcame their wonderment and detached the cables.\n\n\"She's in remarkably good shape for sitting underwater for almost fifty years,\" murmured the salvage superintendent of the battered old barge that was nearly as ancient as the locomotive. Since the nineteen twenties, it had been used for dredging operations on the lake and surrounding tributaries.\n\nBob Kaufman was a big, friendly man, ready with a laugh at the slightest hint of something jovial. With a face ruddy from long hours spent in the sun, he had been working on the barge for twenty-seven years. Now seventy-five, he could have retired long ago, but as long as the dredging company kept him on he was going to keep working. Sitting at home and working jigsaw puzzles was not his idea of the good life. He studied the man standing beside him, who was, as close as he could figure, slightly older.\n\n\"What do you think?\" Kaufman asked.\n\nThe man turned, tall and still lean in his late seventies, hair full and silver. His face was as weathered as buckskin. He stared at the locomotive thoughtfully through eyes yet to rely on glasses. They gleamed blue with a tinge of lavender. A large silver mustache covered his upper lip as if it had been planted there many years ago. It matched his eyebrows, which had become bushy with age. He lifted an expensive Panama hat off his head and dabbed at his forehead with a handkerchief.\n\nHe walked over to the salvaged locomotive, now sitting solidly on the deck, and focused his attention on the cab. Water and muck poured down its ladders and spilled across the deck of the barge.\n\n\"Despite the grime,\" he said finally, \"she's still aesthetically pleasing to the eye. Only a question of time before a railroad museum comes up with the funds to restore her for display.\"\n\n\"Lucky a local fisherman lost his outboard engine and dragged the bottom to find it or the locomotive might have been down there another half century.\"\n\n\"Yes, it was a stroke of luck,\" the tall, silver-haired man said slowly.\n\nKaufman stepped over and ran a hand over one of the big drive wheels. A sentimental expression crossed his face. \"My daddy was an engineer with the Union Pacific,\" he said quietly. \"He always said the Pacific-type locomotive was the finest he ever drove. He used to let me sit in the cab when he brought a train into the yard. The Pacific class was used mostly to haul passenger cars because it was so fast.\"\n\nA team of divers, wearing suits of canvas sandwiched between layers of rubber, stood on a platform as it was raised from beneath the surface of the cold water. They wore the Mark V brass hard hat, large weight belts around their chests, and diving boots with canvas tops, brass toes, and lead soles that weighed thirty-six pounds. Altogether, the divers wore one hundred fifty pounds of equipment. They tugged at their umbilical cords, leading to the surface-supplied diving air pump, as the platform was raised and swung down to the deck. They were no sooner aboard than another team climbed down ladders and stood on the platform as it descended into the waters of the lake, still icy from the long Montana winter.\n\nThe tall man watched silently, looking out of place among the barge's crew in their grease-stained work clothes and overalls. He wore neatly pressed brown slacks with an expensive cashmere knit sweater under a cashmere jacket. His shoes were highly polished and had amazingly kept their shine on the oil-soaked deck, amid the rusting cables.\n\nHe eyed the heavy layers of silt on the steps leading to the cab and turned to Kaufman. \"Let's get a ladder over here so we can climb into the cab.\"\n\nKaufman gave an order to a nearby barge crewman and a ladder soon appeared and was propped against the lip of the cab's floor behind the engineer's seat. The superintendent went up first, followed by the elderly observer. Water dripped in sheets from the roof while dissolved coal merged with the silt flowing through the open door of the firebox onto the metal floor.\n\nAt first, it looked like the cab was empty. The maze of valves, pipes, and levers mounted over the boiler was coated with layers of ooze and the tentacles of green weed growing from it. The muck on the floor of the cab was ankle-deep, but the tall, quiet observer did not seem to notice it coming over the tops of his shoes. He knelt down and studied three humps that rose from the ooze like small hills.\n\n\"The engineer and fireman,\" he announced.\n\n\"You sure?\"\n\nHe nodded. \"I'm sure. The engineer was Leigh Hunt. He had a wife and two children, both grown now to middle age. The fireman was Robert Carr. He was going to be married after the run.\"\n\n\"Who was the third man?\"\n\n\"Name was Abner Weed. A tough customer. He forced Hunt and Carr to operate the engine with a gun in their backs.\"\n\n\"They don't look pretty,\" Kaufman muttered, repelled by what he saw. \"I'm surprised they didn't turn into skeletons.\"\n\n\"There would be nothing left of them if they died in salt water, but the cold, fresh water of Flathead Lake preserved them. What you see is the adipose tissue in which fat is stored. It breaks down over time when immersed, giving the body a waxy, soapy look called saponification.\"\n\n\"We'll have to call the sheriff and get a coroner out here.\"\n\n\"Will that delay the operation?\" asked the stranger.\n\nKaufman shook his head. \"No, it shouldn't slow things down any. As soon as the team of relief divers attach the lift cables, we'll bring up the coal tender.\"\n\n\"It's important that I see what's in the attached car.\"\n\n\"You will.\" Kaufman looked at the man, trying in vain to read his thoughts. \"Better we tackle the tender first to simplify matters. If we concentrate on the car before it has been uncoupled from the tender, it might prove disastrous. It may not be as heavy as the locomotive, but unless we're very careful it might break into pieces. It's a far trickier operation. Besides, the front end of the baggage car is half buried under the tender.\"\n\n\"It's not a baggage car. It's a boxcar, or freight car.\"\n\n\"How could you know that?\"\n\nThe observer ignored the question. \"Raise the coal tender first. You're in charge.\"\n\nKaufman stared down at the ugly lumps that had once been humans. \"How did they get here? How could a train come to be lost in the middle of the lake all these years?\"\n\nThe tall man gazed out over the calm blue lake. \"Forty-four years ago, there was a ferry that carried railcars loaded with lumber back and forth across the lake.\"\n\n\"It sure is strange,\" said Kaufman slowly. \"Newspapers and the Southern Pacific officials reported that the train was stolen. As I recall, the date was April 21, 1906.\"\n\nThe old man smiled. \"A cover-up by the company. The train wasn't stolen. A railroad dispatcher was bribed to charter the engine.\"\n\n\"Must have been something valuable in the freight car to kill for,\" said Kaufman. \"Like a shipment of gold.\"\n\nThe old man nodded. \"Rumors circulated that the train was carrying gold. If the truth be known, it was not gold but hard cash.\"\n\n\"Forty-four years,\" Kaufman said slowly. \"A long time for a train to go missing. Maybe the money is still inside the car.\"\n\n\"Perhaps,\" said the tall man, looking toward the horizon at a vision only he could see. \"Just perhaps we'll find the answers when we get inside.\"\n\n## THE BUTCHER BANDIT\n\n## 1\n\nJANUARY 10, 1906 BISBEE, ARIZONA\n\nANYONE SEEING AN OLD DERELICT SOT SLOWLY SWAYING down Moon Avenue in Bisbee that afternoon would have mistaken him for what he was not, a man who had grown old before his time working the mines that ran through the mineral-rich mountains under the town. His shirt was grubby and he smelled unwashed. One suspender held up torn and ragged pants that were stuffed into scuffed and worn boots that should been thrown in the trash gully behind the town long ago.\n\nSnarled and greasy hair straggled to his shoulders and merged with an uncut beard that hung halfway down his protruding stomach. He looked through eyes so dark brown they were nearly black. There was no expression in them; they seemed cold and almost evil. A pair of work gloves covered the hands that had never held a shovel or a pick.\n\nUnder one arm, he carried an old gunnysack that appeared empty. Almost whimsically, the dirty burlap had DOUGLAS FEED & GRAIN COMPANY, OMAHA, NEBRASKA stenciled on it.\n\nThe old man took a minute and parked on a bench at the corner of Moon Avenue and Tombstone Canyon Road. Behind him was a saloon, mostly empty because it was the middle of the day and its usual patrons were hard at work in the mines. The people walking and shopping in the little mining town paid him no more than a quick, disgusted glance. Whenever they passed, he pulled a whiskey bottle from a pant pocket and drank heavily before recapping it and putting it back. No one could have known it was not whiskey but tea.\n\nIt was warm for June; he guessed the temperature to be in the high nineties. He sat back and looked up and down the streets as a trolley car passed, pulled by an aging horse. Electric-motored trolleys had yet to come to Bisbee. Most of the vehicles on the streets were still horse-drawn wagons and buggies. The town had only a handful of automobiles and delivery trucks, and none were in evidence.\n\nHe knew enough about the town to know that it was founded in 1880 and named after Judge DeWitt Bisbee, one of the moneymen behind the Copper Queen Mine. A good-sized community, its population of twenty thousand made it the largest city between San Francisco and St. Louis. Despite the many miners' families that lived in modest little wooden buildings, the main economy was based around saloons and a small army of shady ladies.\n\nThe man's head nodded to his chest; he looked like a drunk who had dozed off. But it was an act. He was conscious of every movement around him. Occasionally, he glanced across the street at the Bisbee National Bank. He watched with interest, through half-closed eyes, as a truck with chain drive and solid-tired wheels rattled up to the bank. There was only one guard, who got out of the truck and carried a large bag of newly printed bills inside. A few minutes later, he was helped by the bank's teller to lug a heavy chest through the door and onto the truck.\n\nThe man knew that it was a shipment of gold, a piece of the three million ounces that had been produced at the local mines. But gold was not what piqued his interest. It was too heavy and too risky for one man to dispose of. It was the cash that brought him to Bisbee, not the prized yellow metal.\n\nHe watched as the truck moved away and two men, whom he had identified as security guards at the giant Phelps Dodge Mining Company, walked out of the bank. They had delivered the cash to pay the mining company payroll the following day. He smiled to himself, knowing the assets of the Bisbee National Bank had risen to a new level.\n\nHe had watched the people who came and went from the bank for nearly two weeks until he could identify them by sight. He had also noted the time when they came and went. Satisfied now there was no one in the bank except one teller and the owner\/manager, he looked at his watch and nodded to himself.\n\nLeisurely, the old derelict rose, stretched, and ambled across the brick street and trolley tracks to the bank, carrying the large, empty gunnysack over one shoulder. Just as he was about to enter, a woman unexpectedly walked past. She gave him a look of loathing, stepped around him, and went inside. She was not in his plan, but he decided to deal with the matter rather than wait. He checked the street and followed her into the bank.\n\nHe closed the door. The teller was in the vault and the woman waited until he reappeared. The derelict removed a model 1902 Colt .38 caliber automatic from his boot, struck the woman on the nape of the neck with the barrel, watching with detachment as she slowly folded to the wooden floor. It happened so suddenly and silently that the owner of the bank did not see or hear anything from his office.\n\nThen the drunken miner suddenly turned bank robber leaped sprightfully over the counter, entered the owner's office, and put the gun barrel to his head. \"Resist and you'll be shot dead,\" he said in a low but forbidding tone. \"Now, call the teller into your office.\"\n\nThe bald, fat, shocked bank owner looked at him with brown eyes widened with fright. Without argument, he called out, \"Roy, come in here.\"\n\n\"Be right there, Mr. Castle,\" Roy called out from inside the vault.\n\n\"Tell him to leave the vault open,\" said the bank robber quietly, with a sharp edge to his voice.\n\n\"Roy, don't close the vault door,\" Castle complied as ordered, his eyes crossing as they focused on the gun pressing against his forehead.\n\nRoy stepped from the vault, a ledger under one arm. He couldn't see the unconscious woman lying under the counter. Suspecting nothing, he entered Castle's office and abruptly stiffened when he saw the robber holding a gun to his boss's head. The robber pulled the gun barrel away from Castle's head and motioned with the muzzle toward the vault.\n\n\"Both of you,\" he said calmly, \"into the vault.\"\n\nThere was no thought of resistance. Castle rose from his desk and led the way into the vault while the robber stepped quickly to the window to check the street for anyone heading for the bank. Except for a few women shopping and a passing beer wagon, the street was quiet.\n\nThe interior of the vault was well lit, with an Edison brass lamp hanging from the steel ceiling. Except for the chest containing the gold, stacks of bills, mostly the payroll for the mining companies, covered the shelves. The robber threw the gunnysack at the teller.\n\n\"Okay, Roy, fill it with all the greenbacks you have.\"\n\nRoy did as he was told. With trembling hands, he began sweeping the piles of bills of various denominations into the sack. By the time he was finished, the sack was stretched to the limit of its burlap fibers and seemed to be the size of a well-filled laundry bag.\n\n\"Now, lay down on the floor,\" ordered the robber.\n\nCastle and Roy, believing the robber was now about to make his getaway, stretched out flat on the floor, with their hands stretched over their heads. The robber pulled a heavy woolen scarf from one of his pockets and wrapped it around the muzzle of his automatic. Then he systematically shot both men in the head. It sounded more like two loud thumps than the sharp crack of gunfire. Without another second's hesitation, he heaved the sack over one shoulder and walked from the vault without looking back.\n\nUnfortunately, he wasn't finished. The woman under the counter moaned and tried to rise to her elbows. With utter indifference, he leaned down, lowered the gun, and shot her in the head like he had the bank owner and teller. There was no remorse, not the slightest hint of emotion. He didn't care whether any of them left families behind. He had murdered three defenseless people in cold blood with as little interest as he might have shown stepping on a column of ants.\n\nHe paused to search for one of the shell casings he thought he'd heard fall to the floor from inside the scarf wrapped around the gun but could not find it. He gave up and walked casually from the bank, noting with satisfaction that no one had heard the muted gunshots.\n\nWith the gunnysack bulging with cash slung over his shoulder, the man walked through the alley running behind the bank. Stepping into a small alcove under a stairway where he would not be seen, he took off the grimy clothes, removed the gray wig and beard, and threw everything in a small valise. Now revealed in an expensively tailored suit, he perched a bowler hat at a jaunty angle on his head and its neatly brushed carpet of red hair. He slipped on a necktie and knotted it before also tossing the scuffed boots in the valise. He was a short man, and the soles and heels of the boot had been raised nearly two inches. Next, he pulled on a pair of English-made leather shoes, with lifts in the heel to make him appear taller, before turning his attention to a large leather suitcase he had hidden under a canvas tarp along with a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. Glancing up and down the alley every few seconds, he transferred the huge pile of cash from the gunnysack to the suitcase, which he strapped on a rack over the rear wheel of the motorcycle. The valise containing his disguise he tied on a front rack.\n\nAt that moment, the man heard shouting coming down the alley from Tombstone Canyon Road. Someone had discovered the bodies in the Bisbee National Bank. Unconcerned, he pushed the motorcycle forward and started the three-horsepower, twenty-five-cubic-inch one-cylinder engine. He threw one leg over the seat and rode deserted back alleys to the railroad yard. He moved unseen along a siding where a freight train had stopped to take on water.\n\nHis timing was perfect.\n\nAnother five minutes and the freight train would have moved back onto the main line and headed toward Tucson. Without being noticed by the engineer and the brakeman, as they pulled a big pipe down from the wooden tank into the tender for water to make steam, the man took a key from his vest pocket and opened the padlock to the door to a boxcar that was marked with a painted sign that read O'BRIAN FURNITURE COMPANY, DENVER. He slid the door open on its rollers. The presence of the boxcar in this time and place was no coincidence. Acting as a fictitious representative of the equally fictitious O'Brian Furniture Company, he had paid cash for it to be included in the freight train passing through Bisbee, en route from El Paso, Texas, to Tucson, Arizona.\n\nHe took a wide plank, attached by brackets to the side of the boxcar, and used it as a ramp to ride the Harley-Davidson aboard. Then he quickly closed the rolling door and reached through a small hinged opening to replace the lock as the whistle on the engine tooted and the train began moving forward from the siding onto the main track.\n\nFrom the outside, the boxcar looked like any other that had been in use for several years. The paint was faded, and the wooden sides were dented and chipped. But its appearance was deceptive. Even the lock on the door was fake, making it look like the car was buttoned up tight. It was the inside that was the most deceptive, however. Instead of an empty interior or one packed with furniture, it was luxurious, ornately constructed, and furnished as ostentatiously as any private railcar belonging to the president of a railroad. Mahogany paneling spread over the walls and ceiling. The floor was covered by a thick carpet. The d\u00e9cor and furniture were extravagantly magnificent. There was an opulent sitting room, a palatial bedroom, and an efficient kitchen with the latest innovations for preparing gourmet meals.\n\nThere were no servants, porters, or cooks.\n\nThe man worked alone, without accomplices who might reveal his true name and occupation. No one knew of his clandestine operations as a bank robber and mass murderer. Even the railroad car had been built and decorated in Canada before being secretly transported across the border into the United States.\n\nThe robber relaxed in a plush leather settee, uncorked a bottle of 1884 Ch\u00e2teau La Houringue Bordeaux, chilled in buckets, and poured himself a glass.\n\nHe knew the town sheriff would quickly form a posse. But they would be looking for an old mangy miner who murdered while in a drunken fit. The posse would fan out, searching the town, almost certain he was too poor to own a horse. None of the townspeople had ever seen him come and go on horseback or driving a buggy.\n\nImmensely pleased with himself, he sipped the wine from a crystal glass and studied the leather suitcase. Was this his fifteenth, or was it his sixteenth, successful robbery? he mused. The thirty-eight men and women and two children he had killed never entered his mind. He estimated the take of the mining payroll at $325,000 to $330,000. Most robbers wouldn't have come close to guessing the amount inside the case.\n\nBut it was easy for him, since he was a banker himself.\n\nThe sheriff, his deputies, and the posse would never find the murdering robber. It was as if he had disappeared into thin air. No one ever thought to connect him with the dapper man riding through town on a motorcycle.\n\nThe hideous crime would become one of Bisbee's most enduring mysteries.\n\n## 2\n\nSEPTEMBER 15, 1906 THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER BELOW HANNIBAL, MISSOURI\n\nSOON AFTER THE TWENTIETH CENTURY WAS BORN, steamboating on the Mississippi began to fade. Few passenger steamboats still reigned in style. The Saint Peter was one of the last grand passenger boats to have survived the onslaught of the railroads. Two hundred fifty feet long and seventy-five feet wide, she was a splendid example of palatial elegance, with side-curving stairways, plush passenger cabins, and a magnificent main dining room with the finest food to be found anywhere. Ostentatious salons were provided for the ladies while the men smoked their cigars and played cards in handsome rooms adorned with mirrors and paintings.\n\nCard games on steamboats plying the river were notorious for their cardsharp gamblers. Many passengers left steamboats poorer than when they boarded. At one table in the gambling room of the Saint Peter, in a quiet corner away from the main action, two men were enjoying a game of five-card stud.\n\nAt first glance, the scene looked like any other in the room, but a closer look revealed that no chips sat on the green felt table.\n\nJoseph Van Dorn calmly studied his hand before laying down two cards. \"A good thing we're not in this for the money,\" he said, smiling, \"or I would owe you eight thousand dollars.\"\n\nColonel Henry Danzler, director of the United States government's Criminal Investigation Department, smiled in return. \"If you cheated like I do, we'd be even.\"\n\nVan Dorn was a congenial man in his early forties. His cheeks and chin were buried under a magnificent red burnsides beard that matched what remained of the hair that circled his bald dome. His face was dominated by a Roman nose, and his brown eyes looked sad and melancholy, but his looks and manner were deceiving.\n\nIrish-born, he bore a name known and respected throughout the country for tenacity in tracking down murderers, robbers, and other desperados. The criminal underworld of the time knew he would chase them to the ends of the earth. Founder and chief of the renowned Van Dorn Detective Agency, he and his agents had prevented political assassinations, hunted down many of the West's most feared outlaws, and helped organize the country's first secret service agency.\n\n\"You'd still deal yourself more aces than me,\" he said affably.\n\nDanzler was an enormous man, tall and mammoth in girth, weighing slightly over three hundred pounds, yet he could move as effortlessly as a tiger. His salt-and-pepper hair was immaculately trimmed and brushed, shining under the light that streamed in through the boat's big windows. His blue-green eyes had a soft glow to them, yet they seemed to analyze and record everything going on about him.\n\nA veteran and hero of the Spanish American War, he had charged up San Juan Hill with Captain John Pershing and his black \"Buffalo Soldiers\" of the Tenth Cavalry and had served with distinction in the Philippines against the Moros. When the government's Criminal Investigation Department was authorized by Congress, President Roosevelt asked him to become its first director.\n\nDanzler opened the lid of a large pocket watch and stared at the hands. \"Your man is five minutes late.\"\n\n\"Isaac Bell is my best agent. He always gets his man\u2014and occasionally a woman, too. If he's late, there's a good reason.\"\n\n\"You say he's the one who apprehended the assassin Ramos Kelly before he could shoot President Roosevelt?\"\n\nVan Dorn nodded. \"And he rounded up the Barton gang in Missouri. He shot and killed three of them before the other two surrendered to him.\"\n\nDanzler stared at the famous detective. \"And you think he's the man to stop our mass murderer and bank robber?\"\n\n\"If anyone can stop the killer, Isaac can.\"\n\n\"What is his family background?\"\n\n\"Very wealthy,\" answered Van Dorn. \"His father and grandfather were bankers. You've heard of the American States Bank of Boston?\"\n\nDanzler nodded. \"Indeed. I have an account there myself.\"\n\n\"Isaac is very affluent. His grandfather left him five million dollars in his will, thinking Isaac would take his place as head of the bank one day. It never happened. Isaac preferred detective work to banking. I'm lucky to have him.\"\n\nDanzler caught a shadow on his arm. He looked up and found himself looking into soft blue eyes with a slight violet cast, eyes that had looked over horizons to see what was beyond. The effect was almost mesmerizing, as though they were searching deep into Danzler's inner thoughts.\n\nDanzler could size up a man as precisely as he could a horse. The intruder was tall and lean, stood well over six feet, and weighed no more than one hundred seventy-five pounds. A large flaxen mustache that covered his entire upper lip conformed with the thick mass of neatly barbered blond hair. His hands and fingers were long and nimble and hung loosely, almost casually, at his sides. There was a no-nonsense look about him. The colonel judged that this was a man who dealt with substance and did not endure fools or insignificant and phony candor. He had a determined set to the chin and lips that were spread in a friendly smile. Danzler guessed his age at about thirty.\n\nHe was dressed immaculately in a white linen suit without a wrinkle. A heavy gold chain dipped from a left vest pocket that was attached to a large gold watch inside the right pocket. A low-crowned hat with a wide brim sat squarely on his head. Danzler might have pegged him as a dandy, but the look of elegance was betrayed by a pair of worn leather boots that had seen many hours in stirrups. Bell carried a thin valise and set it down beside the table.\n\n\"Colonel Danzler,\" said Van Dorn, \"this is the man I told you about, Isaac Bell.\"\n\nDanzler offered his hand but did not rise from his chair. \"Joe here tells me that you always get your man.\"\n\nBell grinned slightly. \"I'm afraid Mr. Van Dorn has exaggerated. I was ten minutes too late when Butch Cassidy and Harry Longabaugh sailed for Argentina three years ago from New York. Their boat pulled away from the dock before I could apprehend them.\"\n\n\"How many agents or law enforcement officers were with you?\"\n\nBell shrugged. \"I intended to handle the matter on my own.\"\n\n\"Wasn't Longabaugh the Sundance Kid?\" asked Danzler.\n\nBell nodded. \"He got the nickname when he tried to steal a horse in Sundance, Wyoming. He was caught and spent eighteen months in jail.\"\n\n\"Surely you didn't expect to subdue them without a fight.\"\n\n\"I think it is safe to say that they would have resisted,\" said Bell, without explaining how he would have single-handedly captured the former members of the infamous Wild Bunch.\n\nVan Dorn sat back in his chair, made no comment, and gave the colonel a smug look.\n\n\"Why don't you sit down, Mr. Bell, and join our little game?\"\n\nBell looked at the empty table quizzically and then at Danzler. \"You appear to have no chips.\"\n\n\"Just a friendly little game,\" said Van Dorn, shuffling the deck of cards and dealing out three hands. \"So far, I owe the colonel eight thousand dollars.\"\n\nBell sat down, the quizzical look altered to one of understanding. The game was a pretense. His chief and the colonel were sitting in the corner away from the other gamblers and playing as if they were in a serious game. He laid his hat in his lap, picked up his cards, and acted as if he were deep in thought.\n\n\"Are you familiar with the swarm of bank robberies and murders that have occurred around the western states in the past two years?\" Danzler inquired.\n\n\"Only in conversation,\" replied Bell. \"Mr. Van Dorn has kept me busy on other cases.\"\n\n\"What do you actually know about the crimes?\"\n\n\"Only that the robber murders anyone in the bank during the act, escapes like a spirit, and leaves no evidence behind that might incriminate him.\"\n\n\"Anything else?\" Danzler probed.\n\n\"Whoever he is,\" answered Bell, \"he is very, very good. There have been no leads and no breaks in the investigation.\" He paused and stared at Van Dorn. \"Is that why I've been called here?\"\n\nVan Dorn nodded. \"I want you to take over the case as chief investigator.\"\n\nBell threw down a card, picked up the card that Danzler dealt, and slipped it in the fan, which he held in his left hand.\n\n\"Are you a lefty, Mr. Bell?\" asked Danzler out of curiosity.\n\n\"No. Actually, I'm right-handed.\"\n\nVan Dorn laughed softly. \"Isaac can draw the derringer he hides in his hat, cock it, and pull the trigger faster than you can blink.\"\n\nDanzler's respect for Bell grew during the conversation. He drew back his coat and revealed a 1903 Colt .38 caliber hammerless automatic. \"I'll take Joe's word for it, but it would be interesting to put it to the test\u2014\" Danzler had not finished the sentence when he found himself staring into the twin muzzles of a derringer.\n\n\"Age has slowed you, Henry,\" said Van Dorn. \"Either that or your mind wandered.\"\n\n\"I have to admit, he is very fast,\" Danzler said, visibly impressed.\n\n\"What office will I work out of?\" Bell asked Van Dorn as he slipped the derringer back in his hat, where it fit in a small pocket inside the crown.\n\n\"The crimes have occurred from Placerville, California, in the west, to Terlingua, Texas, to the east,\" replied Van Dorn. \"And from Bisbee, Arizona, in the south, to Bozeman, Montana, in the north. I think it best if you operated in the center.\"\n\n\"That would be Denver.\"\n\nVan Dorn nodded. \"As you know, we have an office there with six experienced agents.\"\n\n\"I've worked with two of them three years ago,\" said Bell. \"Curtis and Irvine are good men.\"\n\n\"Yes, I forgot,\" Van Dorn said, now recalling. \"I might add, Colonel, that Isaac was responsible for the apprehension of Jack Ketchum, who was later hung for two murders committed during a train robbery.\" He paused and reached under the table and produced an identical valise to the one Bell had carried into the gambling salon. Bell then passed his empty valise to Van Dorn. \"Inside, you will find the reports on all the crimes. Every lead so far has led up a blind alley.\"\n\n\"When do I start?\"\n\n\"At the next landing, which is Clarksville, you will depart and take the first train to Independence. From there, you will be given a ticket on the Union Pacific express to Denver. You can digest and study what little clues and evidence we've gathered. Once you arrive, you'll take up the hunt for the murdering scum.\" A look of anger and frustration clouded Van Dorn's brown eyes. \"Sorry, I didn't give you a chance to pack when you left Chicago, but I wanted you to start as soon as possible.\"\n\n\"Not to worry, sir,\" Bell said with a faint smile. \"Fortunately, I packed two suitcases for the duration.\"\n\nVan Dorn's eyebrows raised. \"You knew?\"\n\n\"Let's say I made an educated guess.\"\n\n\"Keep us informed on your manhunt,\" said Danzler. \"If you need any help from the government, I'll do all in my power to assist you.\"\n\n\"Thank you, sir,\" Bell acknowledged. \"I'll be in contact as soon as I get a firm grip on the situation.\"\n\nVan Dorn said, \"I'll be working in our Chicago office. Since transcontinental telephone service has yet to run from St. Louis across the prairie to Denver and beyond to California, you'll have to telegraph me on your progress.\"\n\n\"If any,\" Danzler muttered sarcastically. \"You're up against the best criminal brain this country has ever known.\"\n\n\"I promise I won't rest until I capture the man responsible for these hideous crimes.\"\n\n\"I wish you good luck,\" Van Dorn said sincerely.\n\n\"Not to change the subject,\" Danzler spoke with satisfaction as he laid his card hand on the green felt, \"I have three queens.\"\n\nVan Dorn shrugged and threw his cards on the table. \"Beats me.\"\n\n\"And you, Mr. Bell?\" said Danzler with a crafty grin.\n\nIsaac Bell slowly laid his cards on the table one by one. \"A straight flush,\" he said matter-of-factly. Then, without another word, he rose and walked briskly from the salon.\n\n## 3\n\nLATE IN THE MORNING, A MAN DROVE AN OLD WAGON, hitched to a pair of mules, past the cemetery outside the town of Rhyolite, Nevada. The graves had simple wooden fences around them, with the names of the deceased carved on markers made of wood. Many were children who had died of typhoid or cholera, aggravated by the hard family life of a mining town.\n\nThe July heat in the Mojave Desert was unbearable under the direct rays of the sun. The driver of the wagon sat beneath a tattered umbrella attached to the seat. Black hair fell past his neck but just short of the shoulders. His head was protected by a stained Mexican sombrero. His unseen eyes peered through the stained-blue glass of spectacles, and a handkerchief wrapped the lower half of his face, to keep out the dust raised by the mules' hooves. The manner in which he was hunched over made it difficult, if not impossible, to determine his build.\n\nAs he rode by, he stared with interest at a house a miner had built using thousands of cast-off saloon beer bottles embedded in adobe mud. The bottoms of the bottles faced outward with the mouths facing in, the green glass casting the interior in an eerie sort of light.\n\nHe came to the railroad tracks and drove the mules along the road next to them. The tops of the rails gleamed like narrow twin mirrors in the blinding sun. These were the tracks of the Las Vegas & Tonopah Railroad, which wound through the middle of the residential district of the town.\n\nThe wagon rolled slowly past more than eighty railcars on a siding. They had been unloaded of their incoming freight. The empty cars were now being filled with outgoing ore for the mills. The driver took a brief glance at a boxcar being coupled to a thirty-car train. The lettering on the side said O'BRIAN FURNITURE COMPANY, DENVER. He glanced at the dial of his cheap pocket watch\u2014he carried nothing that might help identify him\u2014and noted that the train was not scheduled to leave for Las Vegas for another forty-four minutes.\n\nA quarter of a mile later, he came to the Rhyolite train station. The substantial building was a mixture of Gothic and early Spanish styles. The ornate depot had been built of stone, cut and hauled from Las Vegas. A passenger train that had steamed in from San Francisco sat alongside the station platform. The passengers had disembarked, and the seats cleaned by porters, and the train was now filling with people heading back toward the coast.\n\nThe driver reached the center of town, where the streets were bustling with activity. He turned to stare at a large mercantile establishment, the HD & LD PORTER store. Beneath the sign was a slogan painted on a board that hung above the front entrance. It read We handle all things but Whiskey.\n\nThe 1904 gold rush had resulted in a substantial small city of solidly constructed buildings built to last a long time. By 1906, Rhyolite was a thriving community of over six thousand people. It had quickly graduated from a busy tent town to an important city meant to stand far into the distant future.\n\nThe main buildings were constructed of stone and concrete, making the small metropolis of Rhyolite the major city of southern Nevada. A four-story bank came into sight, a fine-looking structure that gave it a look of substance and wealth. Half a block away, a three-story stone office building was going up.\n\nThere was a post office, an opera house, a twenty-bed hospital, comfortable hotels, two churches, three banks, and a large school. Up-to-date, Rhyolite boasted an efficient telephone system and its own electrical-generating plant. It also had a booming red-light district and forty saloons and eight dance halls.\n\nThe man driving the wagon was not interested in anything the town had to offer except some of the assets of the John S. Cook Bank. He knew that the safe inside could hold over a million dollars in silver coins. But it was far easier to carry cash from the payrolls of the mines, and he had yet to take a single silver, or gold, piece. He figured that with eighty-five companies engaged in mining the surrounding hills, the payroll take should be quite considerable.\n\nAs usual, he had planned well, living in a boardinghouse for miners while entering the Cook Bank on numerous occasions to make small deposits in an account he had opened under a false name. A brief friendship was struck up with the bank's manager, who was led into thinking the town newcomer was a mining engineer. The man's appearance had been altered with a wig of black hair, a mustache, and a Vandyke beard. He also walked with a limp, which he said was the result of a mining accident. It proved to be a flawless disguise with which to study the banking habits of the citizens and the times when the bank was doing little business.\n\nAs he drove the wagon and mules into town toward the Cook Bank, however, his image had been changed from that of a mining engineer to that of a small-time freight hauler to the mines. He looked like any one of the town's haulers, struggling to make a living in the broiling heat of the desert during summer. He reined in the mules at the rear of a stable. When he was certain no one was observing him, he lifted a dummy dressed exactly the same as himself and tied it to the seat of the wagon. Then he led the mules back toward Broadway, the main street running through town. Just before reaching the concrete walkway in front of the bank's entrance, he slapped the mules on their rumps and sent them off, pulling the wagon down the street through the main part of town, his dummy likeness sitting upright on the seat and holding the reins.\n\nHe checked for customers approaching the bank. None of the people milling around the town seemed headed in that direction. He looked up at the four-story building, glancing at the gold paint on the windows of the upper floor advertising a dentist and a doctor. Another sign, with a hand pointing downward, indicated that the town post office was in the basement.\n\nHe strolled into the bank and looked around the lobby. It was empty except for a man making a withdrawal. The customer took his money from the teller, turned, and walked from the bank without glancing at the stranger.\n\nThere goes a lucky man, the robber thought.\n\nIf the customer had bothered to notice him, he would have been shot dead. The robber never left anyone behind to identify the least detail about him. Then there was always the possibility, although slim, that someone might see through his disguise.\n\nHe had learned from conversations in the neighboring saloons that the bank was run by a manager for a company of men who were owners of the region's most productive mines, especially the Montgomery-Shoshone Mine whose original claim had grossed nearly two million dollars.\n\nSo far, so good, thought the robber as he leaped over the counter, landing on his feet next to the startled teller. He pulled the automatic from his boot and pressed the muzzle against the teller's head.\n\n\"Do not move, and do not think of stepping on the alarm button under the counter or I'll splatter your brains on the wall.\"\n\nThe teller could not believe what was happening. \"Is this really a holdup?\" he stammered.\n\n\"It is that,\" replied the robber. \"Now, walk into the manager's office very slowly and act as if nothing is happening.\"\n\nThe frightened teller moved toward an office with a closed door whose etched glass made it difficult to see in or out. He knocked.\n\n\"Yes, come on in,\" came a voice from the other side.\n\nThe teller Fred pushed open the door and was roughly shoved inside, losing his balance and falling across the manager's desk. The sign on the desk, HERBERT WILKINS, was knocked to the floor. Wilkins swiftly took in the situation and reached for a revolver under his desk. He was five seconds too late. The robber had learned about the weapon from the manager himself, while talking at a nearby saloon.\n\n\"Do not touch that gun,\" snapped the robber, as if he were psychic.\n\nWilkins was not a man who frightened easily. He stared at the robber, taking in every inch of his appearance. \"You'll never get away with it,\" he said contemptuously.\n\nThe robber spoke in a cold, steady voice. \"I have before and I will do so again.\" He motioned toward the imposing safe that stood nearly eight feet high. \"Open it!\"\n\nWilkins looked the robber square in the eye. \"No, I don't think I will.\"\n\nThe robber wasted no time. He wrapped the muzzle of his automatic in a heavy towel and shot the teller between the eyes. Then he turned to Wilkins. \"I may leave here without a dime, but you won't live to see it.\"\n\nWilkins stood, horrified, staring down at the spreading pool of blood around Fred's head. He looked at the smoldering towel where the bullet had passed through, well knowing it was unlikely that anyone in the building had heard the gunshot. As if in a trance, he walked to the safe and began turning the combination lock to the required numbers. After half a minute, he pulled down on the latch and the massive steel door swung open.\n\n\"Take it and be damned!\" he hissed.\n\nThe robber merely smiled and shot Wilkins in the temple. The bank manager had barely struck the floor when the robber strode quickly to the front door, slammed it shut, hung a CLOSED sign in the window, and pulled down the shades. Then he methodically cleaned out the safe of all bills, transferring them into a laundry bag he carried tied around his waist under his shirt. When the sack was filled until it bulged in every seam, he stuffed the remaining bills in his pant pockets and boots. The safe cleaned of all money, the robber stared briefly at the gold and silver coins inside and took just one gold souvenir.\n\nThere was a heavy iron rear door to the bank that opened onto a narrow street. The robber unlocked the door's inside latch, cracked the door open, and scanned the street. It was lined on the opposite side with residential houses.\n\nA group of young boys were playing baseball a block from the bank. Not good. This was entirely unexpected by the robber. In his many hours of observing the streets around the Cook Bank, this was the first time he had found children playing in the street behind the bank. He was on a time schedule and had to reach the railyard and his secret boxcar in twelve minutes. Shouldering the bag so his face was shielded on the right side, he walked around the ball game in progress and continued up the street, where he ducked into an alley.\n\nFor the most part, the boys ignored him. Only one stared at the poorly dressed man toting a big sack over his right shoulder. What struck the boy as odd was that the man wore a Mexican sombrero, a style that was seldom seen around Rhyolite. Most men in town wore fedoras, derbies, or miner's caps. There was also something else about the raggedy man...Then another boy yelled, and the boy turned back to the game, barely in time to catch a pop fly.\n\nThe robber tied the sack around his shoulders so that it hung on his back. The bicycle he'd parked earlier behind a dentist's office was sitting there behind a barrel that had been placed to catch runoff water from the building's drainpipe. He mounted the seat and began pedaling along Armagosa Street, past the red-light district, until he came to the railyard.\n\nA brakeman was walking along the track toward the caboose at the end of the train. The robber couldn't believe his bad luck. Despite his meticulous planning, fate had dealt him a bad hand. Unlike with his other robberies and murders, this time he had been noticed by a stupid young boy. And now this brakeman. Never had he encountered so many eyes that might have observed him during his escape. There was nothing he could do but see it through.\n\nLuckily, the brakeman did not look in the robber's direction. He was going from car to car checking the grease in the axle boxes of the trucks and wheels the boxcars rode on. If the brass sleeve that rotated inside the box did not receive enough lubricant, the friction would heat the end of the axle to a dangerous level. The weight of the car could break the axle off and cause a disastrous crash.\n\nAs the robber cycled past, the brakeman did not bother to look up. He instead went about his business, trying to complete his inspection before the train departed for Tonopah and then on to Sacramento.\n\nAlready, the engineer was looking at his gauges to make sure he had enough steam to move the heavy train. The robber hoped the brakeman would not turn back and witness him entering his private boxcar. Quickly, he unlocked and slid open the door. He threw the bicycle inside and then climbed a small ladder up to the door, dragging the heavy money sack over the threshold.\n\nOnce inside the boxcar, the robber peered down the length of the train. The brakeman was climbing aboard the caboose, which housed the train crew. There was no sign he'd witnessed the robber enter the boxcar.\n\nSecure inside his palatial car, the robber relaxed and read a copy of the Rhyolite Herald. He could not help but wonder what the paper would print the following day about the bank robbery and the killing of its manager and teller. Again, as he had so many times earlier, he felt no remorse. The deaths never entered his mind again.\n\nLater, besides the mystery of how the robber\/killer had escaped without a trace, the other puzzle was the wagon found outside of town on the road toward Bullfrog. The wagon was empty and appeared to have been driven by a dummy. The posse that chased it down was mystified.\n\nSheriff Josh Miller did put two and two together, but his speculation went nowhere. Nothing made sense. The desperado left no clues.\n\nThe robbery and murders in Rhyolite became another enigma that went unsolved.\n\n## 4\n\nTHE SUMMER SUNLIGHT HEIGHTENED THE CONTRAST of colors in the mile-high altitude of Colorado. The sky was free of clouds, a vivid blue that spread over the city of Denver like a quilt. The temperature was a comfortable eighty-one degrees.\n\nIsaac Bell closed the door to his stateroom and left the train by stepping off the observation platform at the rear of the Pullman car. He paused to look up at the clock tower of the Gothic-style Union Station. Built of stone hauled down from the Rocky Mountains, the imposing three-story structure stretched a quarter of a mile.\n\nThe arrowhead-tipped hands of the huge clock read 11:40. Bell lifted his large gold watch from the vest pocket of his tailored linen suit and glanced at the hands that pointed to Roman numerals. His time was 11:43. He smiled at himself with satisfaction, knowing for certain that the big clock-tower clock was three minutes slow.\n\nHe walked down the redbrick platform to the baggage car, identified his trunks, and hailed a porter. \"My name is Bell. Could you please see that my trunks are sent to the Brown Palace Hotel?\"\n\nThe porter smiled broadly at the gold coin Bell laid in his hand and rubbed it almost reverently. \"Yes, sir, I'll deliver them myself.\"\n\n\"I'm also expecting a large wooden crate on a later train. Can I count on you to make sure it is delivered to the Union Pacific freight warehouse?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, I'll take care of it.\" Still rubbing the gold piece, the porter grinned broadly.\n\n\"I'd be grateful.\"\n\n\"May I take that for you?\" said the porter, nodding at the valise in Bell's hand.\n\n\"I'll keep it with me, thank you.\"\n\n\"Can I hail you a taxi?\"\n\n\"That won't be necessary. I'll take the tram.\"\n\nBell strolled through the high-ceilinged grand lobby of the depot, with its majestic hanging chandeliers, past the rows of high-backed oak waiting benches and out the main entrance, flanked by twin Grecian columns. He crossed Wyncoop Street onto 17th Street and passed under the newly erected Mizpah Arch, a gatelike structure with a pair of American flags flying on top that was built to welcome, and bid farewell to, train travelers. Mizpah, Bell knew, meant watchtower in ancient Hebrew.\n\nTwo ladies wearing light summer dresses, gloves, and ornate hats decorated with flowers drove by in an electric battery\u2013powered car. Bell doffed his hat, and with nods and smiles they acknowledged the attention of the attractive man as they motored up 17th Street toward the state capitol building.\n\nHorse-drawn wagons and carriages still outnumbered the few automobiles that chugged up and down the streets of the city. A Denver Tramway Company trolley car clanged around the corner off Wazee Street and approached the end of the block, where it stopped to let off and take on passengers. The horse-drawn railways were a thing of the past and electric trolleys ruled the streets, reaching every neighborhood in Denver.\n\nBell climbed the steps and gave ten cents to the motorman. The bell was clanged and the big red trolley clattered up 17th Street. Three-and four-story brick buildings filled the next fourteen blocks. The sidewalks were crowded with people on a typical business day. The men wore black or gray suits and ties, while the women strolled in the long dresses whose skirts rose just above the ankles. Most of the women wore flamboyant hats and carried parasols.\n\nHe observed with interest a store that was selling Cadillac motorcars. The awnings were rolled out, shadowing the windows and revealing the vehicles inside. He glanced at the street signs so he could recall the location. An enthusiast of motorcars, he owned a Locomobile race car that had been driven by Joe Tracy in the 1905 Vanderbilt Cup road race on Long Island, in New York, placing third. Bell had converted it to street driving by adding fenders and headlamps.\n\nHe also owned a bright red motorcycle. The newest racing model, its V-Twin engine put out three and a half horsepower. It had an innovative twist grip throttle, weighed only one hundred twenty pounds, and could whip over the roads at nearly sixty miles an hour.\n\nWhen the trolley rattled to a stop at California and 17th Streets, Bell stepped down the stair to the pavement and sauntered over to the sidewalk. It had been three years since he had set foot in Denver. Tall buildings stood on almost every corner, and the construction never stopped. He walked a block to the Colorado Building, a brown stone structure that rose eight stories on 16th and California Streets.\n\nThe windows were high and shielded by awnings that matched the brown exterior of the walls. The overhang above the top floor stretched nearly ten feet over the sidewalk far below. Hedgecock & Jones and the Braman Clothing Company occupied the street level. Above them were several different businesses, including the Fireman's Fund Insurance Company and the Van Dorn Detective Agency.\n\nBell turned into the lobby and moved through a group of office workers who were streaming out of the building on their lunch break. The floor, walls, and ceiling were beautifully constructed of green Italian marble the color of jade. He entered an Otis elevator behind two pretty young ladies and moved to the rear of the car as the operator closed the steel scissor-gate door. As was the custom, Bell played the gentleman and removed his wide-brimmed hat.\n\nThe elevator operator pivoted the handle on the curved throttle housing, sending the elevator toward the upper floors at a leisurely pace. The women exited at the fifth floor, chatting gaily. They both turned and gave Bell a bashful glance before disappearing down the hallway.\n\nThe operator stopped the elevator and opened the door. \"Eighth floor, and a good afternoon to you, sir,\" he said cheerily.\n\n\"Same to you,\" replied Bell.\n\nHe exited into a hallway painted a muted Mexican red above with walnut wainscot halfway up the wall below. He turned right and came to a door with etched lettering on the upper glass that advertised THE VAN DORN DETECTIVE AGENCY. Beneath was the agency's slogan: We never give up, never.\n\nThe antechamber was painted white, with two padded wooden chairs and a desk, behind which a young woman sat primly in a swivel chair. Van Dorn was not a man to waste money on ostentatious d\u00e9cor. The only embellishment was a photo of the head man hanging on the wall behind the secretary.\n\nShe looked up and smiled sweetly, admiring the well-dressed man standing opposite her. She was a pretty woman, with soft brown eyes and wide shoulders. \"May I help you, sir?\"\n\n\"Yes. I'd like to see Arthur Curtis and Glenn Irvine.\"\n\n\"Are they expecting you?\"\n\n\"Please tell them Isaac Bell is here.\"\n\nShe sucked in her breath. \"Oh, Mr. Bell. I should have known. Mr. Curtis and Mr. Irvine did not expect you until tomorrow.\"\n\n\"I managed to catch an earlier train out of Independence, Missouri.\" Bell looked at the sign on her desk. \"You're Miss Agnes Murphy?\"\n\nShe held up her left hand, displaying a wedding band. \"Mrs. Murphy.\"\n\nBell smiled his beguiling smile. \"I hope you don't mind if I simply call you Agnes, since I'll be working here for a time.\"\n\n\"Not at all.\"\n\nShe rose from her desk, and he could see she wore a pleated blue cotton skirt with her white fluffy blouse. Her hair was piled atop her head in the fashion of the Gibson girl, which was so popular then. Her petticoats rustled as she went through the door to the inner offices.\n\nAlways curious, Bell moved around the desk and looked down at the letter Mrs. Murphy had been typing on a Remington typewriter. It was addressed to Van Dorn, and spelled out the superintendent of the western states' displeasure at having Bell come in and take over the unsolved case. Bell had never met Nicholas Alexander, who headed the Denver office, but he was determined to be courteous and polite to the man despite any antagonism.\n\nBell moved away from Mrs. Murphy's desk and stood looking out the window over the rooftops of the city when Alexander walked into the anteroom. He looked more like the bookkeeper of a funeral parlor than the chief investigator who had unraveled many crimes and brought the offenders to full justice. He was a short man, his head barely coming up even with Bell's shoulders. He wore a coat that was too large and his trousers were baggy. The high collar of his shirt showed wear and sweat stains. His head was devoid of hair except around the temples and at the rear; the eyebrows were trimmed as neatly as his hair. A pair of pince-nez glasses were clipped to the bridge of his nose in front of almost-sad-looking gray-green eyes.\n\nAlexander held out his hand as his lips spread into a smile that was completely lacking in humor. \"Mr. Bell, I'm honored to meet Van Dorn's finest agent.\"\n\nBell didn't buy the compliment since there was no hint of warmth about it. \"The honor is mine in meeting you,\" Bell replied, nearly biting his tongue. It was obvious Alexander simply thought of Bell as an interloper into his private territory.\n\n\"Please come on back. Before I show you to your new office, we'll have a talk.\"\n\nAlexander abruptly turned and strode stiffly through the door into the inner offices. Mrs. Murphy stood aside and smiled sweetly as they passed.\n\nAlexander's office was positioned in the only corner with a panoramic view of the mountains; the other offices were small and windowless. Bell observed that they were also doorless, offering almost no privacy. Alexander's domain was embellished with cowhide sofas and chairs. His aspen desk was expansive and completely barren of paperwork. Though Alexander's suit was a poor fit and bore wrinkles, he was fastidious about his working habits.\n\nHe seated himself in a high-backed chair behind his desk and motioned Bell to sit in an uncushioned wooden chair on the opposite side. The only thing missing for intimidation, Bell thought, was a platform under Alexander's work space so he could look down on his employees and visitors like a minor god on Mount Olympus.\n\n\"No, thank you,\" Bell said quietly. \"After sitting on a train for two days, I'd prefer a softer seat.\" He lowered his long frame onto one of the sofas.\n\n\"As you wish,\" said Alexander, not pleased with Bell's superior demeanor.\n\n\"You were not here when I worked on a case three years ago.\"\n\n\"No, I came six months later when I was promoted from our Seattle office.\"\n\n\"Mr. Van Dorn spoke very highly of you,\" Bell lied. Van Dorn had not mentioned him.\n\nAlexander folded his hands and leaned across the empty wasteland of his desk. \"I trust he briefed you on the murderer and his operations.\"\n\n\"Not in conversation.\" Bell paused to hold up the valise. \"But he gave me several reports that I examined while riding on the train. I can see why the felon responsible for the robberies and murders is so difficult to pin down. He plans his criminal ventures with extreme care and his techniques appear to be flawless.\"\n\n\"All reasons why he eludes capture.\"\n\n\"After absorbing the material, I do believe his fetish for detail will be his undoing,\" said Bell thoughtfully.\n\nAlexander looked at him suspiciously. \"What, may I ask, brought you to that conclusion?\"\n\n\"His jobs are too perfect, too well timed. One small miscalculation could prove his last.\"\n\n\"I hope we can have a close relationship,\" Alexander said with veiled animosity.\n\n\"I agree,\" said Bell. \"Mr. Van Dorn said I could have Art Curtis and Glenn Irvine on my team, if it is all right with you.\"\n\n\"Not a problem. I wouldn't go against Mr. Van Dorn's wishes. Besides, they told me they worked with you a few years ago.\"\n\n\"Yes, I found them to be dedicated agents.\" Bell came to his feet. \"May I see my office?\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\nAlexander came from behind his desk and stepped into the hallway.\n\nBell saw that all the offices were quite small and quite plain. The furniture was sparse and there were no pictures on the walls. Only one other agent was present in the office, a stranger to Bell whom Alexander did not bother to introduce.\n\nBefore Alexander could point out a closet office, Bell asked innocently, \"Do you have a conference room?\"\n\nAlexander nodded. \"Yes, on the opposite side of the hallway from the offices.\" He stopped, opened a door, and stood aside as Bell walked in.\n\nThe conference room stretched nearly thirty feet and flowed fifteen feet to the side. A long pine table, stained dark and with a polished surface, sat beneath two massive, circular chandeliers. Eighteen leather captain's chairs were spaced evenly around it. The room was paneled in pine that matched the table, the floor carpeted with deep red pile. High windows rose on one wall, allowing the early-afternoon sunlight to illuminate every corner of the room.\n\n\"Very nice,\" said Bell, impressed. \"Very nice.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Alexander with pride showing in his bloodhound eyes. \"I use it frequently for meetings with politicians and influential people in the city. It gives the Van Dorn Detective Agency significant respect and an image of importance.\"\n\n\"It will do nicely,\" Bell said matter-of-factly. \"I'll work in here.\"\n\nAlexander looked directly at Bell, a fiery look in his eyes that suddenly glowed with anger. \"That's not possible. I won't permit it.\"\n\n\"Where is the nearest telegraph office?\"\n\nAlexander seemed taken back. \"Two blocks south on Sixteenth Street and Champa. Why?\"\n\n\"I'll send a message to Mr. Van Dorn requesting the use of your conference room as an operations center. Considering the importance of the case, I'm sure he will give it his blessing.\"\n\nAlexander knew when he was licked. \"I wish you well, Mr. Bell,\" he conceded. \"I will cooperate with you any way I can.\" He then turned and left Bell to return to his suite in the corner. He paused in the doorway. \"Oh, by the way, I've reserved a room for you at the Albany Hotel.\"\n\nBell smiled. \"That won't be necessary. I've booked a suite at the Brown Palace.\"\n\nAlexander appeared confused. \"I can't believe Mr. Van Dorn would allow that on your expense account.\"\n\n\"He didn't. I'm paying for it out of my own funds.\"\n\nNot aware of Bell's prosperous situation, the superintendent of the western states looked completely bewildered. Unable to comprehend, but not wanting to ask questions, he returned to his office in a daze and closed the door, utterly defeated.\n\nBell smiled again and began spreading out the papers he'd carried in the valise on the conference table. Then he stepped into the anteroom and approached Agnes Murphy. \"Agnes, could you let me know when Curtis and Irvine show up?\"\n\n\"I don't expect them back until tomorrow morning. They went up to Boulder on a bank fraud case.\"\n\n\"All right, then. And would you call the building maintenance superintendent and have him come up? I have some alterations to make in the conference room.\"\n\nShe looked at him questioningly. \"Did you say the conference room? Mr. Alexander seldom allows the help to step inside. He keeps it mostly to entertain the town bigwigs.\"\n\n\"While I'm here, it will be my office.\"\n\nAgnes looked at Bell with newly found respect. \"Will you be staying at the Albany Hotel? That's where most all visiting agents stay.\"\n\n\"No, the Brown Palace.\"\n\n\"Mr. Alexander consented to the extra expenditure?\" she asked warily.\n\n\"He had no say in the matter.\"\n\nAgnes Murphy stared after him as if she had just seen the Messiah.\n\nIsaac Bell returned to his office and rearranged the chairs to the conference table so he could have a large work space at one end. After a few minutes, the building superintendent arrived. Bell explained the alterations he wished to make in the room. The end wall was to have a layer of soft material so a map of the western states and towns the killer had hit could be pinned to it. Another layer was to be installed on the inside wall for information, photos, and drawings. The superintendent, after Bell had offered him a twenty-dollar gold piece, promised to have the installation accomplished by noon the next day.\n\nBell spent the rest of the afternoon organizing and planning his hunt for the bank killer.\n\nAt precisely five o'clock, Alexander stuck his head in the door on his way home. \"Are you settling in all right?\" he asked icily.\n\nBell did not bother to look up. \"Yes, thank you.\" He finally looked into Alexander's angry eyes. \"By the way, I'm making some changes in the room. I hope you don't mind. I promise to put it back exactly the way it was when the case is closed.\"\n\n\"Please see that you do.\" Alexander swung his head in a gesture of dismissal and left the office.\n\nBell was not happy that things were not going well between Alexander and him. He had not planned to get in a game of quarrelsome loggerheads with the head of the agency's office, but if he hadn't gone on the attack he knew that Alexander would have walked all over him.\n\n## 5\n\nBUILT IN 1892 BY HENRY C. BROWN ON THE SPOT where he used to pasture his cow before he struck it rich, the hotel was fittingly named the Brown Palace, for the \"Queen City of the Plains,\" as Denver was called. Constructed of red granite and sandstone, the building was in the shape of a ship's bow. The men who made their fortunes in gold and silver stayed there with their wives, who took afternoon tea, and their daughters, who danced away the nights at opulent balls. Presidents McKinley and Roosevelt had stayed there, as well as a few emperors and kings and other members of foreign royalty, not to mention the celebrities of the time, particularly famous stage actors and actresses. The Brown Palace was also embraced by locals and visitors alike because it was the anchor to the busy financial and cultural district of the city.\n\nIt was nearly dark when Bell walked through the 17th Street entrance of the Brown Palace Hotel. He checked in at the desk and looked around the magnificent lobby, which was situated in an atrium that reached up to the ninth floor. The pillars and wainscoting, freighted in by railroad from Mexico and carved from golden onyx, reflected the pastel light that filtered down from the massive stained-glass ceiling. Over seven hundred wrought-iron panels graced the balcony railings, ringing the lobby from the upper floors.\n\nWhat was not generally known was that the owner of the Navarre Hotel and restaurant across the street had had an underground rail system dug from the Brown Palace to his own establishment in order to accommodate gentlemen wishing to enjoy the ladies of an upstairs brothel without being seen entering or leaving.\n\nBell was given his key and entered the elevator, telling the operator which floor his suite was on. A woman stepped in behind him. She stopped at the mirrored wall, turned, and faced the door. She was dressed in a long blue silk gown with a large bow in the back. Her fire opal red hair was fine and silken, pulled back in a bun with curls streaming from it. There were two large feathers rising from the hair. She had an engaging charm about her. She stood tall and erect and nubile, Bell guessed probably between twenty-five and twenty-seven, perhaps younger, judging by her swan neck and face as smooth as alabaster. Her eyes were a golden brown. She was, in Bell's mind, unusually attractive\u2014not quite beautiful, maybe, but very lovely by any standard. He also noticed she wore no wedding ring.\n\nThe woman was dressed as if she meant to attend a party in one of the hotel's ballrooms, Bell reasoned. He was right as usual. The elevator stopped on the second floor, which held the ballrooms and dance floors. He stood aside, hat in hand, and made a slight bow as she exited onto the landing.\n\nShe threw him a smile with surprising warmth and nodded, and said, in a mellow yet husky tone, \"Thank you, Mr. Bell.\"\n\nAt first, it slipped by Bell. Then it hit him like a hammer on a thumb. He was stunned that she knew him, and positive he'd never seen her before. Bell gripped the arm of the elevator operator. \"Hold the door open a moment.\"\n\nBy now, she had mingled in with a crowd that was funneling through the arched doorway of the hotel's grand ballroom. The women wore ravishing gowns in extravagant colors\u2014crimson, peacock blue, emerald green\u2014with ribbons, sprigs, and feathers in their hair. The men were dressed in their finest evening clothes. A banner over the doorway read BENEFIT FOR ST. JOHN'S ORPHANS.\n\nBell stepped back, nodding at the elevator operator. \"Thank you. Please take me up.\"\n\nBell unlocked the door to his suite and found a study, living room, ornate bath, and bedroom with a canopied bed, all furnished in Victorian elegance. His trunks had been opened and his clothes packed in the dresser and hung in the closet by a maid, a service provided to those who reserved suites. The trunks were not in sight. They had been moved from the room and stored in the basement storage area. Bell lost no time in taking a quick bath and shaving.\n\nHe opened his watch and read the time. Thirty minutes had elapsed since he stepped from the elevator. Another fifteen minutes were taken to tie his black tie and insert the shirt studs and cuff links, usually a job that took four hands. It was one of the few times he wished he had a wife to help. Black socks and shoes came next. He did not wear a cummerbund but a black vest instead, with a gold chain running from the left pocket through a buttonhole to the big gold watch in the right pocket. Last, he slipped on a single-breasted black jacket with satin lapels.\n\nOne final view of his reflection in a full seven-foot mirror and he was ready for the evening, whatever it would bring.\n\nThe charity ball was in full swing when he walked inside the grand ballroom and stood unobtrusively behind a tall potted palm. The ballroom was spacious and majestic. The parquet dance floor was laid in an intricate sunburst design and colorful murals adorned the ceiling. He spied the mysterious woman, seated with her back to him, with three couples at table six. She appeared to be alone, without an escort. He sidled up to the hotel director in charge of the evening's event.\n\n\"Pardon me,\" said Bell with a friendly smile, \"but could you tell me the name of the lady in the blue dress at table six?\"\n\nThe director straightened with a haughty look. \"I'm sorry, sir, but we frown on giving information on our guests. Besides, I can't know everybody who comes to the ball.\"\n\nBell passed him a ten-dollar gold certificate. \"Will this jog your memory?\"\n\nWithout a word, the director held up a thin leather book and ran his eyes over the entries. \"The single lady at the table is Miss Rose Manteca, a very wealthy lady from Los Angeles whose family owns a vast ranch. That's all I can tell you.\"\n\nBell patted the director on the shoulder. \"I'm grateful.\"\n\nThe director grinned. \"Good luck.\"\n\nAn orchestra was playing a medley of ragtime and modern dance tunes. Couples were dancing to a song called \"Won't You Come Over to My House.\"\n\nBell walked up behind Rose Manteca and whispered in her ear. \"Would you please consent to dance with me, Miss Manteca?\"\n\nShe turned from the table and looked up. Golden brown eyes looked into a pair of mesmeric violet eyes. She was smooth, Bell thought, but his sudden appearance in evening dress completely stunned her. She lowered her eyes and recovered quickly, but not before her face blushed red.\n\n\"Forgive me, Mr. Bell. I did not expect you so soon.\"\n\n\"So soon?\" he asked. What an odd thing to say, he thought.\n\nShe excused herself to the people at the table and stood up. Gently, he took her by the arm and led her to the dance floor. He slipped his arm around her narrow waist, took her hand, and stepped off smartly with the music.\n\n\"You're a very good dancer,\" she said after he swept her around the floor.\n\n\"Comes from all those years my mother forced me to take lessons so I could impress the debutantes in our city.\"\n\n\"You also dress very well for a detective.\"\n\n\"I grew up in a city where the affluent men lived in tuxedos.\"\n\n\"That would be Boston, would it not?\"\n\nFor once, in his years of investigation, Bell was at a loss, but he recovered and came back. \"And you're from Los Angeles.\"\n\nShe was good, he thought. She didn't bat an eye.\n\n\"You're very knowledgeable,\" she said, unable to fathom his eyes.\n\n\"Not half as knowledgeable as you. What is your interest? How do you know so much about me? Better yet, I should ask why?\"\n\n\"I was under the impression you like to solve mysteries.\" She tried consciously to look past him over his tall shoulder, but she was drawn into those incredible eyes. This was a sensation, a stirring she had not counted on.\n\nThe photographs she had been shown did not do him justice face-to-face. He was far more attractive that she had imagined. He also came off as highly intelligent. This she'd expected, though, and could understand why he was so famous for his intuition. It was as though he was stalking her as she was stalking him.\n\nThe music ended and they stood together on the dance floor waiting for the orchestra to begin the next musical arrangement. He stepped back and ran his eyes from her shoes to the top of her beautifully styled hair. \"You are a very lovely lady. What prompted your interest in me?\"\n\n\"You're an attractive man. I wanted to know you better.\"\n\n\"You knew my name and where I came from before you met me in the elevator. Our meeting was obviously premeditated.\"\n\nBefore she could reply, the orchestra began playing \"In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree,\" and Bell led her around the floor in a foxtrot. He held her against him and gripped her hand tightly in his. Her waist was small, made even smaller by a corset. The top of her head came up even with his chin. He was tempted to press his lips against hers but thought better of it. This was neither the time nor the place. Nor were his thoughts on romance. She was spying on him. That was a given. His mind was trying to formulate a motive. What interest could a total stranger have in him? The only possibilities he could conjure up were that she'd been hired by one of the many criminals he had put behind bars, shot, or seen hanged. A relative or friend out for revenge? She didn't fit the image of someone who associated with the scum he had apprehended over the last ten years.\n\nThe music ended, and she released his hand and stood back. \"You'll have to excuse me, Mr. Bell, but I must return to my friends.\"\n\n\"Can we meet again?\" he asked with a warm smile.\n\nShe slightly shook her head. \"I don't think so.\"\n\nHe ignored her negative reply. \"Have dinner with me tomorrow night.\"\n\n\"Sorry, I'm busy,\" she answered, with a haughtiness in her voice. \"And even in your fancy tuxedo you couldn't bluff your way into the Western Bankers' Ball at the Denver Country Club like you did tonight at the benefit for St. John's Orphans.\" Then she threw out her chin, swept up her long skirt, and walked back to her table.\n\nOnce seated, she stole a glance back at Bell, but he was nowhere to be seen among the crowd. He had completely disappeared.\n\n## 6\n\nTHE FOLLOWING MORNING, BELL WAS THE FIRST ONE in the office, using a skeleton key that could open ninety doors out of a hundred. He was sorting through bank robbery reports at the end of the long table when Arthur Curtis and Glenn Irvine entered the conference room. Bell rose to greet them and shook hands. \"Art, Glenn, good to see you both again.\"\n\nCurtis stood short and rotund, with a rounded stomach neatly encased in a vest whose buttons were stretched to their limit. He had thinning sandy hair, wide megaphone ears, blue eyes, and a smile that showed a maze of teeth that lit up the room. \"We haven't seen you since we tracked down Big Foot Cussler after he robbed that bank in Golden.\"\n\nIrvine placed his hat on a coat stand, revealing a thick head of uncombed brown hair. \"As I remember,\" he said, standing as tall and as scrawny as a scarecrow, \"you led us directly to the cave where he was hiding out.\"\n\n\"A simple matter of deduction,\" Bell said with a tight smile. \"I asked a pair of young boys if they knew of a place where they liked to hide out from their folks for a few days. The cave was the only location within twenty miles, close enough to town so Cussler could sneak in for supplies.\"\n\nCurtis stood in front of the large map of the western United States and thoughtfully studied the little flags signifying the killer's spree. There were sixteen of them. \"Got any intuition on the Butcher Bandit?\"\n\nBell looked at him. \"Butcher Bandit? Is that what they're calling him?\"\n\n\"A reporter from the Bisbee Bugle came up with it. Other newspapers have picked it up and spread the term across the territory.\"\n\n\"It won't help our cause,\" said Bell. \"With that name on everyone's lips, the law-abiding citizens will come down hard on the Van Dorn Detective Agency for not apprehending him.\"\n\n\"That's already started,\" Curtis said, laying the Rocky Mountain News on the table in front of Bell. He stared down at it.\n\nThe lead column was on the robbery and murders in Rhyolite. Half the column was devoted to the question \"Why haven't law enforcement agencies made any progress in the case and captured the Butcher Bandit?\"\n\n\"The heat is on,\" Bell said simply.\n\n\"The heat is on us,\" Irvine added.\n\n\"So what have we got?\" asked Bell, pointing to a stack of files two feet high on the bank crimes piled on the desk in front of him. \"I've studied the reports while coming west on the train. It appears that all we have is that we're not dealing with the typical cowboy turned bank robber.\"\n\n\"He works alone,\" said Curtis, \"and he's devilish clever and evil. But what is most frustrating is that he never leaves a trail for a posse to follow.\"\n\nIrvine nodded his head in agreement. \"It's as though he disappears into the hell he came from before he leaves town.\"\n\n\"No tracks are ever found leading into the surrounding countryside?\" asked Bell.\n\nCurtis shook his head. \"The best trackers in the business have come up dry every time.\"\n\n\"Any evidence he might have holed up in town until the excitement died down?\"\n\n\"None that's ever turned up,\" replied Curtis. \"After the robberies, he was never seen again.\"\n\n\"A ghost,\" murmured Irvine. \"We're dealing with a ghost.\"\n\nBell smiled. \"No, he's human, but a damned smart human.\" He paused and fanned out the files on the conference table. He selected one and opened it, the report on the robbery in Rhyolite, Nevada. \"Our man has a very rigid modus operandi that he sticks with on every bank job. We believe he hangs around for a few days studying the town and its people before robbing the bank.\"\n\n\"He's either a gambler or a risk taker,\" said Curtis.\n\n\"Wrong on both counts,\" Bell corrected him. \"Our man is bold and he's shrewd. We can assume he does his dirty work using disguises, since the people of all the towns he's struck never agree on the appearance of suspicious-looking strangers.\"\n\nIrvine began pacing the conference room, occasionally examining a flag pinned on the map. \"Citizens of the towns recall seeing a drunken bum, a uniformed soldier, a well-to-do merchant, and a small-time freight hauler. But none could tie them to the murders.\"\n\nCurtis looked at the carpeted floor and shrugged. \"How odd there are no witnesses who can give a credible identification.\"\n\n\"Nothing odd about it,\" said Irvine. \"He murders them all. The dead can't speak.\"\n\nBell seemed to ignore the conversation as if he was lost in thought. Then his eyes focused on the map and he said slowly, \"The big question in my mind is why he always kills everyone in the bank during the theft. Even women and children. What does he gain by the slaughter? It can't be that he simply doesn't want to leave witnesses to the robberies, not when he's already been seen around town in disguise...unless...\" He paused. \"There is a new definition created by psychologists for murderers who kill as easily as they brush their teeth. They call them sociopaths. Our man can kill without remorse. He has no emotions, does not know how to laugh or love, and has a heart that is as cold as an iceberg. To him, shooting down a small child holds the same sensitivity as shooting a pigeon.\"\n\n\"Hard to believe there are people that cruel and ruthless,\" muttered Irvine in revulsion.\n\n\"Many of the bandits and gunfighters of the past were sociopaths,\" said Bell. \"They shot other men as easily as if they sneezed. John Wesley Hardin, the famous Texas badman, once shot and killed a man for snoring.\"\n\nCurtis looked steadily at Bell. \"Do you really think he murders everyone in a bank because he enjoys it?\"\n\n\"I do,\" Bell said quietly. \"The bandit gets a weird satisfaction from committing his blood crimes. Another peculiar factor. He makes his escape before the people of the town, including the town sheriff, realized what happened.\"\n\n\"So where does that leave us?\" asked Irvine. \"What avenues do we search?\"\n\nBell looked at him. \"Another of his routine habits is to ignore any gold and take only currency. Glenn, your job is to check out the banks that were robbed and study their records of the serial numbers on the stolen bills. Start in Bozeman, Montana.\"\n\n\"Banks in mining towns aren't in the habit of recording the identifying number of every bill that passes through their hands.\"\n\n\"You might get lucky and find a bank that recorded the numbers of the currency sent from large city banks to make the miners' payroll. If you do, we can trace them. The robber had to either spend the money or exchange the currency through bank deposits and withdrawals. A trail he can't cover up.\"\n\n\"He could have exchanged through foreign financial institutions.\"\n\n\"Maybe, but he would have to spend it overseas. The risk would be too great for him to bring it back into the U.S. I'm betting he kept his loot in the country.\"\n\nThen Bell turned to Curtis. \"Art, you check out all stagecoach and train schedules for any that departed the towns on the same day the robberies took place. If our man couldn't be tracked by a posse, he might easily have taken a train or stage for his getaway. You can begin in Placerville, California.\"\n\n\"Consider it done,\" said Curtis firmly.\n\n\"Are you going to remain here and act as a command post?\" asked Irvine.\n\nBell shook his head and grinned. \"No, I'm going out in the field, beginning with Rhyolite, and retrace the robberies. No matter how good the murderer is or how well he planned his crimes, there has to be a stone he left unturned. There must be evidence that's been overlooked. I'm going to question the mining town citizens who might have seen something, however insignificant, and failed to report it to the local sheriff or marshal.\"\n\n\"You'll give us your schedule so we can get in touch by telegraph if we come onto something?\" said Curtis.\n\n\"I'll have it for you tomorrow,\" replied Bell. \"I'm also going to travel through the mining towns that have large payrolls our man has yet to rob. Maybe, just maybe I can second-guess our butcher, set up a trap, and entice him to strike another bank on our turf.\" Then he pulled open a drawer and passed out two envelopes. \"Here's enough cash to cover your travel expenses.\"\n\nBoth Curtis and Irvine looked surprised. \"Before now, we always had to travel third class, use our own money, and turn in bills and receipts,\" said Curtis. \"Alexander always demanded we stay in sleazy hotels and eat cheap meals.\"\n\n\"This case is too important to cut corners. Trust me, Mr. Van Dorn will okay any monies I request, but only if we show results. The bandit may have everyone believing he's invincible and can't be caught, but he's not faultless. He has flaws just like the rest of us. He will be trapped by a small insignificant mistake he neglected. And that, gentlemen, is our job, to find that insignificant mistake.\"\n\n\"We'll do our best,\" Irvine assured him.\n\nCurtis nodded in agreement. \"Speaking for both of us, permit me to say that it is a real privilege to be working with you again.\"\n\n\"The privilege is mine,\" said Bell sincerely. He felt lucky to work with such intelligent and experienced operatives who knew the people and country of the West.\n\nTHE SUN was falling over the Rockies to the west when Bell left the conference room. Always cautious, he closed and locked the door. As he passed through the outer office, he ran into Nicholas Alexander, who looked like he'd just stepped out of an expensive tailor's shop. The usual shabby suit was gone and replaced by an elegant tuxedo. It was a new image of respectability that he didn't quite pull off. The inner polish simply was not there.\n\n\"You look quite the bon vivant, Mr. Alexander,\" Bell said graciously.\n\n\"Yes, I'm taking the wife to a fancy soiree at the Denver Country Club later this evening. I have many influential friends here in Denver, you know.\"\n\n\"So I've heard.\"\n\n\"A pity you can't come, but it's only for members of the club in good standing.\"\n\n\"I understand perfectly,\" Bell said, masking his sarcasm.\n\nAs soon as they parted, Bell went down the street to the telegraph office and sent a telegram to Van Dorn.\n\nHave set up a schedule of investigations by myself, Curtis, and Irvine. Please be informed that we have a spy in our midst. A woman, a stranger who approached me at the hotel, identified me by name, knew my past, and seemed to know why I was in Denver. Her name is Rose Manteca and she supposedly comes from a wealthy family of ranchers in Los Angeles. Please ask our Los Angeles office to investigate. Will keep you advised of our progress on this end.\n\nBell\n\nAfter he sent the telegram to his superior, Bell walked down the busy sidewalk to the Brown Palace Hotel. After a few words with the concierge, who provided him with a map of the city, he was escorted down to the storeroom and the boiler room beneath the lobby, where he was greeted by the hotel maintenance man. An affable fellow in stained coveralls, he led Bell to a wooden crate that had been dismantled. Under a single, bright lightbulb that hung from the ceiling, the maintenance man pointed at a motorcycle that sat on a stand beside the crate and gleamed a dazzling red.\n\n\"There she is, Mr. Bell,\" he said with satisfaction. \"All ready to go. I personally polished her up for you.\"\n\n\"I'm grateful, Mr....\"\n\n\"Bomberger. John Bomberger.\"\n\n\"I'll take care of your services when I leave the hotel,\" Bell promised him.\n\n\"Glad to be of help.\"\n\nBell went up to his room and found hanging in the closet the tuxedo that had been cleaned by the hotel during the day. After a quick bath, he dressed and removed a long linen coat from the closet and slipped it on, the bottom hem dropping to the tops of his highly shined shoes. Next, he slipped on a pair of leggings to save his tux trousers from the oily liquid that often came out of the engine. Finally, he donned a cap with goggles.\n\nBell took a back stairway down to the storeroom. The red cycle, with its white rubber tires, stood as if it was a steed waiting to carry him into battle. He kicked the stand up to the rear fender, took hold of it by the handlebars, and pushed all one hundred twenty pounds of it up a ramp used by wagons to remove the hotel bedding for cleaning and to allow merchants to bring in food for the restaurant and room service kitchens.\n\nBell exited the ramp and found himself on Broadway, the street that ran past the state capitol building with its golden dome. He mounted the hard, narrow saddle that perched over the camelback fuel tank above the rear wheel. Because it was built for racing, the seat was level with the handlebars and he had to lean almost horizontal to ride the machine.\n\nHe pulled the goggles over his eyes, then reached down and twisted open the valve that allowed fuel to fall by gravity from the tank to the carburetor. Then he placed his feet in the bicycle-style pedals and pumped down the street, allowing the electrical current from the three dry-cell batteries to flow to the coil, producing a high-voltage spark that ignited the fuel in the cylinders. He'd only gone about ten feet when the V-Twin engine popped into life, the exhaust rattling in a high-pitched snarl.\n\nBell curled his right hand around the grip throttle and twisted it less than half its rotation, and the racing bike lurched forward by its single-speed chain drive and he soon found himself cruising down Broadway around the horse-drawn carriages and occasional automobiles at thirty miles an hour.\n\nBecause it was built for racing, the bike had no headlight, but a half-moon lit the sky, and the street was lined with electric lights, providing enough illumination for him to see a pile of horse dung in time to dodge around it.\n\nAfter about two miles, he stopped under a streetlamp and consulted his map. Satisfied he was traveling in the right direction, he continued until he reached Speer Avenue, before turning west. Another two miles and the Denver Country Club came into view.\n\nThe big, high-peaked building was ablaze with lights that streamed from the numerous huge square windows that encircled the building. The drive in front of the main entrance was packed with parked carriages and automobiles whose drivers and chauffeurs stood in groups, conversing and smoking. Two men in white tie and tails could be seen checking the invitations of the people who entered.\n\nBell was certain he would cause too much attention by riding up to the entrance on his motorcycle. And, without an invitation, there was little chance of bluffing his way inside even though he was dressed for the occasion. Under the partial light from the half-moon, he turned the handlebars and rode through the night onto the golf course. Careful to stay off the greens and out of the sand traps, he made a wide circular detour and approached the caddy shack that sat behind the main building near the first tee. The interior was dark and the shack was deserted.\n\nHe shut off the ignition and coasted into a clump of bushes beside it. He raised the motorcycle onto its kickstand and removed the long linen coat, draping it over the handlebars. Then he took off the leggings, cap, and goggles. Smoothing back his blond hair, Bell stepped into the light and began strolling up the path leading from the caddy shack to the stately clubhouse. The whole area was illuminated by lustrous electric lights through the windows and tall lamps beside a narrow road that ran from the street to the rear of the country club. Several trucks stood below a wide stairway rising to the rear entrance. Caterers in blue, military-tailored uniforms carried trays of dishes and utensils from the trucks into the kitchen.\n\nUp the stairs, Bell went between two of the caterers, moving into the kitchen as though he owned it. None of the waiters rushing in and out of the dining-room doors carrying trays of food, or the chefs, paid him the slightest attention. For all they knew, the tall man in the tuxedo was one of the reigning managers of the country club. If he had a problem gaining entry into the dining room, it was thankfully eliminated. He simply pushed open one of the kitchen's swinging door, and stepped into the crowd of refined members of the club, walking between the tables, his eyes searching for Rose Manteca.\n\nAfter only two minutes scanning the tables, he spotted her on the dance floor.\n\nBell stiffened.\n\nRose was dancing with Nicholas Alexander.\n\nHe thought fleetingly of enjoying the expressions on their faces when he walked up and asked to cut in. But discretion was a wiser choice than ego. He had seen more than he had bargained for. Now he knew the spy's identity. But Bell was certain that Alexander was not a paid agent for the Butcher Bandit and his female snoop. He was merely a fool and a dupe for a pretty face. He was pleased that they had not noticed him.\n\nBell placed a napkin over his arm and took hold of a coffeepot as though he was waiting on a table. He could hold up the pot in front of his face, should either Rose or Alexander look in his direction. The music stopped, and he watched as they walked back to a table. They were seated together, with Alexander between Rose and an older, heavily jowled woman Bell took to be the agent's wife. If it proved nothing else, it proved that they hadn't met casually for a dance. Seated together meant that their table was reserved in advance. They were no strangers.\n\nBell stared openly at Rose. She wore a red silk dress that nearly matched her flaming hair. This night it was a combination of a bun in the back and curls along the sides and front. Her breasts were pressed against silk fringe that edged the bodice of her dress and swelled into twin, white mounds. She was a beautiful woman from toes to hair.\n\nHer lips were parted in a delightful laugh and her golden brown eyes twinkled in mirth. Her hand fell on Alexander's arm, indicating to Bell that she liked to be physical. A sense of excitement surrounded her that was contagious to those at the table. She was a charmer, gorgeous and ravishing, but her aura did not penetrate Bell. He felt no fire, no passion of arousal toward her. In his analytical mind, she was the enemy, not an object of desire. He saw through the transparent veneer of her loveliness to the cunning and guile beneath.\n\nHe decided he had seen enough. Quickly, he ducked behind a waiter who was heading back to the kitchen and walked beside him until they passed through the swinging doors.\n\nAs Bell put on the gear he'd left hanging on the motorcycle, he considered himself lucky. He had stumbled on a situation he had not fully expected but one he could profit from. As he rode back to the Brown Palace, he knew the only information that he'd feed to Alexander would be false and misleading. He might even conjure up a bit of trickery to beguile Rose Manteca.\n\nThat part of his plan intrigued him. Already, he felt as if he had a head start in tracking a cagey lioness.\n\n## 7\n\nSHORTLY AFTER BELL RETURNED TO THE OFFICE THE next morning, a runner from the telegraph office brought him a telegram from Van Dorn.\n\nMy chief agent in Los Angeles reports that he can find no trace of a Rose Manteca. There is no family by that name owning a ranch within two hundred miles of the city. It looks to me as if the lady has pulled the wool over your eyes. Was she pretty?\n\nVan Dorn\n\nBell smiled to himself. He stuffed the telegram in his pocket, walked to Alexander's office, and knocked on the door.\n\n\"Come in,\" Alexander said softly, as if talking to somebody in the same room.\n\nBarely hearing the words, Bell stepped inside.\n\n\"You're here to report, I assume,\" said Denver's head agent without prelude.\n\nBell nodded. \"I wanted to bring you up to date on our activities.\"\n\n\"I'm listening,\" Alexander said without looking up from the papers on his desk or offering Bell a chair.\n\n\"I've sent Curtis and Irvine out into the field to question the law enforcement officers and any witness to the robberies and killings,\" Bell lied.\n\n\"It's not likely they will dig up anything the local law officials haven't already provided us.\"\n\n\"I intend to leave myself on the next train to Los Angeles.\"\n\nAlexander looked up, a suspicious expression in his eyes. \"Los Angeles? Why would you go there?\"\n\n\"I'm not,\" Bell answered. \"I'm getting off in Las Vegas and taking the spur line to Rhyolite, where I plan to talk to witnesses, if any, on my own.\"\n\n\"A wise plan.\" Alexander almost looked relieved. \"I thought for a moment that you were going to Los Angeles because of Miss Manteca.\"\n\nBell feigned surprise. \"You know her?\"\n\n\"She sat at my table with my wife and me at the country club party and dance. We've met on other occasions. She said you two had met at the Orphans Ball, and she seemed very interested in your work and background. She was especially fascinated by the bank robber\/ murderer.\"\n\nI'll bet she was interested in my work, Bell thought. But he said, \"I didn't know I made an impression on her. She did a pretty good job of brushing me off.\"\n\n\"My wife thought Miss Manteca was smitten with you.\"\n\n\"Hardly. All I learned about her was that she came from a wealthy family in Los Angeles.\"\n\n\"That's true,\" Alexander replied out of ignorance. \"Her father owns a huge spread outside the city.\"\n\nIt was obvious to Bell that Alexander had neither investigated Rose nor bothered to be suspicious of her questions about him and the Butcher Bandit case.\n\n\"When do you expect to return?\" asked Alexander.\n\n\"I should wind up the Rhyolite investigation and be back within five days.\"\n\n\"And Curtis and Irvine?\"\n\n\"Ten days to two weeks.\"\n\nAlexander refocused his attention on the papers atop his desk. \"Good luck,\" he said briefly, dismissing Bell.\n\nReturning to the conference room, Bell relaxed in a swivel chair and propped his feet on the long table. He sipped coffee from a cup Mrs. Murphy had brought earlier. Then he leaned back and stared at the ceiling, as if seeing something on the floor above.\n\nSo his suspicions about Rose Manteca were right on the money. She was not only a fraud but perhaps somehow connected to the Butcher Bandit, and sent to learn what she could of the Van Dorn Detective Agency's investigation. Bell's quarry could never be overestimated. He was no ordinary bandit. Hiring the services of a lovely spy was the work of a man who carefully thought out his operation. Rose, or whatever her true identity was, was good. She had no problem burrowing into the confidence of the Denver office director. The groundwork had been carefully laid. It was clearly the work of a professional. Employing a counterfeit meant the bandit had first-rate resources and a network of tentacles that could delve into government and the business community.\n\nWHEN BELL returned to the Brown Palace, he went to the desk and asked for Rose Manteca's room number. The clerk looked very official when he said, \"I'm sorry, sir. We can't give out our guests' room numbers.\" Then a smug look came across his face. \"But I can tell you that Miss Manteca checked out at noon.\"\n\n\"Did she say where she was going?\"\n\n\"No, but her luggage was taken to the Union Station and placed on the one o'clock train for Phoenix and Los Angeles.\"\n\nThis was not what Bell had expected. He cursed himself for letting her slip through his fingers.\n\nWho really was Rose Manteca? Why would she take the train for Los Angeles when there was no record of her living there?\n\nThen another thought began to tug on Bell's mind. Where would his nemesis strike next? He couldn't even begin to guess and he found it frustrating. He had always felt as if he was in control of his earlier cases. This one was different, too different.\n\n## 8\n\nTHE BLOND-HAIRED MAN WITH A THICK, YELLOW-BROWN, pomaded handlebar mustache had a prosperous appearance about him. After walking through the train depot, he settled into the backseat of the Model N Ford taxicab and enjoyed a beautiful, cloudless day as he viewed the sights of Salt Lake City nestled beneath the Wasatch Mountains. He was dressed in the neat, dandified fashion of the day, but with a sophisticated business look. He wore a silk top hat, a black, three-button cutaway frock coat with vest and high rounded collar, and an elegant tie. His hands were encased in pearl gray kid gloves, and matching spats covered his midstep to just above the ankle over his shoes.\n\nHe leaned slightly forward as he stared from window to window, his hands gripping the handle of a sterling silver cane adorned with an eagle's head with a large beak on the end. Though it was innocent-looking, this cane was a gun with a long barrel and a trigger that folded out when a button was pressed. It held a .44 caliber bullet whose shell could be ejected and a new cartridge inserted in the barrel from a small clip in the eagle's tail.\n\nThe cab passed the church of the Latter-Day Saints\u2014the Temple, Tabernacle, and Assembly Hall. Built between 1853 and 1893, the six-foot-thick gray granite walls were topped by six spires, the highest bearing a copper statue of the angel Moroni.\n\nAfter leaving Temple Square, the cab turned down 300 South Street and came to a stop in front of the Peery Hotel. Designed with European architecture only a short time earlier during the mining boom, it was Salt Lake City's premier hostelry. As the doorman retrieved the luggage from the rear of the cab, the man ordered the driver to wait. Then he entered through the cut-glass double doors into the stately lobby.\n\nThe desk clerk smiled and nodded. Then he glanced at a large clock standing in the lobby and said, \"Mr. Eliah Ruskin, I presume.\"\n\n\"You presume right,\" answered the man.\n\n\"Two-fifteen. You're right on time, sir.\"\n\n\"For once, my train was punctual.\"\n\n\"If you will please sign the register.\"\n\n\"I have to leave for an appointment. Will you see my luggage is taken to my room and my clothing placed in the closet and drawers?\"\n\n\"Yes, Mr. Ruskin. I will personally see to it.\" The clerk leaned over the registry desk and nodded at a large leather suitcase set securely between Ruskin's legs. \"Would you like me to send your bag up to your room?\"\n\n\"No, thank you. I'll be taking it with me.\"\n\nRuskin turned and walked out to the curb, cane in one hand, the other clutching the handle of the suitcase, the weight of its contents tilting his right shoulder downward. He pushed it through the cab's door and reentered the backseat.\n\nThe desk clerk thought it odd that Ruskin hadn't left the bag in the cab. He wondered why Ruskin would lug such a heavy case into the lobby and then carry it outside again. He speculated that something of value must be inside. His thought soon faded when another guest showed up to register.\n\nEight minutes later, Ruskin stepped from the cab, paid the driver, and entered the Salt Lake Bank & Trust lobby. He walked to the security guard who was seated in a chair near the door.\n\n\"I have an appointment with Mr. Cardoza.\"\n\nThe guard rose to his feet and motioned toward a frosted-glass door. \"You'll find Mr. Cardoza in there.\"\n\nThere had been no reason for Ruskin to ask the guard where to go. He could just as easily have seen the bank manager's office door. The guard did not notice that Ruskin had observed him closely, how he moved, his age, and how he placed the holster, containing a new .45 caliber Model 1905 Colt Browning automatic pistol, at his hip. The brief study also revealed the guard was not particularly alert and watchful. Day after day of seeing customers come and go without the slightest disturbance had made him listless and indifferent. He didn't appear to find anything unusual about Ruskin's big case.\n\nThe bank had two tellers behind the counter in their cages. The only other employees except for the guard were Cardoza and his secretary. Ruskin studied the big steel door to the vault that was open to the lobby to impress the customers and suggest that their savings were in solid, protective hands.\n\nHe approached the secretary. \"Hello, my name is Eliah Ruskin. I have a two-thirty appointment with Mr. Cardoza.\"\n\nAn older woman in her fifties with graying hair smiled and stood up without speaking. She walked to a door with ALBERT CARDOZA, MANAGER painted on the upper part of the frosted-glass pane, knocked, and leaned in. \"A Mr. Eliah Ruskin to see you.\"\n\nCardoza quickly came to his feet and rushed around his desk. He shoved out a hand and shook Ruskin's palm and fingers vigorously. \"A pleasure, sir. I've looked forward to your arrival. It's not every day we greet a representative from a New York bank that is making such a substantial deposit.\"\n\nRuskin lifted the suitcase onto Cardoza's desk, unlocked the catches, and opened the lid. \"Here you are, half a million dollars in cash to be deposited, until such time we decide to withdraw it.\"\n\nCardoza reverently stared at the neatly packed and bundled fifty-dollar gold certificate bills as though they were his passport to a banker's promised land. Then he looked up in growing surprise. \"I don't understand. Why not carry a cashier's check instead of five hundred thousand dollars in currency?\"\n\n\"The directors of the Hudson River Bank of New York prefer to deal in cash. As you know from our correspondence, we are going to open branch banks throughout the West in towns that we think have potential for growth. We feel it is expedient to have currency on hand when we open our doors.\"\n\nCardoza looked at Ruskin somberly. \"I hope your directors do not intend to open a competing bank in Salt Lake City.\"\n\nRuskin grinned and shook his head. \"Phoenix, Arizona, and Reno, Nevada, are the first of the Hudson River branch banks to open in the West.\"\n\nCardoza looked relieved. \"Phoenix and Reno are certainly booming.\"\n\n\"Ever have a bank robbery in Salt Lake?\" Ruskin asked casually while looking at the vault.\n\nCardoza looked at him quizzically. \"Not in this city. The citizens would not allow it. Salt Lake is one of the most crime-free cities in the country. The Latter-Day Saints are upstanding and religious people. Trust me, Mr. Ruskin, no bandit would dare to attempt a robbery of this bank. Your money will be absolutely and one hundred percent safe once it's locked up in our vault.\"\n\n\"I've read of some fellow called the Butcher Bandit who robs and murders throughout the western states.\"\n\n\"Not to worry, he only strikes in small mining towns and robs payrolls. He wouldn't be stupid enough to try robbing a bank in a city the size of Salt Lake. He wouldn't get past the city limits before the police shot him down.\"\n\nRuskin nodded toward the vault. \"Very impressive repository.\"\n\n\"The very finest vault west of the Mississippi, built especially for us in Philadelphia,\" Ruskin said proudly. \"An entire regiment armed with cannons couldn't break inside.\"\n\n\"I see it is open during business hours?\"\n\n\"And why not. Our customers enjoy seeing how well their deposits are protected. And as I've mentioned, no bank has ever been robbed in Salt Lake City.\"\n\n\"What is your slowest time of day?\"\n\nCardoza looked puzzled. \"Slowest time of day?\"\n\n\"When you have the least customer transactions?\"\n\n\"Between one-thirty and two o'clock is our slowest time. Most of our customers have gone back to their offices after their lunch hour. And, because we close at three, a number of customers come in for late transactions. Why do you ask?\"\n\n\"Just curious as to how the traffic compares with our bank in New York, which seems to be about the same.\" He patted the suitcase. \"I'll leave the money in the case and pick it up tomorrow.\"\n\n\"We'll close shortly, but I'll have my head clerk count it first thing in the morning.\"\n\nCardoza pulled open a drawer of his desk, retrieved a leather book, and wrote out a deposit slip for the half-million dollars. He handed it to Ruskin, who inserted it into a large wallet he carried in the breast pocket of his coat.\n\n\"May I ask a favor?\" Ruskin inquired.\n\n\"Certainly. Anything you wish.\"\n\n\"I would like to be on hand when your clerk does the count.\"\n\n\"That's very gracious of you, but I'm sure your bank has accounted for every dollar.\"\n\n\"I'm grateful for your trust, but I would like to be present just to be on the safe side.\"\n\nCardoza shrugged. \"As you wish.\"\n\n\"There is one other request.\"\n\n\"You have but to name it.\"\n\n\"I have other business to conduct in the morning and cannot return until one-thirty tomorrow. And, since your business is slowest then, it should be a good time for the count.\"\n\nCardoza nodded in agreement. \"You're quite right.\" He stood and extended his hand. \"Until tomorrow afternoon. I look forward to seeing you.\"\n\nRuskin held up his cane as a good-bye gesture, dismissed Cardoza, and left the office. He walked past the security guard, who didn't give him a glance, and swung his cane like a baton as he stepped onto the sidewalk.\n\nHe smiled to himself, knowing that he had no intention of returning to the bank merely to count the contents of the suitcase.\n\n## 9\n\nTHE NEXT AFTERNOON, RUSKIN WALKED TO THE BANK, making sure he was seen on the street by the passing crowd and stopping in shops to browse, making small talk with the merchants. He carried his gun cane more as a prop than for protection.\n\nReaching the Salt Lake Bank & Trust at one-thirty, he entered and ignored the guard as he turned the key in the front entrance door, locking it. Then he turned the sign around in the window so that it read CLOSED from the street and pulled down the window shades, as the guard sat there in his bored stupor, not realizing that the bank was about to be robbed. Neither Albert Cardoza's secretary and the tellers nor the female depositor standing at the counter took notice of the intruder's unusual behavior.\n\nThe guard finally came alert and realized that Ruskin was not acting like a normal bank customer and might be up to no good. He came to his feet, his hand dropping to the holster holding his .38 Smith & Wesson revolver, and asked blankly, \"Just what do you think you're doing?\" Then his eyes widened in alarm as he found himself staring into the muzzle of Ruskin's .38 Colt.\n\n\"Make no resistance, and walk slowly behind the counter!\" Ruskin ordered as he wrapped his gun in a battered, old heavy woolen scarf with burn holes in it. He quickly moved behind the counter before the clerks in their cages became alert and could make a grab for the shotguns at their feet. Never expecting their bank to be robbed, they hesitated in confusion.\n\n\"Don't even think about going for your guns!\" Ruskin snapped. \"Lay flat on the floor or you'll get a bullet in your brain.\" He motioned his cane at the frightened woman at the counter. \"Come around the counter and lay down on the floor with the tellers and you won't get hurt,\" he said in a cold tone. Then he motioned the gun at Cardoza's secretary. \"You, too! Down on the floor!\"\n\nWhen all were lying on the highly polished mahogany floor facedown, he rapped on Cardoza's door. Unable to distinguish voices outside his office, the bank's manager was not aware of the macabre event unfolding within his bank. He waited out of habit for his secretary to enter, but she did not appear. Finally, irritated at being interrupted, he stepped from his desk and opened the door. It took him a full ten seconds to comprehend what was happening. He stared at Ruskin and the gun in his hand.\n\n\"What is the meaning of this?\" he demanded. Then he saw the people lying on the floor and looked back at Ruskin in utter confusion. \"I don't understand. What is going on?\"\n\n\"The first bank robbery of Salt Lake City,\" said Ruskin, as if amused.\n\nCardoza did not move. He was frozen in shock. \"You're a director of a respectable New York bank. Why are you doing this? It makes no sense. What do you hope to gain by it?\"\n\n\"I have my motives,\" Ruskin answered, his voice cold and toneless. \"I want you to make out a bank draft for four hundred seventy-five thousand dollars.\"\n\nCardoza stared at him as if he was crazy. \"A bank draft to whom?\"\n\n\"Eliah Ruskin, who else?\" answered Ruskin. \"And be quick about it.\"\n\nMired in confusion, Cardoza pulled open a drawer, retrieved a book containing bank drafts, and hurriedly scribbled out one for the amount Ruskin demanded. When finished, he passed it across the desk to Ruskin, who slipped it into his breast pocket.\n\n\"Now, down on the floor with the others.\"\n\nAs if in the throes of a nightmare, Cardoza slowly lowered himself onto the floor next to his trembling secretary.\n\n\"Now, then, none of you move, or even twitch, until I tell you to.\"\n\nWithout saying more, Ruskin walked inside the vault and began stuffing the bank's currency into leather money sacks he'd seen earlier stacked on a shelf inside the huge five-ton door. He filled two of them, estimating the take at roughly two hundred thirty thousand dollars in larger denominations, none under ten dollars. He had planned well. From inside banking information, he knew that the Salt Lake Bank & Trust had received a large shipment of currency issued from the Continental & Commercial National Bank of Chicago for their reserves. The suitcase with his own money he left on another shelf of the vault.\n\nLaying aside the sacks, he closed the vault door. It swung shut as easily as a door on a cupboard. Then he turned the bog wheel that activated the inside latches and set the timer for nine o'clock the next morning.\n\nUnhurriedly, as if he was strolling through a park, he stepped behind the counter and ruthlessly shot the people lying on the floor in the back of the head. The muffled shots came so quickly, none had time to know what was happening and cry out. Then he raised the bank's window shades, so people passing on the sidewalk could see that the vault was shut and would assume the bank was closed. The bodies were conveniently out of sight behind the counter.\n\nRuskin waited until the sidewalk was clear of foot traffic and vehicles before he nonchalantly exited the bank, locked the door, and strolled leisurely from the building, swinging his cane. By four o'clock, he had returned to the Peery Hotel, had a bath, and come down to the restaurant, where he enjoyed a large smoked-salmon plate with dill cream and caviar accompanied by a bottle of French Clos de la Roche Burgundy 1899. Then he read in the lobby for an hour before going to bed and slept like a rock.\n\nLATE IN the morning, Ruskin took a taxi to the Salt Lake Bank & Trust. A crowd of people were clustered around the front door as an ambulance pulled away from the bank. Police in uniforms were in abundance. He pushed his way through the crowd, saw a man who was dressed like a detective, and addressed him.\n\n\"What happened here?\" he asked courteously.\n\n\"The bank has been robbed and five people murdered.\"\n\n\"Robbed, murdered, you say? This is disastrous. I deposited half a million dollars in cash here yesterday from my bank in New York.\"\n\nThe detective looked at him in surprise. \"Half a million dollars, you say? In cash?\"\n\n\"Yes, I have my receipt right here.\" Ruskin flashed the receipt in the detective's face. The detective studied it for a few moments and then said, \"You are Eliah Ruskin?\"\n\n\"Yes, I'm Ruskin. I represent the Hudson River Bank of New York.\"\n\n\"A half million dollars in cash!\" the detective gasped. \"No wonder the bank was robbed. You better come inside, Mr. Ruskin, and meet with Mr. Ramsdell, one of the bank's directors. I'm Captain John Casale, with the Salt Lake Police Department.\"\n\nThe bodies had been removed, but large areas of the mahogany floor were layered in dried blood. Captain Casale led the way to a man\u2014a huge, fat man with a large protruding stomach behind a vest and massive watch chain. The man was sitting at Cardoza's desk, examining the bank's deposits. His brown eyes appeared dazed beneath the bald head. He looked up and stared at Ruskin, annoyed at the intrusion.\n\n\"This is Mr. Eliah Ruskin,\" announced Casale. \"He says he deposited half a million dollars with Mr. Cardoza yesterday.\"\n\n\"Sorry to meet you under such tragic circumstances. I am Ezra Ramsdell, the bank's managing director.\" Ramsdell rose and shook Ruskin's hand. \"A terrible, terrible business,\" he muttered. \"Five people dead. Nothing like this has ever happened in Salt Lake City before.\"\n\n\"Were you aware of the money Mr. Cardoza was holding for my bank?\" asked Ruskin flatly.\n\nRamsdell nodded. \"Yes, he called me on the telephone and reported that you had come in and placed your bank's currency in the vault.\"\n\n\"Since Mr. Cardoza, God rest his soul, wrote me out a receipt, my directors will assume your bank will make good on the loss.\"\n\n\"Tell your directors not to worry.\"\n\n\"How much cash did the robber take?\" Ruskin asked.\n\n\"Two hundred forty-five thousand dollars.\"\n\n\"Plus my half million,\" he said, as if agitated.\n\nRamsdell looked at him queerly. \"For some inexplicable reason, the robber didn't take your money.\"\n\nRuskin simulated a stunned expression. \"What are you telling me?\"\n\n\"The bills in a large, brown leather suitcase,\" said Captain Casale. \"Are those yours?\"\n\n\"The gold certificates? Yes, they are from the bank I represent in New York.\"\n\nRamsdell and Casale exchanged odd looks. Then Ramsdell said, \"The case you and Mr. Cardoza placed in the vault still contains your currency.\"\n\n\"I don't understand.\"\n\n\"It hasn't been touched. I opened and checked it myself. Your gold certificates are safe and sound.\"\n\nRuskin made a show of acting perplexed. \"It doesn't make sense. Why take your money and leave mine?\"\n\nCasale scratched one ear. \"My guess is, he was in a hurry and simply ignored the suitcase, not realizing it was filled with a king's fortune in cash.\"\n\n\"That's a relief,\" said Ruskin, taking off his silk top hat and wiping imaginary sweat from his brow. \"Assuming the robber won't return, I'll leave it in your vault until such time as we require it to open our new branch banks in Phoenix and Reno.\"\n\n\"We are most grateful. Especially now that our currency on hand has been wiped out.\"\n\nRuskin looked around at the spread of dried blood on the floor. \"I should leave you to your investigation.\" He nodded at Casale. \"I trust you will catch the killer so he can be hung.\"\n\n\"I swear we'll track him down,\" Casale said confidently. \"Every road out of Salt Lake and all the train depots are covered by a network of police officers. He can't travel beyond the city limits without being caught.\"\n\n\"Good luck to you,\" said Ruskin. \"I pray you will apprehend the fiend.\" He turned to Ramsdell. \"I will be at the Peery Hotel until tomorrow afternoon, should you require my services. At four o'clock, I will board a train, to oversee the establishment of our new bank in Phoenix.\"\n\n\"You are most generous, sir,\" said Ramsdell. \"I will be in touch as soon as we resume operations.\"\n\n\"Not at all.\" Ruskin turned to leave. \"Good luck to you, Captain,\" Ruskin said to Casale as he made for the front entrance of the bank.\n\nCasale stared out the window as Ruskin walked across the street toward a taxi. \"Most strange,\" he said slowly. \"If I know my train schedules, the next train for Phoenix doesn't leave for another three days.\"\n\nRamsdell shrugged. \"He was probably misinformed.\"\n\n\"Still, there is something about him that bothers me.\"\n\n\"What is that?\"\n\n\"He didn't look overjoyed that his bank's money was not taken by the robber. It was almost as if he knew it was safe before he walked in the door.\"\n\n\"Does it matter?\" asked Ramsdell. \"Mr. Ruskin should be glad his half a million dollars was overlooked by the robber.\"\n\nThe detective looked thoughtful. \"How do you know it's a half a million dollars? Did you count it?\"\n\n\"Mr. Cardoza must have counted it.\"\n\n\"Are you certain?\"\n\nRamsdell began walking from the office toward the vault. \"Now is as good a time as any to make a quick tally.\"\n\nHe opened the case and started to lay the first layer of stacked bills on a nearby shelf. The top layer consisted of twenty thousand dollars in gold certificate bills. Underneath, the rest of the case was filled with neatly cut and banded newspaper.\n\n\"Good God!\" Ramsdell gasped. Then, as if struck by a revelation, he rushed back to the bank manager's office and opened a book that lay on the surface of the desk. The book contained bank drafts\u2014but the final draft was missing and unrecorded. His face went ashen. \"The murdering scum must have forced Cardoza to write a bank draft for the half million. Whatever bank he deposits it in will assume we authorized it and demand payment from Salt Lake Bank and Trust. Under federal law, we are bound to honor it. If not, the lawsuits, the prosecution from United States Treasury agents\u2014we'd be forced to close.\"\n\n\"Ruskin was not only a fraud,\" Casale said firmly, \"he was the one who robbed your bank and murdered your employees and customer.\"\n\n\"I can't believe it,\" muttered Ramsdell incredulously. Then he demanded, \"You've got to stop him. Catch him before he checks out of his hotel.\"\n\n\"I'll send a squad to the Peery,\" said Casale. \"But this guy is no buffoon. He probably went on the run as soon as he walked out the door.\"\n\n\"You can't let him get away with this foul deed.\"\n\n\"If he's the notorious Butcher Bandit, he's a shrewd devil who vanishes like a ghost.\"\n\nEzra Ramsdell's eyes took on an astute glint. \"He has to deposit the draft at a bank somewhere. I'll telegraph the managers of every bank in the nation to be on the lookout for him and contact the police before they honor a draft made out to Eliah Ruskin for half a million dollars. He won't get away with it.\"\n\n\"I'm not so sure,\" John Casale said softly under his breath. \"I'm not so sure at all.\"\n\n## 10\n\nTHE BUTCHER BANDIT WAS A COUNTRY MILE AHEAD of him, Bell thought as the train he was riding slowed and stopped at the station in Rhyolite. He had received a lengthy telegram from Van Dorn telling of the Salt Lake massacre, as it had become known. A bank in a major city like Salt Lake was the last place he or anyone else expected the Butcher to strike. That was his next stop after Rhyolite.\n\nHe stepped from the train with a leather bag that held the bare essentials he carried while traveling. The heat of the desert struck him like a blast furnace, but because of the absence of humidity in the desert it did not soak his shirt with sweat.\n\nAfter getting directions from the stationmaster, he walked to the sheriff's office and jail. Sheriff Marvin Huey was a medium-sized man with a head of tousled gray hair. He looked up from a stack of wanted posters and stared at Bell with soft olive brown eyes as the Van Dorn agent entered the office.\n\n\"Sheriff Huey, I'm Isaac Bell from the Van Dorn Detective Agency.\"\n\nHuey did not rise from his desk nor offer his hand; instead, he spit a wad of chewing tobacco juice into a cuspidor. \"Yes, Mr. Bell, I was told you'd be on the ten o'clock train. How do you like our warm weather?\"\n\nBell took a chair across from Huey without it being offered and sat down. \"I prefer the high-altitude cool air of Denver.\"\n\nThe sheriff grinned slightly at seeing Bell's discomfort. \"If you lived here long enough, you might get to like it.\"\n\n\"I wired you concerning my investigation,\" Bell said without preamble. \"I want to obtain any information I can that would be helpful in tracking down the Butcher Bandit.\"\n\n\"I hope you have better luck than I did. After the murders, all we found was a dilapidated, abandoned freight wagon and team of horses that he had driven into town.\"\n\n\"Did anyone get a good look at him?\"\n\nHuey shook his head. \"No one gave him the slightest notice. Three people gave different descriptions. None matched. All I know is, my posse found no tracks from wagon, horse, or automobile leading out of town.\"\n\n\"What about the railroad?\"\n\nHuey shook his head. \"No train left town for eight hours. I posted men at the depot who searched the passenger cars before it left, but they found no one that looked suspicious.\"\n\n\"How about freight trains?\"\n\n\"My deputies ran a search of the only freight train that left town that day. Neither they nor the train engineer, fireman, or brakemen saw anyone hiding on or around the boxcars.\"\n\n\"What is your theory on the bandit?\" asked Bell. \"How do you think he made a clean getaway?\"\n\nHuey paused to shoot another wad of tobacco saliva into the brass cuspidor. \"I gave up. It pains me to say so, but I have no idea how he managed to elude me and my deputies. Frankly, I'm put out by it. In thirty years as a lawman, I've never lost my man.\"\n\n\"You can take consolation in knowing you're not the only sheriff or marshal who lost him after he robbed their town banks.\"\n\n\"It still isn't anything I can be proud of,\" muttered Huey.\n\n\"With your permission, I would like to question the three witnesses.\"\n\n\"You'll be wasting your time.\"\n\n\"May I have their names?\" Bell persisted. \"I have to do my job.\"\n\nHuey shrugged and wrote out three names on the back of a wanted poster, and where they could be found, handing it to Bell. \"I know all these people. They're good, honest citizens who believe what they saw even if it don't match up.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Sheriff, but it is my job to investigate every lead, no matter how insignificant.\"\n\n\"Let me know if I can be of further help,\" said Huey, warming up.\n\n\"If need be,\" said Bell, \"I will.\"\n\nBELL SPENT most of the next morning locating and questioning the people on the list given him by Sheriff Huey. Bell was considered an expert at drawing on witnesses' descriptions, but this time around he drew a blank. None of the people, two men and one woman, gave correlating accounts. Sheriff Huey was right. He accepted defeat and headed back to his hotel and prepared to leave for the next town on his schedule that had suffered a similar tragedy: Bozeman, Montana.\n\nHe was sitting in the hotel restaurant, eating an early dinner of lamb stew, when the sheriff walked in and sat down at his table.\n\n\"Can I order you anything?\" Bell asked graciously.\n\n\"No thanks. I came looking for you because I thought of Jackie Ruggles.\"\n\n\"And who might that be?\"\n\n\"He's a young boy of about ten. His father works in the mine and his mother takes in laundry. He said he saw a funny-looking man the day of the robbery, but I dismissed his description. He's not the brightest kid in town. I figured he wanted to impress the other boys by claiming he'd seen the bandit.\"\n\n\"I'd like to question him.\"\n\n\"Go up Third Street to Menlo. Then turn right. He lives in the second house on the left, a ramshackle affair that looks like it may fall down any minute, like most of the houses in that area of town.\"\n\n\"I'm obliged.\"\n\n\"You won't get any more out of Jackie than you did from the others, probably less.\"\n\n\"I have to look on the bright side,\" said Bell. \"As I said, we have to check out every lead, no matter how trivial. The Van Dorn Detective Agency wants the killer as much as you.\"\n\n\"You might stop by the general store and pick up some gumdrops,\" Sheriff Huey said. \"Jackie has a sweet tooth for gumdrops.\"\n\n\"Thanks for the tip.\"\n\nBELL FOUND the Ruggles house just as Huey described. The entire wooden structure was leaning to one side. Another two inches, Bell thought, and it would crash into the street. He started up the rickety stairs just as a young boy dashed out of the front door and ran toward the street.\n\n\"Are you Jackie Ruggles?\" Bell asked, grabbing the boy by the arm before he dashed off.\n\nThe boy wasn't the least bit intimidated. \"Who wants to know?\" he demanded.\n\n\"My name is Bell. I'm with the Van Dorn Detective Agency. I'd like to ask you about what you saw the day of the bank robbery.\"\n\n\"Van Dorn,\" Jackie said in awe. \"Gosh, you guys are famous. A detective from Van Dorn wants to talk to me?\"\n\n\"That's right,\" said Bell, swooping in for the kill. \"Would you like some gumdrops?\" He held out a small sack that he had just purchased at the general store.\n\n\"Gee, thanks, mister.\" Jackie Ruggles wasted no time in snatching the sack and savoring a green gumdrop. He was dressed in a cotton shirt, pants that were cut off above the knee, and worn-leather shoes that Bell guessed were handed down by an older brother. The clothes were quite clean, as befitting a mother who was a laundress. He was thin as a broomstick, with boyish facial features that were covered with freckles, and topped by a thicket of uncombed curly light brown hair.\n\n\"I was told by Sheriff Huey that you saw the bank robber.\"\n\nThe boy answered while chewing on the gumdrop. \"Sure did. The only trouble is, nobody believes me.\"\n\n\"I do,\" Bell assured him. \"Tell me what you saw.\"\n\nJackie was about to reach in the sack for another gumdrop, but Bell stopped him. \"You can have them after you've told me what you know.\"\n\nThe boy looked peeved but shrugged. \"I was playing baseball in the street with my friends when this old guy\u2014\"\n\n\"How old?\"\n\nJackie studied Bell. \"About your age.\"\n\nBell never considered thirty as old, but to a young boy of ten he must have appeared ancient. \"Go on.\"\n\n\"He was dressed like most of the miners who live here, but he wore a big hat like the Mexicans.\"\n\n\"A sombrero.\"\n\n\"I think that's what it's called.\"\n\n\"And he was toting a heavy sack over his shoulder. It looked like it was plumb full of something.\"\n\n\"What else did you notice?\"\n\n\"One of his hands was missing the little finger.\"\n\nBell stiffened. This was the first clue to identifying the killer. \"Are you sure he was missing a little finger?\"\n\n\"As sure as I'm standing here,\" answered Jackie.\n\n\"Which hand?\" Bell asked, containing his mounting excitement.\n\n\"The left.\"\n\n\"You've no doubt it was the left hand?\"\n\nJackie merely nodded while staring longingly at the gumdrop sack. \"He looked at me like he was really mad when he saw I was looking back.\"\n\n\"Then what happened?\"\n\n\"I had to catch a fly ball. When I turned around, he was gone.\"\n\nBell patted Jackie on the head, almost losing his hand in a sea of unruly red hair. He smiled. \"Go ahead and eat your gumdrops, but, if I were you, I'd chew slowly so they last longer.\"\n\nAFTER HE checked out of the Rhyolite Hotel and before he boarded the train, Bell paid the telegraph operator at the depot to send a wire to Van Dorn describing the Butcher Bandit as missing the little finger on his left hand. He knew that Van Dorn would quickly send out the news to his army of agents to watch out for and report any man with that disfigurement.\n\nInstead of traveling back to Denver, he decided on the spur of the moment to go to Bisbee. Maybe\u2014just maybe\u2014he might get lucky again and find another clue to the bandit's identity. He leaned back in his seat, as the torrid heat of the desert grilled the interior of the Pullman car. Bell hardly noticed it.\n\nThe first solid clue, provided by a scrawny young boy, wasn't exactly a breakthrough, but it was a start, thought Bell. He felt pleased with himself for the discovery and began to daydream of the day he confronted the bandit and identified him by the missing finger.\n\n## THE CHASE QUICKENS\n\n## 11\n\nMARCH 4, 1906 SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA\n\nTHE MAN WHOSE LAST ALIAS HAD BEEN RUSKIN stood in front of an ornate brass sink and stared into a large oval mirror as he shaved with a straight razor. When finished, he rinsed off his face and patted on an expensive French cologne. He then reached out and clutched the sink as his railroad boxcar came to an abrupt stop.\n\nHe stepped up to a latched window, disguised from the outside as if it were a section of the wooden wall of the car, cautiously cracked it, and peered outside. A steam switch engine had pushed ten freight cars uncoupled from the train, including the O'Brian Furniture car, through the Southern Pacific Railroad's huge terminal building, called the Oakland Mole. It consisted of a massive pier built on pilings, masonry, and rock laid in the San Francisco Bay itself, on the west side of the city of Oakland. The slip where the ferryboats entered and tied up was at the west end of the main building, between twin towers. The towers were manned by teams of men who directed the loading and unloading of the huge fleet of ferries that moved to and from San Francisco across the bay.\n\nBecause the Oakland Mole was at the end of the transcontinental railway, it was filled twenty-four hours a day with a mixed crowd of people, coming from the east and heading across the continent in the opposite direction. Passenger trains commingled with freight trains that carried goods and merchandise. It was a busy place in 1906, since business was booming in the sister cities of the bay. San Francisco was a thriving commercial center while much of the actual goods were manufactured in Oakland.\n\nRuskin checked a schedule and saw that his cleverly disguised mode of secret travel was on board the San Gabriel, a Southern Pacific Railroad ferry built to haul freight trains as well as passengers. She was a classic ferry, double-ended, her stern and bow surmounted with a pilothouse on each end. She was propelled with side paddle wheels powered by two walking-beam steam engines, each with its own smokestack. Ferries carrying trains had parallel tracks on the main deck for the freight cars, while the cabin deck housed the passengers. The San Gabriel was two hundred ninety-eight feet long, seventy-eight feet wide, and could carry five hundred passengers and twenty railroad cars.\n\nThe San Gabriel was to arrive at the Townsend and Third Streets Southern Pacific terminus, where the passengers would disembark. Then it would move on to Pier 32 at Townsend and King Streets, where its cargo of railroad cars would be taken to the city railyard between Third and Seventh Streets. There, the O'Brian Furniture Company car would be switched to the siding of a warehouse the bandit owned in the city's industrial section.\n\nRuskin had ridden on the San Gabriel many times on his trips across the bay and looked forward to returning home after his venture in Salt Lake City. A great whoop echoed around the Mole from the boat's steam whistle as it announced her departure. She began to tremble when the tall walking-beam engines turned the big twenty-seven-foot paddle wheels that churned the water. Soon the boat was riding the glass-smooth bay toward San Francisco, no more than twenty minutes away.\n\nRuskin quickly finished dressing in an exactingly tailored conservative black business suit. A small yellow rose went in the buttonhole. He sat a derby hat on his head at a rakish angle and pulled a pair of suede gloves over his hands. He picked up his cane.\n\nThen he bent down and gripped the handle to the trapdoor in the floor of the freight car and swung it open. He dropped a large, heavy suitcase through the opening. Then he slowly lowered himself to the deck between the rails, careful not to soil his clothes. Hunched down under the car, he made certain none of the crew were within view as he moved away and straightened up.\n\nRuskin was headed up a stairway to the cabin deck where the passengers rode when, halfway up, he met a crewman coming down. The crewman stopped and nodded at him, a serious expression on his face.\n\n\"Are you aware, sir, that passengers are not allowed on the main deck?\"\n\n\"Yes, I'm aware.\" The bandit smiled. \"I realized my mistake, and, as you see, I was turning around to return to the cabin deck.\"\n\n\"Sorry to have troubled you, sir.\"\n\n\"Not at all. It's your duty.\"\n\nThe bandit proceeded up the stairs and stepped into the ornate, highly decorated cabin deck where the passengers crossed the bay in style. He went into the restaurant and ordered a cup of tea at the stand-up bar, then walked outside onto the open forward deck and sipped as he watched the buildings of San Francisco grow larger across the bay.\n\nThe City by the Bay was already becoming a fascinating, romantic, cosmopolitan city. It had risen in stature since 1900, establishing itself as the financial and merchandising hub of the West. It was built on the foresight of entrepreneurs much like the meticulously dressed man standing on the deck with the huge suitcase. He, like they, saw an opportunity and moved quickly to seize it.\n\nNot one for niceties, Ruskin finished his tea and then threw the cup overboard, not returning it to the restaurant. He idly watched a thick flight of sandpipers fly past the boat, followed by a trio of brown pelicans gliding inches above the water in search of small fish. Then, mingling with the throng, he moved down the forward stairway to the main deck, where the passengers disembarked the ferry onto the pier in front of the big, ornate, Spanish-style Southern Pacific terminus.\n\nHe walked briskly through the interior cavern of the terminus, lugging the big suitcase, and through the doors on the Townsend Street side. For the next few minutes, he stood on the sidewalk and waited. He smiled as a white Mercedes Simplex runabout rolled up the street and came to a tire-skidding halt at the curb in front of him. Under the hood was a massive four-cylinder, sixty-horsepower engine that could move the car as fast as eighty miles an hour. It was a marvelous contrivance of steel, brass, wood, leather, and rubber. Driving it was sheer adventure.\n\nIf the car produced a striking picture, so did the woman behind the steering wheel. She was svelte and wasp-waisted. Her red hair was adorned with a large red bow that matched her fiery hair. Her bonnet was tied under her chin to keep it from blowing away, and she wore a tan linen dress that came halfway up her calves so she could dance her feet deftly over the five floor pedals. She took one hand from the big steering wheel and waved.\n\n\"Hello, brother. You're an hour and a half late.\"\n\n\"Greetings, sister.\" He paused to grin. \"I could only go as fast as the engineer drove the train.\"\n\nShe offered him her cheek and he dutifully kissed it. She inhaled the smell of him. He always used the French cologne she had given him. It smelled like a sea of flowers after a light evening rain. If he hadn't been her sibling, she might have had a love affair with him.\n\n\"I assume your trip was successful.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" he said, strapping the suitcase on the running board. \"And we haven't a minute to lose.\" He climbed into the brown leather passenger's seat. \"I must record the bank draft I obtained at the Salt Lake Bank and Trust before their agents show up to stop the transfer.\"\n\nShe pushed a laced-up brown leather shoe against the clutch and shifted expertly, as the car leaped down the street like a lion chasing a zebra. \"It took two days for you to get here. Don't you think you're cutting it close? They would have contacted law enforcement officials and hired private agents, prodding them to check all the banks in the country for a stolen bank draft worth a fortune.\"\n\n\"And that takes time, not less than forty-eight hours,\" he added, clutching the side of the seat with a hand since there were no doors on the runabout for support as she made a sharp left turn up Market Street. He barely grabbed his derby with his other hand before it almost flew off into the street.\n\nShe drove fast, seemingly recklessly, but nimbly, smoothly whipping around slower traffic at a speed that turned heads and startled passersby. She hurtled past a big beer truck, pulled by a team of Percheron horses, that blocked most of the street, slipping between the stacked barrels on the street and the sidewalk filled with pedestrians with only inches to spare. He bravely whistled a marching tune called \"Garry Owen\" and tipped his hat at the pretty girls coming out of the clothing stores. The big Market Street electric trolley car loomed ahead, and she crossed into oncoming traffic to pass it, sending more than one horse rearing up on its hind legs, to the anger and fist waving of their drivers.\n\nAnother two blocks through the canyon of brick-and-stone buildings, she came to a quick stop, skidding the rear tires when she hit the brakes, in front of the Cromwell Bank on the southeast corner of Market and Sutter Streets. \"Here you are, brother. I trust you enjoyed the ride.\"\n\n\"You're going to kill yourself someday.\"\n\n\"Blame yourself,\" she said, laughing. \"You gave me the car.\"\n\n\"Trade you my Harley-Davidson for it.\"\n\n\"Not a chance.\" She gave a cheery wave and said, \"Come home early and don't be late. We've a date on the Barbary Coast with the Gruenheims to go slumming and take in one of the scandalous dance revues.\"\n\n\"I can't wait,\" he said sarcastically. He stepped down to the sidewalk before turning and unstrapping the suitcase. She saw that he strained as he lifted and knew it was crammed with stolen currency from the Salt Lake bank.\n\nAt the press of the accelerator pedal, the chain-driven Mercedes Simplex charged across the intersection and roared up the street, the thunder of the exhaust coming within a few decibels of breaking the storefront windows.\n\nThe bandit turned and looked with pride at the big, elaborately ornamented Cromwell Bank Building, with its tall, fluted Ionic column and large stained-glass windows. A doorman in a gray uniform opened one of the big glass doors for him. He was a tall man with gray hair, and a military bearing that came from thirty years in the United States Cavalry.\n\n\"Good morning, Mr. Cromwell. Glad to see you back from your holiday.\"\n\n\"Glad to be back, George. How's the weather been in my absence?\"\n\n\"Just like it is today, sir, sunny and mild.\" George looked down at the large suitcase. \"May I carry that for you, sir?\"\n\n\"No, thank you. I can manage. I need the exercise.\"\n\nA small brass sign listed the bank's assets at twenty-two million dollars. It would soon be twenty-three, thought Cromwell. Only the fifty-year-old Wells Fargo Bank had higher assets, capital, and liquidity. George swung open the door, and Cromwell the bandit strode across the marble floor of the bank's lobby, past the beautifully carved desks of the managers and the tellers' windows and the counters without bars, totally open to the customers. The open tellers' area was a strange innovation by a man who trusted no one and robbed out-of-state banks to build his own financial empire.\n\nThe fact was, Jacob Cromwell no longer needed the additional income he stole for his bank. But he was intoxicated by the challenge. He felt he was invincible. He could match wits with any police investigators, not to mention the agents from the Van Dorn Detective Agency, until he died of old age. He knew from his spies that no one was remotely close to identifying him.\n\nCromwell entered an elevator and rode up to the third floor. He stepped out onto the Italian-tiled floor of the main office on the gallery above the bank's lobby. He walked into the grandeur of his suite of offices, the deep, ivory brown carpet muffling his footsteps. The walls were paneled in teak, with carvings depicting scenes of the nineteenth-century West, while the columns that supported the roof were sculpted in the manner of totem poles. The vast ceiling above had been painted with murals of the early days of San Francisco.\n\nHe employed three secretaries to handle his main business, along with much of his personal affairs. They were all beautiful women, tall, graceful, intelligent, and came from fine San Francisco families. He paid them more than they could make working for his competitors. The only requirement was that they all wear the same style and color dress, which the bank paid for. Every day was a different color. Today, they were wearing brown dresses that complemented the carpet.\n\nThey saw him enter and immediately came to their feet and surrounded him, chatting gaily and welcoming him back from what they had been told was a holiday that took him fishing in Oregon. Although he had to use great restraint and willpower, Cromwell never carried on a love affair with any of the three women. He had strong principles about playing on his own turf.\n\nAfter the niceties were over and the ladies returned to their desks, Cromwell asked his senior secretary, who had been with him for nine years, to come into his office.\n\nHe sat down at his massive teak desk and parked the suitcase underneath. He smiled at Marion Morgan. \"How are you, Miss Morgan? Any new gentlemen friends lately?\"\n\nShe blushed. \"No, Mr. Cromwell. I spend my nights staying home and reading.\"\n\nMarion was twenty-one when she finished college and came to work for Cromwell as a teller, and she had risen to manager. She had just turned thirty and had never married, which made many consider her an old maid. But the truth was, she could have had any one of the well-heeled men in town. She was an unusually ravishing and nubile lady who could pick and choose her suitors but had yet to select one for a husband. She was particular about men, and the Prince Charming of her dreams had not appeared. Her straw-blond hair was wrapped on her head, as was the fashion of the day, and her lovely facial features enhanced a long swan neck. Her corseted figure looked like the classic hourglass. She gazed across the desk at Cromwell through coral\u2013sea green eyes, and a delicately shaped hand held a pencil poised above a notepad.\n\n\"I expect agents representing a bank in Salt Lake City to arrive at any moment to check our records.\"\n\n\"Are they going to examine our books?\" she asked as if mildly alarmed.\n\nHe shook his head. \"Nothing like that. I've heard rumors among my fellow bankers that a bank in Salt Lake City was robbed and that monies stolen might have been deposited in another bank.\"\n\n\"Do you wish me to take care of the matter?\"\n\n\"No. Please, simply entertain them until I'm prepared to deal with it.\"\n\nIf Marion had any inquiries as to the uncertainty about Cromwell's request, she showed no curiosity. \"Yes, of course, I'll see that they are comfortable until you wish to see them.\"\n\n\"That will be all,\" said Cromwell. \"Thank you.\"\n\nAs soon as Marion left his office and shut the door, Cromwell reached into his breast pocket and brought out the bank draft from the Salt Lake Bank & Trust. Then he stood and went over to the large stand-up safe that held the bank's ledgers and records. He quickly, and expertly, doctored the books so that it appeared that the draft had already been received and the full amount paid to Eliah Ruskin. Cromwell also made entries that indicated the money had been deducted from his bank's liquid capital.\n\nCromwell did not have long to wait after finishing doctoring the records. The expected agents walked into his outer office twenty minutes later. Marion had stalled them, saying Mr. Cromwell was extremely busy. When a small buzzer beneath her desk sounded, she showed them into his office.\n\nHe was holding a telephone and nodded a greeting while motioning them to take chairs. \"Yes, Mr. Abernathy, I will personally see that your account is closed and the funds transferred to the Bank of Baton Rouge in Louisiana. Not at all. Glad to be of service. Have a good trip. Good-bye.\"\n\nCromwell put down the phone with a dead line and no caller on the other end. He stood, came around the desk, and offered his hand. \"Hello, I'm Jacob Cromwell, president of the bank.\"\n\n\"These gentlemen are from Salt Lake City,\" said Marion. \"They wish to see you about a draft drawn against their bank.\" Then she swirled her skirt, a bare inch above the ankles, left the office, and closed the door.\n\n\"How can I help you?\" Cromwell asked courteously.\n\nOne man was tall and gangly, the other short and stocky and sweating. The tall one spoke first. \"I'm William Bigalow, and my associate here is Joseph Farnum. We are inquiring if any financial institution in San Francisco might have received a bank draft for four hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars drawn on the Salt Lake Bank and Trust.\"\n\nCromwell raised his eyebrows in mock apprehension. \"What seems to be the problem?\"\n\n\"The draft was made under duress by the bank manager before a bandit shot him dead and made off with it, including the bank's money in its vault. We're trying to trace its whereabouts.\"\n\n\"Oh, my,\" said Cromwell, throwing up his hands in a sign of distress. \"That draft came into our hands yesterday afternoon.\"\n\nThe two agents tensed. \"You have the draft?\" Farnum queried expectantly.\n\n\"Yes, it is in a safe in our bookkeeping department.\" Cromwell's tone became grave. \"Unfortunately, we honored it.\"\n\n\"You honored it!\" Bigalow gasped.\n\nCromwell shrugged. \"Why, yes.\"\n\n\"With a check, no doubt,\" said Farnum, in hope there was still time to stop the bandit from cashing it at another bank.\n\n\"No, the gentleman whose name was on the draft asked for cash and we complied.\"\n\nBigalow and Farnum looked at Cromwell in shock. \"You paid almost half a million dollars in cash to someone who walked into your bank off the street?\" Bigalow frowned severely.\n\n\"I checked the draft myself when my manager brought it to me for approval. It appeared perfectly legitimate.\"\n\nBigalow did not look happy. It would be his burden to contact the directors of the Salt Lake Bank and tell them their four hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars had vanished.\n\n\"What was the name on the draft?\"\n\n\"A Mr. Eliah Ruskin,\" answered Cromwell. \"He produced a file of papers that showed Mr. Ruskin was the founder of an insurance company that was going to pay off claims brought on by a fire that destroyed a city block in a town...\" Cromwell paused. \"I believe he said its name was Bellingham, in Washington State.\"\n\n\"Can you describe Ruskin?\" asked Farnum.\n\n\"Very well dressed,\" offered Cromwell. \"Tall, with blond hair and a large blond mustache. I didn't catch the color of his eyes. But I seem to recall that he carried an unusual cane, with a silver eagle's head.\"\n\n\"That's Ruskin, all right,\" muttered Farnum.\n\n\"He didn't waste any time,\" Bigalow said to his partner. \"He must have caught an express train to get here in a little over a day.\"\n\nFarnum stared at Cromwell skeptically. \"Didn't you think that was an astronomical amount to pay a perfect stranger from out of state?\"\n\n\"True, but, as I said, I personally checked the draft to make sure it wasn't a forgery. I asked him why he didn't draw on it from a Seattle bank, but he said his company was opening an office in San Francisco. I assure you that it was a bona fide draft. I could find no reason to be suspicious. We paid, although it took almost every dollar of currency we carried in the vault.\"\n\n\"The bank we represent won't be happy about this,\" Barnum pointed out.\n\n\"I'm not worried,\" Cromwell replied significantly. \"The Cromwell Bank has done nothing illegitimate or illegal. We have adhered to the rules and regulations of banking. As to the Salt Lake Bank and Trust failing to meet their obligations, I'm not concerned. Besides their insurance company paying for the theft of the currency, I happen to know their assets are more than ample to cover a half-million-dollar loss.\"\n\nBarnum addressed Bigalow without turning in his direction. \"We had better get to the nearest telegraph office and notify the Salt Lake Bank and Trust directors. They won't be pleased.\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Bigalow nodded heavily. \"They may not take this lying down.\"\n\n\"They have no choice but to honor the draft. It is safe to say the banking commission will agree in Cromwell Bank's favor, should the directors of the Salt Lake Bank wish to enter a protest.\"\n\nThe two agents came to their feet.\n\n\"We'll need a statement from you, Mr. Cromwell,\" announced Farnum, \"stating the circumstances of the payment.\"\n\n\"I shall have my attorneys draw it up first thing in the morning.\"\n\n\"Thank you for your consideration.\"\n\n\"Not at all,\" said Cromwell, remaining seated. \"I'll do all in my power to cooperate.\"\n\nAs soon as the agents left, Cromwell called in Miss Morgan. \"Please see that I am not disturbed for the next two hours.\"\n\n\"I'll see to it,\" she said efficiently.\n\nSeconds after the door closed, Cromwell walked over and quietly locked it. Then he lifted the heavy suitcase under the desk onto the teak surface and opened it. The currency was piled loosely inside, some in stacks wrapped with paper bands.\n\nMethodically, Cromwell began to count and stack the bills, wrapping the loose ones with bands as he inked in the amount. When he finished, he had his desktop filled with neatly piled bundles of cash, marked and counted. The tally came to two hundred forty-one thousand dollars. Then he carefully put the money back in the suitcase, slid the suitcase back under the desk, and opened several ledgers, entering deposits in bogus accounts, which he had set up previously to conceal money stolen over the years. Money that he used to build up the assets needed to open his own bank. Satisfied that he was covered by all the entries, he buzzed Miss Morgan and informed her that he was ready to deal with the day-to-day business of running a successful house of finance.\n\nThe banking hours were from ten o'clock in the morning until three in the afternoon. When closing time rolled around, Cromwell waited until the employees had all left for home and the bank was locked up. Now, alone in the bank's vast interior, he carried the suitcase down the elevator to the main floor and into the bank vault, which was still open according to his instructions. He placed the currency, one stack at a time, in the proper bins that were used by the tellers for customer transactions. The receipts he had made up would be turned over to his chief accountant in the morning, who would record the juggled deposits without knowing the serial numbers.\n\nJacob Cromwell felt pleased with himself. Swindling as well as robbing the bank in Salt Lake City had been his most bold undertaking to date. And he was not about to repeat it. The evil act would throw off his pursuers, who would think he was becoming more daring, and be led into thinking he might try robbing a major city's bank again. But he knew when not to press his luck. Such a robbery was extremely complicated. When he went out on a crime spree again, it would be in a small town yet to be selected.\n\nAfter closing the vault and throwing the locks and timer, he went down to the basement and slipped out to the street through a hidden door that only he knew existed. Whistling \"Yankee Doodle,\" he hailed a cab and rode to California Street, where he took the cable car up the steep, twenty-four-percent grade of the three-hundred-seventy-five-foot-high slope to his house on Nob Hill, the \"hill which is covered with palaces,\" as Robert Louis Stevenson described it.\n\nCromwell's mansion amid mansions sat on a small picturesque lane called Cushman Street. The other monuments to wealth had been built by the bonanza-mining types and the big-four barons of the Central Pacific, later the Southern Pacific Railroad: Huntington, Stanford, Hopkins, and Crocker. To the eye of a creative artist or designer, the mansions looked like monstrosities of architecture gone mad with ostentation.\n\nUnlike the others that were built of wood, Cromwell and his sister Margaret's house was constructed of quarried stone and reflected more of a sedate, almost library-like exterior. There were some who thought it bore a striking resemblance to the White House in Washington.\n\nHe found his sister impatiently waiting. At her urging, he quickly readied himself for a night on the Barbary Coast. Yes indeed, he thought, as he dressed in his evening clothes, it had been a productive week. One more success to add to his growing sense of invincibility.\n\n## 12\n\nIRVINE COULD NOT COME UP WITH CURRENCY SERIAL numbers in Bozeman. Not only had the bank failed to record them; it had gone out of business due to the robbery. By the time their assets made up for the loss, the bank had collapsed, and the founder sold what few assets that were left, including the building, to a rich silver miner.\n\nIrvine pushed on to the next robbed bank on his list and took the Northern Pacific Railroad to the mining town of Elkhorn, Montana, located at an elevation of 6,444 feet above sea level. A booming mining town with twenty-five hundred residents, Elkhorn had produced some ten million dollars in gold and silver from 1872 until 1906. The Butcher Bandit had robbed its bank three years earlier, leaving four dead bodies behind.\n\nJust before the train pulled into the town station, Irvine studied, for the tenth time since leaving Bozeman, the report on the robbery in Elkhorn. It was the same modus operandi the bandit used on all his other robberies. Disguised as a miner, he entered the bank soon after the currency shipment had arrived to pay the three thousand men working the quartz lodes. As usual, there were no witnesses to the actual crime. All four victims\u2014the bank manager, a teller, and a husband and wife making a withdrawal\u2014had been shot in the head at close range. Again, the shots went unheard, and the bandit escaped into the atmosphere without leaving a clue.\n\nIrvine checked into the Grand Hotel before walking down the street to the Marvin Schmidt Bank, its new name taken from the miner who bought it. The architecture of the bank building was typical of the current style in most mining towns. Local stone laid with a Gothic theme. He walked though a corner door, facing the intersection of Old Creek and Pinon Streets. The manager sat behind a low partition not far from a massive steel safe painted with a huge elk standing on a rock outcropping.\n\n\"Mr. Sigler?\" inquired Irvine.\n\nA young man with black hair, brushed back and oiled, looked up at the greeting. His eyes were a shade of dark green, and his features indicated Indian blood in his ancestry. He wore comfortable cotton pants, a shirt with soft collar, and no tie. He lifted a pair of spectacles from the desk and set them on the bridge of his nose.\n\n\"I'm Sigler. How can I help you?\"\n\n\"I'm Glenn Irvine with the Van Dorn Detective Agency, here for an investigation into the robbery a few years ago.\"\n\nSigler quickly frowned with an attitude of annoyance. \"Don't you think it's a little late for Van Dorn to arrive on the scene? The robbery and murders took place back in 1903.\"\n\n\"We were not engaged to make an investigation at that time,\" Irvine retorted.\n\n\"So why are you here at this late date?\"\n\n\"To record the serial numbers of the bills taken by the robbery, if they were listed in a register.\"\n\n\"Who is paying for your services?\" Sigler insisted.\n\nIrvine could imagine Sigler's distrust and incomprehension. He might have felt the same if he was in the bank manager's shoes. \"The United States government. They want the robberies and murders to stop.\"\n\n\"Strikes me that the bastard can't be caught,\" Sigler said coldly.\n\n\"If he walks on two legs,\" said Irvine confidently, \"the Van Dorn Agency will catch him.\"\n\n\"I'll believe it when I see it,\" Sigler said indifferently.\n\n\"May I see your register of serial numbers? If we have those from the stolen bills, we will make every effort to trace them.\"\n\n\"What makes you think they were recorded?\"\n\nIrvine shrugged. \"Nothing. But it never hurts to ask.\"\n\nSigler fished around in his desk and retrieved a set of keys. \"We keep all the old bank records in a storehouse behind the building.\"\n\nHe motioned for Irvine to follow him as he led the way through a back door toward a small stone building sitting in the middle of the bank's property. The door protested with a loud squeak as it opened on unoiled hinges. Inside, shelves held rows of ledgers and account books. A small table and chair sat at the back of the storeroom.\n\n\"Sit down, Mr. Irvine, and I'll see what I can find.\"\n\nIrvine was not optimistic. Finding a bank that kept a record of serial numbers of its currency seemed highly improbable. It was a long shot, but every avenue had to be followed. He watched as Sigler went through several clothbound ledgers. At last, he opened one and nodded.\n\n\"Here you are,\" Sigler said triumphantly. \"The serial numbers our bookkeeper recorded of all the currency in the vault two days before the robbery. Some of the bills, of course, were distributed to customers. But most were taken by the bandit.\"\n\nIrvine was stunned as he opened the book and stared at the columns of neatly inked numbers within the lines of the pages. There were several different kinds of large banknotes. Gold certificates, silver certificates, notes issued by individual banks were recorded in the ledger. United States Treasury serial numbers were printed vertically and horizontally on the sides; the local bank that issued them added their own number at the bottom. Most came from the Continental & Commercial National Bank of Chicago and the Crocker First National Bank of San Francisco. He looked up at Sigler, now fired with elation.\n\n\"You don't know what this means,\" Irvine said, gratified beyond his greatest expectations. \"Now we can pass out numbers on the stolen bills to every bank in the country where the bandit might have deposited them. Handbills with the numbers can also be distributed to merchants throughout the West, urging them to be on the lookout for the bills.\"\n\n\"Good luck,\" said Sigler pessimistically. \"It's hardly possible that you can trace them back three years. Any one of them could have changed hands a hundred times by now.\"\n\n\"You're probably right, but hopefully the bandit is still spending them.\"\n\n\"Slim chance of that,\" Sigler said with a tight grin. \"I'll bet a month's wage he spent it all a long time ago.\"\n\nSigler was probably right, Irvine thought. But Irvine was not discouraged. Bell had said that it would be an insignificant mistake that would trip the bandit up. Now it was only a question of getting the information out to banks and merchants and hope there would be a response that led to the whereabouts of the mysterious killer.\n\n## 13\n\nCURTIS SAT AT A TABLE IN THE WESTERN ARCHIVES Division of the Union Pacific Railroad's office in Omaha, Nebraska, surrounded by high shelves filled with ledgers and account books of reports on train operations. During the nine days since he launched his search, he had scoured the records of four different railroads and the Wells Fargo stage lines trying to find a link for how the Butcher Bandit escaped capture after committing his robberies and hideous murders.\n\nIt was an exercise in futility. Nothing fell into place. He had begun with the stagecoach possibilities. Most of the stage lines were gone by 1906. Wells Fargo still held the monopoly, with lines extending several thousand miles over overland express routes in remote areas that were not serviced by railroads. But the schedules did not fall into the proper times.\n\nThere were sixteen hundred different company railroads across the nation in 1906, with two hundred twenty thousand miles of track among them. Fifty of the largest had a thousand miles of track each. Curtis had narrowed the number of companies down to five. They were the railroads with scheduled runs through the towns hit by the bandit.\n\n\"Would you like a cup of coffee?\"\n\nCurtis looked up from a train schedule record into the face of a little man standing no more than five feet two inches. His name was Nicolas Culhane, and his biscuit brown\u2013streaked graying hair was brushed forward over his head to cover the receding baldness. The ferret brown eyes shifted with amazing frequency, and he wore a thinly clipped mustache whose pointed ends extended a good inch on either side of his lips. He walked with a slight stoop and wore spectacles with lenses that magnified his eyes. Curtis was amused at the helpful little man with the springy step. He was the perfect stereotype of a keeper of musty records in an archive.\n\n\"No, thank you.\" Curtis paused to glance at his pocket watch. \"I never drink coffee in the afternoon.\"\n\n\"Having any luck?\" asked Culhane.\n\nCurtis shook his head wearily. \"None of the passenger trains ran close to the time the bandit robbed the banks.\"\n\n\"I pray you catch the murdering scum,\" Culhane said, his voice suddenly turned angry.\n\n\"You sound like you hate him.\"\n\n\"I have a personal grudge.\"\n\n\"Personal?\"\n\nCulhane nodded. \"My closest cousin and her little boy were killed by the Butcher at the bank in McDowell, New Mexico.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" Curtis said solemnly.\n\n\"You must catch and hang him!\" Culhane struck a fist on the table, causing the schedule book lying open to tremble and flip its pages. \"He has got away with his crimes far too long.\"\n\n\"I assure you, the Van Dorn Agency is working night and day to bring him to justice.\"\n\n\"Have you found anything at all that might trace him?\" Culhane asked anxiously.\n\nCurtis raised his hands in a helpless gesture. \"All we've discovered is that he is missing the little finger on his left hand. Besides that, we have nothing.\"\n\n\"Did you check out the stagecoach lines?\"\n\n\"I spent a day in the Wells Fargo records department. It was a dead end. None of their schedules put them in town within four hours of the robberies. More than enough time for the bandit to evade capture.\"\n\n\"And the passenger trains?\"\n\n\"The sheriff and marshals telegraphed surrounding towns to stop all trains and examine the passengers for anyone who looked suspicious. They even searched all luggage in hopes that one of the bags might contain the stolen currency, but they turned up no evidence, nor could they make an identification. The bandit was too smart. The disguises he used to rob and murder were too original and too well executed. The law officers had little or nothing to go on.\"\n\n\"Did time schedules work out?\"\n\n\"Only two,\" Curtis replied tiredly. \"The departure times on the others didn't coincide with the events.\"\n\nCulhane rubbed his thinning hair thoughtfully. \"You've eliminated stagecoaches and passenger trains. What about freight?\"\n\n\"Freight trains?\"\n\n\"Did you check out the departure times on those?\"\n\nCurtis nodded. \"There, we have a different story. The trains I've been able to find in the right place at the right time left the robbed towns within the required times.\"\n\n\"Then you have your answer,\" Culhane said.\n\nCurtis didn't reply immediately. He was tired, on the verge of sheer exhaustion, and depressed that he was no further along and had made no discoveries. Inwardly, he cursed the Butcher Bandit. It didn't seem humanly possible the man could be so obscure, so will-o'-the-wisp, so able to defy all attempts at detection. He could almost see the man laughing at the inept efforts of his pursuers.\n\nAt last, he said, \"You underestimate the law enforcement officials. They searched the boxcars of all the freight trains that passed through the towns during the specified time limits.\"\n\n\"What about the boxcars that were switched onto local sidings to be hauled later to other destinations by incoming trains? He could have dodged the posses by hiding in a freight car.\"\n\nCurtis shook his head. \"The posses searched all empty cars and found no sign of the bandit.\"\n\n\"Did they check out the ones that were loaded?\" Culhane questioned.\n\n\"How could they? The cars were locked tight. There's no way the bandit could have entered them.\"\n\nCulhane grinned like a fox on a hot scent. \"I guess nobody told you that the train brakemen all carry keys that will open the locks on the loading doors in case of fire.\"\n\n\"I was not aware of that angle,\" said Curtis.\n\nThe steel-rimmed spectacles slid down Culhane's nose. \"It's certainly something to think about.\"\n\n\"Yes, it is,\" Curtis mused, his mind beginning to turn. \"We're looking at a process of elimination. The posses claimed there were no tracks leading out of town to follow, which means our man didn't ride a horse. There is almost no chance he could have taken a stagecoach, and it appears unlikely he bought a ticket and traveled out of town as a passenger on a train. He also failed to be spotted in an empty boxcar.\"\n\n\"Which leaves loaded boxcars as the only means of transportation that was not examined,\" Culhane persisted.\n\n\"You may be onto something,\" said Curtis thoughtfully.\n\nA peculiar expression crossed Curtis's face as he began to envision a new scenario. \"That leaves a whole new avenue to follow. Now I have to go through freight car records to study the cars that made up those specific trains, who owned them, their manifest, and their ultimate destination.\"\n\n\"Not an easy chore,\" said Culhane. \"You'll have to check out hundreds of freight cars from a dozen trains.\"\n\n\"Like a piece of a puzzle. Find the boxcar that was parked on a nearby siding in all of the robbed towns on the days of the robberies.\"\n\n\"I'll be happy to help you with the Union Pacific freight records.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Mr. Culhane. Two of the freight trains in question were hauled by Union Pacific.\"\n\n\"Just tell me which towns they were at and I'll dig out the records that give the car's serial numbers, their ownership, and the agent who arranged and paid for their transportation.\"\n\n\"You've been a great help to me and I'm grateful,\" Curtis said sincerely.\n\n\"I'm the one who is grateful, Mr. Curtis. I never thought I would be instrumental in bringing the Butcher Bandit, the killer of my cousin and her child, to justice.\"\n\nFour hours later, with Culhane's able assistance, Curtis had the information that gave him a solid direction to investigate. Now all he had to do was research the archives of the Southern Pacific, the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe, and the Denver & Rio Grande railroads to confirm Culhane's theory.\n\nBy nightfall, he was on a train to Los Angeles and the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe archives. Too inspired to sleep, he stared at his reflection in the window since it was too dark to see the landscape roll by outside. He was optimistic that the end of the trail seemed to be over the next hill and around the next bend.\n\n## 14\n\nTHE EARLY EVENING CAME WITH A LIGHT RAIN THAT dampened the dirt street through town as Bell stepped off the train. In the fading light, he could see that Bisbee, Arizona, was a vertical town, with sharply rising hills occupied by many houses that could be reached only by steep stairways. On his way to the Copper Queen Hotel, he walked through the narrow, twisting streets, a maze flanked by new, substantial brick buildings.\n\nIt was a Saturday, and Bell found a deputy holding down the sheriff's office and jail. The deputy said the sheriff was taking a few days off, to make repairs to his house that had been damaged in a flood that had swept down the hills, and would not return to work until Thursday. When Bell asked him for directions to the sheriff's house, the deputy refused to give them, claiming that the sheriff was not to be disturbed unless it was an emergency.\n\nBell checked into the Copper Queen, ate a light dinner in the hotel dining room, and then went out on the town. He skipped having a drink in the Copper Queen Saloon and walked up to the infamous Brewery Gulch, lined with fifty saloons, known throughout the territory as the wildest, bawdiest, and best drinking street in the West.\n\nHe checked out four of the saloons, stepping into each and studying the action, before going on to the next one. Finally, he settled into a large, wooden-walled hall with a stage and a small band playing a ragtime tune while four dancing girls hoofed it around the stage. Moving through the crowded tables to the bar, he waited until a busy bartender asked, \"What'll it be, friend, whiskey or beer?\"\n\n\"What's your best whiskey?\"\n\n\"Jack Daniel's from Tennessee,\" said the bartender without hesitation. \"It won the Gold Medal at the St. Louis Fair as the best whiskey in the world.\"\n\nBell smiled. \"I've enjoyed it, on occasion. Let me have a double shot glass.\"\n\nWhile the bartender poured, Bell turned around, leaned his elbows behind him on the bar, and gazed around the busy saloon. Like most watering holes in the West, a large section of the room was given over to gambling. Bell's eyes went from table to table, looking for the right mix of poker players. He found what he had hoped to find, a table with men dressed in fancier clothes than the large number of miners. They appeared to be businessmen, merchants, or mining officials. Best of all, there were four of them, one short of a fifth player.\n\nBell paid for his whiskey and walked over to the table. \"May I join you gentlemen?\" he asked.\n\nA heavyset man with a red face nodded and motioned toward an empty chair. \"You're quite welcome to sit in,\" he said.\n\nA man directly across the table shuffled the cards, looked across at Bell as he sat down, and began dealing. \"I'm Frank Calloway. The others are Pat O'Leery, Clay Crum, and Lewis Latour.\"\n\n\"Isaac Bell.\"\n\n\"You new in town, Mr. Bell?\" asked O'Leery, a big, brawny Irishman.\n\n\"Yes, I arrived on the six-thirty train from Phoenix.\"\n\n\"Business or pleasure?\" O'Leery probed.\n\n\"Business. I'm an agent with the Van Dorn Detective Agency.\"\n\nThey all looked up from their cards and stared at Bell with inquisitive interest.\n\n\"Let me guess,\" said Crum, folding his hands over a rotund belly. \"You're looking into the bank robbery and murders that took place four months ago.\"\n\nBell nodded as he fanned his hand and examined his cards. \"You are correct, sir.\"\n\nLatour spoke in a French accent as he lit a cigar. \"A little late, aren't you? The trail is cold.\"\n\n\"No colder than it was five minutes after the crime,\" Bell countered. \"I'll take two cards.\"\n\nCalloway dealt as the players called out the number of cards they hoped would give them a winning hand. \"A mystery, that one,\" he said. \"No trace of the bandit was ever found.\"\n\n\"Uncanny,\" O'Leery said as he inspected his hand, his expression revealing he had nothing worth betting on. \"I fold.\" His eyes briefly met Bell's. \"Uncanny that he could escape into thin air.\"\n\n\"The sheriff found no sign of his trail,\" muttered Crum. \"The posse returned to town looking as if their wives had run off with a band of traveling salesmen.\" He paused. \"I'll bet two dollars.\"\n\n\"I'll raise you three dollars,\" offered Calloway.\n\nLatour threw his hand toward the dealer. \"I'm out.\"\n\n\"And you, Mr. Bell,\" inquired Calloway, \"are you still in?\"\n\nBell was amused that the stakes were not high, but not penny-ante either. \"I'll call.\"\n\n\"Two queens,\" announced Crum.\n\n\"Two tens,\" said Calloway. \"You beat me.\" He turned. \"Mr. Bell?\"\n\n\"Two eights,\" Bell said, passing his cards facedown to Calloway. Bell had not lost. He held three jacks, but he thought that losing would bring him closer to the other men's confidence. \"Was there any clue to how the robber escaped?\"\n\n\"Nothing I ever heard of,\" replied O'Leery. \"Last time I talked to the sheriff, he was baffled.\"\n\n\"That would be Sheriff Hunter?\" Bell inquired, recalling what he read in the agency report.\n\n\"Joe Hunter died from a bad heart two months after the murders,\" answered Latour. \"The new sheriff is Stan Murphy, who was Hunter's chief deputy. He knows what went on as well as anybody.\"\n\n\"As nice as they come, if he likes you,\" Crum said. \"But get on his bad side and he'll chew you to bits.\"\n\n\"I'd like to talk with him, but I doubt if he'll be in his office on the Sabbath,\" said Bell, not mentioning the discouraging comments of Murphy's deputy. \"Where might I find him?\"\n\n\"We had a bad flood through town two weeks ago,\" replied Calloway. \"His house was badly damaged. I suspect you'll find him up to his neck in repairs.\"\n\n\"Can you give me directions to his house?\"\n\nO'Leery waved a hand toward the north. \"Just go up to the end of Howland Street and take the stairs. The house is painted green and has a small grove of orange trees alongside.\"\n\nThe talk moved to politics and whether Teddy Roosevelt could run for a third term in 1908 and, if not, whom he would pick as his successor. Bell lost three hands for every hand he won, easily putting the other men at ease as they realized the stranger was no gambling cardsharp. He swung the conversation back to the bank murders.\n\n\"Seems strange that no one saw the robber leaving the bank or riding out of town,\" said Bell idly as he played his cards.\n\n\"Nobody came forward,\" said O'Leery.\n\n\"And none saw the bandit enter or leave the bank,\" Latour added.\n\n\"There was an old drunken miner that hung around across the street from the bank,\" answered Calloway, \"but he disappeared soon afterward.\"\n\n\"Sheriff Hunter did not consider him a suspect?\"\n\nLatour had no luck. He folded for the fifth time since Bell sat down at the table. \"An old miner who was all played out and looked like he wasn't long for this world? He was the last one the townspeople thought had anything to do with the crime.\"\n\n\"More than once, I saw him sprawled on a sidewalk, drunk out of his mind,\" said O'Leery. \"He couldn't have robbed a bank and murdered three people any more than I could become governor. I still think it was an inside job pulled off by someone we all know.\"\n\n\"It might have been a stranger,\" Bell said.\n\nCalloway shrugged negatively. \"Bisbee has twenty thousand inhabitants. Who's to recognize a stranger?\"\n\n\"What about that fellow on a motorcycle?\" Crum asked no one in particular.\n\n\"There was a motorcycle in town?\" asked Bell, his interest aroused.\n\n\"Jack Carson said he saw a dandy riding one.\" Crum threw down a winning hand with a flush.\n\nLatour took a long puff on his cigar. \"Jack said the rider was well dressed, when he saw him pass through an alley. He couldn't figure out how someone riding one of those contraptions could wear clothes so clean and unsoiled.\"\n\n\"Did your friend get a look at the rider's face?\"\n\n\"All Jack could tell was that the rider was clean-shaven,\" Calloway responded.\n\n\"What about hair color?\"\n\n\"According to Jack, the fellow wore a bowler. Jack wasn't sure, as he didn't get a good look because the motorcycle went by too fast, but he thought the hair might have been red. At least, that's what he thought, from a glimpse of the sideburns.\"\n\nFor the second time that week, Bell found excitement coursing through his veins. A resident of Eagle City, Utah, another mining town where the Butcher Bandit left four residents dead, mentioned that he had seen a stranger riding a motorcycle on the day of the killing.\n\n\"Where can I find this Jack Carson?\"\n\n\"Not in Bisbee,\" replied Crum. \"The last I heard, he went back to his home in Kentucky.\"\n\nBell made a mental note to ask Van Dorn to try and find Carson.\n\nO'Leery made another sour face at seeing his hand. \"Whoever rode that motorcycle must have hung around town for a few days after the robbery.\"\n\n\"Why do you say that?\" Bell probed.\n\n\"Because the sheriff and his posse would have spotted the motorcycle's tire tracks if the killer had ridden out of town immediately after the robbery.\"\n\n\"You'd think he would have been spotted if he stayed in town until the posse gave up the hunt.\"\n\n\"You would think so,\" said Calloway, \"but he was never seen again.\"\n\n\"Was Carson a reliable witness?\" Bell laid five dollars on the table. \"I raise.\"\n\n\"Jack was a former mayor of Bisbee, an attorney highly regarded as an honorable man,\" Latour explained. \"If he said he saw a man on a motorcycle, he saw a man on a motorcycle. I have no reason to doubt his word.\"\n\n\"You going to see Sheriff Murphy tomorrow?\" Crum inquired, finally winning a hand.\n\nBell nodded. \"First thing in the morning. But, after talking with you gentlemen, I fear there is little of importance he can tell me.\"\n\nAfter nursing his drink during two hours of play, Bell was even, almost. He was only four dollars in the hole, and none of the other players minded when he bid them good night and walked back to his hotel.\n\nTHE ROAD that wound up to the street toward the sheriff's house was long, and muddy after a rainstorm that struck Bisbee in the middle of the night. Coming to a dead end, Bell mounted the steep stairway that seemed to go on forever. Despite being in excellent physical shape, he was panting when he reached the top.\n\nBell was in a happy mood. He had yet to learn what Irvine and Curtis turned up, if anything. But he was dead certain the man seen on the motorcycle was the Butcher Bandit after he removed his disguise as the old intoxicated miner. A missing finger and a hint of red hair was hardly a triumph. Even the hair color glimpsed by Jack Carson was a long shot. It was the motorcycle that intrigued Bell, not because the bandit owned one but because it fit that a shrewd and calculating mind would use the latest technology in transportation.\n\nThe primary question was, how did the bandit ride it out of town without being seen again?\n\nSheriff Murphy's house was only a few steps from the top of the stairway. It was small, and looked more like a shed than a house. The flood had pushed it off its foundation, and Bell saw that Murphy was busily engaged in propping it up in its new location, ten feet from where it had sat before. True to O'Leery's description, it was painted green, but the flood had devastated the orange grove.\n\nMurphy was furiously wielding a hammer and didn't hear Bell approach. A great torrent of dark brown hair flowed around his neck and shoulders. Most of the lawmen in the West were not fat but lean and angular. Murphy had the body of a blacksmith rather than a sheriff. The muscles in his arms looked like tree trunks, and he had the neck of an ox.\n\n\"Sheriff Murphy!\" Bell shouted over the pounding of the hammer against nails.\n\nMurphy stopped with his hammer in midair and turned. He stared at Bell as he might stare at a coyote. \"Yes, I'm Murphy. But, as you can see, I'm busy.\"\n\n\"You can keep working,\" said Bell. \"I'm with the Van Dorn Detective Agency and would like to ask you a few questions about the bank robbery and murders a few months ago.\"\n\nThe name Van Dorn was respected among law enforcement circles, and Murphy laid down the hammer and pointed inside the little house. \"Come inside. The place is a bit of a mess, but I have coffee on the stove.\"\n\n\"After that climb up the hill, a cup of water would be nice.\"\n\n\"Sorry, the well got befouled by the flood and isn't fit to drink, but I carried a gallon up from a horse trough in town.\"\n\n\"Coffee it is,\" said Bell with a measure of trepidation.\n\nMurphy led Bell into the house and offered him a chair at the kitchen table. There was no sign of the presence of a woman, so Bell assumed that Murphy was a bachelor. The sheriff poured two coffees in tin cups from an enamel pot that sat on the wood-burning stove.\n\n\"I don't know how I can help you, Mr. Bell. I sent a copy of my findings to your agency in Chicago.\"\n\n\"You neglected to mention Jack Carson's sighting.\"\n\nMurphy laughed. \"The guy on a motorcycle? I don't believe what Jack said he saw. The description didn't fit anyone I knew in town.\"\n\n\"The bandit could have changed his disguise,\" Bell suggested.\n\n\"There was no time for him to completely alter his appearance, retrieve his motorcycle, and ride off into the blue.\"\n\n\"The rider and his machine were never seen again?\"\n\nMurphy shrugged. \"Strikes me odd that nobody else saw him except Jack. A man on the only motorcycle in town is bound to be noticed. And how could he ride out of town without leaving a trail?\"\n\n\"I admit it sounds a bit far-fetched,\" said Bell, not wanting to discard the sighting.\n\n\"Jack Carson was an upstanding citizen not noted for being a hard drinker or a teller of tall tales. But I believe he was hallucinating.\"\n\n\"Was there any other evidence discovered that wasn't in your report?\"\n\n\"There was something found after I sent the report to Chicago. Murphy rose from the kitchen table and pulled open a drawer of a rolltop desk. He passed Bell a brass shell casing. \"This was found two weeks later, by a young boy playing on the floor of the bank while his father made a deposit. It was under a carpet. The bandit must have missed it.\"\n\nBell studied the cartridge. \"Thirty-eight caliber. If it was ejected, it must have come from an automatic weapon, probably a Colt.\"\n\n\"That was my guess, too.\"\n\n\"May I keep it?\" asked Bell.\n\n\"Sure. But I doubt you'll learn anything from it, except knowing it came from the bandit's gun. And even that is not cold, hard evidence.\"\n\n\"If not the bandit, then where did it come from?\"\n\nMurphy held up his hands in a helpless gesture. \"I can't begin to guess.\"\n\nBell carefully held the cartridge in the palm of his hand. \"Hopefully, we can obtain the bandit's fingerprints.\"\n\nMurphy grinned. \"You'll find mine as well as the young boy's and two of my deputies'.\"\n\n\"Still,\" said Bell optimistically, \"our experts may be able to pull a print. We won't need a sample of the boy who found it. His print would be small. But I would like sample prints of you and your deputies. You can send them to my Chicago office.\"\n\n\"I've never taken a fingerprint,\" said Murphy. \"I'm not at all sure how it's done.\"\n\n\"The science has been around for centuries, but only in the past few years is it catching on with law enforcement. The impressions on an object\u2014in this case, the cartridge\u2014are created by the ridges on the skin. When the object is handled, the perspiration and oils are transferred to it, leaving an impression of the fingertip-ridge pattern. To record the prints, a fine powder like ground-up graphite from a pencil is dusted on the surface. Then a piece of tape is used to lift the print for study.\"\n\nMurphy sipped at his coffee. \"I'll give it a try.\"\n\nBell thanked the sheriff and walked down the stairway. Three hours later, he was on a train back to Denver.\n\n## 15\n\nCROMWELL'S CHAUFFEUR DROVE THE 1906 ROLLS Royce Brougham, made by the London coach maker Barker, with its six-cylinder, thirty-horsepower engine, from the garage to the front of the palatial Nob Hill mansion Cromwell had designed himself and constructed from white marble blocks cut and hauled by railroad from a quarry in Colorado. The front end had the appearance of a Greek temple, with high fluted columns, while the rest of the house was more simply designed, with arched windows, and a cornice that crowned the walls.\n\nWhile the chauffeur, Abner Weed, a stony-faced Irishman whom Cromwell hired more for his experience as a wrestler than his expertise behind the wheel of an automobile, stood patiently by the Rolls out front, Cromwell waited for his sister in his study, sprawled comfortably on a leather sofa, listening to Strauss waltzes on an Edison cylinder phonograph. He was conservatively dressed in a dark wool suit. After listening to \"Voices of Spring,\" he changed cylinders and played Tales from the Vienna Wood. The cylinders played two minutes of music each.\n\nCromwell glanced up from the machine as his sister came into the room wearing a doeskin dress that fell around her nicely curved calves.\n\n\"A bit risqu\u00e9, aren't we?\" he said, eyeing her exposed flesh.\n\nShe spun around, swirling the skirt and showing off her legs up to midthigh. \"Since we're going slumming on the Barbary Coast, I thought I'd dress like a soiled dove.\"\n\n\"Just be sure you don't act like one.\"\n\nHe rose from the sofa, turned off the phonograph, and held up her coat so she could slip into it. Even with his shoe lifts, he stood the same height as his sister. Then he followed her through the large, intricately carved front doors to the drive and the waiting Rolls-Royce. Abner, attired in his liveried uniform with shiny black boots, stood at attention, holding open the rear door. The Rolls was a town car, with an enclosed passenger compartment, the chauffeur in the open air with nothing but the windshield to protect him. As soon as Cromwell's sister was settled, he instructed the driver where to go. Abner shifted gears and the big car rolled silently over the granite stones laid in the street.\n\n\"This is the first opportunity we've had to talk since I came home,\" said Cromwell, secure in the knowledge that the driver could not hear their conversation through the divider window separating the front and rear seats.\n\n\"I know that your trip to Salt Lake City was successful. And our bank is another seven hundred thousand dollars richer.\"\n\n\"You haven't told me how you made out in Denver.\"\n\n\"Your spies in the Van Dorn Agency were quite accurate in their assessment of the investigation. The Denver office has taken on the job of lead investigator in the hunt for the Butcher Bandit.\"\n\n\"I hate being called that. I would have preferred something with more swank.\"\n\n\"Like what, pray tell?\" she asked, laughing.\n\n\"The Stylish Spirit.\"\n\nShe rolled her eyes. \"I doubt that newspaper editors would be enthused with that one.\"\n\n\"What else did you find out?\"\n\n\"The head of the Denver office, Nicholas Alexander, is an idiot. After I flashed a few of my charms, he couldn't stop speaking about the hunt. He was angry he wasn't put in charge of the investigation and had no reservations about revealing pertinent information concerning the methods they were going to use to catch the notorious bandit. Van Dorn himself named his top agent, Isaac Bell, to the case. A handsome and dashing devil, and very wealthy, I might add.\"\n\n\"You saw him?\"\n\n\"I met him, and, what's more, I danced with him.\" She pulled a small photograph from her purse. \"I was waiting to give you this. Not the greatest likeness, but the photographer I hired was not very proficient at shooting photographs without setting them up in advance.\"\n\nCromwell switched on the dome light of the car and examined the photo. The photo showed a tall man, with blond hair and mustache. \"Should I be concerned about him?\"\n\nHer eyes took on an evasive expression. \"I can't say. He seemed more intelligent and sophisticated than our spies led me to believe. I had them check his background. He rarely if ever fails to find and apprehend his man. His record is quite admirable. Van Dorn thinks very highly of him.\"\n\n\"If, as you say, he is affluent, why is he wasting his time as a simple detective?\"\n\nMargaret shrugged. \"I have no idea. Maybe, like you, he craves a challenge, too?\" She hesitated as she adjusted an imaginary loose curl with her fingers.\n\n\"Where did he get his money?\"\n\n\"Did I forget to mention that he comes from a family of bankers in Boston?\"\n\nCromwell stiffened. \"I know of the Bells. They own the American States Bank of Boston, one of the largest financial institutions in the country.\"\n\n\"He's a paradox,\" she said slowly, recalling her few minutes with him in the Brown Palace Hotel. \"But he can also be very dangerous. He'll come after us like a fox chasing a rabbit.\"\n\n\"A detective who knows the inner workings of banking procedures is not good,\" Cromwell said, his tone low and icy. \"We must be especially wary.\"\n\n\"I agree.\"\n\n\"You're certain he had no clue to your true identity?\"\n\n\"I covered my tracks well. As far as he and Alexander know, my name is Rose Manteca, from Los Angeles, where my father owns a large ranch.\"\n\n\"If Bell is as smart as you suggest, he'll check that out and prove Rose doesn't exist.\"\n\n\"So what?\" she said impishly. \"He'll never know my name is Margaret Cromwell, sister of a respected banker who lives in a mansion on Nob Hill in San Francisco.\"\n\n\"What other information did you pry out of Alexander?\"\n\n\"Only that Bell's investigation is not going well. They have no clues that lead in your direction. Alexander was angry that Bell hadn't taken him into his confidence. He said that Bell was close-mouthed concerning his actions with a pair of agents known as Curtis and Irvine. All I could find out is, they're all out beating the bushes in search of a lead.\"\n\n\"That's good to hear.\" Cromwell smiled thinly. \"They'll never consider that a banker is behind the robberies.\"\n\nShe gazed at him. \"You could quit, you know. We no longer need the money. And no matter how careful, no matter how sharp-witted you are, it's only a question of time before you're caught and hung.\"\n\n\"You want me to give up the excitement and the challenge of achieving what no one else would dare and play the role of a stodgy banker for the rest of my days?\"\n\n\"No, I do not,\" she said with a wicked sparkle in her eye. \"I love the excitement, too.\" Then her voice softened and became distant. \"It's just that I know it cannot go on forever.\"\n\n\"The time will come when we know when to stop,\" he said without emphasis.\n\nNeither brother nor sister possessed even a tinge of repentance or remorse for all the men, women, and children Cromwell had murdered. Nor could they have cared less for all the savings of small businesses, miners, and farmers they had wiped out when the robbed banks, unable to refund their depositors, had to close their doors.\n\n\"Who are you taking tonight?\" she asked, changing the subject.\n\n\"Marion Morgan.\"\n\n\"That prude,\" she scoffed. \"It's a mystery to me why you keep her on the payroll.\"\n\n\"She happens to be very efficient,\" he retorted, not seeking an argument.\n\n\"Why haven't you ever taken her to bed?\" she said with a soft laugh.\n\n\"You know I never play with my employees. It's a principle that has saved me much grief. I'm only taking her out tonight as a bonus for her work. Nothing more.\" His sister's dress was pulled to her knees and he reached over and squeezed one of them. \"Who is the lucky man this evening?\"\n\n\"Eugene Butler.\"\n\n\"That fop?\" he taunted. \"He's as worthless as they come.\"\n\n\"He's filthy rich\u2014\"\n\n\"His father is filthy rich,\" Cromwell corrected her. \"If Sam Butler hadn't made a lucky strike when he stumbled onto the Midas gold vein, he'd have died broke.\"\n\n\"Eugene will be richer than you when his father dies.\"\n\n\"He's a wastrel and a sot. He'll spend his fortune so fast your head will swim.\"\n\n\"I can handle him,\" said his sister. \"He's madly in love with me and will do anything I tell him.\"\n\n\"You can do better, much better,\" grunted Cromwell. He picked up a speaking tube and spoke to the driver. \"Abner, turn left at the next street and stop at the Butler residence.\"\n\nAbner held up a hand to indicate he understood. He stopped the Rolls in front of a huge mansion constructed of wood in the Victorian style of the day. Then he stepped from the car and rang the bell at the iron-gated front door. A maid answered, and he handed her Cromwell's calling card. The maid took it and closed the door. A few minutes later, the door reopened and a tall, handsome man with sharply defined facial features came out and walked toward the car. He could have passed for a matinee idol onstage. Like Cromwell, he wore a woolen suit that was dark navy rather than black, a starched collar, and a tie with a white-diamond pattern. He paused in the portico and sniffed the air, which was tinged with a light fog that rolled in from the bay.\n\nAbner opened the Rolls's rear door, pulled down a jump seat, and stood back. Butler got in and sat down. He turned to Cromwell's sister. \"Maggie, you look positively stunning, good enough to eat.\" He left it there, seeing the fearsome, hostile look in Cromwell's eyes. He greeted Cromwell without offering his hand. \"Jacob, good to see you.\"\n\n\"You look fit,\" said Cromwell as if he cared.\n\n\"In the pink. I walk five miles a day.\"\n\nCromwell ignored him, picked up the speaking tube, and instructed Abner where to pick up Marion Morgan. He turned to his sister. \"What saloon on the Barbary Coast do you wish for us to mingle with the foul-smelling rabble?\"\n\n\"I heard that Spider Kelly's was quite scrubby.\"\n\n\"The worst dive in the world,\" Cromwell said knowledgeably. \"But they have good bands and a large dance floor.\"\n\n\"Do you think it's safe?\" asked Margaret.\n\nCromwell laughed. \"Red Kelly hires a small army of husky bouncers to protect affluent clientele like us from harm or embarrassment.\"\n\n\"Spider Kelly's it is,\" said Butler. \"I even took my mumsy and dad there one evening. They truly enjoyed watching the mix of unsavory people who frequent the place. We sat in the slummers' balcony to watch the lowlife cavort.\"\n\nThe Rolls stopped in front of an apartment building on Russian Hill just off Hyde Street on Lombard, a fashionable but affordable district of the city. This area of Russian Hill contained the homes and meeting places where intellectuals, artists, architects, writers, and journalists engaged in lofty arguments and discussions\u2014but mostly socialized and partied.\n\nMarion did not stand on protocol. She was waiting out front, on the top step of her building. As the Rolls eased to the curb, she descended and then stopped as Abner opened the door for her. She was dressed in a short jacket over a blue blouse with a matching skirt that had a simple elegance about it. Her blond hair was drawn back and twisted into a long braid with a bow at the back of her long neck.\n\nCromwell stepped out and gallantly helped her into the backseat. The chauffeur pulled down the other jump seat in which Cromwell, in a courtly manner, seated himself. \"Miss Marion Morgan, may I present Mr. Eugene Butler. And you've met my sister Margaret,\" he said, using her proper name.\n\n\"Miss Cromwell, a pleasure to see you again.\" Marion's tone was gracious but not exactly filled with warmth. \"Likewise, Eugene,\" Marion acknowledged sweetly with familiarity.\n\n\"You know each other?\" asked Margaret in surprise.\n\n\"Eugene...Mr. Butler...took me to dinner some time ago.\"\n\n\"Two years,\" Butler said good-naturedly. \"I failed to impress her. She spurned all my later invitations.\"\n\n\"And advances,\" Marion added, smiling.\n\n\"Ready for a hot night on the Barbary Coast?\" asked Cromwell.\n\n\"It will be a new experience for me,\" said Marion. \"I've never had the courage to go there.\"\n\n\"Remember the old song,\" said Margaret:\n\n\"The miners came in 'forty-nine,\n\nthe whores in 'fifty-one.\n\nAnd when they got together,\n\nthey produced the native son.\"\n\nMarion blushed and looked demurely at the carpet on the floor as the men laughed.\n\nA few minutes later, Abner turned onto Pacific Street and drove through the heart of the Barbary Coast, named after the lair of the Barbary pirates of Morocco and Tunisia. Here was the home of gamblers, prostitutes, burglars, con men, drunks, derelicts, cutthroats, and murderers. It was all there, debauchery and degradation, poverty and wealth, misery and death.\n\nThe infamous coast boasted more than three hundred saloons, wall-to-wall, within six city blocks, fifty of them on Pacific Street alone. It existed because of crooked politicians who were bribed by the saloon, gambling house, and brothel owners. The reputable citizens of the city complained publicly about the den of iniquity but averted their eyes because they were secretly proud of the distinction that their fair city of San Francisco more than equaled Paris, which bore the enviable reputation as the wickedest city in the Western Hemisphere, as a carnival of vice and corruption.\n\nAnd yet the Barbary Coast was glitzy and glamorous, with loads of ballyhoo and skulduggery, a veritable paradise for people of honest means to go slumming. The unsavory who ran the dens of sin\u2014in most cases, men\u2014relished seeing the swells from Nob Hill enter their establishments because they had no scruples charging them exorbitant prices for admission and liquor, usually thirty dollars for a bottle of champagne rather than the going rate of six to eight. Mixed drinks in most saloons were twenty-five cents and beer a dime.\n\nAbner slipped the Rolls through the revelers wandering the street and pulled to a stop in front of a three-story building that served as a hotel upstairs\u2014in reality, a brothel, called a cow yard, which housed fifty women in rooms, called cribs. The main floor was for gambling and drinking, while the downstairs basement had a stage for bawdy shows and a large wooden floor for dancing. They stepped from the car, with the men in the lead to shield the ladies, who stared with fascination at a flashy uniformed barker on the sidewalk.\n\n\"Step right into Spider Kelly's, the finest drinking and dancing establishment on the coast. All are welcome, all will have the night of their lives. See the wildest show and the most beautiful girls to be found anywhere. See them kick their heels over their heads; see them sway in a manner that will shock and amaze you.\"\n\n\"I like this place already,\" said Margaret gaily.\n\nMarion stared and clutched Cromwell's arm tightly and looked up at a sign largely ignored by the clientele that read NO VULGARITY ALLOWED IN THIS ESTABLISHMENT.\n\nThey entered a large, U-shaped entrance lobby decorated with framed panels of nude women dancing amid Roman ruins. A manager decked out in an ill-fitting tuxedo greeted them and escorted them inside. \"Do you wish to go downstairs for the show?\" he asked. \"The next one starts in ten minutes.\"\n\n\"We would like a safe table away from the riffraff,\" said Cromwell in a demanding tone. \"After we've enjoyed a bottle of your finest champagne, we'll go downstairs for dancing and the show.\"\n\nThe manager bowed. \"Yes, sir. Right this way.\"\n\nHe escorted Cromwell's party through the crowded saloon up to a table on the slummers' balcony Butler had mentioned overlooking the main floor of the saloon. Soon a waitress wearing a thin blouse cut low across her breasts and a skirt that came well above her knees, showing an ample display of legs in black silk stockings held up by capricious garters, brought a magnum of Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin champagne, vintage 1892. As she eased the bottle into an ordinary bucket filled with ice, she brushed against the men and gave each an earthy smile. Margaret returned the smile, letting the waitress know that Margaret knew that besides serving customers in the saloon she also worked in the cribs upstairs. Surprised at seeing a Nob Hill swell dressed in a revealing outfit, the waitress gave Margaret a lewd look.\n\n\"You know, dearie, a redhead like you is in high demand. You could name your own price.\"\n\nMarion was stunned. Cromwell fought to keep from laughing, while Butler became outright indignant. \"This is a lady!\" he snapped. \"You will apologize!\"\n\nThe waitress ignored him. \"If she's Jewish, she can make the top of the scale.\" Then she turned, gave a wiggle to her buttocks, and walked down the stairway.\n\n\"What does being Jewish have to do with it?\" Marion asked naively.\n\n\"There is a myth going around,\" explained Cromwell, \"that Jewish redheads are the most passionate of all women.\"\n\nMargaret was enjoying herself as she gazed around the main floor of the saloon. She felt a giddy elation at seeing the sailors and dock-workers, the young and honest working girls who unknowingly were easily led astray, and the hardened criminals milling around the floor, which was littered with a small army of men too drunk to stand. Unknown to the others, including her brother, Margaret had visited the dives of the Barbary Coast on several occasions. And she was well aware that her brother Jacob often frequented the expensive and most exclusive parlor houses, where the royalty of the shady women plied their trade.\n\nMarion found it disgusting and fascinating at the same time. She had heard the coast was the pit of bitterness and despair for the poor of San Francisco, but she had no idea how far humans could sink. She was not used to drinking and the champagne mellowed her after a while, and she began to see the depravity in a less-sickening light. She tried to imagine herself as one of those loose women, taking men to the cribs upstairs for as little as fifty cents. Horrified at herself, she quickly pushed the thought from her mind and rose unsteadily to her feet after Cromwell held up the empty bottle and announced that it was time for them to go downstairs.\n\nThe manager appeared and found a table that was occupied on the dance floor not far from the stage. Two couples dressed in soiled working clothes protested at having to give up their table, but the manager threatened them with bodily harm if they didn't move.\n\n\"What luck,\" said Margaret. \"The show is just starting.\"\n\nCromwell ordered another magnum of champagne as they watched a well-endowed woman step onto the small stage and begin a Dance of the Seven Veils. It wasn't long before the veils dropped away and she was left with a scanty costume that left little to the imagination. Her abdominal muscles rippled as she gyrated and made several lusty contortions. When she was finished, the men in the audience threw coins on the stage.\n\n\"Well, that was certainly arousing,\" Margaret said sarcastically.\n\nA small band began playing and couples moved onto the dance floor, stepping lively to a dance called the Texas Tommy. Butler and Margaret swirled around the floor with gay abandon as if they were one. Marion felt a self-conscious sense of embarrassment at being held close to her boss. In all the years she had worked for him, this was the first time he had ever asked her out. He was an excellent dancer, and she followed his lead gracefully.\n\nThe band changed tempo at different times so the dancers could move to the steps of the Turkey Trot and the Bunny Hug. Soon the dancers began to sweat in the confined, airless quarters of the basement. The champagne began to make Marion's head reel and she asked Cromwell if she could sit down for a few minutes.\n\n\"Would you mind if I left you for a little while?\" Cromwell asked courteously. \"I'd like to go upstairs and play a few hands of faro.\"\n\nMarion was vastly relieved. She was on the verge of exhaustion, and her new shoes were causing discomfort to her feet. \"Yes, please do, Mr. Cromwell. I could stand a breather.\"\n\nCromwell climbed the wooden stairway and walked slowly through the bustling gambling section until he came to a table where there were no players except the dealer. Two burly men stood behind the dealer and discouraged any customer from sitting at the table.\n\nThe dealer looked like he was born from a bull. His head sat like a chiseled rock on top of a neck that was as thick as a tree stump. His black hair was dyed, plastered down with pomade, and parted in the middle. His nose was flattened across his cheeks from being broken numerous times. His limpid eyes looked oddly out of place on a face that had seen more than its share of fists. He had the torso of a beer keg, round and abundant, but hard, without fat. Spider Red Kelly had been a fighter and had once fought James J. Corbett, knocking down the former heavyweight champion twice but getting knocked out himself in the twenty-first round. He looked up at Cromwell's approach.\n\n\"Good evening, Mr. Cromwell, I've been expecting you.\"\n\nCromwell opened the cover to his watch and glimpsed the hands on the dial. \"Forgive me for being eight minutes late, Mr. Kelly. I was unavoidably detained.\"\n\nRed Kelly smiled, showing a mouth full of gold teeth. \"Yes, I would have also been detained if I was in the company of such a lovely lady.\" He nodded at the table. \"Would you care to try your luck?\"\n\nCromwell took out his wallet and counted out ten fifty-dollar National Bank notes printed by his bank under contract with the federal government. Kelly casually placed the bills in a small stack on the side of the table and pushed a stack of copper tokens advertising the saloon across the table. A typical faro layout of a suit of thirteen cards was painted on the table's green felt cover. The suit was in spades from ace to king, with the ace on the dealer's left.\n\nCromwell placed a token on the jack and one between the five and six in a bet called splitting. Kelly discarded the top card from the dealer box, displaying the next card, called the losing card. It was a ten. If Cromwell had bet on it, he would have lost, since the house wins any wagers placed on the displayed card. Then Kelly pulled the losing card out of the box, revealing the winning card. It was a five. Cromwell won the full bet, not half.\n\n\"Beginner's luck,\" he said as Kelly pushed the winning tokens across the table.\n\n\"What is your pleasure, Mr. Cromwell?\"\n\n\"Nothing, thank you.\"\n\n\"You asked to see me,\" said Kelly. \"What can I do to return the favors you've given me over the years, the generous loans and the help in keeping the police out of my place?\"\n\n\"I need someone eliminated.\" Cromwell spoke as if he was ordering a beer.\n\n\"Here in the city?\" asked Kelly as he dealt another hand.\n\n\"No, Denver.\"\n\n\"A man, I hope,\" said Kelly without looking up from the dealer box. \"Place your bet.\"\n\nCromwell nodded and moved a token between the queen and jack. \"Actually, he's an agent with the Van Dorn Detective Agency.\"\n\nKelly paused before pulling a card from the box. \"Taking out a Van Dorn agent could have serious repercussions.\"\n\n\"Not if it's done right.\"\n\n\"What's his name?\"\n\n\"Isaac Bell.\" Cromwell passed across the picture his sister had given him. \"Here's his photo.\"\n\nKelly stared at it briefly. \"Why do you want him removed?\"\n\n\"I have my reasons.\"\n\nKelly pulled the losing card and revealed the winning card as the queen. Cromwell had won again.\n\nKelly gazed across the table at Cromwell. \"From what I've heard, everyone who's killed a Van Dorn agent has been tracked down and hung.\"\n\n\"They were criminals who stupidly allowed themselves to be run down by detectives from the agency. If done in an efficient manner, Van Dorn will never know who killed Bell or why. Make it look like a random killing or even an accident. Leaving no trace would make it impossible for Van Dorn's agents to retaliate.\"\n\nKelly sank slowly back in his chair. \"I have to tell you, Cromwell, I don't like it.\" There was no \"Mr. Cromwell.\"\n\nCromwell smiled a grim smile. \"Would you like it if I paid you twenty thousand dollars for the job?\"\n\nKelly sat up and looked at Cromwell as if he was not sure if he believed him. \"Twenty thousand dollars, you say?\"\n\n\"I want it done by a professional, not some two-bit killer off the street.\"\n\n\"Where do you wish the deed to take place?\"\n\nThere was never doubt that Kelly would do the job. The saloon owner was knee-deep in any number of criminal activities. Coming under Cromwell's spell for financial gain was a foregone conclusion.\n\n\"In Denver. Bell works out of the Van Dorn office in Denver.\"\n\n\"The farther away from San Francisco, the better,\" Kelly said quietly. \"You got yourself a deal, Mr. Cromwell.\"\n\nThe \"Mr.\" was back, and the transaction agreed upon. Cromwell rose from his chair and nodded toward the tokens on the table. \"For the dealer,\" he said, grinning. \"I'll have ten thousand in cash delivered to you by noon tomorrow. You'll get the rest when Bell is deceased.\"\n\nKelly remained seated. \"I understand.\"\n\nHe pushed his way downstairs and through the dancers, who had stopped dancing. He saw they were watching his sister perform an undulating and provocative hootchy-kootchy dance on the stage, to the delight of everyone present. She had loosened her corset and let her nicely coiffed hair down. Her hips swiveled and pulsed sensually to the music of the band. At the table, Butler was sprawled in a drunken haze while Marion stared in awe at Margaret's gyrations.\n\nCromwell motioned for one of the managers, who also acted as bouncers.\n\n\"Sir?\"\n\n\"Please carry the gentleman to my car.\"\n\nThe bouncer nodded, and with one practiced motion lifted the thoroughly intoxicated Butler to a standing position and threw him over his shoulder. Then the bouncer proceeded up the stairs, carrying Butler's bulk as lightly as if he were a bag of oats.\n\nCromwell leaned over Marion. \"Can you walk to the car?\"\n\nShe glanced up at him as if angry. \"Of course I can walk.\"\n\n\"Then it's time to leave.\" He took her by the arm and eased her from the chair. Marion, unassisted but wobbly, went up the stairs. Then Cromwell turned his attention to his sister. He was not amused by her scandalous behavior. He grabbed her by the arm hard enough to cause a bruise and hauled her off the stage and out of the saloon to the waiting car at the curb. Butler was passed out in the front seat with Abner while Marion sat glassy-eyed in the back.\n\nCromwell roughly shoved Margaret into the backseat and followed her, pushing her into one corner. He sat in the middle between the two women as Abner got behind the wheel, started the car, and drove up the street that was ablaze with multicolored lights.\n\nSlowly, Cromwell slid his arm around Marion's shoulders. She looked at him with a vague, unresponsive expression. The champagne had given her a sense of lethargy, but she was not drunk. Her mind was still clear and sharp. His hand squeezed one shoulder and there was a small pause in her breathing. She could feel his body pressing against hers in the narrow confines of the seat.\n\nThere was a time when Marion had found her boss appealing and felt a deep attraction to him. But in the years she had worked for him, he had made no effort to bridge the gap between them. Now, suddenly, after all this time, he was showing an interest in her. Strangely, there was no emotion or arousal surging within her. She felt as if she were repelled by him and she couldn't understand why.\n\nMarion was relieved there were no further moves on his part. The one arm remained snaked around her waist and his hand rested lightly on her shoulder until Abner stopped the Rolls in front of her apartment house. Cromwell stepped to the sidewalk and helped her from the car.\n\n\"Good night, Marion,\" he said, holding her hand. \"I trust you had an interesting evening.\"\n\nIt was as if she saw now something deep within him that she had never seen before and she felt repulsed by his touch. \"It will be an evening I'll long remember,\" she said honestly. \"I hope Mr. Butler and your sister recover.\"\n\n\"They'll be hungover tomorrow, and justly so,\" he said with a tight smile. \"I'll see you Monday morning. There is a pile of correspondence I have to dictate. I want to have a clean desk when I leave on a business trip on Friday.\"\n\n\"You're leaving again so soon?\"\n\n\"A bankers' conference in Denver. I must attend.\"\n\n\"Until Monday morning, then,\" she said with vast relief as he released her hand.\n\nMarion climbed the steps to the door but turned and gazed at the Rolls-Royce as it pulled away into the street. Her mind acted without command. Things between her employer and herself would never be the same. There was a coldness about him that she was not aware of before and she cringed as she remembered his touch. All of a sudden, the lingering smell of the dance hall's smoke and sweat on her clothes sickened her.\n\nShe rushed upstairs to her room, turned on the faucets of her bathtub, frantically removed her clothes, and slipped into the soapy water to remove all memory of the decadent evening.\n\n\"WHAT WAS your little meeting with Red Kelly all about?\" asked Margaret after they let off Marion at her apartment.\n\n\"I hired him for a little job.\"\n\nShe stared at his face as it was reflected by the light of the passing streetlamps. \"What kind of a job?\"\n\n\"He's going to take care of Isaac Bell,\" he said matter-of-factly.\n\n\"You can't murder a Van Dorn agent!\" Margaret gasped. \"Every peace officer in the country would come after you.\"\n\nCromwell laughed. \"Not to worry, dear sister. I instructed Kelly to administer only enough damage to keep Bell in the hospital for a few months. That's all. Call it a warning.\"\n\nCromwell had blatantly lied to his sister. He would act surprised when Bell's murder was announced and claim the agent's death had been a mistake, that Kelly had gotten carried away. Inciting his sister's anger, he decided, was a small price to pay for eradicating the man who had become his worst enemy.\n\n## 16\n\nGIVE IT ANOTHER COAT,\" CROMWELL ORDERED THE two men painting his boxcar. The color had been the earth brown that most freight cars had been painted since the early days of the railroad. But Tuscan red was the newer color used by Southern Pacific to standardize their vast fleet of freight cargo haulers. Cromwell wanted a second coat because the O'BRIAN FURNITURE COMPANY, DENVER still bled through the freshly dried first coat.\n\nMargaret, dressed in a woolen dress and short jacket to keep her warm against the cool breeze blowing in from the ocean through the Golden Gate, held a parasol against a light early-morning mist that fell in the city. They stood watching the painters on the loading dock of an empty warehouse her brother had leased under a pseudonym.\n\n\"Can you trust them?\" she asked.\n\n\"The painters?\" He stared at the four men busy brushing paint on the boxcar. \"To them, it's just another job, another boxcar that needs to be tidied up. As long as they're well paid, they don't ask questions.\"\n\n\"About time you changed the name,\" she said. \"Some sheriff or a Van Dorn detective is bound to discover that an O'Brian Furniture freight car was present in five of the towns that were robbed.\"\n\n\"The same thought crossed my mind,\" he said.\n\n\"What are you going to call it this time?\"\n\n\"Nothing,\" answered Cromwell. \"It will look just like another freight car belonging to the Southern Pacific Railroad.\"\n\n\"You could buy and decorate a new one. Why keep this old relic?\"\n\n\"Because it looks like an old relic,\" he said with a slight laugh. \"Built in 1890. The railroad is still using this model. I prefer it to look tired and worn from many years and thousands of miles of hauling freight. And because its outward appearance is so ordinary, no one would suspect its true purpose. Even your Mr. Hotshot Bell could never begin to guess its real purpose.\"\n\n\"Don't underestimate Bell. He's smart enough to get wise to your traveling hotel suite.\"\n\nHe gave her a sour look. \"Not that smart. And even if he smells a rat, it's too late. The O'Brian Furniture car no longer exists.\"\n\nCromwell was proud of his aged boxcar. It was thirty-four feet long, with a capacity of forty thousand pounds. Empty, it weighed twelve thousand. Once the second coat was dry, the car would be finished off with the proper signage on its wooden sides, which would include a serial number under the letters SP, for Southern Pacific. The capacity and unloaded weight also would be lettered on one side, while the SP insignia sunrise\u2014a white circle with SOUTHERN arched across the top, PACIFIC arched across the bottom, and LINES across the middle\u2014would be painted on the opposite side. When finished, the boxcar would look like any one of thousands of cars belonging to the Southern Pacific.\n\nEven the serial number, 16173, was correct. Cromwell had arranged for the number to be lifted from a car in the middle of a railyard, scrapped, and then transferred to his rolling suite.\n\nNothing was ever left to chance. Every move was carefully thought out, then rehearsed and rehearsed again and again. All possible contingencies were considered and dealt with. Nothing escaped Cromwell's attention, down to the last detail. No bandit in the history of the United States, including Jesse James and Butch Cassidy put together, came close to matching him in the number of successful robberies he pulled off and the amount of loot he collected. Or the number of people killed.\n\nAt the mention of Bell's name, Margaret's mind traveled back to when they danced together at the Brown Palace Hotel. She cursed herself for wanting to reach out and touch him. The mere thought of it sent a shiver down her spine. She had known many men, a great number of them intimately. But none had affected her as much as when she was in Bell's arms. It was a wave of yearning she could neither understand nor control. She began to wonder if she would ever see him again, knowing deep inside it would be extremely dangerous. If they ever did meet, he surely would learn her true identity and find a path to her brother Jacob.\n\n\"Let's leave,\" she said, angry at herself for allowing her emotions to lose control.\n\nCromwell saw the faraway look in her eyes but chose to ignore it. \"As you wish. I'll return tomorrow to oversee the finished results.\"\n\nThey turned and walked through a door into the warehouse. Cromwell paused to lock the door and set a bar in place so no one could enter. Their footsteps echoed throughout the deserted interior of the building. The only furnishings were in one corner, two desks, and a counter that looked like the tellers' windows at a bank.\n\n\"A pity you can't lease this space out and put it to good use,\" said Margaret, fussing with her hat that had tilted to one side of her head when the pin slipped out.\n\n\"I must have a place to park the boxcar,\" Cromwell replied. \"So long as it sits unnoticed on a siding, next to the loading dock of an empty warehouse whose owner cannot be traced, so much the better.\"\n\nShe gave her brother a suspicious glance and said, \"You have that look on again.\"\n\n\"What look?\"\n\n\"The one that means you're planning another robbery.\"\n\n\"I can't fool my own sister,\" he said with a grin.\n\n\"I suppose it's a waste of time trying to talk you into retiring from the robbery business.\"\n\nHe took her hand and patted it. \"A man can't bear to give up a pursuit in which he excels.\"\n\nShe sighed in defeat. \"All right, where this time?\"\n\n\"I haven't decided yet. The first step is to make discreet inquiries in banking circles about payrolls. Then I have to select towns that have railroads and sidings for freight trains. The getaway is the most important part of the operation. Next is a study of the streets and location of the bank. Finally, I have to carefully plan the actual robbery itself, the timing and my disguises.\"\n\nMargaret stopped beside the desks and counter. \"And this is where you rehearse.\"\n\nHe nodded. \"After our agents obtain a layout of the interior of the bank and I arrange the furnishings accordingly.\"\n\n\"You have it down to a fine science.\"\n\n\"I try,\" he said loftily.\n\n\"Your method of operation is becoming too polished, too sophisticated,\" she cautioned him.\n\nHe took her by the arm and gently squeezed. \"I wouldn't have it any other way.\"\n\n## 17\n\nBELL CAME TO THE OFFICE DIRECTLY FROM THE TRAIN and found Irvine and Curtis already in the conference room waiting for him. He could tell the news was good because there were no frowns or grim looks on their faces. The jovial mood was enhanced by Irvine smoking a cigar and Curtis pulling a silver cigarette case from his coat pocket. \"You two seem to be in good spirits,\" said Bell, setting down his suitcase.\n\n\"We found some leads,\" Curtis said, lighting a cigarette. \"Nothing earth-shattering, but a few small pieces to fit in the puzzle.\"\n\n\"How about you, Isaac, did you turn up anything?\" asked Irvine.\n\nBefore Bell could answer, Agnes Murphy entered the conference room carrying a tray with three cups and a coffeepot. \"Sorry to interrupt,\" she said sweetly, \"but I thought you gentlemen might like some coffee.\"\n\nBell took the tray from her and set it on the long table. \"That's very kind of you, Agnes.\"\n\nShe turned and started for the door. \"I'll be right back.\" In less than a minute, she returned with a sugar bowl and cream pitcher. \"I didn't forget. I just couldn't carry it all.\"\n\n\"You're a lifesaver,\" said Curtis with a broad smile, as he lightly kissed her on the cheek.\n\nBell and Irvine exchanged glances, smiling. They both knew that Curtis and Agnes were just pals and always teasing each other. Agnes gathered her skirts as she turned, left the conference room, and closed the door.\n\n\"Besides the coffee,\" said Bell, \"it was thoughtful of her to close the door.\"\n\nCurtis blew a smoke ring toward the ceiling. \"She knows the score. Agnes has no more respect for Alexander than we do.\"\n\n\"You were about to say...\" Irvine prompted Bell.\n\n\"I discovered that, besides a missing finger, he probably has red hair. And rides a motorcycle, which he's used on more than one robbery.\" Bell reached into his pocket and lifted out a small silk sack, opened it, and spilled the cartridge out on the table. \"We now know the Butcher Bandit uses a thirty-eight-caliber Colt automatic. This shell casing was found under a carpet. The killer somehow missed it since he hasn't left any shells at his other bank hits. Sheriff Murphy of Bisbee was a smart man and had the county coroner remove the bullets from the murder victims. They all came from a thirty-eight Colt.\"\n\n\"We can check sales of all thirty-eight Colt automatics,\" said Curtis.\n\n\"There couldn't be more than ten thousand of them,\" Irvine replied sarcastically. \"It would take ten agents years to check out every gun dealer, salesman, and hardware store owner who sells thirty-eight Colt automatics.\"\n\n\"Art is right,\" Bell said as he stared at the brass cartridge. \"It would be a tremendous long shot.\"\n\nCurtis grinned like a fox. \"Not if we have a lead to where the bandit hides out. Then we can check out dealers in the area.\"\n\n\"Good thinking,\" Bell agreed, not knowing what Curtis was about to reveal. \"In the meantime, I'll send it off to Chicago and see if our agency experts can pull any fingerprints.\" He relaxed in a chair and tilted it back on two legs, propping a foot against the table. \"Now, let me hear what you two have unearthed.\"\n\nIrvine opened a bound ledger and placed the book on the table in front of Bell and Curtis. \"I hit pay dirt in Elkhorn, Nevada. They had recorded the serial numbers of the fifty-dollar bills in their vault the day before the robbery.\"\n\n\"I can understand why,\" said Bell. \"Fifties are counterfeited more than any other bill. As their bookkeeper itemized the bills, he must have studied each one and made sure they weren't bogus.\"\n\nIrvine tapped the entries in the book with his finger as he looked at Bell. \"You can request the Chicago office to put out bulletins to banks around the West to be on the lookout for them. Fifties will be easier to trace than fives, tens, or twenties.\"\n\n\"And a lot easier than ones,\" Curtis added.\n\n\"I'll see to it,\" Bell assured Irvine.\n\n\"I made a few inquiries on my own and actually came up with two banks in San Francisco where three of the bills showed up.\"\n\n\"Good work,\" said Bell. He then focused on Curtis. \"Now, how about you, Arthur? Any luck on your end?\"\n\n\"Did you find any passenger trains the killer might have escaped on?\" Irvine queried.\n\n\"No. But freight trains are a different story.\"\n\n\"Weren't they searched by the posses?\"\n\nCurtis shook his head. \"Not the ones that were loaded and locked.\"\n\n\"So where did you go from there?\" inquired Bell.\n\nCurtis broke out into a smile that spread and beamed. \"It took many hours of digging in musty old railroad company records, but I did manage to make an interesting discovery. I found three cars that were on the sidings of towns that were robbed. Boxcar serial number 15758 was present in Virginia City and Bisbee during the robberies. In Virginia City, its cargo manifest was listed as fifty bales of barbed wire to be transported to a ranch in Southern California. Boxcar 15758 was empty when it sat on a siding waiting to be switched to another train in Bisbee.\"\n\n\"Empty,\" Irvine repeated, stirring restlessly in his chair.\n\n\"Yes, empty. It had hauled a load of pottery from Las Cruces, New Mexico, to Tucson, before being sent empty back to El Paso.\"\n\n\"So we can scratch that one,\" muttered Bell. \"What about the others?\"\n\nCurtis referred to his notes. \"Number 18122 was present at Elkhorn, Nevada, and Grand Junction, Colorado, when their banks were robbed. It was on the siding at Grand Junction waiting to be switched to a train to take it to Los Angeles. Its cargo was sixty cases of wine. At Elkhorn, it carried a load of mattresses, from a factory in Sacramento, California.\"\n\n\"So much for 18122,\" said Irvine. \"It's not likely the bandit escaped to different locations.\"\n\nCurtis fairly beamed. \"I saved the best for last.\" Rising and walking to a blackboard, he wrote O'BRIAN FURNITURE COMPANY, DENVER on the black surface. Then he turned with a pleased expression on his face. \"Now we come to a boxcar that was present at five robberies.\"\n\nBoth Bell and Irvine sat up suddenly in their chairs as Curtis caught their fixed attention. The agent had taken the bull by the horns and delved into an area no one had thought to go.\n\nBell, surprised at Curtis's unexpected revelation, said, \"The car was in five towns on the day their banks were robbed?\"\n\n\"I've made a list of towns, times, and its final destination.\"\n\nIrvine nearly spilled his coffee as he set it back on the tray. \"Don't you mean destinations, plural?\"\n\n\"No. Destination, singular.\" Curtis laughed softly. \"In every instance, the furniture car from Denver went to San Francisco. I could find no record of it ever having been hauled to Denver or anywhere else. I can only assume it was a fa\u00e7ade the bandit used to escape the posses.\"\n\nBell stared at the writing on the blackboard. \"I'll bet a month's pay that a check of furniture stores in Denver will prove O'Brian Furniture does not exist.\"\n\n\"I think that goes without saying,\" Irvine summed up.\n\nBell turned to Curtis. \"When was the last Southern Pacific Railroad account of the car?\"\n\n\"It was put on a siding in the San Francisco railyards two weeks ago. At my last inquiry, it was still there.\"\n\n\"Then we've got to find and search it.\"\n\n\"And stake it out,\" said Irvine.\n\n\"That, too,\" replied Bell. \"But we must be very careful not to alert the bandit that we're closing in on him.\"\n\nCurtis lit another cigarette. \"I'll leave on the first train in the morning for San Francisco.\"\n\n\"Irvine and I will join you.\" Bell then turned his attention to Irvine. \"You mentioned that three bills turned up in San Francisco.\"\n\nIrvine nodded. \"That's right. One at the Cromwell National Bank of San Francisco and two at the Crocker National Bank.\"\n\nBell smiled for the first time. \"It would seem, gentlemen, all roads lead to San Francisco.\"\n\n\"It's beginning to look that way,\" Curtis agreed, his enthusiasm growing.\n\nThe two agents stared expectantly at Bell as he studied the map with the flags marking the terrible crimes committed by the Butcher Bandit. The evidence was almost infinitesimal and could easily lead to dead ends. Yet there was satisfaction in what the three Van Dorn agents had gleaned. Meager as it was, they had little else to go on. But it was enough for a plan to form in Bell's mind.\n\n\"It might be like betting on a plow horse at the racetrack, but I think we may have an opportunity to trap the bandit.\"\n\n\"You have a plan?\" asked Irvine.\n\n\"Suppose we plant stories in the local San Francisco newspapers revealing that a million-dollar payroll is being shipped by special train to a bank in a town populated by several thousand miners. The large amount would be because the mine owners have declared a special bonus for the workers to avert a threatened strike called by the miners' union over the demand for substantially increased wages.\"\n\nCurtis pondered Bell's proposition and said, \"The bandit could easily check out the story and find it's false.\"\n\n\"Not if we have one of us sitting in the telegraph office when the inquiry comes in and give the appropriate reply.\"\n\n\"We might even get lucky and discover who sent the telegram,\" said Irvine.\n\nBell nodded. \"There is that, too.\"\n\nIrvine gazed into his coffee cup as if he was a fortune-teller reading tea leaves. \"It's a thousand-to-one shot. We all know that.\"\n\n\"No doubt about it,\" Bell said, \"it's worth a try. And, if the scheme fails, we might still stumble onto another lead to the bandit.\"\n\n\"Got a mining town in mind?\" Curtis asked.\n\n\"Telluride, Colorado,\" answered Bell. \"Because the town is situated in a box canyon. Telluride is also the area where its miners struck the mine owners in 1901 and 1903, so another strike is quite plausible.\"\n\n\"If the O'Brian Furniture freight car shows up,\" said Curtis, \"we'll know our man took the bait.\"\n\n\"Once the train pulls it onto the Telluride siding, the only way out is the way it came.\" Irvine sighed and smiled contentedly. \"The bandit will be trapped and have no means of escape.\"\n\nThe atmosphere in the conference room crackled with expectation and hope. What had almost seemed like a lost cause was coming together. Three pairs of eyes trained on the giant wall map, traveled west toward the Pacific Ocean, and focused on the port city of San Francisco.\n\nIn the elevator that took him down to the street for his walk to the Brown Palace, Bell felt jubilant. Win, lose, or draw, the end of the game was in sight. Granted, it was still hazy and indistinct, but the cards were finally falling in Bell's favor. His thoughts turned to Rose and he found himself wondering for the hundredth time what connection she had with the Butcher Bandit.\n\nWhat woman could be close to a man who murdered women and children? He began to believe that she might be as rotten as the bandit, if not more so.\n\nBELL STEPPED from the Brown Palace elevator and walked to his suite. He pulled the key from his pant pocket and inserted it in the door lock. Before he could turn the key, the door slipped open a crack. The latch had not been fully engaged when the door had been closed.\n\nBell paused and tensed. His first thought was that the maid had forgotten to close the door and spring the bolt. It was a logical assumption, but an inner wisdom made him suspicious. The perception of something being not quite right had saved him on more than one occasion.\n\nBell had made many enemies during his years as a detective with Van Dorn. Several of the men he had captured and seen tried and sentenced to prison had vowed they would come after him. Three had tried and two had died.\n\nIf someone was waiting for him inside his room, it wouldn't be with a gun, he reasoned. Gunshots would echo throughout the hotel and bring a dozen staff running. For a criminal to escape from the ninth floor, he either would have to wait for an elevator or run down the stairs, neither a good choice for a successful escape.\n\nBell was aware that he was probably overexaggerating the threat, which could very well be nonexistent. But he hadn't survived this long without a suspicious mind. If someone was waiting inside his suite, he thought, they would do their dirty work with a knife.\n\nHe removed his hat and dropped it. Before it hit the carpet, his derringer was in his hand, an over-and-under, two-barrel, .41 caliber small handgun that packed a surprisingly heavy punch at close range.\n\nBell waggled the key in the door as if he was turning the lock. He pushed the door open and hesitated, staring around the foyer of the suite and the living room beyond before he entered. The smell of cigarette smoke greeted his nostrils, confirming Bell's suspicions. He only rarely smoked a cigar and then only with brandy after a gourmet dinner. With the derringer in hand, he stepped into the suite. Death, like a third man, was waiting inside.\n\nA man was sitting on a settee reading a newspaper. At Bell's approach, he laid the paper aside and revealed a face as ugly as sin. The black hair was greasy and slicked flat. His face looked like it had been stomped on by a mule, and he had the body of a state fair prizewinning boar. His eyes were strangely soft and friendly, a guise that fooled many of his victims. Bell was not fooled; he could see the man had the strength to spring like a tiger.\n\n\"How did you get in?\" Bell asked simply.\n\nThe stranger held up a key. \"Skeleton key,\" he said in a voice that came like a rock crusher. \"I never leave home without one.\"\n\n\"What is your name?\"\n\n\"It won't matter if you know my name. You'll never get a chance to use it. But since you've asked, it's Red Kelly.\"\n\nBell's photographic memory shifted into gear and the recollection of a report he'd once read came back. \"Yes, the infamous Red Kelly, boxer, Barbary Coast saloonkeeper, and murderer. You fought a good battle against world champion James J. Corbett. I once studied a report on you in the event you ever wandered beyond the California border. This is a mistake on your part. You have protection from crooked politicians that keeps you from getting extradited for crimes in other states, but that won't help you in Colorado. You're subject to arrest here.\"\n\n\"And who is going to arrest me?\" said Kelly showing an expanse of gold teeth. \"You?\"\n\nBell stood loosely, waiting, and expecting a move from Kelly. \"You wouldn't be the first.\"\n\n\"I know all about you, pretty boy,\" said Kelly contemptuously. \"You'll bleed just like the other poor slobs I've put in the grave.\"\n\n\"How many detectives and police?\"\n\nKelly grinned nastily. \"Three that I can remember. After a while, the numbers began to fade.\"\n\n\"Your days of murder are over, Kelly,\" Bell said calmly.\n\n\"That'll be the day, pretty boy. If you think you can bully me with that popgun in your hand, you're wasting your breath.\"\n\n\"You don't think I could kill you with it?\" Bell said.\n\n\"You'd never get the chance,\" Kelly retorted coldly.\n\nThere it was. Bell caught it instantly. The sudden shift in the eyes. He swung into a crouch and, in the blink of an eye, aimed and fired a shot into the forehead of the man who was creeping up behind him from where he'd been, hidden by a curtain. The report reverberated out the open door and throughout the atrium of the hotel.\n\nKelly glanced at the body of his henchman with all the interest of a horse that had stepped on a prairie dog. Then he smiled at Bell. \"Your reputation is well founded. You must have eyes in the back of your head.\"\n\n\"You came to kill me,\" said Bell evenly. \"Why?\"\n\n\"It's a job, nothing more.\"\n\n\"Who paid you?\"\n\n\"Not necessary for you to know.\" Kelly laid aside the paper and slowly got to his feet.\n\n\"Don't try for the gun in the belt behind your back,\" Bell said, the derringer as steady as a branch on an oak tree.\n\nKelly flashed his gold teeth again. \"I don't need a gun.\"\n\nHe sprang forward, his powerful legs propelling across the room as if he had been shot from a cannon.\n\nWhat saved Bell in those two seconds was the span between them, a good eight feet. Any less distance and Kelly would have been all over him like an avalanche. As it was, Kelly struck him like a battering ram, a glancing blow that knocked Bell sideways over a chair and onto the grass green carpet. But not before he pulled the trigger of the derringer and sent a bullet into Kelly's right shoulder.\n\nThe brute was stopped in his tracks but did not fall. He was too powerful, too muscular, to fold with a bullet that did not penetrate his heart or brain. He contemplated the spreading of crimson on his shirt with the detached look of a surgeon. Then he grinned fiendishly. \"Your little popgun only holds two bullets, pretty boy. Now it's empty.\"\n\n\"I wish you would stop calling me pretty boy,\" said Bell, leaping to his feet.\n\nNow it was Kelly's turn to reach behind his back and retrieve his Colt revolver. He was just bringing it level to pull the trigger when Bell hurled his derringer like a baseball pitcher receiving the signal from the catcher to throw a fastball. At four feet away, he couldn't miss. The little gun, solid as a piece of quartz, thudded off Kelly's face just above the nose and between the eyes.\n\nBlood gushed from the gash and quickly covered the lower half of Kelly's face. The blow staggered him more than the slug in his shoulder. There was no gasp of pain, no bloodcurdling cry. He made no sound other than a great sigh. The gun was still in his hand, but he did not lift it to aim. He couldn't. Bell put his head down and charged the strong man like a porpoise into a great white shark, accelerating with every step, thrusting his head into Kelly's stomach with all his strength. The ex-boxer merely grunted and brushed Bell away, throwing him halfway across the room with a strength nothing less than phenomenal.\n\nBell crashed into a wall with a crunch that forced the breath from his lungs. If the impact had been any harder, he'd have been in traction for two months. But his bone-jarring charge had not been in vain. During the collision of his one hundred eighty-five pounds against Kelly's two-fifty, he had snatched the revolver from the hand of the killer.\n\nThere was no command to cease another assault, no \"Stop or I'll shoot.\" Bell had been through the mill and knew you don't waste words on a killer dead set on sending you to a marble slab at the county coroner's. He had no illusions about beating Kelly in a man-to-man fight. The murderer was stronger and more ruthless. Bell barely got off two shots before Kelly recovered enough to reach out and grasp Bell around the neck with the ferocity of a gorilla, his massive hands choking the life out of the detective. He fell against Bell, pressing him into the carpet, his massive weight crushing Bell's torso and pinning his arms so he couldn't fire the Colt again. Kelly squeezed calmly and purposely, as though the bullets he had taken were a mere annoyance.\n\nBell couldn't move, and there was no reaching up in an attempt to pull off the fingers digging into his neck. Kelly's strength went way beyond Bell's. Bell didn't doubt that he wasn't the first man Kelly had strangled. Unless he did something very rapidly, he wouldn't be the last. Blackness was edging his line of vision, and getting darker by the moment.\n\nWhat stunned Bell more than the realization that he was only seconds away from death was what happened to the two bullets he had pumped into Kelly. He was certain he had struck the Goliath in the body. Bell looked up into two eyes that were as dark as evil and the blood that had turned the lower face into a horrific mask of crimson. What was keeping him alive, why wasn't his strength ebbing? The man wasn't human.\n\nThen, perceptibly, Bell felt the pressure begin to ease slightly. Rather than try to pry the hands from around his neck, Bell reached up and embedded his thumbs in Kelly's expressionless eyes, knowing it would be the final move before darkness closed over him. In a violent, corkscrew motion, Bell twisted his body out from under Kelly.\n\nThe big boxer groaned and covered his eyes with his hands. Unseeing, he crawled toward Bell, who kicked out viciously, catching Kelly in the stomach. Only then did he see the two bullet holes seeping blood through Kelly's shirt below the rib cage. What kept him going? Bell wondered. He should have died before now. But, instead, Kelly reached out and grabbed Bell by the leg.\n\nBell felt himself being pulled across the carpet, now stained and soaked with Kelly's blood. He lashed out with his free foot. It bounced off Kelly, who acted as if he never felt it. The grip on Bell's calf tightened. Fingernails dug through his pants into his flesh. He was pulled closer to Kelly, seeing an agonized face, the eyes glaring with hatred.\n\nIt was time to end this ghastly fight. Bell's right hand still held the Colt. With deadly calm, he raised the barrel until the muzzle was only inches from Kelly's face, deliberately pulled the trigger, and sent a .44 caliber bullet into Kelly's right eye.\n\nThere was no terrible scream or horrible gurgling sound. Kelly exhaled an audible gasp from his throat and rolled over on the carpet like some great beast in its death throes crumpling to the earth.\n\nBell sat up on the floor and massaged his throat, panting from the exertion. He turned his head and stared at the doorway as men came rushing into the suite. They stopped in stunned shock at the sight of the sea of blood and the great hump of a man whose face was unrecognizable because of the bloody, congealing mask. The face looked particularly grotesque due to the gold teeth showing through the open lips that slowly became coated red.\n\nKelly had died hard, and for what? Money? A debt? A vendetta? Not the latter. Bell had never launched an investigation against the Barbary Coast giant. Someone must have paid him to kill and paid him extremely well.\n\nBell wondered if he would ever know the answer.\n\nTHE NEXT MORNING, Bell stepped out of the big porcelain bathtub, toweled off the water that dripped down his body, and gazed in the mirror. His throat didn't look pretty. It was swollen, with purple bruises so obvious that he could see the shape of Red Kelly's fingers where they had dug into his flesh. He put on a clean white shirt and was pleased to see that the high, starched collar, though it chafed his tender skin, covered the bruises.\n\nThey weren't the only purplish green marks on his aching body. He had several from falling over the chair, and from being thrown across the room and into the wall by Kelly's brute strength. They were tender to the touch and would not fade anytime soon.\n\nAfter dressing in his trademark linen suit, Bell left the hotel and stopped off at the Western Union office and sent a telegram to Joseph Van Dorn that told of the attempt on his life. When he came slowly through the door of the office, Agnes Murphy openly stared at him. She stood up with a look of motherly concern in her eyes. \"Oh, Mr. Bell. I heard about your unfortunate incident. I do hope you're all right.\"\n\n\"A few bruises, Agnes, nothing more.\"\n\nCurtis and Irvine heard his voice and came from the conference room, followed by Alexander from his office. Both agents vigorously shook his hand\u2014a bit too vigorously, Bell thought, wincing at the discomfort that traveled over his aching body. Alexander merely stood back, as if he was a spectator in an audience.\n\n\"Glad to see you alive and kicking,\" said Curtis. \"We heard it was quite a fight.\"\n\n\"It was as close as I ever came to buying the farm,\" said Bell.\n\n\"After talking to you over the phone,\" said Curtis, \"I wired your identification of Red Kelly to our San Francisco office. They're going to check out Kelly and any of his clients who might have wanted you eliminated.\"\n\n\"A terrible thing,\" Alexander said without emotion. \"Unthinkable, that someone would attempt to assassinate a Van Dorn agent.\"\n\nBell gave Alexander a long hard look. \"I can only wonder how Kelly knew where I was staying.\"\n\n\"Kelly was a well-known crime boss on the Barbary Coast in San Francisco,\" said Irvine. \"Could any of your former friends who you put in jail or friends and families of those who were executed because you arrested them be from San Francisco?\"\n\n\"None that I can name,\" answered Bell. \"If I had to make a guess, I'd have to say the Butcher Bandit was behind it.\"\n\n\"Knowing you were on the case,\" said Irvine, \"he'd certainly have a motive.\"\n\nAlexander said, \"We won't rest until we get to the bottom of this.\" To Bell, his words rang hollow. \"I can't tell you how glad I am that you are alive and well.\" Then he turned and walked back to his office.\n\nAs soon as he was out of earshot, Bell said, \"Another nail in the coffin, gentlemen. The key to the bandit's whereabouts is San Francisco.\"\n\n## 18\n\nWHEN BELL, IRVINE, AND CURTIS STEPPED OFF THE ferry from Oakland and entered the huge Ferry Building, they found themselves in a three-story-tall hall with repeating arches and skylights overhead. They exited onto the Embarcadero, at the foot of Market Street. While Irvine and Curtis went to hail a motor cab, Bell turned and looked up at the two-hundred-forty-foot clock tower, modeled after the twelfth-century Giralda bell tower in Seville, Spain. The long hands on the expansive dial read eleven minutes past four.\n\nBell checked the time on his watch and duly noted that the ferry building clock was one minute fast.\n\nBecause of the huge crowds in the terminal after pouring off four ferryboats at the same time, the agents were unable to find a free motor cab. Bell stopped a horse-drawn carriage, haggled a price with the driver, and commandeered it to carry them to the Palace Hotel on Montgomery Street. As they settled in the carriage, Curtis spoke to Bell.\n\n\"How do you plan to handle the Van Dorn San Francisco office?\"\n\n\"We're having dinner with the district director. His name is Horace Bronson. I once worked with him in New Orleans. He's a fine fellow and very efficient. When I sent him a telegram, he wired back and offered every cooperation in his power. He promised to send his agents out to obtain the names of people from gun dealers who might have purchased a thirty-eight-caliber Colt automatic.\"\n\nIrvine rolled an unlit cigar around in his fingers. \"On my end, I'll start with the Cromwell and Crocker banks and see if they can help trace any of the stolen currency serial numbers.\"\n\nBell said to Irvine, \"You might check out the other major banks, too, such as Wells Fargo and the Bank of Italy, in case any stolen bills might be in their possession. If the bandit is from San Francisco, it stands to reason he'd have passed them around town.\"\n\n\"We have our work cut out for us,\" said Curtis. \"I'll see if I can't track down the O'Brian Furniture car.\"\n\nBell stretched out his feet in the carriage and said, \"After we meet with Bronson, I'll write out news releases about the fake currency shipment to the San Miguel Valley Bank in Telluride and prevail upon the editors of the city's major newspapers to run the story.\"\n\nThe carriage reached the magnificent Palace Hotel and turned into the Garden Court, the hotel's elegant carriage entrance that was commanded by seven stories of gleaming white marble balconies with over a hundred ornamented columns. Light from above filtered through a huge stained-glass-domed skylight.\n\nBell paid off the coachman as porters took the luggage inside. The three Van Dorn detectives walked into a vast, majestic lobby. After registering, they went up to their rooms in a redwood-paneled hydraulic elevator. Bell arranged for the rooms to be joined together to create a large suite.\n\n\"Tell you what,\" said Bell to Irvine and Curtis. \"It's almost five o'clock, so nothing can be accomplished today. Let's get cleaned up. Then we'll go out, have a good meal, get a good night's sleep, and start beating the bushes first thing in the morning.\"\n\n\"Sounds good to me,\" Irvine said, his stomach growling, since they had eaten nothing in the last eight hours.\n\n\"What have you got in mind for a restaurant?\" asked Curtis.\n\n\"Bronson is a member of the Bohemian Club. He's arranged for us to eat with him in their dining room.\"\n\n\"Sounds exclusive.\"\n\nBell smiled. \"You don't know how exclusive.\"\n\nAT EIGHT O'CLOCK, the men exited a motor cab at the Taylor Street entrance of the powerful and elite Bohemian Club. Founded in 1872 as a gathering place for newspaper journalists and men of the arts and literature, its members included Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Ambrose Bierce, and Jack London. Over the years, powerful and influential men who made up the business elite of the city joined and soon became the dominant group. No women were allowed, and wives and unmarried guests of the members had to enter through a back door.\n\nThis evening, women were permitted into the dining room because Enrico Caruso was being honored and he insisted upon his wife being present. The club directors considered it a special occasion and so had made it one of the few exceptions.\n\nIrvine and Curtis followed Bell into the main reception room and stood for a moment until a tall man with a youthful face in a well-conditioned, muscular body that gave the impression of towering height came forward and shook Bell's hand vigorously. \"Isaac, how good to see you.\"\n\n\"The pleasure is mine,\" returned Bell, pleased to see an old friend and prepared for a bone-crushing handshake. \"You're looking fit.\"\n\n\"I still work at it.\" He nodded at Irvine and Curtis and smiled. \"Hello, I'm Horace Bronson.\"\n\nHis voice was husky and went with the broad shoulders that looked as though they were about to burst the seams of his neatly tailored gray suit. His facial features made him look like a schoolboy under a thick forest of sun-bleached hair.\n\nBell made the introductions and was amused to see the tight expressions on his agents' faces and their eyes blink as Bronson compressed their hands in his big paw. Though he headed up an office with ten agents in a major city, Bronson deferred to Bell, who out-ranked him in the agency. He also greatly admired Bell for his wide experience and enviable reputation in apprehending lawbreakers. And he was also indebted to the master detective who had recommended him to Van Dorn for the post in San Francisco.\n\n\"Come this way into the dining room,\" he said warmly. \"The club is noted for its gourmet fare and fine wine.\"\n\nBronson led the way from the imposing grand lobby into the large and impressive dining room finished majestically with mahogany on the floors, walls, and ceiling. He had a few words with the ma\u00eetre d'.\n\nBronson put his hand on Bell's shoulder. \"I asked him for a table I usually reserve for talking business. It's in a corner of the dining room where we can't be overheard.\"\n\nThe ma\u00eetre d' showed them to a table off by itself but with an unimpaired view of the other diners throughout the room. A waiter was standing by, who laid napkins in their laps and waited until Bronson perused the wine list and made his selection. As soon as the waiter was out of earshot, Bronson relaxed and looked at Bell.\n\n\"I checked out the number of businesses that have sold thirty-eight-caliber Colt automatics since they were introduced on the market. The total comes to sixty-seven. I've put four agents on the investigation. They should have an answer in two or three days\u2014earlier, if they get lucky.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Horace,\" said Bell. \"That will save us much-needed time to look into our other leads.\"\n\n\"It's the least I can do,\" Bronson said with a broad smile. \"Besides, Mr. Van Dorn ordered me to give you my fullest cooperation.\"\n\n\"We'll need all the help we can get.\"\n\n\"Do you have any other leads on the Butcher Bandit?\"\n\n\"I'll have to swear you to secrecy. I've found that the bandit has spies inside our agency.\"\n\n\"You're safe confiding with me,\" Bronson said with growing concern. \"It's hard to believe such an intrusion can happen. Does Van Dorn know about it?\"\n\nBell nodded. \"He knows.\"\n\nThen Bell gave Bronson a rundown on the evidence, slim as it was, that led them to San Francisco. He explained Irvine's tracking of the serial numbers on the money, Curtis's discovery of the getaway freight car, and his own revelation about the bandit's hair and missing finger. He told it carefully, with the details but without embellishment. Irvine and Curtis also added comments on what they had uncovered during their investigations. When Bell finished his report, Bronson sat silent for several moments.\n\nAt last, he said, \"Your investigation has shown great progress, Isaac. You have something tangible when there was nothing a few weeks ago. But, unfortunately, it's hardly enough to identify the bandit.\"\n\n\"No, it's not,\" Bell agreed, \"but it's a thread that can lead to a string that can lead to a rope.\"\n\nThe wine that Bronson selected, a California chardonnay reserve from Charles Krug, the oldest winery in the Napa Valley, arrived and, after the proper tasting ceremony, was poured. As they studied the menu, all talk of the bandit was put on hold while they enjoyed the wine and made their selections.\n\n\"What intrigues you?\" Bronson asked Bell.\n\n\"The kitchen has sweetbreads in b\u00e9chamel sauce. I'll give them the taste test since I am a lover of sweetbreads.\"\n\n\"Aren't they bull's testicles?\" said Curtis.\n\n\"You're thinking of Rocky Mountain oysters,\" said Bronson, laughing.\n\n\"Prized by gourmets throughout the world,\" explained Bell, \"they are the thymus glands of veal. There are two glands, one in the throat and the other near the heart. The heart sweetbread is considered the most delicious by chefs\u2014\"\n\nSuddenly, Bell stopped in midsentence and stared intently across the dining room. His violet eyes narrowed, as if focusing in the distance. His relaxed position stiffened and he sat up, as if lost in preoccupation.\n\n\"What is it, Isaac?\" asked Irvine. \"You look like you've seen the Resurrection.\"\n\n\"I have,\" Bell murmured, his eyes staring at a couple who had walked in the door and were talking to the ma\u00eetre d'. They were a striking pair that turned every head in the dining room. Both had the same flame red hair. The woman was as tall as the man, who was slight in stature.\n\nShe wore a yellow two-piece dress suit of the Empire style, with a gored skirt that created an elongated trumpet-bell shape with a short trail on the floor. The blouse was embroidered with lace trim and worn under a short jacket that had an extremely low neckline which allowed her to show off a magnificent diamond necklace. In an era dominated by formality, her fashionable Merry Widow\u2013wide hat with lavish feather trim was perfect for a dressy function. A fox boa was draped around her shoulders.\n\nThe man wore an expensive black suit with vest. A large gold chain hung from one pocket and threaded through a buttonhole to another pocket that held a watch. A large diamond-encrusted fob hung from it. There was a confident look in his eyes that missed nothing. He surveyed the room as if he owned it. Seeing several people he knew, he smiled slightly and graciously bowed his head. The couple was shown to a table in the center of the dining room in a position highly visible to the other diners. It was a rehearsed entrance that was carried off with sophisticated elegance.\n\n\"Who is that couple who made the grand entrance?\" Bell asked Bronson.\n\n\"That's Jacob Cromwell, who owns the Cromwell National Bank. He's a member of the Bohemian Club. The handsome woman at his side is his sister.\"\n\n\"Sister?\"\n\n\"Yes, her name is Margaret, a member of the social elite. Keeps busy with charity work. She and her brother are very wealthy and influential. They live on Nob Hill.\"\n\n\"So her name is Margaret Cromwell,\" Bell said quietly. \"I knew her in Denver as Rose Manteca.\"\n\nIrvine looked at Bell. \"Is she the woman you told us about who was a spy for the Butcher Bandit?\"\n\n\"Unless she has a twin sister,\" Bell answered, \"that's her.\"\n\n\"Impossible,\" said Bronson in a tone heavy with derision. \"The assumption is utterly ridiculous. She and her brother do more for San Francisco than half the wealthy of the city put together. They support orphan homes, the humane society for the lost and wandering animals of the city, and city beautification. They give large donations to worthy causes. They are highly respected and admired.\"\n\n\"He makes a strong case,\" said Curtis. \"If the Cromwells own a large San Francisco bank and are already wealthy, what's their percentage in robbing and killing?\"\n\n\"Is Miss Cromwell married?\" Bell asked Bronson.\n\n\"No, she's single, and has the reputation of being on the wild side.\"\n\n\"Could you have been wrong about her being a spy for the bandit?\" Irvine suggested.\n\nBell gazed intently at Margaret Cromwell, taking in every detail of her face. She seemed deep in conversation with her brother and did not turn in his direction. \"I could be mistaken,\" he murmured without conviction. \"The resemblance between her and the woman I met in Denver is uncanny.\"\n\n\"I know Cromwell personally,\" said Bronson. \"He cooperated with Van Dorn on a bank swindle that a gang of con men were using to bilk local businesses. I'll introduce you.\"\n\nBell shook his head and came to his feet. \"Not to bother. I'll introduce myself.\"\n\nHe stood, dodged the chairs of the diners, and made his way to the Cromwells' table. He purposely came up behind and slightly off to the side of Margaret so she wouldn't notice his approach. He ignored Cromwell and looked down at her with a condescending smile and wondered how she would react. \"I beg your pardon, Miss Cromwell, but I believe we met in Denver. My name is Isaac Bell.\"\n\nShe went rigid, and did not turn and look up at him. She stared across the table into her brother's eyes with an unfathomable expression\u2014surprise, maybe, or consternation, or something else\u2014something bordering on shock or distress. For an instant, it was as though she did not know how to react. And then she recovered in the blink of an eye.\n\n\"I'm sorry, but I don't know a Mr. Isaac Bell.\" Her voice was steady without the least indication of a tremor. She spoke without looking at him. She knew that if she did it would come like a physical blow to her stomach. She was grateful she wasn't standing or her legs would have turned to rubber and she'd have fallen to the carpet.\n\n\"Forgive me,\" said Bell, certain now from her reaction that she was the woman he knew as Rose Manteca. \"It must be a case of mistaken identity.\"\n\nCromwell had come to his feet out of courtesy and was holding his napkin. He gazed at Bell like a prizefighter sizing up his opponent before the bell of the first round. He showed not the least bit of surprise or incomprehension. He held out his hand. \"Jacob Cromwell, Mr. Bell. Are you a member of the club?\"\n\n\"No, a guest of Horace Bronson, of the Van Dorn Detective Agency.\"\n\nBell shook Cromwell's hand, thinking it strange the banker would keep his gloves on while he ate. Out of years of investigative habit, he glanced at the little finger of the glove on the left hand. The material over the finger was filled out and solid. Not that he thought there was the remotest chance Cromwell was the bandit. That was a crazy idea.\n\nCromwell nodded. \"I know Horace. A fine man. A credit to your company.\"\n\nBell noticed close up how Cromwell's red hair was closely trimmed and was beginning to thin at the rear of the head. The banker was short and thin and carried himself with more feminine grace than masculine roughness. Bell saw the same expression in the eyes as he'd once seen in a mountain lion he had shot in Colorado. There was a cold, almost dead, look from deep inside.\n\n\"Yes, that he is.\"\n\n\"Bell? I do not think I've heard the name before,\" Cromwell said as if trying to place it. He dismissed the thought as if it were of no great importance. \"Do you live in San Francisco?\"\n\n\"No, Chicago.\"\n\nMargaret still could not bring herself to look at Bell. She felt an uncontrollable fire down deep in her body. Her discomfort flared and she blushed red as a cherry. Then she turned angry, not so much at Bell but at herself for showing emotion. \"My brother and I would like to enjoy our dinner in private, Mr. Bell. If you will excuse us.\"\n\nHe saw her long neck turn red and felt pleased. \"I'm very sorry for the intrusion.\" He nodded at Cromwell. \"Mr. Cromwell.\" Then Bell turned and walked back to his table.\n\nAs soon as he was certain Bell had moved out of earshot, Cromwell snorted. \"What in hell is he doing in San Francisco? I thought Red Kelly took care of him.\"\n\n\"Apparently, Kelly failed,\" Margaret said with a small feeling of satisfaction in her stomach.\n\n\"How did he know you were here?\"\n\n\"Don't look at me,\" said Margaret angrily. \"I took the train from Denver to Los Angeles as Rose Manteca and bought a horse there under another name. Then I rode it to Santa Barbara, where I took a train to San Francisco under yet another name. There is no way he could have traced me.\"\n\n\"Are we to consider it coincidence?\"\n\nShe looked like a lost dog. \"I don't know. I just don't know.\"\n\n\"Regardless of why he's in San Francisco, his presence spells trouble,\" said Cromwell, staring openly with a constrained smile at the four agents seated around their table. \"I don't think he's put two and two together, but after seeing you, suspecting you might have a connection with the bandit, and learning you're my sister, he'll be nosing around.\"\n\n\"Maybe it's time for me to take a vacation.\"\n\n\"Not a bad idea.\"\n\n\"I'll book passage to Juneau, Alaska, first thing in the morning.\"\n\n\"Why Juneau?\" asked Cromwell. \"It's colder than a witch's nipple up there.\"\n\n\"Because it's the last place he'd look.\" She paused, and her eyes took on a shrewd look. \"And there is the fact that Eugene's father, Sam Butler, oversees his mining operations outside of Juneau.\" Margaret laughed, loosening the bond on her emotions. \"It gives me a chance to look over my future financial interests.\"\n\n\"Dear sister,\" Cromwell said genially, \"you are a never-ending, constant source of amazement.\" Then he brazenly looked across the dining room at Bell. \"I wonder,\" he muttered, \"what happened to Red Kelly.\"\n\n\"Maybe Bell killed him.\"\n\n\"Maybe,\" said Cromwell. \"If that's the case, Bell is far more dangerous than I gave him credit for. Next time, I'll handle the matter myself.\"\n\nWHEN BELL returned to the table, his dish of sweetbreads had arrived. He picked up a fork, looking forward to tasting the delicacy, but he was stopped by questions from everyone at the table.\n\n\"Was she the woman you think you met in Denver?\" demanded Bronson.\n\nBell dodged the question, not wanting to dwell on what he knew was a touchy subject with Bronson. \"I am probably wrong. I admit it. But the resemblance is quite extraordinary.\"\n\n\"You have an eye for beauty,\" Bronson said with a mild chuckle.\n\n\"How did you find Cromwell?\" asked Irvine. \"Do you think he will be helpful when I make an appointment with him to discuss the stolen currency that passed through his bank?\"\n\n\"You'll have to ask Horace. I didn't mention our investigation. He seemed nice enough, if a little lordly.\"\n\n\"He has a reputation of being lofty,\" said Bronson. \"But, one on one, he's quite solicitous, and I'm sure he will be very cooperative in your investigation.\"\n\n\"We shall see,\" Bell said, finally savoring the sweetbreads. After swallowing, he nodded at Irvine. \"I think I'll accompany you to the Cromwell National Bank.\"\n\n\"You want to meet him again?\" asked Bronson.\n\nBell shook his head. \"Not a priority, but I would like to probe around his bank.\"\n\n\"What do you expect to find?\" wondered Curtis.\n\nBell shrugged, but there was a faint gleam in his eyes. \"You know, I haven't the faintest idea.\"\n\n## 19\n\nMARION SAT AT HER DESK, TYPING A LETTER, WHEN two men entered the office. She turned from her Underwood Model 5 typewriter and looked up. One man, with a thicket of un-brushed brown hair, smiled a friendly smile. He was thin, and would have appeared sickly if not for his tanned face. The other was tall, with blond hair. She could not see his face because he had turned away and seemed to be studying the luxurious d\u00e9cor of the office. \"Miss Morgan?\"\n\n\"Yes, may I help you?\"\n\n\"My name is Irvine.\" He handed her his agency card. \"My fellow agent, Isaac Bell, and I are from the Van Dorn Detective Agency. We have an appointment with Mr. Cromwell.\"\n\nShe came to her feet but did not smile. \"Of course. Your appointment was for nine-thirty. You're five minutes early.\"\n\nIrvine made an open gesture with his hands. \"You know the saying...\"\n\n\"About the early bird getting the worm?\" she said as if amused.\n\nThe tall blond-haired man faced her. \"But the second mouse gets the cheese.\"\n\n\"Very astute, Mr. Bell...\" said Marion, her voice trailing off.\n\nTheir eyes met, and Marion suddenly felt something she had never felt before as she gazed into the blue-violet eyes. She realized now that he was well over six feet tall, with a wiry body clothed by a nicely tailored white linen suit. A large mustache was the exact shade of his flaxen, well-groomed hair. He was not handsome in the pretty-boy sense, but his features were craggy and masculine. There was a look of ruggedness about him, a man who was at home in the wild country of the West as well as the comforts of city life. She openly gazed at him, her usually well-restrained emotions in upheaval. No man had ever moved her this way before, certainly not on the first meeting.\n\nBell was also moved by the beauty of Marion and her aura of loveliness. The floor trembled beneath his feet as he stared back at her. She looked dainty but strong as a willow. There was a serene confidence about her that suggested she could surmount any complicated problem. She was poised and graceful, and, from the narrow waist to the flared bottom of her lengthy skirt, he could tell that she had long legs. The thick, lustrous hair was piled atop her head, with one long, narrow strand falling nearly to her waist. He guessed that she was the same age as he, give or take a year.\n\n\"Is Mr. Cromwell busy?\" he asked, tearing himself back to the purpose of the visit.\n\n\"Yes...\" she said with a trace of a stammer. \"But he is expecting you.\"\n\nShe knocked on Cromwell's door, entered, and announced Bell and Irvine's arrival. Then she stood aside and motioned them in as Cromwell came from behind his desk to greet them. As they passed through the door, Bell purposely brushed his hand against Marion's. She felt as if an electric shock had passed through her, before closing the door.\n\n\"Sit down, gentlemen,\" said Cromwell. \"Horace Bronson tells me you've come about the stolen currency that passed through my bank.\"\n\nIrvine seemed not to notice it, but Bell again found it intriguing that Cromwell wore gloves.\n\n\"That is correct,\" Irvine said as Bell let him handle the conversation. \"One of the bills, serial number 214799, was reported as being deposited in your bank.\"\n\n\"That is entirely possible,\" said Cromwell, toying with an unlit cigar. \"I assume it was a fifty-or hundred-dollar bill, because we never record any currency less than that amount.\"\n\nIrvine checked his notations in a notebook. \"Actually, it came from a merchant on Geary Street, a florist's shop. The manager, whose name is Rinsler, contacted the Van Dorn Detective Agency because he thought the bill might be counterfeit. It proved to be genuine. He stated that he'd obtained it from the Cromwell National Bank when he was transferring cash to a private safe.\"\n\n\"Rinsler's reasons sound a bit shady,\" added Bell. \"But if he's violated the law, that's a problem for the local police department.\"\n\n\"Millions of dollars pass through this bank during the course of a year,\" said Cromwell. \"I don't see why one bill is so important.\"\n\n\"Because a check of the serial number revealed that it came from a bank robbery in Elkhorn, Montana, where the bandit murdered four bank employees and customers,\" Bell explained.\n\nCromwell waited for more, but Bell and Irvine went silent. Irvine was examining his notes, but Bell was watching Cromwell intently. The banker met the unrelenting gaze without shifting his eyes. It stimulated his ego knowing that he was in a game of wits with the best agent Van Dorn had.\n\n\"I'm sorry, gentlemen,\" said Cromwell, moving his gaze from Bell to his unlit cigar. \"I fail to see how I can help you. If other bills from the robbery passed through the Cromwell Bank, they have long gone into general circulation and there is no way to trace them, no way of knowing who deposited them.\"\n\n\"That is true,\" Bell replied. \"But we have to check out every lead, no matter how remote.\"\n\n\"The bills were new and had consecutive serial numbers,\" explained Irvine. \"Is it possible you recorded them before they were put into circulation?\"\n\n\"Quite possible, since, as I've said, we record fifty-and hundred-dollar bills.\"\n\n\"Could you have your bookkeeper check your records?\" Bell asked.\n\n\"Happy to oblige.\" Cromwell paused to press a buzzer under his desk. Within seconds, Marion Morgan was standing in the doorway. \"Miss Morgan, would you please have Mr. Hopkins come up to my office?\"\n\nShe nodded. \"Of course.\"\n\nWhen Hopkins showed up, he was not what Bell expected. Instead of a colorless, lackluster little man with glasses and a pencil behind one ear who spent his working life poring through numbers in ledgers, Hopkins looked like a star athlete, big, robust, and quick of movement. He nodded as Bell and Irvine were introduced.\n\n\"Mr. Bell and Mr. Irvine are from the Van Dorn Detective Agency. They are here to check out serial numbers on currency that was stolen during a bank robbery in Elkhorn, Montana. A fifty-dollar bill was deposited in our bank before it was given to a customer cashing a check. These gentlemen think that other stolen bills might have passed through the bank. They would like you to check the list of serial numbers that we recorded.\"\n\nHopkins looked positively congenial as he smiled. \"I'll need the serial numbers.\"\n\n\"Check for consecutive bills above and below 214799,\" answered Cromwell, relying on his memory.\n\n\"Right away, sir,\" acknowledged Hopkins. He made a slight bow to Bell and Irvine. \"I should have the numbers, if they exist, within a few hours.\"\n\n\"I'd be grateful,\" said Bell.\n\n\"Anything else, gentlemen?\" said Cromwell, ending the interview.\n\n\"No, you've been most helpful. Thank you.\"\n\nBell let Irvine move out ahead of him to the elevator, lagging behind. He stopped at Marion's desk and gazed at her. \"Miss Morgan?\"\n\nShe swirled her chair from her typewriter in his direction but shied from looking into his eyes.\n\n\"I know this is terribly presumptuous of me, but you look like an adventurous lady, and I was wondering if you might throw caution to the winds and have dinner with me this evening?\"\n\nHer first impulse was to reject him, but some forbidden door had opened and she fought a battle of principle against desire. \"I'm not allowed to date bank customers. Besides, how do I know I can trust a complete stranger?\"\n\nHe laughed and leaned toward her. \"Number one, I am not a bank customer. And, number two, if you can't trust a bonded detective, who can you trust?\" He reached out and took her hand in his.\n\nA terrifying wave of anxiety swept over her as she fought a losing battle. Her last barrier crumpled and, along with it, her final grip on control. All self-restraint had evaporated.\n\n\"All right,\" she heard herself say, as if she was listening to a total stranger. \"I get off work at five o'clock.\"\n\n\"Good,\" he said, a little too enthusiastically, he thought. \"I'll meet you at the front entrance.\"\n\nShe watched him walk toward the elevator. \"Good Lord,\" she murmured to herself. \"I must be mad to have agreed to have dinner with a perfect stranger.\"\n\nYet, as she berated herself, there was a twinkle in her eye.\n\nIRVINE WAITED for Bell in the elevator. \"What was all that about?\"\n\n\"I have a dinner date with Cromwell's personal secretary.\"\n\n\"You work fast,\" Irvine said admiringly.\n\nBell grinned. \"Things just sort of fell into place.\"\n\n\"Knowing you like I do, I'll bet you have an ulterior motive.\"\n\n\"You might say that I'm mixing business with pleasure.\"\n\n\"You may be playing with fire,\" said Irvine seriously. \"If she catches wise that you're using her to probe into Cromwell's affairs, there could be trouble.\"\n\n\"I'll worry about that when the time comes,\" Bell said comfortably.\n\nOn the ride back to the hotel, Bell's thoughts were not on the business part of the coming evening but rather the pleasure.\n\n## 20\n\nMARION COULD NOT EXPLAIN IT. THE SENSATION was one she had not experienced since a boy she dreamed about in school had smiled at her. That was all. He never approached or talked to her. Now, as she sat across an intimate table for two, she felt as giddy as a schoolgirl.\n\nBell had picked her up outside the Cromwell Bank at exactly five o'clock in a motor cab. The driver drove directly from the street into the seven-story building that contained the city's most famous French restaurant, Delmonico's. They entered an elevator that took them to the top floor, where the ma\u00eetre d' showed them into an enclosed private dining room with a large picture window that overlooked the city and the bay.\n\nPeople who could afford it thought nothing of consuming ten-course meals, each accompanied by a different wine. Bell ordered oysters Rockefeller with a tangy curry sauce, followed by a flavorful broth, poached Great Lakes sturgeon, frog's legs \u00e0 la poulette, pork chops, chicken Kiev, assorted roasted game birds, boiled potatoes, and creamed peas.\n\nMarion had never dined this sumptuously in her life. True, she had been wined and dined by the city's eligible and moneyed bachelors, but none had treated her this lavishly. She was more than thankful the portions were small but regretted not loosening her corset in advance.\n\nFor dessert, Bell ordered cr\u00eapes suzette, the flaming orange-flavored delicacy. When the waiter stood at their table expertly spooning the flaming mixture over the cr\u00eapes, Marion forced herself to look directly into Bell's eyes.\n\n\"May I ask you a question, Mr. Bell?\"\n\nHis smile was engaging. \"I believe we know each other well enough for you to call me Isaac.\"\n\n\"I'd prefer Mr. Bell, if you don't mind,\" she said in what she thought was a proper manner.\n\nThe smile remained. \"Suit yourself.\"\n\n\"How can you afford all this on the pay of a detective?\"\n\nHe laughed. \"Would you believe I saved up all month just to impress you?\"\n\n\"Not for an instant,\" she said haughtily.\n\n\"Is Cromwell the biggest bank in San Francisco?\"\n\nShe was taken back by his question to her answer. \"No, there are two others that are larger, including Wells Fargo. Why do you ask?\"\n\n\"My family owns the largest bank in New England.\"\n\nShe tried to digest it but could not. \"Would you be upset if I said I didn't believe you?\"\n\n\"Ask your boss. He'll verify my claim.\"\n\nShe frowned, confused. \"Why are you a hired detective when you could be president of a bank?\"\n\n\"I happen to like criminal investigation more than banking. I felt trapped at a desk. There is also the challenge of matching wits with the criminal mind.\"\n\n\"Are you successful?\" she asked, teasing.\n\n\"I win more times than I lose,\" he answered honestly.\n\n\"Why me?\" she asked him. \"Why wine and dine a mere secretary instead of a socialite more your equal?\"\n\nBell did not mince words. \"Because you're attractive, intelligent, and I'm captivated.\"\n\n\"But you don't know me.\"\n\n\"I hope to change that,\" he said, devastating her with his eyes again. \"Now, enough talk. Let's enjoy the cr\u00eapes.\"\n\nWhen they finished the savory dessert, Bell asked the waiter for two glasses of fifty-year-old port. Then he leaned back, fully sated. \"Tell me about Jacob Cromwell.\"\n\nThe food and wine had done its work. Marion was too mellow to see the trap she was stepping into. \"What would you like to know?\"\n\n\"Where he came from, how he launched his bank, is he married. After meeting him, I found him most interesting. I heard he and his sister Margaret are the city's leading philanthropists.\"\n\n\"I've worked for Mr. Cromwell for nine years and I can safely say he is a very smart and perceptive man who is a confirmed bachelor. He started the bank in 1892 with very little in assets and weathered the depression of the nineties. He made money through the worst of it. Most all the banks in the city came close to closing their doors during hard economic times. Not Cromwell National Bank. Through shrewd management and sound banking principles, he built a financial empire with assets running in the many millions of dollars.\"\n\n\"A resourceful man,\" said Bell admiringly. \"Obviously, a self-made man.\"\n\nShe nodded. \"The growth of Cromwell National Bank is nothing short of a financial miracle.\"\n\n\"Where did he find the money to open a bank?\"\n\n\"That's a bit of a mystery. He's very close-lipped about his business affairs prior to launching a small bank on Market Street. Rumor has it, he started with no more than fifty thousand dollars. When I came to work, the bank's assets were well over a million.\"\n\n\"What sort of investments does he make with his fortune?\"\n\nShe held up her hands in a helpless gesture. \"I honestly don't know. He's never mentioned his personal finances to me, and I've seen no paperwork or correspondence. I assume he plunges his profits back into the bank.\"\n\n\"What of his family? Where did he and his sister come from?\"\n\nAgain, Marion looked lost. \"He's never spoken of his past. One time, he mentioned that he and Margaret's father had a farm in North Dakota, in a little town called Buffalo. Other than that, his family ties are buried in the past.\"\n\n\"I'm sure he has his reasons,\" said Bell. He did not want to push Marion too far, so he turned the conversation to his own childhood growing up in the elitist society of Boston. Going to Yale University, and his father's extreme displeasure when he went to work at the Van Dorn Detective Agency and not the family bank. He took a circuitous route back to Cromwell. \"Cromwell stuck me as an educated man. I wonder where he went to school.\"\n\n\"Margaret once said they attended college in Minnesota,\" said Marion, dabbing a napkin to her lips after finishing her cr\u00eapes.\n\n\"Margaret is a beautiful woman,\" he said, watching for a reaction.\n\nMarion barely veiled her dislike of Cromwell's sister. \"I know she's involved with a number of charities, but she is not someone I'd have as a close friend.\"\n\n\"She can't be trusted?\" Bell guessed.\n\n\"She doesn't always tell the truth. And there are always rumors of scandal, which Mr. Cromwell manages to cover up. Strangely, he doesn't seem disturbed by her antics. It's almost as if he enjoys them.\"\n\n\"Does he travel much?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes, he's often away fishing in Oregon, enjoying the Bohemian Club's retreat in the redwoods, or hunting in Alaska. He also attends at least three banking conferences a year in various parts of the country. Once a year, he and Margaret tour Europe together.\"\n\n\"So he doesn't manage the day-to-day business of the bank.\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"No, no, Mr. Cromwell is always in weekly contact with the bank when he's away. He also has a board of directors that has the best brains in the business.\"\n\nThe waiter brought their glasses of port on a silver tray. They sipped in silence for a few moments before Marion spoke.\n\n\"Why are you asking me all these questions about Mr. Cromwell?\"\n\n\"I'm an investigator. I'm just naturally curious.\"\n\nShe pushed a curl from her forehead and patted her hair. \"I feel rejected.\"\n\nHe gazed at her carefully. \"Rejected?\" he echoed.\n\n\"Yes, you ask all these questions about my boss, but you haven't asked about me. Most men I've known always asked about my past on the first date.\"\n\n\"Dare I go there?\" he asked, teasing her.\n\n\"Nothing risqu\u00e9,\" she said, laughing. \"My life's been pretty dull, actually. I am a California native, born across the bay in Sausalito. My mother died when I was quite young, and my father, who was an engineer for the Western Pacific Railroad, hired tutors for me until I was old enough to go to the city's first secretarial school. When I graduated, Jacob Cromwell hired me, and I've worked in his bank ever since, working up from an office typist to his personal secretary.\"\n\n\"Ever been married?\"\n\nShe smiled coyly. \"I've had a proposal or two but never walked down the aisle to the altar.\"\n\nHe reached across the table and took her hand. \"Hopefully, Prince Charming will come along one day and sweep you off your feet.\"\n\nShe pulled her hand back, more from exerting her authority than rejecting him. \"Prince Charmings are few and far between. I've yet to see one in San Francisco.\"\n\nBell decided not to go there. He was determined to ask her out again and see where their wave of mutual attraction might take them. \"I've enjoyed the evening. It's not often I can value the company of such a lovely woman who can hold her own in conversation.\"\n\n\"You're very good at flattery.\"\n\nHe dropped his eyes from hers. Bell did not want to push his luck, but there was one more enigma he had to have answered. \"There's another thing about Cromwell that intrigues me.\"\n\nHe could see from her expression that she was disappointed and had expected him to say something about them getting together again, and he sensed that she was beginning to doubt her feelings toward him.\n\n\"What is it?\" Her tone suddenly went icy.\n\n\"When I first saw him in the dining room of the Bohemian Club, and today in his office, he was wearing gloves. Does he always wear them when dining or working at his desk?\"\n\nShe folded her napkin and laid it on the table as a sign that for her the evening was over. \"When he was a boy, he was in a fire. Both his hands were badly burned, so he wears gloves to cover the scars.\"\n\nBell felt guilty for using Marion. She was a vital, beautiful, and intelligent woman. He stood, came around the table, and pulled her chair out for her. \"I'm truly sorry for letting my detective's undue inquisitive nature get the best of me. I hope you'll forgive me. Will you give me a chance to make it up to you?\"\n\nShe could tell that he was sincere and felt a tickle of excitement, her hope rising again that he was truly interested in her. He was far more enticing than she could have imagined. \"All right, Isaac, I'll go out with you again. But no questions.\"\n\n\"No questions,\" he said with a tingle of pleasure at hearing her use his first name. \"That's a promise.\"\n\n## 21\n\nTWO DAYS LATER, THE FOUR DETECTIVES MET IN THE Van Dorn Detective Agency offices on the fifth floor of the Call Building on Market Street. They sat in a semicircle at a round table and compared notes. They were all in shirtsleeves, their coats hanging on the back of their chairs. Most wore straight, conservative neckties under their stiff collars. Only one wore a bow tie. Three sipped coffee from cups with the Van Dorn logo baked on the porcelain surface, the fourth drank tea. Loose papers and bound reports covered the top of the table. \"I've written up a story telling how one of the largest shipments ever of newly printed currency from the San Francisco Mint will be shipped under heavy guard to the mining town of Telluride, Colorado, to make the payroll and a bonus to ten thousand miners,\" Bell told them. \"I merely alluded to the exact amount but suggested that it was in the neighborhood of five hundred thousand dollars.\"\n\n\"I used my contacts with the newspaper editor to run the article,\" said Bronson. \"It will be printed in tomorrow's papers.\"\n\nIrvine spun his cup slowly around on its saucer. \"If the bandit lives in San Francisco, it should tantalize him into making a try for it.\"\n\n\"If he lives in San Francisco,\" repeated Curtis. \"We're going out on a limb on this one. We may have run up a dead-end alley.\"\n\n\"We know the boxcar and several of the stolen bills ended up here,\" said Bell. \"I think the odds are good he lives somewhere in the Bay Area.\"\n\n\"It would help if we knew for certain,\" Bronson said wearily. He looked at Irvine. \"You say your search to backtrack the stolen currency went nowhere.\"\n\n\"A bust,\" Irvine acknowledged. \"The trail was too cold and there was no way to trace the bills before they were recirculated.\"\n\n\"The banks had no record of who turned them in?\" asked Bronson.\n\nIrvine shook his head. \"The tellers have no way of knowing because they don't list the serial numbers. That's done later by the bank's bookkeepers. By the time we made a connection, it was too late. Whoever traded in the bills was long gone and forgotten.\"\n\nBronson turned to Curtis. \"And your search for the boxcar?\"\n\nCurtis looked as if he had just lost the family dog. \"It disappeared,\" he replied helplessly. \"A search of the railyard turned up no sign of it.\"\n\n\"Maybe it was sent out on a freight train that left the city,\" Bell offered.\n\n\"Southern Pacific freight trains that left on scheduled runs in the last week show no manifest that includes a freight car owned by the O'Brian Furniture Company.\"\n\n\"You're saying it never left the railyard?\"\n\n\"Exactly.\"\n\n\"Then why can't it be found?\" inquired Bronson. \"It couldn't have vanished into thin air.\"\n\nCurtis threw up his hands. \"What can I say? Two of your agents and I searched the railyard from top to bottom. The car is not there.\"\n\n\"Did the Southern Pacific's dispatchers know where the car was switched after it arrived?\" asked Bell.\n\n\"It was switched to a siding next to the loading dock of a deserted warehouse. We checked it out. It wasn't there.\"\n\nIrvine lit a cigar and puffed out a cloud of smoke. \"Could it have been coupled to a train without the dispatcher knowing about it?\"\n\n\"Can't happen,\" Curtis came back. \"They would know if a car was covertly added to their train. The brakemen use a form to list the serial numbers on a train in the sequence the cars are coupled together. When the boxcars arrive at their designated destination, they can easily be switched from the rear of the train before it continues on its run.\"\n\n\"Perhaps the bandit figured the car had outlived its usefulness and he had it scrapped and destroyed,\" said Bronson.\n\n\"I don't think so,\" Bell said thoughtfully. \"My guess is that he simply had it repainted with a new serial number and changed the name to another fictitious company.\"\n\n\"Won't make any difference,\" said Curtis. \"He couldn't use it anyway.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Bell asked.\n\n\"Only the Rio Grande Southern Railroad runs into Telluride.\"\n\n\"So what's stopping him from repainting that railroad's insignia over one advertising the Southern Pacific?\"\n\n\"Nothing. Except it would be a waste of time. The Rio Grande Southern runs on a narrow-gauge track. The Southern Pacific trains run on standard gauge, nearly a foot wider. There's no way the track can accommodate the bandit's boxcar.\"\n\n\"How stupid of me,\" muttered Bell. \"I forgot that only narrow-gauge railroads run through the Rocky Mountains.\"\n\n\"Don't feel bad,\" said Bronson. \"I never thought of it either.\"\n\nIrvine struck the table with his fist in frustration. \"He'll never bite the hook, knowing that he can't escape in his private freight car.\"\n\nBell smiled tightly. \"He has his strengths, but he also has his weaknesses. I'm counting on his greed and his ego, his sense of invincibility. I'm certain he will take the bait and attempt to rob the bank in Telluride. The challenge is too mighty for him to ignore.\"\n\n\"I wish you the best of luck,\" said Bronson. \"If anybody can catch the Butcher, you can.\"\n\n\"What about you, Horace? Any luck on tracing the bandit's gun?\"\n\n\"Nothing encouraging,\" Bronson said soberly. \"New firearm purchases don't have to be registered. All any buyer has to do is lay down the money and walk out with the gun. We've drawn a blank with dealers. Even if they remember who they sold a Colt thirty-eight automatic to, they won't give out any names.\"\n\nIrvine stared at a wall without seeing it. \"It would seem, gentlemen, that all our hard-earned leads have turned into blind alleys.\"\n\n\"Setbacks, yes,\" Bell muttered softly. \"But the game isn't over\u2014not yet. We still have a chance to make the final score.\"\n\n## 22\n\nCROMWELL SAT AT THE TABLE, EATING HIS BREAKFAST and reading the morning paper. He folded the first section on a front-page article and passed it across the table to Margaret without comment.\n\nShe read it, her eyes squinting as the story hit home, then she looked up quizzically. \"Do you intend on going for it?\"\n\n\"I find it very tempting,\" he replied. \"It's as though a gauntlet was thrown at my feet.\"\n\n\"What do you know about Telluride?\"\n\n\"Only what I've read. It lies in a box canyon. Has an extensive red-light district, and Butch Cassidy robbed the San Miguel Valley Bank there in 1889.\"\n\n\"Was he successful?\"\n\nCromwell nodded. \"He and his gang got away with over twenty thousand dollars.\"\n\n\"I suppose you're thinking if he could do it, you could do it.\"\n\n\"Cassidy conducted an amateur holdup and rode away on horses,\" Cromwell said pompously. \"My methods are more scientific.\"\n\n\"If Telluride is in a box canyon, there is only one way in and one way out. A posse would have time to stop a train and search the cars.\"\n\n\"I can't use my boxcar anyway. It will have to be left behind.\"\n\n\"I don't understand.\"\n\n\"The railroad running in and from Telluride is the Rio Grande Southern. The tracks are narrow gauge, the rails too closely spiked for my Southern Pacific car. I'll just have to find another means of leaving town without the threat of capture.\"\n\nMargaret scrutinized the story again. \"I don't have a good feeling about this.\"\n\n\"I don't consider feelings. I work with hard facts, and I play it safe by taking into account every contingency, no matter how small.\"\n\nShe watched him across the table as he poured another cup of coffee. \"You'll need help with this job.\"\n\nHe looked over his cup. \"What have you got in mind?\"\n\n\"I'll come with you.\"\n\n\"What about your little journey to Juneau, Alaska?\"\n\n\"I'll simply postpone it.\"\n\nCromwell considered that for a few moments. \"I can't put you at risk.\"\n\n\"You haven't failed yet,\" Margaret admonished him. \"But, this time, you may need me.\"\n\nHe was quiet for a while. Then he smiled. \"I do believe you'd come along if I ordered you not to.\"\n\nShe laughed. \"Have I ever bowed to your demands yet?\"\n\n\"Not even when we were children,\" he said, remembering. \"Though you were two years younger, I could never get the upper hand.\"\n\nShe patted a napkin against her red lips. \"It's settled, then. We're in this job together.\"\n\nHe sighed. \"You win. But I hope I won't be sorry I didn't put you on the boat to Alaska.\"\n\n\"What do you want me to do?\"\n\nHe stared down at the table, as if seeing an abstract image, while he circled his fork on the tablecloth. \"Take a train to Colorado tomorrow and then make a connection to Telluride.\"\n\nShe stared at him. \"You want me to leave before you?\"\n\nHe nodded. \"I'll deviate from my usual routine. Instead of my spending time mingling with the locals and studying the bank operation, you can do it. As a woman, you can conduct a close scrutiny without arousing suspicion.\"\n\n\"A woman in Telluride?\" she mused. \"I'll have to pass myself off as a prostitute.\"\n\n\"Better yet, claim that you're an abandoned wife whose husband left her to strike it rich in the mines and disappeared. That way no one will be suspicious of you asking questions and snooping around.\"\n\n\"But in order to live and eat, I have to find work in a bordello.\"\n\n\"Have it your own way,\" he said, resigning himself as always to his sister's whimsical ways.\n\n\"And you?\"\n\n\"I'll come a few days later, after I've checked out the shipment and firmed up my plans for the robbery and our getaway.\" He paused and gazed at her with a look of brotherly love. \"I must be mad for involving you in such a risky venture.\"\n\n\"I'm mad, too.\" She laughed a lilting laugh. \"Insane with excitement and a growing rage for adventure.\" She threw him the feminine expression of a cat about to leap on a mouse. \"Of course, the thought of acting like a prostitute is an attraction I find delicious.\"\n\n\"Spare me the details.\"\n\nThen she suddenly became serious. \"What about Isaac Bell?\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"What about him?\"\n\n\"He seems to show up everywhere, maybe even Telluride.\"\n\n\"The thought crossed my mind, but, once I verify the currency shipment, I believe that pretty much eliminates him. He's too busy chasing ghosts all over San Francisco to show up out of the blue in Telluride.\"\n\n\"I don't trust him any more than I can throw this house.\"\n\nHe laughed. \"Cheer up, sister dear. This will be a walk in the park just like the other robberies. You'll see.\"\n\n## 23\n\nTHE SPRING DAY WAS COOL AND BRISK AS BELL DEPARTED the train at the town depot and walked to the corner of Aspen Street and Colorado Avenue, where he found a three-story wooden building with a sign out front that read MAMIE TUBBS BOARDINGHOUSE. He carried a battered valise and wore a worn wool coat with a vest and flannel shirt underneath. His pants were heavy cotton with almost the consistency of canvas. Boots that looked as if they had walked five thousand miles protected his feet while a rumpled old Stetson sat solidly on his head. The fabricated image was embellished with a Dublin-style bent pipe wedged between his teeth. Bell also walked with a pronounced limp as if his left leg was stiff.\n\nHe stepped into the parlor of the boardinghouse and was greeted by Mamie Tubbs, a jolly woman as round as a huge pear. Her gray hair hung down her back in two braids, and she had a face that looked like a large saucer with a nose.\n\n\"Greetings, stranger,\" she said in a voice as deep as a man's. \"Looking for a place to stay?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am,\" said Bell politely. \"I'm new in town.\"\n\n\"Seven dollars a week including meals, providing you're at the table when I dish up.\"\n\nHe reached into a pocket, brought out a few folded bills, and counted out seven dollars. \"Here's your money, in advance. \"I don't have much, but enough to tide me over for a while.\"\n\nShe had noticed his limp when he came into the parlor. \"You lookin' to work in the mines?\"\n\nBell tapped a hand against his leg. \"My mining days ended when I was injured by a badly laid stick of dynamite.\"\n\nShe eyed him suspiciously, beginning to wonder where any future rent was going to come from. \"Where do you expect to find a job?\"\n\n\"A friend found me work as a cleanup man at the New Sheridan Hotel.\"\n\nShe smiled. \"They couldn't find you a room in the basement?\"\n\n\"All beds in the basement were taken by miners,\" Bell lied. He had no idea if miners slept in the basement.\n\nThe impression of a crippled miner, he knew, would satisfy Mamie Tubbs enough so she wouldn't gossip around town about her new boarder. She showed him to his room, where he unpacked his valise. He removed a towel wrapped around a Colt Browning model 1905 .45 caliber automatic pistol with a custom twenty-shot magazine and shoulder stock that fit in a slot behind the grip. He slipped the weapon under the bed but kept his trusty Remington derringer inside his Stetson. He retightened the wrapping around his knee so it hindered normal movement.\n\nAfter a beef stew dinner in Mamie's dining room, he met the other people who were staying at the boardinghouse. Most were miners, but there were a few store clerks, and a husband and wife who were opening a restaurant. After dinner, Bell strolled up Pacific Avenue and studied the layout of the town.\n\nTelluride\u2014the name supposedly came from the saying \"to hell you ride\"\u2014was launched after gold was discovered in the San Miguel River. The gold, along with silver-bearing ore, found high in the San Juan Mountains, quickly attracted an army of prospectors and miners over the next fifty years. By 1906, more millionaires per capita lived in Telluride than in New York City.\n\nThe miners eventually dug three hundred fifty miles of tunnels that honeycombed the surrounding mountains, some as high as twelve thousand feet above sea level. The population soared to over five thousand, and the rip-roaring town soon overflowed with wild and crazy living mixed with a healthy dose of corruption. There were three dozen saloons and one hundred eighty prostitutes to keep the army of miners in a good mood after long twelve-hour shifts in the Silver Bell, Smuggler-Union, and Liberty Bell mines at three dollars a day.\n\nWhen the sun dropped behind the mountains and darkness came, a blaze of lights flashed on up and down the streets. In 1892, mine owner L. L. Nunn had hired the electrical wizard Nikola Tesla to build the world's first alternating-current power plant to move ore on cables down the mountain and miners up from town. After running lines from the power plant into town, Telluride became the first town in history to have electric streetlamps.\n\nBell walked past the notorious cribs where the scarlet women plied their trade. The upper-class houses were called the Senate and the Silver Belle. Music could be heard through the windows out on the street as a piano player pounded out the \"Dill Pickles Rag\" and other ragtime tunes. The street was called Popcorn Alley, its name coming from the constant opening and closing of doors all night.\n\nHe moved up to the main section of town on Colorado Avenue and looked through the windows of the Telluride First National Bank. Tomorrow, he would meet with the town sheriff and the bank manager to plan a reception for the Butcher Bandit, should he swallow the bait and make an attempt to rob the bank. He passed the old San Miguel Valley Bank that Butch Cassidy had robbed seventeen years previously.\n\nThe evening air had turned cold, once the sun took its heat beyond the mountain peaks. Bell noticed that the nine-thousand-foot altitude caused him to take deeper breaths. He ignored the main street saloons and headed for the New Sheridan Hotel.\n\nBell stepped inside the lobby and asked the desk clerk to see the manager. In a minute, a short man with a florid face and bald head came out of the office with quick, hurried steps, like a mouse running from a hole in the wall. He smiled an official smile, but not too warmly, as he sized up Bell's rather dowdy appearance.\n\n\"I'm sorry, all our rooms are taken. The Sheridan is full up.\"\n\n\"I don't want a room,\" said Bell. \"Are you Mr. Marshall Buckman?\"\n\nThe smile straightened and the eyes narrowed. \"Yes, I'm Buckman.\"\n\n\"I'm Isaac Bell with the Van Dorn Detective Agency.\"\n\nBuckman eye's widened again and he bowed. \"Mr. Bell. I received your telegram. Permit me to say the Sheridan will cooperate in every way.\"\n\n\"The most important thing,\" explained Bell, \"is to confirm to anyone who asks that I work here as a janitor.\"\n\n\"Yes, of course,\" Buckman said in a patronizing manner. \"You can count on me.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Mr. Buckman. Now, if you don't mind, I think I will enjoy the best whiskey in your bar.\"\n\n\"We serve only superior whiskey from the finest distillers. No local rotgut is tolerated at the Sheridan.\"\n\nBell nodded and then turned his back on Buckman and stepped toward the bar. He paused and read a plaque listing rules for the hotel patrons.\n\nDon't shoot the pianist, he's doing his damndest.\n\nNo horses above the first floor.\n\nNo more than 5 in a bed.\n\nFunerals on the house.\n\nBeds 50 cents, with sheets 75 cents.\n\nAt the doorway, he stood aside as a blond lady whose face was hidden under a wide-brimmed hat stepped past him. All he saw was that she had a fine figure.\n\nConversely, she paid no attention to the limping man who walked by her as she headed for the carpeted stairway leading to her room.\n\nMuch later, Bell cursed himself for not recognizing the blonde just as Margaret blamed herself for not identifying the limping man until it was too late.\n\n## 24\n\nBELL EXPLAINED THE SITUATION TO SHERIFF HENRY Pardee and the bank manager, Murray Oxnard. The three men sat around a table eating a breakfast served by the sheriff's wife. Pardee's house sat directly behind his office and the jail. He walked to the door, made sure it was locked, and drew the curtains so nobody could see inside.\n\nBell was impressed with the sheriff. One wall of the parlor had bookshelves from floor to ceiling stacked with works by Shakespeare, Plato, Voltaire, Bacon, and Emerson, along with several volumes in Latin. Bell had never met a peace officer in a small town who was so well read.\n\nPardee ran a hand through a thick mane of graying hair and tugged at a shaggy mustache. \"What you're saying, Mr. Bell, is that you think the Butcher Bandit is going to hit our town bank.\"\n\n\"I can't say for certain,\" Bell replied. \"But if he's true to form, he'll be lured by the large payroll that is being shipped to the bank from the First National Bank of Denver.\"\n\n\"I know of no such payroll shipment,\" said Murray Oxnard. He was a tall, quiet man with broad shoulders and narrow hips. He seldom smiled, and his face was always fixed with a dour expression.\n\n\"There is no shipment,\" explained Bell. \"It is a ruse to smoke out the bandit.\"\n\nPardee rapped the fingers of one hand on the table. \"If he is as smart as I've read, he'll dig into the true facts and find it's all a sham.\"\n\nBell shook his head. \"No, sir, the directors of the bank in Denver are primed to go along with the story.\"\n\n\"If I may ask,\" said Pardee, \"why did you choose Telluride?\"\n\n\"Because you sit in a box canyon with its only entrance and exit to the west. The situation that makes it ideal to block off his escape route if we don't apprehend him during the attempted robbery.\"\n\n\"I don't like it,\" said Oxnard. \"The bandit is known to murder without batting an eye. I cannot put my employees at risk, nor will I have their blood on my hands.\"\n\n\"I do not intend to have you or your people in the bank when and if the robbery occurs. Myself and one other Van Dorn agent will man the bank. Another agent will watch the trains coming in and out, since the bandit is known to escape his crimes by using a railroad freight car.\"\n\n\"What about my customers?\" Oxnard pressed on. \"Who will tend to their transactions?\"\n\n\"My agent and I are fully experienced in running the daily affairs of a bank. If the bandit steps up to a teller's cage, we'll be ready for him.\"\n\n\"Do you know what he looks like?\" asked Pardee.\n\n\"Except for the fact we know he's missing the little finger on his left hand and he has red hair, we have no description.\"\n\n\"That's because he murders everyone who can identify him. You don't have much to go on.\"\n\n\"I still cannot bring myself to go along with this,\" said Oxnard. \"One of my customers could be in the wrong place at the wrong time and get shot.\"\n\n\"We'll take every precaution,\" said Bell soberly. \"There may be some risk, but this bandit must be stopped. He's already killed over thirty people. There's no telling how many more will die before we can apprehend him and stop the murders.\"\n\n\"What can I do to help?\" Pardee said, giving Oxnard a cold stare.\n\n\"Don't patrol the bank with your deputies and scare off the bandit,\" answered Bell. \"Stand by\u2014out of sight, if possible\u2014but be ready to act in case he shows up. We'll arrange a signal when he makes his play.\"\n\nThough Oxnard had his demons about the trap, Pardee was already imagining the notoriety he would receive if the bandit were caught in the act under his jurisdiction. As far as he was concerned, the debate was decisive and now it was over. He had only one more question.\n\n\"When is the supposed money shipment due?\"\n\n\"Tomorrow,\" Bell told him.\n\nOxnard looked at him inquiringly. \"What about the shipment that's already sitting in the safe for the real payroll?\"\n\n\"Leave it in the safe. I guarantee, the bandit won't get it.\"\n\nPardee twisted the ends of his mustache. \"Ever been in a mining town on payday, Mr. Bell?\"\n\n\"I haven't had the luxury, but I hear it can get pretty wild.\"\n\n\"That's true,\" said Oxnard with a faint grin. \"Every payday, all hell breaks loose from one end of town to the other.\"\n\nPardee matched his grin. \"Yes, the cribs will be busy until the miners have wasted their hard-earned money on whiskey and gambling.\" He paused a moment and looked at Bell. \"Where are you staying, in case I have to get in touch with you?\"\n\n\"I'm staying at Mamie Tubbs Boardinghouse.\"\n\n\"A good place to keep a low profile,\" said Oxnard. \"Mamie's a fine old gal, and a good cook.\"\n\n\"I can vouch for her stew,\" Bell said with humor.\n\nAfter breakfast, the meeting broke up. Bell and Oxnard thanked Mrs. Pardee for a fine breakfast. Then the three men stepped outside and walked toward town, Pardee leaving them when he got to his office and jail. Bell went with Oxnard to the bank to study its interior layout.\n\nThe floor plan was the same as a thousand other banks'. The bank manager's office sat behind the teller's cage, which was enclosed in glass except for the area in front of the cash drawers. This section of the counter was open through narrow bars. The vault was more like a large safe and stood in an alcove off to the side of the lobby. Bell learned that it was closed during business hours and opened only to withdraw currency or when all cash and coins were returned after closing.\n\n\"You don't have a vault?\" Bell said to Oxnard.\n\n\"Don't need one. Payroll money usually goes up to the mines under heavy guard the second day after the shipment comes in.\"\n\n\"Why the second day?\"\n\n\"We need the time to make a count to verify the amount shipped from the bank in Denver.\"\n\n\"So the bandit has a limited window of opportunity.\"\n\nOxnard nodded. \"If he's going to make his play, it will have to be tomorrow.\"\n\n\"Have you seen or had contact with any new depositors or people who simply walked into the bank and then walked out again?\"\n\n\"A new superintendent for the Liberty Bell mine opened a checking account.\" He paused to gaze up at the ceiling in thought. \"Then there was a very attractive woman who opened an account. A very small account. Very sad.\"\n\n\"Sad?\"\n\n\"Her husband left her back in Iowa to strike it rich in Colorado. She never heard from him again, and the last thing she learned was from a friend, a conductor on the railroad. He told her that her husband left word he was going to Telluride to work in the mines. She came here in an attempt to find him. Poor soul. Chances are, he was one of the many men who died in the mines.\"\n\n\"I'd like the name of the mine superintendent,\" said Bell, \"so I can check him out.\"\n\n\"I'll get it for you.\" Oxnard went into his office and returned in less than a minute. \"His name is Oscar Reynolds.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\"\n\nOxnard stared at Bell. \"Aren't you going to check out the woman?\"\n\n\"The bandit has never worked with a woman\u2014or any man, for that matter. He always commits his crimes alone.\"\n\n\"Just as well,\" Oxnard sighed. \"Poor thing. She only opened an account for two dollars. In order to eat, she'll probably have to work in a bordello, since jobs for women are scarce in Telluride. And those jobs that do exist are filled by the wives of the miners.\"\n\n\"Just to play safe, I'd like her name, too.\"\n\n\"Rachel Jordan.\"\n\nBell laughed softly. \"Her, you remembered.\"\n\nOxnard smiled. \"It's easy to remember a name with a pretty face.\"\n\n\"Did she say where she was staying?\"\n\n\"No, but I can only assume it's in a crib.\" He gave Bell a sly look. \"You going to look her up?\"\n\n\"No,\" said Bell thoughtfully. \"I hardly think a woman is the Butcher Bandit.\"\n\n## 25\n\nMARGARET WAS NOT ENDURING THE LIFE OF A PROSTITUTE in a crib on Pacific Avenue. She was living in style in the New Sheridan Hotel. After opening a small account at the town bank to examine the floor plan, number of employees and where they were located, and the type of safe, she made the rounds of the mining companies to make inquiries about a long-lost husband who never existed. The effort gave her story substance, and soon she became the source of gossip around town.\n\nShe went so far as to call on Sheriff Pardee with her bogus story, to see what kind of man he was face-to-face. Mrs. Alice Pardee came into the office when Margaret was asking the sheriff for his cooperation in finding her husband. Alice immediately felt sorry for the woman in the cheap, well-faded cotton dress who poured out her sad tale of the abandoned wife desperately seeking the man who had deserted her. Alice assumed that this Rachel Jordan was half starved and invited her up to their house for dinner. Margaret accepted and arrived in the same cheap dress, which she had bought in San Francisco at a used-clothing store for the poor.\n\nThat evening, Margaret made a display of helping Alice Pardee in the kitchen, but it was obvious to the sheriff's wife that their guest was not at home over a hot stove. Alice served a homemade meal of mutton chops, boiled potatoes, and steamed vegetables, topped off by an apple pie for dessert. After dinner, tea was served and everyone settled in the parlor, where Alice played tunes on an old upright piano.\n\n\"Tell me, Mrs. Jordan,\" Alice asked, pausing to change the sheet music, \"where are you staying?\"\n\n\"A nice lady, Miss Billy Maguire, hired me as a waitress at her ladies' boardinghouse.\"\n\nPardee and his wife exchanged pained glances. Alice sucked in her breath. \"Big Billy is the madam of the Silver Belle bordello,\" she said. \"Didn't you know that?\"\n\nMargaret made a display of looking sheepish. \"I had no idea.\"\n\nAlice bought Margaret's lie, Pardee did not. He knew there was no way any woman could fail to recognize the difference between a boardinghouse and a bordello. The germ of suspicion began to grow in his mind, but his wife was swept by compassion.\n\n\"You poor thing,\" she said, putting her arm around Margaret. \"You'll not stay at the Silver Belle another minute. You'll stay here with Henry and me until you find your husband.\"\n\n\"But he may not be in Telluride,\" Margaret said as if about to weep. \"Then I would have to move on, and I don't want to inconvenience you.\"\n\n\"Nonsense,\" said Alice. \"You march right back to Big Billy's and bring back your things. I'll make up the spare bed for you.\"\n\nMargaret went into her act and shed a few tears. \"How can I ever thank you? How can I ever repay you?\"\n\n\"Don't give it a thought. Henry and I are only too glad to help a poor soul in distress. It's the Christian thing to do.\"\n\nAs she sipped her coffee, Margaret moved the conversation to Pardee's job as sheriff. \"You have to live an exciting life,\" she said. \"Telluride seems like an uninhibited town. You must be kept quite busy.\"\n\n\"The miners can get pretty rowdy at times,\" Pardee agreed, \"but serious crimes like murder don't happen but once every six months or so. It's been peaceful since the union strikes by the miners two years ago, when the governor sent in the army to squelch the rioting.\"\n\nMargaret was slow and deliberate in her answers to Pardee's questions about her missing husband. She in turn made general inquiries about the town and the mines. \"A lot of money must pass through the bank to the mining companies,\" she said casually.\n\nPardee nodded. \"The payrolls can add up to a considerable amount.\"\n\n\"And you never have a fear of robbers and thieves?\" she asked innocently.\n\n\"The miners are a solid lot and rarely indulge in crime. Except for occasional fights in the saloons, or a killing when a confrontation gets out of hand, the town is pretty quiet.\"\n\n\"When I was in the bank, I saw that the safe looked very strong and secure.\"\n\n\"It's strong, all right,\" said Pardee, lighting his pipe. \"Five sticks of dynamite couldn't blow it open.\"\n\n\"And the bank manager is the only one who knows the combination?\"\n\nPardee thought it strange a question like that came from a woman, but he answered without hesitation. \"Actually, the locking bolts are set to spring open at ten o'clock every morning. At three o'clock in the afternoon, the manager closes the door and sets the clock.\"\n\n\"Someone at the Silver Belle told me Butch Cassidy robbed the local bank.\"\n\nPardee laughed. \"That was a long time ago. We've never had a bank robbery since.\"\n\nMargaret was leery of pushing too hard, but there was information she had to know if her brother was to carry out a successful robbery. \"The miners' payroll. Is it taken directly to the mining companies when it arrives?\"\n\nPardee shook his head and went along with Bell's story. \"It came in today and went directly to the bank. Tomorrow, it will be counted and sent to the mines the next day.\"\n\n\"Are there extra guards in the bank to protect the money?\"\n\n\"No need,\" said Pardee. \"Anyone who tried to rob the bank wouldn't get far. With the telegraph lines running alongside the railroad tracks, peace officers around the county would be alerted and posses formed to wait for the robbers when they tried to escape.\"\n\n\"Then such a crime would be impossible to commit successfully.\"\n\n\"I guess you could say that,\" Pardee replied confidently. \"There's no way it could succeed.\"\n\nMargaret left the Pardee house and walked toward the Silver Belle. As soon as she was out of sight, she ran down an alley to the New Sheridan Hotel to pack her meager clothes. She felt pleased with herself and could not believe her luck. Staying with the sheriff and his wife would give her access to most of the town. When her brother arrived, she would have enough information for him to plan a foolproof crime.\n\nHer only problem was the whereabouts of her brother. To her knowledge, he had not arrived in town, and tomorrow was the only day the payrolls could be robbed before they went to the mines for distribution to the miners. She began to feel extremely uneasy.\n\n## 26\n\nTHE FOLLOWING MORNING, A BLACK-HAIRED WOMAN drove a smart-looking buggy pulled by a dappled gray horse on the road into Telluride. The road led from the ranching community of Montrose, a rail terminus for the Rio Grande Southern Railroad. She had arrived from Denver and rented the rig and horse at the local stable. She was dressed in a long buckskin skirt over a pair of pointed-toe leather boots. Her upper torso was covered by a nicely knit green sweater under a wolfskin fur coat. A lady's-style flat-topped cowboy hat was set squarely on her head. She was fashionably attired for the West, but not ostentatious.\n\nShe came onto Colorado Avenue, passed the San Miguel County Courthouse, and pulled the horse to a stop in front of the town stable. She climbed down from the buggy and tied the horse to a hitching post. The stable owner came out and lifted his hat.\n\n\"Good afternoon, ma'am. Can I help you?\"\n\n\"Yes, I wonder if you would please feed and water my horse. I have to be on the road back to Montrose this afternoon.\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am,\" said the stable owner politely, slightly taken aback by a voice that had a gentle harshness about it. \"I'll take care of it. While I'm at it, I'll tighten your front wheels. They look a mite loose.\"\n\n\"You're very kind, thank you. Oh, and by the way, my sister will come for the buggy and pay you.\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am.\"\n\nThe woman left the stable and walked a block to the New Sheridan Hotel. She approached the desk clerk and asked, \"Do you have a Miss Rachel Jordan registered here?\"\n\nThe clerk shook his head, stared at what he saw as an attractive woman, and said, \"No, ma'am, she checked out last night.\" He paused, turned, and pulled an envelope out of a mail-and-key slot. \"But she said if someone asked for her to give them this.\"\n\nThe woman thanked the clerk, walked out onto the sidewalk, opened the envelope, and read the note. She stuffed it in her purse and began walking through town. After a short hike, she came to the Lone Tree Cemetery, on a hill north of the San Miguel River. She passed through the gate and walked among the tombstones, noting that most of the deceased had died from mine accidents, snow slides, and miner's consumption.\n\nA pretty blond woman was sitting on a bench beside a grave site, leaning back and sunning herself. Out of the corner of one eye, she caught the approach of another woman. She sat up and stared at the intruder, who stopped and looked down at her. Margaret began to laugh.\n\n\"My God, Jacob,\" she finally gasped. \"That's the most ingenious disguise you've ever created.\"\n\nCromwell smiled. \"I thought you'd approve.\"\n\n\"A good thing you're short, thin, and wiry.\"\n\n\"I don't know why I never thought of it before.\" He awkwardly bunched up his buckskin skirt and sat down on the bench next to Margaret. \"Tell me, sister dear, what have you learned since you've been here?\"\n\nMargaret told him how she became friendly with the sheriff and his wife. She handed him a sketch she'd made of the Telluride First National Bank's interior and a description of the employees. Her report included the arrival of the payroll shipment from the bank in Denver and the counting today before it was sent to the mines tomorrow.\n\nCromwell looked at his watch. \"We have one more hour before the bank closes. The best time to remove the currency and leave town.\"\n\n\"I spotted a man hanging around the railroad depot. I couldn't tell for sure, but I suspect he might have been a Van Dorn agent who was on the lookout for you.\"\n\nCromwell looked thoughtful. \"Even if Van Dorn sends agents to watch train arrivals and departures during payroll shipments, they're only chasing a phantom. No way they could know where I'll strike next.\"\n\n\"If they're wise to your boxcar, it's a good thing you had it repainted.\" She looked at him quizzically. \"Just how do you expect us to make a clean escape after you rob the bank?\"\n\nCromwell grinned wolfishly. \"Who would suspect a pair of clean-cut, attractive ladies riding slowly out of town in a horse and buggy?\"\n\nShe placed her arm around his shoulders. \"The simplest plan is the best plan. You are brilliant, brother. You never cease to amaze me.\"\n\n\"I appreciate the compliment,\" he said, rising to his feet. \"We don't have much time. The payroll awaits.\"\n\n\"What would you like me to do?\"\n\n\"Go to the stable and pick up my horse and buggy. I told the stable owner my sister would come by to get the rig. Then wait at the back door of the bank.\"\n\nWHILE IRVINE watched the train station and town railyard, Bell and Curtis manned the Telluride Bank. Sitting in Murray Oxnard's office, Bell began to think he had bet on the wrong horse. There were only ten minutes left before closing time and no sign of the bandit. Playing the role of a teller, Irvine was getting ready to close out his cashbox in anticipation of waiting on the last customer.\n\nBell glanced down at the .45 Colt automatic he'd kept in an open desk drawer and regretted that he would not get to use it on the Butcher Bandit. Blowing the scum's head off was too good for him, Bell mused. Not after he had murdered so many unsuspecting people. His death would save the taxpayers the expense of a trial. Now Bell was faced with admitting defeat and starting over again with the meager clues he and his agents had ferreted out.\n\nIrvine walked over to the office door and leaned his shoulder against the frame. \"I can't deny it was a good try,\" he said with a tightness in his voice.\n\n\"It looks as if the bandit failed to take the bait,\" Bell said slowly.\n\n\"Perhaps he didn't read the article in the paper because he doesn't live in San Francisco.\"\n\n\"It's beginning to look that way.\"\n\nJust then the door opened and a woman wearing a buckskin skirt walked into the bank, her hat pulled low so it covered her eyes. Bell gazed past Irvine but relaxed at seeing what appeared to be a well-dressed woman. He nodded to Irvine, who walked back to his teller's cage and said, \"How may I help you, ma'am?\"\n\nCromwell lifted his head slightly so he could look into Irvine's face. Then with a pang of alarm he stiffened as he instantly remembered the Van Dorn agent as one of the men who were sitting with Bell and Bronson in the Bohemian Club dining room only days earlier. He did not answer Irvine for fear his voice would give him away to the agent. Cromwell became charged with tension as he realized this was a trap. There came a pause as he lowered his head, his mind racing with alternatives. His advantage was that the agent did not recognize him, not dressed as a woman, and was not alert to the fact that the bandit was less than four feet away on the other side of the counter.\n\nHe could shoot the agent and take what money was in the safe or he could simply turn around and walk out of the bank. He chose the latter option and was about to beat a hasty retreat when Bell stepped from the office. Cromwell immediately recognized Bell. For the first time in his criminal career, he felt the spur of panic.\n\n\"How may I help you, ma'am?\" Irvine repeated, vaguely wondering why the woman did not answer him the first time.\n\nAlready, Bell was looking at him with a questioning expression on his face, as if the female customer looked familiar. Bell was a master of identification and had a photographic memory when it came to faces. His eyes betrayed the fact that he was trying to recall where he'd seen her. Then his eyes dropped to Cromwell's hands, which were covered by leather gloves. Abruptly, as if he had seen an apparition, he realized that he was staring at the bandit. It struck him like a hammer blow to the head. Bell's eyes flared open and he gasped: \"You!\"\n\nCromwell did not waste another second. He reached into his large cloth purse and jerked out his .38 Colt, which had a heavy cloth taped around the muzzle. Without the slightest hesitation, he pointed the Colt at Irvine's chest and pulled the trigger. A loud thump reverberated in the bank's lobby. Then he swung the muzzle around and shot at Bell even before Irvine hit the floor like a rag doll.\n\nIf Bell hadn't instinctively whirled around and thrown his body over the top of the desk, crashing to the floor behind it, the bullet would have caught him square in the stomach. The violent thrust saved him, but the bullet still plowed through the fleshy part of his thigh. He hardly felt the piercing blow. In a single movement, he reached up and snatched his Colt from the desk drawer. Without the luxury of time, he snapped off a shot at Cromwell that missed the neck of the bandit by less than half an inch.\n\nThen, faster than lightning could strike, both men fired again, the shots coming so closely together they sounded as one.\n\nCromwell's second bullet gouged a small trench across the side of Bell's head, barely piercing the skin but creasing the skull. Bell's vision became a blurred mist and he fell into the black pit of unconsciousness. Blood quickly seeped from the wound and covered the side of his head. It had not been a decisive wound, but to Cromwell, who was still standing, it looked as if he had shot off half of Bell's head.\n\nThe bandit did not come out of the gun battle unscathed. Bell's bullet had caught Cromwell in the waist but had passed through without striking any internal organs. He swayed, and only by reaching out and grasping the edge of the teller's cage did he prevent himself from falling to the floor. He stood there for a few moments, fighting the pain. Then he turned and unlocked the rear door, standing aside as Margaret burst in.\n\n\"I heard shots outside,\" she shouted shock. \"What went wrong?\"\n\n\"It was a trap,\" he murmured as anger replaced fear. Holding a hand over his wound, he motioned the muzzle of his Colt toward the office floor. \"I killed Isaac Bell.\"\n\nMargaret stepped into the office and looked down at the bloodied Van Dorn agent and a look of horror came into her eyes as she recognized Bell despite the blood covering much of his face. \"Oh, my God!\" She felt as if she was going to be sick, but the nausea quickly passed when she turned and saw that her brother was also bleeding. \"You're hurt!\" she gasped.\n\n\"Not as bad as it looks,\" he said through clenched teeth.\n\n\"We've got to get out of here. The shots will bring the sheriff and rouse half the town.\"\n\nMargaret half carried, half dragged her wounded brother through the rear door of the bank. Outside, the horse and buggy were waiting. She used all her strength to push him onto the seat of the rig, untied the horse from the fence post, and climbed aboard.\n\nShe raised the whip to urge the horse to a gallop, but he grabbed her wrist. \"No, go slowly, as if we're two women out for a buggy ride. It will look suspicious if we charge out of town.\"\n\n\"The sheriff is a smart man. I know him. He won't fool easily.\"\n\n\"Even a smart man won't suspect a woman of robbing a bank and killing two men,\" muttered Cromwell.\n\nAt the end of the alley, Margaret turned the buggy up a side street and then headed west toward the town limits. Cromwell took off the wolfskin coat and draped it over his lap to cover the blood that soaked his sweater. He slipped the Colt into one of his cowboy boots and sat back, trying to keep his mind clear by ignoring the throbbing pain in his side.\n\nBELL HAD instructed Sheriff Pardee that he would fire a shot as a signal if the bandit made his appearance. But Pardee knew there was trouble when he heard five shots, some of them muffled like the distant dynamite charge in a nearby mine. He rushed into the street from a hardware store where he had been hiding, fearful that the woman he'd seen walk into the bank might have been shot by the bandit.\n\nSeeing him running toward the bank, four of his deputies leaped from their hiding places and rushed after him, while a fifth deputy ran to the railroad depot to alert Curtis. With his single-action Smith & Wesson drawn and the hammer pulled back, Pardee burst through the door of the bank. At first, he didn't see anyone. Irvine was lying out of sight, behind the teller's cage, and Bell was down on the other side of the desk. Then he came around the cage, saw the Van Dorn agent sprawled on the floor in a pool of blood. He checked to make sure Irvine was dead before he entered the office and found Bell.\n\n\"Is he a goner?\" asked one of his deputies, a great bear of a man with a huge stomach bulging over pants with suspenders stretched to their limits, who stood poised with a sawed-off shotgun at the ready.\n\n\"The bullet only creased his skull,\" answered Pardee. \"He's still alive.\"\n\n\"What about the woman?\"\n\nPardee's mind did not register for a moment. Then it hit him. \"The woman who came into the bank before the gunshots?\"\n\n\"That one.\"\n\n\"She must have been abducted by the bandit.\"\n\n\"But we saw no one else enter the bank before or after her.\"\n\nPardee stood up in confusion and disbelief. It took all his imagination to believe a woman was the Butcher Bandit.\n\n\"The bandit must have entered through the back door.\"\n\n\"I don't know, Sheriff,\" said the deputy, scratching his chin. \"The door should have been locked from the inside, like it always is.\"\n\nPardee rushed over to the rear door and found it unlocked. He jerked it open and peered up and down the alley but saw no one. \"Hell's fire,\" he muttered. \"She got away.\"\n\n\"She can't get far,\" said the deputy.\n\n\"Round up the men!\" snapped Pardee. He motioned to another deputy, who was standing at the entrance of the bank. \"Get Doc Madison. Tell him the Van Dorn agent is down with a head wound and to get over to the bank double-quick.\" Pardee knelt down and quickly examined Bell again. \"Also tell him there looks like there's a bullet in the agent's leg.\"\n\nThe deputy was no sooner out the door than Pardee was on his heels, running toward his horse tied to the hitching post in front of his office. It didn't seem possible, he thought, that everything had gone so terribly wrong. Only then did it begin to strike him that the bandit was a man disguised as a woman and that the poor widow he and his wife had taken in was an accomplice.\n\nAS SOON as they left the city limits of Telluride and passed the road leading to the mines of Ophir to the south, Margaret gave the horse the whip and urged it to run through the canyon and down the road heading west toward Montrose. During the ten minutes since they left the bank, Cromwell had time to think. He pointed to a break in the trees that led to a bridge over the San Miguel River. It was an overgrown access road used by the railroad for maintenance crews repairing the track.\n\n\"Get off the road,\" Jacob said to Margaret. \"Go over the bridge and head down the track bed.\"\n\nShe turned and looked at him. \"I thought you said they'd never be suspicious of two women in a buggy?\"\n\n\"That was before it occurred to me that the sheriff and his deputies were watching the bank.\"\n\n\"That goes without saying, but what does it have to do with our escape?\"\n\n\"Don't you see, dear sister? I was the last one to enter the bank and never came out. If what you say is true, Pardee is no fool. He must have put two and two together by now and is looking for both of us. But he'll never think to search for us riding over the track bed. He'll be certain we took the road.\"\n\n\"And if he doesn't find us, what do you think he'll do then?\"\n\n\"He'll backtrack, thinking that we hid out in the trees while he and his posse rode past. By then, we'll be on a train out of Montrose, dressed as two men.\"\n\nAs usual, Cromwell was miles ahead of his pursuers when it came to matching wits. Though he was disheartened that Bell had out-smarted him in laying a well-conceived trap, he gained a certain amount of satisfaction believing he had killed the famous Van Dorn agent.\n\nJust as he had predicted, the sheriff and his posse charged down the road that was out of sight of the railroad tracks in the trees and, not finding any sign of their quarry, had doubled back toward Telluride. It was a bumpy ride over the railroad ties, but it was compensated for by knowing that Pardee had been hoodwinked and would end up empty-handed.\n\n## 27\n\nBELL WAS CARRIED TO THE TELLURIDE HOSPITAL, where he was treated by the town doctor. The first bullet out of Cromwell's Colt had entered and exited his thigh, causing only minor damage to the tissue. The doctor said it would heal within a month. The doctor then stitched the scalp wound, sewing up the crease as neatly as a tailor mending a torn suit pocket.\n\nAfter ignoring the doctor's demands that he remain in the hospital for a few days, Bell limped to the depot to take the next train to Denver. Wearing a hat to cover the bandage around his head, he, along with Curtis, watched with anger and sadness as the coffin containing Irvine was lifted into the baggage car by Sheriff Pardee's deputies. Then he turned and held out his hand to Pardee. \"Sheriff, I can't thank you enough for your cooperation. I'm grateful.\"\n\nPardee shook Bell's hand. \"I'm sorry about your friend,\" he said sincerely. \"Did he have a family?\"\n\n\"Fortunately, no wife or children, but he lived with an aging mother.\"\n\n\"Pour soul. I suppose it's the county poorhouse for her.\"\n\n\"She'll be taken care of in a good nursing home.\"\n\n\"A good nursing home doesn't come cheap. Did Irvine have money?\"\n\n\"No,\" replied Bell, \"but I do.\"\n\nPardee refrained from any more questions. \"If only things had fallen our way.\"\n\n\"Our well-laid plans certainly turned into a fiasco,\" said Bell, seeing the baggage car door close behind the coffin. \"The bandit made me out the fool.\"\n\n\"Not your fault,\" said Pardee. \"He fooled us all, and I was the biggest fool. I'm certain now the destitute widow who my wife and I took in was in cahoots with him. I should have been suspicious when she finagled information out of me about the bank's operations.\"\n\n\"But you didn't tell her there was a trap being set. Cromwell would have never walked into the bank if he suspected a trap.\"\n\nPardee shook his head. \"They bought your story\u2014hook, line, and sinker. If only we had known he was going to wear women's clothing, we might not have thought twice before we shot him down like the dog he is.\"\n\n\"According to reports of his other robberies, he never dressed as a woman.\"\n\n\"Even if the trap turned sour, my posse and I should have apprehended them. Stupidly, I thought they'd stay on the road. It never crossed my mind they would use the railroad track bed as an escape route until it was too late. By the time I figured out how they had outfoxed me, they were long gone.\"\n\n\"Were the train passenger lists checked in Montrose?\"\n\n\"I wired the stationmaster, but they had already left on the train to Grand Junction,\" answered Curtis. \"He didn't remember two women boarding, but he noticed two men. He said that one looked as if he were sick.\"\n\n\"There was blood on the back step of the bank,\" said Pardee with a tight smile. \"You must have plugged him.\"\n\n\"Not seriously enough to stop him,\" Bell muttered quietly.\n\n\"I telegraphed the marshal of the territory. He had deputies in Grand Junction search all the trains going east and west but found no trace of two women traveling together.\"\n\nBell leaned on a cane given to him by Pardee. \"I'm beginning to know how the bandit's mind works. He went back to wearing men's clothes and dressed his sister as a man, too. The marshal, looking for two females, never suspected them.\"\n\n\"A clever man, Cromwell.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" admitted Bell, \"he is that.\"\n\n\"Where do you go from here?\" asked Pardee.\n\n\"Back to Denver and start all over again.\"\n\n\"But now you know the bandit's name and habits.\"\n\n\"Yes, but making a case is impossible. No federal prosecutor would waste time on an indictment with such flimsy evidence.\"\n\n\"You'll nail him,\" Pardee said confidently.\n\n\"We'll work even harder now that we've got a personal reason to see him hung,\" said Bell.\n\nWHEN BELL and Curtis reached Denver late in the evening, a hearse was waiting to take Irvine to the local mortuary.\n\n\"He was my closest friend,\" said Curtis. \"I'll console his mother and take care of the funeral arrangements.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" Bell said. \"I'll take care of the costs.\"\n\nBell took a taxi to the Brown Palace Hotel. Entering his suite, he removed his clothes and relaxed in a tub of hot water, propping his wounded leg on the edge to keep the bandage from getting wet. He closed his eyes and let his mind wander over the events of the past few days. Bell now knew the woman he'd passed in the New Sheridan Hotel was Margaret Cromwell. When her brother entered the bank from the front door, she was waiting in the rear with a horse and buggy. The picture of Cromwell made up as a woman disgusted him, yet he could not help but respect the shrewd, calculating mind of the Butcher Bandit. Avoiding Sheriff Pardee's posse by driving the rig down the railroad track bed was a stroke of genius.\n\nAt first, Bell thought Cromwell would not tempt fate with another robbery. The possibility seemed extremely remote, but, as he had with all the criminals he'd apprehended, Bell began to make inroads inside Cromwell's mind. He trained himself to think like the bandit. The more Bell thought about it, the more he became convinced that Cromwell believed he was invincible and immune to every investigation by law enforcement officers, especially the agents of the Van Dorn Detective Agency.\n\nThe next step would have to be carefully thought out. His mind was considering alternatives to accumulate enough evidence to arrest Cromwell when he heard a knock on his door. Favoring his good leg and suffering a brief bout of dizziness caused by his head wound as he stood, Bell climbed awkwardly out of the tub, put on a robe, and limped to the door. After pulling it open, he was surprised to see Joseph Van Dorn standing in the hallway.\n\nVan Dorn looked up at the bandage around Bell's head, which had seeped a spot of red, and he grinned tightly. \"You're a sorry sight.\"\n\n\"Come in, sir, and make yourself at home.\"\n\nVan Dorn studied his wounded agent. He was concerned, but he made an effort to look nonchalant. \"Is there much pain?\"\n\n\"Nothing aspirin won't cure.\"\n\nVan Dorn stepped into the suite and looked around. \"I like an agent who travels in style when it's not my money.\"\n\n\"Can I call room service and get you something to eat or drink?\"\n\nVan Dorn waved a hand. \"No, thanks, I ate on the train from Chicago just before it arrived in Denver. A glass of port would hit the spot.\"\n\nBell phoned Van Dorn's request to room service and hung up the phone. \"I did not expect the head man to travel over a thousand miles just to see me.\"\n\n\"A meeting between us is not only appropriate but vital to the investigation.\" Van Dorn sank into an overstuffed chair. \"I prefer a detailed report to a few words on a telegram. Now, tell me what happened in Telluride, and leave out nothing.\"\n\n\"Most of what I can tell you went wrong,\" Bell said sourly.\n\n\"Don't blame yourself,\" Van Dorn consoled him. \"I wish I had a dollar for every plan I conceived that turned bad.\"\n\nA waiter brought a glass of port, and then Bell spent the next forty minutes filling Van Dorn in on the scheme to catch the Butcher Bandit and how Cromwell turned the tables on him and Sheriff Pardee. He told of the murder of Irvine and his own wounding, ending up with him waking up in the Telluride Hospital.\n\nWhen Bell finished, Van Dorn asked, \"You're certain Jacob Cromwell is the Butcher Bandit?\"\n\n\"His disguise was the work of genius, and Irvine and I were caught off guard. But there is no doubt in my mind Cromwell was the person I recognized wearing women's clothing at the bank. Both Pardee and I also identified his sister, Margaret, who was staying in town to help him rob the bank.\"\n\nVan Dorn pulled a cigar case from his vest pocket, retrieved a long, thin corona, and lit it with a wooden match he flamed with his thumbnail. \"It makes no sense. If Cromwell is wealthy, owns a bank with assets in the millions, and lives on Nob Hill in San Francisco, what does he gain by risking it all to pull off a string of robberies and murders?\"\n\n\"From what I've been able to put together, the money he stole was used to build his bank's assets.\"\n\n\"But why now, when he is financially secure and his bank well established? Why continue the crime spree?\"\n\nBell gazed through a window at the blue sky above the city. \"The simple answer is, the man is insane. I've put together a profile of him in my mind. I'm certain he robs and kills because he enjoys it. The money is no longer his intent. It has lost its importance. Like a man addicted to whiskey or opium, he is driven to commit mayhem and murder. He believes himself too untouchable by law enforcement. In his mind, he is invincible and considers every criminal act as a challenge to outwit the law.\"\n\n\"You have to admit,\" said Van Dorn, blowing a large blue smoke ring across the room, \"so far, he's done a pretty good job of making us and every peace officer west of the Mississippi look like a bunch of amateurs.\"\n\n\"Cromwell is not flawless. He's human and humans make mistakes. When the time comes, I intend to be there.\"\n\n\"Where do you go from here?\"\n\nBell grimaced. \"I wish everybody would stop asking me that.\"\n\n\"Well?\"\n\nBell's gaze was focused and calm as he stared at Van Dorn. \"It's back to San Francisco to build a case against Cromwell.\"\n\n\"From what you've told me, that won't be easy. You have little evidence to make a case. A defense attorney would crucify you on the witness stand. He'd laugh at your identification of a man dressed like a woman, claiming it was impossible to tell the difference. And, without another witness or any fingerprints, I'd have to say you're fighting a lost cause.\"\n\nBell fixed Van Dorn with an icy stare. \"Are you suggesting I resign from the investigation?\"\n\nVan Dorn scowled. \"I'm not suggesting anything of the sort. I'm only pointing out the facts. You know perfectly well this is the number one priority case within the agency. We won't rest until Cromwell is behind bars.\"\n\nBell tenderly touched the side of his head, as if to feel if the wound were still there. \"As soon as I sew up a few loose ends here in Denver, I'm returning to San Francisco.\"\n\n\"I can arrange a team of agents to assist you. You have but to ask.\"\n\nBell shook his head. \"No. With Carter as my right-hand man, and backed by Bronson and the agents in his office, I'll have all the manpower I'll need. Better we continue to work undercover without an army of agents to cause complications.\"\n\n\"What about Colonel Danzler and the Criminal Investigation Department in Washington? Can the government be of help in this matter?\"\n\n\"Yes, but only at the opportune moment. Cromwell has an incredible amount of influence with the political and wealthy elite in San Francisco. He is the city's leading philanthropist. If we obtain enough evidence to indict him, his friends will circle the wagons and fight us every step of the way. At that time, we'll need all the help from the federal government we can get.\"\n\n\"What is your plan?\"\n\n\"At the moment, I have no set plan. Cromwell is fat, dumb, and happy, not knowing we're getting closer to him with each passing day.\"\n\n\"But you're no closer now to seizing him than you were three weeks ago.\"\n\n\"Yes, but now I have the advantage.\"\n\nVan Dorn's eyebrows raised in curiosity and he muttered skeptically, \"What advantage is that?\"\n\n\"Cromwell doesn't know I'm still alive.\"\n\n\"It will come as a blow to his ego when he sees you've been resurrected.\"\n\nBell smiled faintly. \"I'm counting on it.\"\n\n## 28\n\nCROMWELL'S WOUND FROM B ELL'S BULLET WAS NOT serious. He held off having it tended by a physician until he returned with Margaret to San Francisco, where the entry-and-exit wound in his side was cleaned with antiseptic, stitched, and bandaged. The doctor, an old friend, asked no questions, but Cromwell told him a lie anyway about accidentally shooting himself when cleaning a gun. Because his wife received a generous donation from Cromwell for her pet project, the ballet company of San Francisco, the doctor filed no police report and vowed the incident would never be mentioned.\n\nCromwell returned to his office at the bank and quickly settled into the old routine of managing his financial empire. His first project for the day was to write a speech to give at the opening of a sanitarium for the elderly, funded and built through his generosity. Modesty was not one of his virtues and he named the hospital the Jacob Cromwell Sanitarium. He called in Marion Morgan to transcribe his notes on the speech.\n\nShe sat in a chair beside his desk and gazed at him. \"If you forgive me for asking, Mr. Cromwell, but are you feeling all right? You look a bit pale.\"\n\nHe forced a smile as he instinctively, lightly, touched his side. \"I caught a cold from fishing at night. It's almost gone away.\"\n\nHe handed her his notes, swung around in his leather chair, and stared out the window at the surrounding city. \"Edit my sanitarium speech, and please feel free to make any suggestions you feel are pertinent.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\nMarion rose to leave Cromwell's office but hesitated at the door. \"Excuse me, but I was wondering if you ever heard from the detective from the Van Dorn Agency again?\"\n\nCromwell swung back around from the window and stared at her curiously. \"Isaac Bell?\"\n\n\"I believe that was his name.\"\n\nHe could not help a mild grin as he said, \"He's dead. I heard he was killed during a bank robbery in Colorado.\"\n\nMarion's heart felt as if it was squeezed between two blocks of ice. She could not believe Cromwell's words. Her lips quivered, and she turned away from him so he couldn't see the shock written on her lovely face. Barely maintaining her composure, she said nothing and stepped from the office and closed the door.\n\nMarion sat at her desk as if in a trance. She could not understand the sense of grief over a man she hardly knew, a man with whom she had shared only one dinner. Yet she could see his face in her mind as if he was standing in front of her. The short-lived bond between them had been cruelly cut. She could not explain her feeling of sorrow and she didn't try. She felt as if she had lost a dear friend.\n\nWith trembling hands, she inserted a sheet of paper in her typewriter and began transcribing Cromwell's notes for his speech.\n\nAT FIVE O'CLOCK, late in the afternoon, Cromwell stood on the steps of a new three-story redbrick building on Geary and Fillmore Streets, listening to a long and flowery introduction by city mayor Eugene Schmitz, a close friend of Cromwell's who had benefited from large contributions secretly transferred to his personal account at the Cromwell Bank. A crowd of five hundred people attended the inauguration, along with members of the city's fire and police departments, political bosses, and over fifty elderly patients sitting listlessly in their wheelchairs.\n\nCromwell's own remarks were short and to the point. He modestly referred to himself as a \"humble messenger of the Lord\" who had chosen to help those who could not help themselves. When he finished, the applause was polite and subdued, befitting the formal occasion. A ribbon was cut at the front entrance and Cromwell was heartily congratulated. He shook every hand that was thrust at him. He made a show of embracing all of the patients waiting to enter the building. Mayor Schmitz gave him a bronze plaque for his philanthropic efforts and announced that, henceforth, April 12th would be known as Jacob Cromwell Day.\n\nMaking his way through a throng of well-wishers and admirers, Cromwell reached the parking space that held the Mercedes Simplex. Margaret was already seated behind the wheel, looking lovely in a green wool dress with cape.\n\n\"Well done, brother. Another good deed under the Cromwell banner.\"\n\n\"It never hurts to have friends in high places, as well as the adoration of the foul-smelling rabble.\"\n\n\"Aren't we the humanitarian?\" she said sarcastically.\n\n\"What about your benevolent pet projects that somehow get publicized in the society pages of the newspapers?\" he retorted.\n\n\"Touch\u00e9.\"\n\nCromwell moved to the front of the car and cranked the engine. Margaret retarded the spark and set the hand throttle. The engine caught and coughed into a throaty roar. Cromwell climbed into the seat as Margaret advanced the spark, shifted gears, and advanced the throttle. The Mercedes Simplex bounded out into the street between a cable car and beer truck.\n\nBy now, Cromwell was used to his sister's mad driving antics and relaxed in the seat, but was prepared to jump should a disaster rear up its head. \"Drive up to Pacific Heights and stop at Lafayette Park.\"\n\n\"Any particular reason?\"\n\n\"We can walk the paths while we talk.\"\n\nShe didn't question him further. The Mercedes Simplex easily cruised up the hill to Pacific Heights. She turned off Fillmore Street and took Sacramento Street until she reached the park, then stopped at the foot of a path leading into the trees. A five-minute walk took them to the summit of the park, which presented them with a beautiful panoramic view of the city.\n\n\"What do you wish to talk about?\" Margaret asked.\n\n\"I've decided to undertake another robbery.\"\n\nShe stopped in midstride and stared at him in distress. \"You must be joking.\"\n\n\"I'm dead serious.\"\n\n\"But why?\" she demanded. \"What have you to gain? You almost got caught in Telluride. Why tempt fate again for no purpose?\"\n\n\"Because I like a challenge. Besides, I rather enjoy being a legend in my own time.\"\n\nShe turned and looked away stunned. \"That's stupid.\"\n\n\"You don't understand,\" he said, putting his arm around her waist.\n\n\"I understand that it's crazy, and that someday your luck will run out and they'll hang you.\"\n\n\"Not for a while, at any rate,\" he said. \"Not while their best agent lies in his grave.\"\n\nMargaret remembered the incredible blue-purple eyes and Bell's arm around her as they danced at the Brown Palace. She seemed to hear her voice from far away. \"Bell dead, it's hard to believe.\"\n\nHe looked at her curiously. \"You sound like you had a crush on him.\"\n\nShe shrugged and tried to look uninterested. \"Oh, he was nice-looking, in a strange sort of way. I imagine other women found him attractive.\"\n\n\"No matter. Isaac Bell is history.\" Cromwell stopped and began leading his sister back to the automobile. \"I'm going to fool Van Dorn and all the other stupid peace officers who want me hung. They'll never suspect I'd commit another crime so quickly, at a bank in a town they'd never suspect. Once again, they'll be caught with their pants down.\"\n\nA tear came to her eye and Margaret dabbed a handkerchief at it, not sure if her emotions were twisted by Bell's demise or her brother's madness. \"Where this time?\"\n\n\"Not a mining town payroll,\" he said, grinning. \"I'll throw them a curve and hit a town that doesn't expect me, and leave them frustrated once again.\"\n\n\"What town?\"\n\n\"San Diego, here in California.\"\n\n\"That's almost in our backyard.\"\n\n\"All the better,\" said Cromwell. \"My escape will be that much easier.\"\n\n\"What makes San Diego so special?\"\n\n\"Because the city's Wells Fargo is fat with deposits, from merchants and from ships importing goods into the port. And because I'd love to poke a hole in my biggest competitor.\"\n\n\"You're crazy.\"\n\n\"Do not call me crazy!\" he said harshly.\n\n\"What do you call yourself? Everything we've worked for could come crashing down around us if you're ever caught.\"\n\n\"Not so long as they're dealing with a mastermind,\" Cromwell said brashly.\n\n\"When will you ever stop?\" Margaret demanded.\n\n\"When the Cromwell Bank is as big as the Wells Fargo Bank and I am crowned king of San Francisco,\" he said with a nasty glint in his eyes.\n\nShe knew it was hopeless to argue with her brother. Without his knowledge, she had quietly moved assets, little by little over the years, into the Wells Fargo Bank, where he would never think to trace them. The expensive jewelry she had purchased was put away in a safe-deposit box. If the worst came to pass and her brother was caught and hung, she would leave San Francisco, go to Europe, and live a life of luxury before finding a rich and titled husband.\n\nThey reached the automobile and Jacob helped his sister into the driver's seat. As he cranked the engine to life, Cromwell's self-confidence was overwhelming. Like a ship sailing into a heavy sea with all sails set, danger became a challenge that bordered on addiction. At the thought of outwitting every law enforcement officer in the West once again, his face beamed like that of a religious fanatic who had just witnessed a miracle.\n\nNeither of them paid any attention to a man sitting on a bench near the car dressed like a worker, with a toolbox perched in his lap, casually smoking a pipe.\n\n## 29\n\nBELL'S TRAIN GOT HIM INTO SAN FRANCISCO AT EIGHT o'clock in the morning. By nine, he was meeting with Carter, Bronson, and five of his agents. Everyone was seated around a large conference table that was twice as large as the one in the office in Denver. Bell was dead tired, and his wounds still gave him trouble, but he ignored the pain, as he had with earlier injuries, and soldiered on. \"Gentlemen,\" he began, \"now that our number one suspect for the Butcher Bandit is Jacob Cromwell, we are going to put him and his sister, Margaret, under twenty-four-hour surveillance.\"\n\n\"That means their every movement outside their palace on Nob Hill,\" added Bronson.\n\nOne agent held up a hand. \"Sir, we'll need photos for identification, since most of us have no idea of what they look like.\"\n\nBronson picked up a bulky file on the table. \"Photographs of them were taken while they were out and about town.\"\n\n\"Who took them?\" asked Bell.\n\nBronson smiled and nodded at one of his agents across the table. \"Dick Crawford here is an ace photographer.\"\n\n\"Didn't the Cromwells get suspicious about a photographer following them around, shooting their picture?\" asked Carter.\n\nBronson nodded at Crawford. \"Dick, tell everyone how you pulled it off without them getting wise.\"\n\nCrawford had a narrow saturnine face with a small jaw and bushy eyebrows beneath a bald head. A serious man, he did not show any humorous disposition. \"I wore coveralls and carried a toolbox with a small hole cut out in one end for the camera lens. All I had to do was reach into the box to adjust the focus and shoot their picture. They didn't have a clue and never so much as gave me a glance.\" He then set a small camera on the table and explained its application. \"What you see is a Kodak Quick Focus box camera that takes postcard-sized images.\"\n\nAs Crawford talked, Bronson passed out photos of Jacob and Margaret Cromwell.\n\n\"You will note that the photos are remarkably sharp and distinct,\" Crawford continued. \"The unique feature of the camera is that, unlike other cameras with a set focus, I could set the distance using the small wheel you see on the side. Then all I had to do was press a button and the front of the lens would pop out to the correct distance for exposure.\"\n\nEveryone studied the photos. They showed the Cromwells, individually or together, walking down the street, coming out of stores and restaurants. Several photos were of Jacob Cromwell entering and exiting his bank. Two showed him speaking at the opening of his sanitarium for the elderly. Crawford even followed them to Lafayette Park and shot them walking along a path. Bell was particularly interested in the pictures showing Margaret behind the wheel of an exotic-looking car.\n\n\"A Mercedes Simplex,\" he said admiringly. \"The Cromwells have good taste in automobiles.\"\n\nBronson examined the photos showing the car. \"It looks expensive. How fast will it go?\"\n\n\"At least seventy, maybe eighty, miles an hour,\" replied Bell.\n\n\"I doubt if there is a car in San Francisco that could catch it in a chase,\" said a bushy-haired agent at the end of the table.\n\n\"There is now,\" Bell said, his lips spread in a grin. \"It was unloaded from a freight car this morning.\" He looked at Curtis. \"Am I correct, Arthur?\"\n\nCurtis nodded. \"Your automobile is sitting in the Southern Pacific freight warehouse. I hired a boy who works in the railyard to clean it up.\"\n\n\"You sent a car here from...\"\n\n\"Chicago,\" Bell finished.\n\n\"I'm curious,\" said Bronson. \"What automobile is so special that you'd have it shipped all the way from Chicago?\"\n\n\"A fast motorcar can come in handy. Besides, as it turns out, it's more than a match for Cromwell's Mercedes Simplex, should it come to a pursuit.\"\n\n\"What make is it?\" asked Crawford.\n\n\"A Locomobile,\" answered Bell. \"It was driven by Joe Tracy, who drove it to third place in the 1905 Vanderbilt Cup road race on Long Island.\"\n\n\"How fast is it?\" inquired Bronson.\n\n\"She'll get up to a hundred and five miles an hour on a straight stretch.\"\n\nThere came a hushed silence. Everyone around the table was astounded and disbelieving.\n\nThey had never seen or heard of anything that could go so fast. Professional auto races with competing factory cars had not come to the West Coast yet.\n\n\"Incredible,\" said Bronson in awe. \"I can't imagine anything traveling a hundred miles an hour.\"\n\n\"Can you drive it on the street?\" asked Curtis.\n\nBell nodded. \"I had fenders and headlamps installed and the transmission modified for street traffic.\"\n\n\"You've got to give me a ride in it,\" said Bronson.\n\nBell laughed. \"I think it can be arranged.\"\n\nBronson turned his interest back to the photos of the Cromwells. \"Any thoughts on what the bandit will do next?\"\n\n\"After Telluride,\" said Curtis, \"I would bet his days of robbery and murder have ended.\"\n\n\"Sounds logical if he knows we're onto him,\" agreed Bronson.\n\n\"We can't be sure of that if he thinks all witnesses to the fiasco in Telluride are dead, including me,\" said Bell. \"He is a crazy man, driven to rob and kill. I don't believe he can ever stop cold. Cromwell believes his criminal acts can never be traced. He simply does not fit the mold of Black Bart, the James Gang, the Daltons, or Butch Cassidy. Compared to Cromwell, they were crude, backwoods amateurs.\"\n\nOne of the agents stared with growing admiration at Bell. \"So you think he will strike again.\"\n\n\"I do.\"\n\n\"You may have suckered him with your story about Telluride,\" said Bronson. \"But if he is as smart as you say he is, Cromwell won't make the same mistake twice and step into another trap.\"\n\nBell shook his head. \"There is little hope of that, I'm afraid. For the moment, all we can do is try to outguess him, and, failing that, we keep gathering evidence until we can convict him.\"\n\n\"At least we know he isn't infallible.\"\n\nBronson grunted. \"He's about as close as you can come.\"\n\nBell poured himself a cup of coffee from a pot sitting on the conference table. \"Our edge is that he doesn't know his every move is being watched. You will have to be very careful and not make him or his sister wary. If we can stay on his tail the next time he leaves town for a robbery, we have a chance of bringing his crime wave to a halt.\"\n\nBronson looked around the table at his agents. \"It looks like we have our job cut out for us, gentlemen. I'll let you work out your surveillance shifts among yourselves. I received a telegram from Mr. Van Dorn. He said to pull out all the stops. He wants the Butcher Bandit caught, whatever the cost, whatever the effort.\"\n\nBell said to Bronson, \"I wonder if you could do me a favor.\"\n\n\"You have but to name it.\"\n\n\"Call Cromwell's office and ask for Marion Morgan. Tell her you're calling in the strictest confidence and she is to say nothing to no one, including her boss. Tell her to meet you at the northeast corner of Montgomery and Sutter Streets, a block from the Cromwell Bank, during her lunch hour.\"\n\n\"And if she asks me the purpose?\"\n\nBell made a crooked smile. \"Just be vague and tell her it's urgent.\"\n\nBronson laughed. \"I'll do my best to sound official.\"\n\nAFTER THE CONFERENCE, Bell and Carter took a cab to the Southern Pacific freight warehouse. They checked in with the superintendent, looked over the car for damage, and, finding none, signed off the necessary transport paperwork.\n\n\"She's a beauty,\" Curtis said admiringly, gazing at the bright red\u2013painted automobile with its gleaming brass radiator topped by a custom-sculpted bronze eagle with wings outspread and a temperature gauge in its chest. Behind the radiator was a barn-roof-cut hood. A big cylindrical gas tank sat mounted behind the two seats. The narrow tires were moored to huge wooden spoked wheels that had sped over the twisting roads of Long Island during the Vanderbilt Cup race.\n\nBell climbed into the seat behind the big steering wheel, mounted on its long shaft, turned the ignition switch on the wooden dashboard, set the throttle lever on the steering wheel, and moved the spark lever to retard. Next, he took a hand pump and pressurized the fuel tank, forcing gas to the carburetor. Only then did he walk to the front of the car, grip the big crank with his right hand, and heave vigorously. The engine coughed and kicked over on the second try, with a thunderous roar from the exhaust pipe.\n\nThen Bell, joined by Carter, sat in the red leather driver's seat and advanced the spark as he eased the throttle to an idle position. After releasing the brass hand brake, he pushed in the clutch and pulled the shift lever into first gear. Next, he moved the throttle lever and released the clutch, having attracted a crowd of warehouse workers who cheered as the rakish car rolled forward.\n\nAs soon as the Locomobile was speeding down a road alongside the railroad tracks, Carter asked loudly, \"Are we headed back to the office?\"\n\nBell shook his head. \"Show me the way to the warehouse where the O'Brian Furniture boxcar was parked.\"\n\n\"Then turn left at the next crossing over the tracks,\" directed Carter.\n\nA few minutes later, Bell parked the Locomobile behind the empty warehouse and turned off the big engine. With Carter leading the way, they walked up a ramp to the loading dock. A single freight car sat on the siding.\n\n\"Is this where you found Cromwell's phony furniture freight car?\" asked Bell.\n\n\"According to the Southern Pacific's freight-movement schedule,\" said Curtis. \"I ran a check of company freight car movements. Car 16173 is no longer listed on Southern Pacific freight records. No one knows what happened to it. It's as if it vanished overnight.\"\n\nBell studied the sides of the car parked alongside the loading dock. \"It could have been repainted and given a new serial number.\"\n\n\"It's entirely possible.\" Curtis stared at the number and then nodded. \"Car 16455. I'll check it out.\"\n\n\"This car has had a new paint job recently,\" said Bell slowly. \"There isn't a scratch on it.\"\n\n\"You're right,\" Curtis murmured thoughtfully. \"It's as clean as the day it came out of the factory.\"\n\nBell walked up to the boxcar's loading door and placed his fingers around a bronze lock that sealed the interior from entry. \"Why would an empty car on a siding be locked up?\"\n\n\"Maybe it's been loaded with cargo and is waiting to be coupled to a train.\"\n\n\"I wish I knew what was inside,\" Bell mused.\n\n\"Shall we break it open?\" Curtis inquired with a growing sense of anticipation.\n\nBell made a slight shake of his head. \"Better we leave well enough alone for the time being. Until we check out the serial number, we won't know the history of this car. And should it belong to Cromwell, he'll know if we tampered with the lock.\"\n\n\"If we proved this is the freight car he used to escape his criminal acts, we can arrest him.\"\n\n\"Nothing is that simple. It might simply be an empty car that was shunted to this siding temporarily. Cromwell's no fool. He wouldn't leave evidence lying around just waiting to be found. Chances are, there is nothing incriminating inside, certainly not enough to stand him under the hangman's noose.\"\n\nCurtis shrugged in understanding. \"We'll keep a sharp eye on it, but I doubt if he'll be using it anytime soon, if ever again, considering how he came within a hair of being caught in Telluride.\"\n\n\"And, sooner or later, he'll learn I'm still alive and know I identified him,\" Bell said with a wide grin. \"Then he'll really make things interesting.\"\n\nMARION PUT down the phone and looked toward the doorway leading to Cromwell's office. As usual, it was closed. He almost always worked in private, handling his day-to-day business over the telephone or a speaker system he had installed around the bank.\n\nShe glanced up at a big Seth Thomas Regulator wall clock, with its enclosed pendulum swinging back and forth. The hands were pointing at Arabic numerals that read three minutes to twelve. When she put down the phone after listening to Bronson's instructions, she was torn between her loyalty to Cromwell\u2014and whether she should tell him about the call\u2014and the building sense of excitement that coursed through her body at the thought of performing an act of secrecy. Because a distinct rift had built between her and Cromwell over the past year, especially since that night in the Barbary Coast when he and Margaret had acted so strangely, she felt less loyalty and respect toward him. He was not the same man she had come to trust for so many years. He had become distant and aloof, cold and rude toward her much of the time.\n\nThe minute hand clicked over the hour hand, both pointing to twelve, when she took her purse, put on her hat, and stepped out of the office, all the while keeping an eye on the closed doorway to Cromwell's office. She bypassed the elevator and flew down the stairway to the lobby. Passing through the big entrance doors, she turned and hurried down Sutter Street to Montgomery. The streets and side-walks were busy during the lunch hour and it took her a good ten minutes to skirt the crowds. Reaching the corner, she stood there, looking around, but found no one looking in her direction or coming toward her. She had never met Bronson and had no idea what he looked like.\n\nAfter a minute, her attention, and that of many people passing along the street, was drawn to a big red car that moved effortlessly through traffic. There was a brute strength about its appearance that made it look as if it were hurtling over the pavement, even though it was moving no more than twenty miles an hour. Its bright red paint had been hand rubbed to a glistening finish. Everything about it portrayed a powerful elegance.\n\nWith her attention focused on the car, she did not notice the man behind the wheel until it came to a stop in front of her and he said, \"Please climb in, Marion.\"\n\nShe paled, one hand flying up and holding her throat, startled to find herself gazing into the violet eyes of Isaac Bell that seemed to draw her into his soul. \"Isaac,\" she murmured in shock. \"Jacob told me you were dead.\"\n\nHe held out his hand, grasped hers, and pulled her up onto the leather passenger seat with an ease and strength that stunned her. \"It just goes to show, you can't believe all you hear.\"\n\nOblivious to the crowd that had gathered around the car, Bell circled his arm around Marion's waist. Then he took her in his arms and kissed her.\n\n\"Isaac!\" she gasped when he released her. Her protest was one more of enjoyment than embarrassment. \"Not in front of all these people.\"\n\nBy now, the crowd that had assembled to stare at the car found themselves being entertained by the man and woman in the front seats. They began to applaud and cheer them on.\n\nBell pulled back and smiled wickedly. \"I was never able to resist a beautiful lady.\"\n\nMarion was almost swept away by the moment\u2014almost but not quite. \"Can we please move away?\" she insisted.\n\nBell laughed, tipped his hat to the people cheering him on, and shifted the Locomobile into first gear. He stepped lightly on the gas pedal and moved into the street amid the flow of traffic. He drove north on Montgomery before turning left into Chinatown. He swung into an alley and came to a stop behind a large Mandarin-style restaurant, painted red and gold and with a pagoda roof. An attendant waiting there bowed.\n\n\"I will watch your car, sir.\"\n\nBell gave him a tip that made the attendant's eyes pop. \"I'm counting on you.\" Then he helped Marion from her seat to the ground.\n\n\"The Empress of Shanghai,\" she said, staring at the ornate entrance. \"I've always wanted to eat here.\"\n\n\"It came highly recommended.\"\n\n\"I wondered how you knew about the rear parking.\"\n\nAfter they entered a long hallway, they were greeted by a beautiful woman with long shiny black hair wearing a Chinese sheath silk dress slit high on the sides. She led them upstairs to a small private dining room and seated them. While they were studying the menu, a pot of tea arrived and was poured.\n\n\"You were limping,\" she said.\n\n\"A little memento of Telluride, Colorado.\"\n\nFor the first time, she noticed the bandage on his head as he removed his hat. She frowned and raised her eyebrows. \"Another memento?\"\n\nHe nodded and smiled gamely.\n\nMarion looked into Bell's eyes and her own eyes became misty. \"You don't know how happy I am that you weren't killed.\"\n\n\"Your boss certainly tried.\"\n\n\"Mr. Cromwell!\" she exclaimed as her mood altered from compassion to alarm. \"I don't understand.\"\n\n\"He's the man who shot me and killed a Van Dorn agent who was my friend.\"\n\n\"You can't be serious.\"\n\n\"Like it or not, Jacob Cromwell is the Butcher Bandit who has held up over twenty banks in the past twelve years and killed nearly forty innocent people.\"\n\n\"That's crazy!\" Marion bit her lower lip. She looked as if she was lost and had nowhere to turn. \"He couldn't have done what you say.\"\n\n\"What I said is true,\" Bell said with a sudden gentleness. \"We have evidence. Maybe not enough to convict, but it falls at Cromwell's doorstep.\"\n\n\"But he's helped so many people in need,\" she protested.\n\n\"A front,\" said Bell icily. \"He's built a wall around his empire, guarded by an army of good citizens who believe he and Margaret are generous people who want to help the poor out of the goodness of their hearts. It's an act. Cromwell could care less about those who are destitute. He uses them to promote his own purposes. In the eyes of the city's crooked politicians, he can do no wrong so long as he supports them with secret donations.\"\n\nConfused, Marion sipped at her tea, her hand noticeably trembling. \"I simply refuse to believe it,\" she murmured.\n\nBell reached across the table and took both her hands in his. \"Believe me, Marion, it's true. I looked into his eyes and recognized him the instant he shot me at the bank in Telluride.\"\n\nShe pulled her hands back and clasped them together tightly. \"Oh, Isaac, it's all too fantastic. Why would Jacob rob banks when he already owns the second-largest bank in San Francisco? The thought is too absurd to be real.\"\n\n\"I can't give you an answer, Marion. In the beginning, he took the money to build his own bank. But when he became rich, the robbery and killings became an obsession. I've seen many cases like Cromwell's. The robberies and the murders are like a narcotic for him. He can't help himself, and will go on killing until I stop him.\"\n\nShe looked up into his sensitive violet eyes across the table. They had turned dark and cold. \"You, Isaac? Does it have to be you?\"\n\n\"I can't let him go on murdering people.\" Bell spoke the words in a monotone, as if he were reading an accusation in a courtroom. \"I am not going to let him thumb his nose at the law and continue to run around free, living the life of a wealthy Santa Claus.\" Then he added, \"And that goes for his sister, Margaret. She's buried in his evil operations up to her pretty neck.\"\n\nMarion dipped her head in utter confusion as her hat covered her eyes. \"I've known Jacob and Margaret for years and yet I didn't know them.\"\n\n\"It's hard,\" Bell said softly, \"but you'll have to accept it.\"\n\nShe tilted her head back and the forward brim of her wide flowered hat rose until he could look directly into her coral\u2013sea green eyes. \"What can I do?\" she asked softly.\n\n\"For one thing, you must go on as if you know nothing. Continue your duties as his loyal secretary. Our agents will have both brother and sister under constant surveillance. All you have to do is report anything suspicious or unusual regarding Jacob's actions.\"\n\n\"You mean, of course, report to you.\"\n\nHe nodded. \"Yes.\"\n\nShe suddenly had the feeling she was being used, that Bell's interest in her was purely as an informer. She turned away so he couldn't see the tears welling up in her eyes.\n\nBell immediately sensed what was whirling in her mind. He moved his chair around the table until he was sitting close enough to put his arm around her shoulders. \"I know what you're thinking, Marion, and it's not true. I know I am asking you to commit a devious act, but lives hang in the balance. Yet there is much more. It goes far beyond a request for your help.\" He paused to build up his courage. \"I'm in love with you, Marion. I can't explain why it happened so suddenly, but it did. You must believe me.\"\n\nMarion looked into his face and saw only affection and fondness. Her fears vanished in an instant as she leaned forward and kissed him solidly on the lips. When she pulled back, she smiled wickedly. \"You must think I'm a brazen hussy.\"\n\nHe laughed at seeing her blush. \"Not at all. I enjoyed it.\"\n\nThen her eyes turned soft. \"I have to admit I felt something when I looked up and saw you standing there in the office.\"\n\nThis time, he kissed her.\n\nAfter a long moment, he pulled back and grinned. \"Perhaps we should order before they ask us to leave for disorderly conduct.\"\n\n## 30\n\nAS SOON AS MARION RETURNED FROM HER LUNCH WITH Bell and was in the midst of typing a letter, Cromwell called her into his office. She concealed her nervousness by not looking him in the face as he spoke. \"Marion, I'm going to attend the National Conference for Community Banks. It is being held in Los Angeles this year on March twenty-eighth to March thirtieth. Could you please make the necessary travel arrangements, and book me a room at the Fremont Hotel downtown?\"\n\n\"To be in Los Angeles by the twenty-eighth, you'd have to leave tomorrow,\" said Marion. \"That's awfully short notice.\"\n\n\"I know,\" Cromwell said with an offhand shrug. \"I wasn't going to attend, but I changed my mind.\"\n\n\"Will you wish to charter a private car?\"\n\n\"No. I'll leave private cars to the presidents of the Crocker and Wells Fargo banks. When I go on bank business, I'll travel as a simple passenger so my depositors will know I have their best interest at heart and am not squandering their money.\"\n\nMarion rose to her feet with a rustle of her skirts. \"I'll see to it.\"\n\nAs soon as she returned to her desk, she picked up her telephone and in a low voice, nearly that of a whisper, asked the operator for the Van Dorn Detective Agency. When Marion gave the receptionist her name, she was immediately put through to Bell.\n\n\"Isaac?\"\n\n\"Marion? I was just going to call and ask you out for dinner and a play.\"\n\nShe felt pleased that he was happy to hear her voice. \"I have some information for you,\" she said seriously. \"Jacob is going out of town.\"\n\n\"Do you know where?\"\n\n\"Los Angeles,\" she answered. \"He's going to attend the National Conference for Community Banks. It's a forum for bankers, to exchange the latest in banking operations.\"\n\n\"When does it take place?\"\n\n\"The twenty-eighth to the thirtieth of this month.\"\n\nBell thought a moment. \"He'd have to be on a train tomorrow if he was going to make Los Angeles by the twenty-eighth.\"\n\n\"Yes, that's right,\" said Marion. \"As soon as I ring off, I have to make his reservations. He's traveling in a coach, as an ordinary passenger.\"\n\n\"Not like your boss to save a buck.\"\n\n\"He claimed it would impress Cromwell depositors by not squandering the bank's assets.\"\n\n\"What do you think, Marion? Is this trip legitimate?\"\n\nShe did not hesitate in answering. \"I do know there really is a National Conference for Community Banks on those dates in the City of Angels.\"\n\n\"I'll see that one of our agents is with him all the way.\"\n\n\"I feel soiled going behind his back,\" she said remorsefully.\n\n\"Do not regret it, sweetheart,\" Bell replied tenderly. \"Jacob Cromwell is an evil man.\"\n\n\"What time should I expect you?\" Marion asked, happy to get off the subject of Cromwell.\n\n\"I'll pick you up at six so we can have an early dinner before making the play.\"\n\n\"Are we going in your red racer?\"\n\n\"Do you mind?\"\n\n\"No, I enjoy the exhilaration of speed.\"\n\nHe laughed. \"I knew there was something about you that attracted me.\"\n\nMarion hung up the phone, surprised to find her heart beating at a rapid rate.\n\nON GUT INSTINCT, and the knowledge that Bell and his agent Irvine had been nosing around before he killed them, Cromwell made elaborate plans to cover his tracks even more thoroughly. He was certain that with the loss of two of his agents, Van Dorn would add fuel to the investigation by probing ever deeper into every lead. He could expect more agents to come around asking more questions about the stolen money that had been dispersed through merchants and other banks around the city.\n\nJust to be on the safe side, Cromwell called the chief dispatcher of the Southern Pacific and informed him that he was sending in a written request to move his disguised freight car, now serial number 16455, sitting at the abandoned warehouse, to a new location across the bay in Oakland. Within minutes, the order was received by the yardmaster, who sent a switch engine that was coupled to the car and pulled it onto a boxcar ferry.\n\nCromwell also ordered a special train, a private Pullman car pulled by an engine and tender; destination: San Diego. The order went through the O'Brian Furniture Company of Denver, which had a long-standing account and was a respected customer of the Southern Pacific Railroad Company.\n\nOnly then did he sit back in his chair, light an expensive cigar, and relax, totally self-assured that he was once again ten steps ahead of any remote suspicion that might be held by Van Dorn or any other law enforcement agency.\n\nHe would have been even more smug if he had known that before Bronson could send an agent to keep an eye out for anyone approaching the freight car, it had been switched onto the ferry and transported to a siding in the Southern Pacific railyard in Oakland.\n\n## 31\n\nEARLY THE NEXT MORNING, CROMWELL BID MARGARET good-bye and stepped into his Rolls-Royce limousine. Abner smoothly steered the car through the city traffic to the Southern Pacific passenger station for trains running directly north or south that did not have to cross the bay. Stopping at the station entrance, he opened the car door and handed Cromwell a valise.\n\nAs the Rolls pulled away from the curb, Cromwell casually walked into the station, showed his ticket to the gatekeeper, and joined the other passengers moving along the platform. He climbed the steps to the third coach and boarded the train.\n\nA Van Dorn agent watched him board and then loitered until the train began to move, making sure that Cromwell did not step back on the platform, in case he had missed the train. Only then did the agent swing aboard the last car and begin walking through the passenger cars until he reached the one Cromwell had entered. To his amazement, Cromwell was nowhere to be seen. Alarmed, the agent rushed through the remaining cars, searching until he reached the locked door to the baggage car. Still no Cromwell. Then he hurried to the back of the train, entertaining the possibility that he had missed the banker, but Cromwell was still nowhere to be found.\n\nUnseen, Cromwell had departed the passenger car by the opposite door and stepped down and crossed the tracks to another platform, where the special train he had chartered was waiting. He climbed aboard his private car, where he relaxed in the luxury and glamour of what was a veritable yacht on wheels. He removed his coat, sat back casually in an overstuffed velvet chair, and opened the morning paper. A steward served him breakfast that had been specially prepared by the car's private chef. He was leisurely reading the San Francisco Chronicle when the train pulled away from the station and onto the main track for the run to Los Angeles, just fifteen minutes behind the regularly scheduled passenger train on which Marion had booked him a seat.\n\n\"NO WORD from my agent, so I can safely assume Cromwell is on his way to Los Angeles,\" said Bronson.\n\nBell looked up from a map depicting San Francisco and its neighboring big city to the south. \"His train is scheduled to arrive in Los Angeles at four-thirty this evening. I'm told he's staying at the Fremont Hotel.\"\n\n\"I was lucky. I managed to wire Bob Harrington, who heads up the Southern California Van Dorn office, before the flash flood somewhere to the south took out the line. He's going to have a man disguised as a cabbie pick up Cromwell and take him to his hotel. My agent on the train will point him out. From there, Harrington's agents can keep a tight rein on him.\"\n\n\"His trip sounds innocent enough,\" Bell said slowly. \"But I don't trust him. He's up to something. I feel it in my bones.\"\n\n\"He won't get far if he tries anything,\" Bronson said confidently. \"Should he make even a tiny false move, a dozen agents will land on him like a ton of bricks.\"\n\nBell walked back to an empty office and rang up Marion over at the bank. \"Did you survive last night?\" he asked lovingly.\n\n\"I had a wonderful time, thank you. The meal was scrumptious and the play was delightful.\"\n\n\"Now that the cat is away, how about the mouse coming out and play\u2014say, for lunch?\"\n\n\"I'm game.\"\n\n\"I'll pick you up in front of the bank.\"\n\n\"I'll meet you where we met before,\" she said without hesitation. \"I don't want our relationship to be obvious. If any of the employees see me getting in your flashy red car, they're liable to talk, and it will get back to Jacob.\"\n\n\"Same time, same place,\" he said before he hung up.\n\nLater that morning, a Western Union messenger came running into the office. \"I have an urgent message for a Mr. Horace Bronson,\" he said to the receptionist, gasping because of his dash from the Western Union office.\n\nBronson, who was coming back from the bathroom down the hall, said, \"I'm Bronson. I'll take it.\" He flipped the messenger a coin and tore open the envelope. As he read the message, his lips tightened and his forehead turned into a hard frown. He rushed through the office until he came to Bell.\n\n\"We're in trouble,\" he announced.\n\nBell looked at him questioningly. \"Trouble?\"\n\n\"My man lost Cromwell.\"\n\nBell faltered, taken completely off balance. \"How could he lose him on a train?\"\n\n\"Cromwell must have gotten on the train and immediately jumped off the opposite side without being seen.\"\n\n\"Your agent should have alerted us sooner,\" Bell snapped, anger flaring.\n\n\"The train had departed the station and he couldn't get off until it stopped in San Jose,\" Bronson explained. \"He sent a telegram from there.\"\n\n\"He could have saved thirty minutes by using the telephone.\"\n\nBronson shrugged helplessly. \"The phone lines are unreliable and in constant repair.\"\n\nBell sank into a chair, stunned and furious at having the rug pulled out from under him. \"He's going to rob and kill again,\" he said, his face flushed with frustration. \"The bastard is rubbing it in our faces.\"\n\n\"If we only knew where,\" said Bronson, overcome with defeat.\n\nBell walked over to the window and looked across the roofs of the city buildings. He stared without seeing, lost in thought. Finally, he turned. \"Cromwell is taunting us,\" he said slowly. \"He expects us to run around like chickens with our heads cut off, wondering where he went.\"\n\n\"He's obviously heading in the opposite direction he told his secretary.\" Bronson gave Bell a hard stare. \"Unless she's lying.\"\n\nBell didn't meet his stare. The possibility crossed his mind, too. He merely shook his head. \"No, I'm certain Marion told the truth.\"\n\nBronson walked over to a map of the United States hanging on one wall. He stared at it, perplexed. \"I doubt if he'll head north into Oregon or Washington. He probably doubled back to the Ferry Building, crossed the bay, and took a train heading east.\"\n\nA smile slowly began to curve and spread across Bell's face. \"I'll bet my Locomobile Cromwell is still heading south.\"\n\nBronson looked at him. \"Why would he continue south if he literally threw us off the track?\"\n\n\"I know how the man thinks,\" said Bell in a voice that defied argument. \"Though he doesn't know his every movement is being watched, he never takes chances, every possibility is carefully thought out.\"\n\nBronson looked at his pocket watch. \"The next train isn't until noon.\"\n\n\"Too late,\" Bell disagreed. \"He has too much of a head start.\"\n\n\"But how do we know that, since he jumped the train?\"\n\n\"He gave Marion a cock-and-bull story about riding in coach so his depositors would think he's a down-to-earth kind of guy. Ten will get you twenty he chartered a private train.\"\n\nBronson's apprehension appeared to loosen. \"Harrington can still have his agents follow him when he arrives in Los Angeles.\"\n\nBell shook his head. \"His agents won't be able to identify him. Your agent got off the train in San Jose to notify you Cromwell wasn't on board. He's probably waiting for the next train back to San Francisco.\"\n\n\"That is a problem,\" Bronson agreed. \"But they can still grab him when he checks into the Fremont Hotel.\"\n\n\"If Cromwell checks into the Fremont,\" Bell said shrewdly. \"Since he slipped off the passenger train, it's unlikely the rest of his story to Miss Morgan was true.\"\n\n\"If not Los Angeles, then where is he going?\"\n\n\"Cromwell could stop his train anywhere between here and there, but my guess is that he's going on through Los Angeles.\"\n\n\"Through?\" wondered Bronson. \"Through to where?\"\n\n\"The last place we would expect him to go for a robbery, the least likely destination.\"\n\n\"Which is?\"\n\n\"San Diego.\"\n\nBronson thought quietly for several moments. Finally, he said, \"That's a long shot.\"\n\n\"Maybe. But that's all we have going,\" said Bell. \"He's demonstrated that he doesn't always rob mining towns. Why not a city with a bank bulging with profits from goods imported by rich merchants and the owners of large ranches around Southern California?\"\n\n\"A long shot or not, we can't overlook it. If only I could alert Harrington to send his agents to the San Diego railroad terminal and be on the lookout for a private train. But the telephone and telegraph lines from San Jose to Los Angeles are still down due to flooding.\"\n\nBell shook his head. \"Cromwell's too smart to run his train directly into the city. He'll park it on some remote siding and use another mode of transportation to get to the city, probably the motorcycle he used on other robberies.\"\n\n\"If only Harrington's had a description,\" said Bronson.\n\n\"They couldn't identify him anyway; he'll probably be wearing a disguise.\"\n\nBronson's optimism suddenly vanished out the window. \"Then where does that leave us?\"\n\nBell smiled. \"I'll have to go to San Diego and confront him myself.\"\n\n\"Not possible,\" Bronson said. \"By the time we can hire a special express train, have it on the tracks, and leave town, he will have conducted his dirty business and be halfway back to San Francisco.\"\n\n\"Very true,\" acknowledged Bell. \"But, with a little luck, I can make it to Los Angeles before his train arrives and be waiting for him.\"\n\n\"So how are you going to beat him to Los Angeles, fly on a big bird?\" Bronson said sarcastically.\n\n\"I don't need a big bird.\" Bell gave Bronson a canny look. \"I have something just as fast.\" Then he smiled bleakly. \"But, first, I have to break a date.\"\n\n## 32\n\nTHE BIG RED LOCOMOBILE SWEPT THROUGH SAN Francisco like a bull running through the streets of Pamplona, Spain, during the Fiesta of San Fermin. Bell sat back in the red leather seat, his two hands tightly gripping the bottom of the big spoked steering wheel, turning the car with his palms facing up, using his biceps to twist the stiff mechanism around curves and street corners.\n\nThe time was fifteen minutes before ten o'clock.\n\nNext to him, in the shotgun seat, sat Bronson, whose job was to keep the fuel pressure pumped up. Every few minutes, he pulled out the pump handle that was mounted on the upper wooden panel just above the slanting floorboard and shoved it forward, sending gas to the carburetor. Besides keeping the big hungry engine fed, he took on the job of navigator, since Bell had no knowledge of the California countryside. As Bell drove, Bronson braced his feet on the floorboard and pressed his back into the leather seat to keep from being thrown to the pavement, feeling as if he was being shot through the muzzle of a cannon.\n\nNot wanting to take either hand from the steering wheel, Bell also gave Bronson the job of sounding the big horn bulb. The agent seemed to enjoy squeezing out squawking honks at the people and traffic, especially at intersections. It was not long before his hand ached.\n\nBronson was wearing a long leather coat, his feet and lower legs encased in boots. His head was covered by a leather helmet with huge goggles that made him look like an owl on a quest for a rodent. The goggles were a necessity since the Locomobile did not have a windshield.\n\nThe car hadn't traveled a hundred yards when Bronson had dire misgivings about what he had gotten himself into by insisting that he accompany Bell on this mad dash to San Diego in an open car over roads that weren't much better than cow paths.\n\n\"How are the brakes on this mechanical marvel of engineering?\" Bronson asked caustically.\n\n\"Not great,\" Bell answered. \"The only brakes are on the shaft driving the chains to the rear wheels.\"\n\n\"Do you have to go so fast through town?\" Bronson protested.\n\n\"Cromwell's private train has over an hour's head start,\" yelled Bell through the exhaust. \"We need every minute we can gain.\"\n\nPedestrians, who heard the throaty exhaust roar coming up the street followed by a strange blaring sound from the bulb horn, were stunned when they saw the red Locomobile bearing down on them. Staring incredulously, they quickly stepped out of the street until the machine sped past. The twin exhaust pipes, barely protruding from the left side of the hood, throbbed like cannon.\n\nTwo workmen, who were carrying a large windowpane alongside the street, froze in total shock as the car thundered past, the explosive roar of the Locomobile's exhaust shattering the glass in their hands. Neither Bell nor Bronson ever looked back, their complete focus being on the traffic that ran thick or thin in front of them, forcing Bell to swing the wheel violently back and forth as though he was driving through an obstacle course. His great satisfaction came in pointing the car in the direction he wanted to go and having it respond as if anticipating his thoughts.\n\nBell jockeyed his foot from the accelerator to the brake and back again, as he tore down the streets, hammering turns at the intersections onto the main street leading from the city, wishing he was a sorcerer who could magically make the traffic disappear. Bell narrowly missed a laundry truck, throwing the Locomobile into a four-wheel drift to avoid it. He spun the thick wooden rim of the steering wheel fiercely as he dove between vehicles littering the streets. Drivers of other motorized vehicles stared in awe at the speed of the car as it flashed up from behind and quickly disappeared up ahead. Horses harnessed to buggies and wagons reared at the noise of what their drivers thought was the devil's chorus.\n\nAs they neared the outer edge of the city's southern limits, the traffic began to thin. Bell slowed the Locomobile around a sweeping turn onto the main road south that paralleled the railroad tracks. He breathed a sigh of relief at seeing automobiles and wagons becoming sparse. He was also thankful that he now had ample room to swerve around any vehicle that blocked his path. The huge automobile was incredibly responsive. Bell pressed the accelerator within an inch of the floor, as the car began to rocket along a road that ran straight with few curves. The faster the Locomobile traveled, the more solid her feel of stability, as the drive chains on her axles whirred at a high, metallic pitch.\n\nSoon the road became straight and rural. Picturesque farming communities came up on the horizon and quickly slipped behind the automobile's dust trail. San Carlos, Menlo Park, and then San Jose, towns that were linked together by the El Camino Real, the old road used in the late 1700s by the Franciscan friars who built twenty-one missions, each a day's journey apart.\n\nEnjoying a straight, open road with little traffic, Bell pressed the accelerator to the floor and pushed the automobile as hard as it could go. The Locomobile was in its element now, running as strongly as when it had in the Vanderbilt Cup race, the first American car to place in an international speed event. Like a racehorse that had been retired and then brought back to run again, the Locomobile roared down the road like a maddened elephant, the cavernous cylinders of its mighty engine turning the huge crankshaft effortlessly.\n\nBell loved the big machine. He had an exceptional sense of its temperament and idiosyncrasies. He gloried in its strength and simplicity, felt intoxicated by the speed produced by the big pounding engine, and drove like a demon possessed, reveling at the vast, swirling cloud of dust the Locomobile hurled in its wake.\n\nBronson looked over at Bell, who wore a short leather jacket and jodhpur riding pants with boots. He wore goggles but no helmet, preferring to hear the beat of the engine. There was a look of unfathomable concentration about him. He looked relentlessly determined to beat Cromwell at his own game. Bronson had never seen anyone with such fierce, decisive resolve. He turned away and studied his map. Then he tapped Bell on the shoulder.\n\n\"There is a fork in the road coming up. Veer left. The road is better inland than along the coast. At this rate, Salinas will come up in another hour. After that, Soledad.\"\n\n\"How's our time?\" Bell asked without taking his hands from the wheel and digging out his pocket watch.\n\n\"Ten past eleven,\" Bronson answered over the exhaust. \"Without knowing how fast we're going, I have no way of knowing how much time, if any, we've gained on Cromwell's train.\"\n\nBell nodded in understanding. \"The auto does not have a speedometer or a tachometer, but I'd guess our speed to be over ninety miles an hour.\"\n\nBronson had been slowly becoming attuned to the wind rushing against his face, the telegraph poles streaking past at lightning speed. But then a stretch of road became violently rough and rutted, and Bronson soon realized what it would be like inside the rattle of a maddened sidewinder. He clutched the arm of his seat in a death grip with one hand and gamely worked the fuel pump with the other.\n\nThey hurtled over the narrow, rolling farm road and crossed into Monterey County before coming to the agricultural community of Salinas. The farmland along the sides of the road was strikingly beautiful, turning green under the spring sun. Fortunately, the main road through town was quiet, with only one or two automobiles and a few horse-drawn wagons parked along the sidewalks. People heard the booming bellow of the Locomobile's exhaust as it crossed the city limits. They turned and looked speechlessly as the big fire red machine shot through the business section of town. They had no time to indulge their curiosity before the hard-charging machine was heading into the open country to the south.\n\n\"What's the next town?\" asked Bell.\n\nBronson consulted his map. \"Soledad.\"\n\n\"How far?\n\n\"About twenty-five miles. We'd better fill the tank there, because it's a good two hundred miles to the next major town.\" He turned and looked at the huge cylindrical brass tank mounted behind the seats. \"How much does it hold?\"\n\n\"Forty-five gallons.\"\n\n\"They should have a garage in Soledad that services automobiles and farm machinery.\"\n\nThe words were no sooner out of Bronson's mouth than the left rear tire went flat after striking a sharp rock in the road. The Locomobile fishtailed for a hundred yards before Bell brought it under control and braked it to a stop.\n\n\"Only a matter of time,\" said Bell resignedly. \"One of the predicaments of road racing.\"\n\nHe was out of the automobile and shoving a jack under the rear axle within three minutes while Bronson removed one of the two spare tires on the rear of the automobile. Bell removed the wheel and replaced it inside of ten minutes. He had changed tires that gave out at breakneck speeds many times since he owned the Locomobile. Then he separated the tire from the wheel and tossed the tire to Bronson. \"There's a patching kit under your seat. Patch the hole while we drive. I'll remount it on the wheel after we reach Salinas.\"\n\nNo sooner were they on their way again over a reasonably smooth road than a hay wagon hitched to a team of horses loomed up. The farmer, believing he was the only one for a mile around, was driving right down the center of the road, with only a few feet to spare before the weeds and brush along the edge of the dirt thoroughfare met fences surrounding fields of artichokes, chilies, mushrooms, and lettuce.\n\nBell began to slow but had no choice but to pull the Locomobile half off the road and pass the hay wagon with only inches to spare, but he hadn't been left enough room for a free-and-clear passage. He took out a good thirty feet of a frail wooden fence, luckily without causing severe damage to the car. Only the front right fender was bent and twisted, scraping the tire when it hit a bump in the road. Bell did not look back to see the farmer shaking his fist and cursing him as his horses reared and nearly turned the wagon over on its side. Nor was he happy at being inundated by the dust storm that spewed from the Locomobile's drive wheels.\n\n\"That's one mad sodbuster,\" said Bronson, turning in his seat and looking behind him.\n\n\"He probably built and owns the fence we destroyed,\" Bell said with a sly grin.\n\nWithin ten miles, Soledad came into view. Named after the Mission Nuestra Se\u00f1ora de la Soledad that had been founded over a hundred years before, the town was a major railroad stop in the valley for transporting to market as quickly as possible the produce grown there. Bell quickly slowed as he entered town and soon found a garage where he could purchase gasoline for the Locomobile. While Bronson and the garage owner poured cans of fuel into the big tank, Bell wrestled with the crumpled right front fender, bending it back away from the tire. Then he took the tube Bronson had patched, inserted it back inside the tire, and remounted it on the wheel before bolting it on the rear of the Locomobile.\n\n\"You fellas the first car in a race passing through?\" the garage owner asked, clad in a pair of greasy coveralls.\n\nBell laughed. \"No, we're alone.\"\n\nThe garage owner looked at the dusty and damaged automobile and shook his head. \"You fellas must be in a mighty big hurry.\"\n\n\"That we are,\" said Bell, pressing bills that more than covered the price of the gasoline into the garage owner's hand.\n\nHe stood there, scratching his head, as the Locomobile roared away and quickly became a red speck down the main street of town before traveling out into the farm country. \"Them fellas must be crazy,\" he mumbled. \"I hope they know the bridge over Solvang Creek is out.\"\n\nFifteen minutes later and twenty miles down the road from Soledad, a sharp left-angled curve with a down slope came rushing toward them. A sign that stood beside the road flashed past.\n\n\"What did it say?\" asked Bell.\n\n\"Something about a bridge, was all I caught,\" replied Bronson.\n\nA barricade of railroad ties blocked the center of the road, and Bell could see the upper part of a bridge that looked as if it had broken apart in the middle. A crew of men were working to repair the center span while another crew were installing poles and restringing the telegraph and phone lines that had been torn away by a flash flood.\n\nBell jerked his foot off the accelerator, made a hard twist of the wheel. He jammed both feet on the brake, locking the rear wheels, fishtailing the rear end across the road, and causing the Locomobile to slow into a four-wheel drift. He straightened the front of the automobile with one second to spare and they flew through the air over the edge of the slope and dove down the steep bank of a broad ravine that had once been a dry wash. They landed in an explosion of dust less than twenty feet from a wide stream two feet deep that flowed toward the sea.\n\nThe heavy steel chassis and massive engine, driven by momentum, smacked into the water with an enormous eruption of silty brown water that burst over the Locomobile in a giant wave. The violent thump jarred Bell and Bronson in their every joint. Water gushed over the radiator and onto the hood before flooding over the men, drenching them in a deluge of liquid mud. Taking the full brunt of the surge, they felt as if they were driving through a tidal wave.\n\nThen the big automobile burst into clean air on the opposite shore, as it shuddered and shed itself free of the stream. Bell instantly jammed the accelerator to the floor, hoping against hope that the powerful engine would not drown and die. Miraculously, the spark plugs, magneto, and carburetor survived to do their job and kept the big four-cylinder combustion chambers hitting without a single miss. Like a faithful steed, the Locomobile charged up the opposite slope until it shot onto level ground again and Bell regained the road.\n\nWith great relief after their narrow brush with disaster, Bell and Bronson pulled off their goggles and wiped them clean of the mud and silt that splattered the lenses.\n\n\"It would have been nice if that garage guy had warned us,\" said Bronson, soaked by their ordeal.\n\n\"Maybe they're close-lipped in these parts,\" Bell joked.\n\n\"That was where the flash flood took out the phone and telegraph lines.\"\n\n\"We'll contact your counterpart in the Los Angeles office when we stop for gas again.\"\n\nThe road flattened out and appeared well maintained for the next ninety miles. Bell, with his ear tuned to any miss of the brawny engine's cylinders, let the Locomobile run as fast as he dared over the dirt-and-gravel road, thankful there were no sharp turns, and especially happy the tires held without going flat.\n\nFinally, his luck ran out when he hit a stretch of the road that was rock infested but worn smooth by eons of rain. He slowed to save the tires, but one became embedded with a sharp stone and hissed flat within a hundred yards. One of the spares was quickly thrown on the axle and, with Bronson patching the tube once again, Bell continued his mad dash toward Los Angeles.\n\nSan Luis Obispo and Santa Maria came and went. Then they dropped down in altitude as the road ran along the Pacific Coast. The ocean glittered blue under the sky, turning white as the breakers rolled onto the white sandy beach that was flecked with black rocks.\n\nOutside of Santa Barbara, they became airborne over a large hump in the road, crashing down on the other side with an impact that knocked the wind out of Bronson, who was amazed that the sturdy car held together without flying to pieces.\n\nThey entered Santa Barbara, where they refueled, filled the radiator with water, and installed the spare tire. A quick stop was made at the railroad depot, where Bronson sent a wire to his fellow agent Bob Harrington asking him to meet them at the Los Angeles railroad terminal.\n\nInstead of taking the treacherous winding road called the Grapevine over Tejon Pass before plunging down into Los Angeles, Bronson directed Bell to run the Locomobile along the railroad tracks that were laid with far more gradual turns. The rough ride strained the automobile's chassis as it rolled through the narrow pass below the 4,183-foot summit, but it held together until they reached the long slope leading down into the San Fernando Valley.\n\nAt last, the worst was behind them. Now they were in the homestretch, and the Locomobile was pressing hard and gaining on Cromwell's private train with every mile. According to Bronson's time estimate, they were only fifteen minutes behind. With luck, they just might reach the Los Angeles railroad terminal ahead of the Butcher Bandit.\n\nMost cheering was the sight of tall buildings in the far distance. As they neared the outskirts of the city, the traffic began to build. Bronson marveled at Bell's physical endurance. His blue eyes, hard and unblinking, never left the road. The man was born to sit behind the wheel of a fast car, Bronson thought. He looked at his watch. The hands on the dial read four-twelve. They had averaged over sixty miles an hour for the four-hundred-mile run.\n\nTraffic thickened the closer they came to the main part of the city and Bell began his now accustomed routine of swerving around horse-drawn wagons and buggies and automobiles. He was vastly relieved when the dirt road finally became paved with bricks. He raced in and around big red trolley cars that rode tracks down the center of the street. He was surprised by the number of automobiles he rushed past, unaware that there were over two thousand of them traveling the streets of the mushrooming city of one hundred twenty thousand.\n\nBell found the thoroughfares of the City of Angels were considerably wider than those of San Francisco, and he made good time with more room to negotiate around the traffic. They passed through downtown, heads turning in awe at the speed of the red Locomobile. A police officer blew his whistle and became angered when Bell ignored it and sped on. The policeman jumped on his bicycle and took up the chase but was soon left far behind, until the automobile was completely out of sight.\n\nThe big train depot came into view as Bell rounded a corner on two wheels. A man in a brown suit and wide-brimmed hat was standing on the curb at the entrance frantically waving his arms. Bell braked to a stop in front of Bob Harrington, the Van Dorn agent in charge of Southern California operations. At first, Harrington didn't recognize Bronson. The man in the mud-encrusted leather coat and helmet looked like an apparition until the goggles were raised.\n\n\"My God, Horace, I didn't recognize you,\" said the intense man with a tanned face and sharp features. At six foot five inches, Harrington towered over Bell and Bronson.\n\nBronson stiffly stepped to the pavement and stretched his aching muscles. \"I doubt if my own mother would know me.\" He turned and pointed at Bell, still sitting exhausted behind the wheel. \"Bob, this is Isaac Bell. Isaac, Bob Harrington.\"\n\nBell pulled off his driving glove and shook Harrington's hand. \"Good to meet you, Bob.\"\n\n\"I heard a lot about your exploits, Isaac. It's an honor to meet you.\"\n\nBell wasted no more time in pleasantries \"What's the status of Cromwell's private train? Are we in time to stop it?\"\n\nHarrington slowly shook his head. \"Sorry to have to tell you, but the regularly scheduled passenger train pulled off on a siding in Ventura and let it go through. When it came to Los Angeles, it bypassed the depot and took the express track south to San Diego. By doing that, it cut off nearly half an hour.\"\n\n\"How long ago?\" asked Bell, his hopes dashed.\n\n\"About twenty minutes.\"\n\n\"We would have beat it by ten minutes,\" Bronson observed morosely.\n\nBell looked at the tired Locomobile, wondering if there was enough left in her for the final dash. He knew, without looking in a mirror, that he was more exhausted than the automobile.\n\nHarrington studied the worn-out men. \"I can have my agents in San Diego apprehend Cromwell when his special train stops at the San Diego depot.\"\n\n\"He's too smart to get off at the depot,\" said Bell. \"He'll stop the train outside of town and enter in one of his many disguises.\"\n\n\"Where do you think he's headed?\"\n\n\"One of the local banks.\"\n\n\"Which one?\" queried Harrington. \"There are at least ten.\"\n\n\"The one with the most assets.\"\n\n\"You honestly believe a lone bandit will attempt robbing the San Diego Wells Fargo Bank?\" Harrington asked skeptically. \"It's the most secure bank in Southern California.\"\n\n\"All the more reason he'd attempt it,\" answered Bell. \"Cromwell loves a challenge.\"\n\n\"I'll telephone ahead and have my agents standing by the entrance.\"\n\nBell shook his head doubtfully. \"He'll spot them and call it off. Unless we can catch him in the act, we still haven't enough evidence to convict. And your agents have no idea what he looks like, and, if they did, they'd never see through his disguise. He's that good.\"\n\n\"We can't stand around and let him waltz into the bank unhindered,\" protested Bronson. \"He'll murder everyone inside.\"\n\nBell turned to Harrington. \"Tell your agents to close the bank until Horace and I get there.\"\n\n\"You're not continuing on to San Diego?\" Harrington asked incredulously.\n\n\"Yes,\" Bell said simply as he wearily climbed behind the wheel of the Locomobile. \"What's the fastest way out of town to the south?\"\n\n\"Just stay on the road that runs alongside the railroad tracks. It will take you straight south to San Diego.\"\n\n\"What's the condition?\"\n\n\"Well maintained all the way,\" said Harrington. He stared doubtfully at the tired machine. \"You should make good time if your automobile holds up.\"\n\n\"She got us this far,\" said Bell with a tight smile. \"She'll see us through.\"\n\n\"Tell your agents we're on our way,\" Bronson said tiredly. He looked like a man stepping up to the gallows.\n\nHarrington stood for a few moments watching the Locomobile roar down the road. Then he slowly shook his head and walked to the nearest telephone.\n\nTen minutes later, Bell reached the outer limits of the city and aimed the eagle ornament on the big brass radiator down the open road toward San Diego. Even after the wild ride from San Francisco, Bronson still marveled at Bell's expertise and mastery at timing the engine rpms and judging the precise moment to engage the clutch and grip the tall brass lever that meshed the unsynchronized gears.\n\nBell's weary mind was divided between his driving over the road ahead and the image of Jacob Cromwell robbing another bank and killing everyone in it. As they closed in on their destination, his nerves tightened and his blood churned with adrenaline while the faithful engine beat with the steadiness of a healthy pulse.\n\n## 33\n\nTHE TIME SPED AWAY SWIFTLY AS THE LOCOMOBILE ate up the one hundred twenty miles between the two cities in nine minutes under two hours. The last light was glimmering over the ocean to the west when they dropped down from Mount Soledad toward the heart of the city that opened up before them like a carpet of buildings tinted gold by the final rays of the setting sun. Though the Locomobile sported huge acetylene headlamps, Bell did not wish to take the time to stop the car and light them. \"How's our gas?\" Bell asked in a rasping voice, his mouth coated with dust.\n\nBronson turned in his seat, unscrewed the big gas tank cap, and dipped a stick down to the bottom. He withdrew the stick and stared at the moisture at its very tip.\n\n\"Let's just say we'll have to finish the race on fumes.\"\n\nBell nodded without answering.\n\nThe grinding strain had taken its toll on him. After hours of twisting the big steering wheel in a thousand gyrations to turn the stiff linkage to the front wheels, his arms felt numb, as if they were no longer a part of his body. His ankles and knees also ached from constant clutch, accelerator, and brake pedal action. And both his hands were blistered inside his leather driving gloves. Yet Bell drove at full throttle the last few miles, forcing the Locomobile to leap toward the final destination like a bear sprinting after an elk.\n\nThe Locomobile was badly worn down, too. The knobby tread on the Michelin tires was nearly shredded, the wheels were wobbling from the beating they had endured, the faithful engine was beginning to emit strange noises, and steam was billowing from the radiator cap. Still, the magnificent machine pushed on.\n\n\"I wonder what's in Cromwell's mind,\" said Bell. \"He's too late to commit robbery today. The bank is closed until tomorrow morning.\"\n\n\"This is Friday,\" answered Bronson. \"The banks in San Diego stay open until nine o'clock in the evening.\"\n\nThey were sprinting down India Street, parallel to the railroad tracks, with the depot no more than a mile away, when Bell flicked his eyes from the road for an instant and glanced in the direction of a train with only one car that was slowing to a halt.\n\nThe locomotive pulling the private Pullman car came to a stop on a siding four tracks over from the street. Smoke lazily rose from its stack as the engineer vented steam from exhaust tubes. The fireman had climbed on top of the tender, preparing to take on water from a large wooden tank. With the growing darkness, lights blinked on in the Pullman car, which was now parked a mile away from the depot and the city's downtown.\n\nBell knew immediately that this had to be Cromwell's private train.\n\nHe did not hesitate. He spun the wheel hard left and sent the Locomobile bouncing wildly across the railroad tracks. By the time he had bounded over three tracks, he had blown all four of the badly worn tires and rolled the rest of the way up to the train on the rims of the wheels, showering sparks like meteors as they smashed against the steel rails.\n\nBronson said nothing. He had been frozen in confused shock, until he saw the train and realized what Bell had up his sleeve. Excitement grew to elation at knowing that, after their five-hundred-mile daredevil drive, they had finally come within spitting distance of their goal.\n\nBell slammed the Locomobile to a stop across the tracks in front of the locomotive. Its momentum finally spent, the battered automobile sat forlornly with its overheated engine crackling, its radiator hissing steam, and the smell of shredded tires. Its mad and wild chase had come to a fitting climax in front of the quarry it had pursued through the backwoods of hell.\n\n\"We may be jumping the gun,\" said Bronson. \"He hasn't attempted to rob the bank yet. We can't arrest him without a crime.\"\n\n\"Maybe. But on the drive down here from San Francisco, I had much to think about. Better we take Cromwell now, before he has time to act. If he sees through our trap again, we're lost. I'll worry about gathering enough evidence to convict him later. Besides, he's not on home ground. He can't call in expensive attorneys to get him out on bond.\"\n\nBell was well aware that no one had had the time to exit the train during the few minutes since it had come to a standstill. He climbed from the automobile and walked unsteadily toward the Pullman car, the aches and pain and weariness slowly falling away. He halted abruptly, and slipped between the Pullman and the coal tender, as two stewards wrestled a motorcycle from the car to the ground beside the track.\n\nHe waited patiently for a few minutes until a man dressed in the uniform of a railroad conductor stepped from the Pullman car and threw one leg over the seat of the motorcycle that Bell recognized as a Harley-Davidson. The man's back was to Bell as Bell stepped silently alongside the Pullman car and stopped only when he was no more than five feet behind the man, who was leaning down to open the fuel valve to the carburetor in preparation for starting the engine.\n\n\"The Harley is a good machine,\" Bell said calmly, \"but I prefer the Indian.\"\n\nThe man on the motorcycle froze at the sound of the familiar voice. He slowly turned and saw an apparition standing behind him. Eerie illumination fell from overhead electric lights along the railroad siding. The figure wore a short leather coat over jodhpurs and boots that looked like they had been dragged through a swamp. A pair of goggles was pushed back on his head, revealing strands of blond hair coated in dried mud. But there was no mistaking the face, the piercing eyes, and the begrimed mustache that covered the upper lip.\n\n\"You!\"\n\n\"Not very original,\" Bell said cynically. \"But since I used the same expression at the bank in Telluride, I won't criticize.\"\n\nA silence came over the two men that seemed to last a lifetime, but it was only the few seconds that it took Cromwell to see that the apparition really was Isaac Bell. Cromwell just stood there in growing disbelief, his face suddenly turning pale.\n\n\"You were dead!\" he gasped. \"I shot you!\"\n\n\"Twice, as a matter of fact,\" said Bell with a hard edge to his voice. His right hand gripped the 1905 Colt .45 automatic, its muzzle aimed squarely between Cromwell's eyes and held as steady as an iron bar in concrete.\n\nFor the first time in his life, Jacob Cromwell was taken completely off guard. His agile mind, filled with overconfidence, had never considered how he would act should the time ever come when he was apprehended. The unthinkable was never dwelled upon. He had always thought of himself as untouchable. Now he stood face-to-face with his archenemy, who should have been dead. He felt like a captain whose unsinkable ship had run up on the rocks.\n\nCromwell's Colt .38 was in his coat pocket, but he knew Bell would blow his brains out before he could reach for it. Slowly, he lifted his hands into the air in abject defeat.\n\n\"What happens now?\" he asked.\n\n\"I'm going to borrow your special train to take you back to San Francisco. There, I'll turn you over to the police, until such time as you're tried for murder and hung.\"\n\n\"You have it all mapped out.\"\n\n\"The day had to come, Cromwell. You should have quit when you were ahead.\"\n\n\"You can't arrest me. I have committed no crime.\"\n\n\"Then why are you disguised as a railroad conductor?\"\n\n\"Why don't you shoot me now and get it over with?\" Cromwell asked, his composed arrogance coming back on keel.\n\n\"A mere slap on the hand for your crimes,\" Bell said caustically. \"Better you have plenty of time to think about the hangman's noose tightening around your murdering neck.\"\n\nBronson came from around the rear of the Pullman car, his Smith & Wesson double-action .44 revolver drawn and pointed at Cromwell's chest. \"Nice going, Isaac. You nabbed our friend here before he could commit another crime.\"\n\nBell handed Bronson a pair of Tower nickel-plated, double-lock handcuffs. The agent wasted no time in snapping them on Cromwell's wrists. Then he gave the bandit a thorough search and found the .38 Colt automatic.\n\n\"The weapon you used to commit three dozen murders,\" Bronson said with a cold voice.\n\n\"Where did you come from?\" Cromwell demanded at seeing Bronson and knowing with certainty that these men would not hesitate to shoot him if he gave the slightest indication of trying to escape.\n\n\"Isaac drove us from San Francisco in his automobile,\" he answered as if it were an everyday event.\n\n\"Impossible!\" snorted Cromwell.\n\n\"I thought so, too,\" said Bronson, leading Cromwell up the steps into the Pullman car, where he took his own handcuffs, placed them around Cromwell's ankles, and roughly shoved him onto a couch.\n\nBell walked back up the track and stared sadly at the mauled Locomobile. A barrel-chested man carrying an oil can in the coveralls and denim striped hat of a locomotive engineer came up behind him and stared dumbly at the automobile.\n\n\"How in God's name did that derelict come to be on the tracks in front of my engine?\"\n\n\"It's a long story,\" said Bell wearily.\n\n\"What's going to happen to it?\"\n\nBell spoke quietly, almost reverently: \"It's going to be shipped back to the factory in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where it will be rebuilt until it is as good as new.\"\n\n\"Fix this wreck?\" said the engineer, shaking his head. \"Why bother?\"\n\nBell looked at the Locomobile with a loving expression in his eyes and said, \"Because she deserves it.\"\n\n## 34\n\nYOU'RE A FOOL IF YOU THINK YOU CAN GET AWAY with kidnapping me,\" Cromwell stated contemptuously. \"You have no authority to arrest me without a warrant. As soon as we get back to San Francisco, my attorneys will demand my release. After making fools of the Van Dorn Detective Agency, I shall walk free as a bird. Then I'll launch a series of lawsuits that will break your agency and drown it in a sea of scandal.\"\n\nCromwell sat manacled to a large couch in the center of the parlor car. His wrists, legs, and even his neck were encased in steel bands that were chained to tie-down rings on the floor of the forward baggage section of the car. No chances were taken. Four heavily armed Van Dorn agents from the Los Angeles office sat in the car less than ten feet from the bandit, sawed-off shotguns, loaded and cocked, laid across their knees.\n\n\"You may have a chance to demonstrate your arrogant ego with your pals in city hall, my friend,\" said Bell. \"But you'll walk free only as far as a pig to a butcher shop.\"\n\n\"I am an innocent man,\" said Cromwell matter-of-factly. \"I can prove I was nowhere near the bank robberies you accuse me of. Where is your evidence? Where are your witnesses?\"\n\n\"I'm a witness,\" Bell answered. \"I saw through your disguise as a woman in Telluride before you shot me.\"\n\n\"You, Mr. Bell? What jury in San Francisco would buy your testimony? The trial will be a farce. You have nothing to bring an indictment, much less conviction.\"\n\nBell gave Cromwell a foxlike smile. \"I am not the only witness. There are other people in the towns where you committed your murders who can identify you.\"\n\n\"Really.\" Cromwell leaned back in the couch as if he hadn't a care in the world. \"From what I read of the Butcher Bandit, he always used disguises during his crimes. How can he be identified?\"\n\n\"You'll have to wait and see.\"\n\n\"I have great influence in San Francisco,\" Cromwell said with total conviction. \"I have contributed heavily to the election of every superior and federal court judge on the bench. They owe me. Same with the good citizens of San Francisco. Even if you could bring me to trial, no jury of my peers will convict me, not when they take into account the many thousands of dollars I've spent on their behalf.\"\n\n\"You're betting your hand before you see it,\" said Bell. \"A federal judge will be sent out from Washington to hear your case and the venue will be moved elsewhere, where you're not the city's darling.\"\n\n\"I can afford the finest attorneys in the country,\" Cromwell continued haughtily. \"No jury, regardless of what judge sits on the bench, will ever sentence me for crimes with so little evidence, certainly not with my reputation as a man who is beloved by the poor and homeless of San Francisco.\"\n\nBronson's face was clouded with disgust. It took all his willpower not to plant his fist in Cromwell's face. \"Tell that to the families of the victims you shot down in cold blood. Tell them how the money you stole went to give you a lavish lifestyle as a banker in a mansion on Nob Hill.\"\n\nCromwell smiled brazenly and said nothing.\n\nThe train began to slow. Bronson stepped over to a window and peered out. \"We're coming into Santa Barbara. The engineer will probably stop to take on water.\"\n\n\"I'd like to get off at the depot,\" said Bell. \"There's a little matter I'd like to take care of.\"\n\nAs soon as the train came to a stop, Bell jumped down the stairs to the platform and quickly disappeared into the depot. Ten minutes later, as the engineer tooted the whistle warning that he was going to engage the drive wheels, Bell trotted out and climbed back aboard the Pullman car.\n\n\"What was that all about?\" asked Bronson.\n\nCromwell immediately suspected something that was not to his liking. He shifted in his chair and leaned forward to listen.\n\n\"The phone lines have been repaired over the ravine where the flash flood went though,\" Bell answered Bronson. Then he looked down at Cromwell with a sardonic grin. \"I put a call through to the Van Dorn office and instructed our agents to take your sister into custody as an accomplice.\"\n\n\"You're insane,\" Cromwell cried out.\n\n\"I think we can prove she is implicated in the murders carried out by the Butcher Bandit.\"\n\nCromwell surged up from the couch, his face a mask of loathing and hate, but was stopped dead by his chains. \"You dirty swine,\" he hissed. \"Margaret had nothing to do with any of this. She knew nothing about my...\" He hesitated, before he incriminated himself. He slowly lowered himself back onto the couch, his composure and presumptuous behavior regaining control. \"You'll pay dearly for involving an innocent woman in your ridiculous accusations. Margaret will be back in her parlor within an hour after she's falsely accused of crimes she knows nothing about.\"\n\nBell stared into Cromwell's eyes with the self-assurance of a panther about to take a bite out of an antelope. \"Margaret will talk,\" Bell said firmly. \"She will tell what she knows in an effort to save her brother. She'll lie, of course, but she'll be tripped up on a thousand details she can't answer. Margaret will be the witness who will unwittingly lead you to the gallows.\"\n\n\"Even if I was guilty, Margaret would never utter a single word against me,\" Cromwell said with conviction.\n\n\"She will if she knows she's going to jail for the rest of her natural life. That, and the loss of a luxurious lifestyle. Turning state's evidence will be quite simple if there is a heavy price to pay for not doing so.\"\n\n\"You've badly underestimated Margaret.\"\n\n\"I don't think so,\" said Bell quietly.\n\nCromwell smiled tightly. \"You'll never connect Margaret with the crimes any more than you can convince a jury that I am guilty.\"\n\nBell stared at the banker. \"Are you guilty?\"\n\nCromwell laughed and nodded around the parlor car. \"Admit to being your Butcher Bandit in front of witnesses? Come now, Bell.\" There was no \"Mr.\" this time. \"You're skating on thin ice and you know it.\"\n\nThen Bell pulled off the glove on Cromwell's left hand and revealed a metal tube where his finger once extended.\n\n\"We'll see,\" Bell mused aloud. \"We shall see.\"\n\nBELL WAS taking no chances. When they reached San Francisco, he ordered the engineer to bypass the main depot and head onto the siding of the railyard. Bronson had a small army of agents on hand to escort Jacob Cromwell to an ambulance, where he was tied down to a stretcher, for the ride through the city.\n\n\"We can't run the risk of putting Cromwell in the county jail,\" said Bell. \"He's right about his friends springing him within an hour. Take him across the bay to the state prison at San Quentin. We'll keep him on ice until we're ready to bring formal charges.\"\n\n\"Every reporter with every newspaper in town will be on hand to report that event,\" said Bronson.\n\n\"They'll send the story across the country by telegraph to every newspaper from here to Bangor, Maine,\" Bell said with a grin. \"Now all we have to do is keep him from slipping through our fingers. Cromwell will attempt to bribe any guard that comes near him.\"\n\n\"I know the warden at San Quentin,\" said Bronson. \"He's as straight as an arrow. Cromwell will be wasting his breath if he thinks he can bribe him into escaping.\"\n\n\"Don't think he won't try.\" Bell looked at Cromwell as he was roughly lifted into the ambulance. \"Put a hood over his head so no one will recognize him. Swear the warden to secrecy, and have him lock Cromwell in solitary confinement, away from the other prisoners. We'll give the warden the necessary paperwork in the morning.\"\n\n\"What about Margaret? I doubt a judge with his hand in Cromwell's pockets would fill out arrest papers for her.\"\n\n\"Go through the motions,\" Bell instructed. \"Put pressure on her. Once she knows her brother is in custody and that she may go down with him, I'm betting Margaret will gather up all the cash she can and make a run for it. Then she'll sail right into our hands.\"\n\nBefore heading for Bronson's office, Bell stopped off at a telegraph office and sent a lengthy wire to Van Dorn reporting the capture of the notorious Butcher Bandit. He also asked for whatever help Colonel Danzler could offer from the federal government.\n\nCROMWELL WAS right about one thing. Margaret walked out of the police department less than thirty minutes after she was escorted there by two Van Dorn agents. Cromwell's attorneys were already there arranging bond when she arrived. Even her chauffeur was on hand to drive her home, waiting in the Rolls-Royce out front, parked in a zone where no vehicle was allowed. A court magistrate miraculously appeared to sign the necessary release papers. It seemed to a reporter, who happened to be present covering a burglary case, that Margaret's arrest and almost-instant release were a staged formality.\n\nMeanwhile, Bronson and his agents had driven the ambulance carrying Cromwell onto the ferry that took them across the bay to Marin County. After moving off the dock, they drove to the state prison at San Quentin. As Bronson had claimed, the warden was very cooperative and even proud to have the famous Butcher Bandit in his prison until Bell and Bronson could orchestrate an arraignment.\n\nAfter Bell left the telegraph office, he walked to Cromwell's bank. He took the elevator up to the main office and approached Marion's desk. \"Get your hat,\" he said without preamble in a no-nonsense tone. \"You're taking the rest of the day off.\"\n\nShe faltered, taken completely off balance by his sudden appearance after three days. Her sensual feelings toward him came flooding back. She could see that there was no arguing with him, yet she said, \"I just can't leave when I feel like it. I could lose my job.\"\n\n\"Your job is already lost. Your boss is behind bars.\" He walked around her desk and pulled her chair out so she could stand.\n\nShe rose slowly and stared at him, dazed. \"What are you saying?\"\n\n\"The show is over. I'm holding Cromwell until we obtain the necessary warrant for his arrest and documents for an indictment.\"\n\nAlmost as if she were moving in a fog, she retrieved her hat and purse from a cabinet behind her desk and then stood there unsure of what else to do. Her eyes slipped away and she stared hesitantly at the floor, disbelieving. She had never thought it possible that Jacob Cromwell, regardless of his crimes, was vulnerable.\n\nBell had seen Marion's cheeks blush before and he was always taken by the demure reaction. He took her hat from her fingers and placed it on her head at a jaunty angle. \"I like that,\" he said, laughing.\n\n\"Well, I don't,\" she said with womanly irritation in her voice as she straightened the hat to its proper position on her lovely head of hair. \"Where are you taking me?\"\n\n\"Down to the beach, where we can walk in the sand and have a long talk about recent events.\"\n\n\"Are we taking your fancy automobile?\"\n\nShe was surprised at the pained look that crossed his face. \"I'm afraid we won't be taking it anywhere anytime soon.\"\n\n## 35\n\nCONSTRUCTION ON SAN QUENTIN PRISON BEGAN auspiciously on Bastille Day, July 14, 1852. Why it was later named after a notorious inmate serving time for murder whose name was Miguel Quentin is anybody's guess. The term San is Spanish for male saint. Quentin was no saint, but his name stuck, and the prison became known as San Quentin.\n\nThe oldest state prison in California, it held its first execution in 1893 by hanging Jose Gabriel for murdering an aged couple he worked for. Women were also confined there, in a separate building. By 1906, over a hundred prisoners had died behind the prison walls, from inmate murders to suicides to death from natural causes. They were buried in the cemetery outside the prison walls.\n\nRichard Weber, the warden, was a big man, agile as a gymnast and energetic, a workaholic who was dedicated to his job. Heavyset but solid as a rock, he wore a perpetual grin that ever so slightly curled the corners of his lips. A strict disciplinarian with a strong approach to reform, he put the prisoners to work making products, working the gardens, and joining a number of educational studies. His program of compensating the inmates in a small way, along with rewarding them with reductions in their sentences, enhanced his reputation as the \"Tough But Fair Warden.\"\n\nBronson was close to the mark in claiming Weber could not be bribed. He was known as a man far above the taint of corruption or graft. A devout Catholic, Weber and his wife had raised a family of eight children. His salary as chief of the state's largest prison facility was ample but left little for extra niceties. His dream of retiring someday to a ranch in the San Joaquin Valley was only that, a dream.\n\nThough it was often said that every man has his price, all who knew Warden Weber thought of him as untouchable. But, as it turned out, beneath that hard veneer of integrity he was only human.\n\nSoon after Cromwell was locked up in solitary confinement, Weber visited the bandit\/banker in his small cell two levels below the main prison building. After ordering the guard to unlock the steel door, Weber entered the cell and sat down on a small folding chair he had brought with him.\n\n\"Mr. Cromwell,\" he said politely, \"welcome to San Quentin.\"\n\nCromwell rose from his bunk and nodded. \"Perhaps I should say I'm grateful for your hospitality, but that would be a lie.\"\n\n\"It's my understanding that you'll only be with us for a short time.\"\n\n\"Until I'm arraigned in federal court,\" said Cromwell. \"Is that what Bronson of the Van Dorn Detective Agency told you?\"\n\nWeber nodded. \"He said he was waiting for instructions from the Criminal Investigation Department in Washington.\"\n\n\"You know why I was arrested?\"\n\n\"I was told you were the notorious Butcher Bandit.\"\n\n\"Are you familiar with my status in the community?\" asked Cromwell.\n\n\"I am,\" replied Weber. \"You own the Cromwell Bank and are an admired philanthropist.\"\n\n\"Do you think such a man could rob banks and kill dozens of people?\"\n\nWeber shifted on his seat. \"I must admit I find the idea a bit far-fetched.\"\n\nCromwell circled for the kill. \"If I gave you my word that I did not commit any crimes and these are false charges by the United States government to take over my bank, would you release me?\"\n\nWeber thought a moment, then shook his head. \"I'm sorry, Mr. Cromwell, I am not authorized to release you.\"\n\n\"Even though formal charges have not been filed?\"\n\n\"I have been assured that charges are being filed as we speak.\"\n\n\"If I guarantee that I do not intend to escape but need go directly to my attorneys in the city and obtain the necessary release papers from a court magistrate, then would you allow me to leave the prison?\"\n\n\"I might if I could,\" said Weber. \"But, as warden, I cannot permit you leaving the prison grounds before the release papers are in my hands. Besides, there are Van Dorn agents patrolling outside the prison walls to prevent you from escaping.\"\n\nCromwell looked around the concrete, windowless cell with its steel door. \"Has any inmate ever escaped from solitary?\"\n\n\"Not in the history of San Quentin.\"\n\nCromwell paused to lay his trap. \"Suppose\u2014just suppose, Warden\u2014that you personally took me into San Francisco?\"\n\nWeber looked at him with interest. \"What do you have in mind?\"\n\n\"Deliver me to County Prosecutor Horvath's office and fifty thousand dollars in cash will be delivered to your house on the prison grounds by private messenger precisely one hour later.\"\n\nWarden pondered Cromwell's offer for several moments. He knew it was not an idle offer. The banker was worth many millions of dollars and the offer was in cash, which would leave no trail should law enforcement investigators come sniffing around. Fifty thousand dollars was an enormous sum. He could keep the money hidden until his retirement. Weber also did his arithmetic and knew that it was more than enough to buy him a ranch second to none in the state. It was an offer even an honest man of integrity could not refuse.\n\nFinally, Weber rose from his chair, stepped to the steel door, and rapped three times. The door opened and the uniformed guard entered. \"Put a hood over the prisoner's face and take him to the office behind my house. I'll be waiting there.\" Then he turned and left the cell.\n\nTen minutes later, the guard pushed Cromwell into Weber's office. \"Remove his hood and manacles,\" Weber instructed. As soon as the hood was off and the manacles around Cromwell's feet and hands removed, the guard was dismissed.\n\n\"I trust I can rely on your word as a gentlemen that my compensation will arrive an hour after I safely deposit you on the steps of the city hall?\"\n\nCromwell nodded solemnly. \"You can rest assured, the money will be in your hands this afternoon.\"\n\n\"Good enough.\" Weber rose and walked to a closet. He returned with a woman's dress, hat, purse, and shawl. \"Put these on. You are a small man and about the same size as my wife. You will be disguised as her when we drive through the inner gates and the main gate. Keep your head down and the guards will take no notice. She and I often take drives around the countryside or into town.\"\n\n\"What about Van Dorn's agents who are patrolling the outer walls?\"\n\nWeber smiled thinly. \"I am the last man they would suspect of foul play.\"\n\nCromwell looked at the clothes and laughed.\n\n\"Something funny?\" asked Weber.\n\n\"No,\" replied Cromwell. \"It's just that I've been here before.\"\n\nWhen Cromwell had slipped on the warden's wife's clothes, he wrapped the shawl around his neck and pulled the hat down so it would cover the beard that was beginning to stubble his chin. \"Ready as I'll ever be,\" he announced.\n\nWeber led him out of the office across a yard to the garage that housed the warden's Ford Model T automobile. Cromwell effortlessly cranked over the engine and climbed behind the wheel. The car began rolling over the gravel road toward the inner gates and was passed through with a wave from the warden. The main gate was another story. Here, two guards approached the warden for his personal authority to open the gate. \"Shari and I are running into the city to buy a gift for her sister's birthday,\" he said placidly.\n\nThe guard on the left side of the car dutifully gave the warden a salute and waved him on. The guard on the right gazed at Cromwell, who made a show of looking for something in the purse. The guard dipped his legs to look under her hat, but Weber caught the movement and snapped, \"Stop gawking and open the gate.\"\n\nThe guard straightened up and waved to the engineer in the tower who controlled the mechanism that opened the massive steel doors. As soon as they spread wide enough to permit the Ford through, Weber pulled down the throttle lever and raised his foot off the high-gear pedal. The automobile jumped forward and was soon chugging down the road toward the landing to board the ferry for San Francisco.\n\n## 36\n\nHE WHAT?\" BELL ROARED OVER THE TELEPHONE.\n\n\"What is it?\" asked Bronson, coming into the office as Bell hung up the phone.\n\nBell looked up at him, his face twisted in rage. \"Your friend, the righteous and incorruptible warden of San Quentin, released Cromwell.\"\n\n\"I don't believe it,\" Bronson blurted in utter disbelief.\n\n\"You can believe it, all right!\" snapped Bell. \"That was Marion Morgan, Cromwell's personal secretary. She said he walked into his office five minutes ago.\"\n\n\"She must be mistaken.\"\n\n\"She's right on the money,\" said Curtis from the doorway. He looked at Bronson. \"One of your agents who was following his sister, Margaret, saw him come down the steps of the city hall and get in her automobile.\"\n\n\"Warden Weber taking a bribe,\" Bronson muttered. \"I would have never thought it.\"\n\n\"Cromwell probably offered him a king's ransom,\" said Bell.\n\n\"My agents at the prison reported that Weber left in his automobile with his wife for a shopping trip to the city.\"\n\n\"Not the first time Cromwell disguised himself as a woman,\" Bell murmured angrily. \"He no doubt shed the dress once they were out of sight of San Quentin and before they reached the ferryboat.\"\n\n\"Where does that leave us?\" inquired Curtis.\n\n\"I telegraphed Colonel Danzler, chief of the United States Criminal Investigation Department. He's arranging for a federal judge to swear out a warrant for Cromwell's arrest that cannot be overridden by city or state judicial system. As soon as it is in our hands, we can take Cromwell out of circulation for good.\"\n\n\"That will take at least four days by rail,\" said Bronson. \"What if he attempts to flee the country? We have no legal means to stop him.\"\n\n\"We had no legal means to grab him in San Diego,\" retorted Bell. \"We'll snatch him again and keep him on ice in a secret location until the paperwork arrives.\"\n\nBronson looked doubtful. \"Before we can put our hands on Cromwell again, his pals the mayor, police chief, and county sheriff will protect him with an army of policemen and deputies armed to the teeth. My seven agents will be outnumbered twenty to one if they attempt to seize him.\"\n\n\"Cromwell has that kind of influence?\" asked Curtis.\n\n\"The degree of corruption in San Francisco makes the Tammany Hall political machine of New York City look like a convent,\" said Bronson. \"Cromwell has done more than his share to keep city officials fat and rich.\"\n\nBell smiled a hard, canny smile. \"We'll have our own army,\" he said quietly. \"Colonel Danzler will call out the army regiment that's stationed at the Presidio, if I request it.\"\n\n\"We may need them sooner than you think,\" said Bronson. \"If Cromwell cleans out the cash in his bank and charters another train, he'll be over the border into Mexico free as a bird before we can lift a finger.\"\n\n\"He's right,\" agreed Curtis. \"As it stands, we're helpless. We can't touch him. By the time Danzler can contact the Presidio's commander and order troops called out and marched into the city, it will be too late. Cromwell's graft will have greased his way out of town.\"\n\nBell leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. \"Not necessarily,\" he said slowly.\n\n\"What's going through that devious mind?\" asked Curtis.\n\n\"Suppose the president of the United States requests the president of the Southern Pacific Railroad not to charter a train to Cromwell?\"\n\nBronson looked at him. \"Is that possible?\"\n\nBell nodded. \"Colonel Danzler has great influence in Washington. I was told by Van Dorn that he and President Roosevelt are very close. They fought side by side at San Juan Hill in the war. I think it's safe to say he could persuade the president to go along.\"\n\n\"And if Cromwell charters a ship?\" probed Bronson.\n\n\"Then a United States warship will be sent to stop the ship at sea, take Cromwell off, and return him to San Francisco. By that time, we'll have the necessary warrants for his arrest and trial.\"\n\n\"It sounds like you have all the bases covered,\" Bronson said admiringly.\n\n\"Cromwell is a slippery customer,\" said Bell. \"If there is a way to slip through our net, he'll think of it.\" He paused to look up at a clock on the wall. \"Four thirty-five. I have a dinner date at six o'clock.\"\n\n\"Marion Morgan?\" Curtis asked with a sly smile. \"It strikes me that besides her keeping tabs on Cromwell, you two have a thing going.\"\n\nBell nodded. \"She's an exquisite lady.\" He rose to his feet and slipped on his coat. \"She's fixing dinner at her place.\"\n\nBronson winked at Curtis. \"Our friend is a lucky man.\"\n\n\"I've lost track of time,\" said Bell. \"What day is it?\"\n\n\"Tuesday, April seventeenth,\" answered Curtis. Then he added humorously, \"The year is 1906.\"\n\n\"I'm aware of the year,\" Bell said as he stepped through the door. \"See you all in the morning.\"\n\nSadly, one of the three men in the room would never see tomorrow.\n\nMARGARET STOPPED the Mercedes under the porte cochere that sheltered vehicles at the front door of the mansion before they passed into the courtyard beyond. Since picking her brother up in front of city hall, she had driven him to the bank, where he had spent two hours locked in his office. When he emerged, they rode to Nob Hill in silence. Their chauffeur came from the carriage house and drove the car inside. The instant they stepped into the foyer, Margaret pulled off her hat and spun it across the floor, glaring at her brother with fire in her eye.\n\n\"I hope you're satisfied now that you've sent our fortunes crashing down around us.\"\n\nCromwell walked like an old man into the sitting room and slumped wearily in a chair. \"I made the mistake of underestimating Bell,\" he said. \"He caught up to me before I could hit the bank in San Diego.\"\n\nThe floor tilted beneath Margaret's feet as her entire mood changed. \"Isaac alive? You saw him?\"\n\nHe looked at her intently. \"You appear to take an uncommon interest in him,\" he said with dry amusement. \"Are you glad our nemesis still walks the earth?\"\n\n\"You said you killed him in Telluride.\"\n\nCromwell spoke as if he were describing a truckload of coal. \"I thought I did, but he apparently survived. The only mistake I've made in twenty years.\"\n\n\"Then it was he who brought you back from San Diego and put you into San Quentin.\"\n\nCromwell nodded. \"He had no right. He stepped outside the law. Now Bell is going to move heaven and earth to proclaim me the Butcher Bandit and send me to the gallows.\"\n\n\"It won't be an easy matter of escaping the city. Van Dorn agents are watching our every move.\"\n\n\"I have no intention of fleeing like a thief in the night. It's time those who have curried our favor and funds repay their obligations by keeping us out of Van Dorn's hands until we're ready to quietly depart for greener pastures.\"\n\nShe looked at him resolutely, her mind on an unwavering course of action. \"We'll hire the finest lawyers in New York. It will be impossible to convict you. We'll make Isaac Bell and the Van Dorn Detective Agency the laughingstock of the nation.\"\n\n\"I don't doubt we'll win in court,\" he said quietly, staring at his sister with a serious expression. \"But we'll be finished as an admired institution in San Francisco. The bank will suffer a financial disaster as our depositors, fearful of scandal, run to competing banks. The Cromwell National Bank will close its doors.\" He paused for effect. \"Unless...\"\n\n\"Unless what?\" she asked, meeting his unrelenting gaze.\n\n\"We quietly and secretly move our assets to another city in another country where we can launch a new financial empire under another name.\"\n\nMargaret visibly relaxed now that she began to realize that all was not lost, her lifestyle might not fall off the edge of the cliff after all. \"What city and what country did you have in mind? Mexico? Brazil, perhaps?\"\n\nCromwell grinned wickedly. \"My dear sister, I can only hope Mr. Bell thinks as you do.\"\n\nHe felt smug with self-satisfaction, believing that all he needed was no more than three hours in the morning to arrange for the shipment of the cash reserves from his bank. His paper assets had already been sent out of the country by telegraph when he went to the bank. Now all he and Margaret had to do was pack a few things and lock up the house, leaving it with a realtor to sell. Then it would be clear sailing, once they crossed the border and left the United States behind.\n\nBELL SAT staring thoughtfully at a small fire in the fireplace of Marion's apartment while she was busy in the kitchen. He had brought a bottle of California Beringer 1900 Cabernet Sauvignon and was halfway through a glass when Marion entered the dining room and began setting the table. He looked up and had a strong desire to walk over and press his lips to hers.\n\nShe looked stunning, with her fashionable hourglass silhouette of ample curves and full breasts. She wore a pink satin bodice of cascading lace that reached up under her chin and elongated her tall, graceful neck. The skirt was also pink and long and flowing like an inverted flowering lily. Even with her torso half covered by a large apron, she looked elegant.\n\nHer straw blond hair shined under the light from the candles on the table. It was pulled back in a silky bun like a whorl behind her delicate ears. Bell suppressed his desire to kiss her and simply reveled at the sight of her.\n\n\"Nothing fancy,\" she said, coming over and sitting on the arm of his chair. \"I hope you like pot roast.\"\n\n\"I have a passion for pot roast,\" he said, losing all control and pulling her down onto his lap, where he kissed her long and ardently. She tensed, then trembled, and her eyes became huge and flashed a deep sea of green. As they drew apart, her poise altered. The eyes turned brazen and her expression spicy. Her breathing became quick, and she enjoyed the sensation of deep sensuality, a sensation that she had never experienced with another man. With slow deliberation, she eased out of his lap and stood shakily, brushing back a wisp of hair that had fallen along her temple.\n\n\"Enough of this, unless you want a burned pot roast.\"\n\n\"How long do I have to suffer on an empty stomach?\"\n\nShe laughed. \"Ten more minutes. I'm waiting for the potatoes to soften.\"\n\nHe watched as she returned to the kitchen, her walk as fluid as a gazelle's.\n\nAs she set the bowls on the table, he refilled their glasses, and they sat down. They ate in silence for a few moments. Then Bell said, \"Everything is delicious. You'll make some lucky man a wonderful wife one day.\"\n\nThe words came like a warm breeze across the nape of her neck and a flush of blood flowed across her breasts, hardening the nipples. Deep down, she hoped his feelings were moving in that direction, but she was also afraid that his affection might cool and he would walk off into the dark some evening, never to return.\n\nBell read Marion's confusion and became afraid to go there. He changed the course of the conversation. \"How long did Cromwell remain in the bank today?\"\n\nHer emotion quickly turned to anger. She was mad at herself for responding with the proper words instead of calmly expressing her feelings toward him. \"Most of the time he spent in the office, he seemed very secretive. He also made three trips downstairs to the vault.\"\n\n\"Do you have any idea of what he was about?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"It seemed very mysterious.\" Then she lifted her head and a small smile parted her lips. \"But when he was in the vault, I sneaked into his office and glanced at the paperwork he had spread across his desk.\"\n\nHe waited expectantly as she took a few moments to let him twist in the wind, as if getting even with him for ignoring her feelings for him. \"He was filling out bank drafts and money transfers.\"\n\n\"It figures. Our guess is that he and Margaret are going to skip out of the country and move the bank's funds to their destination. There's no way Cromwell will stay in town and fight us in federal court.\"\n\n\"It would look that way,\" said Marion quietly, wishing they could keep their time together more close and personal.\n\n\"Could you tell where he was sending the bank's funds?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"Only the amounts were filled in, not the banks that were to receive them.\"\n\n\"What do you think he was doing in the vault?\"\n\n\"My best guess is he was packing the bank's cash reserves in crates in preparation to ship them to a bank in whatever city they're going to.\"\n\n\"You're a very astute lady,\" he said, smiling. \"And if you were Jacob and Margaret, where would you go?\"\n\n\"They wouldn't be safe anywhere in Europe,\" Marion answered without hesitation. \"The banks on the Continent work with the U.S. government in freezing illegal funds. There are too many other countries where they could hide their money and begin building their empire again.\"\n\n\"How about Mexico?\" Bell asked, impressed with Marion's intuition.\n\nShe shook her head. \"Margaret could never live in Mexico. The land is too primitive for her tastes. Buenos Aires in Argentina is a possibility. The city is very cosmopolitan, but neither of them speaks a word of Spanish.\"\n\n\"Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai,\" suggested Bell. \"Any of those cities hold any interest?\"\n\n\"Australia or New Zealand, perhaps,\" she said thoughtfully. \"But I've learned over the years in his employ that Jacob doesn't think like most men.\"\n\n\"My experience with the man has led me to the same conclusion,\" Bell said.\n\nMarion went quiet as she passed him more helpings of the pot roast, potatoes, and vegetables. \"Why don't you give your brain a rest and enjoy the fruits of my labors?\" she said, smiling.\n\n\"Forgive me,\" he said honestly. \"I've been a bore as a dinner companion.\"\n\n\"I hope you like lemon meringue pie for dessert.\"\n\nHe laughed. \"I adore lemon meringue pie.\"\n\n\"You'd better. I baked enough for a small army.\"\n\nThey finished the main course and Isaac stood up to help clear the table. She pushed him back down in his chair.\n\n\"Where do you think you're going?\" she demanded.\n\nHe looked like a young boy startled by his mother. \"I wanted to help.\"\n\n\"Sit down and finish your wine,\" Marion said smartly. \"Guests don't work in my house, especially male guests.\"\n\nHe looked at her slyly. \"And if I wasn't a guest?\"\n\nShe turned away from him for fear her inner emotions might show. \"Then I'd make you fix a plumbing leak, a squeaky door hinge, and a broken table leg.\"\n\n\"I could do that,\" he said staunchly. \"I happen to be very handy.\"\n\nShe looked at him disbelieving. \"A banker's son who is handy?\"\n\nHe feigned a hurt look. \"I didn't always work in my father's bank. I ran away from home when I was fourteen and joined the Barnum and Bailey Circus. I helped put up and take down the tents, fed the elephants, and made repairs on the circus train.\" He paused and a sad expression came across his face. \"After eight months, my father found me, hauled me home, and sent me back to school.\"\n\n\"So you're a college man.\"\n\n\"Harvard. Phi Beta Kappa, in economics.\"\n\n\"And smart,\" she added, properly impressed.\n\n\"And you?\" he probed. \"Where did you go to school?\"\n\n\"I was in the first graduating class of Stanford University. My degree was in law, but I soon found that law firms were not in the habit of hiring women lawyers, so I went into banking.\"\n\n\"Now it's my turn to be impressed,\" said Bell honestly. \"It seems I've met my match.\"\n\nSuddenly, Marion went silent and a strange look came over her face. Bell thought something was wrong. He rushed to her side and slid his arm around her.\n\n\"Are you ill?\"\n\nShe looked up at him from her coral green eyes. They seemed dark in thought. Then she gasped. \"Montreal!\"\n\nHe leaned toward her. \"What did you say?\"\n\n\"Montreal...Jacob and Margaret are going to make a run across the Canadian border to Montreal, where he can open another bank.\"\n\n\"How do you know that?\" asked Bell, bewildered at Marion's strange attitude.\n\n\"I just remembered seeing the city Montreal scrawled on a notepad beside his telephone,\" she explained. \"I didn't think it meant anything of importance and dismissed it from my mind. Now it all makes sense. The last place authorities would look for the Cromwells is in Canada. They can easily take on new identities and buy off the right people to become upstanding citizens who start up a solvent financial institution.\"\n\nThe look of confusion faded from Bell's face. \"The piece fits,\" he said slowly. \"Canada is probably the last place we'd think to look. The obvious escape route used by felons over the years is over the southern border into Mexico, using that as a springboard to travel farther south.\"\n\nThen, slowly, his thoughts of the Cromwells evaporated and he became quiet, gentle, and loving as he picked her up in his arms. \"I knew there was a reason I fell in love with you,\" he said, his voice becoming low and husky. \"You're smarter than I am.\"\n\nHer whole body trembled as she entwined her arms around his neck. \"Oh, God, Isaac. I love you, too.\"\n\nHe gently touched his lips to hers as he carried her from the living room into the bedroom. She pulled away and looked up, her eyes now mischievous. \"What about the lemon meringue pie?\"\n\nHe gazed down at her lovely features and laughed. \"We can always eat it for breakfast.\"\n\nBell could not have predicted nor much less have known that within a few hours the pie would become but a dim memory.\n\n## 37\n\nCALLED THE HALLMARK OF THE WEST, THE SAN FRANCISCO of 1906 was a maze of contradictions. One writer described the city as the Babylon of grandiloquence, the Paris of romance, and the Hong Kong of adventure. Another went so far as to portray it as the gateway to paradise.\n\nIt may have been dynamic and exciting, but, in truth, San Francisco was a sprawling, filthy, soot-ridden, foul-smelling, brawling, corrupt, vulgar city with less charm than London in the seventeen hundreds. It intermingled incredible wealth with sordid poverty. Coal smoke from steamboats, locomotives, foundries, house furnaces and stoves enveloped streets already blanketed by the dung of thousands of horses. There were no sewage-treatment plants to be found and the blackened skies reeked of foul odors.\n\nMost all the houses were built of wood. From the nice homes on Telegraph Hill to the stylish mansions of Nob Hill to the shacks and hovels in the outlying districts, it was described by the city's fire chief as a sea of tinderboxes waiting to be lit.\n\nThe image and the myth were to change dramatically within two and a half minutes.\n\nAt 5:12 A.M., on the morning of April 18th, the sun was beginning to lighten the eastern sky. The gas streetlights had been shut off and the cable cars began to clatter from their barns for their runs up and down the many hills of the city. Early workers began walking to their job as those who worked during the late-night hours headed home. Bakers were already at their ovens. Police on the early-morning shift still patrolled their beats, expecting another quiet day, as a light wind without the prevailing fog blew in from the west.\n\nBut at 5:12, the peaceful world of San Francisco and its surrounding towns was shattered by an ominous, rumbling roar that came from the depths of the earth a few miles under the sea beyond the Golden Gate.\n\nHell had come to San Francisco.\n\nThe foreshock shook the surrounding countryside and was felt throughout the Bay Area. Twenty-five seconds later, terrifying, undulating shock waves from the massive earthquake surged across the city like a monstrous hand sweeping stacks of books off a table.\n\nThe rock of the San Andreas Fault, whose walls had been grinding against each other for millions of years, abruptly split apart as the North American Plate under the land and the Pacific Plate beneath the sea unleashed their grip on each other and shifted in opposite directions, one to the north, the other to the south.\n\nThe unimaginable force raged toward the helpless city at seven thousand miles an hour in a disastrous spree that would leave monumental death and destruction in its wake.\n\nThe shock wave struck with savage swiftness. The pavement of the streets running east and west began to rise and crest before falling into troughs, as the quake rolled relentlessly forward and sent block upon block of tall buildings rocking and swaying like willow trees in a hurricane. Wood, mortar, and brick were never meant to withstand such an onslaught. One by one, the buildings began to crumble, their walls falling and avalanching into the streets under a cloud of dust and debris. Every window in the stores along the avenues burst and shattered onto the sidewalks in a shower of jagged shards.\n\nHuge five-and ten-story buildings in the downtown business section toppled in a horrendous crash that sounded like a cannon barrage. Chasms opened and closed on the streets, some filling with groundwater and spilling into the gutters. The rails of streetcars and cable cars were twisted and bent like strands of spaghetti. The most violent shocks lasted for slightly more than a minute before diminishing, although smaller aftershocks continued off and on for several days.\n\nWhen the full light of day showed through the chaos, all that was left of a major city of tall buildings, comprising a vast number of stores, offices, banks, theaters, hotels, restaurants, saloons and brothels, houses and apartments, was now a hundred square miles of jagged mounds of shattered masonry, splintered wood, and twisted iron. Though they'd looked substantial, most of the buildings were not reinforced and fell to pieces before the earthquake was thirty seconds old.\n\nThe city hall, the most impressive edifice west of Chicago, sat smashed and destroyed, its cast-iron columns lying shattered in the street. The Hall of Justice was a skeleton of mangled steel girders. The Academy of Sciences gone as though it had never stood. The post office was still standing but effectively demolished. The Majestic Theater would never stage a show again. Only the redoubtable six-story Wells Fargo Building had refused to tumble down despite a ravaged interior.\n\nThousands of chimneys had been first to fall. None was built with an earthquake in mind. Reaching through and high above the roofs, unable to bend and sway and with no support, they shuddered, then fractured and fell through houses and onto streets that were already clogged with debris. Later, it was determined that over a hundred people died from being crushed in their beds by falling chimneys.\n\nWooden two-and three-story homes leaned drunkenly in all directions, twisted on their foundations and tilted crazily in grotesque angles. Oddly, they stood intact but had shifted as much as twenty feet off their foundations, many across sidewalks and into the streets. Though their exterior walls were intact, their interiors were devastated, floors having collapsed, beams ruptured, the furniture and the inhabitants ending up crushed and buried in the basement. The cheaper houses in the poor part of town had collapsed in a pile of splintered beams and siding.\n\nThose who had survived the earthquake were frozen in stunned shock, unable to speak or conversing in whispers. As the great clouds of dust began to settle, the cries of those who were injured or trapped under the fallen structures came as muffled wails. Even after the main force of the quake had passed, the earth still shuddered with aftershocks that continued to shake walls of brick onto the streets, causing their own tremors and strange rumbling sounds.\n\nFew cities in the history of human civilizations had suffered as much devastating destruction as San Francisco. And yet it was only the opening act of an even-worse scene of disintegration that was yet to come.\n\nTHE SHOCK hurled the bed Isaac and Marion were occupying across her bedroom. The apartment house around them rumbled and shook in a series of convulsions. The noise was deafening as dishes crashed to the floor, bookcases collapsed and the books scattered, pictures were slung off the walls, and the upright piano rolled like a boulder down a mountain across the slanting floor only to fall into the street because the entire front wall of the apartment house had detached itself from the rest of the building and cascaded in a flood of rubble onto the street below.\n\nBell grabbed Marion by the arm and half carried, half dragged her through a hail of falling plaster to the doorway, where they stood for the next thirty seconds while the horrendous noise became even more deafening. The floor moved like a stormy sea beneath their feet. They had barely reached the temporary shelter of the doorway when the great chimney at the top of the roof toppled and fell crashing through the two apartments above and smashed through the floor not ten feet away from them.\n\nBell recognized the bedlam as an earthquake. He had endured one almost as bad as the one that destroyed San Francisco while traveling with his parents in China when he was a young boy. He looked down into the pale face of Marion, who looked up at him, dazed and paralyzed by shock. He smiled grimly, trying to give her courage, as the shock waves tore the floor in the parlor from its beams and sent it collapsing into the lower apartment. He could only wonder if the occupants had been killed or were somehow managing to survive.\n\nFor nearly a full minute, they kept on their feet, clutching the doorframe, as their world turned into a nightmarish hell that went far beyond imagination.\n\nThen slowly the tremors died away and an eerie silence settled over the ruin of the apartment. The cloud of dust from the fallen plaster ceiling filled their nostrils and made it difficult to breathe. Only then did Bell realize that they were still on their feet, clutching the doorframe, with Marion wearing a flimsy nightgown and him in a nightshirt. He saw that her radiant long hair had turned white from the plaster's fine powder that still floated in the air like a mist.\n\nBell gazed across the bedroom. It looked like the contents of a wastebasket that had been dumped on the floor. He put his arm around Marion's waist and pulled her toward the closet, where their clothes still hung on hangers, free of the dust.\n\n\"Dress and be quick about it,\" he said firmly. \"The building isn't stable and might collapse at any minute.\"\n\n\"What happened?\" she asked in utter confusion. \"Was it an explosion?\"\n\n\"No, I believe it was an earthquake.\"\n\nShe stared through the wreck of her parlor and saw the ruined buildings on the other side of the street. \"Good Lord!\" she gasped. \"The wall is gone.\" Then she discovered that her piano was missing. \"Oh, no, my grandmother's piano. Where did it go?\"\n\n\"I think what's left of it is down on the street,\" replied Bell sympathetically. \"No more talk. Hurry and throw on some clothes. We've got to get out of here.\"\n\nShe ran to the closet, her composure back on keel, and Bell could see that she was as tough as the bricks that had fallen around them. While he put on the suit he'd worn the night before, she slipped into a cotton blouse under a coarse woolen jacket and skirt for warmth against the cool breeze blowing in from the sea. She was not only beautiful, Bell thought, she was also a practical, thinking woman.\n\n\"What about my jewelry, my family photos, my valuables?\" she asked. \"Shouldn't I take them with me?\"\n\n\"We'll come back for them later, when we see if the building is still standing.\"\n\nThey dressed in less than two minutes, and he led her around the gaping hole in the floor made by the fallen chimney and past the overturned furniture to the front door of the apartment. Marion felt as if she were in another world, as she stared out into open air where the wall once stood and saw her neighbors beginning to wander bewildered out into the middle of the street.\n\nThe door was wedged tight. The earthquake had shifted the building and jammed the door against its frame. Bell knew better than to attack the door by charging against it with his shoulder. That was a fool's play. He balanced on one leg and lashed out with the other. The door failed to show the least sign of give. He looked around the room and surprised Marion with his strength when he picked up the heavy sofa and shoved it against the door like a battering ram. On the third thrust, the door splintered and swung crazily open on one hinge.\n\nThankfully, the stairway was still standing, winding its way to the floor below. Bell and Marion made it past the main entrance and found a high mountain of debris piled outside the apartment house, thrown there when the front wall crashed and buried the street. The front section of the structure looked as if it had been sliced clean by a giant cleaver.\n\nMarion stopped, her eyes welling with tears at the sight of her mother's piano sitting smashed on the crest of the rubble. Bell spotted two men making their way down the street through the wreckage on a wagon drawn by two horses. He left Marion for a few moments, walked over and conversed with the two men as if striking a deal. They nodded and he came back.\n\n\"What was that about?\" asked Marion.\n\n\"I offered to pay them five hundred dollars to take your mother's piano to Cromwell's warehouse by the railyard. When things get back to normal, I'll see that it's rebuilt.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Isaac.\" Marion stood on her toes as she kissed Bell on the cheek, stunned that a man could be so thoughtful about such a little thing in the midst of such disaster.\n\nThe army of people crowding the middle of the street was strangely subdued. There were no wails or cries, no hysteria. Everyone talked in whispers, glad they were alive, but not knowing what to do next or where to go or whether the earthquake would strike again. Many were still in their nightclothes. Mothers cuddled young children or clutched babies while men talked among themselves studying the damage to their homes.\n\nA lull settled over the ruined city. The worst, everyone thought, had to be over. And yet the greatest tragedy was yet to come.\n\nBell and Marion walked to the intersection of Hyde and Lombard, seeing the cable car rails that now snaked like a meandering silver stream to the streets below Russian Hill. The cloud of dust hung tenaciously over the devastation, slowly dissipating as it was carried toward the east by the offshore breeze. From the docks protruding into the water around the Ferry Building west to Fillmore Street, and from the north bay far to the south, the once-great city was a vast sea of ruin and devastation.\n\nScores of hotels and lodging houses had collapsed, killing hundreds who had been sleeping soundly when the quake struck. The screams and cries of those trapped under the rubble and the badly injured carried up to the hill.\n\nHundreds of electrical poles had toppled, their high-tension wires snapping apart, whipping back and forth like desert sidewinders, sparks shooting from the tattered ends. At the same time, pipes carrying the city's gas had split apart and now unleashed their deadly fumes. Tanks in the basements of manufacturing plants holding kerosene and fuel oil ran toward the fiery arcs thrown from the electrical wires where they met and burst in an explosion of orange flame. In destroyed houses, coals from the fallen chimneys ignited furniture and wooden frameworks.\n\nSoon the wind helped merge the big and small fires into one massive holocaust. Within minutes, the city was blanketed by smoke from fires erupting across San Francisco that would take three days and hundreds of lives before they were contained. Many of the injured and trapped who could not be rescued in time would go unidentified, their bodies incinerated and turned to ashes by the intense heat.\n\n\"It's going to get worse, much worse,\" said Bell slowly. He turned to Marion. \"I want you to go to Golden Gate Park; you'll be safe there. I'll come and find you later.\"\n\n\"Where are you going?\" she whispered, shuddering at the thought that she would be alone.\n\n\"To the Van Dorn office. The city is going to need every law enforcement agent available to help control the chaos.\"\n\n\"Why can't I stay here, near my apartment?\"\n\nHe took another look at the growing conflagration. \"It's only a matter of a few hours before the fire reaches Russian Hill. You can't stay here. Do you think you can make it on foot to the park?\"\n\n\"I'll make it,\" she said, nodding gamely. Then she reached up and circled her arms around his neck. \"I love you, Isaac Bell. I love you so much I hurt.\"\n\nHe slipped his arms around her slim waist and kissed her. \"I love you, too, Marion Morgan.\" He hesitated before pushing her back. \"Now, be a good girl and get a move on.\"\n\n\"I'll wait for you at the bridge over the pond.\"\n\nHe held her hand a moment before turning away and moving through the mass of people who were crowded in the center of the street as far away as they could get from the buildings as a series of light aftershocks rippled through the city.\n\nBell took one of the long stairways leading from Russian Hill. It was split apart in several places but did not block his way down to Union Street. Then he cut over to Stockton and then to Market Street. The scene of destruction went far beyond anything his mind could have created.\n\nThere were no streetcars running, and all automobiles, many of them new models commandeered from dealer showrooms, as well as horse-drawn vehicles, were being pressed into service as ambulances to carry the injured to makeshift hospitals that were springing up in the city squares. The bodies of the dead, those who could be retrieved, were carried to warehouses that had been turned into temporary morgues.\n\nThe falling walls had not only crushed unlucky humans walking the sidewalks but also horses pulling the city's huge fleet of freight wagons. They were felled by the dozens under tons of bricks. Bell saw a driver and horse that had been smashed to pulp by an electrical pole that had fallen on their milk wagon.\n\nReaching Market Street, Bell ducked into the remains of a still-standing doorway that was once the entrance into the Hearst Examiner Newspaper Building. He sought refuge as a herd of cattle appeared that had escaped their pen at the docks. Maddened by fright, they charged down the street and almost immediately vanished, swallowed up by one of the great chasms where the violent thrust of the earthquake had split the streets.\n\nBell could not believe how the great thoroughfare of the city, with its magnificent buildings, had changed from the evening before. Gone were the fleets of vehicles, the throngs of happy, contented people working or shopping in the heart of the city's business district. Now the boulevard was scarcely recognizable. The tall buildings had crumbled to pieces, huge pillars with their decorative cornices and ornamentations had been wrenched from the fa\u00e7ades of the structures and hurled to the sidewalk and street in jumbled fragments. The enormous office and store windows were shattered. Signs that once advertised the businesses occupying them lay scattered amid the wreckage.\n\nAs Bell made his way down through the destruction, he could see that the blocks to the south were becoming an ocean of flame. He knew it was only a matter of time before the big hotels, government buildings, tall office skyscrapers, the great department stores, and the theaters would be burned-out skeletons. There were far too few firemen and almost all of the underground water mains had been ruptured by the earthquake. Hundreds of the city's fire hydrants and water taps trickled and then ran dry. The firemen, helpless in fighting the mushrooming fires, began a heroic struggle to repair the water lines.\n\nAfter dodging the automobiles transporting the injured and making his way over the landslides of brick, Bell came within sight of the Call Building. At first, the twelve-story skyscraper looked in good shape, but as he walked closer he saw that the base of one side of the building had moved two feet over the sidewalk toward the street. Inside, he found that none of the elevators were working because the interior was twisted out of alignment. He made his way up the five flights of stairs to the Van Dorn office and stepped over the mounds of plaster that had fallen from the ceiling. Footprints in the plaster told him others had preceded him.\n\nThe furniture scattered about the office by the quake had been set upright where originally positioned.\n\nBell walked into the conference room and found four Van Dorn agents including Bronson, who rushed over and pumped his hand. \"Am I ever glad to see you alive. I was afraid you might be lying under a ton of rubble.\"\n\nBell managed a smile. \"Marion's house lost the front wall, but her apartment is a mess.\" He paused and looked around room. Not seeing Curtis, he asked, \"Have you heard from Art?\"\n\nThe look on everyone's face told Bell what he needed to know. \"Art is missing, assumed to have been crushed under tons of brick as he made his way from the Palace Hotel to our office,\" Bronson answered solemnly. \"From what reports we've managed to gather, two of my agents are either injured or dead. We don't know yet. Those you see here are the only ones who survived without injury.\"\n\nBell's chest felt as if a belt had been cinched around it and pulled tight. He had seen and known death, but to lose someone close was an enduring hurt. \"Curtis dead,\" Bell muttered. \"He was a fine man, a good friend, and one of the best detectives I ever worked with.\"\n\n\"I lost good men, too,\" Bronson said slowly. \"But now we must do what we can to ease the suffering.\"\n\nBell looked at him. \"What is your plan?\"\n\n\"I met with the chief of police and offered Van Dorn's services. Despite our differences in the past, he was only too glad to have our help. We're going to do what we can to combat looting, apprehend looters stealing from the dead and their demolished homes and take them to the city jail. Thankfully, because it's built like a fortress, it still stands.\"\n\n\"I wish I could join you and the others, Horace, but I have another job.\"\n\n\"Yes, I understand,\" Bronson said quietly. \"Jacob Cromwell.\"\n\nBell nodded. \"The earthquake and the bedlam left in its wake have given him the ideal opportunity to escape the country. I intend to stop him.\"\n\nBronson held out his hand. \"Good luck to you, Isaac.\" He gestured around the room with one hand. \"This building isn't safe. And if it doesn't fall down on its own, it will probably be consumed by the approaching fire. We'll have to take our records and abandon it.\"\n\n\"Where can I reach you?\"\n\n\"We're setting up a command center in the Customs House; it was only slightly damaged. The army units that are arriving to maintain order and help battle the fires are also setting up their headquarters there.\"\n\n\"One of us has to report what has happened to Mr. Van Dorn.\"\n\nBronson shook his head. \"Not possible. All telegraph lines are down.\"\n\nBell shook Bronson's hand. \"Good luck to you, too, Horace. I'll be in contact as soon as I learn Cromwell's whereabouts.\"\n\nBronson smiled. \"I bet nothing like this happens where you live in Chicago.\"\n\nBell laughed. \"Aren't you forgetting the great Chicago fire of 1871? At least your calamity came from an act of God. Chicago's came from a cow who kicked over a lantern.\"\n\nAfter saying his good-bye, Bell retraced his route down the twisted stairs to the devastation on Market Street. He quickly made his way over the rubble and past the crowds of people who had assembled to watch the fire that was now burning throughout Chinatown and relentlessly moving toward the city's primary business district.\n\nHe reached the Palace Hotel, which had fared better than the Call Building. Standing just outside the entrance was a man Bell instantly recognized: Enrico Caruso, who had sung the role of Don Jos\u00e9 in Carmen the night before at the Grand Opera House, was waiting as his valet pulled his trunks out onto the sidewalk. He was dressed in a long, bulky fur coat over his pajamas and smoking a cigar. As Bell passed, he heard the great tenor muttering, \"'Ell of a place, 'ell of a place. I never come back.\"\n\nThe elevators were not running due to the lack of electricity, but the stairways were relatively clear of debris. After entering his room, Bell did not bother to pack his clothes. He saw no reason to burden himself with luggage. He threw only a few personal items in a small valise. Not planning on life-threatening danger in San Francisco, he had left his Colt .45 and the derringer in the room. The Colt went in the valise and the derringer back into its small holster inside his hat.\n\nAs he walked up Powell Street toward Cromwell's mansion on Nob Hill, he saw a small group of men frantically struggling to lift a huge beam from a pile of rubble that had once been a hotel. One of them motioned to him and shouted, \"Come give us a hand!\"\n\nThe men were frantically working to free a woman pinned in the debris and the wreckage around it was burning fiercely. She was still dressed in her nightgown, and he saw that she had long auburn hair.\n\nHe gripped her hand for a moment and said softly, \"Be brave. We'll get you free.\"\n\n\"My husband and my little girl\u2014are they safe?\"\n\nBell looked up into the somber faces of the rescuers. One of them slowly shook his head. \"You'll see them soon,\" he said, feeling the intense heat of the fire closing in.\n\nBell lent his strength to the others and vainly tried to lift the beam that covered the woman's legs. It was an exercise in futility. The beam weighed tons and could not be moved by six men. The woman was very courageous and watched the efforts in silence until the flames began scorching her nightgown.\n\n\"Please!\" she begged. \"Don't let me burn!\"\n\nOne of the men, a fireman, asked for her name and wrote it on a small piece of paper he had in his pocket. The rest of the men retreated from the intense heat and menacing flames, horrified at losing their battle to save the woman.\n\nHer nightgown ignited and she began to scream. Without hesitation, Bell held up his derringer and shot her in the forehead between the eyes. Then, without a backward glance, he and the fireman ran for the street.\n\n\"You had to do it,\" said the fireman, his hand on Bell's shoulder. \"Dying by fire is the worst death. You couldn't let her suffer.\"\n\n\"No, I couldn't do that,\" Bell said, his eyes rimmed with tears. \"But it's a terrible memory I'll take to my grave.\"\n\n## 38\n\nCROMWELL AWOKE IN HIS BED TO SEE THE CHANDELIER in the middle of the room swinging like a wild pendulum, its crystal pendants tinkling madly. The furniture danced about as if possessed by crazed demons. A large painting of a fox hunt dropped from the wall with a loud crash as it struck the polished teak floor. The entire house creaked as the stone blocks of the walls ground against each other.\n\nMargaret came staggering into his room, struggling to remain upright as the quake continued. She was wearing nothing but her nightgown, too shocked to throw on a robe. Her face was as white as the breast of a seagull, her golden brown eyes wide with fright, and her lips trembling.\n\n\"What's happening?\" she gasped.\n\nHe reached out and pulled her against him. \"An earthquake, dear sister. Nothing to fret about. It will pass. The worst is over.\"\n\nHis words were quiet and calm, but she could see the nervous tension in his eyes. \"Will the house fall on us?\" she asked fearfully.\n\n\"Not this house,\" he said resolutely. \"It's built like the Rock of Gibraltar.\"\n\nThe words were no sooner said than the great chimneys above began to topple and crash down. Fortunately, they were constructed on the outside of the house walls and collapsed outward without smashing through the roof. Most of the damage came from sections of the outer wall surrounding the house that cracked and crashed to the ground like rumbling thunder. Finally, the tremors began to taper away.\n\nThe house had stood through the worst of the earthquake and retained its structural integrity, looking as it had before except for the collapsed outer wall and three fallen chimneys. And because the inner walls were board over stone, decorated with paint or wallpaper, and the ceilings were mahogany, there were no clouds of dust from fallen plaster.\n\n\"Oh, Lord,\" murmured Margaret. \"What are we going to do?\"\n\n\"You see to the house. Assemble the servants and see if any are injured. Then put them to work cleaning up the mess. Outwardly, act as if restoring the house was your first priority. But begin packing only those valuables and clothes that you consider essential for our flight out of the country.\"\n\n\"You're forgetting Van Dorn's agents,\" she said, looking up quickly.\n\n\"The quake will prove to be a blessing. The city is in chaos. Bell and his fellow Van Dorn detectives have more-pressing problems on their hands than keeping an eye on us.\"\n\n\"What about you?\" asked Margaret, pulling her nightgown tightly around her body.\n\n\"I'm going to the bank to finish cleaning out the vault of all cash. I put most of the currency in trunks yesterday. When it is all packed, Abner and I will transport the trunks in the Rolls to the warehouse and load them on my railcar for our trip across the Canadian border.\"\n\n\"You make it sound easy,\" she said drily.\n\n\"The simpler, the better.\" He climbed from bed and headed for the bathroom. \"By this time tomorrow, our curtain will ring down on San Francisco and, within a few short months, we'll launch a new banking empire in Montreal.\"\n\n\"How much do you figure we'll have?\"\n\n\"I've already transferred fifteen million by telegraph wire to four different Canadian banks in four different provinces,\" he pointed out. \"We'll carry another four million with us in currency.\"\n\nNow she smiled broadly, the fear of the earthquake suddenly pushed aside. \"That's more than we had when we came to San Francisco twelve years ago.\"\n\n\"A lot more,\" Cromwell said comfortably. \"Nineteen million more, to be exact.\"\n\nBELL MISSED Cromwell by twenty minutes when he reached the mansion on Cushman Street. He studied the house and was surprised at the superficial damage after witnessing the unbelievable destruction of the buildings in the main part of the city. He climbed over the mound of fallen bricks that had been an eight-foot wall and walked up the driveway to the front door.\n\nHe pulled the doorbell knob, stood back, and waited. After a long minute, the door cracked open and the housekeeper peered out at Bell. \"What do you want?\" she demanded, all formal courtesy lost from the lingering fright of the earthquake.\n\n\"I'm from the Van Dorn Detective Agency, here to see Mr. Cromwell.\"\n\n\"Mr. Cromwell is not at home. He left soon after the awful earth shuddering.\"\n\nHe could see a figure approach through the curtains covering the glass of the door. \"Do you know if he went to his bank?\"\n\nThe housekeeper moved back as Margaret stepped onto the threshold. She stared at the man standing on the step in a suit covered with dust, grime, and soot. The face was blackened with ash, the eyes tired of seeing too much misery. She barely recognized him.\n\n\"Isaac, is that you?\"\n\n\"A little worse for wear, I'm afraid. But, yes, it's me.\" He removed his hat. \"Good to see you, Margaret. I'm happy you survived the quake without injury.\"\n\nHer dark eyes were wide and soft, as if she were seeing him for the first time. She stood back from the door. \"Please come in.\"\n\nHe entered and saw that she had been working at cleaning up the mess littering the floors of the mansion, mostly broken china, porcelain figurines, and Tiffany lampshades. She wore a comfortable red cotton skirt and a woolen sweater under a long apron. Her hair was wrapped in a tight curl atop her head, with loose strands falling beside her cheeks. Despite her plain appearance, she filled the air around her with a sweet fragrance. Whether she wore an expensive silk gown or an ordinary work dress, Margaret was still a stunning woman.\n\nShe led him into the parlor and offered him a chair by the fireplace, whose ashes had fanned out over the carpet when the chimney collapsed. \"Would you like a cup of tea?\"\n\n\"I'd sell my soul for a cup of coffee.\"\n\nShe turned to her housekeeper, who had overheard and simply nodded, then scurried off to the kitchen. Margaret found it difficult to gaze directly into Bell's hypnotic eyes. She found herself with a growing lust that she had experienced earlier in his presence.\n\n\"What do you want with Jacob?\" she demanded without preamble.\n\n\"I think you know the answer to that question,\" he replied in a flat tone.\n\n\"You cannot abduct him again. Not in San Francisco. You must know that by now.\"\n\n\"You and he have bribed too many corrupt politicians in this town to ever be held for your crimes,\" Bell said bitterly. He paused and looked around at the servants cleaning up the house and putting the furniture and d\u00e9cor back in its proper place. \"Looks like you intend on remaining in the city.\"\n\n\"Why not?\" she said, faking indignation. \"This is our city. We have a thriving business and close friends. Our hearts are open to the poor who live here. Why on earth should we leave?\"\n\nBell was almost tempted to believe Margaret. She was good, he thought, remembering the night they danced in the Brown Palace Hotel. Very good.\n\n\"Is Jacob at the bank?\"\n\n\"He left to survey the damage.\"\n\n\"I saw what's left of Market Street. Most all the buildings are ruined, few still stand, and the Cromwell Bank is right in the path of the growing inferno.\"\n\nMargaret seemed unconcerned. \"Jacob built the bank to stand for a thousand years, as he did this house, which, you can see, survived the earthquake while the more-pretentious Nob Hill mansions were heavily damaged if not destroyed. The House of Cromwell was built to endure.\"\n\n\"Be that as it may, Margaret,\" said Bell with deadly seriousness. \"But I warn you and Jacob not to consider leaving town.\"\n\nHer anger flared and she came to her feet. \"Do not threaten me, and do not think for a moment you can bully my brother. You're all bluff, Isaac. You have no authority, no influence, in this city. My brother and I will be here long after you're gone.\"\n\nHe came to his feet. \"I admit defeat on that score. I have no influence in this city or with its political machine. But once you cross the city limits, the two of you belong to me. You can count on it.\"\n\n\"Get out!\" she hissed fiercely. \"Get out now!\"\n\nFor a long moment, they glared at each other through wild eyes, infuriated with sudden hostility. Then Bell rose slowly and put on his hat as he walked to the front door.\n\nMargaret jumped to her feet and shouted, \"You'll never lay your hands on my brother again. Never in a thousand years! Over my dead body!\"\n\nHe paused to give her one final look. \"I wish you hadn't said that.\" And then he was gone out the door.\n\nABNER EXPERTLY zigzagged the Rolls-Royce to the Cromwell National Bank on Sutter and Hyde Streets, evading the heaps of bricks and swarms of people littering the streets. At one corner, a policeman stopped the car and ordered Abner to go to the Mechanics' Pavilion, the immense building and arena that housed a huge archive and was the scene for many fairs, sports events, and concerts. In desperate need of an emergency facility, the city had converted the pavilion into a hospital and morgue. The policeman insisted Cromwell put the Rolls into service as an ambulance for the injured.\n\n\"I have other uses for my car,\" Cromwell said loftily. He spoke through the speaking tube: \"Continue on to the bank, Abner.\"\n\nThe policeman pulled out his revolver and pointed the muzzle at Abner. \"I'm personally commandeering this car and seeing that you go directly to the pavilion or I'll blow your driver's head off and turn the car over to someone with decency.\"\n\nCromwell was not impressed. \"A pretty speech, Officer, but the car stays with me.\"\n\nThe policeman's face flushed with anger. He waved his revolver. \"I'm not going to warn you again\u2014\"\n\nThe policeman reeled back in shock, his eyes wide, as a bullet from Cromwell's Colt .38 ripped into his chest. He stood for a moment, bewildered, until his heart stopped and he crumpled to the pavement.\n\nThere was no hesitation, no concern, no remorse. Abner quickly slid from behind the wheel, snatched up the body as if it were a dummy, and set it on the front seat. Then he resumed his position behind the wheel, shifted into first gear, and drove away.\n\nThere was so much pandemonium on the streets\u2014people shouting, the occasional thunder of another building collapsing, and the shriek of the fire equipment\u2014that no one noticed the murder of the policeman. The few people who saw him fall to the ground thought he was injured and being picked up by a driver using his automobile as an ambulance.\n\n\"You'll dispose of him?\" Cromwell asked, as if suggesting that a servant throw a dead cockroach in the trash.\n\nAbner spoke into his speaking tube: \"I'll take care of the matter.\"\n\n\"When you're finished, drive into the freight-and-service entrance at the rear of the bank. Let yourself in the back door\u2014you have the key. I'll need you to help carry several trunks to the automobile.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\nAs the Rolls-Royce reached the corner of Sutter and Market Streets and Cromwell saw the approaching inferno and the magnitude of the destruction, he began to feel apprehensive about what he would find when they drove up to his bank. His growing fear quickly turned to elation when the building came into view.\n\nThe Cromwell National Bank had withstood the earthquake nearly unscathed. The unyielding stone structure had lived up to Cromwell's boast that it would last a thousand years. None of the walls or the great fluted columns had fallen. The only apparent damage was the shattered stained-glass windows, whose shards turned the sidewalk around the bank into a kaleidoscope of colors.\n\nAbner pulled the Rolls to a stop and opened the rear door. Several bank employees were milling around the front entrance, having come to work out of habit, not knowing how else to deal with the tragic interruption of their lives. Cromwell got out and was only halfway up the steps when they surrounded him, all talking at once, bombarding him with questions. He held up his hands for silence and reassured them: \"Please, please, go home and stay with your families. You can do nothing here. I promise your salaries will continue to be paid until this terrible calamity has ended and normal business can resume.\"\n\nIt was an empty promise. Not only did Cromwell have no intention of continuing their salaries while the bank was shut down; he could see that the flames sweeping through the business district of the city were only a few hours away from consuming the bank building. Though the walls were stone and unyielding, the wooden roof beams were highly susceptible to fire, which would quickly gut the building to an empty shell.\n\nAs soon as his employees were walking away from the bank, Cromwell took a set of large brass keys from his coat pocket and unlocked the massive bronze front door. He didn't bother to lock it after him, knowing the fire soon would consume any records inside. He headed straight for the vault. The time lock was set to engage the combination at eight o'clock. It was now seven forty-five. Cromwell calmly walked over to a leather chair at the loan officer's desk, brushed off the dust, sat down, and produced a cigar from a case in his breast pocket.\n\nFeeling as if he were in full command of the situation, he leaned back, lit the cigar, and blew a cloud of blue smoke toward the ornate ceiling of the lobby. The earthquake, he thought, could not have come at a more-opportune time. He might lose a few million, but the insurance would cover any damage to the bank building itself. His competitors tied up their assets in loans, but Cromwell always kept his assets in cash and invested on paper. Once it became known he had fled town, bank examiners would land on the Cromwell National Bank like vultures. With luck, his depositors might get ten cents on their invested dollar.\n\nAt precisely eight, the vault mechanism made a chiming sound as the locks clicked off one by one. Cromwell walked over to the vault and turned the huge wheel, which had spokes like a ship's helm, turned it, and released the bars from their shafts. Then he pulled the giant door open on its gigantic well-oiled hinges as easily as if it were attached to a kitchen cupboard and entered.\n\nIt took him two hours to finish loading four million dollars in large-denomination gold certificate bills into five large leather trunks. Abner arrived, after hiding the body of the policeman under the collapsed floor of a hardware store, and carried the trunks out to the Rolls. Cromwell was always impressed with the Irishman's brute strength. He himself could barely lift one end of a filled trunk off the floor, but Abner hoisted it onto one shoulder with barely a grunt.\n\nThe Rolls was parked in the underground freight entrance used by armored trucks and wagons that delivered currency or coins from the nearby San Francisco Mint. Cromwell helped Abner load the trunks in the spacious rear compartment before covering them with blankets he'd brought from his mansion. Under the blankets, he placed cushions from the chairs in the lobby of the bank, positioning them so that it looked as if they were dead bodies.\n\nCromwell went back inside and left the vault door open so the contents would be destroyed. Then he walked out and climbed in the open driver's section of the Rolls and sat beside Abner. \"Drive to our warehouse at the railyard,\" he instructed.\n\n\"We'll have to detour to the north docks and come around behind the fires if we want to reach the railyard,\" said Abner, shifting the car into first gear. As he skirted the huge fire consuming Chinatown, he headed toward Black Point, to the north. Already, wooden buildings were disintegrating into beds of smoldering ashes as broken chimneys stood like blackened tombstones.\n\nSome streets were clear enough to drive through, Abner avoiding those that were impassable because they were buried under collapsed walls. The Rolls was stopped twice by police, demanding the car be used as an ambulance, but Cromwell merely pointed to the makeshift bodies under the blankets and said they were on their way to the morgue. The police duly stepped back and waved them on.\n\nAbner had to weave his way around crowds of refugees from the burned-out areas, carrying their meager belongings. There was no panic; people moved slowly, as if they were out for a Sunday stroll. There was little conversation, and few looked back at what had been their homes before the calamity.\n\nCromwell was stunned at the intensity and swiftness of the fire as it consumed a nearby building. The towering blaze sent a shower of flaming sparks and debris onto the roof, which became a flaming torch within two or three minutes. Then a firestorm enveloped the entire building and consumed it in less time than it takes to boil water.\n\nRegular army troops from the surrounding military installations began arriving to maintain order and help the city firemen fight the flames. Ten companies of artillery, infantry, cavalry, and the Hospital Corps\u2014seventeen hundred men in all\u2014marched into the city with guns and cartridge belts, prepared to guard the ruins, the bank and store vaults and safes, the post office, and the Mint from looters. Their orders were to shoot any man caught stealing.\n\nThey passed a caravan of soldiers in four automobiles whose backseats were stacked with boxes of dynamite from the California Powder Works. Within minutes, explosions rocked the already-devastated city, as homes and stores were detonated and leveled to slow the rage of the fire. Losing the battle, the army quickly began to dynamite entire blocks in a last-ditch attempt to stop the onslaught of the conflagration.\n\nA sickly pale yellow light crept through the growing pall of smoke. There was no sun falling on the ruins except around the outskirts of the city. The dull ball of the sun appeared red and seemed smaller than its usual size. The army troops, firemen, and police retreated from the flames, herding the homeless to the west away from the approaching holocaust.\n\nAbner twisted the wheel of the Rolls as he evaded the rubble in the streets and the crowd of people struggling to reach the ferry terminal in the hope of crossing the bay to Oakland. At last, he came across a railroad track and followed it into the main Southern Pacific railyard until he reached Cromwell's warehouse. He drove up a ramp and parked next to the boxcar sitting at the loading dock. He noted the serial number painted on the side: 16455.\n\nCromwell did not know that Bell was aware the boxcar was not what it appeared to be. But the agent who was assigned to observe it had been called away by Bronson for other duties after the quake. All looked secure. Cromwell studied the padlock on the big sliding door of the boxcar to make sure it had not been tampered with. Satisfied, he inserted a key and removed the lock, which was more for show than for protection. Then he crouched under the car and came up though the trapdoor into the interior of the car. Once inside, he turned the heavy latches that sealed the door from within and slid it open.\n\nWithout instructions, Abner began carrying the heavy trunks filled with currency from the Rolls, hoisting them up to the floor of the boxcar, where Cromwell dragged them inside. When the last of the four million dollars was removed from the limousine, Cromwell looked down at Abner and said, \"Return to the house, gather up my sister and her luggage, then return here.\"\n\n\"You're staying, Mr. Cromwell?\" asked Abner.\n\nCromwell nodded. \"I have business to conduct across the yard at the dispatcher's office.\"\n\nAbner knew that making a round-trip from the warehouse to the mansion on Nob Hill was a near-impossible task, but he gave Cromwell a casual salute and said, \"I'll do my best to bring your sister here safe and sound.\"\n\n\"If anyone can do it, you can, Abner,\" said Cromwell. \"I have complete faith in you.\"\n\nThen Cromwell closed the sliding door of the boxcar and dropped down through the trapdoor. As Abner drove the Rolls down the ramp, he saw Cromwell making his way across the tracks toward the dispatcher's shack.\n\n## 39\n\nBELL HIKED DOWN NOB HILL AND STOPPED TO HELP a crew of men removing the debris of a small hotel that was little more than a mound of splintered wooden beams and crushed bricks. Underneath the wreckage, a little boy's voice could be heard sobbing. Bell and the men worked feverishly, throwing rubble off to the side and digging a hole toward the pitiful cries.\n\nAfter nearly an hour, they finally reached a small air pocket that had protected the boy from being crushed. In another twenty minutes, they had him free and carried him to a waiting car that would rush him to a first-aid facility. Except for his ankles, which appeared to be fractured, he had suffered no other injuries but bruises.\n\nThe little boy looked to be no more than five years old to Bell. As the boy cried for his mother and father, the men who had saved him looked at each other with great sorrow, knowing his parents, and possibly brothers and sisters, were lying crushed deep within the collapsed hotel. Without a word, they went their separate ways, saddened, but glad they were at least able to save him.\n\nTwo blocks farther on, Bell passed by a soldier supervising a group of men who were pressed into service removing bricks from the street and stacking them on the sidewalk. Bell thought one of the men with a handsome profile looked familiar. Out of curiosity, he stopped and asked an older man, who was observing the operation, if he could identify this man who had \"volunteered\" to clean up the street.\n\n\"He's my nephew,\" the older man said, laughing. \"His name is John Barrymore. He's an actor, performing in a play called The Dictator.\" He paused. \"Or should I say was performing. The theater was destroyed.\"\n\n\"I thought I recognized him,\" said Bell. \"I saw him play Macbeth in Chicago.\"\n\nThe stranger shook his head and grinned. \"It took an act of God to get Jack out of bed and the United States Army to get him to work.\"\n\nThe soldier also tried to put Bell to work picking up bricks from the street, but again Bell showed his Van Dorn identification and moved on. By now, the crowds had scattered and the streets were nearly empty, except for soldiers on horseback, and a few sightseers, who lingered to watch the fires.\n\nIn the time it took Bell to walk another eight blocks to Cromwell's bank, the heart of the city on both sides of Market Street was burning fiercely. The wall of fire was only half a dozen blocks away from the bank when he reached the steps leading up to the huge bronze doors. A young soldier, no more than eighteen years of age, stopped Bell and menaced him with the bayonet on the end of his rifle.\n\n\"If you were going to loot the bank, you're a dead man,\" he said in a voice that meant business.\n\nBell identified himself as a Van Dorn agent and lied, \"I'm here to check on the bank, to see if there are any records or currency that can be saved.\"\n\nThe soldier lowered his rifle. \"All right, sir, you may pass.\"\n\n\"Why don't you accompany me? I might need some extra muscle to remove anything of value.\"\n\n\"Sorry, sir,\" said the soldier, \"my orders are to patrol the street ahead of the flames to prevent looting. I don't suggest you spend much time inside. It's only a question of about an hour before the fire reaches this area.\"\n\n\"I'll be careful,\" Bell assured him. Then he walked up the steps and pushed open one of the doors, which Cromwell fortunately had left unlocked. Inside, it appeared as though the bank were closed for Sunday. The tellers' windows, desks, and other furniture made it look as if they were just waiting for business to resume on Monday morning. The only apparent damage was to the stained-glass windows.\n\nBell was surprised to find the vault door open. He entered and quickly saw that most of the currency was missing. Only silver and gold coins, along with some bills, their denominations no higher than five dollars, were still in the tellers' drawers and in their separate bins and containers. Jacob Cromwell had come and gone. The time Bell had spent helping to save the little boy had kept him from catching Cromwell in the act of removing his bank's liquid assets.\n\nThere was no doubt in Bell's mind now that Cromwell meant to use the disaster to escape the city and flee over the border. Bell cursed that his Locomobile was not drivable. Making his way on foot through the ruins was costing him time and was draining his strength. He left the bank and set out for the Customs House, which was also in the path of the fire.\n\nMARION DID not fully accept Bell's instructions. Against his advice, she climbed back up the shaky stairs and into her apartment. She packed a large suitcase with her family photographs, personal records, and jewelry, topping it off with some of her more-expensive clothes. She smiled as she folded two gowns and a silk cape. Only a woman would save her nice things, she thought. A man would care less about saving his good suits.\n\nMarion lugged the suitcase down the stairs and joined the other now-homeless people in the streets who were carrying or dragging trunks filled with their meager possessions, bedding, and household treasures. As they trudged up the hills of the city, none looked back at their homes and apartments, not wanting to dwell on the shattered and smashed remains where they had lived in peace and comfort until this day.\n\nThrough the night, tens of thousands fled the relentless fires. Strangely, there was no panic, no disorder. None of the women wept, none of the men showed anger at their misfortune. Behind them, picket lines of soldiers retreated before the flames, urging the horde to keep moving, occasionally prodding those who had become exhausted and stopped to rest.\n\nDragging heavy trunks up and down steep hills, block after block, mile after mile, eventually became too heavy a burden. Trunks by the thousands and their contents were abandoned, their owners completely played out. Some people found shovels and buried their trunks in vacant lots, hoping to retrieve them after the fires had died out.\n\nMarion's spirit and fortitude rose within her to a level she had not known existed before. She carried or dragged her suitcase as if she was lost in a stupor. She toiled hour after hour alone, no man offering his assistance. Men, and their families, were all occupied in the heroic attempt to save their own belongings. Finally, when Marion could carry her suitcase no farther, a teenage boy asked if he could help her. Marion cried as she thanked him for coming to her aid.\n\nIt was not until five o'clock in the morning that she and the boy reached Golden Gate Park and met a soldier, who directed them to tents that were being set up for the refugees. She entered one, thanking the boy, who refused her offer of money, and sagged onto a cot and fell deeply asleep in less than ten seconds.\n\nWHEN BELL reached the Customs House, it was like walking through a wall of fire. Though late at night, the city was lit by an eerie, oscillating orange light. Crowds were fleeing the flames, but not before hurriedly loading goods from houses and stores onto wagons and rushing to safety at the last minute. The fire was approaching the Customs House on three sides and threatening the entire block. Soldiers on the roofs of neighboring buildings fought a nonstop battle to extinguish the flames and save the Customs House, whose upper level had been badly damaged in the earthquake. The lower floors, however, were undamaged and being used as an operations center by the army and by a detachment of marines and navy personnel who'd been given the job of providing and maintaining fire hoses.\n\nBell passed through the army guards posted around the building and stepped inside. In a room off the main lobby, he found Bronson consulting with two policemen and an army officer over a large-scale map laid out on a conference table.\n\nBronson saw an ash-covered man, his face blackened by soot, standing in the door and did not recognize him for a few seconds. Then a smile spread across his face and he came over and embraced Bell.\n\n\"Isaac, am I ever glad to see you.\"\n\n\"Do you mind if I sit down, Horace?\" said an exhausted Bell. \"I've walked a very long way.\"\n\n\"Of course.\" Bronson led him to a chair in front of a rolltop desk. \"Let me get you a cup of coffee. Despite the inferno around us, we have no way of heating it\u2014but nobody cares.\"\n\n\"I'd love some, thank you.\"\n\nBronson poured a cup from an enamel pot and set it on the desk in front of Bell. A tall man with topaz brown eyes, shaggy dark brown hair, and wearing an unblemished white shirt with tie, came over and stood beside Bronson.\n\n\"Looks like you've seen better days,\" he said.\n\n\"Many of them,\" replied Bell.\n\nBronson turned to the stranger. \"Isaac, this is the writer Jack London. He's writing an essay on the earthquake.\"\n\nBell nodded and shook hands without standing. \"Seems to me you'll have enough material for ten books.\"\n\n\"Maybe one,\" said London, smiling. \"Can you tell me what you've seen?\"\n\nBell gave London a brief report of what he had seen around town, leaving out the horror of shooting the woman in the burning wreckage. When Bell was finished, London thanked him and walked over to a table, where he sat down and began organizing his notes.\n\n\"How did you make out with Cromwell? Did he and his sister survive?\"\n\n\"Alive and well and headed over the border out of the country.\"\n\n\"Are you sure?\" asked Bronson.\n\n\"I got to Cromwell's bank too late. The vault was cleaned out of all denominations over five dollars. He must have made off with three, maybe four, million.\"\n\n\"He won't be able to leave the city. Not with the mess it's in. The wharfs are jammed with thousands of refugees trying to get over to Oakland. No way he could smuggle that much money in just a couple of suitcases.\"\n\n\"He'd find a way,\" said Bell, enjoying the cold coffee and feeling almost human again.\n\n\"What about Margaret? Did she go with him?\"\n\nBell shook his head. \"I don't know. I went by the house before noon and Margaret acted as if she and Jacob were staying in the city and going to fight us in court. After I found out he had fled with his bank's currency, I could not return to Nob Hill because of the advancing wall of fire. I barely made it here as is.\"\n\n\"And Marion?\" Bronson asked cautiously.\n\n\"I sent her to Golden Gate Park. She should be safe there.\"\n\nBronson started to reply, but a boy no older than twelve ran into the room. He wore a broad cap, heavy sweater, and knickers\u2014short pants gathered at the knee. It was obvious that he had been running a long distance because he was so out of breath he could barely speak.\n\n\"I'm...I'm looking for...for Mr. Bronson,\" he gasped haltingly.\n\nBronson looked up, interested. \"I'm Bronson,\" he answered. \"What do you want with me?\"\n\n\"Mr. Lasch...\"\n\nBronson looked at Bell. \"Lasch is one of my agents. He was at our meeting shortly after the quake. He's guarding a government warehouse at the railyard. Go on, son.\"\n\n\"Mr. Lasch said you would pay me five dollars for coming here and telling you what he said.\"\n\n\"Five dollars?\" Bronson stared at the boy suspiciously. \"That's a lot of money for somebody your age.\"\n\nBell smiled, retrieved a ten-dollar bill from his wallet, and passed it to the boy. \"What's you name, son?\"\n\n\"Stuart Leuthner.\"\n\n\"You've come a long way from the railyard through the fire and devastation,\" said Bell. \"Take the ten dollars and tell us what Lasch told you.\"\n\n\"Mr. Lasch said to tell Mr. Bronson that the boxcar parked in front of Mr. Cromwell's warehouse is gone.\"\n\nBell leaned toward the boy, his face suddenly clouded. \"Say again,\" he instructed.\n\nThe boy looked at Bell, apprehension in his eyes. \"He said Mr. Cromwell's boxcar was gone.\"\n\nBell stared at Bronson. \"Damn!\" he muttered. \"He has fled the city.\" Then he gave the boy another ten-dollar bill. \"Where are your parents?\"\n\n\"They're helping pass out food in Jefferson Square.\"\n\n\"You'd better find them. They must be worried about you. And, mind you, stay away from the fire.\"\n\nWarren's eyes widened as he stared at the two ten-dollar bills. \"Gosh almighty, twenty dollars. Gee, thanks, mister.\" Then he turned and ran from the building.\n\nBell sank back into the chair at the rolltop desk. \"A train?\" he murmured. \"Where did he come by a locomotive?\"\n\n\"All I know is, every ferry is jammed with refugees fleeing across the bay to Oakland. From there, the Southern Pacific is gathering every passenger train within a hundred miles to transport them away from the area. No way he could have hired a locomotive, crew, and tender.\"\n\n\"His freight car didn't roll away by itself.\"\n\n\"Trust me,\" said Bronson, \"no freight cars are being ferried to Oakland. Only people. The only moving trains are those coming in with relief supplies from the east.\"\n\nBell came to his feet again, his eyes cold and fixed on Bronson. \"Horace, I need an automobile. I can't waste hours hiking the part of the city that's not in flames.\"\n\n\"Where are you going?\"\n\n\"First, I have to find Marion and make certain she's safe,\" Bell answered. \"Then I'm heading for the railyard and the dispatcher. If Cromwell hired, or stole, a train to take him out of the city, there has to be a record at the dispatcher's office.\"\n\nBronson grinned like a fox. \"Will a Ford Model K do?\"\n\nBell looked at him in surprise. \"The new Model K has a six-cylinder engine and can churn out forty horsepower. Do you have one?\"\n\n\"I borrowed it from a rich grocery store owner. It's yours, if you promise to have it back by noon tomorrow.\"\n\n\"I owe you, Horace.\"\n\nBronson placed his hands on Bell's shoulders. \"You can pay me back by seizing Cromwell and his evil sister.\"\n\n## 40\n\nMARION SLEPT FOR SIX HOURS. WHEN SHE AWOKE, she found the tent inhabited by five other single women. One was sitting on her cot, weeping. Two looked dazed and lost, while the others showed their strength by volunteering to help feed the suffering at the kitchen facilities that were being set up in the park. Marion rose from her cot, straightened her clothes, and marched with her new friends to several large tents that had been erected by the army as emergency hospitals.\n\nShe was immediately instructed by a doctor to treat and bandage wounds that did not require the services of doctors, who were busy in surgery helping to save the lives of the badly injured. Marion lost track of time. She shrugged off sleep and exhaustion by working in a shelter for children. Many were so brave it tore her heart. After tending the cuts and bruises of a little three-year-old girl who had lost her family, she turned away in tears when the girl thanked her in a tiny voice.\n\nShe moved to the next cot and knelt beside a boy brought in from surgery after having his broken leg set. As she tucked him in a blanket, she felt a presence behind her. Then came a familiar voice.\n\n\"Pardon me, nurse, but my arm fell off. Can you mend it?\"\n\nMarion spun around and threw herself into the open arms of Isaac Bell.\n\n\"Oh, Isaac, thank God you're all right. I was worried about you.\"\n\nBell smiled broadly through the grime on his face. \"A little the worse for wear, but still standing.\"\n\n\"How did you ever find me?\"\n\n\"I'm a detective, remember? The emergency hospital was the first place I looked. I knew you'd be following in the footsteps of Florence Nightingale, your heart is too big not to help those in need, especially children.\" He squeezed her and whispered in her ear. \"I'm proud of you, Mrs. Bell.\"\n\nShe pushed herself back and stared up into his eyes in confusion. \"Mrs. Bell?\"\n\nBell's smile remained fixed. \"Not exactly a romantic time or place to propose, but will you marry me?\"\n\n\"Isaac Bell,\" she cried, \"how dare you do this to me.\" Then she softened, pulled his head down, and kissed him. When she released him, she said slyly, \"Of course I will marry you. It's the best offer I've had all day.\"\n\nHis smile faded, his lips tightened, and his voice harshened. \"I can't stay but a minute. Cromwell and Margaret are fleeing San Francisco. As long as there's a breath in me, I can't let a murdering scum like Cromwell go free.\"\n\nHis fervor frightened her, but she embraced him fiercely. \"It isn't every day a girl is proposed to by her lover who then runs away.\" She kissed him again. \"You come back, you hear?\"\n\n\"As soon as I can.\"\n\n\"I'll be waiting here. I don't expect any of us will be leaving our shantytown soon.\"\n\nBell held up her hands and kissed them both. Then he turned and disappeared from the hospital tent.\n\nBELL DID not consider returning to the Cromwell mansion on Nob Hill to see if Margaret had flown. He was certain she had fled with her brother.\n\nThe palace houses of the rich and powerful were great blazing bonfires. From every part of town came the roaring of the flames, the rumble of crashing walls, and the explosions of dynamite.\n\nThe Model K Ford was light and fast. And it was durable. It climbed over the rubble in the streets like a mountain goat. Unknowingly, Bell took nearly the same route as Cromwell and Abner, skirting along the northern waterfront away from the fire. Barely half an hour had passed since he had left Marion when he stopped the car on the ramp at Cromwell's warehouse, satisfying himself that the boxcar was indeed missing.\n\nSwitch engines were coupling cars to passenger trains in order to evacuate refugees to the southern part of the state, which still had open tracks, while freight cars were being dispatched to transport food supplies and medicine from Los Angeles. He drove the Ford into the railyard along the tracks until he reached a wooden building with a sign above the roof advertising it as the DISPATCH OFFICE. Bell stopped the car, leaped to the ground, and stepped inside.\n\nSeveral clerks were busily working on the paperwork to dispatch trains and none looked up as Bell entered. \"Where can I find the chief dispatcher?\" he asked a harried clerk.\n\nThe clerk nodded toward a door. \"In there.\"\n\nBell found the dispatcher writing numbers on a huge blackboard that displayed the tracks leading to and from the railyard. The sign on the desk read MORTON GOULD. He was a short man with a recessed chin and hawklike beak for a nose. The board showed over thirty different trains dispatched over track that spread from the railyard like a spiderweb. Bell could not help but wonder which one included Cromwell's boxcar.\n\n\"Mr. Gould?\"\n\nGould turned and saw a man who looked as though he'd walked from one side of hell to the other. \"Can't you see I'm busy? If you want to catch a train out of the city, you'll have to go to the Southern Pacific depot\u2014or what's left of it.\"\n\n\"My name is Bell. I'm with the Van Dorn Detective Agency. I'm looking for a boxcar with the serial number 16455.\"\n\nGould motioned toward the board. \"Southern Pacific is moving heaven and earth transporting thousands of homeless out of the city on our fleet of ferryboats and tugs over to Oakland, where we've assembled passenger trains waiting to evacuate them from the area. Over fourteen hundred relief cars are coming in from all over the country. Cars\u2014passenger and freight\u2014on this side of the bay, all three hundred of them, are being routed around the lower part of the state. How do you expect me to keep track of just one car?\"\n\nBell studied Gould's eyes. \"This particular car belonged to Jacob Cromwell.\"\n\nIt was there, a barely perceivable indication of recognition. \"I don't know any Jacob Cromwell.\" Gould paused to stare apprehensively at Bell. \"What's this all about?\"\n\n\"You dispatched a locomotive to pull his private freight car.\"\n\n\"You're crazy. I wouldn't dispatch private trains during an emergency such as this.\"\n\n\"How much did he pay you?\"\n\nThe dispatcher lifted his hands. \"I couldn't be paid by a man I don't know. It's ridiculous.\"\n\nBell ignored Gould's lie. \"Where was the destination of Cromwell's train?\"\n\n\"Now, look here,\" Gould said, fear growing in his eyes. \"I want you out of here, Van Dorn cop or no Van Dorn cop.\"\n\nBell removed his hat and made a motion as if cleaning the inside band. The next thing the dispatcher knew, he was staring into the business end of a derringer. Bell pressed the twin barrels against the side of Gould's left eye socket. \"Unless you tell the truth in the next sixty seconds, I will shoot and the bullet will horribly disfigure your face besides blasting away both of your eyes. Do you wish to spend the rest your life as a mutilated blind man?\"\n\nThe hypnotic grip of terror crossed Gould's face. \"You're mad.\"\n\n\"You have fifty seconds left before you see nothing.\"\n\n\"You can't!\"\n\n\"I can and I will, unless you tell me what I want to know.\"\n\nThe cold expression, along with the icy voice, was enough for Gould to believe the Van Dorn detective was not bluffing. He looked around wildly, as if there was a way to escape, but Bell continued remorselessly.\n\n\"Thirty seconds,\" he said, pulling back the hammer of the derringer.\n\nGould's shoulders collapsed, his eyes filled with terror. \"No, please,\" he murmured.\n\n\"Tell me!\"\n\n\"All right,\" Gould said in a low tone. \"Cromwell was here. He paid me ten thousand dollars in cash to hook his car up to a fast locomotive and direct the train onto a track heading south.\"\n\nBell's eyes partially closed in incomprehension. \"South?\"\n\n\"It's the only way out of the city,\" replied Gould. \"All the train ferries are being used to transport people over to Oakland and the relief trains back. There was no other way he could go.\"\n\n\"How was he routed?\"\n\n\"Down to San Jose, then around the bay to the north until his train turned east on the main line over the mountains and across Nevada to Salt Lake City.\"\n\n\"How long ago did he leave the railyard?\" Bell demanded.\n\n\"About four hours.\"\n\nBell continued the pressure. \"When is he scheduled to reach Salt Lake City?\"\n\nGould shook his head in quick spasms. \"Can't say. His engineer will have to spend a lot of time on sidetracks so the relief trains can fireball through. If he's lucky, his train will reach Salt Lake by late tomorrow afternoon.\"\n\n\"What type of engine did you assign to pull Cromwell's private freight car?\"\n\nGould leaned over a desk and examined the notations in large ledger. \"I gave him number 3025, a 4-6-2 Pacific, built by Baldwin.\"\n\n\"A fast engine?\"\n\nGould nodded. \"We have a few that are faster.\"\n\n\"When will one be available?\"\n\n\"Why do you ask?\"\n\n\"I want the fastest engine you've got,\" answered Bell, menacing Gould with the derringer. \"This is a vital emergency. I have to catch Cromwell's train.\"\n\nGould consulted his big board. \"I have number 3455, a 4-4-2 Baldwin Atlantic. She's faster than a Pacific. But she's in the Oakland yard for repairs.\"\n\n\"How long before she's ready to run?\"\n\n\"The repair shop should have her ready to go in another three hours.\"\n\n\"I'll take her,\" Bell said without hesitation. \"See that Van Dorn is charged for the time it's in use.\"\n\nGould looked as if he was going to protest and argue with Bell, but, staring at the derringer, he thought better of it. \"If you report me, I could lose my job and go to jail.\"\n\n\"Just give me that engine and route me around San Jose toward Salt Lake City and I'll say nothing.\"\n\nGould sighed thankfully and began making out the paperwork to charter and dispatch a route for the locomotive under the Van Dorn Detective Agency. When he was finished, Bell took the papers and studied them for a moment. Satisfied, he left the office without another word, climbed in the Ford, and drove toward the Ferry Building.\n\n## 41\n\nNEARING THE FERRY BUILDING, BELL THREW A BLANKET over his head as he drove through a shower of cinders. He could see that Chinatown was gone, leaving little more than hundreds of piles of charred, smoldering ruins. The Ferry Building had survived with only minor damage to its clock tower. Bell noted that the clock had stopped at 5:12, the time the earthquake struck.\n\nThe streets and sidewalks around the Ferry Building looked like a vast mob scene. Thousands were fleeing, believing the entire city would be destroyed. There was pandemonium and bedlam in the jumbled mass of people, some wrapped in blankets and loaded down with what possessions they were able to carry onto the ferryboat. Some pushed baby buggies or toy wagons, and yet, amid the nightmare, everyone was gracious, courteous, and considerate toward others.\n\nBell stopped beside a young man who seemed to be merely standing around and watching the fire across the street from the wharfs. He held up a twenty-dollar gold piece. \"If you know how to drive a car, take this one to the Customs House and turn it over to Horace Bronson of the Van Dorn Detective Agency and this is yours.\"\n\nThe young man's eyes widened in anticipation, not so much from the money but the chance to drive an automobile. \"Yes, sir,\" he said brightly. \"I know how to drive my uncle's Maxwell.\"\n\nBell watched with amusement as the boy clashed the gears and drove off down the crowded street. Then he turned and joined the mass of humanity that was escaping the destruction of the city.\n\nWithin three days, over two hundred twenty-five thousand people left the peninsula where San Francisco stood, all carried free of charge by the Southern Pacific Railroad to wherever they wished to travel. Within twenty-four hours of the quake, overloaded ferryboats were departing San Francisco for Oakland every hour.\n\nBell showed his Van Dorn credentials and boarded a ferry called the Buena Vista. He found an open place to sit above the paddle wheels and turned back to watch the flames shooting hundreds of feet into the air, with the smoke rising over a thousand feet. It looked as if the whole city was one vast bonfire.\n\nOnce he stepped off the Mole in Oakland, a railroad official directed him to the repair shop where his locomotive was sitting. The mammoth steel monster was a grand sight up close. It was painted black from the cowcatcher to the rear of its coal tender. Bell guessed the cab's roof was at least fifteen feet above the rails. The big drive wheels were eighty-one inches in diameter. In its time, the Atlantic-type locomotive was a masterwork of mechanical power.\n\nTo Bell, it looked mean and ugly. The number 3455 was painted in small white letters on the side of the cab; SOUTHERN PACIFIC, in larger type, ran across the side of the tender, which fueled the boiler with coal and water. Bell walked up to a man wearing the traditional striped engineer's coveralls and striped cap with brim. The man held a big oil can with a long spout and looked to be oiling the bearings on the connecting rods running from the piston cylinder to the drive wheels.\n\n\"A mighty fine locomotive,\" said Bell admiringly.\n\nThe engineer looked up. He was shorter than Bell, with strands of salt-and-pepper hair straying from under his cap. The face was craggy from years of leaning out a cab window into the full wind stream from a speeding engine. The eyebrows over a pair of sky blue eyes were curved and bushy. Bell judged he was younger than he looked.\n\n\"None better than Adeline,\" the engineer answered.\n\n\"Adeline?\"\n\n\"Easier to remember than her four-figured number. Most locomotives are given a woman's name.\"\n\n\"Adeline looks very powerful,\" said Bell admiringly.\n\n\"She's built for heavy passenger service. Came out of the Baldwin Works no more than five months ago.\"\n\n\"How fast will she go?\" asked Bell.\n\n\"Depends on how many cars she's hauling.\"\n\n\"Let's say none.\"\n\nThe engineer thought a moment. \"On a long, straight stretch of open, empty track, she'd top a hundred miles an hour.\"\n\n\"My name is Bell.\" He handed the engineer the paperwork. \"I've chartered your engine for a special job.\"\n\nThe engineer studied the papers. \"Van Dorn detective outfit, huh. What's so special?\"\n\n\"Ever hear of the Butcher Bandit?\"\n\n\"Who hasn't? I've read in the newspapers he's about as deadly as they come.\"\n\nBell wasted no detailed explanation. \"We're going after him. He chartered a Pacific-type locomotive to haul his special private car. He's steaming to Salt Lake City before heading north for the Canadian border. I reckon he has a five-hour head start.\"\n\n\"More like six, by the time we take on coal and get a load of steam up.\"\n\n\"I was told there were repairs. Are they completed?\"\n\nThe engineer nodded. \"The shop replaced a faulty bearing in one of the truck wheels.\"\n\n\"The sooner we get going, the better.\" Bell paused to extend his hand. \"By the way, my name is Isaac Bell.\"\n\nThe engineer's shake was vigorous. \"Nils Lofgren. My fireman is Marvin Long.\"\n\nBell pulled his watch from its pocket and checked the time. \"I'll see you in forty-five minutes.\"\n\n\"We'll be at the coal-loading dock just up the track.\"\n\nBell hurried toward the Oakland terminal until he came to a wooden building that housed the Western Union office. The wire chief told him that only one wire was open to Salt Lake City and it was hours behind getting messages through. Bell explained his mission and the chief was most cooperative.\n\n\"What's your message?\" he asked. \"I'll see that it's sent straightaway to our office in Salt Lake.\"\n\nBell's wire read:\n\nTo the Van Dorn office director, Salt Lake City. Imperative you stop locomotive hauling freight car number 16455. It is carrying the Butcher Bandit. Use every precaution. He is extremely dangerous. Seize and hold until I arrive.\n\nIsaac Bell, special agent\n\nHe waited until the telegrapher tapped out the message before leaving the office and walking to where Lofgren and Long were taking on coal and water. He climbed up into the cab and was introduced to Long, a heavy, broad-shouldered man with large muscles stretching the sleeves of his denim shirt. He wore no hat and his red hair almost matched the flames inside the door to the firebox. He pulled off a leather glove and shook Bell's hand with a hand that was hard and callused from long hours wielding a coal shovel.\n\n\"Ready whenever you are,\" announced Lofgren.\n\n\"Let's do it,\" answered Bell.\n\nAs Long stoked the fire, Lofgren took his seat on the right side of the cab, locked the reverser Johnson bar into place, opened the cylinder cocks, and pulled the rope above his head down twice, causing the steam whistle to scream an about-to-move-forward warning. Then he gripped the long throttle lever and pulled it back. Adeline began to move and slowly gather speed.\n\nTen minutes later, Lofgren was signaled to switch onto the main track east. He eased the throttle back and the big Atlantic began to move forward. Slowly, the train wound through the yard. Long began maintaining his fire, light, level, and bright. In the five years he'd stoked locomotive fires, he'd developed a technique that kept the fire from burning too thin or too thick. Lofgren yanked on the throttle, the drive wheels churned amid a loud blast of steam, and black smoke spewed out the top of the stack.\n\nBell took the seat on the left side of the cab, feeling vastly relieved that he was at last on what he felt certain was the final chase to catch Cromwell and hand him over to the authorities in Chicago, dead or alive.\n\nHe found the vibration of the locomotive over the rails as soothing as floating in a rubber raft on a mountain lake, the chug of the steam propelling the drive wheels and the warm heat from the firebox positively restful for a man on a mission. Before they reached Sacramento and swung east across the Sierra Nevada Mountains, Bell slid down in his seat, yawned, and closed his eyes. Within a minute, he was in a sound sleep, amid the clangor of the speeding locomotive, as Adeline aimed her big cowcatcher toward the Sierra Nevada and Donner Pass.\n\n## 42\n\nABNER WEED'S BARREL CHEST AND BEEFY SHOULDERS were sweating as he shoveled coal into the firebox. There was an art to creating an efficient fire, but he had no idea how. He simply heaved coal through the open door into the fire, ignoring the complaints from the engineer who shouted that too much coal would drop the fire temperature.\n\nAbner took on the job only to spell the fireman, Ralph Wilbanks, a big, burly man who soon became exhausted after a few hours of sustaining the necessary steam temperature that kept the big Pacific locomotive running up the steep grades of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. They traded one hour shoveling, one hour of rest.\n\nAbner stayed alert during the effort, his Smith & Wesson revolver stuffed in his belt. He kept an eye on the engineer, who was constantly busy maintaining a fast but safe speed around the many mountain curves while watching the track ahead for any unforeseen obstacle, such as an unscheduled train coming in the opposite direction. At last, they crested the summit and it was all downhill until they met the flat-lands of the desert.\n\n\"We're coming into Reno,\" yelled Wes Hall, the engineer, above the roar of the flames in the firebox. An intense man with the features of a weathered cowboy, he would have stopped the train in protest when he found his passengers demanded he set speed records across the mountains but relented after Abner put the Smith & Wesson to his head and threatened to kill him, and his fireman, if they didn't do as they were told. A thousand dollars in cash from Cromwell added to the persuasion, and Hall and Wilbanks now pushed the Pacific locomotive through the mountains as fast as they dared.\n\n\"The signal ahead reads red,\" said Wilbanks.\n\nHall waved that he saw it, too. \"We'll have to stop and lay over on a siding.\"\n\nAbner pointed the gun at the engineer's head. \"Lay on the whistle. We're going through.\"\n\n\"We can't,\" said Hall, staring Abner in the eye. \"There must be an express carrying relief supplies to San Francisco coming toward us on the same track. I'd rather you shoot me than cause a collision with another train that would kill all of us and stop traffic in both directions for maybe a week.\"\n\nAbner slowly slid the revolver back under his belt. \"All right. But get us back on the main track as soon as the relief express passes.\"\n\nHall began closing the throttle arm. \"We can use the delay to take on coal and water.\"\n\n\"All right. But mind your manners or I'll blow holes in the both of you.\"\n\n\"Ralph and I can't go on much longer. We're done in.\"\n\n\"You'll earn your money\u2014and stay alive\u2014by pushing on,\" Abner said threateningly.\n\nLeaning out the left side of the cab, Abner could see the train depot and the small town of Reno, Nevada, looming in the distance. As they came nearer, Abner spotted a figure waving a small red flag standing by a switch stand. Hall blew the whistle to announce their arrival and to let the flagman know that he understood the signal to slow down and was prepared to be switched off the main track.\n\nHall precisely stopped the Pacific's tender directly under an elevated wooden water tank on one side of the track and a coal bin on the other. Wilbanks jumped up on the tender, grabbed a rope, and pulled down the spout hinged to the tank until water flowed on board due to gravity. Climbing down from the cab with an oil can, Hall began checking all the bearings and fittings of the locomotive, and, since Cromwell had refused to wait for the arrival of a brakeman, he had to examine the bearings on the wheels of the tender and freight car as well.\n\nKeeping a sharp eye on Hall and Wilbanks, Abner moved past the tender to the door of the freight car. He rapped twice with the butt of his Smith & Wesson, waited a moment, then knocked again. The door was unlatched from the inside and slid open. Jacob and Margaret Cromwell stood there, looking down at Abner.\n\n\"What's the delay?\" asked Cromwell.\n\nAbner tilted his head toward the locomotive. \"We switched to a siding to let an express relief train through. While we're waiting, the crew is taking on coal and water.\"\n\n\"Where are we?\" asked Margaret. She was dressed uncharacteristically in men's pants, with the legs tucked into a pair of boots. A blue sweater covered the upper half of her body, and she wore a bandanna on her hair.\n\n\"The town of Reno,\" answered Abner. \"We're out of the Sierras. From now on, the landscape flattens out into desert.\"\n\n\"How about the track ahead?\" inquired Cromwell. \"Any more relief trains to delay our passage?\"\n\n\"I'll check with the switchman for scheduled westbound trains. But we'll have to stand aside as they come.\"\n\nCromwell jumped to the ground and spread out a map on the ground. The lines drawn across it displayed the railroads in the United States west of the Mississippi. He pointed to the spot signifying Reno. \"Okay, we're here. The next junction with tracks going north is Ogden, Utah.\"\n\n\"Not Salt Lake City?\" asked Margaret.\n\nCromwell shook his head. \"The Southern Pacific main line joins the Union Pacific tracks north of Salt Lake. We swing north at the Ogden junction and head toward Missoula, Montana. From there, we take the Northern Pacific rails into Canada.\"\n\nAbner kept his eyes trained on the crew. He saw the fireman struggle with the coal flowing from the chute into the tender and the engineer moving about as if he were in a trance. \"The crew is dead on their feet. We'll be lucky if they can run the locomotive another four hours.\"\n\nCromwell consulted the map. \"There's a railyard in Winnemucca, Nevada, about a hundred seventy miles up the track. We'll pick up another crew there.\"\n\n\"What about these two?\" inquired Abner. \"We can't let them run to the nearest telegraph office and alert law enforcement up the line that we're coming.\"\n\nCromwell thought for a moment. \"We'll keep them with us, then make them jump the train in a desolate part of the desert. We'll take no chances of Van Dorn agents getting wise to our leaving San Francisco and wiring officials down the line to stop our train, so we'll cut the telegraph lines as we go.\"\n\nMargaret took a long look toward the Sierras and the track they had traveled. \"Do you think Isaac is onto us?\"\n\n\"Only a question of how long, dear sister,\" he said with his usual high degree of self-assurance. \"But by the time he realizes we've flown San Francisco and finds a locomotive to give chase, we'll be halfway to Canada and he'll have no chance to stop us.\"\n\n## 43\n\nADELINEWAS LOFGREN'S PRIDE AND SWEETHEART, and he spoke to her as if the locomotive were a beautiful woman instead of a steel, fire-breathing monster that charged up the curving grades of the Sierras and through Donner Pass. Without having to pull two hundred tons of cars weighed down with passengers and luggage, she performed effortlessly.\n\nThe spring air was cool and crisp, and snow still covered the ground. Donner Pass was the notorious section of the mountains where the most poignant event in western history had taken place. A wagon train made up of a dozen families that would pass into legend as the Donner party became trapped in the winter blizzards of 1846 and suffered terribly until rescued. Many survived by eating the dead. Out of the original eighty-seven men, women, and children, only forty-five lived to reach California.\n\nBell had been fully awake since passing through Sacramento and was finding the scenery spectacular\u2014the towering, rocky peaks; the forest of fir trees, some with branches still laden with snow; the summit tunnels, which were blasted out of granite by Chinese laborers in 1867. Adeline plunged into the black mouth of a long tunnel, the roar of the train's exhaust reverberating like a hundred bass drums. Soon, a tiny circle of light materialized ahead in the darkness and quickly grew wider. Then Adeline burst into the bright sunlight with a noise like thunder. A few miles later came the panoramic view of Donner Lake, as the train began its long, curving descent to the desert.\n\nBell stared with some uneasiness down the sheer thousand-foot drop that was within a step or two of the edge, as the locomotive swung around a sharp bend. He did not need to urge Lofgren to go faster. The engineer was pushing the big locomotive at nearly thirty-five miles an hour around the mountain curves, a good ten miles faster than was considered safe.\n\n\"We're across the summit,\" announced Lofgren, \"and have a downgrade for the next seventy-five miles.\"\n\nBell stood and gave Long his fireman's seat on the left side of the cab. Long thankfully sat down and took a break, as Lofgren closed off steam and allowed Adeline to coast down through the pass in the mountains. Long had been shoveling coal almost nonstop since they had swung onto the main line at Sacramento and up the steep grade into the Sierras.\n\n\"Can I give you a hand?\" asked Bell.\n\n\"Be my guest,\" said Long, lighting up a pipe. \"I'll tell you how to shovel the coal into the firebox. Even though we're loafing along for the next hour, we can't let the fire die down.\"\n\n\"You don't just throw it in with a shovel?\"\n\nLong grinned. \"There's more to it than that. And it's not called a shovel; it's a fireman's scoop, size number four.\"\n\nFor the next two hours, Bell labored in front of the maze of pipes and valves as he learned the intricacies of firing a locomotive. The tender was rocking from side to side around the turns, making it difficult to shovel coal into the firebox. It was easy work, however, with Adeline running downhill. He shoveled just enough coal to keep the steam up. He quickly learned to open the firebox door wide, after hitting the scoop against it and spilling coal over the floor. And instead of stacking the coal in a fiery pile, he developed the knack for making a level fire that burned bright and orange.\n\nThe sharp curves were left behind as their arc increased as they dropped down to the foothills. An hour after Bell turned the scoop over to Long, the fireman shouted to Lofgren: \"We've only got enough water and coal for another fifty miles.\"\n\nLofgren nodded without taking his eyes from the track ahead. \"Just enough to make Reno. We can put in for coal and water there and take on a relay crew.\"\n\nBell realized that the race over the mountains had taken its toll on Lofgren and Long. He could see that the strain on body and mind had drained the staunch engineer, and the physical effort of maintaining steam on the steep grades had sapped the strength of the indefatigable fireman. It seemed evident to Bell that Cromwell's train crew must be worn out as well. He checked his watch and could only wonder if they had narrowed the gap.\n\n\"How long will it take to assemble another crew?\" Bell asked.\n\n\"As long as it takes to coal and water the tender,\" replied Lofgren. Then he smiled wearily, revealing a set of crooked teeth, and added, \"Providing we're lucky and one happens to be standing by.\"\n\n\"I'm grateful to you both,\" Bell said sincerely. \"You did a heroic job getting over the Sierras. You must have set a record.\"\n\nLofgren pulled out his big Waltham railroad watch with its locomotive engraved on the back of the case. \"Indeed,\" he laughed. \"We shaved eight minutes off the old record set by Marvin, me, and Adeline six months ago.\"\n\n\"You love this engine, don't you?\" said Bell.\n\nLofgren laughed. \"Take all the Atlantic locomotives ever put on rails: they're the finest in the world, all built exactly the same, with identical dimensions and construction. Yet, every one is different\u2014like people, they all have diverse personalities. Some can run faster than the others, with the same steam pressure. Some are finicky while others are jinxed, always having bad luck with repair problems. But Adeline, she's a sweetheart. No whims; never cranky, eccentric, or ill-tempered. Treat her like a lady and she's like a thoroughbred mare that wins races.\"\n\n\"You make her sound almost human.\"\n\n\"Adeline may be a hundred seven tons of iron and steel, but she's got a heart.\"\n\nThey were nearing Reno, and Lofgren pulled the whistle cord to announce his intention of switching to the siding for coal and water. He eased back on the throttle to slow the locomotive. The switchman threw the switch lever to link the tapering rails, as he had done for Cromwell's train earlier. Then he waved a green flag to alert Lofgren that the siding was open.\n\nEven before Adeline rolled to a stop, Bell had jumped from the cab and took off running across the railyard to the depot, which looked like a thousand other small-town depots across the nation. It was characterized by wooden slat walls, arched windows, and a peaked roof. The loading platform was empty, giving Bell the impression that no passenger trains were due to stop there anytime soon.\n\nHe stepped inside, past the freight-and-ticket office, and stopped at the telegrapher's small room. Two men were in the middle of a deep conversation when he walked in. It struck him that their faces looked serious and grim.\n\n\"I beg your pardon,\" said Bell, \"I'm looking for the stationmaster.\"\n\nThe taller of the two men stared at Bell for a moment before nodding. \"I'm the stationmaster, Burke Pulver. What can I do for you?\"\n\n\"Has a train come through with only one freight car in the last ten hours heading east?\"\n\nPulver nodded. \"They were stopped on the siding for two hours while two express trains carrying relief supplies for the San Francisco earthquake victims rolled through.\"\n\n\"They were delayed two hours?\" said Bell, suddenly feeling optimistic. \"How long ago did they leave?\"\n\nPulver glanced up at the Seth Thomas clock on the wall. \"About four and a half hours ago. Why do you ask?\"\n\nBell identified himself and briefly explained his chase of Cromwell.\n\nPulver stared Bell in the eye. \"You say that freight car was carrying the notorious Butcher Bandit?\"\n\n\"He was on it, yes.\"\n\n\"If only I had known, I'd have told the sheriff.\"\n\nThe time gap was less than Bell had dared hope. \"Do you have a relay crew available? Mine is worn out, after their record run over the Sierras.\"\n\n\"Who's your crew?\"\n\n\"Lofgren and Long.\"\n\nPulver laughed. \"I might have known those two would try to beat their own record.\" He studied a blackboard on one wall. \"I have a crew on hand.\" He paused. \"I thought there was something funny about that train. Reno is a relay stop for just about every train going either east or west. Highly unusual, not taking on a relay crew. Your bandit won't get far with an engineer and fireman who are used up.\"\n\nBell looked down at the telegrapher, a bald-headed man with a green visor perched on his forehead and garters on his shirtsleeves. \"I'd like to alert lawmen in the towns ahead to stop the train and seize the bandit, whose name is Jacob Cromwell.\"\n\nThe telegrapher shook his head. \"No can do. The lines are down. I can't get a message through to the east.\"\n\nBell said, \"I'll lay money Cromwell is cutting the lines.\"\n\nPulver studied a large blackboard on another wall that showed the trains scheduled to pass through Reno. \"I'll have a crew for you in twenty minutes. You should have a clear run until you reach Elko. After that, I hope you'll find the telegraph in operation or you'll run the risk of colliding with a train traveling west.\"\n\n\"In that case,\" Bell said cynically, \"I'll have the satisfaction of knowing Cromwell collided with it first.\"\n\n## 44\n\nADELINEWAS HITTING HER STRIDE ON THE FLAT, open stretch of track. She was touching ninety miles an hour, roaring across trestles over dry gulches, flying through small towns, and hurtling past signals indicating open track ahead. The telegraph poles running alongside the track swept by in a confused blur. Gray smoke tinged with sparks and cinders spewed from the stack, streaming back in a horizontal cloud over the cab and flattened by the head-on rush of wind.\n\nA doleful, flaxen-haired descendant of the Vikings, Russ Jongewaard, sat in the engineer's seat, one hand on the throttle, while Bill Shea, a tall, humorous Irishman, shoveled coal into the firebox. After hearing from Bell that he was in a do-or-die attempt to capture the famed Butcher Bandit, they gladly came aboard to join the chase.\n\nLofgren and Long stayed aboard, too. \"We're volunteering for the duration,\" said Lofgren. \"With the four of us spelling each other, we won't have to stop for another relay crew.\"\n\nBell pitched in with the coal-shoveling duties. His thigh wound from Cromwell's bullet in Telluride had not completely healed, but as long as he didn't put too much weight on it there was little pain. His scoop held half as much coal as those that Long or Shea pitched in the firebox, but he made up for it with two shovels to their one.\n\nThe two Southern Pacific firemen took turns keeping an eye on the water gauge and watching the steam gauge, making sure it showed their fire was burning well and the engine was operating at just under two hundred pounds of steam pressure, within a hair of the redline mark. They studied the smoke coming from the stack. When it started to go from gray to clear, they added more coal. When it turned black, it meant the fire was too thick and they had to ease off.\n\nA competition, unchallenged and unspoken, developed between Lofgren and Jongewaard, but it did not go unnoticed. Adeline may have shown the immense power of her machinery and the lightning speed of her churning drive wheels, but it was the strength and endurance of the men who drove her to her limits that set records across Nevada that day. The engineers had the bit in their teeth and worked hard to catch the train of the killer of so many innocent people.\n\nSeeing the semaphore that signaled the track was clear beyond Elko, Lofgren kept the throttle against its stop as he swept past the depot at ninety-five miles an hour. People waiting on the platform for a passenger train stared aghast as Adeline shot by like an immense cannonball.\n\nFortunately, junctions were few and far between\u2014a few spur lines running off the main track\u2014so they kept up their rapid speed without slowing. Then agonizing slowdowns began to occur at the town of Wells, and again farther up the track at Promontory, to allow westbound relief trains through. The delays were utilized by taking on coal and water, but a total of eighty minutes was lost.\n\nAt each stop, Bell questioned the stationmasters about Cromwell's train. At Wells, the stationmaster told him that the engineer and fireman who had driven Cromwell's train from Oakland had been found by a section hand checking the ties and rails. He'd had them brought into town, barely able to stand because they were so fatigued and dehydrated. They had confirmed what Bell had feared: Cromwell had frequently ordered the train to stop so his hired gun could climb the poles and cut the wires.\n\n\"How are we doing?\" asked Lofgren when Bell climbed back in the cab.\n\n\"The stationmaster said they passed through three hours ago.\"\n\n\"Then we've picked up an hour and a half since Reno,\" Long said with a wide grin, knowing their untiring efforts were paying off.\n\n\"From here to Ogden, you'll have to keep out a sharp eye. Cromwell is cutting the telegraph wires. We'll be running blind, should we come upon a westbound train.\"\n\n\"Not a great threat,\" said Jongewaard. \"The company won't risk sending trains down the main line if they can't contact stationmasters to set schedules. Still, we'll have to be on the alert, especially around turns where we can't see more than a mile ahead.\"\n\n\"How far to Ogden?\" asked Bell.\n\n\"About fifty miles,\" replied Jongewaard. \"We should make the station in about an hour.\"\n\nWITH LOFGREN at the throttle, Adeline pulled into Ogden's Union Station forty-two minutes later. He was switched to the coal-and water-loading siding and brought the locomotive to a halt. Their routine was now well established. While Long and Shea loaded the coal and water, Lofgren and Jongewaard checked the engine and oiled the drive connectors and wheel bearings. Bell hurried into the big station and found the dispatcher's office.\n\nA pudgy man sat at a desk, staring out the window at an arriving passenger train. His interest was particularly taken by the young pretty women who showed ankles when stepping down the Pullman car steps. Bell read the name on a small sign sitting on the front of the desk.\n\n\"Mr. Johnston?\"\n\nJohnston looked Bell's way and smiled a friendly smile. \"Yes, I'm Johnston. What can I do for you?\"\n\nBell ran through his story of chasing Cromwell for perhaps the sixth time since leaving San Francisco. \"Can you tell me when the train came through?\"\n\n\"Never came through,\" answered Johnston.\n\n\"Never came through your station?\" Bell's thick eyebrows lifted toward his mane of blond hair.\n\n\"Yep,\" Johnston said, leaning back in his swivel chair and setting a booted foot on a pulled-out drawer. \"They were switched onto the line heading north.\"\n\n\"How?\" snapped Bell. \"It was not a scheduled train.\"\n\n\"Some rich woman showed papers to the dispatcher at the junction up the track that said she had chartered a train with right-of-way clearance to Missoula, Montana.\"\n\n\"The bandit's sister,\" said Bell. \"They're trying to reach the border and cross into Canada.\"\n\nJohnston nodded in understanding. \"The dispatcher checked with me on southbound trains. None was scheduled until tomorrow morning, so I told him to go ahead and allow the lady's train to travel north.\"\n\n\"When did this take place\"\n\n\"A little less than two hours ago.\"\n\n\"I've got to catch that train,\" Bell said firmly. \"I'd appreciate clearance to Missoula.\"\n\n\"Why not telegraph the sheriff in Butte to stop the train and take the bandit and his sister into custody?\"\n\n\"I've tried to do that since leaving Reno, but Cromwell has cut every telegraph line between here and there. No reason for him to stop now.\"\n\nJohnston looked stunned. \"My God, he could have caused a head-on collision.\"\n\n\"Until he and his sister reach the Canadian border, they have nothing to lose, even if it means killing anyone who gets in their way.\"\n\nShocked understanding had come to Johnston. \"Get that dirty coward,\" he said, desperation creeping into his voice. \"I'll gladly give you clearance through to Missoula.\"\n\n\"I'm grateful for any help you can give,\" said Bell sincerely.\n\n\"What's your train number?\"\n\n\"No train, only a tender and engine number 3455.\"\n\n\"What kind of engine?\"\n\n\"A Baldwin Atlantic 4-4-2,\" answered Bell.\n\n\"She's a fast one. What about relay crews?\"\n\n\"I have two crews who insist on sticking to the chase until we grab the bandit.\"\n\n\"In that case, all I can do is wish you luck.\" Johnston rose and shook Bell's hand.\n\n\"Thank you.\"\n\n\"Two hours is a hell of a lead,\" said Johnston quietly.\n\n\"We gained two and a half since leaving Oakland.\"\n\nJohnston thought a moment. \"You've got a real chase on your hands. It will be close.\"\n\n\"I'll stop him,\" Bell said gamely. \"I've got to stop him or he'll kill again.\"\n\n## 45\n\nTHERE WAS HOPE IN THE HEARTS OF THE MEN WHO sweated and toiled to drive Adeline over the rails. They had all risen up and reached beyond themselves to do the impossible. Men and women who worked the farms and ranches alongside the track stopped their labor and stared in surprise at the speeding lone locomotive that shrieked its whistle in the distance and thundered past beyond their sight in less than a full minute except for the lingering trail of smoke.\n\nWith Lofgren in the driver's seat, he pressed Adeline harder and harder until they swept over the border from Utah to Idaho at a speed of nearly one hundred miles an hour. Pocatello, Blackfoot, and Idaho Falls came and went. Stationmasters could only stand in shock and confusion, not able to comprehend a locomotive and tender that came out of nowhere with no advance warning and plunged past their depots at unheard-of speed.\n\nBefore they raced out of Ogden, Bell had procured a pile of blankets so the crews could catnap between shifts of driving the locomotive and feeding its boiler. At first, they found it impossible to sleep for short periods because of the clamor of the drive train, the hiss of steam, and the clatter of the steel wheels over the rails. But as exhaustion set in, they found it easier and easier to drift off until their turn came at the scoop and throttle again.\n\nExcept for quick stops for coal and water, Adeline never slowed down. At one stop, in Spencer, Idaho, Bell learned that they were only fifty minutes behind Cromwell's train. Knowing they were rapidly closing the distance inspired them to renew their efforts and work even harder.\n\nThe mystery in Bell's mind was the report given him by the Spencer stationmaster. It seemed that the Southern Pacific main track stopped at Missoula, with only a spur that went another eighty miles to the small port of Woods Bay, Montana, on Flathead Lake.\n\n\"How do you read it?\" Lofgren asked Bell after his place at the throttle was taken by Jongewaard.\n\n\"Cromwell must have found another crew after driving the engineer and fireman from Winnemucca half to death,\" said Bell.\n\nLofgren nodded. \"Without telegraph messages coming through and informing us otherwise, I have to believe he dumped them in the middle of nowhere, too, and forced a relay crew to come aboard for the final dash across the border.\"\n\n\"Then he'll have to do it by driving over a road in an automobile.\"\n\nLofgren looked at him. \"Why do you say that?\"\n\nBell shrugged. \"The stationmaster at Spencer told me Southern Pacific's tracks end at Woods Bay on the east shore of Flathead Lake. I assume the only way Cromwell can continue north into Canada is by road.\"\n\n\"I disagree. My guess is, he's going to take his train onto the car ferry that runs across the lake.\"\n\nBell stared at Lofgren questioningly. \"Car ferry?\"\n\nLofgren nodded. \"Logs from timber operations in Canada are hauled on flatcars across the border to a small port on the west side of the lake called Rollins. From there, they are rolled onto a ferry that carries them across the lake. When they reach Woods Bay, they are coupled to trains that transport them to lumberyards around the Southwest.\"\n\n\"Why doesn't Southern Pacific simply run their tracks north to Canada?\"\n\n\"The Great Northern Railroad received land rights from the government to cross the upper United States. They laid tracks that run from a landing on the west shore of Flathead Lake north to the border, where their locomotives are coupled to flatcars carrying logs hauled by the Canadian Pacific Railroad from the logging camps. Officials from both Great Northern and Southern Pacific refused to work together and never laid tracks that merged around the ends of the lake.\"\n\n\"How do you know all this?\"\n\n\"My uncle lives in Kalispell, above the lake. He's retired now, but he was an engineer for the Great Northern Railroad. He drove an engine between Spokane and Helena.\"\n\nThe interest in Bell's voice gave way to trepidation. \"So what you're telling me is that Cromwell can ferry his train across the lake to the Northern Pacific tracks and go north into Canada without stepping off his freight car.\"\n\n\"That's about the size of it.\"\n\n\"If he gets across on the car ferry before we can stop him...\" His voice trailed off.\n\nLofgren saw the apprehension in Bell's eyes. \"Don't worry, Isaac,\" he said confidently. \"Cromwell can't be more than ten miles up the track ahead of us. We'll catch him.\"\n\nFor a long moment, Bell said nothing. Then he slowly reached in a breast pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. Slowly, he unfolded it and handed it to Lofgren.\n\nThe engineer studied and then spoke without looking up. \"It looks like a list of names.\"\n\n\"It is.\"\n\n\"Names of who?\"\n\nBell dropped his voice until it was barely audible above the clangor of the charging locomotive. \"The men, women, and children Cromwell murdered. I've been carrying it since I was put in charge of chasing him down.\"\n\nLofgren's eyes lifted and gazed through the front window of the track ahead. \"The others should see this.\"\n\nBell nodded. \"I think now is an appropriate time.\"\n\nTHREE HOURS LATER, with Lofgren back on the throttle, Adeline began to slow as she came into Missoula. He brought the locomotive to a halt fifty feet before a switch stand. Shea jumped from the cab, ran up the track, and switched the rails to those of the spur leading to Flathead Lake. He ignored the switchman, who came running out of a shack.\n\n\"Here, what are you doing?\" demanded the switchman, who was bundled up against a cold wind.\n\n\"No time to explain,\" said Shea as he waved to Lofgren, signaling that it was safe to roll onto the spur from the main track. He looked at the switchman as Adeline slowly rolled past and said, \"Did another train pass onto the spur in the last hour?\"\n\nThe switchman nodded. \"They switched onto the spur without permission either.\"\n\n\"How long ago?\" Shea demanded.\n\n\"About twenty minutes.\"\n\nWithout replying, Shea ran after Adeline and pulled himself up into the cabin. \"According to the switchman,\" he reported, \"Cromwell's train passed onto the spur twenty minutes ago.\"\n\n\"Eighty miles to make up twenty minutes,\" Jongewaard said thoughtfully. \"It will be a near thing.\" He pulled open the throttle to the last notch and, five minutes after leaving the junction, he had Adeline pounding over the rails at eighty-five miles an hour.\n\nFlathead Lake came into view as they ran up the eastern shore. The largest freshwater lake in the western United States, it was twenty-eight miles long, sixteen miles wide, and covered one hundred eighty-eight square miles, with an average depth of one hundred sixty-four feet.\n\nThey were in the homestretch now of a long and grueling chase. Lofgren sat in the fireman's seat and helped Jongewaard survey the track ahead. Bell, Shea, and Long formed a scoop brigade to feed the firebox. Not having leather gloves like the firemen, Bell wrapped his hands with rags the engineers used to wipe oil. The protection helped, but blisters were beginning to rise on his palms from the long hours of shoveling coal.\n\nThey soon reached a speed higher than the spur tracks were ever built to endure from a speeding train. There was no slowdown over bridges and trestles. Curves were taken on the outer edge. One double-reverse turn they whipped around in a violent arc rattled the bolts in the tender. Luckily, the tracks then became as straight as the crow flew. Jongewaard held the eighty-five-mile-an-hour pace for the next forty miles.\n\n\"Eureka!\" Lofgren suddenly yelled, vigorously pointing ahead.\n\nEveryone leaned from the cab, the icy wind bringing tears to their eyes. But there it was, four, maybe five, miles directly ahead, a faint puff of smoke.\n\n## 46\n\nMARGARET LOUNGED ON A SETTEE, WEARING AN embroidered silk robe, and stared at the champagne bubbles rising in her saucer-shaped coupe glass. \"I wonder if it's true,\" she said softly.\n\nCromwell looked at her. \"What's true?\"\n\n\"That this glass was modeled from the breast of Marie Antoinette.\"\n\nCromwell laughed. \"There is an element of truth in the legend, yes.\"\n\nThen Margaret gazed out the window Cromwell had raised in the back of the car\u2014it was recessed into the rear wall and was inconspicuous when closed. The tracks that flashed under the wheels seemed to be stretching to infinity. She could see that they were traveling through a valley surrounded by forested mountains.\n\n\"Where are we?\"\n\n\"The Flathead Valley in the heart of the Rocky Mountains.\"\n\n\"How much farther to the border?\"\n\n\"Another thirty minutes to the ferry landing at Flathead Lake,\" said Cromwell, opening their second bottle of champagne for the day. \"Half an hour to cross over onto the Great Northern tracks and we'll be in Canada by sunset.\"\n\nShe held up her glass. \"To you, brother, and a brilliant flight from San Francisco. May our new endeavor be as successful as the last.\"\n\nCromwell smiled smugly. \"I'll drink to that.\"\n\nAHEAD, in the cab of the locomotive, Abner was pressing the crew he had abducted at gunpoint from a small caf\u00e9 beside the railyard in Brigham City, Utah: Leigh Hunt, a curly-red-haired engineer, and his fireman, Bob Carr, a husky individual who had worked as a brakeman before becoming a fireman, a step he hoped would eventually lead to his becoming an engineer. They had just come off a run and were having a cup of coffee before heading home when Abner held his gun to their heads and forced them into the cab of the engine pulling Cromwell's fancy freight car.\n\nAs was the earlier crew, Wilbanks and Hall were thrown from the engine in the middle of nowhere at the same time Abner cut the telegraph wires.\n\nAbner sat on the roof of the tender above the cab so he could prod Hunt and Carr to keep the Pacific locomotive hurtling over the rails to Flathead Lake. The black swirling clouds over the Rocky Mountains to the east caught his attention.\n\n\"Looks like a storm brewing,\" he shouted to Carr.\n\n\"A chinook, by the look of it,\" Carr yelled back over his shoulder as he scooped coal into the firebox.\n\n\"What's a chinook?\" asked Abner.\n\n\"It's a windstorm that roars down out of the Rockies. Temperatures can drop as much as forty degrees in an hour and winds can blow over a hundred miles an hour, enough to blow railcars off the tracks.\"\n\n\"How long before it strikes here?\"\n\n\"Maybe an hour,\" replied Carr. \"About the time we'll reach the train ferry dock at Woods Bay. Once we arrive, you'll have to sit out the storm. The ferry won't sail during a chinook.\"\n\n\"Why not?\" Abner demanded.\n\n\"With hundred-mile-an-hour winds, the lake turns into a frenzy. The wind whips the water into waves as high as twenty feet. The train ferry wasn't built for rough water. No way the crew will take it out on the lake during a chinook.\"\n\n\"We telegraphed ahead to have the ferry waiting for our arrival,\" said Abner. \"We're going across, wind or no wind.\"\n\nBACK IN Cromwell's rolling palace, Margaret had drifted into a light sleep from the champagne while her brother sat and relaxed with a newspaper he'd picked up when Abner abducted the train crew at Brigham City. Most of the news was about the San Francisco earthquake. He read that the fires had finally been put out and wondered if his mansion on Nob Hill and the bank building had survived.\n\nHe looked up, hearing a strange sound different from the clack of the steel wheels on steel rails. It came faint and far off. He stiffened as he recognized it as a train whistle. Cromwell was stunned, knowing now for certain that he was being pursued.\n\n\"Bell!\" he exploded in anger.\n\nStartled at his loud voice, Margaret sat up awake. \"What are you shouting about?\"\n\n\"Bell!\" snapped Cromwell. \"He's chased us from San Francisco.\"\n\n\"What are you saying?\"\n\n\"Listen,\" he ordered her. \"Listen.\"\n\nThen she heard it, the unmistakable sound of a train's steam whistle, barely perceptible, but it was there.\n\nMargaret rushed to the rear window and peered down the track. It was as if a fist had struck her in the stomach. She could see a stream of black smoke rising beyond a curve above a windbreak of small trees.\n\n\"You must tell Abner!\" she screamed.\n\nCromwell had anticipated her and climbed a ladder to the vent opening in the roof of the boxcar. He pushed aside the lid to the vent, stood above the roof, and shot off his revolver to get Abner's attention over the clamor of the locomotive. Abner heard and hurried over the top of the tender, until he was only a dozen feet away from Cromwell.\n\n\"There is a train coming up behind us,\" Cromwell shouted.\n\nAbner braced his feet apart against the pitch and roll of the tender and gazed over the roof of the boxcar. The onrushing train had come around the curve now and was visible in the distance. It looked to be a locomotive and its tender, pulling no cars. It was coming, and coming on fast, as evident from the smoke exploding from its stack and laid flat by the headwind.\n\nNow the two trains were in sight and sound of each other, with the ferry dock at Woods Bay on Flathead Lake only twenty miles away.\n\n## 47\n\nIT WAS AS IFADELINEWAS A COME-FROM-BEHIND THOROUGHBRED pounding around the far turn into the back stretch, flying through the herd and vying for the lead. Her connecting rods were a blur as they whipped the massive drive wheels over the rails. No locomotive ever worked harder. From the Oakland railyard to the wilds of Montana, she had covered more distance faster than any locomotive in history. No one timed her speeds, but none on board her cab or those who had seen her hurtle past ever doubted that she had surpassed ninety miles an hour on straight and level stretches of track.\n\nJongewaard had the throttle against its stop, throwing Adeline over tracks that were never meant for such speeds. Both engineers sat in the cab seats, their eyes fixed on the track ahead. Bell and Long shoveled while Shea systematically banked the fire to keep it burning evenly for the maximum amount of heat for proper combustion.\n\nThe chugging sound of the steam exhaust became one continuous hiss and the smoke poured from the stack in an ever-growing cloud. Bell stopped shoveling every so often to stare at the train ahead, growing larger by the minute. There was no effort to sneak up on Cromwell now; he pulled the cord and gave the whistle a long shriek that cut through the breeze beginning to blow in over the lake. Bell's lips were spread in a tight smile. He hoped Cromwell sensed that it was he who was charging down his throat.\n\nBell turned, looked up to the sky, and saw it had changed from a blue sea to a gray shroud from the chinook wind that howled out of the Rocky Mountains to the east. Great swirls of dust, leaves, and small debris were thrown like wheat chaff through a threshing machine. The water of Flathead Lake had gone from a dead calm to a turbulent mass in less than twenty minutes.\n\nThen, suddenly, both Jongewaard and Lofgren shouted at once: \"Wagon on the track!\"\n\nEvery eye swung and stared at the track ahead.\n\nA farmer with a hay wagon pulled by a team of horses was on a road crossing the tracks. He must have heard the engine's whistle, Bell thought, but the farmer had badly misjudged the speed of the train, believing he could cross the tracks in plenty of time. Jongewaard heaved back the reverser Johnson bar, slowing the drive wheels until they stopped and spun backward in reverse, braking the speeding locomotive.\n\nWhen the farmer realized the iron monster was only a hundred yards away, he whipped his horses in a frenzied attempt to drive them out of the path of onrushing death. By then, it was too late.\n\nAdeline plowed into the wagon in an explosion of hay, wooden planks, splinters, and shattered wheels. The men in the cab instinctively ducked behind the protection of the boiler as debris clattered along the sides of the engine and flew over the roof onto the tender.\n\nMiraculously, the horses had jumped forward and escaped without harm. Bell and the others did not witness the farmer's fate. As soon as Jongewaard brought Adeline to a halt a hundred yards down the track, Bell and crew leaped from the cab and ran back to the crossing.\n\nThey were all vastly relieved to find the farmer lying no more than five feet from the rails with all his hands and feet intact. He had pushed himself to a sitting position and was looking around, befuddled at the demolished wreckage of his wagon.\n\n\"Are you injured?\" asked Bell anxiously.\n\nThe farmer surveyed his arms and legs while feeling a rising bump on the head. \"A rash of bumps and bruises,\" he muttered. \"But, wonder of wonders, I'm still in one piece, praise the Lord.\"\n\n\"Your horses also survived without injury.\"\n\nShea and Long helped the farmer to his feet. And led him to the horses that had seemingly forgotten their narrow brush with death and were eating the grass beside the road. He was glad to see his horses in sound shape but angered that his wagon was scattered over the landscape in a hundred pieces.\n\nBell read his mind and gave him a Van Dorn card. \"Contact my detective agency,\" he instructed. \"They will compensate you for the loss of your wagon.\"\n\n\"Not the railroad?\" the farmer asked, confused.\n\n\"It wasn't the railroad's fault. A long story you'll read about in the newspapers.\" Bell turned and gazed in frustration down the tracks at the fading smoke from Cromwell's locomotive. He refused to believe he had failed so close to his goal. But all was not lost. Already, Jongewaard had backed up Adeline to pick up Bell and the crew.\n\nSeeing the farmer able to fend for himself, Jongewaard yelled to Bell. \"Hop aboard. We've got time to make up.\"\n\nBell, Lofgren, and the fireman had barely climbed back into the cabin when Jongewaard had Adeline barreling down the rails once again in hot pursuit of the bandit's train. The chinook was upon them now. The wind blew the dust and loose foliage like foam flying from surf plunging onto a beach. Visibility had been cut to no more than two hundred yards.\n\nJongewaard could no longer peer out the side of the cab or his squinting eyes would have filled with the dust. Instead, he stared though the cab's forward window, having no choice but to cut Adeline's speed from seventy-five miles an hour down to forty-five.\n\nHe saw a semaphore beside the track with its flag in the horizontal position, signaling the locomotive to stop, but he ignored it. Next came a sign proclaiming the outer town limits of Woods Bay. Not knowing the exact distance to the ferry landing, he slowed down even more until Adeline was creeping along at twenty-five miles an hour.\n\nJongewaard turned to Bell. \"Sorry about the slowdown, but I can't see if the town docks are five hundred yards or five miles away. I've got to lower the speed in case we come upon the bandit's freight car, or flatcars with logs, sitting on the main track.\"\n\n\"How much time do you figure we lost?\" asked Bell.\n\n\"Twelve minutes, by my watch.\"\n\n\"We'll catch them,\" said Bell with measured confidence. \"Not likely the ferry crew will risk crossing the lake in this weather.\"\n\nBell was right about the ferry not normally running across the lake in rough water, but he missed the boat by underestimating Cromwell. The Butcher Bandit and his sister had not come this far to surrender meekly.\n\nCromwell and Margaret were not to be stopped. Already, their train was rolling across the dock onto the ferry.\n\n## 48\n\nTHE RAILCAR FERRY WAS WAITING AT THE DOCK WHEN Cromwell's train arrived. The locomotive was switched onto the track that led across the wooden dock onto the ferry. But that was as far as it would go. The three-man crew had decided it wasn't safe to attempt a crossing until the chinook passed and the lake's surface settled down. They were sitting in the small galley drinking coffee and reading newspapers and did not bother to get up when Cromwell's train rolled on board.\n\nCromwell stepped down from his freight car and walked to the locomotive, bending into the stiff wind. He paused and studied the waves that were building and chopping on the lake. It reminded him of a furious sea. Then he studied the side-paddle, steam-powered ferryboat.\n\nA faded wooden sign attached to the wheelhouse read KALISPELL. The boat was old. The paint was chipped and peeling, the wooden deck worn and rotted. It had seen many years of service\u2014too many. But to Cromwell it looked sturdy enough to endure the severe wind and the valleys forming between the growing waves. He felt secure that it could steam to the west side of the lake. He was irritated at seeing no sign of the crew.\n\nHe looked up the track and felt gratified that the pursuing train was not in sight. He could only wonder why it became delayed. Whatever the reason, there was no time to dally. He waved to Abner in the cab of the locomotive. \"See that the fireman feeds the firebox so we have steam when we reach the Great Northern tracks.\"\n\n\"Consider it done,\" replied Abner, pointing the muzzle of his gun at fireman Carr, who had overheard the conversation. \"You heard the man. Keep shoveling.\"\n\n\"Have you seen the boat crew?\"\n\nAbner shrugged. \"I've seen no one.\"\n\n\"Better roust them. We've got to get under way. That locomotive behind us may arrive any minute.\"\n\n\"What about the train crew?\" said Abner. \"If I leave them alone, they might make a run for it.\"\n\n\"You cast off the lines,\" Cromwell ordered. \"They can't go anywhere if we drift away from the dock. I'll look for the boat crew myself.\"\n\nAbner jumped to the deck, ran onto the dock. He found the bow and stern lines securing the ferry. The waves surged in from the middle of the lake and rocked the boat back and forth against the bumpers hanging along the starboard paddle box. Abner waited while the boat drifted away from the dock and the lines became taut. When the water surged back, the lines became slack, and Abner pulled them off their bollards and threw them over the railings of the Kalispell. Agile as a cat, he leaped back on the deck and returned to the cab of the locomotive.\n\nCromwell climbed a ladder to the wheelhouse and was thankful to get inside out of the howling wind. He found it empty and went down a stairwell that led to the galley, where he found the crew sitting around reading impassively. They looked up as he came down the stairs but showed little sign of response or interest.\n\n\"You Mr. Cromwell?\" said a big, red-faced, heavily bearded man in a red plaid lumberman's coat.\n\n\"Yes, I'm Cromwell.\"\n\n\"We heard your train come onboard. I'm Captain Jack Boss, at your service.\"\n\nThe laid-back attitude of Boss, who remained sitting, and his two-man crew, who showed utmost indifference, angered Cromwell. \"It is of the greatest importance that we get under way immediately.\"\n\nBoss shook his head. \"No can do. The lake is kicking up. It's best if we wait until the storm blows over.\"\n\nAs calmly as if he were lighting a cigar, Cromwell pulled his .38 Colt from a coat pocket and shot one of the crewmen in the forehead. The surprise was so complete the crewman slumped over and stared blankly, as if he were still reading newsprint.\n\n\"Good God!\" was all Boss uttered, his face frozen in shock.\n\nCromwell pointed his gun at the face of the other crewman, who began to shake uncontrollably. \"You will get this boat under way immediately or he goes, too.\"\n\n\"You're crazy,\" gasped Boss.\n\n\"My attendant has already cast off the lines. I suggest you waste no more time protesting.\"\n\nBoss looked at his dead crewman and slowly, dazedly, came to his feet. He glared at Cromwell with a combined expression of disgust and fury. \"You might as well shoot the rest of us,\" he said slowly. \"We'll all die before we get to the other shore.\"\n\n\"A chance we have to take,\" Cromwell said, his voice hard and venomous.\n\nBoss turned to his crewman, Mark Ragan. \"You'll have to operate the engine alone.\"\n\nRagan, a young man yet to see seventeen, nodded with a pale face. \"I can do it.\"\n\n\"Then stoke the boiler and get up enough steam to make good headway.\"\n\nThe crewman left the galley quickly and dropped down a ladder to the engine room. Boss, closely followed by Cromwell, climbed to the wheelhouse.\n\nCromwell stared at Boss. \"Do not even think about going against my instructions, Captain, or your crewman in the engine room will die. Nor will I have any reservation of killing you, should you not take me to the rail landing on the far shore.\"\n\n\"You're diabolical scum,\" Boss said, his face twisted with rage.\n\nCromwell laughed and gave Boss a look as cold as death. Then he turned and left the wheelhouse.\n\nAs he walked back to his palace boxcar, he heard the shrill blare of a steam whistle. It sounded as if it came from no more than a few hundred yards away. And then his ears caught the hiss of steam and the clatter of locomotive drive wheels. Through the debris hurled by the gusts from the chinook, he saw a large engine materialize from the gloom.\n\nToo late, he thought complacently. The Kalispell had already drifted five feet from the end of the dock. No one or nothing could stop him now. Smiling to himself, he made his way back the boxcar and climbed inside.\n\nJONGEWAARD BROUGHTAdeline to a grinding halt only thirty feet from the end of the dock's tracks. Even before the big drive wheels stopped turning, Bell hopped from the cab and ran toward the end of the dock. The railcar ferry was drifting past the pilings out into the lake and the paddle wheels began to turn. The gap had broadened to eight feet when Bell reached the dock's edge.\n\nHe did not hesitate, did not think about or analyze his actions, did not step back for a running start. It seemed too far, but without an instant's interruption, he leaped from the dock. Knowing the distance was too great for him to land on his feet, he reached out and grabbed the railing with his hands, his body falling and swinging like a pendulum against the hull of the ferry. He came within a hair of losing his grip and falling in the water, as the impact knocked the wind from his body. He held the railing in a death grip until his breath returned, but the growing ache in his chest did not fade. Slowly, almost agonizingly, he pulled himself over the railing onto the deck of the ferry alongside Cromwell's boxcar.\n\nBell lightly ran his fingers over his chest and realized he had cracked one, maybe two ribs. Clenching his teeth against the pain, he struggled to his feet and grabbed one of the ladder rungs leading to the roof of the boxcar to support himself from the pitching and heaving of the ship, plowing into the teeth of the chinook. As the Kalispell moved farther into the middle of the lake, the windswept waves surged over the bow and onto the low track deck, swirling around the wheels of the locomotive. The terrible winds brought a stunning rise in temperature of over twenty degrees.\n\nBell cast off any thought of caution. He threw open the loading door of the boxcar and rolled onto the floor, gasping from the agony in his chest, the .45 Colt steady in his hand. Surprise was in his favor. Cromwell was not alarmed, believing that it was Abner who was entering the car. Too late, he saw that it was his worst enemy.\n\n\"Hello, Jacob,\" Bell said with a cordial grin. \"Did you miss me?\"\n\nThere came a few moments of stunned stillness.\n\nBell came to his knees and then his feet, keeping the Colt aimed at Cromwell's heart, and closed the door to the boxcar to seal it off from the gusts of wind that were battering the old ferry. He made a quick scan of the interior of the car. \"Well, well, well,\" he said with interest. \"My compliments.\" He swung his free hand around the exotically furnished car. \"So this is how you escaped your crimes in style.\"\n\n\"I'm glad you approve,\" Cromwell said conversationally.\n\nBell smiled in narrow-eyed guardedness without lowering his Colt. He glanced at the leather trunks lined against one wall. \"The cash from your bank. Must be an impressive amount.\"\n\n\"Enough to initiate a new enterprise,\" Cromwell answered cordially.\n\n\"You followed us?\" Margaret said, baffled and incredulous. It was more a question than a statement.\n\n\"Not exactly followed,\" Bell said curtly. \"More like chased.\"\n\nPredictably, Cromwell recovered his composure. \"How did you arrive so quickly?\"\n\n\"Fortunately, I had a faster engine and dedicated crewmen.\"\n\n\"You knew Margaret and I left San Francisco?\"\n\n\"I tracked down this freight car and figured you had it repainted with a new serial number. My agents had it under surveillance, waiting for the moment when you would use it again. Unfortunately, the earthquake came and my agents had more-pressing duties elsewhere.\"\n\n\"And you discovered that it had left the railyard,\" Cromwell assumed.\n\nBell nodded. \"Only after I went to your bank and saw that you had cleaned out the vault of all large-currency bills.\"\n\n\"But how could you have known we were heading for Canada?\"\n\n\"The dispatcher at the Southern Pacific office,\" Bell said, lying so as not to involve Marion. \"I put a gun to his head and persuaded him to tell me what tracks your chartered train was traveling. Then it was only a matter of filling in the cracks.\"\n\n\"Very ingenious, Mr. Bell.\" Cromwell, champagne glass in hand, stared at Bell appraisingly. \"It seems I have a penchant for underestimating you.\"\n\n\"I've misjudged you a time or two.\"\n\nMargaret spoke in a tone barely above a whisper. \"What do you intend to do?\" Her shock had turned to desperation.\n\n\"Hold your brother for the local sheriff after we reach shore. Then assemble the necessary papers to escort the two of you to Chicago, where he'll have a speedy trial without a fixed jury of your old pals and hang for his crimes.\" Bell's smile turned cold and his voice ominous. \"And you, dear Margaret, will probably spend the best years of your life in a federal jail.\"\n\nBell caught the exchange of knowing looks between Cromwell and Margaret. He could only wonder what they were thinking, but he was pretty sure it didn't bode well. He watched as Cromwell sank into one end of an ornate couch.\n\n\"Our voyage may take a while in this weather.\" As if to accent his statement, the bottle of champagne slid off its table and onto the floor. \"A pity. I was going to offer you a drink.\"\n\nBell could only guess where Cromwell kept his Colt .38. \"I never drink while on duty,\" Bell said facetiously.\n\nThe car took another sudden lurch as the ferry tipped over to one side, the entire hull vibrating as one of the paddle wheels thrashed out of the water. Margaret gasped in fear and stared at the water that was seeping in widening puddles along the bottom of the freight door.\n\nOUTSIDE, the wind shrieked, and the Kalispell creaked and groaned against the onslaught of the mounting waves that rolled down the length of Flathead Lake. The tired old vessel burrowed her bow into the gale-driven crests before dropping sickeningly into the troughs. A towering wave broke out the forward windows, sending sheets of water into the wheelhouse.\n\nCaptain Boss pulled up his coat collar and grasped the helm desperately as the gale lashed him with spray that stung the skin of his face and hands.\n\nA whistle shrilled through the speaking tube from the engine room. Boss picked it up, said, \"Wheelhouse.\"\n\nRagan's voice came with a hollow tone through the tube. \"I'm taking water down here, Captain.\"\n\n\"Can the pumps handle it?\"\n\n\"So far. But the hull is creaking something awful. I fear the bulkheads might give way.\"\n\n\"Get ready to clear out if it gets bad. Make your way to the roof over the galley and unlash the raft.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" replied Ragan. \"What about you, Captain?\"\n\n\"Call me when you leave the engine room. I'll follow if I can.\"\n\n\"What about the people on the train? We can't just abandon them.\"\n\nBoss was a man with moral depth, a God-fearing man of great inner strength from the old school whose word was his bond. He was well respected by all who lived around the lake. He gazed through the broken wheelhouse window at the far shore and the mad water thrashing over the bow and felt certain the Kalispell was not going to make it.\n\n\"They're my responsibility,\" he said slowly. \"You save yourself.\"\n\n\"God bless you, Captain.\"\n\nThen the tube went silent.\n\n## 49\n\nTHE TORNADO WINDS OF THE CHINOOK WERE THE most destructive in memory. Barns were flattened, roofs carried away, trees ripped by their roots, and telegraph and telephone lines downed. The full force of the warm winds roared over Flathead Lake and flogged the water into a swirling turbulence that battered the weary old Kalispell unmercifully as she wallowed in the valleys between the waves. Already, the lifeboat that Captain Boss had hoped would save lives had been torn from its lashed mounting and shattered, its wreckage swept into the restless water.\n\nBoss struggled with the helm in a desperate attempt to keep the Kalispell on a straight course toward the west shoreline, now only two miles away. He nurtured a slim hope that they might reach the safety of the little harbor of Rollins, but, deep inside, he knew the odds were stacked against him and his boat. There was a constant danger the ferry might swing. The engine, tender, and freight car were the straws that would break the camel's back.\n\nWithout their weight, the Kalispell might have ridden higher in the water and not have suffered as badly from the huge waves that swept across her lowered track deck. Boss looked down at the bow and saw that it was badly damaged. Timbers on the exposed part of the bow were being smashed and torn from their beams.\n\nHis clothes and lumberman's coat soaked through to his skin, Boss grimly took one hand off the wheel, held the speaking tube to his mouth, and whistled. There was a lag of nearly thirty seconds before Ragan answered.\n\n\"Yes, Captain?\"\n\n\"How does it look down there?\"\n\n\"I've got good steam, but the water is still rising.\" Ragan's voice was tinged with fear. \"It's over my ankles.\"\n\n\"When it gets to your knees, get out of there,\" Boss ordered him.\n\n\"Do you still want me to unlash the boat?\" Ragan asked anxiously.\n\n\"You don't have to bother,\" Boss said bitterly. \"It's been swept away.\"\n\nThe fear was noticeably heavier in Ragan's voice now. \"What will we do if we have to abandon the boat?\"\n\nBoss said flatly, \"Pray there's enough loose wreckage that will float that we can hang on to until this storm blows over.\"\n\nBoss hung up the speaking tube and gave a mighty heave of the wheel to keep the boat moving against the swell, as a huge wave fell against the left bow of the Kalispell and shoved her broadside to the surge. This was what Boss was afraid of. Caught by a huge wave on the side of the hull and unable to recover, the ferry would capsize and then sink like a stone under the weight of the train.\n\nFighting the ferry around to head into the teeth of the gusts, he stole a glance down at the train and was stunned to see it violently rocking back and forth, as the boat fell into the troughs before being struck by the crests that now swirled around the engine's drive wheels.\n\nBell took little satisfaction in knowing that if the Kalispell sank into the depths of the lake the criminals on the train would die with him.\n\nIN THE locomotive, Hunt and Carr were hanging on to any valve, gauge, or lever within reach to keep from being flung against the boiler and sides of the cab. Abner sat in the fireman's seat, his feet braced against the front panel below the window. He felt no need to keep his gun aimed at the engineer and fireman. Not with everyone fighting to keep from being hurled about and becoming injured. He was no longer their threat. It was the storm around them that was menacing.\n\nThe last thing that occurred to Abner was that Hunt and Carr might conspire against him. He had not heard their exchanged muffled words nor seen their discreet hand signs to each other. There was nothing for him to do but stare with great trepidation at the vicious water battering the ferry. The engineer fell from his seat and reeled across the cab, colliding against Abner. The impact momentarily stunned Abner, but he roughly pushed Hunt back to his side of the cab.\n\nAbner did not pay any attention to Carr, as the fireman struggled to shovel coal into the firebox while fighting to keep his balance against the lurching and rolling of the Kalispell. Hunt staggered against him again. Irritated, Abner tried to heave the engineer back to his side of the cab. But, this time, Hunt had flung himself on Abner, pinning the big man's arms to his side. Then Hunt fell backward, pulling the startled and angered Abner down to the floor of the cab on top of him.\n\nGalvanized into action, Carr swung his coal scoop over his head and brought it down heavily between Abner's shoulder blades. The ferry plunged into a trough just as Carr swung with whiplash speed, but the scoop missed Abner's head and surely would have cracked his skull if it had connected. To Carr, it felt as though he had struck a fallen log.\n\nIt was a vicious blow, a bone-crushing blow, and it would have paralyzed most men and left them unconscious. Not Abner. He gasped, his face twisted in pain, and rolled off Hunt and came to his knees. He reached for his Smith & Wesson and leveled it at Carr. His face was expressionless and his eyes stared unblinkingly as he pulled the trigger. Carr's scoop was poised for another strike, but the fireman froze as the bullet drilled into the center of his chest. The shock threw him against the maze of valves before he slowly sank to his knees and keeled over onto the floor of the cab.\n\nWithout the slightest hesitation, Abner swung the muzzle of the revolver toward Hunt and shot the engineer in the stomach. Hunt doubled over, his eyes locked on Abner with cold hatred mixed with pain and shock. He staggered backward, one hand clutching his stomach, the other outstretched. Too late, Abner realized what Hunt had in mind. Before he could react, Hunt had reached out and struck the engine's brass horizontal brake lever, moving it from right to left. In his last act, the dying man swung his arm around the throttle lever, pulling it toward him as he fell dead.\n\nThe drive wheels spun and the locomotive lurched forward. Abner, weakened by the crushing blow to his back, was too slow to respond. There was a mist surrounding his vision, and it took a long three seconds to realize the locomotive was forging across the deck of the ferry. Any attempt to stop the inevitable came too late. By the time Abner could push back the throttle, the hundred-thirty-four-ton locomotive began its plunge off the Kalispell 's bow into the cold depths of Flathead Lake.\n\n## 50\n\nAT FIRST, NO ONE IN CROMWELL'S BOXCAR REALIZED the train was rolling off the ferry because of the violent motion caused by the waves and wind. Bell quickly distinguished a different movement and sensed the wheels beneath the car were beginning to turn. He threw open the freight door and was met by a blast of wind that staggered him for an instant. But then he lowered his head and leaned out. He took in two macabre sights at once. One, the deck appeared to be moving toward the stern because of the train's forward motion. And, two, the locomotive's front four-wheel truck was rolling off the bow and diving into the surging turbulence below.\n\nBell spun around. \"The train is falling off the boat!\" he shouted over the gale. \"Quick, jump while you still can!\"\n\nCromwell thought he saw an opportunity and did not immediately consider the disaster-in-the-making. Without a word, he launched himself off the couch and drew his automatic as he leaped. A foolish mistake. Instead of instantly squeezing the trigger and killing Bell, he hesitated to say, \"Farewell, Isaac.\"\n\nSuddenly, the hand clutching the gun was knocked off to the side and the bullet smashed into the doorframe beside Bell's head.\n\nMargaret stood in front of Cromwell, her dark eyes on fire and her lips pressed tightly together until she spoke. There was no fear, no fright; she stood with her legs firmly planted on the freight car's floor. \"Enough, Jacob,\" she said.\n\nShe had no time to say more. Bell grabbed her by the arm. \"Jump!\" he urged her. \"Quickly!\"\n\nOnly Bell grasped the inevitable. He glanced out the door again and saw the engine had almost disappeared beneath the waves and the tender and the freight car were moving faster as they were rapidly dragged by the immense weight into the water. The deck was tilted at a sharp angle, and the Kalispell was in dire danger of going down with the train. There were only seconds left before the freight car was pulled over the bow.\n\nHis face contorted with hate, Cromwell swung the Colt's muzzle toward Bell again, but Margaret stepped between the two men. Cromwell was finally aware of the danger now, his eyes sick in the realization that defeat and death were only moments away. He tried to push Margaret aside so he could leap out the door, but she wrapped her arms around her brother's waist, pulling him back inside the car. He swung the barrel of the gun and struck her across the cheek. Blood seeped, but she clutched him in a death grip he could not shake off.\n\nThe freight car's front wheels were irresistibly following the tender off the front of the ferry. Bell tried to yank Margaret out the door, but she was clutching her brother too tightly. The sleeve on her blue sweater tore away and he lost his grip on her arm.\n\nShe looked at Bell and her eyes turned soft. \"I'm sorry, Isaac.\"\n\nHe reached out for her but it was too late. Bell was falling through the door.\n\nHe twisted violently in midair and crashed to the wooden deck, striking the shoulder opposite his cracked ribs. The impact was still enough to make him gasp in agony. He lay there, watching in horror as Cromwell's freight car was drawn below the surface. A hope flashed through his mind that Margaret might still leap through the door and into the water and be saved. But it was not to be. A seething white wall of water washed over the boxcar and penetrated the interior through the open freight door with a surge that made it impossible for anyone inside to escape. Still hoping against hope, Bell lay on the deck, water swirling around him, staring at the bubbles rising from the depths as the ferry steamed over them. He was still staring at the place where the train sank when it fell far astern, but neither Margaret nor her brother came to the surface.\n\nThe bow of the ferry swung up and the hull rose nearly a foot out of the water without the hundreds of tons of deadweight from the train. Almost immediately, to the immense relief of Captain Boss in the wheelhouse, the Kalispell 's stability increased dramatically and she began to burrow through the waves, her paddle wheels driving her toward the western shore of the lake.\n\nIt took Bell nearly ten minutes to struggle across the deck to the door leading to the stairs up to the wheelhouse. When he got to the wheelhouse, looking like the proverbial drowned rat, Boss stared at him in astonishment.\n\n\"Well, now, where did you come from?\"\n\n\"I jumped on deck as you pulled away from the dock in Woods Bay. My name is Bell. I'm an agent with Van Dorn.\"\n\n\"You were lucky you didn't go down with the others.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" he said softly. \"I was lucky.\"\n\n\"Who were those people?\"\n\n\"Two were innocent members of the train crew who were held hostage. The other three were wanted for murder and robbery. I was going to arrest them when we reached port.\"\n\n\"Poor devils. Drownin' isn't a good way to go.\"\n\nBell was deeply marked by guilt and grief. His face was expressionless as he turned his gaze to the waters of the lake. The waves no longer looked deadly and were settling down to a mild chop. The chinook was moving east and the terrible winds had subsided to a stiff breeze.\n\n\"No,\" he murmured. \"Not a good way to go at all.\"\n\n\u2022 \u2022 \u2022\n\n[For a complete list of this author's books click here or visit \nwww.penguin.com\/cusslerchecklist](http:\/\/penguin.com\/cusslerchecklist?OTC-CUSCHKLST)\n\n## UP FROM THE DEPTHS\n\n##\n\nAPRIL 16, 1950 FLATHEAD LAKE, MONTANA\n\nAFTER THE COAL TENDER WAS BROUGHT UP AND SET on the barge behind the big Pacific locomotive, the divers concentrated on running the steel lift cables under the bottom of the freight car and attaching them to a cradle so it could also be raised. Despite the muck and slime, the name SOUTHERN PACIFIC was still readable across the sides of the tender.\n\nLate in the afternoon, the director of the salvage operation, Bob Kaufman, paced the deck impatiently, as the divers were lifted from the bottom on a platform that was swung onto the barge. He looked up at the clouds, which were dark but not threatening, and lit a cigar while he waited for the brass helmet to be lifted off the dive master's head.\n\nAs soon as it was lifted from the diver's head, Kaufman asked, \"How's it look?\"\n\nThe diver, a balding man in his early forties, nodded. \"The cables are secured. You can tell the crane operator he can begin the lift.\"\n\nKaufman waved to the man who operated the big crane that rose skyward from the deck of the salvage barge. \"All cables secure!\" he shouted. \"Lift away!\" Then Kaufman turned and spoke to the tall, older, silver-haired man standing next to him on the deck of the barge. \"We're ready to raise the freight car, Mr. Bell.\"\n\nIsaac Bell nodded. His face was calm, but there was an expression of expectancy. \"All right, Mr. Kaufman. Let's see what it looks like after all these years on the bottom of the lake.\"\n\nThe crane operator engaged the lift levers, tightening the cables as the diesel engine on the crane rose from an idle to a high rpm before flattening out as it strained to hoist the freight car. The operation was not nearly as complex as bringing up the hundred-thirty-four-ton locomotive. Once the car was pulled free from the bottom, the lifting operation went smoothly.\n\nBell watched with an almost-morbid fascination as the freight car broke the surface of the water and was raised up high before the crane slowly swung it over the barge. Deftly coordinating the controls, the crane operator cautiously lowered the car until it settled onto the deck behind the locomotive and tender.\n\nGazing at the train, Bell found it hard to visualize in his mind how it looked so many years ago. He walked up to the car and wiped the lake growth away from the serial number that was barely visible through the oozing slime. The number 16455 now became distinct.\n\nBell looked up at the freight door. It was still as open as when he fell through it so long ago. The interior was dark because the sunlight was diminished by the clouds. Memories flooded back as he recalled that fateful day when the train rolled across the ferry and plummeted to the bottom of the lake. He dreaded what he would find inside.\n\nKaufman came with the ladder they had used to enter the locomotive's cab and propped it against the open floor of the freight car. \"After you, Mr. Bell.\"\n\nBell nodded silently and slowly mounted the ladder until he was standing on the threshold of the boxcar. He stared into the darkness and listened to the water dripping throughout the freight car. He suppressed a shudder. The dampness and the smell of muck and slime seemed to reek of death, hoary and evil and infinitely ghastly.\n\nThe once-ornate furnishings and decor of the palatial car now looked like something out of a nightmare. The plush-carpeted floor was covered with sediment decorated with long slender weeds. The intricately carved bar, the leather chairs and couch, the Tiffany lamps overhead, even the paintings on the walls, looked grotesque under their coating of ooze and growth. Small fish that had not escaped as the car came out of the water were flopping on the floor.\n\nAs if delaying the inevitable, Bell sloshed through the mud and found the five leather trunks along one wall where he remembered seeing them back in 1906. He pulled a folding knife from his pocket and pried open the rusting and nearly frozen latches on the first trunk. Lifting the lid, he saw that the interior was relatively free of silt. He carefully picked up one of the bundles. The paper currency was soggy but had held its shape and consistency. The printing on the gold certificate bills still appeared distinct and well defined.\n\nKaufman had joined Bell and stared fascinated at the stacks of bills stuffed in the trunk. \"How much do you reckon there is?\"\n\nBell closed the lid and motioned at the other four trunks. \"A wild guess? Maybe four or five million.\"\n\n\"What happens to it?\" asked Kaufman with a glint in his eyes.\n\n\"Goes back to the bank whose depositors were robbed of their savings.\"\n\n\"Better not let my crew know about this,\" said Kaufman seriously. \"They may get it in their heads it's open salvage.\"\n\nBell smiled. \"I'm certain the banking commissioners in San Francisco will be most generous in granting a reward to you and your crew.\"\n\nKaufman was satisfied, his gaze sweping through the car. \"This must have been one luxurious palace on wheels before it sank. I've never seen a boxcar fixed up like a private Pullman parlor car.\"\n\n\"No expense was spared,\" said Bell, eyeing several bottles of vintage champagne and expensive brandy that were scattered in the sediment on the floor.\n\nKaufman's expression turned grim as he nodded at two misshapen mounds protruding from the floor. \"These the two you were looking for?\"\n\nBell nodded solemnly. \"Jacob Cromwell, the infamous Butcher Bandit, and his sister, Margaret.\"\n\n\"The Butcher Bandit,\" Kaufman said softly in awe. \"I always thought he'd disappeared.\"\n\n\"A legend handed down through the years because the money was never recovered.\"\n\nThe adipose tissue that once stored Cromwell's fat had broken down and his body, like the corpses in the cab of the locomotive, had turned waxlike in saponification. The notorious killer looked less than something that had once been a living human being. It was as though he had melted into an indiscernible lump of brown gelatin. His body was twisted, as if he'd died writhing in terror when tons of water gushed into the freight car as it followed the locomotive down to the bottom of the lake. Bell knew better. Cromwell might have struggled to survive, but he would never have been gripped with terror. No longer was he a menacing figure. His reign of robbery and murder had ended forty-four years ago under the cold waters of Flathead Lake.\n\nHe waded through the muck to where Margaret's body lay. Her lustrous hair was fanned out in the silt and tangled with strands from a reedlike weed. The once-lovely face looked like a sculpture an artist had left unfinished. Bell could not help but remember her beauty and vivaciousness the night they met in the elevator of the Brown Palace Hotel.\n\nKaufman interrupted Bell's thoughts. \"His sister?\"\n\nBell nodded. He felt an overwhelming sense of sorrow and remorse. Her final words before he fell from the car came back to haunt him. He could never explain his feelings toward her. There was no endearing love on his part, more a fondness coated with hatred. There was no forgiving her criminal actions in league with her brother. She deserved to die as surely as he did.\n\n\"Can't tell from the look of her now,\" said Kaufman. \"She might have been a beautiful woman.\"\n\n\"Yes, she was that,\" said Bell softly. \"A beautiful woman full of life but veiled in evil.\" He turned away saddened but his eyes dry of tears.\n\nSHORTLY BEFORE midnight, the salvage barge tied up at the old railroad dock in Rollins. Bell made arrangements with Kaufman to see that the bodies were taken care of by the nearest mortuary and the next of kin of Hunt and Carr notified. He recognized Joseph Van Dorn standing on the dock surrounded by four of his agents and was not surprised to see him.\n\nVan Dorn was in his eighties but stood straight, with a full head of gray hair and eyes that never lost their gleam. Although his two sons now ran the detective agency from offices in Washington, D.C., he still worked out of his old office in Chicago and consulted on the cases that had never been solved.\n\nBell walked up and shook Van Dorn's hand. \"Good to see you, Joseph. It's been a long time.\"\n\nVan Dorn smiled broadly. \"My work isn't as interesting since you retired.\"\n\n\"Nothing could stop me from coming back on this case.\"\n\nVan Dorn stared at the freight car. Under the dim lights on the dock, it looked like some odious monster from the depths. \"Was it there?\" he asked.\n\n\"The money?\"\n\nBell merely nodded.\n\n\"And Cromwell?\"\n\n\"Both he and his sister, Margaret.\"\n\nVan Dorn sighed heavily. \"Then at long last it's over. We can write finish to the legend of the Butcher Bandit.\"\n\n\"Not many of the Cromwell Bank's depositors,\" Bell said slowly, \"will still be alive to receive their money.\"\n\n\"No, but their descendants will be notified of their windfall.\"\n\n\"I promised Kaufman and his crew a fat finder's fee.\"\n\n\"I'll see that they get it,\" Van Dorn promised. He placed a hand on Bell's shoulder. \"Nice work, Isaac. A pity we couldn't have found the train fifty years ago.\"\n\n\"The lake is two hundred seventy feet where the train sank,\" explained Bell. \"The salvage company that was hired by the San Francisco banking commissioners dragged the lake but couldn't find it back in 1907.\"\n\n\"How could they have missed it?\"\n\n\"It had fallen in a depression in the lake bed and the drag lines passed over it.\"\n\nVan Dorn turned and nodded toward a car parked by the dock. \"I guess you'll be heading home.\"\n\nBell nodded. \"My wife is waiting. We'll be driving back to California.\"\n\n\"San Francisco?\"\n\n\"I fell in love with the town during the investigation and decided to remain after the earthquake and make my home there. We live in Cromwell's old mansion on Nob Hill.\"\n\nBell left Van Dorn and walked across the dock to the parked car. The blue metallic paint of the 1950 Custom Super 8 convertible Packard gleamed under the dock lights. Although the night air was chilly, the top was down.\n\nA woman was sitting in the driver's seat wearing a stylish hat over hair that was tinted to its original blond. She gazed at him approaching with eyes that were as coral\u2013sea green as when Bell met her. The mirth lines around her eyes were the lines of someone who laughed easily, and the features of her face showed the signs of an enduring beauty.\n\nBell opened the door and slipped into the seat beside her. She leaned over and kissed him firmly on the lips, pulled back, and gave him a sly smile. \"About time you came back.\"\n\n\"It was a hard day,\" he said with a long sigh.\n\nMarion turned the ignition and started the car. \"You found what you were looking for?\"\n\n\"Jacob and Margaret and the money, all there.\"\n\nMarion looked out across the black water of the lake. \"I wish I could say I'm sorry, but I can't bring myself to feel grief, not knowing about their hideous crimes.\"\n\nBell did not wish to dwell on the Cromwells any longer and changed the subject. \"You talk to the kids?\"\n\nMarion stepped on the accelerator pedal and steered the car away from the dock toward the main road. \"All four this afternoon. Soon as we get home, they're throwing us an anniversary party.\"\n\nHe patted her on the knee. \"You in the mood for driving all night?\"\n\nShe smiled and kissed his hand. \"The sooner we get home, the better.\"\n\nThey went silent for a time, lost in their thoughts of events long gone. The curtain to the past had come down. Neither of them turned and looked back at the train.\n\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}} +{"text":"\n\n**ESSAYS IN AESTHETICS**\n**_Philosophical eLibrary Editions_**\n\nof works by Jean-Paul Sartre\n\nBeing and Nothingness\n\nThe Emotions: Outline of a Theory\n\nEssays in Aesthetics\n\nExistential Psychoanalysis\n\nExistentialism and Human Emotions\n\nLiterature and Existentialism\n\nThe Philosophy of Existentialism: Selected Essays\n\nTo Freedom Condemned\n\nWhat is Literature? and Other Essays\n_A Philosophical eLibrary Edition_\n\nESSAYS IN AESTHETICS\n\nJEAN-PAUL SARTRE\n\nSelected and Translated by\n\nWade Baskin\n\nWith a New Preface by\n\nSusan Braudy\n\n_PHILOSOPHICAL LIBRARY_\n\n_New York_\nCONTENTS\n\nPREFACE\n\nSARTRE QUOTES\n\nARTIST GALLERY\n\nINTRODUCTION\n\nTHE VENETIAN PARIAH\n\nJACOPO'S SHENANIGANS\n\nTHE PURITANS OF THE RIALTO\n\nMAN AT BAY\n\nA MOLE IN THE SUN\n\nTHE PAINTINGS OF GIACOMETTI\n\nTHE UNPRIVILEGED PAINTER: LAPOUJADE\n\nTHE MOBILES OF CALDER\n\nTHE QUEST FOR THE ABSOLUTE\n\nINDEX\n\nBIBLIOGRAPHY\n\nABOUT THE AUTHOR\n\nJEAN-PAUL SARTRE\n\n_Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations_\nPREFACE\n\nJean Paul Sartre was a total live wire. The man is still bigger than a rock star in France. He lived the life of the mind to its fullest. He also found time in the second half of his life to become an idealistic international politician, manipulating his world-wide reputation to further his ethical and artistic beliefs\u2014which he relished amending and even changing. Biographer Ronald Hayman wrote that Sartre's face was familiar to people who had never seen him; his beliefs and sayings were quoted by people who had never read his books. As Sartre himself once proclaimed euphorically, \"Fame is good, even at forty or fifty; fame is desirable; there is happiness, an intense enjoyment, in pushing one's way into the spotlight like this.\"\n\nAnd to his enormous credit, Sartre is still relevant and celebrated. It is the totality of his work\u2014his deliciously audacious, learned and personal essays such as those in this book, _Essays in_ _Aesthetics_ , as well as his great fiction like _Nausea_ , and his great plays such as _No Exit._\n\nSartre is acknowledged by such intellectuals as Bernard-Henri Levy as the outstanding philosopher of the twentieth century. Like millions of others, Levy has admiration for this great thinker. Levy writes that people thought Sartre the absolute intellectual, and thus they expected from him things they had never expected, and will probably never expect again from anyone else.\n\nSartre was only 5'3\" and homely except when in the throes of commanding an awed group of friends with one of his electrifying new ideas. These boisterous sessions frequently took place in one of his favorite caf\u00e9s, in his small grungy apartment, or in his beloved mother's home, which he frequently shared. When he died in 1980 at the age of 75, fifty-thousand dazed and bereft human beings wandered after his funeral procession each feeling all together and all alone. Thirty-year-old Bernard-Henri Levy mourned with Soviet dissidents, arguing Pakistanis, paparazzi, crying housewives, Sartre's former adversaries and so many more from all over the world. Levy asked himself with wonder how and why the great dry metallic voice of Sartre had gained a hearing in so many languages and affected so many destinies. People who had professed their hatred of the man and his ideas, accusing him of sullying France and corrupting youth, calling him \"a hyena with a typewriter,\" these people honored him with their passion and now with their love. This is what a truly great writer is\u2014a sometimes frightening, always brave beacon.\n\nThe French idolize their passionate intellectuals and artists. Sartre is what they reverently call \"a philosophe\" as well as a timeless artist. This philosopher, creative thinker, critic, biographer, novelist, political gadfly, and playwright almost singlehandedly inspired millions of people to grapple with the philosophy and theology of atheistic existentialism. He argued that a man creates himself by his actions. Existentialism meant to him that a person's existence precedes his essence. Each man has freedom which is not constrained or determined by his basic nature. Thus man is born neither good nor evil. In his book _What Is Literature?_ Sartre writes, \"We are no better than our life and it is by our life that we must be judged.\"\n\nOnce he became a famous world figure, Sartre exerted enormous power as a public political force. Because he was a left-wing moralist who proudly saw himself as independent, he refused the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964 to protest the United States involvement in the war in Vietnam. He also turned down a tour to lecture in the United States for the same reason.\n\nA contrarian to his core, he enjoyed nothing better than denouncing his previous beliefs. After he broke with Soviet Communism, he continued to use Marxian analysis. He finished few writing projects and we are fortunate to have this volume of essays on aesthetics and artists' lives\u2014subjects among those dearest to his heart and soul. He denounces poetic writing in his book _What Is_ _Literature?_ and yet in _Essays in Aesthetics_ he waxes poetic about Alexander Calder's mobile sculptures.\n\nSartre brought his own original thinking and prodigious writing skills to existentialism and made his modernist quest to understand the self and personal identity the hot topic of his era. His questions and answers permeate our lives and our internal monologues to this day. He was above all interested in human beings. Indeed the issues Sartre brought to the public in his swashbuckling debates and prodigious writings remain relevant to many people, including myself. The universality of what he was muddling through is still classic and important.\n\nI have always been fascinated by the existentialists and frequently think about their theories. Sartre studied and revealed the human psyche in a unique and highly intimate way. Like the tortured nineteenth century Danish existentialist philosopher S\u00f8ren Kierkegaard (of whom he was a devoted follower), Sartre relished what philosophers call value theory\u2014ethics and aesthetics. To me these have always been the most meaningful branches of philosophy because they help us understand ourselves.\n\nKierkegaard had formulated a Christian existentialism which includes the concept that with each and every one of our actions we particularize our self, and thus _create_ a self. Therefore our existence precedes our essence. This is a highly moral view and makes each one of us responsible for our own lives\u2014our missteps and our achievements. For Kierkegaard, the lowest stage of human development is about materialism, sensation and pleasure. This brings little or no fulfillment. Kierkegaard writes that it is through suffering that man arrives at the second stage\u2014the ethical stage. Sartre believed the ethical stage is the highest stage of human development.\n\nUnlike Sartre, Kierkegaard postulates a third more evolved state: Christianity, and a person arrives there again through an awareness brought about by suffering. Sartre was able to bring Kierkegaard's philosophy to the forefront of discourse in the twentieth century, although one of Sartre's controversial modifications is to make the ethical stage the highest stage. His is an atheistic existentialism.\n\nMeanwhile, across the channel in England in the mid-twentieth century, rigorous, formalistic and even cold philosophers such as the logical positivists A. J. Ayer and Ludwig Wittgenstein were trying to throw value theory\u2014Sartre's meat and potatoes\u2014out of the academy. Attempting to foment a revolution, they cited scientific principles and clarity. They wanted to prove that Sartre's humanist preoccupations were not philosophy: not measurable, not empirical, too emotional. Thankfully, great French thinkers like Sartre and Albert Camus continued to explore exhilarating questions of the nature of man's existence, his reason for being, his perception of his physical and metaphysical self, indeed his essential nature and control of his fate.\n\nIn this jewel of a collection, _Essays in Aesthetics_ , Sartre analyzes, picks on and extols four artists\u2014giving him the chance to demonstrate his panache with language and his great knowledge of aesthetics, that major philosophical discipline.\n\nSartre is nothing if not opinionated\u2014objectivity is boring. Sartre is not. He paints brilliant word pictures of the motives and methods as well as the art and biographies of the four artists. He has the most fun lambasting Renaissance painter Jacopo Tintoretto. He also examines the art and life of Alberto Giacometti (noting that while Giacometti sketched Sartre, the artist remarked of the philosopher's face, \"what density, what lines of force.\" Upon hearing this, Sartre claims surprise, writing that he believes his features weak and ordinary.) The third artist is the great Alexander Calder, whose mobiles Sartre loved. Finally he extols the abstract painter and experimental film maker Robert Lapoujade, who with Sartre opposed the French war against the Algerians.\n\nIn this delightful volume, Sartre perhaps enjoys himself most when writing his fiery, subjective tirade about Jacobo Tintoretto, the sixteenth century Venetian. Sartre irreverently calls the great artist a \"huckster-painter.\" In ridiculing Tintoretto, Sartre knows whereof he speaks from both inside and out. He is an artist who courted and achieved fame as well\u2014although he cared little for material possessions and in fact gave his money away.\n\nSartre's portrait of Tintoretto is remarkably contemporary and as such is a dead ringer for the dysfunctional marriage of art and commerce in today's art world. According to Sartre, the wily Tintoretto is a wheeler dealer who lies and pretends he doesn't compete with his peers for commissions. Yet he lures potential customers by bragging that he paints originals for the price of reproductions.\n\nPerhaps Sartre also has it in for Tintoretto because the painter went to school for a total of only five years and ridiculed humanist men of letters. Sixteenth century Venice had few poets and fewer philosophers, and Tintoretto irks Sartre because he refuses to have anything to do with them. The painter even wonders about their legitimacy. Sartre contemptuously writes that Tintoretto somehow doesn't believe men of letters earn their livelihood by sweat and work.\n\nIf Sartre disapproves of Tintoretto's business methods, he loves Calder's mobile sculptures. Sartre rhapsodizes like a fine poet about the beauty of his friend's work. He muses that Calder's mobiles are \"fed on air\" and \"vibrate in the wind like Aeolian harps.\" He calls them \"strange creatures halfway between matter and life,\" writing that the mobiles are \"neither completely living nor completely mechanical and which...constantly change but always return to their original position...like aquatic plants bent low by a stream.\"\n\nIn these essays, Sartre displays an astonishing knowledge of visual art and history. It is a show of superior creativity and intellect that deserves to be rediscovered and savored. Employing a similar virtuosity of language at the end of his midlife autobiography simply titled _The Words_ , Sartre immodestly describes his modesty: \"A whole man, mode of all men, worth all of them, and any one of them worth him.\"\n\n_Susan Braudy_\n\n_New York, New York 2011_\n\nSUSAN BRAUDY is an author and journalist. She did graduate study in philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, and was an adjunct professor at Brooklyn College. She blogs for _The Huffington Post_ and has written for _The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Newsweek, Vanity Fair, Ms_. _Magazine, New York Magazine_ and Yale University's _The New Journal_. She has also been a vice president of Warner Brothers.\n\nSusan Braudy is the author of five books; her most recent, _Family Circle, The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left,_ was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. She has also written _Between Marriage and Divorce, A Woman's Diary_ ; _This Crazy Thing Called Love_ , a non-fiction account of the Woodward Family; and the novels _Who Killed Sal Mineo?_ and _What The Movies Made Me Do_.\n\nMs. Braudy lives with Joe Weintraub in New York City.\nSARTRE QUOTES\n\nBeing is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.\n\nLife has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.\n\nGod is dead.\n\nThe existentialist...thinks it is very distressing that God does not exist, because all possibility of finding values in a heaven of ideas disappears along with Him; there can no longer be an a priori Good, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. Nowhere is it written that the Good exists, that we must be honest, that we must not lie; because the fact is we are on a plane where there are only men.\n\nThat God does not exist, I cannot deny. That my whole being cries out for God, I cannot forget.\n\nFreedom is what you do with what's been done to you.\n\nOnce you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.\n\nExistence precedes and rules essence.\n\nThe existentialist says at once that man is anguish.\n\nGenerosity is nothing else than a craze to possess. All which I abandon, all which I give, I enjoy in a higher manner through the fact that I give it away. To give is to enjoy possessively the object which one gives.\n\nThere is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.\n\nGod is absence. God is the solitude of man.\n\nViolence is good for those who have nothing to lose.\n\nFear? If I have gained anything by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear.\n\nI hate victims who respect their executioners.\n\nA lost battle is a battle one thinks one has lost.\n\nNeither sex, without some fertilization of the complimentary characters of the other, is capable of the highest reaches of human endeavor.\n\nHell is other people.\n\nOnly the guy who isn't rowing has time to rock the boat.\n\nThe existentialist does not believe in the power of passion. He will never agree that a sweeping passion is a raging torrent which fatally leads a man to certain acts and is therefore an excuse. He thinks that man is responsible for his passion.\n\nAll I have learned about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.\n\nOne is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one's death, one dies one's life.\n\nIt is only in our decisions that we are important.\n\nMan is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.\n\nWe do not judge the people we love.\n\nEvery existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.\n\nAll human actions are equivalent and all are on principle doomed to failure.\n\nWords are loaded pistols.\n\nLife begins on the other side of despair.\n\nExistentialism isn't so atheistic that it wears itself out showing the God doesn't exist. Rather, it declares that even if God did exist, that would change nothing.\n\nAs far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.\n\nEverything has been figured out, except how to live.\n\nWhen the rich wage war it is the poor who die.\n\nI have no need for good souls: an accomplice is what I wanted.\n\nIf you are lonely when you are alone, you are in bad company.\n\nIf I became a philosopher, if I have so keenly sought this fame for which I'm still waiting, it's all been to seduce women basically.\n\nDeath is a continuation of my life without me.\n\nYou must be afraid, my son. That is how one becomes an honest citizen.\n\nMan can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite possibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth.\n**On refusing the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964**\n\n_The prize was awarded, said the academy, for \"his imaginative writing which by reason of its spirit and freedom and striving for truth has exercised a far-reaching influence on our age_.\"\n\n...[M]y refusal is not an impulsive gesture, as I have always declined official honors.... This attitude is based on my conception of the writer's enterprise. A writer who adopts political, social, or literary positions must act only with the means that are his own\u2014that is, the written word. All the honors he may receive expose his readers to a pressure I do not consider desirable. If I sign myself _Jean-Paul Sartre it_ is not the same thing as if I sign myself _Jean-Paul Sartre, Nobel Prize winner_.\n\nThe writer who accepts an honor of this kind involves as well as himself the association or institution which has honored him.... The writer must therefore refuse to let himself be transformed into an institution, even if this occurs under the most honorable circumstances, as in the present case.\n\n_From a statement by Sartre that first appeared in Le Figaro on October 23, 1964._\nARTIST GALLERY\n\nJacobo Tintoretto\n\n(1518-1594)\n\nBorn Jacopo Comin, the Venetian artist was nicknamed Tintoretto (\"the little dyer\") after his father's craft of dying cloth, a profession called _tintore_ in Italian. Tintoretto was a master painter during the late Italian Renaissance, and together with Paolo Veronese (1528-1588) and Titian (1485-1576), embodied the essence of the Venetian School of painting.\n\nTintoretto is thought to have been a brief student of Titian's, but he developed his own style of painting that was known for his bold use of color and the dramatic manipulation of light and shadow, with rough brushwork that heightened the emotional effect of his work. He was often called _Il Furioso,_ for the fury and speed with which he painted. Few drawings or oil sketches of his survive; to help him visualize detail and perspective, Tintoretto would mold small wax and clay models and experiment with light for the effects of shade and composition.\n\nMost of his work is still in the Venice churches or other buildings which commissioned him, including the Scuola Grande di San Rocco.\n\nLike Titian, Tintoretto kept a large workshop, and his sons Domenico and Marco and his daughter Marietta were trusted assistants. When he died in 1594, he was known as \"the top painter in Venice.\"\n\nAlberto Giacometti\n\n(1901-1966)\n\nSwiss sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti was born in Borgonovo, Switzerland, the son of a Post-Impressionist painter. After studying art in Geneva and Paris in the 1920s, he began to experiment with cubism and surrealism and became known as one of the leading surrealist sculptors, associating with that Paris group until 1934.\n\nAfter breaking with the Surrealists, Giacometti spent the war years in Geneva, then returned to Paris. He had begun sculpting thin, elongated and solitary figures, finding his own signature style in these stretched, fragile yet roughly textured works. His vision of reality seemed to present human existence as a joyless struggle against an uncaring universe\u2014an almost existential view of reality. Critics at the time noted Giacometti's friendship with Jean-Paul Sartre, the father of existentialism, but the artist avowed he was not interested in any philosophical interpretations of his work: his sculptures were an artistic expression of physical reality as he saw it. He became well known, especially in the United States, through two exhibitions in New York City (1948, 1950). The artist died in Chur, Switzerland, in 1966.\n\nGiacometti's elongated forms were quickly recognized as icons of mid-twentieth century art. His sculpture _L'Homme qui marche_ had the distinction in February 2010 of being the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction to date: it brought a record-breaking $104,327,006 at Sotheby's in London.\n\nAlexander Calder\n\n(1898-1976)\n\nThe second child of artist parents\u2014his father Alexander Stirling Calder was a sculptor and his mother was a painter\u2014Calder did not set out to be an artist. He graduated from Stevens Institute of Technology with an engineering degree, having studied among other things applied kinetics, or the effects of force on free-moving objects. After working at various jobs, including hydraulics engineer and fireman in a ship's boiler room, he moved to New York in 1923 and enrolled in the Art Students League. He took a job illustrating for the _National Police Gazette_ , which sent him to sketch scenes at the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. This inspired him to create _Cirque Calder_ , using wire sculptures made with leather, cloth and other found objects to assemble a miniature circus that was manipulated by him. His performances made him famous.\n\nIn 1931 Calder began to create a new type of art with his kinetic sculptures, dubbed \"mobiles,\" that first moved by cranks and motors, but eventually were designed to move entirely on their own with the air current. Calder's stationary artwork came to be called \"stabiles.\" He began to accept commissions for large outdoor sculptures, which became larger over time until he was renowned for them worldwide by the 1960s. He designed monumental pieces for Lincoln Center in New York, for the gardens of UNESCO in Paris and for Expo '67 at Montreal. He even painted some of Braniff Airline's jet planes with his unique and colorful designs.\n\nAlexander Calder\n\n(1898-1976)\n\nThe second child of artist parents\u2014his father Alexander Stirling Calder was a sculptor and his mother was a painter\u2014Calder did not set out to be an artist. He graduated from Stevens Institute of Technology with an engineering degree, having studied among other things applied kinetics, or the effects of force on free-moving objects. After working at various jobs, including hydraulics engineer and fireman in a ship's boiler room, he moved to New York in 1923 and enrolled in the Art Students League. He took a job illustrating for the _National Police Gazette_ , which sent him to sketch scenes at the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. This inspired him to create _Cirque Calder_ , using wire sculptures made with leather, cloth and other found objects to assemble a miniature circus that was manipulated by him. His performances made him famous.\n\nIn 1931 Calder began to create a new type of art with his kinetic sculptures, dubbed \"mobiles,\" that first moved by cranks and motors, but eventually were designed to move entirely on their own with the air current. Calder's stationary artwork came to be called \"stabiles.\" He began to accept commissions for large outdoor sculptures, which became larger over time until he was renowned for them worldwide by the 1960s. He designed monumental pieces for Lincoln Center in New York, for the gardens of UNESCO in Paris and for Expo '67 at Montreal. He even painted some of Braniff Airline's jet planes with his unique and colorful designs.\n\nRobert Lapoujade\n\n(1921-1993)\n\nBorn in Montauban, France, Lapoujade was a painter and a film maker best known for his portraits of French literary figures including Jean-Paul Sartre, Andre Breton, Georges Bataille and Francois Mauriac. Sartre's essay was included in the catalog prepared for an exhibition of Lapoujade's abstract paintings at the Galerie Pierre Domec, Paris in 1961.\n\nLapoujade left school at the age of fourteen, finding work as a butcher, riveter, tile repairer and eventually a dramatic arts teacher. Hence his description as a \"self-made artist.\" He spent the war years in an obscure part of the Alps, and first exhibited his \"formal\" style paintings in Paris in 1947. He turned to painting non-figurative works in the early 1950s, with themes driven by social and political concerns.\n\nLapoujade also had a career in films, directing fifteen short subjects. He won a Cesar, the French equivalent of an Oscar, for his animated short, \"Un Comedien Sans Paradoxe\" (\"An Actor Without Paradox\"). His full-length feature, \"Le Sourire Vertical\" (\"The Vertical Smile\"), shocked the Cannes International Film Festival in 1978 with its sexually explicit and violent scenes. It was later banned by French censors for its content.\nINTRODUCTION\n\nJean-Paul Sartre's views on aesthetics are perhaps less controversial than his views on a number of other issues, particularly the human predicament. As a philosopher he has the dubious distinction of being a center of cult and controversy in Paris and of having most people who have heard of existentialism connect his name with the movement. As a novelist and dramatist he has popularized the notions stated systematically in his formidable masterwork _Being and Nothingness_ and earned notoriety for the movement and its bizarre, pessimistic, perverse and bewildering appraisal of the human situation. As a typical French intellectual he has always exhibited an expanding omniscience that gives added emphasis to his statements on many vital issues, one of which is the place of art and artists in the human situation. Whether he speaks as philosopher, dramatist, novelist or critic, the ex-professor deserves a hearing.\n\nThough he is the point of confluence of three post-Hegelian streams of thought\u2014the Marxist, the existentialist and the phenomenological\u2014and the product of traditional European thinking on aesthetics, ethics, metaphysics and politics, Sartre is profoundly and self-consciously individualistic in his interpretation of the human situation. He exploits the analytical tools of the Marxists and embraces their concern for action, but he disowns their politics. He rejects Kierkegaard's leap of faith but adopts his picture of man as a lonely, anguished creature in a chaotic universe. He discards Husserl's Platonism but adapts the latter's terminology to his own purposes. Add to this the rejection of Cartesian dualism and the adoption of Freudian insights, and the net result is an outlook and a style that produce in the reader a shock of recognition\u2014a feeling that what he is reading is not something new but something long anticipated. Finally, though his tools and arguments evidence his indebtedness to his predecessors, his style and outlook are unmistakably contemporary.\n\nSartre approaches art with an open mind but seeks always to fit his findings into his philosophical scheme. The essays in this collection reveal his concern about fundamental issues relating to the nature of art and its place in the human situation as well as to the formation and function of the artist. And in questioning art he stirs the dust of metaphysical speculations: Is the artist \"a man bent on imposing a human seal on space or a rock dreaming of human qualities?\" Is our universe a \"blind concatenation of causes and effects or the gradual unfolding, forever retarded, disconcerted and thwarted, of an Idea?\" In these essays as in all his writings, we feel a spirit of dedication and a sincere desire on the part of the writer to change the life of the reader.\n\nFour artists are discussed\u2014two painters, one painter-sculptor and one sculptor-painter. Each artist, because he embodies contradictions and confronts enigmas, presents a challenge to Sartre and affords him the opportunity to illustrate his theories about art. Tintoretto is the product of class contradictions and has to achieve self-affirmation through deceit. Giacometti is obsessed by his isolation in a world of things accessible only through their appearances and has to discover how to paint emptiness. Calder works on the borderland between freedom and control and has to discover how to imbue something immobile with movement. Lapoujade strives to reconcile creativity and beauty and must learn to \"give to an infinitely divisible surface the indivisible unity of a whole.\"\n\nSartre's approach is doubly rewarding in that it affords new insights into the activities of both author and subject. In the case of Tintoretto, he offers a convincing refutation of legends that still survive and a brilliant case study of an artist and his era. And in the case of his contemporaries, he shows how each has responded to the challenges of our own era. In addition to these new insights he provides us with a host of striking images and intimate asides: his definition of genius as \"a conflict between a finite presence and an infinite absence\"; his description of Tintoretto's paintings as a \"passionate love affair\" between a city and her rejected suitor; his allusions to the uniqueness of touch and the significance of the Other's look; his having to learn anew to live \"at a respectable distance\" from others after the end of World War II; his fright on boarding a plane as it relates to his love of beauty and his abhorrence of ugliness; his expressed hope that Giacometti will one day paint an illusion that will cause us to experience the \"same shock that we feel on returning late and seeing a stranger walking toward us in the dark.\"\n\nI wish here to express appreciation to those who have helped to prepare this collection of Sartre's essays on art. Professor Jean Lorson of the University of Oklahoma clarified for me several passages in the French texts. Four of my colleagues\u2014Minnie Baker, Richard Bivins, Margaret O'Riley and Mildred Riling\u2014shared the task of reading through the first draft of the translation: Professor Baker and Mr. Bivins paid particular attention to technical points posed by the translation of terms used in art; Dr. O'Riley read and corrected the first draft of the shorter essays; Professor Riling called attention to certain stylistic peculiarities of Sartre and suggested extensive revisions which were incorporated into the final version of the essay on Tintoretto. For their generous help and encouragement I am deeply appreciative.\n\nWADE BASKIN\n\n_Southeastern State College_\nTHE VENETIAN PARIAH1\n\nJacopo's Shenanigans\n\nNothing. His life is an enigma: A few dates, a few facts, and then the cackling of ancient writers. But courage: _Venice speaks to us_. Her voice is that of a perjured witness, now shrill, now whispering, always marked by periods of silence. Tintoretto's life story, the portrait painted during his lifetime by his native city, is tinged with unrequited animosity. The Doge's City reveals her contempt for the most celebrated of her sons. Nothing is stated outright; there are hints, suggestions, remarks made in passing. This inflexible hatred has the inconsistency of sand; it takes the form, not so much of outspoken aversion, as of coldness, moroseness, insidious ostracism. And this is just what we would expect. Jacopo fights a losing battle against a vast adversary, grows tired, surrenders, dies. That is the sum and substance of his life. We can study it in all its somber nakedness if for an instant we push aside the brushwood of slander that blocks our passage.\n\nFirst, the birth of the dyer's son in 1518. Venice immediately insinuates that fate has marked him from the outset: \"About 1530 the youth started to work in Titian's studio as an apprentice but was dismissed a few days later when the illustrious quinquagenarian discovered his genius.\" This anecdote reappears in book after book with astounding regularity. It might be argued that it does little credit to Titian\u2014and this is indeed the case\u2014not _today_ , at any rate, not in our eyes. But when Vasari reports it in 1567, Titian has been reigning for half a century, and nothing is more respectable than long impunity. Then too, according to the customs of his time, Titian has his own studio, where he is second only to God in the conduct of his affairs and has every right to dismiss an employee. In such circumstances his victim is presumed guilty; marked by fate, contagious perhaps, he is presumed to have the evil eye. Here for the first time the gilded legend of Italian painting is threatened by an ill-fated childhood. But the lesson to be learned from his alleged dismissal must come later. The voice of Venice never lies provided that we know how to interpret it; we can listen once our ears have been properly attuned. At this point we suspend judgment but call attention to the improbability of the facts.\n\nThat Titian was not good-natured is well known. But Jacopo was twelve. At twelve talent is nothing and anything will obliterate it; patience and time are required to mold nascent skill and change it into talent; no artist at the pinnacle of his fame\u2014not even the most supercilious\u2014would take umbrage at a small boy. But suppose that the master, jealous, dismissed his apprentice. That amounts to assassination of him. The curse of a national celebrity weighs heavily, very heavily. More especially as Titian lacks the candor to make known his true motives; he is king, he frowns and from this moment on all doors are closed to the black sheep. He is forever barred from the profession.\n\nA blacklisted child is something of a rarity. Our interest quickens. We are eager to find out how he managed to overcome his handicap. Vain desire, for here the thread of the narrative breaks at the same time in every single book and we are confronted by a conspiracy of silence. No one will tell us what happened to him between the ages of twelve and twenty. Some writers attempted to fill the void by imagining that he had learned the art of painting independently. But they were in an even better position than we to know that he could not have done so, for at the beginning of the sixteenth century painting is still a complicated, rather ceremonious technique; unduly fettered by formulas and rites, it is a skill rather than an art, proficiency rather than knowledge, a set of procedures rather than a method. Professional rules, secret traditions\u2014everything contributes toward making the apprenticeship a social obligation and a necessity. The biographers' silence betrays their embarrassment. Unable to reconcile the precocious notoriety of young Robusti and excommunication, they throw a veil of darkness on the eight years that separate the two. We can be certain that no one has rejected Jacopo; and since he has not perished from languor and scorn in his father's dye-shop, he must have worked normally and regularly in the studio of a painter about whom we know nothing except that _he was not_ Titian. In closed, suspicious guilds hatred is retroactive; if the mysterious beginning of Jacopo's life seems a premonition of its mysterious end, if a curtain raised to show a disaster miraculously arrested is lowered on a disaster unattended by any miracle, this is because Venice rearranged everything afterwards to make his childhood consonant with his old age. Nothing happens and nothing ends; birth mirrors death and between the two lies scorched earth; everything is consumed by the curse.\n\nWe pass beyond these mirages and find our view unobstructed all across the horizon. An adolescent emerges, dashes away at high speed in search of glory. The year is 1539; Jacopo has left his patron to set up his own studio; he is now a _past master_. The young employee has won independence, fame, a clientele; now it is his turn to hire workers, apprentices. This much is certain: in a city filled with painters, where an economic crisis threatens to strangle the market, becoming a master at the age of twenty is the exception to the rule; merit alone is not enough, nor work, nor tact; one must also have a run of good luck. Everything is in Robusti's favor. Paolo Cagliari is ten, Titian sixty-two; between the unknown child and the old man who will surely die before long many good painters might be found, but only Tintoretto holds out the promise of excellence; in his generation, at any rate, he has no rival and therefore he finds the road before him open. He does in fact pursue this road for several years: his commissions multiply, he enjoys the public's favor as well as that of patricians and intellectuals; Aretino deigns to congratulate him in person.2 The young man is endowed with supernatural gifts which Providence reserves for adolescents who are to die, but he does not die and his woes begin: The old monarch Titian manifests a startling longevity, continuing all the while to vent his hatred on his young challenger and finally resorting to the malicious ruse of officially designating as his successor, to the surprise of no one, Veronese; Aretino's condescension turns to bitterness; critics lash out, censure, chide, castigate\u2014in short, they behave like modern critics. This matters little so long as Jacopo retains the public's favor. But suddenly the wheel turns. At thirty, confident of his means, he asserts himself, paints _The Miracle of St. Mark_ and puts himself, his whole self, into the painting. It is characteristic of him to astound, to strike hard and impose his will by surprise. In this instance, however, he will be the first to be caught off guard; his work dumbfounds his contemporaries but it also scandalizes them. He finds impassioned detractors but not impassioned defenders; behind the scenes we can detect a cabal: Frustration.3 Face to face, united and separated by the same feeling of uneasiness, Venice and her painter contemplate but no longer understand each other. \"Jacopo has not lived up to the promises of his adolescence,\" says the city. And the artist remarks, \"To deceive them, all I had to do was reveal myself. So _I_ was not what they loved!\" Mutual grudges widen the gap between them, breaking one thread in the Venetian woof.\n\nThe pivotal year is 1548. _Before_ , the gods are for him; _afterwards_ , against. No great misfortunes are associated with his persistent bad luck\u2014just enough little ones to lead him to the brink of despair. The gods smiled on the child only to bring about the downfall of the man. Jacopo suddenly undergoes radical change and becomes the frantic, harassed outlaw, Tintoretto. _Before_ , we know nothing about him except that he worked relentlessly, for fame is not easily acquired at the age of twenty. _Afterwards_ his tenacity turns to rage; he wants to produce, to produce without ceasing, to sell, to crush his rivals by the number and dimensions of his canvases. There is a certain element of desperation in his forced effort, for until his death Robusti works against the clock without ever revealing whether he is trying to find himself through his work or to escape from himself through excessive activity. \"Lightning Tintoretto\" sails under a black flag, and for this swift pirate all means are fair, with a marked preference for unfair advantages. Disinterested whenever disinterest pays off, he lowers his eyes, refuses to name a price, repeats like a child, \"It will be whatever you wish.\" But those Neapolitan rascals are in a better position than anyone else to know the value of their wares; they expect the customer to fleece himself through his generosity.\n\nOn other occasions he offers his merchandise at cost in order to close a transaction, only to make other more advantageous sales as a result of the initial emergency contract. On learning that the Crociferi are going to offer a commission to Paolo Cagliari, he feigns ignorance of everything and offers them his services. They essay a polite refusal: \"Thank you, but we want something Veronese.\" And he: \"Something Veronese?4 Well and good. And who is going to do it?\" Somewhat taken aback, they reply: \"Why, we thought that Paolo Cagliari had been designated....\" And Tintoretto now expresses his amazement: \"Cagliari? The idea is fantastic. I'll paint you something Veronese. And for less.\" Signed and sealed. He resorted to the same gambit twenty times, painting _in the style of_ Pordenone, _in the style of_ Titian, always for less.\n\nHow can he cut costs? That is the question that torments him. One day he finds the contemptible but ingenious answer that will wreck a tradition. The masters are accustomed to having their canvases copied; their studios execute replicas and sell them at inflated prices, thereby creating a second market for their paintings. To win over their clientele, Jacopo will offer them _better paintings for less_. He eliminates sketches; he will allow others to draw their inspiration from his canvases but not to copy them; through simple, invariable procedures his collaborators will produce something new but not original. They will need only to rearrange the composition, put the left on the right and the right on the left, substitute an old man for a woman who can be used again in another context. Such operations require some training but no more time than simple copying. Tintoretto candidly proclaims: \"In my studio one can acquire an original work for the price of a reproduction.\"\n\nWhen his canvases are spurned, he gives them away. On May 31, 1564, at the Scuola San Rocco the Brotherhood decides to beautify its conference hall by placing a painting in the central oval of the ceiling. Paolo Cagliari, Jacopo Robusti, Schiavone, Salviati and Zucearo are invited to submit sketches. Tintoretto bribes servants, obtains the exact measurements. He had already worked for the Brotherhood and I do not rule out the hypothesis that he found accomplices even within the _Banca e Zonta_. On the day set, each painter exhibits his sketch. When Robusti's turn comes, he electrifies them all. He climbs up a ladder, removes a section of pasteboard, and reveals above their heads a dazzling painting, already in place, already finished. Pandemonium. \"A drawing is easily misunderstood,\" he explained. \"While I was about it, I preferred to see it through. But if my work is displeasing to you, gentlemen, I will give it to you. Not to you, but to San Rocco, your patron, who has done so much for me.\" This forced their hand and the rascal knew it, for the rules of the Brotherhood prohibited their refusing religious donations. All that remained was for them to make the episode a matter of record in the Scuola: \"On this day the undersigned Jacopo Tintoretto, painter, presented to us a painting; he asked no remuneration, promises to complete the work if requested to do so, and states that he is satisfied with it.\" And the undersigned wrote in his turn: \" _Io Jachomo Tentoretto pintor contento et prometo ut supra_.\"\n\nSatisfied? Why not? His gift spreads panic among his competitors, opens to him every door of the Scuola, places its vast, barren walls at the mercy of his brush and finally brings him an annual pension of a hundred ducats. So satisfied is he, in short, that he repeats the gambit in 1571. At the Doge's Palace this time, authorities wishing to commemorate the battle of Lepanto, organize a contest. Instead of a sketch Tintoretto brings a canvas and presents it as a gift. It is accepted with gratitude; shortly thereafter he sends his bill.\n\nIn his base but charming shenanigans one is tempted to see, perhaps, a trait attributable more to morals than to character. We might with some degree of accuracy say that ostentation was characteristic not of Tintoretto but of his century. If an attempt were made to condemn him on the basis of these anecdotes, I know everything that might be said in his defense. The most telling argument is that no one at that time could _work for himself_. Today paintings are in demand; then painters were for sale. They lined the market place like the _bracciante_ in the southern towns; buyers came, examined all of them, singled out one and took him to their church, their _scuola_ or their _palazzo_. Artists had to make themselves available, to advertise themselves as our directors do, to accept just any work in the same way that our directors accept just any scenario in the foolish hope of using it to display their talents. Everything was under contract: the subject, number, quality, and sometimes even the attitude of the figures, and the dimensions of the canvas; these were complemented by restrictions imposed by traditions relating to religion and to taste. Their clients had their moods just as our producers have their whims. And their clients\u2014alas!\u2014they, too, had their sudden inspirations; at their bidding, everything had to be reworked. In the palace of the Medici, Benozzo Gozzoli was for a long time knowingly tortured by idiotic patrons; and we need only compare Tintoretto's _Paradise_ in the Louvre with the one in the Doge's Palace to understand the magnitude of the pressures to which he was subjected. Intransigence, rejection of compromise, the superb choice of misery were out of the question since the artist had to provide for his family and keep his studio in operation, as present-day machines are. In sum, he had to renounce painting or to paint according to instructions. No one can blame Tintoretto for wishing to become rich. As a matter of fact, toward the middle of his life he was never out of work, never lacked money. This utilitarian artist followed the principle that nothing is done for nothing, that painting would be a mere pastime unless it produced some income. At long last, as we shall see, he will buy a comfortable plebeian house in a residential district. This purchase will crown his career, exhaust his savings, leave the Robusti children with only a ludicrous heritage to divide: the contents of his studio, a diminishing clientele, and the house itself, which is passed on to the oldest son, then to his son-in-law. Twelve years after the death of her husband, Faustina recalls bitterly that he left his family in need; she has every reason to complain, for the deceased had his own way. He liked money, of course, but in the American way. He saw in it nothing more than the external sign of success. At the bottom, this contract chaser sought only one thing: the means of practicing his craft. There is also an element of justice in his shenanigans, for they would be inconceivable without his professional talent, hard work, and speed. His speed gives him an advantage, for to paint a good picture he requires only the time taken by others to make bad sketches.\n\nFurthermore, if he plagiarized Veronese, the latter repaid him in kind. Their reciprocal borrowings must be viewed through the eyes of their contemporaries. For many of their contemporaries the greatest painters are those who have met the test of certain social criteria; they are personalities defined by collective judgment. We are interested in a particular painting at first, and then in the particular man who painted it; we hang Matisse on our walls. But contrast our view with that of the _Crociferi:_ they were not interested in Cagliari; they wanted a certain style that appealed to the senses, trifles, inoffensive and harmonious pomp; they knew a trademark, a slogan. A painting signed Veronese is certain to please. That is what they wanted, nothing else. Cagliari could produce better works and proved it when he painted his _Terrible Crucifixion_ ,5 but he was too shrewd a businessman to squander his genius. Under such conditions we could hardly blame Tintoretto for appropriating at times a style that belonged exclusively to no one. After all, he made an honest proposal: \"You want something trite and lifelike? I will provide it.\"\n\nI am aware of the tastes of his age. My aim here is not to judge him but to determine whether his age could identify itself with him without discomfort. And on this point the evidence is explicit: his conduct shocked his contemporaries and turned them against him. A little disloyalty would perhaps have been tolerated, but Tintoretto went too far; throughout Venice a single complaint was voiced: \"He goes too far!\" Even in that commercial city such shrewdness in commerce is unique. At the Scuola San Rocco, when he stole their commission, his colleagues barked so loudly that he felt obliged to appease them: the establishment had other ceilings and walls, the work had only begun; as for him, now that his gift had been accepted, he would disappear, leaving the field open to the most worthy of them. His unfortunate rivals soon discover that he is lying like a pagan, for the Scuola will become his fief, and as long as he lives, no other painter will ever cross the threshold. They had surely not waited for this occasion to begin hating him. It is worth noting, however, that the scandal occurs in 1564 and that the first _Life_ of Tintoretto appears in 1567. The shortness of the interval between the two events further enlightens us concerning the origin and significance of the ugly rumors collected by Vasari.6 Calumnies on the part of jealous rivals? They were all extremely jealous of each other; why, then, are calumnies heaped on Robusti alone unless he is the \"foul smell\" of the artists, unless he represents in the eyes of each and all the collective and magnified faults of his fellow men? Furthermore, even his clients seem shocked by his conduct. Not all of them, no. But he has made numerous enemies in high places. Zammaria de Zigninoni, a member of the San Rocco Brotherhood, promises fifteen ducats for decorative works under the express condition that Jacopo not be given the commission. The records of the Brotherhood suggest, moreover, that the _Banca e Zonta_ held a few tense and somewhat unceremonious meetings in the Scuola in connection with the restricted donation and Jacopo's gambit; an agreement was reached but Zigninoni kept his ducats. Nor do the officials always seem kindly disposed toward him. In 1571, Tintoretto contributes his _Battle of Lepanto;_ in 1577 the painting is destroyed by fire; when the question of replacing it arises, he has every reason to believe that the government will call on him. Not at all. He is deliberately passed over and preference is shown instead to the mediocre Vincentino. It might be argued that his canvas had met with disfavor. But that is hardly plausible, for Jacopo always treads softly when working for the officials; he \"paints like Titian,\" disguising his own style. Besides, after 1571 the government gave him several commissions. No, the Venetian authorities have no intention of depriving themselves of his services; they simply want to punish him for his rascality. In short, there is unanimity: he is a disloyal colleague, a maverick painter, and there is bound to be something unsavory about him since he is without friends. Sweet troubled souls who use the dead to edify the living and especially yourselves, try if you will to find in his excesses the glittering proof of his passion. The fact is that passions are as diverse as people: ravenous and contemplative, dreamy and practical, abstract, dawdling, apprehensive, rash\u2014a hundred others. I will call Tintoretto's passion practical, apprehensive-recriminatory and ravenous-rash. The more I reflect on his ludicrous gambits, the more I become convinced they were born of an ulcerated heart. What a nest of vipers! There we find everything: the delirium of pride and the folly of humility, chained ambition and unchained confusion, harsh rebukes and persistent bad luck, the goad of success and the lash of failure. His life is the story of an opportunist tormented by fear; it has a healthy, sprightly beginning; the offensive is well staged until the hard blow of 1548; after this the rhythm quickens, goes out of control, lights the fires of hell. Jacopo will fight on until the time of his death, knowing that he will not win. Opportunism and anguish, those are the two biggest vipers. If we wish truly to know him, we must have a closer look at them.\n\n1 Tr. First published in _Les Temps Modernes_ (November, 1957) under the title of _Le S\u00e9questr\u00e9 de Venice_.\n\n2 Tr. Because of the influence which he exercised over kings, diplomats and artists through his writings, Pietro Aretino (1492-1556) has been called the first journalist. Curiously, the amoral publicist whose services went to the highest bidder counted Titian among his devoted friends.\n\n3 Ridolfi even maintains that the Scuola San Marco refused the canvas and that Tintoretto had to take it back to his studio.\n\n4 Tr. The spacious architectural quality of the paintings of Veronese (Paolo Cagliari, 1528-1588) is typical of his school.\n\n5 It is in the Louvre. The irony is that he was inspired by the _real_ Robusti.\n\n6 Tr. The celebrated painter, architect and biographer published his _Lives of Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects_ in 1550. The date generally given for the revised edition is 1568.\nTHE PURITANS OF THE RIALTO\n\nNo one is a cynic. To be discouraged in the absence of discouragement is the diversion of saints. Only up to a certain point, however, for these chaste and generous creatures stigmatize their lechery and denounce their avarice. If they discover their real gangrene\u2014saintliness\u2014they look for justification, like all guilty creatures. _Tintoretto_ is no saint; he knows that everyone in town condemns his conduct; he persists only because he thinks that he is right and they are wrong. And let no one come up and say that he is aware of his genius, for a genius\u2014this is ironical but true\u2014knows his courage but not his worth. Nothing is more wretched than sullen temerity that reaches for the moon and writhes in defeat; first comes pride, without proofs or pedigrees; when it matures into madness we can call it genius if we choose, but I fail to see that very much is gained thereby. No, to justify his piracy Tintoretto pleads neither limited originality nor unlimited aspirations. He defends his rights, claiming that he has been wronged whenever a commission goes to one of his colleagues. Left to himself, he would have covered every wall in the city with his paintings; no _campo_ would have been too vast, no _sotto portico_ too obscure for him to illuminate. He would have covered the ceilings, people would have walked across his most beautiful images, his brush would have spared neither the fa\u00e7ades of the palaces that line the Canale Grande nor the gondolas, nor perhaps the gondoliers. The man imagines that he was born with the privilege of transforming his city single-handed, and a good case can be drawn up in his favor.\n\nWhen he begins his apprenticeship painting is on the wane. In Florence the crisis is manifest; Venice, as always, is silent or hypocritical, but we know for a certainty that the authentic Rialtan sources of inspiration have dried up. At the end of the fifteenth century the city is deeply affected by the passing of Antonello da Messina. His death marks a turning point; afterwards painters are imported. I am not saying that they are brought in from distant regions but simply that the most famous painters come from the mainland: Giorgione, from Castelfranco; Titian, from Pieve di Cadore; Paolo Cagliari and Bonifazio dei Pitati, from Verona; Palma Vecchio, from Sarinalta; Girolamo Vecchio and Paris Bordone, from Treviso; Andrea Schiavone, from Zara; and others still. As a matter of fact, this aristocratic republic is primarily a technocracy and has always been bold enough to recruit specialists from far and wide and clever enough to treat them as her own. Moreover, this is the time when the Republic of Venice, checked at sea and threatened by coalitions on the continent, turns to the hinterlands and tries through conquests to assert her might. Most of the new immigrants are from annexed territories. Venice betrays her anxiety by importing artists on a massive scale. When we recall that the artists of the Quattrocento were for the most part born inside the walls of the city or in Murano, we cannot suppress the notion that after the extinction of the Vivarini and Bellini families and after the death of Carpaccio, the resurgence of her generations of artists would not have been possible without a blood transfusion.\n\nPainting is like all the other crafts in that the patriciate is responsible for facilitating the immigration of good artisans and\u2014to prove what might be called their cosmopolitan chauvinism\u2014for making the Republic of the Doges into a melting pot. In the eyes of this distrustful and jealous aristocracy, foreigners make the best Venetians; their adoption of Venice is proof of inspiration just as aloofness signals a weak character. We can be sure that the local artisans did not look upon the newcomers in the same way. Why should they? For them the newcomers represent foreign competition. They are tactful enough not to complain, and they carry on as if nothing were wrong; but there are conflicts, inescapable evidences of tension, charges and countercharges stemming from wounded pride. Forced to bow to the technical superiority of the alien settlers, the natives hide their humiliation by expanding their prerogatives. They agree to The Puritans of the Bialto take second place to the most skilled, to the most expert, but only in return for a sacrifice: their birthright must remain intact. Only a Rialtan can claim Venice as his own; while Germans are better glaziers, they can never boast that they are true Venetians. Before their disappearance the great painters of the Quattrocento had the bitter experience of seeing the public turn away from them and bestow their favors on young intruders who scorned them. For example Titian, the outsider, leaves one of the Bellini brothers for the other\u2014Gentile for Giovanni\u2014in pursuit of still another outsider, Antonello, the meteor that rent the sky and the water of the lagune twenty years earlier. Tiziano Vecellio has no need of Giovanni; what he seeks in him is a reflection; he proves this by soon abandoning the master of the disciple and joining Giorgione's school, for the third alien seems to the second to be the true heir to the first. Tiziano and Giorgio belong to the same generation; the pupil may even be older than the teacher. Did the Bellini brothers realize on that day that they had served their time? And what did Giovanni's true disciples say? And the others, the last representatives of the Murano school, what did they think? Many of them were youngsters or men still in their prime; the influence of Antonello da Messina had reached all of them through Giovanni Bellini; colors and light came from Messina, but their acclimatization was effected by Giovanni; through him they had become Venetian. The young artists staked their honor on remaining faithful but were strangled by their fidelity. They did their best to adapt to new conditions without abandoning the rather crude techniques that they had been taught, but to do so was to accept mediocrity. They must have felt bitter resentment on seeing two young intruders join forces, break with the indigenous tradition, rediscover the secrets of a Sicilian, and effortlessly carry painting to its highest perfection. Giovanni still reigns, however, and the fame of this admirable artist spreads throughout northern Italy. The barbarian invasion begins during his latter years and triumphs after his death in 1516.\n\nAt the height of the invasion, the greatest painter of the century is born in the heart of the occupied city, in an alley on the Rialto. A somber plebeian pride, always humiliated, always rebuffed, constantly in waiting, seizes upon the opportunity, infiltrates the heart of the sole Rialtan with a remnant of talent, emboldens and inflames it. We recall that he springs directly from neither the working class nor the bourgeoisie. His father is a successful artisan, a member of the petty bourgeoisie, who takes pride in not working for others. As the son of a working man Jacopo would perhaps have remained the obscure collaborator of an artist; as the son of an independent craftsman, however, he has to become a master or a failure. He will pass through the ranks but is prevented by his class and family status from stopping along the way. That he fails to leave good impressions in the studio where he serves his apprenticeship is understandable, for his aim on entering the studio was to leave it as soon as possible to reclaim the place already reserved for him in the social hierarchy. Then, too, Schiavone (or Bordone or Bonifazio dei Pitati\u2014they are all the same) must have looked upon him as an intruder while Jacopo considered his master an alien or a thief. The Little Dyer is a _native_ and Venice is his birthright. Had he been a mediocre painter, he would have remained modest and resentful; but he is brilliant and knows it, and he will take second place to no one. Aliens, in the eyes of a Rialtan, have nothing to protect them other than their professional worth; if Jacopo outshines them as a painter, they will have to disappear, even if this means their assassination. No one paints or writes without a mandate; would anyone dare if \" _I_ were not the Other\"?1 Jacopo is given a mandate by a toiling population to redeem through his art the privileges of a purebred Venetian. That explains his unscrupulous conduct. Popular recrimination fills his heart with an abiding desire to reassert a claim; he has been given the task of winning recognition of his rights; whoever champions such a just cause can use any means to succeed\u2014he will show no mercy, give no quarter. His misfortune results from the fact that his struggle against the undesirables brings him into conflict with the patriciate and its policy of assimilation of foreigners in the name of the indigenous artisans. When he shouted in the streets, \"Veronese to Verona!\" it was the government that he was calling in question. Realizing this, he hesitates, then resumes his obstinate course, exhibiting a curious mixture of flexibility and inflexibility. As a prudent subject of a police state he always gives in, or pretends to; as an _indigenous_ citizen of the most beautiful of all cities, his arrogance is boundless; he can even be servile without losing his ankylosis of pride. Everything is to no avail. His schemes against those protected by the aristocracy are thwarted by his impatience or by his incurable bluntness, or they backfire. Now we see the rancor of the Republic in a new light. The subject asks essentially only for what would probably have been accorded him, but his perverse submissiveness nettles the authorities, and they consider him a rebel. Or at the very least they are suspicious of him, and their suspicions are well founded. The consequences of his impetuousness are worth examining.\n\nFirst, the studied and almost sadistic violence which I will call lack of self-restraint. Born among the underlings who endured the weight of a superimposed hierarchy, he shares their fears and their tastes; we find their prudence even in his presumptuousness. His neighbors, alert, courageous, somewhat suspicious of outsiders, have helped him to establish a system of values, shown him the dangers that life holds in store, pointed out the hopes that are permitted and those that are prohibited. Specific, limited opportunities, a foreseeable destiny, a future already visible in its general outlines, being imprisoned inside a transparency like a tiny flower inside a glass paperweight\u2014all this kills dreams. One desires only what is possible; this is a mitigating circumstance that enrages fools and excites far-fetched but ephemeral ambitions. Jacopo's ambition suddenly asserts itself. Bolstered by its virulence and diverse forms, it assimilates a minute pencil of light, its possibilities. Or rather, nothing is _possible_. There is a means and there is an end in view, which is the prescribed task; one can rise above the heaviest low-lying mists and touch the rigid, luminous membrane of the ceiling; there are other ceilings, membranes that grow progressively clearer and more delicate, and at the very top, perhaps, is the blue of the sky. But what does this matter to Tintoretto; each has his own soaring range and his own habitat. Tintoretto knows that he is talented; he has been told that his talent is his capital. By putting his capacities to the test he will capitalize on them and provide himself with an adequate income. And so we see him totally mobilized for a long life, prepared always to exploit the vein even to the point of depletion of both mine and miner. At about the same time another slave to work, Michelangelo, is undertaking projects only to desert them in disgust and leave them unfinished. Tintoretto _always_ finishes things with the terrible application of a man bent on finishing his statements come what may; even death stood aside for him at San Giorgio, where it allowed him to apply the finishing touches to his last canvas, or at least to give final instructions to his collaborators. Never during his entire life did he allow himself an indulgence, a dislike, a preference, or even the comfort of a dream. During periods of exhaustion he must have repeated to himself this principle: \"To refuse a commission is to hand it over to my colleagues.\"\n\nHe has to produce at any cost. Here the will of a man and that of a city coalesce. A hundred years earlier Donatello had scolded Uccello for sacrificing creativity to experimentation and for carrying the love of painting to the point of ceasing to paint pictures2, but that was in Florence, and the Florentine artists had just begun to risk experimentation with _perspective;_ by applying to painted objects the laws of geometrical optics, they were trying to construct a new plastic space. Other times, other customs. In Venice, under the leadership of Titian, everyone shares the opinion that painting has just reached the peak of perfection, that further advances are impossible: Art is dead, long live life. The supreme barbarity begins with Aretino's foolish statements: \"How realistic it is! How true to life! _You would never believe it is painted!_ \" In short, it is time for painting to disappear in the face of _realizations;_ inspired merchants want something beautiful and useful. A work ought to please the lover of art, dazzle Europe with the pageantry of the Republic, awe the people. And still today we stand in awe, we the little tourists, before the Venetian cinemascope and prattle about one of Titian's realizations, one of Paolo Cagliari's productions, one of Pordenone's performances, one of Vecention's stagings. Jacopo Robusti shares the prejudices of his age, and our experts stress the point. How many times have I heard them say, \"Tintoretto, bah! Just like the movies.\" And still, no one else in the world, either before or after him, has carried so far the passion for research. With Titian, painting flowers and dies, a victim of its own perfection; Jacopo sees in its death the necessary condition for a resurrection: everything is to have a new beginning, to be done over\u2014a theme to which we shall return. But\u2014and this is his major contradiction\u2014he will never allow his experiments to restrict his productivity. So long as there remains in Venice one barren wall, the painter's task is to cover it; morals prohibit transforming a studio into a laboratory. Art is in its entirety a serious profession and a battle to the death against intruders. Like Titian, like Veronese, Jacopo will produce exquisite cadavers. With one difference: his cadavers are racked by fever, and we do not know at first whether this is the aftermath of life or the onset of putrefaction. And if the comparison with movie-making is pressed, he resembles the cinematographer in _this_ respect: he accepts imbecile scenarios but imbues them with his obsessions. He has to fool the buyer, to give him something for his money; the buyer will have his Catherine, his Theresa, his Sebastian; for the same price he will have on the same canvas, if there is sufficient room, his wife and his brothers. But underneath it all, behind the sumptuous and banal fa\u00e7ade of the _realization_ , he pushes forward his experimentation. Each of his great works has a double meaning; its strict utilitarianism disguises an unending quest. Fitting his research into the frame of the paid commission, he is obliged to revolutionize painting even while respecting the stipulations of his client. Such is the inner motivation of his excessive activity, and such will later be the reason for his perdition.\n\nHe also has to win commissions. We have already seen that he succeeds. But let us re-examine his actions; now they will appear in a new light. Tintoretto's rebellion has various repercussions. Having rebelled against the politics of the melting-pot, he is forced to infringe upon corporate regulations or practices. The government, unable to eliminate competition and aware of its advantages, takes pains to channel it through contests. The powerful and the rich, if their taste is the deciding factor, will preserve public order by practicing bland protectionism in the form of directed competition.\n\nAre they sincere? Doubtless, and all would be perfect if we were certain of their abilities but we have only their word. Sometimes harmony reigns\u2014and then they choose Vincentino. Tintoretto always avoids their contests. Does he deny their competence? Certainly not! He simply refuses them the right to treat a native in the same way as an intruder. But contests do exist, and by shunning them, our rebel is trying deliberately to destroy protectionism. He is trapped in a corner. Since the officials pretend to base their judgment on merit, and since he challenges their right to judge him, he has either to renounce painting or to win recognition through the quality of his works. He loses no time in bringing his works to their attention. Seizing upon every opportunity, he takes his competitors by surprise, confronts his jurors with the accomplished fact, and utilizes all his cunning and speed, all the diligence of his collaborators in establishing a system of mass production which breaks every record and allows him to sell his canvases at rock-bottom prices, and at times to give them away. Two second-hand shops face each other on a Roman avenue; the shopkeepers, I imagine, have conspired to simulate a merciless struggle that will not cease until both shops are brought under a single proprietor; through their eternal confrontation the shop windows suggest a tragic comedian bent on contrasting the two sides of his nature. One is covered with gloomy slogans: _\"Prezzi disastrosi!_ \" The other contains multicolored placards which announce: _\"Prezzi da ridere! da ridere! da ridere!_ \" This has been going on for years, and whenever I see the shops they make me think of Tintoretto. Had he chosen laughter or tears? Both, I think\u2014depending on the client. We can even surmise that he chuckled privately and complained publicly that he was being robbed; in any case, in his studio, every day was like a year-end clearance sale, and clients were willing to meet the judicious prices set at his liquidation sales. Having set out to commission a medallion, they ended by turning over to him every wall in their house. He was the first to break the strained bonds of friendship within the confraternity. For this unlabeled Darwinist, colleague meant personal enemy, and he discovered before Hobbes the meaning of absolute competition: _Homo homini lupus_. Venice trembles. Unless a vaccine can be found to combat the virus Tintoretto, the good old corporate system will fall apart and all that remains will be smoldering antagonisms, molecular solitudes. The Republic condemns his new methods, brands them felonies, speaks of slipshod work, of cut-rate sales, of monopoly. Later, much later, other cities will honor his methods in another language, using terms like _struggle for life, mass production, dumping, trust_ , etc. For a while this man of bad character will lose on one canvas all that he gains on another. Through hook or crook he will win commissions\u2014but not acceptance. Through a strange reversal he, the _native_ , the one-hundred-percent Rialtan, is an intruder, almost a pariah in his own city. The inevitable consequence is that he will perish unless he establishes a family. First, to stifle competition within his studio. This champion of liberalism reverses the Biblical precept; he will have others never do to him what he does to them. Moreover, he needs steadfast loyalty; outside collaborators can be frightened and discouraged by all the scandals circulated about him, and much time will be wasted if he has to reassure them. None of the scandals will permanently damage his reputation. Why does he need disciples? He wants other hands, other pairs of arms, nothing more. From absolute competition to exploitation of the family\u2014that is his course. In 1550 he marries Faustina dei Vescovi and immediately starts producing children. Just as he produces pictures: without let or hindrance. His brood has only one shortcoming: there are too many girls. Too bad! He will put all of them except two in the convent: Marietta, whom he retains as his helper, and Ottavia, whom he marries to a painter. \"Lightning Tintoretto\" will persist until Faustina gives birth to two sons, Domenico and Marco. Before their arrival he has already begun to teach the craft to his oldest daughter, Marietta. A woman painter is something extraordinary in Venice. He must have been very impatient. Finally, around 1575, his operation is completed; the new staff includes Sebastiano Casser, his son-in-law, Marietta, Domenico and Marco. The symbol of a domestic association is the _domus_ which protects and imprisons the group. At about the same date Jacopo buys a house, which he will never abandon. In this small lazaret the leper will live half-quarantined with his family, loving them more and more as he witnesses the swelling of the ranks of the _others_ who hate him. On observing him _in his home_ , at work, in his relations with his wife and children, we discover another side of his personality\u2014that of the austere moralist. Was there not more than a trace of Calvinism in his life? We see here pessimism and work, the profit motive and devotion to the family. Human nature is vitiated by original sin; men are divided by self-interest. The Christian must seek salvation through his works; he must struggle for survival, labor unceasingly to improve the Earth that God has entrusted to him; he will find the mark of divine favor in the material success of his undertaking. As for the promptings of his heart, they should be reserved for the flesh of his flesh, for his children. Was Venice feeling the influence of the reformed Religion? We know that in the second half of the century there was in Venice an odd person, Fra Paolo Sarpi, who was popular among the patricians, hostile to Rome, and familiar with foreign Protestant movements. But in all probability the petty bourgeoisie knew nothing about the tendencies, discernible in certain intellectual quarters, that seemed vaguely to favor the Reform. It would be more accurate to say that the Republic reformed itself. And by Tintoretto's time this reform has been going on for a long time. Venetian merchants owe their living to credit; they cannot accept the sentence pronounced by the Church on those whom it insists on labeling usurers, and they scorn Roman obscurantism in favor of science, especially when practical. The State has always affirmed the domination of civil authority and will not change its basic doctrine. The State has the upper hand over its clergy and, when Pope Pius V takes it upon himself to remove ecclesiastics from the jurisdiction of lay tribunals, the Senate pointedly refuses to recognize the removal. Furthermore, the government has many reasons for considering the Holy See a temporal and military power rather than a spiritual power. All this does not prevent the authorities from currying the Pope's favor, if the interest of the Republic is at stake, or pursuing heretics, or organizing a sumptuous feast in honor of St. Bartholomew to flatter a very Christian monarch. Tintoretto's pseudo-Calvinism is transmitted to him by his city; the painter unknowingly assimilates the benign Protestantism found at that time in every great capitalist stronghold.3 The artist's position is then highly equivocal, especially in Venice. But let us press our advantage; this very ambiguity may well enable us to understand Jacopo's puritanical passion.\n\nWe read that \"The Renaissance attributed to the artist the traits which Antiquity reserved for the man of action and which the Middle Ages had used to adorn its saints.\" This is not untrue, but to me the opposite observation seems at least equally true: \"[During the sixteenth century] painting and sculpture were still looked upon as manual arts; all the honors were reserved for poetry. That explains the attempts to put the figurative arts on the same footing with literature.\"4 We know that Aretino, the Petronius of the poor and the Malaparte of the rich, was the arbiter of taste and elegance for the snobs of the Venetian patriciate and that Titian was honored by his friendship, for the artist, with all his fame, was not the poet's equal. And Michelangelo? He made the mistake of imagining that he was of noble birth, and this illusion ruined his life. As a youth he wanted to cultivate the humanities, to write, in the belief that a nobleman deprived of his sword could take up the pen without degrading himself. Forced to take up the chisel, he was never able to console himself. From his dais of shame he looked down upon sculpture and painting, deriving what empty, shriveled joy he could from feeling superior to what he was doing. Forced to remain silent, he sought to provide a language for the mute arts, to multiply allegories and symbols; he wrote a book on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and tortured marble to force it to speak.\n\nWhat are we to conclude? Are the Renaissance painters heroes and gods, or are they manual workers? Everything is relative, depending on the clientele and the mode of remuneration. Or rather painters are primarily manual workers. They may become employees of the court or remain local masters. It is up to them to choose\u2014or to be chosen. Raphael and Michelangelo are court appointees. Proud but dependent, they will be dumped in the street if on the slightest pretext they meet with disfavor; against this, the sovereign guarantees their fame. This sacred person accords to the elect a portion of his supernatural powers; the glory of his throne falls upon them like a ray of sunshine, and they reflect it upon the people; the divine right of kings gives painters divine rights. The result: daubers changed into supermen. Just who are these ordinary men whom a giant has snatched from the petty bourgeoisie and suspended between heaven and earth, these satellites whose borrowed splendor is overpowering? Are they anything other than ordinary men raised above humanity? They are heroes, yes\u2014intercessors, intermediaries. Today still, nostalgic republicans worship in them, under the guise of genius, the light from the dead star of Monarchy.\n\nTintoretto is of another ilk. He works for merchants, for officials, for parish churches. Not that he is uneducated. He was enrolled in school at the age of seven and probably ended his schooling at twelve, after he had learned to write and reckon; besides, and more important still, we would surely have to class as education the patient cultivation of the senses, of manual and mental faculties, and of the traditional empiricism still associated with studio painting around 1530. But he will never acquire the trappings of the court painters. Michelangelo writes sonnets; Raphael is supposed to have been versed in Latin; and Titian himself finally acquired a veneer through associating with intellectuals. Compared to these worldlings, Tintoretto seems like a dunce; he will never have the leisure or the taste for toying with ideas and words. He ridicules the humanism of men of letters. Venice has few poets and still fewer philosophers, but for him these are too many and he has nothing to do with any of them. Not that he shies away from them; he simply ignores them. He is willing to admit their social superiority. Aretino has every right to congratulate him with condescending benevolence; this high-ranking person has been _received_ in Venice and is a member of the inner circle; patricians who would never dream of greeting a painter in the street invite him to their table. But does Tintoretto have to envy him, too? Does he have to envy him _because he writes?_ To him the creations of the mind acquire an utterly immoral air because they are gratuitous. God placed us on the earth to earn our bread by the sweat of our brow; but writers do not sweat. Do they really work? Jacopo never opens a book with the exception of his missal; he would never be so foolish as to force his talent for the sake of competing with literature. His paintings include everything but _mean_ nothing; they are as mute as the world. All that he really values, this son of an artisan, is physical effort, manual creation. What fascinates him in the profession of painting is that here professional ability is pushed to the point of prestidigitation and the delicacy of the merchandise reduced to its quintessence. The artist is the supreme worker; he exhausts himself and his material in order to produce and sell visions.\n\nThat would not prevent him from working for princes if he liked them. He does not and that is the crux of the matter. They frighten him without inspiring him. He never tries to approach them or to make himself known to them. He seems to take pains to confine his reputation within the walls of Venice. During his whole life he left Venice only once, when he was in his sixties, to go just outside the city to Mantua. Even then he had to be begged to go. His clients wanted him to hang up his own canvases, but he refused to go without his wife. This stipulation not only affords proof of his conjugal sentiments; it leaves no doubt about his horror of travel. And it would be wrong to think that his Venetian colleagues share his horror, for they leave no road untraveled. A century earlier Gentile Bellini was sailing the seas. What adventurers! But Jacopo is a mole, happy only within the network of his molehills. Whenever he tries to imagine the outside world, he is gripped by terror; still, if he has a choice, he prefers to risk his skin rather than his paintings. He accepts foreign commissions\u2014and for him anything beyond Padua is foreign\u2014but does not solicit them. What a contrast between his frenzied behavior in the Doge's Palace, the Scuola San Rocco, the home of the Crociferi, and this indifference! He entrusts the execution of foreign commissions to his collaborators, surveys from afar their serial productions, takes care not to interfere, as if fearful of allowing the tiniest spangle of his talent to venture beyond his native soil\u2014European distribution rights are available for only his B pictures. In the Uffizi, the Prado, the National Gallery, the Louvre, in Munich and in Vienna, we find Raphael, Titian, a hundred others. Every painter, or almost every painter, except Tintoretto. He fiercely guarded his works for his fellow citizens and the only way to find out anything about him is to search for him in his native city for the very good reason that he did not _want_ to leave Venice.\n\nBut we must be specific. In Venice itself he has two distinct clienteles. He besieges public officials and, naturally, puts his whole studio to work, including the head of the family, if the Senate gives him a commission. Still visible in the Doge's Palace, under a lighting system that shows them off to advantage, are the works of a strong collective personality that bore the name of Tintoretto. But if you are interested in Jacopo Robusti you will have to abandon the Piazzetta, cross the Piazza San Marco, ride a donkey across bridges that span the canals, turn down a labyrinth of dark, narrow streets, enter still darker churches. There you will find him. At the Scuola San Rocco you will find him in person, without Marietta or Domenico or Sebastiano Casser; there he works alone. A grimy haze darkens the canvases, or perhaps the lighting is at fault; wait patiently until your eyes become adjusted; finally you will see a rose in the darkness, a genius in the penumbra. And who paid for these paintings? Sometimes the faithful of the parish, sometimes the members of the Brotherhood\u2014middle-class men, great and small; they are his true public, the only public that he loves.\n\nThis huckster-painter has none of the qualities of a God-hero. With a little luck he will become notorious, famous, but never glorious; his profane clientele lacks the power to crown him. Of course the renown of his august colleagues honors the whole profession and he, too, scintillates somewhat. Does he covet their glory? Perhaps. But he meets none of the requirements for acquiring glory; he rejects the favor of princes because it would reduce him to servitude. Jacopo Robusti takes pride in remaining a petty chief, a peddler of Fine Arts made to order, the master of his own studio. He makes no difference between the economic independence of the producer and the freedom of the artist; his activities prove that he has a secret desire to reverse the laws of marketing, to create demand by supplying goods. Did he not create slowly and patiently within the Brotherhood of San Rocco a demand for art\u2014a certain kind of art\u2014which he alone could satisfy? His independence is preserved to an even greater degree when he works for associations\u2014 _consorterie_ , parishes\u2014and when these great bodies make their decisions by majority vote.\n\nMichelangelo, a pseudo-noble, and Titian, the son of peasants, are directly exposed to the attraction of the monarchy. Tintoretto's heritage is that of the independent craftsman and worker. The artisan is an amphibian; as a manual worker, he is proud of his hands, and as a member of the petty bourgeoisie, he is attracted by the ruling bourgeoisie. By fostering competition the ruling bourgeoisie allows fresh air to circulate within a stifling protectionism. At that time there is in Venice _a bourgeois hope_. Only a glimmer, for the aristocracy has long since taken precautions; in their stratified world, rich men are _made_ , patricians are born. But restrictions are placed on the wealthy; not only are businessmen and industrialists restricted to their own class but they are also denied entrance into the most lucrative professions; the State restricts the concession of the _appalto_ (shipping franchise) to the aristocracy. Sad, dreamy bourgeoisie! Everywhere else in Europe members of the bourgeoisie are hastening to disown their past and buy titles and castles. In Venice everything is denied them, even the humble blessing of betrayal. Betrayal will therefore take the form of dreams. Giovita Fon-tana, originally from Piacenza, moves into the business world, accumulates gold and spends it in building a palace on the Canale Grande; an entire existence is summed up in these brief words: a voracious desire, satiated, is finally turned into dreamy snobbery, a merchant dies and is reborn as an imaginary patrician. Rich commoners dance in a ring and hide their nocturnal fantasies; grouped into associations they outdo themselves in charitable works, their melancholy austerity contrasting sharply with the melancholy orgies of a disenchanted patriciate.\n\nFor the Republic is no longer mistress of the seas. Gradually the aristocracy begins to decline, failures multiply, the number of poor noblemen increases, the others lose their spirit of enterprise. The sons of the merchant princes buy land and live on their income. Soon ordinary \"citizens\" replace them in certain functions; ships eventually come under the control of men from the bourgeoisie. But the bourgeoisie is still not ready by any stretch of the imagination to consider itself the rising class. It even harbors the notion that it may one day insure the resurgence of the fallen nobility; we should say rather that an obscure agitation took hold of it, making its condition less tolerable and resignation to it more difficult.\n\nTintoretto does not dream. Never. If ambition is dependent on opportunities for social advancement, then the most ambitious commoners in Venice are the members of the petty bourgeoisie, for they still have the opportunity to rise above their class. But the painter is aware of his deep-seated affinities with his clients. He appreciates their attitude toward work and morality, their good common sense. He likes their nostalgia and, especially, he shares their profound desire for freedom; all of them need freedom, if only to produce and to buy and sell. These are the clues to his opportunism; his is a need for air which comes from the summits. A troubled sky, a distant, invisible ascent opens to him a vertical future; like a balloon he is borne aloft, filled with the new spirit, for since childhood his outlook has been that of the bourgeoisie. But the contradictions within the class of his origin are to limit his ambitions: as a peddler, he hopes always to outdo himself; as a laborer he pretends to work with his hands. That is enough to determine his position. There are in Venice approximately 7,600 patricians, 13,600 citizens, 127,000 artisans, workers, and small businessmen, 1,500 Jews, 12,900 domestics and 550 beggars. Ignoring the Jews and nobles, beggars and domestics, Tintoretto is interested only in the imaginary barrier that separates the commoners into two groups, 13,600 on the one hand and 127,000 on the other. He wants to be first in the second group and last in the first\u2014in short, the most humble of the rich and the most distinguished of the tradesmen. This makes the artisan, in the heart of troubled Venice, a pseudo-bourgeois more true than a true bourgeois. In him and on his canvases the Brotherhood of San Rocco will admire the embellished image of a bourgeoisie untainted by betrayal.\n\nMichelangelo has reservations about working for the Sovereign Pontiff; his contempt sometimes makes him recoil, for this nobleman looks down on art. Tintoretto is just the opposite; he outstrips himself; without art, what would he be? A dyer. Art is the force that lifts him above his natal condition, and his dignity is the thing that sustains him. He has to work or to fall back to the bottom of the well. Recoil from art? Keep away from it? How? He has no time to raise questions about painting. Who knows whether he even gives it a second thought? Michelangelo thinks too much; he is a gentleman, an intellectual. Tintoretto does not meditate\u2014he paints.\n\nSo much for his opportunism. His destiny is to incarnate bourgeois puritanism in an aristocratic Republic during its decline. Elsewhere this somber humanism would take root; in Venice it will disappear before being recognized for what it is, but not before arousing the distrust of an aristocracy always on guard. The moroseness that official and bureaucratic Venice manifests toward Tintoretto is the same as that which the patriciate evidences toward the Venetian bourgeoisie. These cantankerous merchants and their painter pose a danger to the Establishment and have to be kept under surveillance.\n\n1 Tr. \"The Other\" occupies a central position in the existential world: \"The Other is not only the one whom I see but the one _who sees me_ \" and makes it possible for me to \"recognize that I _am_ \" as he sees me; I do not choose to be what I am for the Other, \"but I can try to be for myself what I am for the Other, by choosing myself as I appear to the Other.\" Quoted from \"The Other and His Look\" in Justus Streller's _To Freedom Condemned_ (New York: Philosophical Library, 1960).\n\n2 Tr. Paolo Uccello (1397-1475) first exhibited a heroic sense of design and helped to create the Renaissance superman. His rigorous application of linear perspective during a later period is generally assumed to represent a paradoxical return to Gothic traditions.\n\n3 The very same one that inoculated Italian towns against the Lutheran sickness and encouraged Italy to carry out its own religious revolution under the name of Counter Reformation.\n\n4 Eugenio Battista, in an excellent article on Michelangelo published in _I'Epoca_ (August 25, 1957).\nMAN AT BAY\n\nThere is something superb about Tintoretto's stubborn refusal to compete: \"I acknowledge no rival and accept no judge.\" Michelangelo would probably say that. The bad part is that Tintoretto does not. Quite the opposite: when invited to present a sketch, he will lose no time in accepting. Afterwards, we know that he releases his bolts of lightning. Yes, somewhat in the same manner that a cuttle-fish scatters its ink. Blinded by lightning, spectators are unable to see his picture clearly. Everything is arranged, moreover, so that they need never study it or\u2014more important still\u2014appreciate it. When they come out of their stupor, the canvas is in place, the offer under seal, and they will have seen only the flash. Either I am badly mistaken or he is being evasive; he seems to be afraid to come face to face with his adversaries. Would he waste all this ingenuity if he felt certain that his talent would suffice? Would he deign to astound his contemporaries through the quantity of his output if they had no reservations about its quality?\n\nAnd then rivalry brings to the fore his mania for self-affirmation through self-effacement; this is his strong point, his trade-mark. The slightest criticism upsets him, offends him. In 1559 the San Rocco church commissioned the _Healing of the Paralytic_ to balance a canvas by Pordenone. No one asks him to imitate the style of his predecessor. There is no cause for rivalry,1 for Antonio di Sacchis has been dead for twenty years; and if it was once possible for him to influence the younger painter, that time has passed, for Jacopo has mastered his art. Still, he is unable to resist the temptation; he has to paint in the style of Pordenone. Attention has been focused on the way in which he \"exaggerates the baroque violence of their gestures... by contrasting his monumental figures with the architecture inside which they are compressed\" and \"achieved this effect by lowering the ceiling... and using the columns themselves... to immobilize the gestures, freeze their violence.\" He shudders at the notion of being forever imprisoned in an inert confrontation: \"Compare, if you like, one Pordenone with the other; I, Jacopo Robusti, am leaving.\" He has, of course, taken pains to have the spurious Di Sacchis outshine the real Di Sacchis. His retreat is not a rout; he issues a parting challenge: \"Old or young, I take them all on and beat them on their own ground.\" But this is precisely the thing that arouses suspicion. Why would he need to play their game and submit to their rules if he could outshine them all by being himself? What resentment in his insolence! This Cain assassinates every Abel preferred over him: \"You like this Veronese? Well, I can do much better when I deign to imitate him; you take him for a man and he is nothing but a technique.\" And what humility. From time to time this pariah slips into the skin of another person in order to enjoy in his turn the delight of being loved. And then at times it would seem that he lacks the courage to manifest his scandalous genius; disheartened, he leaves his genius in semidarkness and tries to prove it _deductively:_ \"Since I paint the best Veroneses and the best Pordenones, just imagine _what I am capable of painting_ when I allow myself to be me.\" As a matter of fact, he almost never takes the liberty of being himself unless someone builds up his confidence and leaves him alone in an empty room. This lack of self-confidence has its origin, of course, in the hostility manifested toward him by others. But the painter's timidity and his fellow citizens' bias have their source in the same disease; in 1548, in Venice, under Tintoretto's attack against patricians, connoisseurs and aesthetes, _painting is in jeopardy_.\n\n* * *\n\nA long evolution has begun\u2014an evolution which will substitute everywhere the profane for the sacred. Cold, glittering, rimy, the diverse branches of human activity emerge one after the other from mellow divine promiscuity. Art has its turn, and from the settling mists emerges a sumptuous disenchantment, painting. It still recalls the time when Duccio and Giotto were showing God His Creation just as it had left His hands, after He had recognized it as His work, put the world in its frame for all eternity, and closed the books of the whole affair. Into the picture, the fief of the Sun and the supreme Eye, monks and prelates sometimes slipped their transparency; they came tiptoeing in to view what God was viewing, then excused themselves and went away. Finished: the Eye is closed, Heaven blind. What is the result? First a change of clientele. As long as the work was done for the clergy, all went well; but the day the biggest of the Florentine bankers had the ridiculous notion of using frescos to beautify his house, The Omnipotent One, dismayed, began to buttress his claim to the role of Lover of Souls. Then, too, there was the Florentine affair, the conquest of perspective. Perspective is profane; sometimes even, it is a profanation. Observe Mantegna's Christ lying feet first and head remote; do you think that the Father is satisfied with a foreshortened Son?2 God is absolute proximity, universal envelopment by love; can He be shown _from a distance_ the Universe that He has created and that He is at each instant saving from annihilation? Is Being to conceive and produce Non-Being? The Absolute to engender the Relative? Light to contemplate Shadow? Reality to be taken for Appearance? No, this would be a renewal of the eternal story: Ingenuity, the Tree of Knowledge, Original Sin and Expulsion. This time the Apple is called perspective. But the Florentine Adamites nibble at it rather than eat it, thereby avoiding immediate discovery of their Fall. During the middle of the Quattrocento, Uccello thinks that he is still in Paradise, and poor Alberti, the theoretician of the \"perspectivists,\" is still trying to present geometrical optics as an Ontology of Visibility; he is rather ingenuous in asking the Divine Look to guarantee convergent lines. Heaven has failed to heed this absurd request, relegating man to the nothingness which is properly his and which he has just rediscovered once again; distance, isolation, separation\u2014these negations set our bounds; only man has a horizon. Alberti's window opens on a measurable universe, but this rigid miniature depends wholly on the point that defines both concentration and dispersion\u2014the eye. In Piero della Francesca's _Annunciation_ , between the Angel and the Virgin we see retreating columns; this is an illusion, for in themselves and for their Creator none of these inert white columns, identical and incomparable, have ever stirred in their sleep. Perspective is an act of violence which human weakness is forcing upon God's little world. A hundred years later in the Netherlands Being will be rediscovered at the very heart of appearing and appearance will reclaim the dignity of apparition; painting will have new aims and will acquire new meaning. But before Vermeer can give us the sky, the stars, day and night, the moon and the earth in the form of a tiny brick wall, the bourgeoisie from the North must win their greatest victories and forge their humanism.\n\nIn sixteenth-century Italy Faith still burns in the artists' hearts, combatting the atheism of their hands and eyes. In their attempt to get a firmer grasp on the Absolute, they perfect techniques which force upon them a Relativism which they detest. These mystified dogmatists can neither push forward nor retrace their steps. If God no longer looks at the images that they paint, who will replace Him? Their images are but the reflection of man's impotence; what will validate them? If the sole aim of painting is to gauge our myopia, it is not worth one hour's labor. To reveal man to the Omnipotent One who deigned to raise him from the clay was an act of thanksgiving, a sacrifice. But why reveal man to man? Why reveal him _as he is not?_ The artists born near the end of the century, around 1480\u2014Titian, Giorgione, Raphael\u2014pay lip service to heaven. More about this later. And then the wealth and efficacy of means still disguise the sinister indetermination of ends. Furthermore, we can surmise that Raphael had a presentiment of those ends; he mocked everyone and everything, caroused with women, sold chromos, and through his _Schadenfreude_ incited his collaborators to produce obscene engravings. Insincerity means suicide. At any rate the serenity of painting vanishes with these sacred monsters. In the second quarter of the century painting runs amuck as a result of its own perfection. In the barbaric taste which contemporaries evidenced for great \"realizations,\" a certain uneasiness is manifested; the public demands that the painter utilize all the pomp of realism to conceal his subjectivity, that he efface himself before life, blot out all memory of himself; ideally it should be as if one came upon the pictures by surprise, somewhere in the forest, and saw persons springing from the canvas and splinters from the broken frame flying at the throats of passers-by. The object should reabsorb its visibility, contain it, turn attention away from it by continuously appealing to all the senses, and particularly to the sense of touch; every artifice should be employed to replace the _representation_ by a hollow participation of the spectator in the spectacle, so that horror and tenderness would thrust men against their images and, if possible, into their midst, so that desire, burning all the fires of perspective, would discover the _ersatz_ of divine ubiquity\u2014the immediate presence of flesh, the logic of the heart. What is desired is _the thing itself_ and its destruction: bigger than nature, more real, more beautiful\u2014Terror. But Terror is a disease of rhetoric. Art will slink away, ashamed, once it has lost its letters of credit. Fettered, kept under surveillance, subjected to restrictions imposed by the State, the Church and taste, more sought after and honored, perhaps, than ever before, the artist for the first time in history becomes conscious of his solitude. Who gave him this mandate? What is the source of the right which he arrogates to himself? God has gone out, Darkness reigns. How can he paint in the dark? And _whom?_ And _what?_ And _why?_ The object of art is still the world, that Absolute, but _Reality_ steals away, reversing the relation between the finite and the infinite. A vast plenitude has been supporting the wretchedness of bodies and their fragility; now fragility becomes the sole plenitude, the unique surety. The Infinite is emptiness, darkness, inside and outside the creature; the Absolute is absence, it is God sequestered in human souls, it is desertion. It is too late to _portray_ , too early to _create;_ the painter is in hell; something comes to birth: a new damnation\u2014genius, that uncertainty, that foolish desire to traverse the world's darkness and contemplate it from without, to crush it against walls and canvases, to sift out its unknown splendors. Genius\u2014a new word in Europe, a conflict between the Relative and the Absolute, between a finite presence and an infinite absence. For the painter knows full well that he will not leave the world, that even if he could, he would bear with him everywhere the Nothingness that transpierces him; he cannot transcend perspective without first acquiring the right to create other plastic spaces.\n\nMichelangelo dies obsessed, summing up his despair and scorn in these two words: original sin. Tintoretto says nothing; he practices deceit, for if he acknowledged his solitude, he would find it unbearable. But for that very reason we can understand that he suffers from it more than anyone else; our spurious bourgeois, working for the bourgeoisie, lacks even the alibi of glory. In the pit of vipers the Little Dyer thrashes about, infected with the moral neurosis which Henri Jeanson so aptly named \"the frightening moral robustness of the ambitious\"; he sets modest objectives for himself: to rise above his father through the judicious exploitation of his talents, to corner the market by flattering public taste. Light-hearted opportunism, cunning, speed, talent\u2014nothing is lacking and everything is undermined by a vertiginous void, by Art without God. This Art is ugly, mean, dark; it is the imbecile passion of the part for the whole, an icy, tenebrous wind blowing through perforated hearts. Drawn by the void, Jacopo sets out on a motionless voyage from which he will never return.\n\nGenius does not exist; it is the scandalous audacity of Nothingness. He, the Little Dyer, exists and knows his limitations; this level-headed boy wants simply to mend the rent. All he asks is a modest plenitude; how can Infinity concern him? And how is he to know that one stroke of his brush is enough to confound his judges? His mean, stubborn ambition will be unleashed in the Darkness of Ignorance. After all, it is not his fault if painting is a lost dog with no collar; later there will be fools who will rejoice over their Abandonment; in mid-sixteenth-century Italy, the first victim of monocular perspective seeks to hide his. To work alone and for nothing is to die of fear. One must have arbiters. At any price. God has died away, Venice remains\u2014Venice which can fill up holes, seal cavities, plug outlets, stop hemorrhages and leaks. In the Doge's Republic good subjects have to consider the State in all their activities; painters must paint to beautify the city. Jacopo places himself at the disposal of his fellow citizens; they formulate a certain academic notion of Art which he is quick to adopt. All the more so since he has always had the same notion; it was explained to him when he was a small child, and he believed it: an artisan's worth is measured by the number and importance of the commissions that he receives, the honors that he is accorded. He will hide his genius under his opportunism and consider social success the sole obvious sign of a mystical victory. His deception blinds others; on the earth he plays poker and cheats; and then he gambles on heaven, without deception. If he wins down here with all the aces that he pulls from his sleeve, he dares to pretend that he will win up there; if he sells his canvases, this means that he has snared the world. But who could blame him for his malice? It is the nineteenth century that pronounced the divorce of the artist and the public; in the sixteenth, it is _true_ that painting is running amuck; it has ceased to be a religious sacrifice; but it is _equally true_ that it is being rationalized\u2014it is becoming a social service. Who then would dare to say, in Venice: \"I paint for myself, serve as my own witness\"? And as for those who say this today, are we sure that they are telling the truth? Everyone is a judge, no one is; make what you will of that. Tintoretto is more to be pitied than blamed; his Art cuts through his age like a flaming sword, but he can see it only through the eyes of his time. Besides, he has chosen his own hell; there upon the Finite again closes up over the Infinite, ambition over genius, Venice over her painter who will never again emerge. But captive Infinity gnaws away at everything; Jacopo's calculated opportunism turns to a frenzy; now he has not only to succeed but also to _prove_. A voluntary culprit, the unfortunate painter has made himself party to an endless trial; acting as his own attorney, he has made each painting a witness for the defense and has never ceased to plead his case. There is a city to convince, with its magistrates and its bourgeoisie whose verdict, to be rendered solely by them and not subject to appeal, will determine his mortal future and his immortality. He and he alone is responsible for the strange amalgam; he has to choose between drawing up a code for his own court of last resort and transforming the Republic of Venice into a supreme tribunal. He makes the only choice possible under the circumstances. Unfortunately for him. How well I understand his indifference toward the rest of the universe! He is not concerned with the opinion of the Germans or even the Florentines. Venice is the most beautiful, the richest; she has the best painters, the best critics, the most enlightened patrons of art. _Here_ , inside the brick walls, between a tiny patch of sky and still water, under the flamboyant absence of the Sun, Eternity will be won, lost, in a single lifetime, forever.\n\nWell and good. But why cheat? Why deck himself out in the trappings of Veronese? If he wants his genius to arouse admiration, why does he smother it so frequently? And why does he name judges only to corrupt them and deceive them?\n\nWhy? Because the court is prejudiced, his cause lost, his sentence set, and he knows it. In 1548 he asks Venice to bear witness to the Infinite; she becomes frightened and refuses. What a destiny! Abandoned by God, he has to practice deceit in choosing judges; having found them, he has to cheat in order to have his case adjourned. Throughout his life he will keep them in suspense, sometimes fleeing, sometimes turning on them and blinding them. Everything has its place: suffering and ill-humor, arrogance, flexibility, tremendous effort, rancor, implacable pride and the humble desire to be loved. Tintoretto's painting is first and foremost a passionate love affair between a man and a city.\n\n1 Ridolfi, deceived by the resemblance of their styles, declared that the canvas was painted _\"in concurrenza con il Pordenone_.\"\n\n2 Tr. Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506) began at an early age to experiment with traditional subjects. His most daring achievement is the unorthodox image of Christ in the ungainly position from which medical students might have viewed his deathly pallor and open wounds.\nA MOLE IN THE SUN\n\nIn this senseless romance the city is apparently even more foolish than the man. She has not failed to honor all her other painters. Then why evidence toward this one, the greatest of them all, sullen distrust, moroseness? For the simple reason that she is in love with someone else.\n\nThe Republic of Venice is hungry for prestige. Her ships have long accounted for her glory; tired and threatened with decline, she flaunts an artist. Titian alone is worth a fleet. From tiaras and crowns he has stolen flakes of fire to fashion for himself a halo. His adopted land admires him _first and foremost_ because of the respect that he inspires in the Emperor; in the sacred light, awesome but perfectly harmless, which encircles his cranium, Venice pretends to recognize her own glory. The painter of kings can be nothing less than the king of painters; the Queen of the Seas acknowledges him as her son and through him recovers a trace of majesty. She has at once given him a profession, a reputation; but when he works for kings, he is suffused with divine light which seeps through walls and spreads as far as San Marco; then she knows that he is repaying a hundredfold what he has received from her. He is a National Asset. Furthermore, this man has the longevity of trees; he endures for a century and unobtrusively becomes an Institution. The presence of an academy consisting of one member born before them and determined to survive them is demoralizing to young artists; it exasperates them and stunts their ambitions. They imagine that their city has the power to immortalize the living and that Venice has reserved this favor for Titian alone. A victim of this misunderstanding, Tintoretto\u2014under the fallacious pretext \"I am entitled to it\"\u2014demands the same recognition as his illustrious predecessor. But worth is not subject to litigation; one cannot demand from a Republic something which belongs by right to a hereditary monarchy. Jacopo is wrong in upbraiding the Doge's City for focusing all reflectors toward the baobab of the Rialto; the reverse is true. A pencil of light whose source is Rome or Madrid\u2014outside the walls, at any rate\u2014strikes the ancient trunk and reflects onto Venice, eliminating the shadows through a sort of indirect lighting. And I, too, was about to make a mistake, for I first thought of entitling this chapter \"In Titian's Shadow.\" The truth is that _Titian cast no shadow_. Weigh this carefully: on the day of Jacopo's birth the old man is forty; he is seventy-two when his young rival first tries to assert himself. That would be the moment for him to step down, to fade away gracefully. Nothing doing! The indomitable monarch reigns on for twenty-seven years. When he finally disappears, the centenarian has the supreme good fortune of leaving an unfinished _Piet\u00e0_ \u2014like a youthful dream cut short. For more than half a century Tintoretto the Mole burrows in a labyrinth whose walls are splattered with glory; until the age of fifty-eight the nocturnal beast is hemmed in by sunlight, blinded by the implacable celebrity of an Other. When the light is finally extinguished, Jacopo Robusti is old enough to die but insists on surviving the tyrant. He will gain nothing thereby, however, for Titian is adroit enough to combine two contradictory functions and to serve as an employee of the Court without relinquishing his independence as a petty employer\u2014a happy circumstance not often found in history, and certainly not in the case of Tintoretto, who has put all his eggs in one basket. Visit both tombs and you will see the price he is still paying for his sacrifice to his country. The radioactive corpse of the Grand Old Man lies buried under a mountain of embellishments at Santa Maria dei Frari, a veritable cemetery of Doges; Tintoretto's corpse rests beneath a slab in the murky darkness of a parish church. To me, this is well and good. Titian has the garnish, the sugar and spice, and this is poetic justice; I even wish that he had been buried in Rome beneath Victor Emmanuel's monument, the most hideous in all Italy except for Milan's Grand Central Station. Against this, Jacopo has the horror of naked stone; his name is sufficient. But since this is strictly a personal opinion, I can understand why an irritated traveler would ask Venice for an explanation: \"Ungrateful town, is that the best you could do for the best of your sons? Mean city, why do you put floodlights around Titian's _Assumption_ and stint on electricity for Robusti's canvases?\" I know the explanation; it appeared in 1599 in Aretino's correspondence: \"If Robusti wants to be honored, why doesn't he paint like Vecellio?\" Jacopo will hear the same refrain every day of his life; it will be repeated before his canvases after his death as well as before, and it is still heard today: \"Why does he paint like this? Why does he stray from the Royal Way prepared for him? Our great Vecellio has carried painting to such heights of perfection that no further progress is possible; newcomers will have to follow in the Master's footsteps or Art will fall back into barbarism.\" Fickle Venetians! Inconsequential bourgeois! Tintoretto is _their_ painter; he portrays what they see and feel; this they can not endure. Titian ridicules them, and they worship him.1 Titian spends most of his time soothing princes, reassuring them through his canvases that everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds. Discord is but an illusion; archenemies are secretly reconciled by the colors of their cloaks. Violence? only a ballet danced half-heartedly by spurious he-men with downy beards. Such is his method of depreciating wars. The painter's art borders on the apologetic, becomes a theodicy: suffering, injustice, evil do not exist; nor does mortal sin; Adam and Eve sinned only in order that they might have the opportunity to know and to make known to us that they were naked. In a magnificent quadruple gesture God, noble and benevolent, leaning out from his Heaven, stretches out His arms toward the upraised arms of supine Man. Order reigns; quelled and enslaved, perspective respects hierarchies; discreet accommodations assure kings and saints of preferred positions. If someone is lost in the distance, shrouded by the haze that envelops vague terrain or obscured by smoke from remote lamps, this is never by accident. The indistinctness of the figure corresponds to the obscurity of his condition; besides, it helps to focus attention on the patches of light in the foreground. The artist pretends with his brush to relate an event or record a ceremony; by sacrificing movement to order and contrast to unity, he makes his brush caress bodies rather than copy them. Not one of the bearded persons witnessing the Assumption is individualized. First come several legs and upraised arms\u2014a flaming bush; then the substance is impregnated with an element of differentiation and engenders fleeting figures scarcely distinguishable from the collective background which can at any moment reabsorb them\u2014such is the condition of the underlings; Titian reserves individuality for the Great. Even here, however, he is careful to round off their angles; sharp lines isolate, create distance, signify pessimism; the courtesan, who is a professional optimist, directs a symphony of colors proclaiming God's glory, which he epitomizes and mitigates. Titian then applies the finishing touches; he scrapes and polishes, applies lacquers and varnishes. Sparing no effort to hide his labor, he manages finally to remove every trace of himself from the canvas. The stroller enters an unobstructed area, walks among flowers under a proper sun; the proprietor is dead; the stroller is so lonely that he forgets himself and disappears. The result is treason of the worst sort: the betrayal of Beauty.\n\nFor once the traitor has the excuse of believing in what he is doing. He is not a townsman but a transplanted peasant; when he arrives in Venice, he comes as a rustic child of the Middle Ages. The country youth has long nurtured a popular, reverent love for the nobility; he makes his way through the bourgeoisie without even seeing it and rejoins his true masters at the summit, all the more certain of pleasing them because they have his sincere respect. We frequently hear that he secretly considered himself their equal; this, I think, is completely false. What would have been the source of his light? He is a vassal; raised to the peerage through the glory that only kings can dispense, he owes to them everything, even his pride; why would he choose to turn against them? He looks upon his haughty serenity, the hierarchy of power and the beauty of the world as complementary reflexes; in the best possible faith he puts the bourgeois techniques of the Renaissance to the service of feudalism\u2014he has stolen their tool.\n\nYet he is admired by both the bourgeoisie and the patriciate. He provides the Venetian technocrats with an alibi by speaking of happiness, glory and preordained harmony at the time they are making laudable efforts to obscure their decline. Every merchant, whether a nobleman or a commoner, is captivated by the sanctimonious canvases that reflect the tranquility of kings. If all is for the best, if evil is but a beautiful illusion, if each keeps forever his hereditary place in the divine and social hierarchy, then this means that nothing has happened for the last hundred years: the Turks have not taken Constantinople, Columbus has not discovered America, the Portuguese have not even dreamed of dumping spices or the continental powers of forming a coalition against the Republic of Venice. People had thought that the Barbary pirates were threatening the seas, that the African source of precious metals had been exhausted, that the scarcity of money had slowed down transactions during the first half of the century and that then suddenly an outpouring of Peruvian gold from the Spanish waterworks had reversed the tide, raised prices, flooded the market\u2014but that was only a dream. Venice still reigns over the Mediterranean; she is at the pinnacle of her power, wealth and grandeur. In other words, they want Beauty, these uneasy souls, because it is reassuring. I understand them, for I have boarded a plane two hundred times without ever becoming reconciled to it. I am too earth-bound to consider flying normal; occasionally fear surges up\u2014especially when my companions are as ugly as I; but if there is on board a beautiful woman or a handsome boy or a charming couple in love, my fear vanishes; ugliness is a prophecy\u2014it trails a certain element of extremism which seeks to carry negation to the point of horror. Beauty seems indestructible; its sacred image protects us; so long as we have it in our presence, no catastrophe will occur. The same is true of Venice; she is beginning to fear that she will sink into the mire of her lagoons; imagining that she will find salvation through Beauty, the supreme levity, she makes a pretense of transforming her palaces and canvases into buoys and floats. Those responsible for Titian's success are the very ones who desert the sea, who try to escape their disenchantment through orgies, who prefer the security of ground rent to profit from commerce.\n\nTintoretto is born in a troubled town; he breathes Venetian uneasiness, is consumed by Venetian uneasiness, can paint nothing but Venetian uneasiness. If they were in his place, his severest critics would behave no differently. But they are not; they cannot escape uneasiness but wish not to have it brought to their attention; they condemn paintings that _represent_ it. Fate has decreed that Jacopo unwittingly expose an age which refuses to recognize itself. Now we understand the meaning of his destiny and the secret of Venetian malice. Tintoretto displeases everyone: patricians because he reveals to them the puritanism and fanciful agitation of the bourgeoisie; artisans because he destroys the corporate order and reveals, under their apparent professional solidarity, the rumblings of hate and rivalry; patriots because the frenzied state of painting and the absence of God discloses to them, under his brush, an absurd and unpredictable world in which anything can occur, _even_ the death of Venice. It would seem that this painter who has assimilated bourgeois culture might at least find favor with the class that he has adopted. Not so. The bourgeoisie will accept him only with reservations; it always finds him fascinating, but often it finds him terrifying. The reason is that it has not recognized itself for what it is. Signor de Zigninoni must have dreamed of betrayal; he was searching covertly for a means of acceding to the patriciate, of escaping from the bourgeois reality that he was helping in spite of himself to create. What he finds most distasteful in Robusti's paintings is their radicalism and their \"demystifying\" virtues. In short, it is necessary at any price to refute Tintoretto's testimony, to make it seem that he has failed in his venture, to deny the originality of his research, _to get rid of him_.\n\nConsider the charges brought against him: _first_ , that he works too fast and leaves his imprint everywhere. People want smooth, finished work, especially _the impersonal element;_ if the painter portrays himself, he is subjecting himself to interrogation and thereby putting the public on trial. Venice imposes on her artists the maxim of the puritans: \"No personal remarks.\" She is careful to equate Jacopo's lyricism with the callous haste of a jaded contractor. Then comes Ridolfi's charge that Tintoretto wrote on the walls of his studio: \"The color of Titian combined with the drawing of Michelangelo.\" The charge is baseless; the statement first appears in 1548 in the writings of a Venetian art critic and does not refer to Robusti. The latter, in fact, could have known the works of Michelangelo only through reproductions by Daniele de Volterra\u2014consequently, _not before_ 1557. And could anyone take those words at face value? Is it conceivable that he would try _seriously_ to follow the absurd formula? The legend is but a dream of his age; confronted by the Spanish menace, the Northern states and the Central states dream of forming an alliance\u2014too late. But the awakening of a national consciousness, though brief, cannot fail to have a transient influence on the Fine Arts. \"Michelangelo and Titian'\" means Florence and Venice. How nice for painting to be unified!\n\nNothing serious, obviously. The dream is inoffensive so long as it is everyone's dream. But those who pretend to see in it the obsession of Robusti _alone_ must have wanted to destroy the artist by lodging in the heart of his art an explosive nightmare. Color is Jake laughing; drawing, Jake crying. In the first instance unity, in the second the risk of disorder. On the one hand the harmony of the spheres, on the other abandonment. The two Titans of the century throw themselves on each other, embrace each other, try to stifle each other\u2014Jacopo is the theater of operations. And sometimes Titian wins by a hair and sometimes Michelangelo barely manages to claim the match. In either case, the loser is strong enough to spoil the winner's triumph, and the result of the Pyrrhic victory is a botched picture. Botched through excess. Tintoretto seems to his contemporaries like an insane Titian, devoured by Buonarroti's somber passion, shaken by St. Vitus dance\u2014possessed, a freakish split personality. In one sense Jacopo exists only as a battlefield; in another sense he is a monster, a fraud. Vasari's fable becomes crystal clear; Adam Robusti wanted to taste the fruits of the tree of knowledge and Archangel Tiziano, pointing his finger and flapping his wings, chased him out of Paradise. To have bad luck or to bring bad luck is still one and the same in Italy. If you have recently had financial troubles or an automobile accident, if you have broken your leg or lost your wife, do not expect to be invited to dinner; a hostess would not wittingly expose her other guests to premature baldness, a head cold or, in extreme cases, to a broken neck caused by a fall on her stairway. I knew a Milanese who had the evil eye; this was discovered last year; he no longer has a single friend, and he dines alone, at home. Such is Jacopo: a caster of spells because a spell was cast on him. Or perhaps on his mother when she was carrying him. The spell actually has its source in Venice: uneasy, accursed, she has produced a troubled soul and placed a curse on his uneasiness. The unfortunate victim loves a despairing and uncompromising town to the point of despair, and his love horrifies the beloved. When Tintoretto passes by, people step aside: he smells of death. Exactly. But what other odor is given off by patrician festivities and bourgeois charity and the docility of the people? Pink houses with flooded cellars and walls crisscrossed by rats? What odor is given off by stagnant canals with their urinous cresses and by grey mussels fastened with squalid cement to the underside of quays? In the depths of a river a bubble is clinging to the mud; broken loose by the eddies formed by gondolas, it rises through murky water, breaks through the surface, spins around, glistens and bursts; everything crumbles away when the blister bursts\u2014bourgeois nostalgia, the grandeur of the Republic, God and Italian painting.\n\nTintoretto was the chief mourner for Venice and a way of life, but when he died there was no one to act as his chief mourner; then silence fell, and hypocritically pious hands hung crepe over his canvases. When we remove this black veil, we find a portrait, started anew a hundred times. The portrait of Jacopo? The portrait of the Queen of the Seas? As you will: the city and her painter have one and the same face.\n\n1 Tr. Titian Tiziano Vecellio (c. 1477-1576) owed his enormous success as a portraitist to his ability to paint each subject's ideal of himself.\nTHE PAINTINGS OF GIACOMETTI1\n\nFrom the back of the room where I was sitting at the Sphinx, I could see several nude women. The distance that separated us (the glossy wood floor seemed insuperable even though I wanted to walk across it) impressed me as much as did the women.2\n\nThe result: four inaccessible figurines balanced on the edge of a vertical background formed by the floor. Giacometti painted them as he saw them\u2014 _from a distance_. Still, the four women have an arresting presence. They seem to be poised on the floor ready at any moment to drop down upon him like the lid on a box.\n\nI have often seen them, especially in the evening, in a little place on the Rue de l'Echaud\u00e9, very close and menacing.\n\nDistance, far from being an accident, is in his eyes part and parcel of every object. These whores, twenty steps away\u2014twenty impossible steps away\u2014are forever outlined in the light of his hopeless desire. His studio is an archipelago, a conglomeration of irregular distances. The Mother Goddess against the wall retains all the nearness of an obsession. When I retreat, she advances; when I am farthest away, she is closest. The small statue at my feet is a man seen in the rear-view mirror of an automobile\u2014in the act of disappearing; moving closer to the statue is to no avail, for the distance cannot be traversed. These solitudes repel the visitor with all the insuperable length of a room, a lawn, or a glade that none would dare to cross. They stand as proof of the paralysis that grips Giacometti at the sight of his equal.\n\nIt does not follow, however, that he is a misanthropist. His aloofness is mixed with fear, often with admiration, sometimes with respect. He is distant, of course, but man creates distance while distance has no meaning outside human space. Distance separates Hero from Leander and Marathon from Athens but not one pebble from another.\n\nI first understood what distance is one evening in April, 1941. I had spent two months in a prison camp, which was like being in a can of sardines, and had experienced absolute proximity; the boundary of my living space was my skin; night and day I felt against my body the warmth of a shoulder or a bosom. This was not incommodious, for the others were _me_.\n\nThat first evening, a stranger in my home town, having not yet found my old friends, I opened the door of a caf\u00e9. Suddenly I was frightened\u2014or almost; I could not understand how these squat, corpulent buildings could conceal such deserts. I was lost; the scattered patrons seemed to me more distant than the stars. Each of them could claim a vast seating area, a whole marble table while I, to touch them, would have had to cross over the \"glossy floor\" that separated us.\n\nIf they seemed inaccessible to me, these men who were scintillating comfortably in their bulbs of rarefied gas, it was because I no longer had the right to place my hand on their shoulders and thighs or to call one of them \"knuckle-head.\" I had re-entered middle-class society and would have to learn once again to live \"at a respectable distance.\" My attack of agoraphobia had betrayed my vague feeling of regret for the collective life from which I had been forever severed.\n\nThe same applies to Giacometti. For him distance is not a voluntary isolation, nor even a withdrawal. It is something required by circumstances, a ceremony, a recognition of difficulties. It is the product\u2014as he himself said3\u2014of forces of attraction and forces of repulsion. He cannot walk a few steps across the glossy floor that separates him from the nude women because he is nailed to his chair by timidity or by poverty; and he feels at this point that the distance is insuperable because he wants to touch their lush flesh. He rejects promiscuity, the fruit of close proximity, because he wants friendship, love. He dares not take for fear of being taken.\n\nHis figurines are solitary, but when placed together, no matter how, they are united by their solitude and transformed into a small magical society:\n\nOn observing the figures which, to clear away the table, had been set at random on the floor, I discovered that they formed two groups which seemed to correspond to what I was looking for. I mounted the two groups on bases without the slightest change....\n\nOne of Giacometti's scenes is a crowd. He has sculptured men crossing a public square without seeing each other; they pass, hopelessly alone and yet _together;_ they will be forever lost from each other, yet would never lose each other if they had not sought each other. He defined his universe better than I possibly could when he wrote, concerning one of his groups, that it reminded him of\n\na part of a forest observed during the course of many years... a forest in which trees with barren, slender trunks seemed like people who had stopped in their tracks and were speaking to each other.\n\nWhat is this circular distance\u2014which only words can bridge\u2014if not negation in the form of a _vacuum?_ Ironic, defiant, ceremonious and tender, Giacometti sees space everywhere. \"Not everywhere,\" you will say, \"for some objects are in contact.\" But Giacometti is sure of nothing, not even that. Week after week he was captivated by the legs of a chair: they were not touching the floor. Between things, between men lie broken bridges; the vacuum infiltrates everything; each creature creates its own vacuum.\n\nGiacometti became a sculptor because of his obsession with emptiness. About one statuette he wrote: \"Me, rushing down a street in the rain.\" Sculptors rarely fashion their own busts. Those who do attempt \"self-portraits\" study themselves from without in a looking glass. They are the true prophets of objectivity. But imagine a lyrical sculptor: what he tries to reproduce is his inner feeling, the boundless vacuum that surrounds him, leaving him defenseless and exposing him to the storm. Giacometti is a sculptor because he wears his vacuum as a snail its shell, because he wants to explain all its facets and dimensions. And sometimes he finds compatible the modicum of exile that he carries everywhere\u2014and sometimes he finds it horrifying.\n\nA friend once moved in with him. Pleased at first, Giacometti soon became upset: \"I opened my eyes one morning and found his trousers and his jacket _in my space_.\" At other times, however, he grazes walls and skirts ramparts; the vacuum all around him portends a catastrophe, untoward events, avalanches. In any case he must bear witness to its presence.\n\n* * *\n\nCan he do this through sculpture? By kneading plaster, he creates a vacuum _from a plenum_. The figure when it leaves his fingers is \"ten steps away,\" and no matter what we do, it remains there. The statue itself determines the distance from which it must be viewed, just as courtly manners determine the distance from which the king must be addressed. The situation engenders the surrounding no-man's land. Each of his figures is Giacometti himself producing his little local vacuum. Yet all these slight absences that are as much a part of us as our names, as our shadows, are not enough to make a world. There is also the Void, the universal distance between all things. The street is empty, drinking in the sun; suddenly, in this empty space a human being appears.\n\nSculpture can create a vacuum _from a plenum_ , but can it show the plenum arising from what was previously a vacuum? Giacometti has tried a hundred times to answer this question. His composition _\"La Cage_ \" represents his \"desire to abolish the socle and have a _limited_ space for creating a head and face.\" That is the crux of his problem, for a vacuum will forever antedate the beings that inhabit it unless it is first surrounded by walls. The \"Cage\" is \"a room that I have seen. I have even seen curtains behind the woman....\" On another occasion he made \"a figurine in a box between two boxes which are houses.\" In short, he builds a frame for his figures, with the result that they remain at a certain distance away from us but live in the closed space imposed on them by their individual distances, in the prefabricated vacuum which they cannot manage to fill and which they endure rather than create.\n\nAnd what is this framed and populated vacuum if not a painting? Lyrical when he sculptures, Giacometti becomes objective when he paints. He tries to capture the features of Annette or of Diego just as they appear in an empty room or in his deserted studio. I have tried elsewhere to show that he approaches sculpture as a painter since he treats a plaster figurine as if it were a person in a painting.4 He confers on his statuettes a fixed, imaginary distance. Inversely, I can say that he approached painting as a sculptor since he would like to have us assume that the imaginary space enclosed by a frame is a _true_ void. He would like to have us perceive through thick layers of space the woman that he has just painted in a sitting position; he would like for his canvas to be like still water and for us to see the figures _in_ the painting as Rimbaud saw a room in a lake\u2014as a transparency.\n\nSculpturing as others paint, painting as others sculpture, is he a painter? Is he a sculptor? Neither, both. Painter and sculptor because his era does not allow him to be both sculptor and architect; sculptor in order to restore to each his circular solitude and painter in order to replace men and things in the world\u2014that is, in the great universal void\u2014he finds it convenient to model what he had at first hoped to paint.5 At times, however, he knows that only sculpture (or in other instances only painting) will allow him to \"realize his impressions.\" In any case the two activities are inseparable and complementary. They allow him to treat from every aspect the problem of his relations with others, whether distance has its origin in them, in him, or in the universe.\n\n* * *\n\nHow can one paint a vacuum? Before Giacometti it seems that no one had made the attempt. For five hundred years painters had been filling their canvases to the bursting point, forcing into them the whole universe. Giacometti begins by expelling the world from his canvases. For example, he paints his brother Diego all alone, lost in a hangar, and that is sufficient.\n\nA person must also be separated from everything around him. This is ordinarily achieved by emphasizing his contours. But a line is produced by the intersection of two surfaces, and an empty space cannot pass for a surface. Certainly not for a volume. A line is used to separate the container from the content; a vacuum, however, is not a container.\n\nIs Diego \"outlined\" against the partition behind him? No, the \"foreground-background\" relation exists only when surfaces are relatively flat. Unless he leans back against it, the distant partition cannot \"serve as a background\" for Diego; in short, he is in no way connected with it. Or rather he is only because man and object are in the same painting and must therefore maintain appropriate relations (hues, values, proportions) for conferring on the canvas its unity. But these correspondences are at the same time erased by the vacuum that interposes itself between them.\n\nNo, Diego is not outlined against the gray background of a wall. He is there, the wall is there, that is all. Nothing encloses him, nothing supports him, nothing contains him; he _appears_ all alone within the vast frame of empty space.\n\nWith each of his paintings Giacometti takes us back to the moment of creation _ex nihilo_. Each painting restates the old metaphysical question: Why is there something rather than nothing? And yet there is something: this stubborn, unjustifiable, superfluous apparition. The painted person is hallucinatory because presented in the form of an interrogative apparition.\n\n* * *\n\nBut how can the artist place a figure on his canvas without confining it? Will it not explode in empty space like a fish from the depths on the surface of the water? Not at all. A line represents arrested flight, a balance between the external and the internal; it fastens itself around the shape adopted by an object under the pressure of outside forces; it is a symbol of inertia, of passivity.\n\nGiacometti does not think of finitude as an arbitrary limitation, however. For him the cohesion of an object, its plenitude and its determination are but one and the same effect of its inner power of affirmation. \"Apparitions\" affirm and confine themselves while defining themselves. Somewhat as the strange curves studied by mathematicians are both encompassing and encompassed, the object encompasses itself.\n\nOne day when he had undertaken to sketch me, Giacometti expressed surprise: \"What density,\" he said, \"what lines of force!\" And I was even more surprised than he since I believe my features to be weak and ordinary. But the reason is that he saw each feature as a centripetal force. A face is forever changing, like a spiral. Turn around: you will never find a contour\u2014only a plenum. The line is the beginning of negation, the passage from being to non-being. But Giacometti holds that reality is pure positivity, that there _is_ being and then suddenly there no longer is any, but that there is no conceivable transition from being to nothingness.\n\nNotice how the multiple lines that he draws are _inside_ the form depicted. See how they represent intimate relations between being and itself; the fold in a garment, the wrinkle in a face, the protruding of a muscle, the direction of a movement\u2014all these lines are centripetal. They tend to confine by forcing the eye to follow them and leading it always to the center of the figure. The face seems to be contracting under the influence of an astringent substance, giving the impression that in five minutes it will be the size of your fist, like a shrunken head. Still, demarcation of the body is missing. At times the heavy mass of flesh is demarcated vaguely, slyly by a blurred brown nimbus somewhere under the tangly lines of force\u2014and sometimes it is literally unbounded, the contour of an arm or a hip being lost in a dazzling play of light.\n\nWe are shown without warning an abrupt de-materialization. For example, a man is shown crossing his legs; as long as I looked only at his head and bust, I was convinced that he had feet. I even thought that I could see them. If I look at them, however, they disintegrate, disappear in a luminous haze, and I no longer know where the void begins and where the body ends. And do not think that this is the same as one of Masson's attempts to disintegrate objects and give them a semblance of ubiquity by scattering them over the whole canvas. If Giacometti fails to demarcate a shoe, the reason is not that he believes it to be unbounded but that he counts on us to add its bounds. They are actually there, these shoes, heavy and dense. To see them, we need only refrain from viewing them in their entirety.\n\nTo understand this procedure we need only examine the sketches that Giacometti sometimes makes for his sculptures. Four women on a socle\u2014fine. But let us examine the drawing. First we see the head and neck sketched in bold strokes, then nothing, then an open curve encircling a fixed point\u2014the belly and navel; we also see the stump of a thigh, then nothing, and then two vertical lines and, further down, two others. That is the whole thing. A whole woman. What did we do? We used our knowledge to reestablish continuity, our eyes to join together these _disjecta membra_. We _saw_ shoulders and arms on a white paper; we saw them because we had _recognized_ a head and torso.\n\nThe members were indeed there, though not represented by lines. In the same way we sometimes apprehend lucid, complete ideas that are not represented by words. The body is a current flowing between its two extremities. We are face to face with the absolute reality, the invisible tension of blank paper. But does not the blankness of the paper also represent empty space? Certainly, for Giacometti rejects both the inertia of matter and the inertia of absolute nothingness. A vacuum is a distended plenum, a plenum an oriented vacuum. Reality fulgurates.\n\n* * *\n\nHave you noticed the superabundance of light strokes that striate his torsos and faces? Diego is not solidly stitched but merely basted, in the language of dressmakers. Or could it be that Giacometti wishes \"to write luminously on a dark background\"? Almost. The emphasis is no longer on separating a plenum from a vacuum but on painting plenitude itself. And since it is at once unity and diversity, how can it be differentiated unless divided? Dark strokes are dangerous, for they risk effacing being, marring it with fissures. If used to outline an eye or encircle a mouth they may create the impression that there are fistules of empty space at the heart of reality. The white striae are there to serve as unseen guides. They guide the eye, determine its movements, dissolve beneath its gaze. But the real danger lies elsewhere.\n\nWe are aware of the success of Arcimboldo\u2014his jumbled vegetables and cluttered fish. Why do we find this artifice so appealing? Is it perhaps because the procedure has long been familiar to us? In their own way, have all painters been Arcimboldos? Have they not fashioned, day after day, face after face, each with a pair of eyes, a nose, two ears and thirty-two teeth? Wherein lies the difference? He takes a round cut of red meat, makes two holes in it, sets in each of them a white marble, carves out a nasal appendage, inserts it like a false nose under the ocular spheres, bores a third hole and provides it with white pebbles. Is he not substituting for the indissoluble unity of a face an assortment of heterogeneous objects? Emptiness insinuates itself everywhere: between the eyes and eyelids, between the lips, into the nostrils. A head in its turn becomes an archipelago.\n\nYou say that this strange assemblage conforms to reality, that the oculist can remove the eye from its orbit or the dentist extract the teeth? Perhaps. But what is the painter to paint? Whatever is? Whatever we see? And what do we see?\n\nTake the chestnut tree under my window. Some have depicted it as a huge ball, a trembling unity; others have painted its leaves individually, showing their veins. Do I see a leafy mass or a multitude of leaves? I must say that I see both, but neither in its entirety, with the result that I am constantly shifting from one to the other. Consider the leaves: I fail to see them in their entirety, for just as I am about to apprehend them they vanish. Or the leafy mass: just as I am about to apprehend it, it disintegrates. In short I see a swarming cohesion, a writhing dispersion. Let the painter paint that.\n\nAnd yet Giacometti wants to paint what he sees just as he sees it. He wants the figures at the heart of their original vacuum on his motionless canvas forever to fluctuate between continuity and the discontinuity. He wants the head to be at once isolated because sovereign and reclaimed by the body to serve as a mere periscope of the belly in the sense that Europe is said to be a peninsula of Asia. The eyes, the nose, the mouth\u2014these he wants to make into the leaves of a leafy mass, isolated from each other and blended all together. He succeeds, and this is his supreme triumph.\n\nHow does he succeed? By refusing to be more precise than perception. He is not _vague;_ he manages rather to suggest through the lack of precision of perception the absolute precision of being. In themselves or for others with a better view, for angels, his faces conform rigidly to the principle of individuation. A glance reveals that they are precise down to the most minute detail; furthermore, we immediately recognize Diego or Annette. That in itself would be sufficient, if required, to cleanse Giacometti of any taint of subjectivism.\n\nAt the same time, however, we cannot look at the canvas without uneasiness. We have an irrepressible urge to call for a flashlight or at least a candle. Is it a haze, the fading light of day, or our tired eyes? Is Diego lowering or raising his eyelids? Is he dozing? Is he dreaming? Is he spying? It happens of course that the same questions are asked at popular exhibitions, in front of portraits so bland that any answer is equally appropriate and none mandatory.\n\nThe awkward indetermination of popular painters has nothing in common with the calculated indetermination of Giacometti, which might more appropriately be termed overdetermination. I turn back toward Diego and see him alternately asleep and awake, looking at the sky, gazing at me. Everything is true, everything is obvious; but if I bend my head slightly, altering my viewpoint, this truth vanishes and another replaces it. If after a long struggle I wish to adopt one opinion, my only recourse is to leave as quickly as possible. Even then my opinion will remain fragile and probable.\n\nWhen I discover a face in the fire, for example, or in an inkblot, or in the design of a curtain, the shape that has abruptly appeared becomes rigid and forces itself upon me. Even though I can see it in no other way than this, I know that others will see it differently. But the face in the fire has no truth while in Giacometti's paintings we are provoked and at the same time bewitched by the fact that _there is_ a truth and that we are certain of it. It is there, right under my nose, whether I look for it or not. But my vision blurs, my eyes tire, I give up. Then I begin to understand that Giacometti overpowers us because he has reversed the facts in stating the problem.\n\nA painting by Ingres is also instructive. If I look at the tip of the odalisk's nose, the rest of the face is light and soft, like pinkish butter interrupted by the delicate red of the lips; and if I shift my attention to the lips, they emerge from the shadows, moist and slightly parted, and the nose disappears, devoured by the absence of differentiation in the background. I am not bothered by its disappearance, however, for I am secure in the knowledge that I can always recreate it at will.\n\nThe reverse holds true in the case of Giacometti. To make a detail seem clear and reassuring all I need do is refrain from centering my attention on it. My confidence is reinforced by what I see through the corner of my eye. The more I look at Diego's eyes the less they communicate to me; but I notice slightly sunken cheeks, a peculiar smile at the corners of the mouth. If my obsession with truth draws my attention down to his mouth, everything immediately escapes me. What is his mouth like? Hard? Bitter? Ironical? Wide-open? Sealed? Against this, _I know_ that his eyes, which are almost beyond my range of vision, are half-closed. And nothing prevents me from continuing to turn, obsessed by the phantom face that is constantly being formed, deformed and reformed behind me. The remarkable part is its credibility. Hallucinations also make their appearance on the periphery only to disappear when viewed directly. But on the other hand, of course...\n\n* * *\n\nThese extraordinary figures, so perfectly immaterial that they often become transparent and so totally, so fully real that they can be as positive and unforgettable as a physical blow, are they appearing or disappearing? Both. They seem so diaphanous at times that we do not even dream of questioning their features; we have to pinch ourselves to learn whether they really exist. If we insist on examining them, the whole canvas becomes alive; a somber sea rolls over them, leaving only an oil-splotched surface; and then the waves roll back and we see them glistering under the water, white and naked. But their reappearance is marked by a violent affirmation. They are like muffled shouts rising to the top of a mountain and informing the hearer that somewhere someone is grieving or calling for help.\n\nThe alternation of appearance and disappearance, of flight and provocation, lends to Giacometti's figures a certain air of coquetry. They remind me of Galatea, who fled from her lover under the willows and desired at the same time that he should see her. Coquettish, yes, and graceful because they are pure action, and sinister because of the emptiness that surrounds them, these creatures of nothingness achieve a plenum of existence by eluding and mystifying us.\n\nEvery evening an illusionist has three hundred accomplices: his audience and their second natures. He attaches to his shoulder a wooden arm in a bright red sleeve. His viewers expect him to have two arms in identical sleeves; they see two arms, two sleeves, and are satisfied. Meantime a real arm, clothed in black and invisible, produces a rabbit, a card, an explosive cigarette.\n\nGiacometti's art is similar to that of the illusionist. We are his dupes and his accomplices. Without our avidity, our gullibility, the traditional deceitfulness of the senses and contradictions in perception, he could never make his portraits live. He is inspired not only by what he sees but also, and especially, by what he thinks we will see. His intent is not to offer us an exact image but to produce likenesses which, though they make no pretense at being anything other than what they are, arouse in us feelings and attitudes ordinarily elicited by the presence of real men.\n\nAt the Gr\u00e9vin Museum one may feel irritated or frightened by the presence of a wax guardian. Nothing would be easier than to construct elaborate farces by capitalizing on that fact. But Giacometti is not particularly fond of farces. With one exception. A single exception to which he has consecrated his life. He has long understood that artists work in the realm of the imaginary, creating illusions, and he knows that \"faked monsters\" will never produce in spectators anything other than factitious fears.6\n\nIn spite of his knowledge, however, he has not lost hope. One day he will show us a portrait of Diego just like all others in appearance. We shall be forewarned and know that it is but a phantom, a vain illusion, a prisoner in its frame. And yet on that day, before the mute canvas we shall feel a shock, a very small shock. The very same shock that we feel on returning late and seeing a stranger walking toward us in the dark.\n\nThen Giacometti will know that through his paintings he has brought to birth a real emotion and that his likenesses, without ever ceasing to be illusory, were invested for a few instants with _true_ powers. I hope that he will soon achieve this memorable farce. If he does not succeed, no one can. In any case, no one can surpass him.\n\n1 Tr. Originally published in _Les Temps Modernes_ (June, 1954). Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) belonged to an artistic Swiss family. Unchanged by success, he worked from 1927 until his death in a two-room studio in the industrial section of Paris. His paintings are for the most part studies of himself, his wife Annette and his brother Diego. His best known sculptures are probably _Three Men Walking_ (1949), _Walking Quickly Under the Rain_ (1949), and _Man Crossing a Square on a Sunny Morning_ (1950). Known primarily as a surrealist in the early 1930's, he went through a long period of experimentation and emerged in the 1940's as one of the world's most controversial sculptors. Defining art as \"an absurd activity,\" he has evolved elongated figures expressing nihilism and despair, terror and doom.\n\n2 Letter to Matisse (November, 1950).\n\n3 Letter to Matisse (1950).\n\n4 Tr. See the last essay in this collection.\n\n5 For example, his _Nine Figures_ (1950): \"I had wanted very much to paint them last spring.\"\n\n6 Tr. Sartre's first philosophical work was a study of the imagination, published in France in 1936. It was subsequently published in English in 1948 under the title _Psychology and Imagination_ (New York: Philosophical Library).\nTHE UNPRIVILEGED PAINTER: LAPOUJADE1\n\nSince Goya killers have not ceased their slaughter nor pacifists their protests. Every five or ten years a painter attempts to revive the horrors of war by modernizing uniforms and weapons.2\n\nLapoujade's undertaking is different. His aim is not to congeal art by putting it to the service of Genteel Thought but rather to study _internally_ the nature and scope of painting. Almost a century ago Art became critical; since then it has flaunted its right to judge painting. Lapoujade has evolved his own style while painting and has finally created presences that are an integral part of each composition and yet transcend them all.\n\nHis presences could not be communicated through figurative art.3 The human figure, in particular, disguised men's suffering; it disappeared, and its demise within the very matrix of art gave birth to something else\u2014to tortured victims, razed towns, massacred hordes, ubiquitous tormentors. The painter shows us both victims and victors\u2014in short, the portrait of our century. No longer is the object of his art the individual or the typical. It is the singularity and reality of our age. How did Lapoujade manage through the very limitations imposed by abstract art to achieve what figurative art could not?\n\nSince canvases have won the right to be judged solely according to the laws of painting, the artist can reaffirm the fundamental, inviolable link between creativity and beauty. Whatever its provenance, a canvas will be beautiful, or it will not be; daubing is not painting, nor will it look like anything but daubing. Beauty is not the object of art but its flesh and blood, its being. Everyone has always said this, everyone pretends to know it. It is nevertheless true that in abstract art the fundamental link between creativity and beauty, obscured by an alchemist's dream, by the desire to produce a real absolute, is once again revealed in its pristine purity.\n\nAt the same time the clich\u00e9, \"Art for the sake of Art,\" is reasserted. But this is sheer nonsense! No one paints to create art or to make it be. The artist simply paints. Lapoujade doesn't paint his canvases in the hope of enlarging by a few square centimeters the domain of beauty; but he draws his motifs, his themes, his obsessions, his objectives from the very essence of his art. After the plastic world has dissolved the figures that constrained it, what claim does it have to continued existence? Every work that we see here has the same provenance. _Hiroshima_ , like all the others, was preempted _by art_.\n\nThis may come as a shock. Politicians began long ago the practice of making minor demands on the services of the artist. Beribboned turncoats have proven time and again that painting dies whenever it is made to serve alien purposes. In fact, until now painters wishing to call attention to the evil done to some men by others were faced with two unpleasant alternatives: they could betray painting without contributing much to morals or, if their work looked beautiful regardless, they could betray the anger or grief of men for Beauty. Either way, the result was treason.\n\nGood sentiments tend toward formalism. If a feeling of righteous indignation is to be communicated, the public must be able to decipher the message; the anxieties of art must be subordinated to false securities. Because Living Beauty is forever evolving, the artist shuns the perplexities inherent in experimentation and elects instead inanimate Beauty. He adopts the most legible transcription, which is necessarily an ancient, conventionalized style of painting.\n\nAttempts to depict acts of violence, mutilated corpses and living bodies racked, tortured and burned have been sterile. By falling back upon visual conventions, artists have shown us a moving side of reality and have conditioned us to react as we normally would\u2014with horror, anger, and especially with the silent flood of sympathy that makes every man experience the wounds of other men as so many holes in his own flesh. This unbearable spectacle puts the spectator to flight. A painting may evidence ingenious composition, correct proportions and harmony, but everything is wasted if the spectator flees and fails to return. And if he should come back, punctured eyes and infected wounds\u2014everything\u2014would disintegrate and beauty would never again be reconstituted. Total failure.\n\nWe can be sure that the painter would be called tactless. People would say that he ought to be more discreet, more delicate if he ever again took up such scabrous subjects. Titian, to cite but one name, was known for his tact. Great men of the world could commission him to paint a massacre according to their instructions and could rest assured that he would produce a procession or a ballet. And the result would be beautiful\u2014naturally. Through this procedure torture is eliminated from the canvas just as its scent is eliminated from a painted rose. Murderers dressed in rich garments and dashing mercenaries are shown surveying the operation; as the crowning stroke a victim's bare foot, healthy and alluring, is revealed while his legs, torso and head remain hidden. Tiziano Vecellio was a traitor, for he forced his brush to paint comforting terrors, painless suffering and living corpses. Through him Beauty betrayed man and consorted with kings. For a self-willed man in a room with windows overlooking a concentration camp to paint a compote is not serious; his sin is one of negligence. The real crime would be in painting the concentration camp as if it were a compote\u2014in the same spirit of research and experimentation.\n\nI know of two exceptions. But the first is only apparent. Uncertain and overwhelmed by revulsion and remorse, the tormented visionary Goya painted his visions instead of war. This misguided man lost all desire to guide the masses and finally transformed the horrors of battles and mass murders into the naked horror of being Goya.\n\n_Guernica_ is different.4 Here the most fortunate of artists enjoyed the most unprecedented good fortune, with the result that his canvas combined incompatible qualities. Effortlessly. Unforgettable revulsion, commemoration of a massacre, the painting seems nevertheless to have resulted solely from the quest for Beauty; furthermore, the quest was successful. It will always be a bitter accusation, but this does not disturb its calm plastic Beauty; conversely, its plastic beauty enhances rather than hinders its emotional impact. The Spanish Civil War, a crucial moment in the period preceding World War II, broke out when _this_ painter's life and _this_ type of painting were approaching their decisive moment. The negative force of the brush was exhausting figurative painting and opening the door to systematic destruction.\n\nAt this period the figure was still intact, for the aim of experimentation was movement, the very quality that was to entail its disintegration. There was no need for violence to be hidden or transformed; it was simply identified with the disintegration of men brought about by their own bombs. Thus an experimental procedure resulted in a work whose singular meaning was that of a revolt and a denunciation of the massacre. The same social forces that had made the painter the negation of _their_ order had also produced fascist acts of destruction and _Guernica_. This stroke of fortune allowed Picasso to avoid cajoling beauty. If the crime is odious because it has become beautiful, this is attributable to the fact that it is \"Explosive\" and that the beauty of Picasso is \"ordered exploding\" _(explosante-fixe)_ , as Breton has said. The miraculous throw of the dice was never repeated. When Picasso tried, after World War II, to make a new beginning, his art had changed, and so had the world; they were now at odds. In short, censorship. When dealing with men and their suffering we can accept neither figuration of horror nor its disguise through pageantry.\n\nFor Lapoujade there is no longer any alternative; there is no longer any problem. This is because I borrowed the previous examples from figurative art. Paradoxically, imitation of the human figure entails externally imposed conditions while the absence of imitation entails conditions imposed by Art itself.\n\nThis is the last stage of a long journey. For years he has been depicting the nudes, couples, and crowds that have imposed themselves upon his brush. Look at his adolescents: nothing is missing. Yet the flesh is shown without its husk; the artificial contours of a body are not there. Nor is it strewn indiscriminately across the canvas. Contours, volume, mass, perspective\u2014didn't he have to use all these to _put us in the presence_ of a nude body? Evidently he did not. Or rather the reverse is true: the painting intrinsically requires us to experience the delicacy of flesh at the very moment when it is freed from alien forms.\n\nThe first stage is anxiety. Freed from an academic tradition, the artist wants to be able to cultivate thoroughly his garden\u2014the plane surface that he has inherited\u2014to transform routine farming which allows much of the land to lie fallow into intensive cultivation; furthermore, he wants to eliminate tolls and duties, barriers, detours, restrictions imposed by imitation. He wants to expand the scope of Art and at the same time to reaffirm its unity.\n\nThe fundamental purpose of experimentation is to give to Beauty a finer grain, a firmer and richer consistency. The artist's sole concern ought to be art. And when we look at Lapoujade's works, we feel not that he is searching for a new style of painting, but that he is giving another nature to painting. The rest follows, of course. But serious changes in all the arts are at first material while form, the quintessential matter, comes last.\n\nLapoujade belongs to a generation of builders.5 After what he himself calls the \"disintegration of figurative art\" by Picasso, Braque and a whole generation of analysts, all that remained for the newcomers was a medley of colors and rhythms, of crumbled remnants. They had no choice. These refined, ductile materials permitted and required integration into new wholes.\n\nAt first the newcomers were united by the common task that awaited them. Then each of them worked alone, trying to determine the aims and resources of the new art. Lapoujade chose to restore to us the World. This is in my opinion an option of capital importance. We can be sure, however, that the World made no requests; if it returned, bloody and new, its return was exacted by Painting.\n\nBeauty is not monadic. It requires two unities, one visible and the other secret. If ever we managed even after relentless effort to penetrate into the essence of a work by a single glance, the object would be reduced to its inert visibility, Beauty would be effaced, and only its ornamentation would remain. To put it more aptly, the unification which the painter and the viewer seek can be achieved only through the permanent recomposition of a certain presence. And this presence, in turn, can communicate to us its indecomposable unity only through the medium of Art, and only in conjunction with our efforts and the painter's efforts to constitute or reconstitute the beauty of a whole.\n\nThe act is purely aesthetic but, to the very degree that we remain aloof, the Whole infiltrates each visual synthesis, shaping it and giving it strength. _We_ must rediscover the paths outlined for us by the painter and try to follow them. _We_ must reconstruct these abrupt splotches of color, these distilled units of matter. _We_ must revive echoes and rhythms. Only then does a presence, intuition denied, come to the rescue. By regulating our choice it keeps us moving along the right paths. To _construct_ requires only the establishing of visible relations; to guarantee a construction and save it from total absurdity requires a transcendental unity. This unity insures that the viewer's eyes will never cease their movement, and the perpetual movement of the eyes accounts for the permanence of the invisible unity. We keep on looking, for if we ever stopped, everything would disintegrate.\n\nWhat is this presence? I hasten to point out that Lapoujade is not a Platonist, nor am I. He is not guided in his compositions by an Idea. No, his guiding principle completes each canvas and is inseparable from it: neither can exist apart from the other. This abstract painter tries to imbue each painting with a concrete presence, and if all must be given the same name, then we might as well say that each work was motivated by a quest for meaning and that the quest was in each instance successful.\n\nOne point in particular merits clarification: a meaning is not a sign or a symbol\u2014not even an image. When we view Canaletto's6 painting of Venice, the resemblance is perfect. His _View of the Salute_ , which embodies both perfect perspective and topographic exactitude, cannot be misinterpreted. That is why the painting has no meaning. No more meaning than an Identification Card. When Guardi7 shows scattered rubbish and bricks bathed in shimmering light, the alleys and canals that he has selected are insignificant. He shows us a commonplace wharf or a studied decomposition of light. Canaletto puts his brush in the service of his native town; Guardi is concerned only with plastic problems, with light and substance, with colors and light, with unity amid diversity through rigorous imprecision. Result: Venice is present in each canvas\u2014as it was for him, as it is for us, as it has been experienced by everyone and seen by no one. I once paid a visit to a writer in the handsome garret of a brick palace beside a river. Not one of the figures that Guardi loved to paint was to be seen. Still, as soon as I saw the place, as soon as I observed my host's surroundings, my thoughts turned to the painter. I again saw his Venice, my Venice, the Venice experienced by each of us, and I felt the same way about other men, other objects and other places. The same? Not exactly. Meaning depends on the substance from which it emerges. Guardi always says more than we experience, and he says it differently.\n\nFigurative painting was the first to be subjected to the rule of the two unities. Paradoxically, however, the incarnation of an invisible presence is obscured somewhat by an external bond\u2014the brutal, mechanical bond that subjects the portrait to the model. The painter who incarnates himself in his work believes that grapes must be painted in clusters. It is as if since Apelles8 the artist has had no ambition other than that of fooling the birds. Still, when Van Gogh painted a field, he did not pretend to transfer it to his canvas; he tried, through deceptive figuration whose sole criterion was the dictates of art, to incarnate on a sticky vertical surface the fullness of an immense world with its fields and men, including Van Gogh. Our world.\n\nNot this: Van Gogh never tried to show us a field containing crows, and certainly not one containing fruit trees, for the simple reason that these objects resist figuration. He provides aesthetic substance for the incarnation of a presence that defies the brush: the world in the process of being covered with fields, its sap and flowers being poured _from a wand_. Again the image must be remote from the model or the world will not be as it should. Van Gogh had to begin by distorting everything if he was to show through art that the most delicate or innocent natural blemish is inseparable from horror.\n\nWe have seen that figurative painting involves three elements: the reality to be depicted on the canvas, the representation provided by the painter, and the presence that finally permeates the work. This trinity might seem to entail complications, and it does. Though supposed to serve as a guide, our essentially ambiguous reality guides nothing; it floats around, bellies up, out of control; it can be manipulated only when real, that is, when transformed into an imaginary object. No field will transmit the charm or horror of the world until largely rebuilt; or rather it will transmit both, together or separately. It will reflect everything, but not consistently; instead of cohesiveness there will be fragmentation, absurdity, confusion.\n\nSuch monotonous disorder, unless restraints are introduced, will never transmit the complex structures of an _experienced_ universe. What the painter adds to his canvas are the days of his life, the time that passes or does not pass. These powerful catalysts transform the object depicted. The inert individuality of the model is not transmitted to the canvas, but neither will the figure drawn there assume the general character of a type or sign. The influence of the world on a man and a man's enduring passion for the world will imbue a few acres of land with biographical individuality if both are recorded in the deceptive play of light on film. They will evoke the adventure of living, of contemplating the very birth of folly, of hurtling toward death.\n\nThe same chance figure, integrated for want of anything better into a composition, will undergo modifications imposed by art\u2014it will be planed down, made smooth, reduced. Van Gogh pretends to \"paint\" a field but knows what he is really doing. He brings order to a canvas but never tries to reconstruct with exactitude the soft ripples made by the wind in passing through wheat or to evoke completely the staggering, intimate presence of man, the heart of the world, through that part of the world, the heart of man, that he has circumscribed.\n\nWhen finally he puts down his palette, when the presence is incarnated in the composition, what has become of the representation of the object? A transparency, a trace, little more than a magnificent allusion to the object represented. And the field, finally, the plain field that the artist has pretended to represent, this would be eliminated from the canvas if the world did not come to the rescue and incarnate itself in the undulating expanses of wheat bereft of figures, in the thick paste of a rimless sun or in the galaxy of suns at earth-level which are the only true inhabitants of the canvas and the only true vestiges of the creative act.\n\nIn figurative painting conventions are of little importance. It is sufficient if we are convinced that the figure proposed is in _this_ system of references the best representation of the object. The best means the strongest, richest, most meaningful form. A matter of luck or skill. Still, since the last century each new option has tended to widen the gap between figure and object. The greater the distance between the two, the stronger the inner tension of the work. When the artist goes so far as to discard resemblances, to rule out any similitude between image and reality other than a fortuitous one, meaning is set free by the disintegration of _representation_ and begins to exert a negative influence. Meaning is the product of the forces of destruction. It flashes out across dissemblances, lacunae, approximations, deliberate indeterminations. Invisible, it blinds because it dissolves the figures in its inimitable presence.\n\nSuch also are the meanings that haunt our world. They annihilate detail and draw from it their sustenance. Every brick wall hides Venice from me if it is alone. I will still sense this city even after its palaces have been destroyed and its plumage plucked and redeployed in such a way that I lose sight of every feather. On his canvas the artist paints the rudiments of intuition only to blot them out immediately thereafter. Aroused by this refusal the presence\u2014which is the thing itself undetailed and in undivided space\u2014will incarnate itself. But this is a trap set by the artist. He introduces other figures that bear no relation to the object in question but suggest other associations\u2014waste paper, sand, pebbles. He seeks to produce a new being, a presence all the more austere because it feeds on an absence surreptitiously falsified by substitutions. How many painters between World War I and World War II dreamed of being at once chemists and alchemists, capable of forcing lead to fuse with gold and be incarnated with its essence? One of them, aiming at a double transformation, tried to paint a wardrobe that would be a chest without ceasing to be a wardrobe; he hoped that elective signalizing would allow him to treat each object by turns as plastic substance or as incarnation.\n\nThis double aim was always suspect. The artist wanted, not to annihilate and make us experience the world's disheveled meanings, but to create meanings that had never before existed. Abortive marvels, uninspired legerdemain. At the end of this long crisis in which the artist's creativity was submerged in disillusionment through failure to understand that the imaginary is the sole absolute, the figure had the good sense to disintegrate. And meaning? Did it disappear at the same time? Quite the opposite. As we have just seen, there was no true link between the two. Set free, the incarnate presence appeared as the _sine qua non_ of abstract art.\n\nThe shattering and scattering of images is not a studied choice exercised by new painters. It is an event that is still unfolding, and not all of its consequences are known. A permanent deflagration, it spreads continuously from canvas to canvas. Each painter sees it simultaneously as his problem and his material. Art offers him an explosion to subdue, and this through explosive tactics.\n\nTheir predecessors having sown the wind, those who today seek to subdue the storm stir up a cyclone within the cyclone and organize its tiniest spangles with pitiless rigor. Using the laws that they have devised and visual logic, they must preserve and reshape this pulverulence; search for the multiple unity within the multiplicity; acquire new insights into the canvas; know how to detail and contain on it dilations and coagulations, whirling fields of fire, dark commas, splotches, puddles, trails of blood across the sun; use fluidity and density as rigid structural elements in a unified plastic ceremony. Deceit and trickery are out. Details are no longer negligible; nothing is missing, everything counts.\n\nBy toying with colors, strengthening lines, making and exploiting discoveries, structuring the whirlwind, and compensating for local turbulences by balancing them rigorously, the painter causes the formidable event to coagulate. At the worst, the result is a rose-window; at best, a pleasant carousal. To preserve the rhythm of explosive space, to prolong the vibration of its colors, to exploit in depth the strange, terrifying disintegration of being and its whirling movement, the artist must use his brush to impose meaning on his canvas and on us.\n\nNo movement without roads, no roads without direction\u2014and who will decide these vectorial determinations unless the artist has an unrestricted view? But he must catch sight of a mighty motif if he is to undertake the unification of this sumptuous dispersion without figures and resemblances. Only one motif exists: the secret unity of the work. It is, if you will, in the painting itself.\n\nThere is another world, said Eluard, and it is in this one. But the artist will find it only by proceeding towards the unification of his canvas. Each time that we effect new syntheses or that the eye unifies neighboring objects, we become a little more aware of its presence. We can never expose all of this presence, for it is merely the work itself considered as an organism. Lapoujade was invited by Art to duplicate the false unity of figurative painting; as soon as he did, he understood what was required of him: to eliminate chance and give to an infinitely divisible surface the indivisible unity of a whole.\n\nA few painters feel as he does and have chosen lyrical unity. The lyrical painter impulsively attacks his canvas; he leaves it to attack us. He paints as he strikes, and the presence incarnated on his canvas is his own. He gives to his work the quick unity of an aggressive act. Lapoujade knows that lyrical painting is possible. It can be done and has already been done. He might be afraid that a projection of himself in the pure medium of art would be illegible. And of course Art, in spite of what is too often said about it, is not a language. But neither is it true that we communicate only through signs. We _experience_ through others what others _experience_ as us; for our fellow men we are a common experience.\n\nLyrical painters try to give to their canvas the unity of their emotion, of their _\u00e9lan_ or their calm; in short, they choose to make the viewing public experience their singular adventure. Would this be possible without preliminary unanimity? Probably not, for singularity is revealed only as a differentiation from commonality. If painters only had to paint themselves, each could have his day. Art would preserve its integrity even if hermetic. But lyrical painting is also an act affixing to multiplicity an indispensable seal, and this act must be forever renewed. Beauty is not created unless the act is renewed.\n\nSince the eye has as its immediate stimulus communication, representing the incessantly recreated completion and perpetual animation of the abstract work, the painter must give it his immediate and constant attention. Meaning, since it is revealed through unification and since its revelation promotes unity, must be by nature communicable. To establish the condition without providing the means for fulfilling it is to risk exposing the work to the perils of indetermination.\n\nSuch is, I believe, the profound conviction of Lapoujade. Painting is an important avenue of communication, and at every intersection it finds the presences that it incarnates. Nor does it have to search them out. Meanings, if the artist wishes to collect them, can be gathered by the dozens; the eye may read them, but slowly, without particular awareness of their obviousness or necessity. If they are not evoked at once by the trembling of matter taking shape and the urgency shared by painter and viewer, how can they be imposed? False evidence is misleading; the artist lends a hand and sets us straight. If without even lending an ear he understands the confused sounds of highways and byways, this is because he, too, is a highway. And here and there are neglected, deserted trails. Lapoujade, the versatile link between man and the world, paints teeming, stampeding masses as they cry out, fall silent, remain mysteriously suspended, and stubbornly dissolve into asphalt coloration. He insists that solitude does not befit painting and his canvases have convinced me that he is right.\n\nOne day, said Marx, there will be no more painters. It would be just as fitting that one day there will be neither men nor painters, but that day is remote. Lapoujade is a strange contradiction. With a few of his contemporaries he has reduced painting to the sumptuous austerity of its essence; surrounded by human presences incarnated on his canvas, however, he is the first not to claim special privileges. A painter, he uses painting to tear away the artist's mask, leaving only men and himself, without prerogatives, one among us, obliterated by the splendor of his work.\n\nLook at his works: crowds. Nor is he the first, for the more fools people see on a canvas, the more they are accustomed to laugh. But the old artists were protected. They worked at the right hand of the Prince and on a tribune; if they had to work face to face with the people and on their level, then they were protected by soldiers. Each painting conveyed its message: \"I am a painter; I belong to you, great men of the World, and I show you the superficial side of the mob which you govern and from which you have deigned to rescue me forever.\"\n\nThe age was responsible and so was the \"figure.\" How was the artist to paint the crowd seen by itself, as it experienced itself and makes itself, here and everywhere? How was he to curve space to inscribe in it the infinite circle whose center is everywhere entwined with its circumference? How was he to show in each the leaders and the followers? And these human molecules, what forms, what colors would show that each defies comparison with the others and that all are interchangeable? What system of references could he choose to make lovers of art understand that the crowd can admit the painter into their ranks only by stripping him bare, that he is denied the flimsiest prop or visual accessory, that aroused masses reject seconds, that he must enter their ranks naked, unadorned, as a man, participate in everything, flee or change, provide disciplined leadership, be put to the test, produce? Was he to bear the weight of twenty or a hundred thousand other \"selfs\" only to return to his canvas, under the best possible circumstances, with violent but inchoate memories? The inner reactions of a crowd cannot be seen. They are assimilated, experienced, acknowledged. Let that be represented through figures!\n\nThis is what characterizes the new painter of crowds: he can incarnate their presence only by refusing to represent them through figures. Of course, by banishing the Figure from his studio he like all artists is renewing the vow of penury that Beauty has never ceased to exact and will never cease to exact. But he goes much further than this: he gives up his tribune. A man, he refuses to be excluded by virtue of his privileged position and to contemplate his species from the outside. Figurative painting isolates both painter and model. While deforming the figure, anarchistic and bourgeois artists spoke with gentle irony of their solitude. Obviously, they were not communicating!\n\nThere is instantaneous communication, however, if the artist is Lapoujade. His crowd is real, surging, uneasy. He is _exposed_ to it and following the gradual annihilation of detail, there remains the meaning of the mass rally, of the police charge of October 27. The meaning is the experience shared by thousands of unknown people certain that for all of them it was the same. This experience requires substance for its incarnation; language is inadequate since it isolates a vast number of facts each of which draws its meaning from the others.\n\nTo express, to paint his indeterminate and multiple adventure as an interchangeable man, Lapoujade provides for crowds a substance which, though fluid, manifests rigid unity within dispersion. The unification of discrete particles is the realization of a transcendent element: the explosive unity of the masses. It follows that the crowd within each of us is urged to rediscover the discrete totality of its life. The painter leads us. There are, he says, immediate data of expression: the dark, dense aggregation of colors at the bottom of the canvas, a swelling of matter, a vivid upsurge of light, a hundred other, a thousand other interlocking constituents. But they only stir the heart. The essential quality is in the singularity of the routes traced by his brush. Now compact, now rarefied, at times thick and at other times liquid, the substance itself is not intended to reveal the invisible, the metamorphosis around us and through us of a glade into a thicket, a steppe, or a virgin forest. It _suggests_ through its texture and its itineraries.\n\nThe painter uses to advantage the contrast between the rigidity of his materials and the indeterminacy of experience. Crowded spots seem to recoil from each other; a new route, suddenly discovered, forces colors to pale as they acquire new reciprocal relations; finally, through these metamorphoses we grasp the indivisible presence of the manifestation as it is incarnated with all its densities at one and the same time. And then, abruptly, a path of asphalt: space. It overflows and runs down to the bottom of the canvas. But is there a top? A bottom?\n\nSpace itself is _a direction_ created by the crowd and determined by their actions. The splotch of color is a thick spurt, a flight to the horizon, an abrupt penetration of space. The police charge. Will the people flee? Resist? No matter what they do, space exists with all its dimensions in one. It is distance\u2014diminishing on one side and on the other appearing interminable. But words are unnecessary; the splotch is able by itself to revive meaning. And what is created is not an artificial presence, a wardrobe-fish or a wolf-table as in the time of trick artists, but a real presence, indivisible, common and singular, enriched by everything contributed by the painter.\n\nMan among men, men in the midst of the world, the world within men, that is the unique presence evoked by his overpowering explosion; that is the unique ordeal, common to all and yet peculiar to each, experienced along with us, through us and for us by Lapoujade; that is the unique message communicated at first glance to illuminate the canvas even before being illuminated by it. But the rejection of special privilege, identical to the rejection of figuration, is a commitment made by painter and by man. It led Lapoujade from one canvas to another toward the most radical consequences of this undertaking.\n\nTo begin with, if the painter ceases to contemplate other men, if he is rejected by his peers, _action_ sets him apart or constitutes a permanent bond with all men and each man. He acts, suffers, frees himself and dominates or is dominated. His act of contemplation is purely passive; his brush must recreate action, not from without but through his experiencing the Other. The Meaning of the painting will be the incarnation of the Other known through the modification that he is subjected to and of the painter as he discovers himself through the modification that he experiences or inflicts.\n\nWhatever its carnation, the inertia of a Nude is generally distressing. The woman is alone, the painter at the opposite end of the room. In real life no one\u2014certainly no painter\u2014ever contemplated so docile a nude from so far away. Lapoujade paints a couple. He has at times evoked the tenderness of adolescent flesh, but in the erotic series called _Le Vif du Sujet_ he wanted to suggest woman as she is approached by men, as she appears in the act of love. A Nude, in short, involves two people. Even if the only real presence is a woman, the presence of a man is suggested by the movement of colors, and this gives to the canvas _its_ presence.\n\nAction, the multiple link between men, molds splotches of color and matter into a coherent structure and brings to perfection the painter's project: to use the visible splendors of nonfigurative art to incarnate that which cannot be represented through figures. Abstract art which seemed at first to impose limitations, actually extends the painter's freedom and assigns to him new functions.\n\nThe other consequence of this option is obviously the unprivileged painter's decision to show his solidarity with other men. Their solidarity has a firm basis, for he has only what they have, wants nothing more, is nothing more. Then, too, its permanence is assured. Woman appears on his canvases in the act of love, men joined in a common struggle. The most astounding yet simple truth is that the choice of abstraction led Lapoujade in the name of art itself once again to place man on his canvases. Not, however, as man appeared in the days of princes and prelates\u2014modest and anonymous in his patient and tenacious struggle to satisfy his hunger and deliver himself from oppression. He appears everywhere on the canvases of Lapoujade, who never ceases painting him and refining his portrait.\n\nLapoujade now understands that man, seen by an unprivileged eye, is today neither great nor small, beautiful nor ugly. His art challenges him to place on his canvases a true portrait of the human kingdom, and the truth about this kingdom, today, is that the human species includes torturers, their accomplices and martyrs. Torturers are few in number but their accomplices are many; most people fall into the group of the tortured, or are candidates for torture. Lapoujade understands this. No one in 1961 can speak of men without first mentioning torturers; no one can speak of Frenchmen to the French without mentioning the tortured Algerians. That is our portrait; we must look at it realistically; later we can decide to preserve it or to modify it.\n\nLapoujade chose to show torture because it is deeply ingrained in us, because it reaches, alas, to our ignoble core. On attempting to paint it, he saw that he could capture its portrait only through nonfigurative art, which evokes the total meaning of the human situation. His triptych is beautiful without reserve\u2014and can be beautiful without remorse. Beauty is not hidden in non-figurative painting. It shows through. The painting _exhibits_ nothing. It lets horror seep down but _only if it is beautiful_ \u2014that is, organized in the most complex and fertile manner.\n\nThe preciseness of the scenes evoked depends on the preciseness of his brush. The viewer must identify and reconstruct the conjugation of striae and beautiful yet sinister colors; this is the only way of _experiencing_ the meaning of what was for Alleg and Djamila their martyrdom.9\n\nMeaning, as I have said, contributes to the total picture something other than a new and alien element. Incarnated in plastic substance, it allows us to sense, through the frenzy of colors, mutilated flesh and unbearable suffering. But the suffering that we sense is that of the victims, and let us not pretend that we find it unbearable in this imperious and discreet form.\n\nBehind and through the radiant Beauty we see only a pitiless Destiny which men\u2014we men\u2014have made for man. Lapoujade's success is complete because it issues from painting and its laws. In other words, it conforms to the logic of abstract painting. It is no mean achievement, I believe, for a painter to meet with such favor in our eyes by showing undisguised the grief that wells from our hearts.\n\n1 Tr. Robert Lapoujade was born at Montauban in 1921. According to the biographical notice printed in the catalog prepared for an exhibition of his non-figurative paintings (Gal\u00e9rie Pierre Domec, Paris, March 10-April 15, 1961), he is a self-made artist, a practitioner \"by necessity\" of various trades, and a writer. His works have been widely exhibited in Europe and America. The Museum of Modern Art has acquired two of his canvases. This essay was originally printed in the aforementioned catalog.\n\n2 Tr. Francisco Jos\u00e9 de Goya (1746-1828), an indefatigable moralist as well as a great artist, depicted the horrors of war in bold colors in _Dos de Mayo_ and repeated the same theme in his most famous etchings, _Disasters of War_.\n\n3 Tr. Since definitions are not always universally accepted (witness the complaint of those who hold that \"abstract\" art is highly concrete), I have chosen to use the literal equivalents of the French expressions, figurative and non-figurative, rather than contrasts involving \"representational,\" \"objective,\" and the like.\n\n4 Tr. Picasso's masterwork was painted in 1935, Goya's _Dos de Mayo_ in 1808.\n\n5 Occasionally one of these good painters remarks fatalistically that in a negative era their art destroys itself and refuses to be a medium of communication. But this is wrong. The new era builds more than it razes. Never before has painting been so compact, so concentrated as in the hands of these architects of the abstract.\n\n6 Tr. The Italian painter and engraver Giovanni Antonio Canaletto (1697-1768) is noted for his precision as well as his fine sense of color and atmosphere.\n\n7 Tr. The landscapes of Francesco Guardi (1712-1793) are characterized by the dissolution of all figures into light and color.\n\n8 Tr. In the most famous of his portraits of Alexander the Great, his patron's hand appears to protrude from the colored surface.\n\n9 Tr. Henri Alleg was charged with attempting to endanger state security and imprisoned after he published a book detailing tortures to which he had allegedly been subjected as a prisoner of French troops in Algeria. His book, later published in English as _The Question_ , was banned in France in 1958. Djamila Bouhired, Algeria's Joan of Arc, was tortured and sentenced to die. She was reprieved only after her plight became an international scandal.\nTHE MOBILES OF CALDER1\n\nThe sculptor is supposed to imbue something immobile with movement, but it would be wrong to compare Calder's art with the sculptor's. Calder captures movement rather than suggests it; he has no intention of entombing it forever in bronze or gold, those glorious, asinine materials that are by nature immobile. With vile, inconsistent substances, with tiny slivers of bone or tin or zinc, he fashions strange arrangements of stems and branches, of rings and feathers and petals. They are resonators or traps; they dangle at the end of a fine wire like a spider at the end of its silk thread or settle on a pedestal, wan, exhausted, feigning sleep; a passing tremor strikes them, animates them, is canalized by them and given a fugitive form\u2014a _Mobile_ is born.\n\nA Mobile: a small local festival, an object defined by its movement and nonexistent apart from it, a flower that withers as soon as it stops moving, a free play of movement, like coruscating light. Sometimes Calder amuses himself by imitating a new form. For example, he once presented me with a bird of paradise with iron wings; a wisp of air brushing it while escaping through the window is enough to rouse the bird; it clicks, stands erect, spins, nods its crested head, rolls and pitches and then, as if in sudden obedience to an unseen signal, executes a slow turn with its wings spread. But most of the time it imitates nothing, and I know no other art less deceptive than his.\n\nSculpture suggests movement, painting depth or light. Calder suggests nothing; he captures and embellishes true, living movements. His mobiles signify nothing, refer to nothing other than themselves; they simply are, they are absolutes.\n\nIn his mobiles chance probably plays a greater part than in any other creation of man. The forces at work are too numerous and too complicated for any human mind, even that of their creator, to foresee all possible combinations. For each of them Calder establishes a general scheme of movement, then abandons it; the time, the sun, heat and wind will determine each particular dance. Thus the object is always midway between the servility of statues and the independence of natural events. Each of his evolutions is an inspiration of the moment; it reveals his general theme but permits a thousand personal variations. It is a little hot-jazz tune, unique and ephemeral, like the sky, like the morning; if you miss it, you will have lost it forever.2\n\nVal\u00e9ry said that the sea is a perpetual renewal. One of Calder's objects is like the sea\u2014and equally spellbinding: ever changing, always new. A passing glance is not enough; one must live with it and be bewitched by it. Then the imagination can revel in pure, ever-changing forms\u2014forms that are at once free and fixed.\n\nThe movements of the object are intended only to please us, to titillate our eyes, but they have a profound, metaphysical meaning. The reason is that the mobiles have to have some source of mobility. Previously Calder used an electric motor; he now abandons his mobiles in the midst of nature; in a garden or near an open window, they vibrate in the wind like aeolian harps. Fed on air, they respire and draw their life from the tenuous life of the atmosphere. Thus their mobility is of a very peculiar kind.\n\nAlthough they are human creations, they never have the precision and efficiency of movement of Vaucanson's automatons.3 But the charm of the automaton resides in the fact that it agitates a fan or plays a guitar like a man, yet moves its hand with the blind, persistent rigor of purely mechanical translations. Against this, Calder's mobiles move and hesitate, as if correcting a mistake by starting anew.\n\nI have seen in his studio a beater and a gong suspended high overhead; the slightest gust caused the beater to pursue the gong as it turned round; it would take aim, lash out at the gong, miss it by a hair, like an awkward hand, and then when least expected, strike and hit it squarely in the center, producing a frightening noise. But the movements are too artistically contrived to be compared with those of a ball rolling on a uneven plane and changing its course solely on the basis of irregularities encountered. They have a life of their own.\n\nOne day when I was talking with Calder in his studio, a model which until then had remained at rest was seized, right in my presence, by a violent agitation. I retreated until I thought I was beyond its reach. Suddenly, just when the agitation had ceased and the model seemed lifeless, its long, majestic tail, which had not moved previously, indolently roused, as if regretfully, rotated in the air and grazed my nose.\n\nTheir hesitations, revivals, gropings, tumblings, abrupt decisions, and especially their marvelous swan-like nobility make of Calder's mobiles strange creatures, halfway between matter and life. Sometimes their movements seem to have a purpose and sometimes they seem to have lost their purpose along the way and to have lapsed into imbecile fluctuations. My bird flies, wavers, swims like a swan, like a frigate; he is a bird, a single bird and then, suddenly, he falls apart and all that remains are slivers of metal traversed by vain little tremors.\n\nCalder's mobiles, which are neither completely living nor completely mechanical and which constantly change but always return to their original positions, are like aquatic plants bent low by a stream, the petals of the sensitive plant, the legs of a headless frog, or gossamer caught in an updraft. In short, although Calder has no desire to imitate anything\u2014his one aim is to create chords and cadences of unknown movements\u2014his mobiles are at once lyrical inventions, technical, almost mathematical combinations and the perceptible symbol of Nature: great elusive Nature, squandering pollen and abruptly causing a thousand butterflies to take wing and never revealing whether she is the blind concatenation of causes and effects or the gradual unfolding, forever retarded, disconcerted and thwarted, of an Idea.\n\n1 Tr. First published in _Les Temps Modernes_ and later in _Situations HI_ (Paris: Gallimard, 1948). Alexander Calder achieved recognition as a sculptor some twenty years ago when the Museum of Modern Art exhibited his works. His mobiles are today found in such diverse places as New York's Chase Manhattan Bank, a hotel in Cincinnati, an airport in Pittsburgh, and UNESCO headquarters in Paris. He maintains two studio-homes, one near Sach\u00e9, France, and the other near Roxbury, Connecticut.\n\n2 Tr. In Sartre's earliest novel, _Nausea_ (first published in 1938), jazz enables the central character to escape momentarily from the pervasive, overpowering feeling of nausea that engulfs him.\n\n3 Tr. Jacques de Vaucanson (1709-1782) devised mechanisms that brought him considerable fame. Among his most celebrated automatons were his _Flute Player_ and _Duck_.\nTHE QUEST FOR THE ABSOLUTE1\n\nA glance at Giacometti's antediluvian face reveals his arrogance and his desire to place himself at the beginning of time. He ridicules Culture and has no faith in Progress\u2014not in the Fine Arts, at least. He considers himself no further \"advanced\" than his adopted contemporaries, the men of Eyzies and Altamira.2 Then, when nature and men were in their prime, there was neither ugliness nor beauty, neither taste nor dilettantes nor criticism. The man who first had the notion of carving a man from a block of stone had to start from zero.\n\nHis model: man. Neither a dictator nor a general nor an athlete, primitive man still lacked the dignity and charm that would seduce future sculptors. He was nothing more than a long, indistinct silhouette walking across the horizon. But his movements were perceptibly different from the movements of things; they emanated from him like first beginnings and impregnated the air with signs of an ethereal future. They must be understood in terms of their ends\u2014to pick a berry or push aside a briar\u2014not their origins. They could never be isolated or localized.\n\nI can separate a bent branch from a tree but never an upraised arm or a clenched fist from a man. The _man_ raises his arm, the _man_ clenches his fist, the _man_ is the indissoluble unit and the absolute source of his movements. Furthermore, he is an enchanter of signs; they cling to his hair, shine in his eyes, dance between his lips, perch on his fingertips. He speaks with his whole body; when he runs he speaks, when he talks he speaks, and when he falls asleep his sleep is speech.\n\nHis substance: a rock, a lump of space. From mere space Giacometti therefore had to fashion a man, to inscribe movement in total immobility, unity in infinite multiplicity, the absolute in pure relativity, the future in the eternal present, the loquacity of signs in the tenacious silence of things. The gap between substance and model seems unbridgeable, yet exists only because Giacometti has gauged its dimensions. I am not sure whether he is a man bent on imposing a human seal on space or a rock dreaming of human qualities. Or perhaps he is both and mediates between the two.\n\nThe sculptor's passion is to transform himself completely into length so that from its fullness can spill the statue of a man. He is haunted by thoughts of stone. Once he was terrified by the void; for months he walked to and fro, accompanied by an abyss\u2014his emptiness in the process of achieving awareness of its desolate sterility. On another occasion it seemed to him that objects, spiritless and dead, were no longer touching the ground; he lived in a fluctuating universe, knowing in his flesh and even to the point of martyrdom that there is neither height nor depth nor length nor real contact between things; but at the same time he was aware that the sculptor's task is to carve from the infinite archipelago a face filled with the only being that can _touch_ other beings.\n\nI know no one else who is as sensitive as he to the magic of faces and gestures. He looks at them with passionate envy, as if they were from another kingdom. At his wit's end he has at times tried to mineralize his equals: to envision crowds advancing blindly toward him, rolling across boulevards like stones in an avalanche. Thus each of his obsessions was a task, an experience, a means of experiencing space.\n\n\"He's crazy,\" people say. \"Sculptors have been carving away for three thousand years\u2014and nicely, too\u2014without such rigmaroles. Why doesn't he try to produce impeccable works according to tested techniques instead of pretending to ignore his predecessors?\"\n\nThe truth is that for three thousand years sculptors have been carving only cadavers. Sometimes they are shown reclining on tombs; sometimes they are seated on curule chairs or perched on horses. But a dead man on a dead horse does not make even half a living creature. He deceives the rigid, wide-eyed people in the Museum. His arms pretend to move but are held fast by iron shanks at each end; his rigid outlines can hardly contain infinite dispersion; mystified by a crude resemblance, the spectator allows his imagination to imbue the eternal sinking of matter with movement, heat and light.\n\nIt is therefore necessary to start again from zero. After three thousand years the task of Giacometti and of contemporary sculptors is not to glut galleries with new works but to prove that sculpture is possible by carving. To prove that sculpture is possible just as by walking Diogenes proved to Parmenides and Zeno the possibility of movement. It is necessary to go the limit and see what can be done. If the undertaking should end in failure, it would be impossible to decide under even the most favorable circumstances whether this meant the failure of the sculptor or of sculpture; others would come along, and they would have to begin anew. Giacometti himself is forever beginning anew. But involved here is more than an infinite progression; there is a fixed boundary to be reached, a unique problem to be resolved: how to make a man out of stone without petrifying him. All or nothing: if the problem is solved, the number of statues is of little consequence.\n\n\"If I only knew how to make one,\" says Giacometti, \"I could make them by the thousands....\" Until he succeeds, there will be no statues at all but only rough hewings that interest Giacometti only insofar as they bring him closer to his goal. He shatters everything and begins anew. From time to time his friends manage to save from destruction a head, a young woman, an adolescent. He raises no objection and again takes up his task. In fifteen years he has had but one exposition.\n\nHe consented to the exposition because he had to make a living, but even then he had misgivings and wrote by way of excusing himself: \"It is mainly because I was goaded by the terror of poverty that these sculptures exist in this state (bronzed and photographed), but I am not quite sure of them; still, they were almost what I wanted. Almost.\"\n\nWhat bothers him is that these impressive works, always mediating between nothingness and being, always in the process of modification, perfection, destruction and renewal, have begun to exist independently and in earnest, and have made a start, far from him, toward a social career. He prefers simply to forget about them. The remarkable thing about him is his intransigence in his quest for the absolute.\n\nThis active, determined worker is displeased by the resistance of stone, which slows down his movements. He has chosen a weightless substance which is also the most ductile, perishable and spiritual of all substances\u2014plaster. He hardly feels it at his fingertips; it is the impalpable reflex of his movements.\n\nOne first notices in his studio strange scarecrows made of white daubs that coagulate around long reddish strings. His experiences, his ideas, his desires and his dreams project themselves for a moment on his plaster men, give them a form and pass on, and their form passes on with them. Each of these nebulous creatures undergoing perpetual metamorphosis seems like Giacometti's very life transcribed in another language.\n\nMaillo's statues insolently fling in our eyes their heavy eternity. But the eternity of stone is synonymous with inertia; it is the present forever solidified. Giacometti never speaks of eternity, never thinks of eternity. I was pleased by what he had said to me one day concerning some statues that he had just destroyed: \"I was happy with them, but they were made to last only a few hours.\"\n\nA few hours\u2014like the dawn, like sadness, like ephemera. And his creations, because they were destined to perish on the very night of their birth, are the only ones among all the sculptures that I know to retain the ineffable charm of transiency. Never was substance less eternal, more fragile, more nearly human. Giacometti's substance\u2014this strange flour that slowly settles over his studio and buries it, that seeps under his nails and into the deep wrinkles on his face\u2014is the dust of space.\n\nBut space, even if naked, is still superfluity. Giacometti is terrified by the infinite. Not by Pascalian infinity, not by what is infinitely great. The infinity that runs through his fingers is of a more subtle and secretive type. In space, says Giacometti, there is a superfluity. This _superfluity_ is the pure and simple coexistence of juxtaposed elements. Most sculptors have allowed themselves to be deceived; they have confused the proliferation of space with generosity, they have put too much into their works, they have been captivated by the plump contour of a marble bosom, they have unfolded, stuffed and distended the human gesture.\n\nGiacometti knows that there is nothing superfluous about a living person because everything is function. He knows that space is a cancer that destroys being, that devours everything. For him, to sculpture is to trim the fat from space, to compress it and wring from it all its exteriority. The attempt may well seem hopeless, and I believe that on two or three occasions Giacometti has reached the verge of despair. If sculpturing entails carving and patching in this incompressible medium, then sculpture is impossible. \"And yet,\" he said, \"if I begin my statue, like others, at the tip of the nose, it will not be too great an infinity of time before I reach the nostril.\" Then it was that he made his discovery.\n\nConsider Ganymede on his pedestal. If you ask me how far away he is, I will tell you that I don't know what you are talking about. By \"Ganymede\" do you mean the youth carried away by Jupiter's eagle? If so, I will say that there is no _real_ distance between us, that no such relation exists because he does not exist. Or are you referring to the block of marble that the sculptor fashioned in the image of the handsome lad? If so, we are dealing with something real, with an existing mineral, and can draw comparisons.\n\nPainters have long understood all that since in pictures the unreality of the third dimension necessarily entails the unreality of the two other dimensions. It follows that the distance between the figures and my eyes is _imaginary_. If I advance, I move nearer to the canvas, not to them. Even if I put my nose on them, I would still see them twenty steps away since for me they exist once and for all at a distance of twenty steps. It follows also that painting is not subject to Zeno's line of reasoning; even if I bisected the space separating the Virgin's foot from St. Joseph's foot, and the resulting halves again and again to infinity, I would simply be dividing a certain length on the canvas, not flagstones supporting the Virgin and her husband.\n\nSculptors failed to recognize these elementary truths because they were working in a three-dimensional space on a real block of marble and, although the product of their art was an imaginary man, they thought that they were working with real dimensions. The confusion of real and unreal space had curious results. In the first place, instead of reproducing what they _saw_ \u2014that is, a model ten steps away\u2014they reproduced in clay what _was_ \u2014that is, the model itself. Since they wanted their statue to give to the spectator standing ten steps away the impression that the model had given them, it seemed logical to make a figure that would be for him what the model had been for them; and that was possible only if the marble was _here_ just as the model had been _out there_.\n\nBut what exactly is the meaning of being _here_ and _out there?_ Ten steps away from her, I form a certain image of a nude woman; if I approach and look at her at close range, I no longer recognize her; the craters, crevices, cracks, the rough, black herbs, the greasy streaks, the lunar orography in its entirety simply cannot be the smooth, fresh skin I was admiring from a distance. Is that what the sculptor should imitate? There would be no end to his task, and besides, no matter how close he came to her face, he could always narrow the gap still further.\n\nIt follows that a statue truly resembles neither what the model _is_ nor what the sculptor _sees_. It is constructed according to certain contradictory conventions, for the sculptor represents certain details not visible from so far away under the pretext that they exist and neglects certain others that do exist under the pretext that they are unseen. What does this mean other than that he takes the viewpoint of the spectator in order to reconstruct an acceptable figure? But if so, my relation to Ganymede varies with my position; if near, I will discover details which escaped me at a distance. And this brings us to the paradox: I have _real_ relations with an illusion; or, if you prefer, my true distance from the block of marble has been confused with my imaginary distance from Ganymede.\n\nThe result of all this is that the properties of true space overlay and mask those of imaginary space. Specifically, the real divisibility of marble destroys the indivisibility of the person. Stone and Zeno are the victors. Thus the classical sculptor flirts with dogmatism because he thinks that he can eliminate his own look and imbue something other than man with human nature; but the truth is that he does not know what he is doing since he does not reproduce what he sees. In his search for truth he encounters convention. And since the net result is to shift to the visitor the responsibility for breathing life into his inert images, his quest for the absolute finally makes his work depend on the relativity of the angles from which it is viewed. As for the spectator, he takes the imaginary for the real and the real for the imaginary; he searches for indivisibility and everywhere finds divisibility.\n\nBy reversing classicism, Giacometti has restored to statues an imaginary, indivisible space. His unequivocal acceptance of relativity has revealed the absolute. The fact is that he was the first to sculpture man as he is seen\u2014from a distance. He confers _absolute distance_ on his images just as the painter confers absolute distance on the inhabitants of his canvas. He creates a figure \"ten steps away\" or \"twenty steps away,\" and do what you will, it remains there. The result is a leap into the realm of the unreal since its relation to you no longer depends on your relation to the block of plaster\u2014the liberation of Art.\n\nA classical statue must be studied or approached if it is continuously to reveal new details; first, parts are singled out, then parts of parts, etc., with no end in sight. You can't approach one of Giacometti's sculptures. Don't expect a belly to expand as you draw near it; it will not change and you on moving away will have the strange impression of marking time. We have a vague feeling, we conjecture, we are on the point of seeing nipples on the breasts; one or two steps closer and we are still expectant; one more step and everything vanishes. All that remains are plaits of plaster. His statues can be viewed only from a respectful distance. Still, everything is there: whiteness, roundness, the elastic sagging of a beautiful ripe belly. Everything except matter. From twenty steps we only think we see the wearisome desert of adipose tissue; it is suggested, outlined, indicated, but not given.\n\nNow we know what press Giacometti used to condense space. There could be but one\u2014distance. He placed distance within our reach by showing us a distant woman who keeps her distance even when we touch her with our fingertips. The breasts that we envisioned and anticipated will never be exposed, for they are but expectancy; the bodies that he creates have only enough substance to hold forth a promise.\n\n\"That's impossible,\" someone might say. \"The same object can't be viewed from close range and from afar.\" But we are not speaking of the same object; the block of plaster is near, the imaginary person far away.\n\n\"Even so, distance would still have to compress all three dimensions, and here length and depth are affected while height remains intact.\" True. But it is also true that each man in the eyes of other men possesses absolute dimensions. As a man walks away from me, he does not seem to grow smaller; his qualities seem rather to condense while his \"figure\" remains intact. As he draws near me, he does not grow larger but his qualities expand.\n\nAdmittedly, however, Giacometti's men and women are closer to us in height than in width\u2014as if they are projecting their stature. But Giacometti purposely elongated them. We must understand that his creatures, which are wholly and immediately what they are, can neither be studied nor observed. As soon as I see them, I know them; they flood my field of vision as an idea floods my mind; the idea has the same immediate translucidity and is instantaneously wholly what it is. Thus Giacometti has found a unique solution to the problem of unity within multiplicity by simply suppressing multiplicity.\n\nPlaster and bronze are divisible, but a woman in motion has the indivisibility of an idea or an emotion; she has no parts because she surrenders herself simultaneously. To give perceptible expression to pure presence, to surrender of self, to instantaneous emergence, Giacometti has recourse to elongation.\n\nThe original movement of creation\u2014the timeless, indivisible movement so beautifully epitomized by long, gracile legs\u2014shoots through his Greco-like bodies and lifts them toward the heavens. In them even more than in one of Praxiteles' athletes I recognize man, the first cause, the absolute source of movement. Giacometti succeeded in giving to his substance the only truly human unity\u2014unity of action.\n\nSuch is the type of Copernican revolution that Giacometti has attempted to introduce into sculpture. Before him men thought that they were sculpturing _being_ , and this absolute dissolved into an infinite number of appearances. He chose to sculpture _situated_ appearance and discovered that this was the path to the absolute. He exposes to us men and women as _already seen_ but not as already seen by himself alone. His figures are already seen just as a foreign language that we are trying to learn is already spoken. Each of them reveals to us man as he is seen, as he is for other men, as he emerges in interhuman surroundings\u2014not, as I said earlier for the sake of simplification, ten or twenty steps away, but at a man's distance. Each of them offers proof that man _is_ not at first in order to be _seen_ afterwards but that he is the being whose essence is in his existence for others. When I perceive the statue of a woman, I find that my congealed look is drawn to it, producing in me a pleasing uneasiness. I feel constrained, yet know neither why nor by whom until I discover that I am constrained to see and constrained by myself.\n\nFurthermore, Giacometti often takes pleasure in adding to our perplexity\u2014for example by placing a distant head on a nearby body so that we no longer know where to begin or exactly how to behave. But even without such complications his ambiguous images are disconcerting, for they upset our most cherished visual habits. We have long been accustomed to smooth, mute creatures fashioned for the purpose of curing us of the sickness of having a body; these guardian spirits have watched over the games of our childhood and bear witness in our gardens to the notion that the world is without risks, that nothing ever happens to anyone and, consequently, that the only thing that ever happened to them was death at birth.\n\nAgainst this, something obviously has happened to Giacometti's bodies. Are they emerging from a concave mirror, from a fountain of youth or from a deportation camp? We seem at first glance to be confronted by the emaciated martyrs of Buchenwald. But almost immediately we realize our mistake. His thin, gracile creatures rise toward the heavens and we discover a host of Ascensions and Assumptions; they dance, they _are_ dances, made of the same rarefied substance as the glorious bodies promised us. And while we are still contemplating the mystical upsurge, the emaciated bodies blossom and we see only terrestrial flowers.\n\nThe martyred creature was only a woman but she was _all_ woman\u2014glimpsed, furtively desired, retreating in the distance with the comic dignity of fragile, gangling girls walking lazily from bed to bathroom in their high-heeled shoes and with the tragic horror of scarred victims of a holocaust or famine; all woman\u2014exposed, rejected, near, remote; all woman\u2014with traces of hidden leanness showing through alluring plumpness and hideous here on earth but no longer entirely on earth, living and relating to us the astounding adventure of flesh, _our_ adventure. For she chanced to be born, like us.\n\nNevertheless, Giacometti is dissatisfied. He could win the match promptly simply by deciding that he has won. But he can't make up his mind and keeps putting off his decision from hour to hour, from day to day. Sometimes, during the course of a night's work, he is ready to acknowledge his victory; by morning everything has been shattered. Is he afraid of the boredom that lurks beyond his triumph, the boredom that beset Hegel after he had imprudently stapled together his system? Or perhaps matter seeks revenge. Perhaps the infinite divisibility that he eliminated from his work keeps cropping up between him and his goal. The end is in sight, but to reach it he must improve.\n\nMuch has been done but now he must do _a little_ better. And then _just a little_ better still. The new Achilles will never catch the tortoise; a sculptor must in some way be the chosen victim of space\u2014if not in his work, then in his life. But between him and us, there must always be a difference of position. He knows what he wanted to do and we don't; but we know what he has done and he doesn't. His statues are still largely incorporated in his flesh; he is unable to see them. Almost as soon as they are produced he goes on to dream of women that are thinner, taller, lighter, and it is through his work that he envisions the ideal by virtue of which he judges it imperfect. He will never finish simply because a man always transcends what he does.\n\n\"When I finish,\" he says, \"I'll write, I'll paint, I'll have fun.\" But he will die before finishing. Are we right or is he right? He is right because, as Da Vinci said, it is not good for an artist to be happy. But we are also right\u2014and ours is the last word. Kafka as he lay dying asked to have his books burned and Dostoevski, during the very last moments of his life, dreamed of writing a sequel to _The Brothers Karamazov_. Both may have died dissatisfied, the former thinking that he would depart from the world without even making a mark on it and the latter that he had not produced anything good. And yet both were victors, regardless of what they might have thought.\n\nGiacometti is also a victor, and he is well aware of this fact. It is futile for him to hoard his statues like a miser and to procrastinate, temporize and find a hundred excuses for borrowing more time. People will come into his studio, brush him aside, carry away all his works, including the plaster that covers his floor. He knows this; his cowed manner betrays him. He knows that he has won in spite of himself, and that he belongs to us.\n\n1 Tr. First published in _Les Temps Modernes_ and later reprinted in _Situations 111_ (Paris: Gallimard, 1948).\n\n2 Tr. That the paleolithic hunters of southern France and Northern Spain had a keenly developed aesthetic sense is attested by many artifacts preserved in limestone caves near Eyzies-de-Tayac and Altamira.\nINDEX\n\nA\n\nAlberti,\n\nAlexander the Great, n\n\nAlleg, Henri, n\n\nArcimboldo,\n\nAretino, Pietro, , , , ,\n\nB\n\nBellini, Gentile, ,\n\nBellini, Giovanni,\n\nBordone, Paris, ,\n\nBouhired, Djamila, n\n\nBraque,\n\nC\n\nCagliari, Paolo, _see_ Veronese\n\nCalder, Alexander, , 123-127\n\nCanaletto, Giovanni Antonio,\n\nCarpaccio,\n\nCasser, Sebastiano, ,\n\nD\n\nDiogenes,\n\nDonatello,\n\nDostoevski, Fyodor,\n\nDuccio,\n\nE\n\nEluard,\n\nF\n\nFontana, Giovita,\n\nFrancesa, Piero della,\n\nG\n\nGiacometti, Alberto, , , 77-95, 128-143\n\nGiacometti, Annette, n, ,\n\nGiacometti, Diego, n, , , , ,\n\nGiorgione, , ,\n\nGiotto,\n\nGoya, Francisco Jos\u00e9 de, , n,\n\nGozzoli, Benozzo,\n\nGreco, El,\n\nGuardi, Francesco, ,\n\nH\n\nHegel,\n\nHobbes, Thomas,\n\nHusserl,\n\nI\n\nIngres,\n\nJ\n\nJeanson, Henri,\n\nJoan of Arc, n\n\nK\n\nKafka,\n\nKierkegaard, Soren,\n\nL\n\nLapoujade, Robert, , 96-122\n\nM\n\nMaillol,\n\nMantegna, Andrea,\n\nMarx, Karl,\n\nMasson,\n\nMatisse, Henri, , n, n\n\nMessina, Antonella da, ,\n\nMichelangelo, , , , , , ,\n\nP\n\nParmenides,\n\nPicasso, Pablo, n, ,\n\nPitati, Bonifazio dei, ,\n\nPius V, Pope, 42-43\n\nPordenone, , , , n\n\nPraxiteles,\n\nR\n\nRaphael, , , ,\n\nRidolfl, n, n,\n\nRimbaud,\n\nRobusti, Domenico, ,\n\nRobusti, Faustina, ,\n\nRobusti, Jacopo, _see_ Tintoretto\n\nRobusti, Marco,\n\nRobusti, Marietta, ,\n\nRobusti, Ottavia,\n\nS\n\nSacchis, Antonio di,\n\nSalviati,\n\nSarpi, Fra Paolo,\n\nSartre, Jean-Paul, 7-10, n, n\n\nSchiavone, Andrea, , ,\n\nStreller, Justus, n\n\nT\n\nTintoretto, , 13-76\n\nTitian, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 65-76,\n\nU\n\nUccello, Paolo, n,\n\nV\n\nValery, Paul,\n\nVan Gogh, Vincent, ,\n\nVasari, Giorgo, ,\n\nVaucanson, Jacques de, n,\n\nVecchio, Girolamo,\n\nVecchio, Palma,\n\nVecellio, Tiziano, _see_ Titian\n\nVecention,\n\nVermeer,\n\nVeronese, , , , n, , , , , ,\n\nVictor Emmanuel, King,\n\nVincentino, ,\n\nVinci, Leonardo da,\n\nVivarini,\n\nVolterra, Daniele de,\n\nZ\n\nZeno, , ,\n\nZigninoni, Zammaria de, ,\n\nZuccaro, \nSARTRE BIBLIOGRAPHY\n\nNausea (1938)\n\nThe Wall (1939)\n\nThe Flies (1943)\n\nBeing and Nothingness (1943)\n\nNo Exit (1945)\n\nThe Age of Reason (1945)\n\nThe Reprieve (1945)\n\nExistentialism and Humanism (1945)\n\nDeaths Without Burial (1946)\n\nThe Respectful Prostitute (1946)\n\nAnti-Semite and Jew (1947)\n\nDirty Hands (1948)\n\nTroubled Sleep (1949)\n\nThe Devil and the Good Lord (1951)\n\nSt. Genet: Actor and Martyr (1952)\n\nThe Condemned of Altona (1959)\n\nCritique of Dialectical Reason (1960)\n\nThe Words: An Autobiography (1964)\nABOUT THE AUTHOR\n\nBorn in Paris in 1905, Jean-Paul Sartre graduated the \u00c9cole Normale Sup\u00e9rieure at the age of twenty-two. He subsequently taught philosophy at the Lyc\u00e9e du Havre, studied under Husserl and Heidegger at the Institut Fran\u00e7ais, Berlin (1933-34), and held a professorship at the Lyc\u00e9e Condor\u00e7et, Paris (1935-42). Mobilized at the outbreak of World War II, Sartre served with the French Army until his capture at the Maginot Line. He spent the following nine months in a German prison camp, where he composed and directed plays for his fellow prisoners. On his release in 1941, Sartre joined the Paris Resistance movement as a journalist, contributing to various underground newspapers, including _Les Lettres Fran\u00e7aises_ and _Combat_. Despite the Nazi censorship during the Occupation, he produced his first play in 1943, _Les Mouches (The Flies)_ , a retelling of the Orestes legend advocating freedom and resistance to tyranny. His second play, _Huis-clos (No Exit)_ , was produced a year later. His first major work, a novel, _La Naus\u00e9e (Nausea)_ was published in 1938; his first philosophic work, _L'\u00c9tre et le N\u00e9ant (Being and Nothingness)_ , appeared in 1943.\n\nIn 1942 Sartre resigned his professorship to devote full time to writing. Asserting that a writer must refuse to allow himself to be classified as an institution, he rejected appointment to the French Legion d'Honneur in 1945, and rejected the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964. He was one of the major artists and writers in France to demand independence for Algeria, and in 1965 declined a lecture tour in the United States in protest of the American military role in Vietnam. Sartre embraced Marxism and traveled to Cuba to meet Fidel Castro and Ernesto \"Che\" Guevara\n\nSartre's writings include novels, plays, screenplays, essays on literature and psychology, a philosophical and sociological biography of the French playwright Genet, philosophic treatises, articles of social commentary and the first volume of his autobiography. He is presently the editor of _Les Temps Modernes_ in 1946, becoming a politically engaged activist and the major spokesman for atheistic existentialism for his generation. Sartre was one of the few philosophers to develop a complete system of thought consistent with the ethical and philosophical dilemmas of his time. He died in Paris on April 15, 1980.\nAll rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.\n\nNew Preface and arrangement\n\ncopyright \u00a9 2011, copyright \u00a9 1963\n\nby the Philosophical Library, Inc.\n\nISBN:978-1-4532-2856-2\n\nThis 2012 edition distributed by Open Road Integrated Media\n\n180 Varick Street\n\nNew York, NY 10014\n\nwww.openroadmedia.com\n\n**JEAN-PAUL SARTRE**\n\nFROM PHILOSOPHICAL LIBRARY \nAND OPEN ROAD MEDIA\n\n_Philosophical Library's mission is to reintroduce readers to **books of lasting value** by the intellectual icons of the twentieth century, including Albert Einstein, Jean-Paul Sartre, Kahlil Gibran, and Andr\u00e9 Gide._\n\n**FIND OUT MORE AT**\n\n**WWW.PHILOSOPHICALLIBRARY.COM**\n\n**FOLLOW US:**\n\n**@PhilLibrary**\n\n**Facebook.com\/PhilosophicalLibrary**\n\n**PhilosophicalLibrary.Tumblr.com**\n\nPhilosophical Library is one of a select group of publishing partners of Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.\n\nFind a full list of our authors and\n\ntitles at www.openroadmedia.com\n\nFOLLOW US\n\n@OpenRoadMedia\n\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}} +{"text":" \n## More Praise for IVY + BEAN\n\n\"Just right for kids moving on from beginning readers . . . illustrations deftly capture the girls' personalities and the tale's humor. . . . Barrows' narrative brims with sprightly dialogue.\" \n\u2014 _Publishers Weekly_ , starred review\n\n\"In the tradition of Betsy and Tacy, Ginnie and Genevra, come two new friends, Ivy and Bean. . . . The deliciousness is in the details here. . . . Will make readers giggle.\" \n\u2014 _Booklist_ , starred review\n\n\"A charming new series.\" \u2014 _People_\n\n\"Ivy and Bean are a terrific buddy combo.\" \u2014 _Chicago Tribune_\n\n\"Readers will be snickering in glee over Ivy and Bean's antics.\" \n\u2014 _Kirkus Reviews_\n\n\"This is a great chapter book for students who have recently crossed the independent reader bridge.\" \n\u2014 _School Library Journal_\n\n\"Annie Barrows' simple and sassy text will draw in both the reluctant reader and the young bookworm. Fans of Beverly Cleary's Beezus and Ramona will enjoy this cleverly written and illustrated tale of sibling rivalry and unexpected friendship.\" \n\u2014 _BookPage_\n\nFor Esme and Megan, friends from the beginning \u2014A. B.\n\nFor the other Ivy, and her brother, Moss \u2014S. B.\n\nThanks to Dr. George Matsumoto of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute for useful information regarding squid.\nFirst Chronicle Books LLC paperback edition published in 2010.\n\nText \u00a9 2009 by Annie Barrows. \nIllustrations \u00a9 2009 by Sophie Blackall. \nAll rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.\n\nBook design by Sara Gillingham. \nTypeset in Blockhead and Candida. \nThe illustrations in this book were rendered in Chinese Ink.\n\nISBN 978-0-8118-7666-7 (PB) \nISBN 978-0-8118-7656-8 (EPUB, MOBI)\n\nThe Library of Congress has catalogued the previous edition as follows. \nBarrows, Annie. \nIvy and Bean doomed to dance \/ written by Annie Barrows ; illustrated by Sophie Blackall. \np. cm. \u2014 (Ivy and Bean ; bk. 6) \nSummary: Second-grade best friends Ivy and Bean beg for ballet lessons, then, when they are cast as squids in their first recital, scheme to find a way out of what seems to be boring, hard, and potentially embarrassing. \nISBN 978-0-8118-6266-0 \n[1. Ballet\u2014Fiction. 2. Best friends\u2014Fiction. 3. Friendship\u2014Fiction.] I. Blackall, Sophie, ill. \nII. Title. III. Title: Ivy and Bean doomed to dance. IV. Title: Doomed to dance. \nPZ7.B27576Iwb 2009 \n[E]\u2014dc22 \n2009004367\n\nChronicle Books LLC \n680 Second Street, San Francisco, California 94107\n\nwww.chroniclekids.com\n\n# CONTENTS\n\nBALLET OR BUST 7\n\nDIP, DIP, CRASH! 20\n\nBAD NEWS BENEATH THE SEA 31\n\nSQUIDS IN A FIX 40\n\nGERMS OF HOPE 51\n\nTIGHT TENTACLES 62\n\nBYE-BYE, BALLET 75\n\nVERY FISHY 89\n\nOCEAN LIFE GONE BAD 99\n\nIN HOT WATER 112\n\nSQUIDARINAS 121\n\n## BALLET OR BUST\n\nIt was a book that started all the trouble. \"Read, read, read! That's all grown-ups ever say to me,\" said Bean, \"but when I finally do read, I get in trouble.\" She slumped in her chair. \"And then the grown-ups take the book away.\"\n\nIvy nodded. \"It's totally not fair,\" she agreed. \"And they shouldn't blame us anyway. It's all Grandma's fault.\"\n\nIvy's grandma had sent her the book. It was called _The Royal Book of the Ballet_. Each chapter told the story of a different ballet, with pictures of fancy girls in feathery tutus and satin toe shoes.\n\nBean was at Ivy's house on the day it arrived. They were supposed to be subtracting, but they were tired of that so they ripped open the package and sat down side by side on Ivy's couch to look at _The Royal Book of the Ballet_.\n\n\"I heard that sometimes their toes bleed when they're dancing,\" said Bean. \"The blood leaks right through the satin part.\"\n\n\"That's gross,\" said Ivy, turning the pages. Suddenly she stopped.\n\n\"Whoa, Nellie,\" murmured Bean, staring.\n\n\"Is she kicking his head off?\" asked Ivy in a whisper.\n\n\"That's what it looks like,\" said Bean. \"What's this one called, anyway?\"\n\nIvy flipped back a few pages. \" _Giselle_ ,\" she said, reading quickly. \"It's about a girl named Giselle who, um, dances with this duke guy, but he's going to marry a princess, not Giselle, so she takes his sword and stabs herself.\" Ivy and Bean found the picture of that.\n\n\"Ew,\" said Bean. \"But interesting.\"\n\n\"Yeah, and then she turns into a ghost with all these other girls. They're called the Wilis.\"\n\nThe picture showed a troop of beautiful women dressed in white. They had very long fingernails.\n\n\"And then,\" Ivy read on, \"the duke goes to see Giselle's grave, and she comes out with the Wilis, and they decide to dance him to death.\" Ivy stared at the picture. \"To _death_.\"\n\nBean leaned over for a closer look. It was pretty amazing. Giselle's pointed toe had snapped the duke's head up so that his chin pointed straight up to the sky. It would fall off in a moment. The Wilis stood in a circle, waving their long fingernails admiringly.\n\nBean lifted the page, wishing that she could see more of the picture, but there was no more. There never was. \"Wow,\" she said, shaking her head. \"She showed him.\"\n\nFor a few minutes, Ivy and Bean sat in silence, thinking.\n\n\"Okay,\" Ivy said finally. \"I'm Giselle, and you're the duke.\"\n\n\"All right,\" said Bean. \"But next time, I get to be Giselle.\"\n\nIt was fun playing Giselle, even though Ivy's mom wouldn't let them dance with a knife and they had to use a Wiffle bat instead. After they had each been Giselle a couple of times, they were Wilis, waving long Scotch-tape fingernails as they danced various people to death.\n\n\"Mrs. Noble!\" shrieked Bean. \"I'm dancing Mrs. Noble to death.\" Ivy ran to get a pair of her mother's high heels and pretended to be Mrs. Noble, a fifth-grade teacher who had once given Ivy and Bean a lot of trouble.\n\nBean the Wili chased Mrs. Noble around the house, waggling her fingernails and screaming. Finally, when they were both laughing so hard they couldn't dance any more, they rushed into the kitchen and fell over on the floor.\n\n\"Well, look who's here,\" said Ivy's mom. She was making dinner.\n\n\"Mom,\" Ivy said when she got her breath back, \"I _have_ to take ballet class.\"\n\nIvy's mom stirred something into something else. \"You had to take ice-skating, too.\"\n\nIvy wiggled her toes. \"Yeah, but that was a mistake.\"\n\n\"How do you know ballet isn't a mistake, too? Those skates were expensive.\"\n\n\"Ballet is different,\" Ivy explained. \"Ballet isn't freezing and dumb. Ballet is pretty. And it's good for you.\"\n\n\"I'm going to take it, too,\" Bean said. \"That way, we can help each other during the hard parts.\"\n\nIvy's mom looked at Bean in a surprised sort of way. \"You're going to take ballet?\"\n\n\"Sure.\" Bean's mom would be happy to let her take ballet. Bean was certain of it. After all, Bean thought, her mother liked nice stuff. And ballet was nice. Except for the part where you danced people to death.\n\nThe funny thing was, Bean's mother wasn't happy to let her take ballet. Not at all.\n\n\"You'll start it, and then you'll decide you hate it and want to quit.\"\n\n\"No, I won't. I'll love it,\" Bean said.\n\n\"I'll bet you a dollar you'll hate it,\" said Nancy. Nancy had taken ballet when she was Bean's age. Bean remembered the time Nancy had cried because she was a chocolate bar in a ballet about candy.\n\n\"But I'm not going to be a dorky old piece of candy,\" Bean said. \"I'm going to be a Wili.\" She knew better than to tell Nancy that she was going to be Giselle. Nancy would just make fun of her.\n\n\"Ha,\" said Nancy. \"You have to be whatever they tell you to be.\"\n\n\"Nancy,\" said her mom. \"I'll discuss this with Bean in private, please.\"\n\n\"I'll bet you, Mom,\" said Nancy, getting up. \"I'll bet you two dollars she quits after a week.\"\n\n\"I'll bet you a hundred I don't,\" said Bean.\n\n\"Good-bye, Nancy,\" said their mother. Nancy left, and Mom turned to Bean. \"Now, honey, I didn't want to go into this in front of Nancy, but if I do let you take ballet, there will be no quitting.\"\n\n\"Quitting? Why would I quit?\"\n\n\"You quit softball.\"\n\n\"But that was softball. All you do in softball is stand around waiting for five hundred years until it's time to hit the stupid ball. And then you miss anyway. Ballet isn't like that.\"\n\nHer mother looked at her.\n\nBean made her eyes big. \"I thought you wanted me to learn new things,\" she said.\n\nHer mother looked at her some more.\n\n\"Nancy got to take ballet.\" Bean wiggled her lower lip. She knew that a trembling lower lip is very sad looking.\n\nHer mother laughed. \"You're drooling. Okay. I will let you take ballet on one condition, and here it is: You will go for the whole session. Four months. Sixteen lessons One performance. No quitting. And no complaining.\"\n\n\"No problem!\" said Bean. She jumped up and hugged her mother. \"When can I start? I already know how to kick\u2014you want to see?\"\n\n## DIP, DIP, CRASH!\n\nIt was not long before Ivy and Bean realized that they had made a terrible mistake.\n\nBean began to realize it while Madame Joy was talking about first position. You stuck your heels together and your toes apart. Big deal. Where was the leaping? Where was the kicking? Where was the dancing?\n\nThen Madame Joy chattered for a long time about nice round arms. Who cared about arms? When Madame Joy started in on second position, which turned out to be just regular standing, Bean stopped listening.\n\nIvy paid careful attention to first position. Heels, toes. Great! Then she paid careful attention to second position. Arms out, legs out. Great! Then came third position.\n\n\"Now,\" said Madame Joy, \"third position. For third position, we slide our right foot, like so, to the middle of our left foot. Then we lift one nice round arm up, up in the air, leaving our other nice round arm\u2014\"\n\nIvy fell over with a thump.\n\n\"Goodness!\" exclaimed Madame Joy. \"Let's try that again.\"\n\nLet's not, thought Ivy.\n\nBut they did. In fact, they did nothing but one, two, three, four, and five for half an hour. After that, Madame Joy showed them something called a pli\u00e9. She acted like it was the most important thing in the world, but really it was just bending your knees and dipping a little. Dip, dip, dip. Row, row, row your boat, thought Bean.\n\n\"Hey, guys,\" she called, \"Get this!\" She sang, \"Dip, dip, dip your knees\u2014\"\n\nNobody joined in. Instead, Madame Joy said, \"We save our singing for after class, Bean.\"\n\nSheesh, Bean said to herself. You'd think she'd be happy to get a little more pep in here.\n\nBut it was even worse when Madame Joy was peppy. \"All right, girls! Time to leap like little kitties!\" Madame Joy said, springing into the air with her ballet slippers fluttering.\n\n\"She doesn't leap like a kitty. She leaps like a frog,\" Bean whispered to Ivy.\n\n\"Bean!\" called Madame Joy. \"You may lead the kitties.\" She twirled briskly around and hauled Bean to the front of the line. \"Now,\" she said, smiling, \"you are a kitty! Leap!\" Madame Joy bounded across the wide, empty floor.\n\nBean closed her eyes and imagined she was a cat.\n\nShe was a skinny black cat that wanted to catch a bird. And then eat it. Bean crouched. She twitched her tail. She narrowed her eyes. \"RRRRRrrrowll!\" she screeched and then lunged forward, landing on her hands and knees in the middle of the floor. \"Got him!\" she yelled.\n\nMadame Joy stared at Bean for a second, and then she said, \"Dulcie, will you show us how to leap like a kitty?\"\n\n\"Yes, Madame Joy,\" said Dulcie, only she said, \"Madame Jwah.\" For some reason, Madame Joy liked that. Dulcie came to the front of the line and stood with her arms out and her toes pointed.\n\nBean rose to her feet. \"So I already did it, right?\" she asked. \"I get to be done, right?\"\n\n\"No,\" said Madame Joy. \"You need more practice. Go to the end of the line.\"\n\nBean clomped to the end of the line and stood behind Ivy.\n\nDulcie lifted her arms higher and smiled proudly. Then she hopped across the empty floor, ker-plop, ker-plop. When she reached the other side of the ballet studio, Dulcie stood before Madame Joy and held out her tiny pink dance skirt. Then she swirled one leg behind the other and curtseyed.\n\n\"Show-off,\" whispered Bean.\n\n\"I can't believe that we asked for this,\" said Ivy, her eyes on Dulcie.\n\n\"We didn't just ask. We begged,\" Bean said glumly.\n\nIt was true. They had begged.\n\nAfter everyone had leaped, Madame Joy clapped her hands and told them they had to be butterflies.\n\nBean raised her hand. \"Can I be a Wili instead?\"\n\nMadame Joy stared at her. \"Not today,\" she said in a way that really meant never. Then she turned on some music, and all the other girls ran around the room flapping their arms and pointing their toes.\n\nThat's when Ivy and Bean turned to look at each other, and their eyes said _We have made a terrible mistake_.\n\n## BAD NEWS BENEATH THE SEA\n\nEvery week Bean and Ivy put on tights and leotards and went to Madame Joy's School of the Ballet, where they fell down and hurt themselves (Ivy) and were bored out of their minds (Bean). Every week they were told to watch Dulcie pli\u00e9 and kitty-jump across the floor even though she was only five. Every week they waited and waited for Madame Joy to clap her hands and say it was time to be butterflies. They hated being butterflies, but at least that meant ballet class was almost over.\n\nIt seemed like it couldn't get worse. And then one day, instead of telling them to be butterflies, Madame Joy told them to sit in a circle on the floor.\n\n\"We're going to be mushrooms,\" whispered Ivy to Bean.\n\nBean didn't think so. When grown-ups asked you to sit in a circle, they were usually about to tell you something you didn't want to hear. Ms. Aruba-Tate, Ivy and Bean's second-grade teacher, was forever gathering them in a circle for bad news. Like, the class fish died over the weekend. Or, everyone has to start using real punctuation. Or, the pencil sharpener is off-limits. Circles meant trouble.\n\nBean watched Madame Joy walk pointy-toed to a chair and sit. No floor for her. \"Girls,\" she began, \"I have something very special to tell you.\"\n\n\"Oh, tell us, Madame Jwah!\" cried Dulcie. She even clapped her hands.\n\nMadame Joy smiled. \"As many of you know, we end each session with a lovely recital. A recital, girls, is a chance for you to dance before your friends and family so that they can see what you've learned.\"\n\nIvy coughed.\n\nMadame Joy leaned forward eagerly. \"Most of our recitals are held here at the school, but this time we have been invited to participate in The World of Dance! Isn't that wonderful?\"\n\nSeveral girls said, \" _Oooooooh!_ \"\n\nBean was getting a not-so-good feeling. \"What's The World of Dance?\" she asked.\n\nMadame Joy's smile grew. \"The World of Dance is a gathering of many different dance schools from all over town\u2014tap dancers, jazz dancers, hip-hop dancers. We will be representing the ballet. Each group gets a chance to perform, just as in a regular recital, but we'll be performing on a real stage in a real theater!\"\n\n\" _Oooooooh!_ \" repeated the same girls.\n\nBean was sick of hearing that.\n\nIvy's hand shot into the air. \"Can we do _Giselle?_ \"\n\n\" _Giselle?_ \" Madame Joy looked surprised. \"No. Goodness, no. We will be doing a lovely piece called 'Wedding Beneath the Sea.' \"\n\n\"Wedding Beneath the Sea\"? Bean didn't care if she was rude. She yelled, \"What are Ivy and me?\"\n\nMadame Joy raised her eyebrows. \"I was planning to discuss parts next, but if you must know, you and Ivy will be the two friendly squids.\"\n\nNobody said, \"Oooooooh.\" Squids? Ivy and Bean looked at each other. _We have made a really terrible mistake_.\n\nOn the drive home, Bean and Ivy were quiet. That was because of the no-complaining rule.\n\nQuietly, they got out of the car and went into Bean's backyard. Quietly, they stuffed themselves into Bean's tiny playhouse and slumped against the walls.\n\n\"Squids. Who ever heard of squids?\" said Bean. \"I don't even know what squids are.\"\n\n\"I'm not totally sure,\" said Ivy, \"but I think they're ugly, and I think people eat them.\"\n\n\"Oh, great,\" moaned Bean. \"I can't believe that stupid Dulcie gets to be the mermaid, and we're squids.\"\n\n\"I believe it,\" said Ivy. \"We're awful.\"\n\n\"We're not _awful_ \u2014\" began Bean.\n\n\"Oh yes we are,\" said Ivy. \"I'm worse than you, but you're pretty bad, too.\"\n\n\"That's because we hate it. If we liked it, we'd be better at it.\"\n\n\"I thought I'd like it,\" said Ivy sadly.\n\n\"So did I,\" said Bean. \"I thought we'd be kicking some heads off. I didn't know about the positions and pli\u00e9s and all that.\"\n\n\"You know, they can't _make_ us do it,\" said Ivy.\n\nBean thought about that. \"Yes, they can,\" she said.\n\nIvy sighed. \"It was mean of them to make us promise not to complain,\" she said.\n\n\"Yeah,\" said Bean. \"They knew all along how horrible it would be.\"\n\n\"We're going to have to be squids in front of everybody,\" said Ivy. \"That's the most horrible thing of all.\"\n\n\"They'll probably laugh at us,\" said Bean, imagining it.\n\n\"They can't. They're _parents_ ,\" Ivy said.\n\n\"Remember? It's friends, too. There might even be someone from school there,\" Bean said gloomily.\n\n\"If only we could quit,\" Ivy moaned.\n\n\"But we can't,\" said Bean.\n\nIvy frowned. That meant she was getting determined. \"There has to be a way,\" she said, determinedly. \"Nothing is impossible.\"\n\nBean stared at her. \"It's impossible for us to be good at ballet.\"\n\n\"Well, _that_ , sure,\" said Ivy. \"But it's not impossible for us to break our arms.\"\n\n## SQUIDS IN A FIX\n\n\"What?\" said Bean.\n\n\"We can't be squids if we break our arms,\" said Ivy. \"Remember what Madame Joy said? We're supposed to wave our tentacles gently on the passing tide. No way can we do that if we've got broken arms. Right?\"\n\nThat was true. But. Broken arms. That could be going too far. Bean pictured her arm cracked in half.\n\n\"I saw a picture of a guy who broke his arm, and his bone poked out of his skin,\" she said.\n\nIvy made an ouch face.\n\n\"Yeah, I know,\" said Bean. \"Maybe we don't have to break them. Maybe we can just sprain them instead.\" She didn't really know what a sprain was, but she knew that it didn't involve bones poking out of your skin.\n\n\"Okay. Sure. We can't be squids with sprained arms either,\" said Ivy. \"No way.\"\n\n\"No how,\" agreed Bean. They looked at each other. \"So, how do you sprain an arm?\" Bean asked.\n\n\"I bet it's like breaking, only smaller,\" Ivy reasoned. \"When she was a kid, my mom broke her arm falling off her garage roof. If we want to just sprain our arms, maybe we should find something shorter than a garage and fall off it.\"\n\nThis made sense. Bean looked around her backyard. There was the porch, but they'd crack their heads open on the stairs. There was the playhouse. There was the trampoline\u2014\"Hey, I've got an idea,\" Bean said. \"We'll jump off the playhouse onto the trampoline and then boing from the trampoline onto the ground. That should do it.\"\n\nFirst they had to drag the playhouse across the lawn and set it down next to the trampoline. Bean noticed that the playhouse was not much taller than the trampoline. They were going to have to jump hard.\n\nNext, Bean climbed up the plastic playhouse shutters until she was perched on the roof like a giant bird.\n\nIvy took a running jump at the playhouse and flung herself over the roof. \"Oof,\" she said.\n\n\"You have to stand up,\" said Bean. \"Or your jump will be too short.\"\n\n\"You go first,\" said Ivy in a muffled voice.\n\nBean rose slowly to her feet. The playhouse made a funny sound.\n\nIvy began to push herself up on her hands. There was another funny sound. It was a bending sort of sound. A cracking sort of sound.\n\nThe roof was caving in.\n\n\"Abandon ship!\" Bean hollered and bounced onto the trampoline. But the two sides of the playhouse were folding around Ivy like a taco. She couldn't abandon ship. She couldn't do anything. Bean watched as Ivy sank closer and closer to the ground.\n\n\"Are you okay?\" she asked.\n\n\"I'm fine,\" said Ivy.\n\nAfter a few minutes, the playhouse stopped sinking, and Bean tried to pull Ivy out by yanking on her head. But Ivy said that hurt worse than being tacoed, so Bean yanked on the playhouse instead. Soon the roof de-caved enough for Ivy to squeeze out, and then Bean crawled inside and kicked the ceiling until the playhouse was almost the shape it had been before.\n\n\"Whew,\" said Bean, sitting down. \"We're going to have to get some tape to fix that crack.\" She wiped her sweaty face with her sweaty hand. \"Duct tape. I love fixing things.\"\n\n\"But Bean,\" said Ivy. \"We didn't fix anything. We're still squids.\"\n\nDang. Bean had almost forgotten about that. Her duct-tape happiness faded. She was a squid. A friendly squid. \"Maybe we'll get so sick we can't be in The World of Dance,\" she suggested.\n\n\"That's not a bad idea,\" said Ivy thoughtfully. \"In fact, that's a great idea. We can't dance if we're sick. Let's get sick.\"\n\nSick. Well, it would hurt less than spraining her arm. \"Okay, but how?\" asked Bean.\n\n\"Germs,\" said Ivy. \"We'll catch some germs and get sick.\"\n\n\"Germs,\" said Bean, thinking. \"I know where germs are. At school. Ms. Aruba-Tate says the school is full of germs. That's why she's always making us wash our hands.\"\n\n\"But we don't want regular dirt germs. We want sick germs,\" said Ivy. \"We'll have to find someone sick.\"\n\n\"Easy-peasy.\" Bean was definitely cheerful now. \"Tomorrow we'll find the sickest person at school and touch him!\"\n\n## GERMS OF HOPE\n\nIvy and Bean stood on the playground of Emerson School. Around them children were running and shouting. There were kids dangling from the monkey bars and dropping off the play structure. There were kids playing wall ball. There were kids arguing about four square. Some fifth-grade girls walked around the field, talking, which looked so incredibly boring that Bean hoped she would never get to fifth grade. Ivy and Bean leaned against the fence and watched. They were hunting for germs.\n\n\"I bet MacAdam is full of germs,\" whispered Bean.\n\nMacAdam was eating dirt. He liked to do that. But other than eating dirt, he looked perfectly healthy.\n\n\"We need someone sicker,\" said Ivy. \"Look for someone sitting down. If you sit down during recess, it's because you're sick.\"\n\nThey peered around the playground. \"Drew is sitting down,\" said Bean, \"but that's probably because the Yard Duty got him.\"\n\n\"What about that kid over there?\" Ivy pointed to a first-grade-looking kid that Bean didn't know. He was sitting by himself on a bench.\n\n\"Hey! He coughed!\" said Bean. \"Let's get him!\"\n\nIn a flash, they were at his side.\n\nHe looked up.\n\nIvy nudged Bean and pointed at his nose. It was runny.\n\n\"Are you sick?\" asked Bean.\n\n\"Yes,\" said the kid. He coughed with his mouth wide open and then looked back up at them again. \"What?\"\n\n\"What have you got?\" asked Ivy.\n\n\"What does it matter?\" said Bean. \"He's sick.\"\n\n\"I don't want to throw up,\" whispered Ivy.\n\n\"Oh,\" said Bean. She didn't want to throw up either. \"You're not going to throw up, are you?\" she asked the boy.\n\nHe looked a little worried. \"I don't think so. Maybe.\"\n\nIvy took a step away. Bean stared at him, thinking about friendly squids. \"Can I touch your face?\" she asked finally. \"Me and her, we need to get sick.\"\n\nHe wiped his nose. \"Okay.\"\n\nBean stuck her hand on his face. It was kind of gross. \"Breathe on me,\" she told him.\n\nHe puffed a big breath at her. She could feel the germs hitting her skin.\n\nIvy was standing far away in the bushes by now. \"I'll just catch it from you,\" she called.\n\nBean rubbed her hands all over her face. \"Thanks,\" she said to the kid. He sneezed.\n\nBean and Ivy knew about germs. They didn't make you sick right away. You had to wait at least a couple of hours. That was okay. Ivy and Bean didn't want to get sick during science. They liked science.\n\nThis month, science was Ocean Life. And today Ocean Life was fish prints. It was art and science mixed together, Ms. Aruba-Tate said. The second-graders nodded. They liked art, too.\n\nMs. Aruba-Tate explained about fish prints. You took a dead fish and painted it. Then you dropped it pretty hard on a piece of paper. When you picked it up again, there was a paint fish on your paper. Then you used your crayons to draw an undersea environment around the fish.\n\n\"Does everyone understand the instructions?\" asked Ms. Aruba-Tate, looking around the classroom.\n\n\"Are the fish dead?\" asked Zuzu.\n\n\"Yes, the fish are dead,\" said Ms. Aruba-Tate.\n\n\"Are you sure?\"\n\n\"Completely sure,\" said Ms. Aruba-Tate. \"Any other questions?\"\n\nThe second-graders shook their heads. Fish prints sounded like fun.\n\n\"Now who is our supply person today?\" asked Ms. Aruba-Tate.\n\n\"Eric!\" shouted the second grade.\n\nEric leaped to his feet, waving his hands in the air. \"Thank you, thank you!\"\n\n\"Eric, please put one fish at each table,\" said Ms. Aruba-Tate, handing him a big plastic box.\n\nEric went around the room, carefully choosing the right dead fish for each table.\n\n\"Hurry up!\" shouted everyone. Paint and dead fish. This was the best science yet.\n\nBean was itching to begin. When Eric reached her table, there were just two dead fish left in the box, but he couldn't decide between them. He looked at one and then the other. \"Which one should I give you? The little one or the big one?\"\n\n\"Just give us one!\" shouted Bean.\n\n\"Maybe I should ask Ms. Aruba-Tate which one I should give you,\" Eric said.\n\nBean reached into his box and grabbed a dead fish.\n\n\"Ms. Aruba-Tate! Bean took a fish!\"\n\nDang. Bean looked at her teacher. Was she going to be sent to the rug? Was she going to miss out on dead fish and paint?\n\nBut Ms. Aruba-Tate smiled at Bean. \"Next time, don't grab, Bean.\"\n\nBean loved Ms. Aruba-Tate with all her heart.\n\nCarefully Bean smeared her fish with green paint. She looked down and saw the fish's eye looking up. Poor fish. She decided to make the most beautiful fish print in the world, to make it up to the fish for being dead. Slowly she laid the fish on her paper and pressed. Then she pressed harder. It had to be good.\n\n\"Bean! Watch out!\" squawked Vanessa.\n\nOops. She had pressed a little too hard.\n\nThe fish was kind of bent. She lifted it up and peeked at her print. That was kind of bent, too.\n\n\"You wrecked it!\" said Vanessa. \"And your fish print is all lumpy.\"\n\n\"It's not lumpy,\" said Bean.\n\n\"It's about to have babies,\" said Ivy.\n\n\"Yeah!\" said Bean. She handed the fish to Ivy. \"I did it on purpose,\" she said to Vanessa.\n\nWhile Ivy made her fish print, Bean drew an undersea environment for her fish. Kelp. An octopus. A sea anemone. A wrecked ship with ghosts. Science was her favorite subject, for sure.\n\n## TIGHT TENTACLES\n\nIvy and Bean worked so hard on their fish prints that they forgot about getting sick. It was only on the way home that they remembered. Ivy looked down Bean's throat.\n\n\"It's pink,\" she said.\n\n\"It's always pink,\" said Bean. She felt her forehead. \"I have a headache,\" she said.\n\n\"That's good,\" said Ivy encouragingly.\n\nBut when they got to Bean's house, Bean's mother said that a person with a headache was too sick to eat an ice-cream bar, and that's when Bean realized that she didn't have a headache after all. She felt fine.\n\nShe still felt fine the next day.\n\nAnd the day after that.\n\nIvy touched a kid with a rash. Nothing. Eric sneezed on Bean eight times. Nothing. Half the kids in the first grade had lice, but Ivy and Bean decided that lice wouldn't help. Their mothers would make them be squids with lice.\n\nBy the end of the week, Ivy and Bean were completely unsick. They needed a new plan. But what?\n\nUsually Bean didn't worry much. In fact, grown-ups sometimes said she didn't worry enough. But that weekend, even while she was doing fun things like going to a fair that included a giant slide, Bean worried. Mostly it didn't feel like worry. What it felt like was fun with a little bit missing. When Bean came whooshing to the bottom of the giant slide, she thought, Why don't I feel totally great? And then she remembered. Because I have to be a squid in front of everyone.\n\nIvy worried, too. Ivy usually didn't worry about real life. Ivy usually worried about things like the Permian extinction, when a whole lot of animals died. The Permian extinction was very upsetting, but it had happened 250 million years ago, so it wasn't real life anymore.\n\nThis weekend Ivy didn't think about the Permian extinction. She thought about how she would feel being a squid on a stage in front of a whole lot of people. She knew how she would feel. Stupid. She would probably trip, because she usually did. And even if she didn't trip, she would be a squid. Everyone would know that Madame Joy had made her a squid because she was the worst dancer in the class. Too bad the Permian extinction didn't wipe out squids, Ivy thought.\n\nOn Sunday afternoon, Ivy went over to Bean's house to be measured for her squid costume. Bean's mother had said she would make both squid costumes because Ivy's mom didn't like to sew. But it wasn't even a real costume. Madame Joy's picture showed a white leotard with a circle of droopy white tentacles hanging from the waist.\n\nMadame Joy said that tentacles were a breeze to make. Bean's mom didn't think so.\n\n\"Who ever heard of squid costumes, anyway?\" she muttered.\n\n\"No complaining,\" said Bean.\n\n\"None of your lip there, missy,\" her mother said.\n\nThat was grown-ups for you. They never followed their own rules.\n\n\"I suppose I could stuff a bunch of tights and sew them on,\" Bean's mother mumbled. Bean and Ivy exchanged looks.\n\n\"Tights?\" Bean said. \"Like the kind you wear on your legs?\"\n\nHer mother looked up. \"Yes, tights. Stuffed tights. For the tentacles. Do you have a better idea?\"\n\nBean thought of the Wilis in their long feathery dresses. She thought of herself with stuffed tights bouncing around her waist.\n\n\"Tights it is!\" said her mother.\n\n\"We're going to look like idiots,\" said Bean.\n\n\"No complaining,\" said her mother.\n\nMonday started out badly. Ms. Aruba-Tate was at choking class. The Principal had told her to take choking class so she would know what to do if a student choked. Bean said if someone choked, you dangled them upside down by their ankles until whatever it was fell out. Ms. Aruba-Tate said she didn't think so, but she would find out.\n\nMs. Aruba-Tate's substitute was Teacher Star. Teacher Star wasn't mean, but she never stopped singing. She sat on Ms. Aruba-Tate's stool and strummed her guitar and sang. She told the second-graders to sing along, but they didn't want to, so she sang alone. She sang and sang and sang some more.\n\nIvy read her book under her desk. Bean thought about choking. Then she thought about ballet class. She thought about Dulcie and her pink chiffon dance skirt. She thought about white tentacles made out of stuffed tights.\n\n\"There's a little blue planet in the sky,\" sang Teacher Star.\n\nIt was nice to see Ms. Aruba-Tate again after lunch recess, but by then Bean was too busy thinking about ballet class to pay attention to what Ms. Aruba-Tate was saying. Something about permission slips. She was waving a piece of paper. Who knew what it was about?\n\n\"Does anyone have any questions about our trip?\" asked Ms. Aruba-Tate.\n\n\"What trip?\" asked Bean.\n\n\"Will someone tell Bean about our field trip to the aquarium?\" said Ms. Aruba-Tate. \"Emma?\"\n\n\"We're going on a field trip to the aquarium,\" said Emma.\n\n\"To see some ocean life,\" said Dusit.\n\n\"We're going to see them feed the sharks,\" said Eric. \"Raw meat.\"\n\n\"And baby penguins,\" said Zuzu.\n\n\"They're going to feed the baby penguins to the sharks,\" said Eric. He clashed his teeth together, being a shark.\n\n\"Eric,\" said Ms. Aruba-Tate.\n\n\"Just kidding, Ms. Aruba-Tate,\" said Eric.\n\n\"Oh!\" said Ivy in a very loud voice. Everyone looked at her. Ivy hardly ever said anything in a very loud voice.\n\n\"Ivy?\" asked Ms. Aruba-Tate.\n\nIvy gave Bean an enormous smile. Then she turned to Ms. Aruba-Tate and said, \"I was just thinking about how much I love ocean life.\"\n\n## BYE-BYE, BALLET\n\n\"We're saved!\" hissed Ivy, pulling Bean toward the door.\n\n\"Saved from what?\" Bean hissed back.\n\n\"Being squids!\" squealed Ivy. She raced out into the breezeway. Bean's sleeve was in her hand, so Bean raced with her. Together they left the school behind and hurried toward Pancake Court.\n\n\"Okay,\" puffed Bean, \"how are we saved?\"\n\nIvy stopped. \"The field trip! We're going to run away! We'll run away to the aquarium, and we'll stay there until after The World of Dance is over!\"\n\nRunning away! What a great idea! Bean had been waiting for years to run away. What she had been waiting for was a reason. She didn't want to hurt her parents' feelings by running away for no reason. The World of Dance was a great reason. This was the chance of a lifetime.\n\nOh yeah. Bean suddenly remembered the other reason she had never run away. \"What about food?\" she asked.\n\n\"Easy-peasy-Parcheesi,\" said Ivy. \"I read about it in a book. You know how people throw money in fountains? We scrape it off the bottom of the fountain after the aquarium is closed at night, and then we buy food with it.\"\n\nThat was pretty smart. Bean was impressed. Also, it would be fun to walk in a fountain without grown-ups freaking out about it. \"Cool,\" she said. \"Where will we sleep?\"\n\n\"We'll find a good spot once we get there. Aquariums are good for sleeping because they're dark.\"\n\n\"And quiet. Fish are very quiet.\" Bean pictured herself drifting off to sleep with fish swirling around her. It would be nice. \"It'll be like sleeping on a boat.\"\n\nIvy rubbed her hands together. \"In this book I read, the kids filled their clarinet cases with extra underwear, but we'll use our backpacks.\"\n\n\"My backpack is pretty big.\"\n\n\"We should bring jackets, too. And money. In the book, they brought all their money.\"\n\n\"Why do we need money if we're going to scrape it out of the fountain?\" asked Bean. \"Besides, I only have four dollars and some coins.\"\n\n\"I've got twenty-six and some coins,\" said Ivy. \"But I don't want to spend it. I'm saving for a glass doll.\"\n\n\"There will be plenty of money in the fountain,\" Bean decided.\n\n\"And we'll get clean at the same time,\" said Ivy.\n\n\"Boy,\" Bean said, shaking her head. \"It's too bad I wasted all that time worrying.\"\n\nSomehow, knowing that they were going to run away made ballet class better. \"Still not good,\" said Bean. \"But better.\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" said Ivy. She was watching Dulcie do an arabesque. An arabesque was when you stretched out one arm and one leg at the same time. Arabesques made Ivy fall over. Dulcie could arabesque all day long. \"Bet she puts glue on her shoes,\" muttered Ivy.\n\n\"Very nice, Dulcie,\" said Madame Joy.\n\n\"Thank you, Madame Jwah!\" said Dulcie.\n\nNow instead of being butterflies at the end of ballet class, they practiced \"Wedding Beneath the Sea.\" Dulcie swayed and kitty-jumped and fluttered her fingers. Two starfish girls twirled with their arms out. Two seahorse girls galloped in and out of the starfish. Two tuna girls glided together across the floor. Ivy and Bean, the friendly squids, stayed in one place and waved their arms.\n\n\"Call this dancing?\" Bean whispered. \"This is standing.\"\n\n\"Enter the prince!\" cried Madame Joy.\n\nThe prince was a girl wearing a black leotard and a red hat that looked like a tiny pillowcase. The prince was the second-crummiest part in \"Wedding Beneath the Sea,\" but it was way better than being a friendly squid. The prince at least got to leap. The prince-girl leaped toward Dulcie while Dulcie fluttered away. Then the prince got down on one knee and waved her arms at Dulcie. Then Dulcie nodded, and all the other fishy things got in a circle and danced around them. Except the two friendly squids. Madame Joy said they were like doormen. They guarded the entrance to the mermaid palace.\n\nFinally Madame Joy clapped her hands. Class was over. For Ivy and Bean, it was especially over. Next week they'd be living at the aquarium.\n\nIvy grinned at Bean. \"Bye-bye, ballet,\" she whispered.\n\n\"Down with squids!\" Bean whispered back. The night before the field trip Bean filled her backpack with useful items. Band-Aids? Check. Pencil? Check. String? Check. Underwear? Check. Bag of salt? Check. Nancy had told her once that all you needed to stay alive was salt and water. Bean figured there would be plenty of water at the aquarium.\n\nBean zipped her backpack closed. She looked around her room. It seemed like she should be discussing important things with Ivy. She couldn't think of any important things, but she called Ivy anyway.\n\n\"Are you ready?\" she asked.\n\n\"Who's this?\" said Ivy.\n\n\"Bean!\"\n\n\"Oh. Hi, Bean,\" said Ivy. She didn't like talking on the phone. \"What do you want?\"\n\n\"Are you ready? Say ten-four if you are.\"\n\n\"Say what?\" asked Ivy.\n\n\"Ten-four,\" said Bean.\n\n\"Fourteen,\" said Ivy.\n\n\"No! It means yes,\" said Bean.\n\n\"Yes what?\"\n\n\"Ivy! Yes, I'm ready!\" yelled Bean.\n\n\"Oh. I'm ready, too. Good-bye.\" Ivy hung up.\n\nForget it. Bean went back to her room. It was almost bedtime, which meant it was almost morning, which meant it was almost running-away time. Bean could hardly wait.\n\n## VERY FISHY\n\nMs. Aruba-Tate's class swarmed off the bus. They were proud. Their bus behavior had been excellent, if you didn't count Marga-Lee and Dusit.\n\nThey stampeded up the stairs toward the aquarium's front door. Who would get there first? Who would be the best?\n\n\"Boys and girls! Stop!\" hollered Ms. Aruba-Tate. They stopped. Ms. Aruba-Tate didn't holler very often. \"Boys and girls! Stay where you are! Don't move! Stay with your buddy! Try to stay together!\"\n\nThe white marble patio outside the aquarium was full of hollering teachers and wandering kids. There were kids sliding down the handrail on the stairs. There were boys throwing their backpacks at each other. There were girls walking along the rim of the fountain. All the teachers were trying to get all the kids to stand still. What a nuthouse, thought Bean.\n\n\"Boys and girls! Follow me!\" shouted Ms. Aruba-Tate. \"Stay with your buddy!\"\n\nLinking arms, Ivy and Bean climbed the stairs toward the big golden doors.\n\n\"Our new home,\" Bean whispered.\n\nThey went inside. The aquarium was big and dim, with dark hallways like arms leading off in many directions. It was sort of greenish all over, and even with hundreds of kids wandering around, it was quiet.\n\n\"Okay,\" said Ivy, pulling out a list. \"The first thing we do is find a good hiding place.\"\n\nBut they couldn't find a good hiding place because Ms. Aruba-Tate was calling them over to the alligator pit. The second-graders clustered around the pit and stared down at the alligators.\n\n\"Look!\" Bean nudged Ivy. \"There's money in there!\" Bright coins sparkled in the slimy alligator water.\n\nIvy looked. \"No way am I going in an alligator pit to get money,\" she said.\n\n\"Oh. Right.\" Bean stared at the money. What a waste. The alligators seemed dead anyway. They didn't even move. Maybe she could just slip in and out.\n\nOne of the alligators spread its mouth wide in a yawn.\n\nMaybe not.\n\n\"Stay together!\" called Ms. Aruba-Tate, leading them from the alligator pit to a dark hallway. \"Now we will see Coastal Zones.\"\n\nIvy nodded at Bean. Coastal Zones sounded like a good place to make a getaway.\n\n\"When do we eat lunch?\" yelled Paul. \"I'm starving to death.\"\n\n\"Now,\" whispered Ivy. She and Bean started to walk backward.\n\n\"There will be no eating inside the aquarium,\" said Ms. Aruba-Tate. \"Ivy! Bean! Stay with the group!\"\n\n\"Boy, does she have sharp eyes,\" Bean muttered.\n\nCoastal Zones turned out to be tide pools. Tide pools were good because you got to stick your hands in them. Ivy and Bean decided to run away later. Ivy held an orange starfish, which was really called a sea star and had eyes at the ends of its arms. Pretty neat.\n\nA sea anemone wrapped its soft tentacles around Bean's finger. She hoped it didn't hurt when she pulled her finger away.\n\nAfter Coastal Zones, there were penguins. Bean and Ivy liked penguins, but Zuzu loved them. She cried when it was time to go. Eric said he was going to freak if they didn't get to sharks soon, so Ms. Aruba-Tate let them skip shrimp and move straight to sharks.\n\n\"I want to see sharks,\" said Bean. \"Then we'll go.\"\n\nIvy nodded. She wanted to see sharks, too.\n\nAs it turned out, sharks were not that exciting. For one, they were small. And they swam around in circles, zip, zip. They didn't care if the second grade wanted to see them or not. They just zipped around.\n\n\"Come along, boys and girls,\" called Ms. Aruba-Tate. \"Let's investigate the Kelp Forest.\"\n\nThe Kelp Forest. Boringsville. Bean nodded to Ivy. Ivy nodded to Bean. They waited beside the shark glass while the rest of the class surged forward. Ms. Aruba-Tate was listening to Emma tell about the time she was seasick. She didn't notice Ivy and Bean.\n\nNo one noticed.\n\nIn a minute, they were all alone with the sharks.\n\nNow that Ms. Aruba-Tate's class was gone, Bean and Ivy could hear the sharks. They could hear them move through the water.\n\n\"Come on.\" Ivy pulled on Bean's sleeve.\n\n\"Wait a second.\" Bean leaned close to the glass wall. Bean wondered if they could hear her. \"Hi,\" she said. The sharks swam around, their black eyes empty. They didn't care. \"Let's get out of here,\" she said to Ivy.\n\nThey turned and scurried down a hall lined with little tanks of fish.\n\nWhen they got to the end of that hall, they turned down another.\n\nAnd then another. They had done it.\n\nThey were runaways.\n\n## OCEAN LIFE GONE BAD\n\nIvy and Bean came to a gray room. It didn't have any ocean life in it. What it did have in it were a lot of dishes.\n\n\"We must be near the cafeteria,\" said Ivy.\n\nA man walked into the room pushing a cart. He didn't look surprised to see them, but he didn't look happy either. \"No kids in here,\" he said. \"Cafeteria's that way.\" He pointed to a door.\n\n\"Okay,\" said Bean. She and Ivy went through a different door.\n\nNow they were in a dark hallway. A dark, small hallway. They could just barely see the sign on the wall. It said, \"Life without Light: Creatures of the Deep Sea.\"\n\n\"Perfect!\" said Ivy.\n\n\"Perfect? For what?\" asked Bean. It didn't look perfect to her. It looked dark.\n\n\"Life without Light.\" said Ivy. \"It's great for sleeping. Plus, no one will be able to see us.\"\n\nBean looked around the little hall. \"We're going to sleep in here?\"\n\n\"No. This is just where they put the sign. The fish and stuff are in there.\" She pointed to a doorway.\n\nTogether they walked into a long, narrow room. At least Bean thought it was a long, narrow room. She couldn't really tell because it was so dark. It was even darker than the hall.\n\n\"Why don't they turn on some lights?\" whispered Bean. It seemed like a whispering place.\n\n\"It's showing what it's like in the deep sea. The sun doesn't get all the way down there,\" whispered Ivy.\n\n\"So that's all? Just a dark room?\" Bean shook her head.\n\n\"I don't know. I can't tell. Do you see fish tanks anywhere?\"\n\nBean looked hard into the darkness. She could see some glimmering on the wall. Maybe it was glass. Or something else. Bean started to get a worried feeling. \"Why aren't there any people in here?\" she asked.\n\n\"I don't know,\" Ivy said again. Bean could see the outline of Ivy's head as she looked from side to side. \"Maybe the sign was old. Maybe there's nothing in here.\"\n\nFor a moment, they stood there in the dark. It was so quiet that they heard the sound of the quiet. Bean began to think of all the things that might be slithering silently toward them.\n\n\"Ivy? I'm not liking this so much,\" she said.\n\nIvy linked her arm into Bean's. That was better. A little. \"There's got to be a light switch in here somewhere,\" said Ivy. \"If we walk around, I bet we'll find one. And once we turn on the light, we'll figure out where to hide our backpacks.\"\n\nSlowly, with their arms out, they walked toward the wall. Bean's hands brushed against cool glass. No light switches there. She felt around its edges.\n\n\"Hey,\" said Ivy. \"Here's a button thing. Should I push it?\"\n\n\"Um,\" said Bean. \"What if it opens a trapdoor and water gushes out?\"\n\nToo late. Ivy had pushed the button. The wall in front of them began to glow with red light. For a second, they blinked at the brightness. And then they saw. Behind the glass was black water rising high above their heads. They pressed their faces to the window. Was it just empty water?\n\n\"I don't see any fish,\" Bean began to say\u2014and then a massive mouth came hurtling toward them, shining with thousands of needle teeth. \"YIKES!\" Bean took an enormous leap backward, dragging Ivy behind her. \"Holy moly cannoli!\" she squeaked. \"What the heck is that?\"\n\nIvy didn't say anything, but her hand held tight to Bean's. The giant mouth was attached to a long snaky creature that glared at them with tiny bright eyes.\n\n\"I guess this is what it's like at the bottom of the sea,\" whispered Ivy.\n\nBean shivered.\n\nOn the other side of the glass wall, a fish swam by, a thin arm sprouting from its head. At the end of the arm was a glowing lump. The fish swished its head from side to side, and the glowing lump swung like a lantern.\n\nSlowly the two girls made their way around the room. Long white worms poked from tubes. See-through fish wiggled along, trailing other fish with glowing eyeballs. Shining blobs with no heads or tails rolled on the floor of the tank. Were they alive?\n\n\"Could we turn the lights off again?\" Ivy asked in a small voice. \"I can't stop looking at those blobs.\"\n\nBean reached over to the button under the glass and pressed it. The red light faded into darkness. Thick nighttime darkness. With worms and giant mouths in it.\n\n\"Ivy?\" said Bean. \"I don't think I can live in here for two weeks.\"\n\n\"Sure you can,\" said Ivy, but her voice didn't sound sure. \"They're inside tanks. Tank glass is super-strong.\"\n\nThere was a pause.\n\n\"I keep thinking they're watching us,\" said Bean.\n\n\"I keep thinking the glass is going to break,\" said Ivy.\n\nBean pictured the giant mouth whizzing toward her. She jumped up and pressed the button again.\n\nBut it was a different button. The red light did not begin to glow. Instead, a serious voice began to talk.\n\n\"The most famous creature of the deep sea can't be seen in an aquarium because it has never been captured alive. The giant squid, which may reach a length of forty feet, is shown here in a rare video. . . .\"\n\nThe voice went on talking, but Bean and Ivy didn't hear it.\n\nThey were watching the video. An enormous white blob flapped in empty black water, its long, blubbery white arms trailing behind. Around and around it spun and ruffled and circled, dancing in the water. It was like a horrible Wili, Bean thought. Its legs flailed and waved. Then, with a giant flap and whirl, the squid shot toward them. Its head, huge and soft, turned, and suddenly a single monster eye, an eye the size of a plate, stared right into theirs. It could see them.\n\nFor a second, Ivy and Bean stood frozen.\n\nAnd then they began to run.\n\n## IN HOT WATER\n\nBean couldn't stop running. She was gasping for air and her backpack was slamming into her shoulders, but she couldn't stop running.\n\nIvy slammed into a kid. \"Excuse me,\" she gasped.\n\n\"Watch out!\" yelled a teacher as they pounded by. \"No running in the aquarium!\"\n\nThey couldn't stop. The squid was back there, waiting for them. They had to get out.\n\nThey tore up a dark hallway filled with sardines and down a dark hallway filled with jellyfish.\n\nThey flashed past the sharks, past the penguins, past the alligator pit, and exploded through the heavy golden doors into the outside world.\n\nAir instead of water. Light instead of darkness. People instead of fish.\n\nThey were safe.\n\nFor a moment, they stood there, panting and gasping. I love light, thought Bean. I love air. I love this white marble patio\u2014\n\n\"BEAN! IVY! WHERE ON EARTH HAVE YOU BEEN?\" Ms. Aruba-Tate rushed toward them with her arms open. \"Did you get lost? We were looking everywhere! Oh dear, I was so worried!\" She gathered them up in a giant hug. \"Oh dear,\" she said, \"oh, honeys!\"\n\nIvy and Bean let themselves be hugged. It felt nice, after that squid, to be hugged.\n\n\"We're okay,\" said Bean.\n\n\"We got lost,\" Ivy said quickly. That was kind of true.\n\n\"Oh, sweeties!\" Ms. Aruba-Tate hugged them again. \"Why didn't you go to one of the guards? Didn't I tell you to go to a guard if you got lost?\"\n\n\"There weren't any guards,\" said Bean. That was completely true.\n\nNow the rest of Ms. Aruba-Tate's class was clustering around.\n\n\"There you are!\" said Emma. \"See, Ms. Aruba-Tate, I told you they weren't dead.\"\n\n\"We got to see the eels and you didn't,\" said Eric. \"They're hecka gross.\"\n\n\"I can't believe you got lost,\" said Vanessa. \"Where'd you go?\"\n\n\"Into a part of the aquarium that no one has ever seen before,\" said Ivy.\n\n\"There was this squid with eyes this big,\" said Bean, holding her hands apart.\n\n\"You're making that up,\" said Vanessa.\n\n\"We're not!\" said Ivy. \"There were white worms and this mouth with teeth\u2014\"\n\n\"Girls!\" interrupted Ms. Aruba-Tate. She looked very serious. \"Girls, are you telling me that you were wandering around the aquarium having a good time? That you didn't even try to find us?\"\n\nIvy and Bean looked at each other. \"Um,\" said Bean.\n\n\"We were trying to find you, Ms. Aruba-Tate,\" said Ivy. \"We just happened to see a few worms and things while we were trying.\"\n\n\"Ivy and Bean, I am very disappointed in you,\" Ms. Aruba-Tate began. \"Our class has discussed safety rules many times, and I was counting on you being mature enough to understand that a field trip is an educational experience, not an excuse for bad behavior.\"\n\nAll the way to the bus Ms. Aruba-Tate talked about disappointment and safety and bad behavior. Ivy and Bean nodded. They said she was right and they were wrong. They said they were sorry.\n\nShe was going to have to tell their parents, Ms. Aruba-Tate said.\n\nIvy and Bean nodded. They knew she had to.\n\nThey also knew that their parents were going to be mad. And that they were going to get in trouble.\n\nBut Ivy and Bean didn't care as long as each of them could hold one of Ms. Aruba-Tate's hands on the bus ride home. As long as they never had to go back to that aquarium and see that squid again in their whole lives.\n\n## SQUIDARINAS\n\nThey were right. Bean's mother was mad. \"This is not what I expect from you, Bernice Blue. When you go on a trip of any kind, I expect you to listen to the grown-up in charge. This is something we've discussed a thousand times.\" Bean's mother folded her arms and glared at Bean.\n\nBean could tell she was supposed to say something. \"I'm sorry,\" she said.\n\n\"I should think so!\" said her mother. She glared some more. \"Well! We'll talk about the consequences this evening when Daddy comes home. In the meantime, both of you go upstairs and try on your ballet costumes. And I don't want to hear any complaining!\"\n\nBean and Ivy walked quietly upstairs. Quietly they closed the door to Bean's room. \"Whew,\" said Ivy. \"That was a close one.\"\n\n\"It's not over yet,\" said Bean. \"Your mom still has to get mad.\"\n\n\"I know,\" said Ivy. \"But at least none of them found out about the running-away part.\"\n\n\"We've got to get rid of the evidence,\" said Bean, busily pulling the bag of salt, the Band-Aids, the string, and the underwear out of her backpack. She stuffed it all under her bed.\n\nIvy did the same.\n\n\"Jeez!\" Bean slumped against her bed. \"What a day.\"\n\nIvy lay down on the floor. \"I'm pooped.\"\n\n\"Are you trying on those costumes?\" shouted Bean's mother from downstairs.\n\n\"Sheesh,\" said Bean, getting up. \"Work, work, work. That's all I do.\" The white leotards lay across her bed, stuffed tights legs tangled around them. \"Come on,\" said Bean. \"You have to try yours on, too.\"\n\nIvy sighed and got up. Together they untangled the tights legs and got undressed and pulled on the white leotards. Bean looked at Ivy in her white leotard with ten white legs dangling from her waist.\n\nIvy looked at Bean. \"I don't think Madame Joy has ever seen a real squid,\" she said.\n\nBean thought about the long, blubbery white legs. It made her head prickle. \"Remember its legs?\"\n\nIvy nodded. \"And its eye? Remember how it looked at us?\"\n\n\"Like it was excited. Like it could hardly wait to squeeze the life out of us,\" said Bean.\n\n\"Like we were food,\" agreed Ivy.\n\n\"Squids are _not_ friendly,\" Bean announced.\n\nIvy lifted up one of her white tights legs and shook it. \"A real squid would wrap its legs around Dulcie and squish her.\"\n\nBean giggled. \"And then it would eat the starfish and the sea horses.\" She bonked Ivy with one of her tights legs. \"And the prince.\"\n\nIvy bonked her back. \"And then it would look at the audience with its humongo eye and say, 'And you people are my dessert.' \"\n\nThere was a pause.\n\n\"You know,\" Bean said thoughtfully, \"we could use your face paint to make big black eyes.\"\n\nThere was another pause. Ivy and Bean looked at each other.\n\n\"Madame Joy will kill us,\" said Ivy.\n\n\"We won't do anything,\" said Bean. \"We'll just look more like real squids. She won't mind.\"\n\n\"In a way, she should be glad,\" said Ivy. \"We'll be teaching everyone what squids are really like.\"\n\n\"Yeah, it's educational,\" said Bean. For the first time, she felt a little bit excited about being a squid. \"And maybe, at the very end, after the rest of the dance is over, we can be two squid trying to squeeze the life out of each other.\"\n\n\"Yeah!\" said Ivy cheerfully. \"Like this!\" She jumped at Bean and wrapped three of her tentacles around Bean's arm.\n\nBean hit Ivy over the head with a tights leg and growled. The two unfriendly squids bashed and squeezed each other until they had to lie down on the floor.\n\n\"You know what?\" said Bean after a minute.\n\n\"What?\" said Ivy.\n\n\"By the time we get through with it, 'Wedding Beneath the Sea' is going to be a lot like _Giselle_. Only more exciting.\"\n\nIvy smiled. \"Plus more scientific.\"\n\n\"I just knew we'd end up liking ballet!\" said Bean happily.\n\nSNEAK PREVIEW OF BOOK 7\n\nIVY + BEAN\n\nWHAT'S THE BIG IDEA?\n\nThere had been a problem in Bean's house. The problem was staples. Bean loved staples. She loved them so much that she had stapled things that weren't supposed to be stapled. The things looked better stapled, but her mother didn't think so, and now Bean was outside.\n\nShe was going to be outside for a long time.\n\nShe looked at her back yard. Same old yard, same old trampoline, same old dinky plastic playhouse, same old pile of buckets and ropes and stilts. None of them was any fun. Maybe she could play junkyard crash. Junkyard crash was when you stacked up all the stuff you could find and then drove the toy car into the stack. But it was no fun alone. Bean got up and scuffed across the nice green lawn until she reached the not-so-nice green lawn. This part of Bean's lawn had holes and lumps in it. The lumps were mostly places where Bean had buried treasure for kids of the future.\n\nBean picked up a shovel. To heck with kids of the future. She was bored now. And maybe a kind old guy had seen her digging and added something interesting to her treasure, like a ruby skull or a dinosaur egg.\n\nBean didn't bury her treasure very deep, so it was easy to dig up. This treasure was inside a paper bag, but the paper bag wasn't doing so well. It wasn't really a paper bag anymore. \"Oh my gosh!\" said Bean loudly. \"I've found treasure!\" She pulled apart the clumps of paper. What a disappointment. No ruby skull. No dinosaur egg. Just the same stuff she had buried two weeks ago: dental floss, tweezers, and a magnifying glass. Some treasure.\n\nBean flopped over on her stomach. \"I'm dying of boredom,\" she moaned, hoping her mother would hear. \"I'm dyyy-ing.\" She coughed in a dying sort of way\u2014\"Huh-ACK!\"\u2014and then lay still. Anyone looking from the porch would think she was dead. And then that person would feel bad.\n\nBean lay very still.\n\nStill.\n\nShe could hear her heart thumping.\n\nShe could feel the hairs on her arm moving.\n\nBean opened her eyes. There was an ant scurrying over her arm. Bean pulled the magnifying glass over and peered at the ant. Her arm was like a mountain, and the little ant was like a mountain climber, stumbling along with a tired expression on his face. Poor hardworking ant. She watched as he dodged between hairs and charged down the other side of her arm toward the ground. She offered him a blade of grass to use as a slide, but that seemed to confuse him. He paused, looked anxiously right and left, and then continued down her arm. He had a plan and he was going to stick to it. Bean watched through the magnifying glass as he scuttled into the grass, rushing along the ground between blades. He was late. He was in trouble. He met another ant by banging into him, but they didn't even stop to talk. They rushed away in opposite directions.\n\nBean followed her ant to a patch of dry dirt. There he plunged down a hole.\n\n\"Come back,\" whispered Bean. She liked her ant. Maybe he would come out if she poked his house. She found a thin stick and touched the top of the hole. Four ants streamed out and raced in four different directions. Bean didn't think any of them was her ant.\n\nBean watched the ant hole for a long time. Ants came and went. They all seemed to know where they were going. They all seemed to have important jobs. None of them seemed to notice that they were puny little nothings compared to Bean.\n\nBean dragged the hose toward the ant hole. She didn't turn the hose on. That would be mean. But she let a little bit of water dribble into the hole, and watched as the dirt erupted with ants. Thousands of ants flung themselves this way and that, racing to safety.\n\n\"Help, help,\" whispered Bean. \"Flood!\"\n\nThe ants ran in orderly lines away from the water. Some were holding little grains above their heads. They were the hero ants. But even the non-hero ants were busy. They were all far too busy to notice Bean watching them through the magnifying glass. To them, she was like a planet. She wasn't part of their world. She was too big and too far away for them to see.\n\nBean looked up into the sky. What if someone was watching her through a giant magnifying glass and thinking the same thing she was? What if she was as small as an ant compared to that someone? And what if that someone was an ant compared to the next world after that?\n\nWow.\n\nBean waved at the sky. Hi, out there, she thought.\nANNIE BARROWS took ballet for five hundred years. It felt like five hundred years, anyway. Once, she had to be a Hungarian flower girl in a ballet. Another time, she was a nougat. Plus, her teacher carried a long wooden stick that she used to hit students in the ankle when they made mistakes. To find out more about Annie's amazing career as a ballerina or about Ivy and Bean, visit www.anniebarrows.com.\n\nMore like Ivy than Bean, SOPHIE BLACKALL was well behaved her entire childhood. She is making up for it now. To learn more about Sophie, visit www.sophieblackall.com.\n\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}