"The Burden of Proof" - читать интересную книгу автора (Turow Scott)

PART ONE

They had been married for thirty-one years, and the following spring, full of resolve and a measure of hope, he would marry again. But that day, on a late afternoon near the end of March, Mr. Alejandro Stern had returned home and, with his attache case and garment bag still in hand, called out somewhat absently from the front entry for Clam, his wife. He was fifty-six years old, stout and' bald, and never particularly good-looking, and he found himself in a mood of intense preoccupation.

For two days he had been in Chicago that city of rough souls on behalf of his most difficult client. Dixon Hartnell was callous, self-centered, and generally full of his lawyers' advice; worst of all, representing him was a permanent engagement. Dixon was Stern's brother-in-law, married to Silvia, his sister, Stern's sole living immediate relation and the enduring object of his affections. For Dixon, of course, his feelings were hardly as pure. In the early years, when Stern's practice mounted to little more than the decorous hustling of clients in the hallways of the misdemeanor courts, serving Dixon's unpredictable needs had paid Stern's rent. Now it was one of those imponderable duties, darkly rooted in the hard soil of Stern's own sense of filial and professional obligation.

It was also steady work. The proprietor of a vast commodity-futures trading empire, a brokerage house he had named, in youth, Maison Dixon, and a series of interlocked subsidiaries, all called MD-this and -that, Dixon was routinely in trouble. Exchange officials, federal regulators, the IRS-they'd all had Dixon's number for years. Stern stood up for him in these scrapes.

But the present order of business was of greater concern. A federal grand jury sitting here in Kindle County had been issuing subpoenas out of town to select MD clients. Word of these subpoenas, served by the usual grim-faced minions of the FBI, had been trailing back to MD for a week now, and Stern, at the conclusion of his most recent trial, had flown at once to Chicago to meet privately with the attorneys representing two of these customers to review the records the government required from them. The lawyers reported that the Assistant United States Attorney assigned to the matter, a young woman named Klonsky, declined to say precisely who was under suspicion, beyond exonerating the customers themselves. But to a practiced eye, this all had an ominous look. The out-of-town subpoenas reflected a contemplated effort at secrecy. The investigators knew what they were seeking and seemed intent on quietly encircling Dixon, or his companies, or someone close to him.

So Stern stood travel-weary and vexed in the slate foyer of the home where Clara and he had lived for nearly two decades. And yet, what was it that wrested his attention so thoroughly, so suddenly? The silence, he would always say.

Not a tap running, a radio mumbling, not one of the household machines in operation. An isolated man, he drew, always, a certain comfort from stillness. But this was not the silence of rest or interruption. He left his bags on the black tiles and stepped smartly through the foyer.

"Clara?" he called again.

He found her in the garage. When he opened the door, the odor of putrefaction overwhelmed him, a powerful high sour smell which dizzied him with the first breath and drove up sickness like a fist. The car, a black Seville, the current model, had been backed in; the driver's door was open. The auto's white dome light remained on, so that in the dark garage she was warmly spotlit. From the doorway he could see her leg extended toward the concrete floor, and the hem of a bright floral shirtwaist dress. He could tell from the glint that she was wearing hosiery.

Slowly, he stepped down. The heat in the garage and the smell which increased revoltingly with each step were overpowering, and in the dark his fear left him weak. When he could see her through the open door of the car, he advanced no farther. She was reclined on the camel-colored leather of the front seat. Her skin, which he noticed first, was burnished with an unnatural peachish glow, and her eyes were closed. It seemed she had meant to appear neat and composed. Her left hand, faultlessly manicured, was placed almost ceremonially across her abdomen, and the flesh had swollen slightly beneath her wedding rings.

She had brought nothing with her. No jacket. No purse. And she had not fallen back completely; her other arm was rigidly extended toward the wheel, and her head was pinned against the seat at a hopeless, impossible angle. Her mouth was open, her tongue extruded, her face dead, motionless, absolutely still. In the whitewashed laundry room adjoining the garage he was immediately sick in one of the porcelain basins, and he washed away all traces before calling in quick order 911 and then his son.

"You must come straightaway," he said to Peter. He had found him at home. "Straightaway." As usual in stress, he heard some faint accentuation of the persistent Hispanic traces in his speech; the accent was always there, an enduring deficit as he thought of it, like a limp:

"Something is wrong with Mother," Peter said. Stern had mentioned nothing like that, but his son's feeling for these things was sure.

"What happened in Chicago?"

When Stern answered that she had not been with him, Peter, true to his first instincts, began to quarrel.

"How could she not be with you? I spoke to her the morning you were leaving."

A shot of terrible sympathy for himself tore through Stern.

He was lost, the emotional pathways hopelessly tangled.

Hours later, toward morning, as he was sitting alone beneath a single light, sipping sherry as he revisited, reparsed every solemn moment of the day, he would take in the full significance of Peter's remark. But that eluded him now. He felt only, as ever, a deep central impatience with his son, a suffering, suppressed volcanic force, while somewhere else his heart read the first clues in what Peter had told him, and a sickening unspeakable chasm of regret began to open.

"You must come now, Peter. I have no idea precisely what has occurred.

I believe, Peter, that your mother is dead."

His son, a man of thirty, let forth a brief high sound, a cry full of desolation. "You believe it?"

"Please, Peter. I require your assistance. This is a terrible moment.

Come ahead. You may interrogate me later." 'For Chrissake, what in the hell is happening there? What in the hell is this? Where are you?"

"I am home, Peter. I cannot answer your questions now.

Please do as I ask. I cannot attend to this alone." He hung up the phone abruptly. His hands were trembling and he leaned once more against the laundry basin. He had seemed so coldly composed only an instant before. Now someterrible sore element in him was on the rise.

He presumed he was about to faint. He removed his tie first, then his jacket. He returned for an instant to the garage door; but he could not push it open. If he waited, just a moment, it seemed he would understand.

The house was soon full of people he did not know'. The police came first, in pairs, parking their cars at haphazard angles in the drive, then the paramedics and the ambulance. Through the windows Stern saw a gaggle of his neighbors gathering on the lawn across the way. They leaned toward the house with the arrival of each vehicle and spoke among themselves, held behind the line of squad cars with their revolving beacons. Within the house, policemen roamed about with their usual regrettable arrogance. Their walkietalkies blared with occasional eruptions of harsh static.

They went in and out of the garage to gawk at the body and talked about events as if he were not there. They studied the Sterns' -rich possessions with an envy that was disconcertingly apparent.

The first cop into the garage had lifted his radio to summon the lieutenant as soon as he emerged.

"She's cooked," the officer told the dispatcher. "Tell him he better come with masks and gloves." Only then did he notice Stern lurking in a fashion in the dark hall outside the laundry room. Abashed, the policeman began at once 'to explain. "Looks like that car run all day. It's on empty now.

Catalytic converter gets hotter than a barbecue-six, seven hundred degrees. You run that engine twelve hours in a closed space, you're generating real heat. That didn't do her any good. You the husband?"

He was, said Stern.

"Condolences," said the cop. "Terrible thing." They waited.

"'Do you have any idea, Officer, what occurred?" He did not know what he thought just now, except that it would be a kind of treachery to believe the worst too soon. The cop considered Stern in silence. He was ruddy and thick, and his weight probably made him look older than he was.

"Keys in the ignition. On position. Garage door's closed."

Stern nodded.

"It dudn't look like any accident to me," the cop said finally. "You can't be sure till the autopsy. You know, could be she had a heart attack or somethin right when she turned the key.

"Maybe it's one of them freak things, too," the cop said.

"Turns the car on and she's thinkin about somethin else, you know, fixin her hair and makeup, whatever. Sometimes you never know. Didn't find a note, right?"

A note. Stern had spent the moments awaiting the various authorities here in this hallway, keeping his stupefied watch beside the door. The thought of a note, some communication, provided, against all reason, a surge of hope.

"You'd just as well stay out of there," the policeman said, gesturing vaguely behind him.

Stern nodded with the instruction, but after an instant he took a single step forward.

"Oncemore," he said.

The policeman waited only a moment before opening the door.

He was known as Sandy, a name he had adopted shortly after his mother and sister and he had arrived here in 1947, driven from Argentina by unending calamities-the death of his older brother, and then his father; the rise of Peren.

It was his mother who had urged him to use this nickname, but he was never wholly at ease with it. There was a jaunty, comic air to the name; it fit him poorly, like someone else's clothing, and, therefore, seemed to betray all that helpless immigrant yearning for acceptance which he so ardently sought to conceal, and which had been in truth perhaps his most incorrigible passion.

To be an American. Having come of age here in the 1950s, he would always hear the whisper of special obligations in the word. He had never bought a foreign car; and he had forsaken Spanish years ago.

Occasionally, in surprise, a few words, a favored expression might escape him, but he had arrived here determined to master the American tongue.

In his parents' home there was no single language-his mother addressed them in Yiddish; with each other, the children used Spanish; his father talked principally to himself in windy high-flown German, which sounded to Stern as a child like some rambling machine. In Argentina, with its deep Anglophile traditions, he had learned to speak the English of an Eton schoolboy. But here the idioms of everyday life flashed in his mind like coins, the currency of real Americans. From the first, he could not bear to use them. Pride and shame, fire and ice, burned away at him always; he could not endure the sniggering that seemed to follow even the slightest accented misuse. But in his dreams he spoke a rich American argot, savory as any jazzman's.

American optimism, on the other hand, he had never absorbed. He could not leave aside the gloomy lessons of foreign experience, of his parents' lives-emigrants, exiles, souls fleeing despots, never at rest.

Certain simple propositions he took as articles of faith: things would often turn out badly. Seated in the living room in an overstuffed chair, amid Clara's raiku vases and Chinese tapestries, he accepted this like the coming true of an evil spell. He had the inkling of various tasks that were somehow imperative, but for the time being he had no thought to move; his limbs were weak from shock, and his heart seemed to labor.

Peter arrived not long after the paramedics. They had already rolled their White-sheeted cart into the garage to remove the body Wiry and always intense, Peter had burst into the house, disregarding the policemen at the front door. Why was it, Stern wondered, that he was so appalled by his son's hysteria, this hyperthyroid look of uncontrollable panic? Peter?was immaculately kempt, a bonethin young man with a highly fashionable hairdo. He wore a blousy French shirt with broad turquoise stripes; his pants were olive, but of a style never worn in any army, ballooning widely near the knee. Stern, even now, could not restrict a critical impulse. It was remarkable, really, that this man whose face was rigid with distress had taken the time to dress.

Rising finally, he encountered his son in the hallway leading from the foyer to the kitchen.

"I just can't believe this." Peter, like Stern, seemed to have no idea how to behave; he moved a single step toward his father, but neither man reached out. "My God," he said, "look at it. It's a carnival outside.

Half the neighborhood's there."

"Do they know what happened?"

"I told Fiona CawIcy." The Cawleys had lived next door to the Sterns for nineteen years. "She more or less demanded it. You know how she is."

"Ah," Stern said. He battled himself, but he found that a selfish shame, juvenile in its intensity, struck at him.

This terrible fact was out now, news now, known. Stern could see the canny deliberations taking place behind Fiona Cawley's deadly yellow eyes.

"Where is she'?." Peter demanded. "Is she still here?"

As soon as Peter had gone off to the garage, Stern recalled that he had meant to speak with him about calling his sisters.

"Mr. Stern?" The policeman ho had gone into the garage was standing there. "Couple of fellas wanted a word, if you don't mind."

They were in Stern's first-floor den, a tiny room that he kept largely to himself. Clara had painted the walls hunter green and the room was crowded with furniture, including a large desk on which certain household papers were carefully laid. It disturbed Stern to see the police stationing themselves in this room which had always been his most private place. Two policemen in uniform, man and a woman, stood, while a plainclothes officer occupied the sofa. This third one, a detective apparently, rose disorderly to offer his hand.

"Nogalski," he said. He gripped Stern's hand tepidly and did not bother to look at him. He was a thick man, wearing a tweed sport coat. A hard type. They all were. The detective motioned to a facing easy chair.

Behind Stern, the female officer mumbled something into her radio: We're talkin' to him now.

"You up to a few questions, Sandy?"

"Of what nature?"

"The usual. You know. We got a report to make. Lieutenant's on the way. Gotta fill him in. This come as a big surprise to you?" the cop asked.

.Stern waited.

"Very much," he said.

"She the type to get all depressed and unhappy, the missus?"

This survey of Clara's character, to be attempted in a few sentences, was for the moment well beyond him.

"She was a serious person, Detective. You would not describe her as a blithe personality."

"But was she seeing shrinks, you know, anything like that?"

"Not to my knowledge. My wife was not of a complaining nature, Detective. She was very private. '' "She wasn't threatening to do this?"

"No."

The detective; mostly bald, looked directly at Stern for the first time. It was evident he did not believe him. "We haven't found a note yet, you know."

Stern stirred a hand weakly. He could not explain.

"And where have you been?" one of the Cops behind Stern asked.

"Chicago."

"For?"

"Legal business. I met with a number of lawyers." The fact that Dixon might be in very serious difficulties, so sorely troubling only an hour ago, recurred to Stern now with a disconcerting novelty. The urgency of that situation waved to him like a hand disappearing in the deep, out of reach for the time being.

"How long you gone?" Nogalski asked. "I left very early yesterday."

"You talk to her?"

"I tried last night, but there was no answer. We have a symphony series. I assumed she had gone for coffee afterwards with friends."

"Who spoke to her last, so far as you know?"

Stern deliberated. Peter's shrill manner would quickly antagonize the police.

"My son might have."

"He out there?"

"He is quite emotional at the moment."

Nogalski, for whatever reason, allowed himself a brief, disparaging smile.

"You do that often?" one of the cops behind him asked.

"What is that, Officer?"

"Travel. Out of town?"

"Occasionally it is necessary."

"where'd you stay?" the woman asked. Stern tried not to react to the drift of the questions. The officers, of course, knew by now who he was and reacted accordingly-they despised most criminal defense lawyers, who hindered the police at every turn and were often richly rewarded for their efforts. To the police, this was a natural opportunity chance to pester an adversary and to indulge their customary nasty fancies about foul play and motives.

Maybe the spick was humping his girlfriend in Chi while somebody for hire set this up. You never know unless you ask.

"On this occasion, I was at the Ritz." Stern stood.

"May I go? My son and I have yet to speak with his sisters."

Nogalski was watching him.

"This doesn't make much sense,It was evident he did not believe him. "We haven't found a note yet, you know."

Stern stirred a hand weakly. He could not explain.

"And where have you been?" one of the Cops behind Stern asked.

"Chicago."

"For?"

"Legal business. I met with a number of lawyers." The fact that Dixon might be in very serious difficulties, so sorely troubling only an hour ago, recurred to Stern now with a disconcerting novelty. The urgency of that situation waved to him like a hand disappearing in the deep, out of reach for the time being.

"How long you gone?" Nogalski asked. "I left very early yesterday."

"You talk to her?"

"I tried last night, but there was no answer. We have a symphony series. I assumed she had gone for coffee afterwards with friends."

"Who spoke to her last, so far as you know?"

Stern deliberated. Peter's shrill manner would quickly antagonize the police.

"My son might have."

"He out there?"

"He is quite emotional at the moment."

Nogalski, for whatever reason, allowed himself a brief, disparaging smile.

"You do that often?" one of the cops behind him asked.

"What is that, Officer?"

"Travel. Out of town?"

"Occasionally it is necessary."

"where'd you stay?" the woman asked. Stern tried not to react to the drift of the questions. The officers, of course, knew by now who he was and reacted accordingly-they despised most criminal defense lawyers, who hindered the police at every turn and were often richly rewarded for their efforts. To the police, this was a natural opportunity chance to pester an adversary and to indulge their customary nasty fancies about foul play and motives.

Maybe the spick was humping his girlfriend in Chi while somebody for hire set this up. You never know unless you ask.

"On this occasion, I was at the Ritz." Stern stood.

"May I go? My son and I have yet to speak with his sisters."

Nogalski was watching him.

"This doesn't make much sense," said the detective. It made no sense, the man said. This was his professional opinion.

Stern looked intently at Nogalski. It was one of the hazards of Stern's calling that he seldom felt grateful to the police.

Coming back down the hall, Stern could hear Peter's voice.

He was carrying on about something. The same ruddy-faced cop who had shown Stern into the garage was listening impassively. Stern took his son by the elbow to draw him away. This was intolerable. Intolerable!

Some tough element of resistance within him was wearing away.

"My God, they're going to do an autopsy-did you know that?" asked Peter as soon as they were alone in the corridor. Peter was an M.D. and today apparently he was haunted by his past, the pathological exams he had practiced on the bums turned up in gutters, the gruesome med school humor as six or seven students studied the innards of the deceased.

Peter suffered with the thought of his mother as another mound of lifeless anatomy awaiting the coroner's saw. "You're not going to allow that, are you?"

A good deal shorter than his son, Stern observed Peter. Was it only with his father that this craven hysteria occurred?

Stern wondered. The climate of their relations did not seem to have changed for years. Always there was this lamenting hortatory quality, too insistent to be passed off as mere whining. Stern had wondered for so long what it was his son expected him to do.

"It is routine, Peter. The coroner must determine the cause of death."

"'The cause of death'? Do they think it was an accident?

Are they going to do a brain scan and figure out what she was thinking?

For God sake, we won't have a body left to bury. It's obvious. She killed herself." No one yet had said that aloud. Stern registered Peter's directness as a kind of discourtesy-too coarse, too blunt. But no part of him riled up in shock.

This was not, he said, the moment to cross swords with the police. They were, as usual, being idiotic, conducting some kind of homicide investigation. They might wish to speak next to him.

"Me? About what?"

"Your last conversations with your mother, I assume. I told them you were too distressed at the moment."

In his great misery, Peter broke forth with a brief, childish smile.

"Good," he said. Such a remarkably strange man. A peculiar moment passed between Stern and his son, a legion of things not understood.

Then he reminded Peter that they needed to call his sisters.

"Right," said Peter. A more sober cast came into his eye.

Whatever his differences with his father, he was.a faithful older brother.

Down the hall, Stern heard someone say, "The lieutenant's here." A large man ducked into the corridor, peering toward them. He was somewhere near Stern's age, but time seemed to have had a different effect on him.

He was large and broad, and like a farmer or someone who worked outdoors, he appeared to have maintained most of the physical strength of youth. He wore a light brown suit, a rumpled, synthetic garment, and a rayon shirt that hung loosely; when he turned around for a second, Stern could see an edge of shirttail trailing out beneath his jacket. He had a large rosy face and very little hair, a few thick gray clumps drawn across his scalp.

He dropped his chin toward Stern in a knowing fashion.

"Sandy," he said.

"Lieutenant," Stern answered. He had no memory of this man, except having seen him before. Some case. Some time. He was not thinking well at the moment.

"When you get a chance," the lieutenant said. Some confusion rose up between Stern and his son..

"You talk to him. I'll call," said Peter. "You know, Marta and Kate.

It's better from me."

With a sudden lucid turn, the kind of epiphanal instant he might have expected at a time of high distress, Stern recognized a traditional family drama taking place. As his children had marched toward adulthood, Peter had assumed a peculiar leadership in the family-he was the one to whom his sisters and mother often turned. He had forged intensive, secret bonds with each of them-Stern did not know how, because the same alliances were never formed with him.

This terrible duty, Stern realized, should be has, but the paths of weakness were well worn.

"Please say I shall speak to them soon."

"Sure." A certain reflective light had come over Peter; he leaned against the wall for an instant, absorbing it all, worn out by his own high emotions. "Life," he observed, "is full of surprises."

In Stern's den, the lieutenant was receiving a report from his officers.

Nogalski had come strolling up as Stern emerged from the hallway. The lieutenant wanted to know what the policemen had been doing. Nogalski spoke. The others knew they had no place to answer.

"I was asking a few questions, Lieutenant."

"Think you've asked enough?" Nogalski took a beat on that.

They did not get along, the detective and the lieutenant-you could see that. "Maybe you could lend a hand outside.

There's a real bunch of gawkers."

When the other officers were gone, the lieutenant gestured for Stern. He knocked at the door with the back of his hand so that it closed part way.

"Well, you got.a shitpot of troubles here, don't you, Sandy? I'm sorry to see you again, under the circumstances." The lieutenant's name was Radczyk, Stern remembered suddenly. Ray, he thought. "You holdin' up?" he asked.

"For the time being. My son is having some difficulty, The prospect of an autopsy for some reason upsets him." The cop, shifting around the room, seemed to shrug. "We find a note someplace, we could do without it, I guess. I could probably fix it up with Russell's office." He was referring to the coroner. "They can always measure the C.O. in the blood." The old policeman looked at Stern directly then, aware probably that he was being too graphic. "I owe, you know," he said.

Stern nodded. He had no idea what Radczyk was talking about.

The policeman sat down.

"The fellas go over all the usual with you?" He nodded again. Whatever that was. "They were very thorough," said Stern. The lieutenant understood at once.

"Nogalski's okay. He pushes, he's okay. Rough around the edges." The lieutenant looked out the door. He was the type someone must have called a big oaf when he was younger, Before he had a badge and a gun.

"It's a tough thing. I feel terrible for you. Just come home and found her, right?"

The lieutenant was doing it all again. He was just much better at it than Nogalski.

"She sick?" the lieutenant asked.

"Her health was excellent. The usual middle-age complaints.

One of her knees was quite arthritic. She could not garden as much as she liked. Nothing else." From the study window, Stern could see the neighbors parting to let the ambulance pass. It rolled slowly through the crowd. The beacon, Stern noticed, was not turning. No point to that. He watched until the vehicle carrying Clara had disappeared in the fullness of the apple tree, just coming to leaf, at the far corner of the lot, then he brought himself back to the conversation. The left knee, Stern thought.

"You don't know of any reason?"

"Lieutenant, it should be evident that I failed to observe something I should have." He expected to get through this, but he did not. His voice quaked and he closed his eyes.

The thought of actually breaking down before this policeman revolted him, but something in him was bleeding away. He was going to say that he had much to regret right now. But he was sure he could not muster that with any dignity. He said, "I am sorry, I cannot help you."

Radczyk was studying him, trying to decide, in all likelihood, if Stern was telling the truth.

A policeman leaned into the room through the half-open door.

"Lieutenant, Nogalski asked me to tell you they found something. Up in the bedroom. He didn't want to touch it till you seen it."

"What is that?" asked Stern.

The cop looked at Stern, unsure if he should answer. "The note," the officer said at last.

It was them on Stern's highboy, jotted on. a single sheet of her stationery, laid out beside a pile of handkerchiefs which the housekeeper had ironed. Like the grocery list or a reminder to get the cleaning. Unassuming. Harmless. Stern picked up the sheet, overcome by this evidence of her' presence. The lieutenant stood at his shoulder. But them was very little to see. Just one line. No date. No salutation. Only four words.

"Can you forgive me?"

ON the dark early morning the day of the funeral, a dream seized Stern from sleep. He was wandering in a large house.

Clara was there, but she was in a Closet and 8, would not come out. She clung shyly to one Of the hanging garments, a woman in her riffles whose knees knocked in a pose of childish bashfulness. His mother called him, and his older brother, Jacobo, voices from other rooms. When he moved to answer them, Clara told him they were dead, and his body rushed with panic.

From the bed, he contemplated the illuminated digits on the clock radio. 4:58. He would not sleep again, too frightened by the thronging images of his dream. There had been such a peculiar look on Clara's face when she told him Jacobo was dead, such a sly, calculating gleam."

About him the house, fully occupied, seemed to have taken on an inert, slumbering weight. His older daughter, Marta-twenty-eight, a Legal Aid lawyer in New York-had flown back the first night and slept now down the hall, in the room which had been hers as a child. His younger daughter, Kate, and her husband, John, 'who lived in a distant suburb, had also spent the night, rather than fight the unpredictable morning traffic over the river bridges. Silvia, Stern's sister, was in the guest room, come from her country house to minister to her brother and to organize the house of grief. Only the two men, Peter and, of course, Dixon-forever the lone wolf were missing.

Last night, the task of mourning in its grimmest ceremonial aspects had begun. The formal period of visitation' would follow the funeral, but Stern, always ambivalent about religious formalities, had opened the house to various heartsore friends who seemed to need to comfort him-neighbors, two young lawyers from Stern's office, his circle from the courthouse and the synagogue; Clara was an only child, but two separate pairs of her cousins had arrived from Cleveland. Stern received them all with as much grace as he could manage. At these times, one responded according to the most deeply trained impulses. To Stern's mother, gone for decades but still in his dreams, matters of social form had been sacred.

But after the house had emptied and the family had trailed off to sleep, Stern had closed himself up in the bathroom off the bedroom he had shared with Clara, racked for the second time that evening by a wrenching, breathless bout of tears. He sat on the toilet, from which the filled skirting that Clara had placed there decades before still hung, with a towel forced to his mouth, howling actually, uncontrolled, hoping no one would hear him. 'What did I do?" he asked repeatedly in a tiny stillborn voice as a rising storm of grief blew through him. Oh, Clara, Clara, what did I do?

Now, examining himself in the bathroom mirrors, he found his face puffy, his eyes bloodshot and sore. For the moment he had regained some humbled remoteness, but he knew the limits of his strength. What a terrible day this would become. Terrible. He dressed fully, except for his suit coat, and made himself a single boiled egg, then sat alone, watching the glint of the sunrise enlarge on the glossy surface of the mahogany dining table, until he felt some new incision of grief beginning to knife through him.

Desperately-futilely-he tried to calm himself.

'How, he thought again, how could he have failed to notice in the bed beside him a woman who in every figurative sense was screaming in pain?

How could he be so dull, his inner ear so deafened? The signs were such, Stern knew, that even in his usual state of feverish distraction he could have taken note. Clam was normally a person of intense privacy. For years, she had made a completely personal study of Japan; he knew nothing about it except the rifles of the books that occasionally showed up on her desk. At other moments, she would read a musical score; the entire symphony would rage along inside her. Barely perceptible, her chin might drop; but not a bar, a note was so much as whispered aloud.

But this was something more. Two or three nights recently he had returned home late, preoccupied with the case he was trying-a messy racketeering conspiracy in to find Clara sitting in the dark; there was no book or magazine, not even 'the TV's vapid flickering. It was her expression that frightened him most. Not vacant. Absent. Removed. Her mouth a solemn line, her eyes hard as agates. It seemed a contemplation beyond words. There had been such spells before.

Between them, they were referred to as moods and allowed to pass. For years, he prided himself on his discretion.

Driven now, he moved restlessly about the house, holding the items she had held, examining them as if for clues. In the powder room, he touched a tortoiseshell comb, a Lilac dish, the dozen cylinders of lipstick that were lined up like shotgun shells beside the sink. My God! He squeezed one of the gold tubes in his hands as if it were an amulet.

On a narrow wig stand in the foyer, three days' mail was piled. Stern fingered the envelopes, neatly stacked. Bills, bills-they were painful to behold. These prosaic acts, visiting the cleaner or department store, humbly bespoke her hopes. On the sixth of March, Clara expected life to continue. What had intervened?

"Westlab Medical Center." Stern considered the envelope. It was directed to Clara Stern at their address. Inside, he found an invoice.

The services, identified by a computer code, had been rendered six weeks ago and were described simply as "Test." Stern was still. Then he moved directly to the kitchen, already counseling himself to reason, exerting his will powerfully to contain the.shameful outbreak of grateful feelings. But he was certain, positive, she had made no mention of doctors or of tests. Clara recorded her appointments in a leather. book beside the telephone. Luncheons. The inevitable musical occasions. The dinner dates and synagogue and bar affairs of their social life. He had brought the.bill and matched its date against the book.

"9:45 Test." He paged back and forth. On the thirteenth there was another entry. "3:30 Dr." He searched further. On the twenty-first, the same. "Dr."

"Test."

"Dr."

Cancer. Was that it? Something advanced. Had she resolved to make her departure without allowing the family to beg her, for their sake as much as hers, to undergo the oncologist's life-prolonging tortures? That would be like Clara. To declare that zone of ultima sovereignty. Her mark of dignity, decorum, intense belief was here.

Pacing, he had arrived once more in the dining room, and he heard movement on the second floor, above him. With even an instant's distraction, he felt suddenly that, for all the blind willingness with which his heart ran to this solution, he had been caught up in fantasy.

There was some explanation of these medical events more mundane, less heroic. Somehow he found the suspicion chilling. Last night, blundering about in their bathroom, searching for tissue, he had come across a bottle of hair coloring hidden in the dark corner of a drawer.

He had no idea how long she had concealed this harmless vanity. Months.

Or years? It made no difference. But mortification shuddered through him. He had the same thought now: so much he had not noticed, did not know about that person, this woman, his wife.

":Daddy?" Stern's daughter Kate, his youngest Child, was at the foot of the stairs. She was in her nightgown, a tall stalk of a young woman, slender and heartbreakingly beautiful.

"Cara," he answered. He had always used this endearment with the girls at times. Stern was still holding the lab bill, and he pressed the envelope into the back pocket of his trousers. This was not a matter to discuss with the children, not today, at any event, when the thought would foment even greater anguish, and certainly not with Kate.

Beauty, Stern suspected, had made the world too simple for Kate. She seemed to drift along, buffered by her uncommon good looks and a kindly disposition. Perhaps that apportioned blame unfairly. Much must have happened here, at home. Clara had concentrated so on Peter; Stern in turn shared a natural intensity with his older daughter, Marta.

Kate had never been irradiated by the most intense energies of the mysterious family dynamic.

As a youngster, she had.displayed the same intellectual talents as her brother and sister; and she had Clara's musical talent. But all of that had withered. In high school she had met John, a sweet, Gentile lunk, an almost laughable prototype, a football player and a paragon of blond male beauty with his apple-pie face and hapless manner. A year after college, in spite of her parents' gentle discouragement, she had married him. John started out in his father's printshop, but it was soon clear the business could not sustain two families, and so Dixon had put him to work at MD, where, after some false starts, John seemed to be making do, one more ex-jock jostling about on the playing field of the markets.

Kate herself taught school. She loved her husband with a pitiable tender innocence, but Stern at moments could feel his heart rub itself raw with worry at the prospect of the moment Kate finally learned about the wallops the world could deliver.

Now she touched his hand.

"Daddy, I want you to know something. We weren't going to say anything for another month, but everyone is so sad-" Kate's mouth trembled slightly.

Dear God, thought Stern, she is pregnant.

She lifted her face proudly. Kate said, "We're going to have a baby."

"Oh my," said Stern. He grasped her hand. "My," he said again, smiling bravely and trying to recall exactly how he would be expected to reflect his delight. He kissed her first on the temple, then took her in his arms. He did so only rarely, and here in her thin nightgown he was amazed by the feel of his daughter, her narrowness, the loose movement of her breasts against him. Kate wept with sudden abandon, then drew back.

"We couldn't say anything," she explained to her father.

"It wasn't safe yet. We'd had some problems. And now I keep thinking, What if Mommy knew?" Once more she became uncontrollable. Once more Stern took his dark, beautiful daughter in his arms. But even as he held Kate, he found there was an abrupt adjustment in his own vision of things.

Clara had abandoned the children, too. He had viewed this last act of hers as aimed exclusively at him. But the children, grown but troubled, were still not past the point where they required occasional assistance.

Would it have made a difference, had Clara known Kate's secret? Or had she decided that they too'd had the last of what she could stand to give?

Above them there was stirring. Marta wa on the stairs, a smaller woman, also dark, with wire-rimmed glasses and a bosky do of untamed black haft. She regarded the scene below with a vulnerable look of her own.

"Group cry?" she asked.

Stern awaited Kate's lead.erself taught school. She loved her husband with a pitiable tender innocence, but Stern at moments could feel his heart rub itself raw with worry at the prospect of the moment Kate finally learned about the wallops the world could deliver.

Now she touched his hand.

"Daddy, I want you to know something. We weren't going to say anything for another month, but everyone is so sad-" Kate's mouth trembled slightly.

Dear God, thought Stern, she is pregnant.

She lifted her face proudly. Kate said, "We're going to have a baby."

"Oh my," said Stern. He grasped her hand. "My," he said again, smiling bravely and trying to recall exactly how he would be expected to reflect his delight. He kissed her first on the temple, then took her in his arms. He did so only rarely, and here in her thin nightgown he was amazed by the feel of his daughter, her narrowness, the loose movement of her breasts against him. Kate wept with sudden abandon, then drew back.

"We couldn't say anything," she explained to her father.

"It wasn't safe yet. We'd had some problems. And now I keep thinking, What if Mommy knew?" Once more she became uncontrollable. Once more Stern took his dark, beautiful daughter in his arms. But even as he held Kate, he found there was an abrupt adjustment in his own vision of things.

Clara had abandoned the children, too. He had viewed this last act of hers as aimed exclusively at him. But the children, grown but troubled, were still not past the point where they required occasional assistance.

Would it have made a difference, had Clara known Kate's secret? Or had she decided that they too'd had the last of what she could stand to give?

Above them there was stirring. Marta wa on the stairs, a smaller woman, also dark, with wire-rimmed glasses and a bosky do of untamed black haft. She regarded the scene below with a vulnerable look of her own.

"Group cry?" she asked.

Stern awaited Kate's lead. She squared her shoulders and dabbed her eyes. The entire family was to know. As he prepared for her declaration, entirely unexpected, an arrow of joy shot forth from the leaden-like mass of his interior and he was overcome by a startlingly exact recollection of the abrupt ways a baby's hands and legs would move, random and sudden as life itself.

"I just told Daddy. I'm going to have a baby." Marta's shriek split the household. A self-serious person, she carded on mindlessly. She embraced her sister, hugged her father. The two young women sat together holding hands.

Peter arrived then, coming early to beat the traffic, and was informed.

With the commotion John emerged, and everyone rose to hug him. In response to his reticence, they were always excessive. They had labored for years to make John feel accepted in a situation where, for many reasons, he knew he never would be. The group by then had migrated together to the living room. Silvia entered in her housecoat, looking grave; clearly she had taken their hoopla as the noise of one more calamity. Silvia and Dixon had never had a family of their own, much to Silvia's despair, and the news, so unexpected, brought Silvia, too, to tears. It was barely past seven and the family, overcome by all of this, clung to one another. And there in the living room, Stern, at last, longed for Clara. He had been waiting for it. More than the disorder and the loss, at this moment there was the absence.

When he looked up, Marta was watching. It had savaged Stern with sorrow to see her the night she had arrived. Marta, brave Marta, his boldest child, trod soldier-like up the walk, a canvas bag slung over her shoulder, weeping openly as soon as she climbed from the taxi. Stern embraced her at the door. 'Daddy, I never thought she was a happy person, but-' Throttled by emotion, Marta got no further. Stern held her and suffered privately the unequivocal nature of his daughter's estimate of her mother. She had always held Clara at greater distance than the other two; as a result, perhaps, she.had more to regret.

Across the' room, his daughter, with her father's tiny close-set eyes, looked at him sadly now.

I miss her, too, she mouthed.

Stern, a frequent morning chef, cooked for the entire group, He fried eggs and flapjacks, and Marta squeezed grapefruit for juice, a family tradition. By nine, an hour before the mortician's limousine was to arrive, they were all fed and dressed, quietly gathered once more in the living room.

"How about bridge?" Marta asked. She prided herself on being unrestrained by convention. In most things, Marta styled herself in the ways of the late sixties. She had been a child then and took it as a time of great romance; she went about in flowing gowns and high-laced boots, with her wind-sprung hair."Mom liked it when we played."

"Oh, sure," said Peter. "She liked it when we squaredanced, too, while we were kids. We can do-si-do to the chapel."

Marta whispered to her brother, Oh fuck off, but smiled.

Marta had always tempered her rivalry with Peter, and she granted him special liberties now. Kate's tears were constant, but Pete, of the three, seemed the hardest hit, morose, pensive, persistently out of balance. He went off by himself at many moments but returned inevitably to the comfort of his sisters. Close-knit, Stern's children appeared to take strength from each other:

Marta again mentioned bridge. "Daddy, would you mind?"

Stern lifted his palms, not quite an answer.

"Will you play?" Kate asked her father.

Silvia motioned Stern forward, encouraging him.

"I have a few things to look after for later." She was preparing the household for the crush of callers that would follow the funeral.

"I shall help Aunt Silvia. You four play."

"I'll help Aunt Silvia," said John. He was on his feet already, a huge young man, a mountainous blond with a neck thick as a tire rim. He had never mastered the game, like so many other things attached to his in-laws. The Sterns with their quiet intense ways had mystified John for most of a decade.

"Come on," Marta called. She was in.the sun room, already looking for cards. Stern understood his daughter's excitement. For an instant, it would be as when she was seventeen and the children were all safe from the world of grownup difficulties. Stern, as ever, found himself chafed and touched by his Marta and her impulses.

"Katy, I will play with you," Stern announced. He was always a partner with one of the girls; usually Kate. He and Peter squabbled when they played together. Stern had spent much of the little time he had at home playing one game or another with his children. Chutes and Ladders.

Monopoly. Word games when they were in the primary grades.

The four of them spent hours around a game table in the sun room. Clara seldom participated. Often she would sit in a fifth chair, with hands and ankles primly crossed, watching or, when necessary, assisting Kate.

But she was not obtrusive. This, for better or worse-rules, moves, strategies-was Alejandro's time.

Peter made the cards and handed them to Stern to deal. The sun room-referred to in the old architect's plans, drawn in the twenties, as 'the solarjura'-was a narrow area, rimmed with windows, floored in slate. From here they looked directly at Clara's garden. It was the time of year when she would have begun to turn the soil. The stalks of last year's gladloll, trimmed neatly almost to the soil, rose in rows, survivors of the mild winter.

Stern bid a weak club. He played all conventions. Anything but hand signals, Clara said.

"Are you going back to work after the baby?" Marta asked her sister.

Kate seemed a bit puzzled. Her future, such as it was, was apparently beyond her. Within, Stern seemed to cringe. This child with a child!

By John, no less. Veyiz mir. Kate told Marta that they did not know yet how the money would work out or how she would feel about leaving the baby.

"Oh, it'll be your first," said Peter. "You'll want to give it lots of attention. It will always be special."

The doorbell rang. Through the front panes, Stern saw his brother-in-law. Dixon had returned to town last night. He had been in New York on pressing business and had delayed flying home. Stern had felt slighted-the usual with Dixon-and he was taken aback, therefore, at his relief at seeing Dixon on the threshold with his bags yesterday evening. His brother-in-law, a large, solid man, had thrown his arms about Stern and made a good show of great sorrow. One could seldom be certain how Dixon truly felt. That was part of his genius-he was like a forest, full of many colors. He could greet you at any instant with a salesman's blather or the gruffest truths.

This morning, however, Dixon's attention had returned more typically to himself. As Stern took his coat, Dixon lowered his voice discreetly.

"When you're back at the stand, Stern, I'd like to ask you a question or two."

Dixon always addressed him military fashion, last name only. They had met originally in the service, which had led, by turns, to Dixon's making Silvia's acquaintance and to his becoming in time her suitor, a development to which Stern was still not fully adjusted, three decades after the fact.

"Business questions?" he asked Dixon.

"That kind of item. I don't need to trouble you now. I want to hear about your trip to Chicago."

Ah yes, thought Stern, the paths of ego were deep and the living needed to go on.

"'I understand your concern, Dixon. The situation may be somewhat involved, however. It i's best that we discuss it another time."

A shadow Passed, predictably, over Dixon. Fifty-five years old, he. was tan, trim, and, even with this darkened look, the image of vitality. He was a powerful man; he worked out every day with weight equipment. Dixon worshipped at the same altar as so many others in America: the body and its uses. His dark brass-colored hair had grown paler and more brittle with age, but was cleverly barbered to give him a mannerly business-like look.

"You didn't like what you heard?" he asked Stern.

In fact, Stern had learned little of substance, The documents he had examined in Chicago account statements and trading records of the clients for an eight- or nine-month period, had been revealing. There was no telling what offense the government was investigating, or even who had suggested to them the prospect of a crime.

"There may be a problem, Dixon. It is too early to become greatly alarmed."

"Sure." Dixon drew a cigarette from an inside pocket. He was smoking heavily again, an old bad habit recently grown worse, which Stern took as a sign of concern. Three years ago the IRS set up a full-scale encampment in Dixon's conference room, with barely a riffle in his breezy style.

This time, however, Dixon was on edge. With word of the first subpoena, he had been on the phone to Stern, demanding that the government be stopped. For the present, however, Stern was loath to contact Ms.

Klonsky, the Assistant United States Attorney. At the U.S. Attorney's Office they seldom told you more than they wanted you to know. Moreover, Stern feared that a call from him might somehow focus the government's attention on Dixon, whose name as yet had gone unmentioned. Perhaps the grand jury was looking at a number of brokerage houses. Perhaps something besides MD connected the customers. For the present it was best to tiptoe about, observing the government from cover. "They're always looking for something," Dixon said bravely now, and went off to find Silvia.

In the sun room, Stern's children were still speaking about the baby.

"Will John help out?" Marta asked. "Change diapers and stuff?."

Kate reared back, astonished.

"Of course. He's in heaven. Why wouldn't he?" Marta shrugged. At moments like this, it concerned Stern that she seemed so dumbfounded by men. Her father's daughter, Marta, regrettably, was not a pretty woman.

She had Stern's broad nose and small dark eyes. Worse still, she shat his figure.

Stern and his daughter were short, with a tendency to gather weight in their lower parts. Marta submitted herself almost masochistically to the rigors of diet and exercise, but you could never escape what nature had provided. It was not, she was apt to say, the form favored by' fashion magazines. Notwithstanding, Marta had always attracted her admirers-but there seemed an inevitable doom in her' relations. In her conversation there were, by idle reference, a procession of men who carne and went. Older, younger. Things always foundered. Marta, in the meantime, now came to her own defense.

"Daddy didn't change diapers," she said.

"I did not?" asked Stern. Surprisingly, he could not recall precisely.

"How could you have changed diapers?" asked Peter, awakened somewhat by the opportunity to challenge his father. "You were never here. I remember I couldn't figure out what a trial was. I thought it was like a place you went. Another city."

Marta called out for John: "Are you going to change the baby's diapers?"

John, carrying a thirty-cup percolator, entered the sun room for a moment. He looked as bad as everyone else, baffled and grieved. He shrugged gently in response to Marta's question. John was a taciturn fellow. He had few opinions that he was willing to express.

In another room the telephone rang. It had been pealing incessantly for two days now. Stern seldom spoke. The children answered, responding tersely with the time and place of the funeral, promising to share the condolences with their father. Most of these conversations seemed to end the same way, with a labored pause before the instrument was cradled. 'Yes, it's true,' one of them would quickly answer. 'We have no idea why."

Silvia emerged from the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron, beckoning to Stern. This call, apparently, he could not avoid. In passing, he touched his sister's hand. A woman with a staff of three at home, Silvia had been here toiling tirelessly for three days, running, organizing, taking care.

"Ah, Sandy. What a sad occasion. My deepest sympathy."

Stern had gone up to their bedroom, still dark and shuttered, to take the phone. He recognized the voice of Cal Hopkinson. Cal was a lawyer.

When Sandy's beloved friend Harry Fagel had died two years ago, Cal, Harry's partner, had become the Sterns' personal lawyer. He updated their wills and each year filed tax returns for the trusts left for Clara. Cal was a practical fellow, amiable if not particularly appealing, and he came rather quickly to the point. Since Marta was in town, he wondered if Stern might want to come down with the children in the next few days to discuss Clara's will.

"Is that necessary, Cal?"

Cal pondered in silence. Perhaps he was somewhat offended.

He was one of those attorneys who lived for details, mowing them down each day in the belief that if they went untended they would overgrow the world.

"It's not necessary, Sandy, but it sometimes helps to prevent questions later. Clara left a large estate,.you know."

Did he know? Yes, it came back to him that he did. If the truth were told, in these moments in which he was too harrowed and weak to avoid it, he could barely see Clara through the glimmer of gold when he had married her. Poor boy weds rich girl. It was a dream as thrilling and illicit as pornography. And in keeping, he had practiced the usual cruel repression. Early on, Stern stilled Henry Mittler's obvious suspicions with a vow to his father-in-law that Clam and he would live solely on his income. Thirty years passed in which Stern feigned not to care about Clara's fortune, in which he left the details of management to her and those he suggested she employ, and at the end, in the sorest irony, the lie was truth.

"Is there some surprise in Clara's affairs of which you wish us to be aware, Cal?"

A lawyer's pause here, the habit of a man who had learned to measure every sentence before he spoke. Cal probably considered it unprofessional to answer.

"Nothing to shock you," he said at last. "I'm sure you have the general picture. There are probably one or two points we should discuss." Cal had laid just enough emphasis on "shock." Surprise but not devastation, in other words. Now what? he thought. A.careful, tidy person always, Clara had left behind her, with no sign of concern, a murky, littered wake. Stern said he would speak to the children and prepared to end the conversation.

"Sandy," said Cal abruptly. Merely from the tone, Stern could tell what was coming. "This is such upsetting news.

You must forgive me for asking, but was there any sign?"

No, he said quickly, no sign. He clapped down the phone in a barely suppressed temper. Cal really was a clod, he thought. Stern closed his eyes and took a further moment of retreat in the dark bedroom, listening to the harsh chorus of mingling voices that rang up the stairwell. He was in his soul too solitary to brook this continuing intrusion.

It was as if there were some large ear pressed to him, attuned to every breath. The thought of the funeral was suddenly unbearable. A death of this nature would stimulate' lurid interest in many. They would be there in teams, in droves, associates and friends and neighbors, come to observe the toll of grief and to eye Stern in a subtle accusatory fashion. Even in those he knew best who had come last night, he could detect that grim curiosity.

What was the story? they all wondered. What exactly had he done to her? Clara's suicide had exposed some dark grisly secret, as if there were a grotesque deformity which previously lay hidden on the body of their married life.

Not certain if it was the loss or simply the humiliation, Stern remained a few more minutes, weeping in the dark.

"Do you want a boy or a girl?" Marta was asking as Stern returned to the card table.

Some confusion swam across Kate's fine dark features. This was the first time, of course, that anyone had put the question.

"We both want a healthy baby," said Kate.

"Naturally, you do," Marta said. "But if you could pick, what would it be-a healthy boy or a healthy girl?"

"Marta," Stern said, with his cards fanned before him. He had been counting his points again-it was as if he had never seen the hand.

"This is not the kind of question a mother-to-be can always answer."

Kate had been thinking. "I'd like a girl." She smiled at all of them.

"Girls are nicer."

"Do they let girls on football teams now?" Peter asked.

"How far have things gone?"

"John would love a girl," Kate responded instantly, "Of course," said Stern.

Peter touched his sister's hand to reassure her-he was merely being himself.

"Mothers always say that girls are harder in the end," Marta volunteered.

"That's not what Mommy said," Kate answered. "That's what she said to me," said Marta. With that utterance, the two sisters stared at one another, some darkling learning looming up between them. For all her brash convictions, Marta was a person of humbling doubts about herself and her place in the world, and she had dwelled more openly than any of them in the last few days on memories of Clara. Much unfinished business, Stern estimated. For the moment, she turned to her father for help. "Isn't that what she said, Dad?"

"Your mother," Stern said, "took the rearing of each of you seriously.

Which means that from time to time she felt challenged." Stern smiled diplomatically at Marta. "I believe I said a club."

"Pass," said Marta.

Kate passed.

Peter was quiet, his face closed within the same stormy, anguished look of the last few days. He was wondering, perhaps, what his mother had said about boys. Eventually, he became aware of the three of them watching.

"A heart," he said, when the bidding had been reviewed for him.

"Well, I hear congratulations are in order!" Dixon had emerged from the kitchen, where he had been with Silvia.

His arms were wide and he was full, as usual, of stuff and personal ceremony. He had missed Kate and John last night and now crushed Kate to his side, where she received her uncle's embrace stiffly. "Where's that husband of yours? I didn't think he had it in him." Dixon wandered off, presumably to look for John. Kate shot a starchy look at his back, seemingly unimpressed by her uncle's coarse humor or his jokes at her husband's expense.

The truth, Stern knew, was that he tolerated Dixon more freely than anyone else in the family. Dixon's base side had always impelled in Clara some clear negative response, which, out of loyalty to Silvia, had grown more pointed after the period six or seven years ago when some aspect of Dixon's sportive sexual life-the details were never shared by Silvia-had led Stern's sister briefly to dismiss him from their household. With Dixon, as in most things, the children had tended to follow Clara's lead. Peter and Marta and most especially Kate had always enjoyed an intimate bond with their aunt, who, childless, had showered them with favor. But that attachment had never run to their uncle.

In response, Dixon adhered to the example of potentates throughout the centuries: he purchased indulgence. Over the years, he had taken every opportunity to employ the members of Stern's family. He had Stern and John on his payroll now, and each of the children had worked as a runner for MD on the floor of the Kindle Countally at Marta. "I believe I said a club."

"Pass," said Marta.

Kate passed.

Peter was quiet, his face closed within the same stormy, anguished look of the last few days. He was wondering, perhaps, what his mother had said about boys. Eventually, he became aware of the three of them watching.

"A heart," he said, when the bidding had been reviewed for him.

"Well, I hear congratulations are in order!" Dixon had emerged from the kitchen, where he had been with Silvia.

His arms were wide and he was full, as usual, of stuff and personal ceremony. He had missed Kate and John last night and now crushed Kate to his side, where she received her uncle's embrace stiffly. "Where's that husband of yours? I didn't think he had it in him." Dixon wandered off, presumably to look for John. Kate shot a starchy look at his back, seemingly unimpressed by her uncle's coarse humor or his jokes at her husband's expense.

The truth, Stern knew, was that he tolerated Dixon more freely than anyone else in the family. Dixon's base side had always impelled in Clara some clear negative response, which, out of loyalty to Silvia, had grown more pointed after the period six or seven years ago when some aspect of Dixon's sportive sexual life-the details were never shared by Silvia-had led Stern's sister briefly to dismiss him from their household. With Dixon, as in most things, the children had tended to follow Clara's lead. Peter and Marta and most especially Kate had always enjoyed an intimate bond with their aunt, who, childless, had showered them with favor. But that attachment had never run to their uncle.

In response, Dixon adhered to the example of potentates throughout the centuries: he purchased indulgence. Over the years, he had taken every opportunity to employ the members of Stern's family. He had Stern and John on his payroll now, and each of the children had worked as a runner for MD on the floor of the Kindle County Futures Exchange during school vacations. When Peter had gone into private practice, Dixon had enrolled MD with Peter's HMO, and even made a short-lived attempt to utilize Peter as his personal physician, although, predictably, they did not get along, quarreling over Dixon's smoking and his general unwillingness to follow advice. Perhaps, Stern had long thought, all this family employment represented Dixon's best efforts-a way to share his imposing wealth, with which he himself was so involved, while maintaining the centrality that he desired in any circumstance.

"Will you name her for Mommy?" Marta inquired of Kate. She seemed more absorbed than her sister with this baby.

Silvia, passing through the solarium, frowned at Marta's directness, but both young women were accustomed to it.

Marta had always had her way with Kate.

"I suppose," said Kate. "Either a boy or a girl. Unless you would mind, Daddy."

Stern looked up from his cards-but he had not' missed a word.

"It would please me if you chose to do this." He smiled gently at Kate.

In his fie, he felt a sudden closeness in the room. Dear God, the turmoil. Things seemed to come at him from all directions. He felt like those paintings he would sometimes see in museums and churches of St.

Sebastian shot full of arrows and holes, bleeding like a leaking hose.

To his enormous chagrin and surprise, he found he had started, silently, to cry again. The tears ran down both sides of his nose. Around him, his children watched, but made no comment. The days, he supposed, would go like this. He removed his handkerchief from his back pocket and found the medical laboratory bill he had examined early this morning. He had entirely forgotten it.

"I shall return in a moment." He headed off to find a Kleenex. Better jam his pockets. From the kitchen, he looked back to the sun room, where his Children, grown up but wounded by their grief, awaited him.

Oh, how these children had mattered to Clara! he thought suddenly. What a worshipful passion. She had been raised with servants, by well-intentioned but limited nannies and governesses. She would have none of that with her own.

Again an image: Coming home, One of those occasional evenings when he was here before they were all in bed, to find her on her knees in the kitchen. Peter sat at the table reading; Marta was crying; Kate was having her dress hemmed. The little girl, her shins blotched, stood motionless as her mother fingered the garment. On the stove, a pot was boiling over. Lord, the clamor and the ferment. Clara looked up to greet him and puckered out a lip to blow a stray lock that had fallen down into her eyes. She smiled, smiled. It was miserable, hard work, as it had always been, a numbing routine of humdrum tasks, but Clara found music in the banging and tumult of family life.

Stern, in his simple-minded way, thought little of this.

Only now could he see that she made herself a devoted audience to their sounds in their needs-as a distraction from that dismal bleat that must have always whistled away within her.

"Sender?" Silvia was standing beside him, concerned. His sister wore her hair in her usual upswept hairdo, a person of simple, graceful beauty her entire life, still smoothfaced and radiant at the age of fifty-one. She had always called him by his Yiddish name, as their mother had.

He smiled faintly to reassure her, then cast his eyes down.

The medical invoice, he noticed, was still in his hand and he passed it with little thought to Silvia, addressing her in a circumspect tone. He asked if Clara had ever spoken of this.

Once more, the doorbell rang. Down the long hall, Stern saw Marta admit two young men in sport coats. They waited inside the foyer, as Marta called out for Dixon. One of the two looked familiar. Henchmen or flunkies, Stern estimated.

Dixon had retainers around him like a Mafia don. His business never ceased and his need to learn what was occurring was constant. The one Stern thought he'd seen before was carrying an envelope and a blue vinyl briefcase. Papers to sign, perhaps? Dixon was going to do a deal on the casket.

Silvia, in the interval, had examined the bill and handed it back. Alone they communicated as they always had, few words.

"Dr. Cawley, Nate, next door would know, no?" she asked.

Of course. Trust Silvia. Nate Cawley, their next-door neighbor, a gynecologist, was Clara's principal physician.

He certainly should have the answer. Stern thought of phoning right now, then recollected that Fiona, Nate's wife, who had been among the visitors last evening, had mentioned, in her usual notable lament, that he was gone for a week on a medical conference. He reminded Silvia.

"Yes, yes." His sister, light-eyed and still striking, studied him earnestly. Apparently, she now shared some of the same thoughts Stern had had earlier.

Through the breakfast-room window, Stern saw the funeral parlor's limousine, dove-gray, swing smoothly into the circular drive before the house, parking behind the dark sedan of Dixon's visitors. Silvia headed off to summon the family. Girding himself, Stern stood.

But down the hall the commotion of angry voices suddenly rose. An alarming scene was taking place near the front door. Dixon was shouting. "What is this?" he yelled at the two men who had arrived only moments before. "What is this!" Above his head, he waved a sheet or two of paper.

Halfway there, Stern realized what had taken place. Now this! He could not manage the sudden ignition of anger; it had waited for days so near at hand, and now his heart felt as if it would fly out of his breast, like some NASA rocket trailing flame.

"You crummy so-andsos!" yelled Dixon. "You couldn't wait?"

Stern rushed to place himself between Dixon and the two men. He had realized where he'd seen the man he recognized-in the federal courthouse, not Dixon's offices. His name was Kyle Horn, and he was a special agent of the FBI.

Dixon was still carrying on. Stern by now had seized the paper from his hand and bulled Dixon a few steps farther back into the foyer. Then he briefly examined the grand jury subpoena. All as usual: a printed form embossed with the court seal. It was directed to Dixon Hartnell, Chairman MD Holdings, and commanded his appearance before a United States grand jury here, four days from now, at 2 P.M.

Investigation 89-86. Attached was a long list of documents Dixon was to have in hand. The initials of Sonia Klonsky, the Assistant United States Attorney, appeared at the bottom of the page.

"I refuse to allow this to take place," said Stern. Half a foot shorter than the agents, he maintained, in rage, the erect bearing of a martinet. "If you call my office next week, I shall accept service there. But not at this time." I require you to leave. Immediately. You may tell Assistant United States Attorney Klonsky that I deplore these tactics and shall not abide them." Stern opened the front door.

Horn was past forty. He looked like all the other FBI agents, with a cheap sport coat and a carefully trimmed haircut, but there was a weathered, leathery look to the skin about his eyes: too much sun, or alcohol: He had a bad reputation, the wrong type of agent, a petty tyrant full of resentments.

"No, sir," he said, He gestured toward the subpoena, which Stern had returned to its envelope and was now extending toward him. "That sucker is served."

"If you file a return of service with the court, I shall move to have you both held in contempt." It occurred to Stern vaguely that this threat was ludicrous, but he gave no ground. "Have you no idea of the nature of this occasion?"

Horn made no move. For a moment, none of the four men moved. Marta had crept to the edge of the living room and watched in grim amazement."

"We are preparing to depart for a funeral," Stern said at last. He pointed out the front windows to the mortuary limousine and the driver in his dead-black suit. "Of Mr. Hartnell's sister-in-law," said Stern.

"My wife."

The second agent, a younger man with blond hair, straightened up.

"I didn't know that," he said, then turned to Horn. "Did you know that?"

Horn stared at Stern.

"I know I can't seem to get a call back from Dixon Harmell.

That's what I know," Horn said. "I know I come by the front door and he's gone out the back."

"I'm.sorry," the younger agent said. He touched his chest.

"All I knew was they said this was where we could find him." The agents, thwarted, had undoubtedly employed their usual techniques. A pretext call, as they referred to it."This is the Bank of Boston. We have a problem with a million-dollar wire transfer for Mr. Hartnell. Where can we find him?" The courts for decades had allowed the use of this kind of adolescent cunning.

"Hey," said Horn to his colleague, "shit happens." He took the subpoena without looking at Stern. Then Horn tapped the envelope. "-This guy'll be in your office Monday morning, nine sharp."

Stern applied both hands to the front door to close it behind the agents. Peter had drawn Marta away, but Dixon remained in the foyer. He had lit a cigarette and was grinning. "Got you fired up, didn't they?"

"How long have they been trying to serve you, Dixon?"

Dixon meditatively watched a plume of smoke drift away. He was always disturbed when Stern saw through him.

"Elise says men have been calling for a week or two. I didn't know what it was about," said Dixon. "Honestly., His mouth shifted as Stern looked at him. "I really wasn't sure. That's one of the things I've been meaning to talk with you about."

"Ah, Dixon," said Stern. It was unbelievable. A man who earned $2 million last year, who called himself a business leader, creeping down the back halls and thinking he could hide from the FBI. Stern put one foot on the stairwell, trying to focus on the enormous task at hand. He needed his coat. It was time, he told himself. Time. He was dizzy and faint at heart.

Family, he thought, with despair.

FOUR days after the funeral, Stern returned to the office.

He wore no tie, a means to signify that he was not formally present. He would look at the mall, answer questions. What was the term? Touch base. He had occupied this space for nearly a decade and had cultivated it with almost the same attention as his home. Small as it might be, this was Stern's empire, and there was inevitably some tonic effect in the electronic chatter of the telephones and business machines, the energetic movements of the dozen people he employed. Not, of course, today. The office, like everything else, seemed flattened, depleted, less color, less music. Entering through the back door, he stood by the desk of Claudia, his secretary, as he considered his lost universe. He looked for something hopeful in the mail.

"Mr. Hartnell is here."

The agents-, as promised, had arrived with the subpoena yesterday. Over the phone, Stern had dictated a letter to prosecutor Klonsky, stating that he represented Dixon and his company, and directing the government to contact Stern if it wanted to speak with anyone who worked for MD-a request the government would inevitably not follow. Then Stern had summoned Dixon for this meeting. His brother-inlaw waited in Stern's office, his feet on the sofa, the Tribune open before him, while he smoked one of Stern's cigars. His sport coat-double-breasted, with its many glittering buttons-had been tossed aside, and his thick forearms, still dark from an island vacation, were revealed. He rose and welcomed Stern to his own office.

"I made myself at home."

"Of course." Stern apologized for being late, then, removing his sport coat, surveyed. Given his trip to Chicago, it had been more than a week' since he had been here, but it all looked the same. He was not sure if he was comforted or horrified by the constancy. Stern's office was decorated in cream-colored tones. Clara had insisted on hiring someone's favorite interior decorator, and the result, Stern often thought, would have been more appropriate to the bedroom of some sophisticated adolescent. There was a sofa with plush pillows, pull-up chairs in the same nubby.beige material, and drapes to match. Behind his desk was an English cabinet of dark walnut-a recent addition and more Stern's taste but his desk was not a desk at all, rather four chromed standards topped by an inch-thick slab of smoky glass. Stern, years later, was still not accustomed to looking down and seeing the soft expanse of his lap. Now he was at liberty to refurnish. The thought came to him plainly. and he closed his eyes and made a small sound. He reached for a pad.

"What is this about, Dixon? Have you any idea?" Dixon shook his large head. "I'm really not sure." Dixon did not say he did not know. Only that he was not certain. Using the intercom, Stern asked Claudia to get Assistant United States Attorney Klonsky on the phone. She had left a number of phone messages, and Stern wanted to arrange an extension of the date when they would have to comply with her subpoena.

"We must answer certain questions at the threshold, Dixon.

What are they investigating? Who is it they seek to prosecute? Is it, in particular, you?"

"Do you think this thing's about me?"

"Probably," said Stern evenly.

Dixon did not flinch, but he took his cigar from his mouth and very carefully removed the ash. He finally made a sound, quiet and mininative.

"This is a subpoena duces tecum, Dixon-a request for records.

Ordinarily, the government would not send two agents to serve it. The prosecutors were attempting to deliver a message."

"They want to scare the shit out of me."

"As you would have it." Stern nodded. "I imagine they felt you would soon hear of the investigation. No doubt, had I not intervened, the agents would have sought to interrogate you while you were carrying on."

Dixon mulled. He was so full of himself that one seldom gave full credit to Dixon's subtlety. He studied people largely for his own advantage, but that did not mean he was not observant. Certainly, he was familiar enough with Stern's nuances to realize he was being told again that he had been a fool.

"How bad will this be?" Dixon asked.

"I think that you should not compare this with your prior encounters with the IRS and the CFTC." The Commodities Futures Trading Commission was the federal agency that regulated the futures industry, the equivalent of the SEC.

"They are bureaucrats and their first love is their own rules. Their minds do not run automatically to prosecution.

Federal grand juries sit to indict. This is a serious business, Dixon."

Dixon mugged up. There was a handsome, weathered look to his eyes.

"Can I ask a dumb question?"

"As many as you like," said Stern.

"What's a grand jury? Really, Besides something that's supposed to make you wet your shorts."

Stern nodded, more or less pleased that Dixon was taking things seriously enough to ask. The grand jury, he explained, was convened by the court to investigate possible federal crimes. In this case, the jurors gathered, by the court's order, every other week, alternating Tuesdays and Thursdays, for eighteen months. They were directed by the United States Attorney's Office, which, in the name of the grand jury, subpoenaed documents and witnesses to be examined at each session. The proceedings were secret. Only the witnesses who testified could reveal what happened. If they chose to. Few individuals, of course, wished to trumpet the fact that they had been haled before a federal grand jury.

"And what kind of chance do I stand with them?" asked Dixon. "This grand jury."

"Very little. Not if the prosecutor decides to indict. It is the U.S.

Attorney's Office we must persuade. Inside the grand jury room, the burden of proof on the government is minimal-ey need merely convince a bare majority of the jurors that here is probable cause to believe a crime has taken place. The prosecutors may introduce hearsay, and the target and his lawyer. have no right to learn. what has taken place or to offer any refutation. It is not what you would describe as evenhanded."

"I'd say," answered Dixon. "Whose idea was this?".

"The framers of the Constitution of the United States," answered Stern.

"To protect the innocent."

"Oh, sure," said Dixon. All things considered, especially given the havoc of a few days ago, he was taking this with stoical calm. But he was, after all, a person Of considerable strength. There was no point in not admiring Dixon. He was one of those fellows Americans had always loved. Dixon had come from one of those bleak Illinois coal mining towns near the Kentucky border. Stern had paid his college and law school bills by driving a punchboard route throughout the Middle West, and when he was out on the road in the riffles, Stern had seen these towns-colorless, square, plain as the prairies, the air sooted with coal dust-placed amid the sensuous pink forms of the earth which had been stripped and raised in the search for coal.

Dixon's father was a German immigrant, a Lutheran minister, a spare, unforgiving, tight-fisted type who had died when Dixon was nine. The mother, sweet-natured but easily trod upon, had depended unnaturally on her son. Stern had not learned any of this from Dixon, but only from his relatives, the spinster aunts and one warmhearted cousin who spoke with admiration of Dixon's early sense that he was destined for more than the numb labored slavery of the coal town.

Behind Stern, the intercom buzzed. No answer at the U.S.

Attorney's Office, Claudia announced. It was two in the afternoon, but the prosecutors answered the phone only when they wanted to. Keep trying, Stern told her.

"One other thing we must determine," he said to Dixon, "is how the government came to launch their investigation. We must try to identify the source of whatever allegations they have decided to examine."

"You mean, who fingered me?"

"If you are the target, yes. When we know who spoke against you, we will have some insight into the limitations on the government's information. Have you any idea?"

"Not a clue," said Dixon succinctly, letting his hands flutter up futilely. No doubt he had half a dozen areas in mind where the government might question him, but he would never share any of that with Stern, who would hector him about correcting each infraction. "Probably the compliance people from the Exchange," said Dixon at last. "They're always bitching to someone about me." The suggestion sounded halfhearted, at best.

The telephone rang: Stern's inside line, a different tone, like a cricket. Only his family had this number; it was Clara whom he would generally expect. That reflex rose in him and foundered while he absorbed the second ring.

"Sender?" asked his sister. A welcome voice. Stern's love for Silvia was like his feelings for no one else-purer,. less burdened. She had been seventeen when their mother died, and Stern, five years the elder, had assumed that his role toward her would become somewhat parental, but their nods, like everyone's, had been less predictable than that.

They looked after one another; they filled in what was lost. Stern and his sister, by the habit of a lifetime, spoke each day. Their conversations lasted barely a minute.

'So, busy?" 'Yes, of course. You?" They spoke of their health, the children, the whirlwinumb labored slavery of the coal town.

Behind Stern, the intercom buzzed. No answer at the U.S.

Attorney's Office, Claudia announced. It was two in the afternoon, but the prosecutors answered the phone only when they wanted to. Keep trying, Stern told her.

"One other thing we must determine," he said to Dixon, "is how the government came to launch their investigation. We must try to identify the source of whatever allegations they have decided to examine."

"You mean, who fingered me?"

"If you are the target, yes. When we know who spoke against you, we will have some insight into the limitations on the government's information. Have you any idea?"

"Not a clue," said Dixon succinctly, letting his hands flutter up futilely. No doubt he had half a dozen areas in mind where the government might question him, but he would never share any of that with Stern, who would hector him about correcting each infraction. "Probably the compliance people from the Exchange," said Dixon at last. "They're always bitching to someone about me." The suggestion sounded halfhearted, at best.

The telephone rang: Stern's inside line, a different tone, like a cricket. Only his family had this number; it was Clara whom he would generally expect. That reflex rose in him and foundered while he absorbed the second ring.

"Sender?" asked his sister. A welcome voice. Stern's love for Silvia was like his feelings for no one else-purer,. less burdened. She had been seventeen when their mother died, and Stern, five years the elder, had assumed that his role toward her would become somewhat parental, but their nods, like everyone's, had been less predictable than that.

They looked after one another; they filled in what was lost. Stern and his sister, by the habit of a lifetime, spoke each day. Their conversations lasted barely a minute.

'So, busy?" 'Yes, of course. You?" They spoke of their health, the children, the whirlwind of life. Today she said immediately, "Back at work. This is good, I believe."

"The best alternative." He covered the receiver and to Dixon mouthed"Silvia." He was not certain if Dixon would want her to know he was here, but his brother-in-law pointed to himself to indicate that he' would like to speak with her when Stern was finished. Stern told her they were together.

"Discussing this stupid business of the other day?"

"Just so."

She emitted a sigh of sorts but made no further inquiry.

His sister and he rarely engaged in any lingering discussions of Dixon, neither the rough and smooth of her marriage nor her husband's complex business affairs. That was more or less the compact of thirty years ago, when Stern had so vehemently opposed their marriage. He had cited religious differences, but only as the best excuse.

How could you tell your sister that this fellow who called himself your friend had the sharp look, with his doublebreasted suits and pomaded hair, of a carnival barker? In those days, Stern would have wagered that Dixon would be gone when the circus left town. But he'd had greater staying power than that. He was brighter than Stern was willing to acknowledge, and more industrious. And perhaps America was a place where virtue was less spontaneously rewarded than Stern-and everyone else-had believed in those days.

"Matters are well in hand," said Stern simply. They spoke briefly of each of his children, and with that done, he extended the phone to Dixon, who spent a few moments chatting happily with his wife. In his own fashion, Dixon was luxurious. He was covetous of Silvia's beauty and loved to see her pampered and expensively dressed. Roses arrived for her every Friday, and you could not walk down the street with Dixon without him spying some item in a rich store window that he decided would look smashing on Silvia.

He was oddly preoccupied with his wife; if Silvia had a cold, it was on Dixon's mind. He called her four times a day. Yet this same doting husband had hot pants when any female between the ages of fifteen and sixty-five passed by, and he was always in pursuit.

"Now work hard," said Silvia to Stern when Dixon handed back the phone.

Her efforts at humor were inevitably awkward. And in this case she was only trying to mask her real concerns. Silvia, for all her occasional anguish, remained enthralled by Dixon, as dazzled as she had been as a sorority girl. His swagger embarrassed her at moments; his wandering broke her heart. But he remained her life's romance, a figure the size of a monument, the man who still seemed to her half a dream.

"Well in hand," said Stern again, but, having Spoken, felt momentarily put out with himself. With work of this kind, it was his practice never to predict favorable outcomes.

The general pattern of results, and the evidence, seldom merited that; and he found clients easier to satisfy if he had dampened their expectations. He replaced the phone in that mood of conflict, reminding himself that this was, after all, his sister, her husband.

Stern found a copy of the grand jury subpoena in the in box on the cabinet behind his desk. He reread it and Dixon came to stand over his shoulder, bringing Stern's humidor with him. In the office, Stern usually lit his first cigar by nine-thirty or ten in the morning, and one was always burning thereafter until he left for the day. Clara had never approved. She complained about the odor in his clothing and on his hands and during an exceptional period of high irritability some years ago had refused to permit cigars inside their home. The humidor had been his father's, inlaid with mother-of-pearl and lined in velvet; his father, a quiet, proper man of fragile character, had placed great stock in certain objects. Stern looked into the humidor with admiration, but for the moment some freighted sense of obligation toward Clara caused him to decline.

"What does this show you?" Dixon asked., tapping the subpoena.

Stern, still reading, lifted a hand. To the first page of the subpoena was stapled a lengthy attachment describing the documents the government sought. Dixon, on behalf of his company and subsidiaries, was required to produce a variety of records-order tickets, Wading cards, clearing documents-relating to a lengthy list of futures trades.

The transactions, identified by date, commodity, number of contracts, month of delivery, and customer account, seemed to have been listed at random. The columns of figures marched down half the page, but the wades appeared to have been sorted neither chronologically nor by client. Stern counted for a moment. There were thirty-seven transactions.

"Let us start from the beginning, Dixon. Tell me about these documents.

How are they generated?"

"You understand my business, Stern."

"Indulge me," he answered. The truth, of course, was that he could keep none of it straight. Other lawyers-a huge finn with offices here and in Chicago-attended to Dixon's regular business affairs. Stern learned what little piece he needed to deal with each problem that came his way and, at its conclusion, let all of it-practices, regulations, terms of art-fly from his mind, as in the aftermath of an exam. Oh, he knew the rudiments, the definitions: a futures contract was a transferable obligation to buy or sell a standard amount of a particular commodity for an agreed price at a fixed date in the future. But the markets had moved well past the point they were at when Dixon had started decades ago, and only farmers sold futures to secure harvest prices. Today the play, as Dixon put it, was in money; the markets sold futures on the markets: on bond and currency prices, on stock indices, options on futures themselves. The talk out in the trading room when Stern visited Dixon's offices was well beyond him, about basis trades and hedging yield curves. For all the arcana, Stern tended to recall Dixon"s confession that the first people known to write futures on the stock market's prices were the bookies in Vegas.

"Take the first trade here, for Chicago Ovens," said Stern, pointing to the subpoena. This client was a huge bakery concern, part of International Provisions, which produced a third of the bread one saw on supermarket shelves. Stern had visited with their lawyers in Chicago.

"As I understand it, this is a typical transaction. They wanted to be certain they can buy wheat in December at a favorable price. So they instructed you to buy them ten million bushels of wheat for December delivery. Correct? Now what happens at MD?"

"Okay," said Dixon. "Every order we get, no matter where it comes from, gets written up on our central order desk, which is here in our offices in the Kindle Exchange. Then they transmit the order to our booth on the trading floor at whatever exchange the future is traded on. Grains and financials in Chicago. Food and fibers in New York. Small lots we'll do here. This one obviously went to Chicago. The order goes into the pit and our broker yells it out till he finds traders who want to sell December wheat. Maybe they're selling for farmers, maybe speculators. Doesn't matter. Then at night the exchange clears the trades-you know, matches them to make sure that MD bought ten million Dec. wheat and someone else sold it. Next day we send our confirm to the client and make sure they've got enough margin money on deposit with us to cover the position.

That's the whole story. There're a million variations. But that's the basic. Right? That's the paper trail they're following."

Stern nodded: all quite familiar. He studied the subpoena again, then asked what sense Dixon made of the list of trades, but his brother-in-law merely shook his head. They had been placed by five different institutional customers over a number of months. Stern had spoken last week in Chicago with the lawyers for two of these customers-a large rural bank in Iowa, and the baker, Chicago Ovens. It seemed likely, therefore, that the government had subpoenaed trading records from the other flue customers as well. Stern told Dixon he would have to contact them.

"What for?" he demanded. It did not attract business to tell customers that a federal grand jury was raking through your records.

"To determine what information they provided." One of the perpetual problems of a grand jury investigation was developing even a rough estimate of what the government knew. Most companies or individuals were not bold enough to disregard the FBI's usual request to keep the agents' questioning secret.

Dixon continued to venture mild objections, but eventually he gave in.

His defense of his business was instinctive. He had started extolling futures in the little rural communities, and over three decades had made Maison Dixon a colossus with corporate clients, commodities pools, managed accounts. MD was a clearing member of all the major exchanges in Chicago and New York, and maintained large offices with humming telephone banks in both cities as well as here, In the meantime, in the late 1960s, Dixon had led a group of local futures merchants in the formation of a small commodifies exchange in Kindel County. Dixon's notion was to trade in lot sizes that were more in keeping with the needs of smaller retail customers. The Chicago Exchange would not trade a contract for the future delivery of wheat or soybeans of less than five thousand bushels. In Kindle, you could trade five hundred at prices that followed Chicago's, tick for tick. The Kindle County Futures Exchange-the KCFE had established its 'minimarket' in all the most popular contracts, and Dixon continued to press his fellow directors for innovations. For the last two years, he had been relentlessly courting the approvals needed to trade a future on the Consumer Price Index. Dixon had made not one smart play in his life but half a dozen. He was regarded with the usual mix of awe and distaste in the financial community. A maverick. A shark. Shrewd.

Unreliable. But talented. He had fierce enemies and many admirers.

"Who are these customers, Dixon? What do they have,in common?"

"Nothing. Nada. Different commodities. Different strategies. The only thing I'd say is, they're probably the five biggest customers I have." He uttered this with considerable resentment. The government was attacking at a vulnerable spot.

"And what have you to do with these accounts Dixon?"

"Not much. Those are big trades they're looking at," said Dixon.

"House rule is that I'm notified on anything that size. But that's it."

"Big trades?" asked Stern.

"Look at 'em," said Dixon. "Everything there is fifteen hundred contracts, two thousand contracts. Pit's gonna jump with those kinds of orders."

"Explain, please."

"You understand this, Stern. Take pork bellies. One car of bellies-one contract-is 40,000 pounds. I get a customer who wants fifteen hundred cars, that's a whole lot of bacon. The price is gonna take off like a rocket. It's supply and demand. You know, we try every gimmick known to man to slow things down. We lay off trades to friendly brokers. We buy the cash commodity and sell the future. But you can't stop it completely. It's like changing nature."

"Ah-ha," said Stern. So they did know something. The government was investigating large trades, trades which MD handled, trades which Dixon knew about, trades which, when placed, had had a significant impact on prices. "And is there nothing else which occurs to you?"

Dixon shook his head gravely. Nope, nothing, he didn't know a thing.

Stern laid his thick finger again across his lips.

Even with this news, it remained difficult to assay the government's suspicions. The records called for could relate to a number of schemes, particularly on the futures exchanges where knavery of all kinds was rife. Were Stern to guess, his estimate would be that Ms. Klonsky and her colleagues suspected market manipulation of some kind.

There were all manner of baroque ploys. A month or two ago, the papers had been full of stories about a foreign government with a failing sugar crop which had tried to force down the world sugar-futures price so the government could buy and fulfill upcoming delivery commitments more cheaply. They had circulated authoritative rumors that something tailed 'left-handed sugar,' a no-calorie form of natural sugar, had been perfected. For three days prices plummeted, then the futures commissions merchants across the country had discerned what was occurring and bid prices out of sight. Dixon, perhaps, had found some less obvious-but equally illegal-way to tamper with the markets' responses to these huge transactions he handled for his customers.

Dixon, however, continued to point up signs that he was in the clear.

"That subpoena doesn't even mention my name," he said.

"That has to be good, doesn't it?"

The absence was superficially encouraging. But there would have been little reason for the agents to be so obvious in their pursuit of Dixon last week-or to have gone out of town with their initial subpoenas-unless they believed he would quickly recognize the meaning of these inquiries. His client, Stern decided, was keeping things to himself-not unprecedented in these circumstances, and, Lord knew, the general course with Dixon. Today, however, was probably not the time to press, On his feet again, Stern, as he often did, took a moment to stare from his window in Morgan Towers, the city's tallest building, down to the Kindle River, whose swift waters ran here, through various tributaries, into the Mississippi.

With its shining, silvery face, the Kindle had been first named La Chandelle, the candle, by the French trader JeanBaptiste DuSable, who had tarried here on his way from New Orleans to what eventually became Chicago. DuSable's trading post, named after him, was now by far the largest part of a consolidated tri-city municipality of almost a million. Just south, where the river branched and rejoined, two other towns, Moreland, settled by the English, who had Anglicized the river's name, and Kewahnee, once an Indian encampment, had grown up from barge ports and had been merged into DuSable in the mid-1930s. In this era of urban sprawl, the entire area, including the tri-cities, was usually referred to by the name of the surrounding county-Kindle-a hodgepodge megalopolis of city and suburb, prosperity and blight, home in total to almost three million people. The willingness of locals to see their city known by the county name had probably not been dampened by the rediscovery during the 1960s that DuSable, traditionally referred to as the first white man in these parts, had been black.

Dixon was speaking behind him. He wanted to know if they were obliged to turn over all the records the government required. Most of the trades, given their size, had been executed in Chicago, and the search for documents would occupy days for Margy Allison, Dixon's executive vice president, who ran the Chicago office, three hundred miles from here.

"I see no choice," said Stern. "I shall complain to the prosecutor bitterly about the burdens of production. Tell her your business will be brought to a standstill. And I must have some time to look at the records, to see if I can make out what the government suspects. But eventually we must produce. We cannot challenge the subpoena as overbroad -it is quite precise."

"Whatever happened to the Fifth Amendment?" That was Dixon for you, cavalier where. other executives would.stammer before the words could come from their mouths.

Stern explained that the subpoena sought records which belonged in law to the corporation rather than to Dixon himself. The corporation, not an individual, had no Fifth Amendment rights. Dixon could refuse to testify about the records; but the papers themselves would have to be handed over, Claudia buzzed. She had lOonsky. Dixon, in the meanwhile, chewed on his cigar and puzzled over the mysterious logic of the law.

"Ms. loonsky," he said.

"Mr. Stern," she answered. A clear, self-assured voice.

They had never met, but Stern had seen her in the courtroom when she approached the podium for status calls. She was in her late thirties, Stern thought, a robust-appearing woman with broad shoulders, dark hair, strong hands. In court, she had emitted the forbidding persona familiar to many assistants, including a number of the women; eager to prove themselves as tough as their male counterparts, they often came across as humorless and driven, citizens of the late century who saw bmtaiity as a necessary mode in female style. It was largely a pose, but under the circumstances, Stern saw little reason to be refn, ing.

"Two of your storm troopers arrived at my home a few days ago with a subpoena for my client Dixon Harmell."

An instant passed without sound. Storm troopers. Stern himself was surprised by the ruffian edge in his voice. Ordinarily, he prided himself on his civility. In the mehnfime, Dixon, across the desk, was beaming. He had rarely been exposed to Stern when he was so pointed.

"Perhaps I need to explain the circumstances," Stern said.

"I understand the circumstances," Ms. lOonsky shot back.

She was bristling already.

No doubt, everyone understood the circumstances, Stern thought. He had many friends in the prosecufmg offices, both the Kindle County Prosecutor's and the United States Attorney's Office, but they were adversaries, too-and human. It was delicious gossip. Did you hear?

About Stern's wife? Here again, as he contemplated this, the world seemed to open, and the force of painful emotion rushed up at him out of his own breast. How, how was it possible? It was such an unreasoning mess. He closed his eyes, which were burning, and he could sense Dixon stirring. It was a sad comment that his shame, more than anything else, brought on these moments, and that the same pride carded him throughmsome forward-straggling thing impelled him to go on with dignity. Where, damn it, was his cigar? When he spoke, there was no tremor in his voice.

'If you understood, I must say I find your conduct deplorable. Perhaps I should speak to Mr. Sennett." Stan Sennett, a career prosecutor, had been U.S. Attorney for two or three years now. He was the toughest and most humorless of all, and far from an ally of Stern's. Sennett was unlikely to become exercisedwthe agents, after all, were just doing their jobswbut Klonsky could not say that.

"Look, Mr. Stern, this was an honest mistake. It might even be," she said, "that if you gave me half a chance, I would have apologized. I've been calling you for days now."

Stern, rebuked, still chose not to answer. She had een an Assistant for only a year, following a clerkship in the U.S. court of appeals, and, presumably, a distinguished law school career, and he sensed an advantage in her inexperience. She had acquired a reputation as bright but phlegmatic, even flaky, the kind to blow hot and cold. He did not wish to lend her any reassurance.

"Tell me, Ms. Klonsky," said Stern, shifting the subject,

"what is the nature of your investigation?" ',I'd prefer not to say right now."

"Are other agencies involved besides the FBI?" Stern wanted to know about the IRS in. particular. They were always. trouble. And if the federal regulators were in-volvedmthe Commodities Futures Trading Commission he might gain some idea hous gossip. Did you hear? About Stern's wife? Here again, as he contemplated this, the world seemed to open, and the force of painful emotion rushed up at him out of his own breast. How, how was it possible? It was such an unreasoning mess. He closed his eyes, which were burning, and he could sense Dixon stirring. It was a sad comment that his shame, more than anything else, brought on these moments, and that the same pride carded him throughmsome forward-straggling thing impelled him to go on with dignity. Where, damn it, was his cigar? When he spoke, there was no tremor in his voice.

'If you understood, I must say I find your conduct deplorable. Perhaps I should speak to Mr. Sennett." Stan Sennett, a career prosecutor, had been U.S. Attorney for two or three years now. He was the toughest and most humorless of all, and far from an ally of Stern's. Sennett was unlikely to become exercisedwthe agents, after all, were just doing their jobswbut Klonsky could not say that.

"Look, Mr. Stern, this was an honest mistake. It might even be," she said, "that if you gave me half a chance, I would have apologized. I've been calling you for days now."

Stern, rebuked, still chose not to answer. She had een an Assistant for only a year, following a clerkship in the U.S. court of appeals, and, presumably, a distinguished law school career, and he sensed an advantage in her inexperience. She had acquired a reputation as bright but phlegmatic, even flaky, the kind to blow hot and cold. He did not wish to lend her any reassurance.

"Tell me, Ms. Klonsky," said Stern, shifting the subject,

"what is the nature of your investigation?" ',I'd prefer not to say right now."

"Are other agencies involved besides the FBI?" Stern wanted to know about the IRS in. particular. They were always. trouble. And if the federal regulators were in-volvedmthe Commodities Futures Trading Commission he might gain some idea how the charges originated.

"I can't answer," said Klonsky.

"What about Mr. Hartnell? Are you willing to say whether or not he is a target?"

She paused, being careful. Klonsky had had her share of bad experiences with the defense bar already.

"I can't tell you he's not."

"I see." Stern thought. "When will you be able to be more precise about his status?"

"Perhaps after we look at the documents we've subpoenaed.

They're due today."

"Well, I am afraid that we shall be a bit late providing them. You are basically asking that Mr. Hartnell and his employees stop running his business and look for records for weeks."

"It's not that bad," said Klonsky.

"I am assured it is."

Klonsky sighed. She was tiring of the conversation. "How long?"

"We need an extension of at least three weeks," he said.

Dixon was looking on approvingly. He had his cigar tucked in his cheek, and a large enthusiastic smile. This was better than TV. "No, I am sorry," said Stern, "I had not consulted Mr. Hartnell. Best make it a full month."

"That's ridiculous. These records are probably in a few cabinets."

"I am informed otherwise, Ms. Klonsky. This is a federal grand jury investigation. I represent both the corpg. rotion and Mr. Hartnell personally. You will not identify your targets. I must be alert to conflicts at the same time that I try to be certain that our compliance with your subpoena is exact. I am required to make at least one trip to Chicago, if not more, to do that. If you wish to limit your requests, or tell me what is needed first, I would try toblige." She was silent. If she narrowed her request, she might disclose her interests. "If you think I am being unreasonable, make a motion to compel. I shall be happy to explain all this to Judge Winchell."

Chief Judge Winchell, a former prosecutor, would rule for the government eventually. But no judge in the federal courthouse would set strict deadlines for Sandy Stern this month. His personal circumstances required no mention here.

Ms. Klonsky knew the score.

"No further extensions," she said. She gave him a date-the second of May. "I'll send you a letter."

"Very well," said Stern. "I shall look forward to meeting with you, after you have reviewed what we provide."

"Right," she said.

"And, of course, Ms. Klonsky, I do accept your apology."

Klonsky, pierced, hesitated, but thought better of whatever she had in mind.

"Right," she said again and clapped down the phone. Stern could not restrain his satisfaction. That had gone well.

Ms. Klonsky was high-strung and ill-humored and he had gotten the better of her. When the month was over, they could ask for another week or two, if need be.

Dixon was laughing, delighted to see the government bashed.

He asked what she had told him.

"Very little. Except that she would not rule out the possibility that you are a target of' her investigation."

Dixon drew on his cigar. He was instantly far more subdued, but he shrugged gallantly.

"You slowed her down," he said.

Stern listed what he would be doing near-term: the other customers he would contact; his trip to Chicago tO look over the records for the subpoena as soon as they had been gathered.

"In the meantime, you know how these things go, Dixon.

Discuss this with no one but me. Act on the assumption that everyone around you is wearing a tape recorder. It would not be surprising if one of them is."

For the first time today, Dixon briefly sported a look of discomfort: he buttoned up his lips and shook his head Then he ground out the cigar and stood.

"I'm sorry this comes up now, Stern," Dixon said. "I hate to be the thing that drags you back into the office."

Stern raised a hand. "I suspect I shall be here a good deal." He said this somewhat heroically, but that lost feeling came over him again. He had no notion, really, of the immediate future, or even, for that matter, of what lay.further ahead. A few images had stirred themselves: figures of stillness and order. He would mind the office and his clients in a state of settled dotage.

Dixon, of course, had different thoughts in mind.

"Oh, you'll have other distractions eventually." He glanced down at his stubbed cigar with the most minute salaciousness. Stern recoiled a bit, but he knew that Dixon was merely crnude enough to say what others were thinking.

Even in tear-stained eyes thick with grief and sympathy, Stern could see he was already differently regarded. A single man. Certain facts were elemental. In his present mood, Stern was persistently repelled by contemplation of this subject. More to the point, he knew that his circumstance was hardly ordinary. What woman of even modest sense would be eager for the company of a man with whom another female had literally found life not worth living?

"I assume this will cost a fortune," Dixon said as he picked his sport coat off the sofa arm.

"It will be expensive," said Stern, barely able to suppress a smile.

Dixon was rich. His business was worth millions, and he paid himself a seven-figure salary each year, but he maintained the typical frugality of a man. who had snuggled. He groused unremittingly about the appalling level of his legal fees. But years ago, in Stern's salad days, during that period when Dixon was still attempting to win Stern back after. marrying Silvia, Dixon had obligingly urged Stern to bill him like any other client, and Stern had never forgotten the instruction. One more peculiar harmonic had been established between them. Dixon paid for Stern's tolerance, and Stern was willing to allow it to be purchased. And always the concern on either side about who was getting the better of the deal. "I can leave some of the documents to the younger lawyers to examine," Stern said, "but we know too little. I must do most of this myself. Ms. Klonsky will take priority over other matters."

"Please," said Dixon. Once more, he looked around the room.

The weight of things had begun to settle on him. He was unhappy. "I don't want to fuck around with this."

Stern considered his brother-in-law with his manifold secrets. Clara's voice, as ever now, came into his mind.

Little as she cared for Dixon, she had never seemed surprised by their alliance. Stern had complained often that he did not know Dixon, was not sure he had ever gotten through to him, found the man at times as elusive as smoke.

'I imagine,' she had answered, 'that he says the same of you.

In the mock-Chippendale reception room of Barstow Zahn and Hanks,.a huge law firm, Stern sat with his children, awaiting Cal Hopkinson, with whom they had an appointment to learn the details of Clara's will.

Stern regarded this event with the same maelstrom of contradictory emotions that lingering concentration on Clara's wealth had always prompted, but for the moment most of that was lost in the strong feelingsregretful, fond, salutary-of having his children near at hand.

Tomorrow, Marta would leave. She had stayed a week following the funeral. Work was slow, she said, and Kate and she had planned to sift through Clara's things.

Irstead, Marta had spent hours alone, looking dreamily about her own room, poking through the house as if it were a new location. She had already mentioned that she would need to return soon to finish.

With the departure of Marta-the child who liked him best, or, more correctly, feared him least-Stern would be alone.

His children had offered him what comfort they could in the last weeks, but he felt them drawn away by the onrush of their lives and their plain bewilderment at having to deal with him on their own. With all the children, Clara had been his mediator; they had far less direct experience of him. Oh, he had cared. Deeply. But, in his compulsive orderly way, in its place. No matter how late he returned home from the office, in a routine as fixed as prayer, he received from Clara each night news of the children, the disturbances and triumphs, the unfolding of each small life. Somehow, at the time, he thought they would know that a portion of her interest was his own. When they reached their teens, he was baffled and stung as, one by one, they took up attitudes which silently accused him of being aloof, un-involved. The lines of attachment were to their mother. As in old-time law, he saw now, the benefits ran only to those in direct contact, in privity.

Cal appeared at last. He shook everybody's hand, precise as a clockmaker, and apologized for the wait. Cal was an unremarkable fellow-temperate, genial, a journeyman of sorts. The most impressive thing about him was a single physical feature: an inch or so behind his left ear, just below his hairline, was a round depression that darkened and appeared to head straight into his skull, as if someone had stuck a little finger into a ball of dough. The mark looked for all the world like a bullet hole-and that was what it was, a war wound from Korea, a medical marvel. The shot had passed straight through, with the only damage to Cal's outer skull. Once noticed, it was the kind of thing you could not keep your eyes off of. Stern spent his meetings with Cal awaiting the instant when he would turn away and Stern could stare freely.

Cal ushered the family toward a wainscoted conference room.

Stern was the last to enter, and Cal detained him at the door.

"Before we start, Sandy- As I told you on the phone last week, there's a question or two I wanted to ask you about Clara's estate some peculiarities I imagine you're aware of."

"Me?" Over the years, his commeme with Clara about her finances was limited to those rare occasions when she raised the subject, and usually he referred her to her bankers or attorneys.

They were interrupted by the arrival of Cal's associate, a young woman with spectacles and straight brown hair named Van Zandt. Marta poked her head out the door to see what the holdup was, and at Stern's suggestion they all proceeded into the conference room, where they were seated around the long walnut table. Little plate engravings, precious caricatures of various legal scenes, ringed the walls, and there was the usual majestic view of the city-the law finns and the corporate headquarters gobbled up all the best space. Harry Fagel had tried years ago to lure Stern 'into this modern Versailles, but he would have none of it.

"I think," said Cal, "I should just start at the beginning and tell you all about Clara's estate."

Stern nodded. Marta nodded. Everyone agreed this was appropriate. Van Zandt handed Cal a document-a memo, no doubt, summarizing the will-and Cal solemnly began. Like most sophisticated estate plans, Clara's had been composed with the first eye on the tax laws. As the result of her father's providence decades before, and careful advice,since, Clara had been able to dispose of a significant fortune without the payment of a single penny in federal estate tax. Cal disclosed this fact with a refulgent smile of minor triumph.

The great bulk of Clara's wealth had never been' transferred to her directly. Her inheritance from her father, mother, and maiden aunt had been placed in a series of trusts that Henry Mittlet had established at the River National Bank; these trusts would endure for generations, spilling out income and preserving corpus, in the venerated fashion of old money. When he was younger, Stern had believed that Henry had made these elaborate arrangements because he feared that his son-in-law was some kind of bounder. Now Stern knew that Henry's faith was simpler: any discretion, no matter how constrained, was liable to abuse. This brass-knuckled cynicism had made Henry a formidable attorney, although the same qualities of character also probably contributed to his daughter's lifetime discontent with him. Clara's fiercest internal struggles had been with her father, a clever, domineering, willful man.

Now Clara was interred in the synagogue's small cemetery, in the sight of the large monument that Henry Mittlet had erected to himself and Clara's mother, Pauline, by the terms of the same will that had created the trusts. The earth reclaimed them all, and their passions, while their bank accounts survived. Stern, never without an appreciation for money, nonetheless contemplated these sad facts with amazement.

"According to our notes," said Cal, "when we revised the estate plan after the most recent changes in the tax laws, the trusts were valued at a little over $7 million. Clara's own estate," he said, referring to the interest spun off to Clara by the trusts over the years which, largely unspent, had been invested for her by the bank, "was in the neighborhood of $2 million. Of course, there have been changes, with the stock market crash and other financial developments, but you have the general picture." Cal had taken his time getting to this point, and you could see that he enjoyed the effect the numbers had on his listeners. Kate's eyes widened and Peter whistled out loud. It was something of an achievement, Stern determined, to have kept the children in the dark about this. He himself was neither shocked by the figures nor far off in the estimates he had made on the way down today, or periodically over the years, concerning these dollars he had seldom deigned to touch.

Clara's will left simple directions. Stern was named executor. The rights to the trusts' income passed in equal divided portions to the children-"share and share alike," as Cal put it. Out of Clara's own fortune, a number of substantial gifts were made to the children and charities; the rest was left in trust for Stern to use as he saw fit.

Having outlined the will, Cal bored in on the details. As he described the provisions, he used the third person-"spouse Alejandro,"

"children Peter, Marta, and Kate" -and did not bother to translate many of the technical terms.

Nonetheless, the inevitable calculations seemed after an interval to take place around the table, and Kate suddenly began to weep. The children could expect to divide among themselves an annual income of about half a million dollars. To this was added a cash bequest to each of $200,000, not to mention the prospect of a good deal more when Stern departed the scene. It occurred to Stern that if he could keep Dixon out of trouble long enough, he would probably be a fitting financial adviser for his nieces and nephew. As to himself, Stern, for reasons he could hardly articulate, felt few compunctions about accepting his wife's gift; perhaps, perversely, because his own estate had grown well past the point where he needed it; or because, after all this, he felt it was his due. By Stern's quick estimate, the residue of the estate left in trust for him-what would remain of Clara's stocks and bonds at the bank-would total about a million dollars.

Going through the details of the trust provision, Cal paused to eye Stern.

"Clara directed specifically that you would remain the beneficiary for life, regardless of any remarriage."

"I see," said Stern.

Cal smiled briefly, delighted by this exacting manag.ement of the future, but the children seemed nonplussed by their mother's forethought-a pulse of discomfort traveled the room. None of them had yet raised this subject with Stern.

No question they had thought of it; everyone had. Even Clara. But it was disconcerting to one and all-to Stern, as wellinto learn that she had formally resolved any objections:

Cal had gone on, but Stern interrupted.

"Is it this trust for me, Cal, that prompted these concerns you raised in the hall?" On reflection, it occurred to him why Cal wanted to speak one-on-one. There might be some conflict btween Clara's desire tprovide for him and the restrictions Henry Mittlet had set, down decades ago. "i'm not concerned, Sandy. I have a question."

"But about this trust for my benefit?"

"More or less. Just give me a moment." Cai dandled a hand; he was too fussy to step out of order. He had been discussing Clara's charitable gifts and he returned to the subject. Kate was crying with fervor. Van Zandt, the bigfirm associate, ever prepared, had come armed with a box of tissue and offered another to Kate, while Cal continued with the details he adored.

"Clara also made a bequest of $500,000 to the Riverside Reformed Congregation, half of which she asked to be used to support the Inner-City Arts Program."

The children took this in, still dazzled by the fountain of money spilling forth, but Stern-who might otherwise have received the funds-found Clara's charity characteristic and commendable. For Stern, the notion of himself as a Jew was an absolute and fixed point of reference, the North Pole, as it were, on has personal compass, against which all other issues of identity were judged. Clara and he shared a belief in the importance of the children's religious education, the observance of the High Holy Days.

But her religion was far more institutionalized than his.

To Clara the synagogue which her maternal grandparents had helped found was a significant anchor, and against all reason she was devoted to the rabbi, a smug self-promoter, and to his many community projects. At Rabbi Weigel's urging, Clara had taught music appreciation as a volunteer for three or four years in the Inner-City Arts Program, an interfaith effort to enhance the curricula of DuSable's most impoverished schools. Clara admired the culture and civility of the well-to-do, but not lheir sense of privilege. She had always been a lerson of conscience.

"That's more or less it." Cal was done. He put down his memo and looked about the table, as if for applause.

"The problem," said Stern, referring once more to the trust Clara had left for him. Cal already seemed to have forgotten.

"Oh," said Cal. "As I say, just one question, Sandy: we've been wondering what became of it."

"It?"

"The money. You understand." Cal leaned forward. "Don't you?

"I had taken it, Cal, from the figures you'd been using that there was another million in the estate." As soon as the words were out he regretted them, particularly the precision with which he seemed to have calculated.

. "Well, not quite," said Cal, mincing as ever. "Clara's holdings haven't made it all the way back from the crash.

But it's the $850,000 that's gone from her investment account I'm talking about."

No one, for a moment, said anything. "Gone?" asked Stern finally.

"Removed," said Cal.

The two men considered each other.

"You're not telling us there has been a defalcation, are you?"

"Lord, no!" Cal turned to Van Zandt, as if for help. "We get a consolidated statement from the bank each quarter on the trusts and Clara's investment account. When we heard the news, we looked, of course, and I saw that this sum had been withdrawn last month. I assumed, Sandy-I was certain she would have discussed {his with you."

Cal paused. "I called."

Stern only now understood.

"You believe Clara spent this money?"

"What else? I took it she'd made an investment on her own, bought a summer home-", Cal's hand trailed off. Marta spoke up.

"What would she do with $850,000? That's bizarre."

Stern, strongly inclined to agree, began to add his voice to Marta's.

But some better instinct saved him. He was-. rising to a treacherous pass. He had no business predicting What was possible or impossible with Clara in these latter days. Perhaps she was funding a hippie sect. on of conscience.

"That's more or less it." Cal was done. He put down his memo and looked about the table, as if for applause.

"The problem," said Stern, referring once more to the trust Clara had left for him. Cal already seemed to have forgotten.

"Oh," said Cal. "As I say, just one question, Sandy: we've been wondering what became of it."

"It?"

"The money. You understand." Cal leaned forward. "Don't you?

"I had taken it, Cal, from the figures you'd been using that there was another million in the estate." As soon as the words were out he regretted them, particularly the precision with which he seemed to have calculated.

. "Well, not quite," said Cal, mincing as ever. "Clara's holdings haven't made it all the way back from the crash.

But it's the $850,000 that's gone from her investment account I'm talking about."

No one, for a moment, said anything. "Gone?" asked Stern finally.

"Removed," said Cal.

The two men considered each other.

"You're not telling us there has been a defalcation, are you?"

"Lord, no!" Cal turned to Van Zandt, as if for help. "We get a consolidated statement from the bank each quarter on the trusts and Clara's investment account. When we heard the news, we looked, of course, and I saw that this sum had been withdrawn last month. I assumed, Sandy-I was certain she would have discussed {his with you."

Cal paused. "I called."

Stern only now understood.

"You believe Clara spent this money?"

"What else? I took it she'd made an investment on her own, bought a summer home-", Cal's hand trailed off. Marta spoke up.

"What would she do with $850,000? That's bizarre."

Stern, strongly inclined to agree, began to add his voice to Marta's.

But some better instinct saved him. He was-. rising to a treacherous pass. He had no business predicting What was possible or impossible with Clara in these latter days. Perhaps she was funding a hippie sect. Or feeding a drug habit.

"Cal, I am not certain I understand how this could have occurred."

"I presume Clara went to the bank, dissolved the great bulk of her portfolio, and took the money. It was hers, after all."

".Have you checked with them?" "Sandy, I wanted to speak with you first. That's why I called." Cal was in excruciating discomfort.

Probate lawyers dealt with a world of fixed intentions. They were not suited to surprise.

Clearly, he feared that the family might blame him, and had descended already to the sweaty depths of lawyerly justification. "I took it you would know about this. It didn't-occur to me-" Cal cut himself off. He seemed to recogffze that he was merely doing harm by reemphasizing how shocked he was that Clara had acted without consulting her husband.

Cal's sudden-and uncharacteristic-sensitivity seemed by some improbable logic to awaken Stern to his own distress. He was, in fact, reeling.

Oh, it was absolutely childish, a response greedy as a six-year-old's, but he could not stifle the thought. She had seen to the children; she had fattened the rabbi and his favorite charity. Only he, in her last days, had been deprived.

Shame and anguish, the same venomous mix, rose in him once more.

Cal had gone on talking.

"Now that you tell me you have no idea What this is about, I'll call Jack Wagoner over at the bank at once. We'll track it all downi The probate court will require it."

These vows seemed to do tittle to comfort Cal himself who sat there worried and deflated, licking his lips. He made it sound as if the money had run away on its own.

"When was this transaction?" asked Marta. "How late in the month?" Cal turned to Van Zandt, who had the date -five days before the afternoon Stern had come home to find Clara. Van Zandt handed a paper, the statement, to Marta; she then offered it to her father, who pushed it aside. The thought of embezzlement, some kind of foul play, occurred to Stern again, but that was unlikely-worse, absurd.

He looked up at a sound: Kate had begun burbling again.

Twenty-six years old, with her face tear-blotched and her makeup washed away, she looked half her age. She lolled back on the arm of her brother, who had been largely silent throughout, still laid low by the contemplation of his mother. Stern, in his present state, found himself easily irritated by Peter's solicitude. How was it, he wondered, that the women always seemed to turn to Peter? None of them would tell you that he was untroubled; but they all seemed to adore his quiet sulkiness. He was available. Reliable. A person you could count on.

Peter had undermined his father in the most insidious wayby exceeding him. By being what it mattered most that Stern was not. This sudden incisive view into the odd mechanisms of his family did nothing to stem the rising tide of his grief.

He shook hands with Cal and Van Zandt. His children stood, too, but seemed to have no idea how to proceed, whether to stay or go, or even if they ought to move. Stern realized suddenly that he was the-center of attention. They were all watching him-his children, the lawyers-looking for signals. What to do, how to respond. But he had little to offer by way of instruction. Here in these elegant surroundings his soul again plummeted toward misery. Suicide.

Money. Disease. Clara had left behind an unreconstructed mess.

He was accosted, more or less unaccountably, by a memory of her, as he happened to have observed her one day on her way to her teaching assignment in the Inner-City Arts Program.

Stern and the children had long expressed concerns for her safety, but Clara twice a week drove her Seville t the eity's depleted neighborhoods for the morning. Coming by to swap cars so he could take hers to the shop, Stern had caught sight of her marching boldly to the school doors-a determined middle-aged lady with a noble look,.reddish hair, a substantial bosom. She carried no purse. Her hands were jammed into the pockets of her plain coat and her head was erect, as she ignored occasional quarreling glances. In that split-second, he recognized something essential: not that she was fearless, but rather that he had seen the same expression often before and that for Clara every trip beyond her home apparently required the same effort to master her anxieties. There were all those inner demons which she conquered only by persuading herself they were not real. Somehow, at the end, they had come to life, surrounded and devoured her. A taciturn, mannerly, dignified woman, Clara Stern had gotten herself caught in the world's muck, and it had sucked her down, like one of those prehistoric creatures whose bones were found in the tar pits.

He knew that sooner or later he was going to stumble into the very heart of it, too, enduring all the same nightmare horrors she had.

They reached the street before Kate, briefly under control, began crying once more.

How does one give up a life? At night, Stern wandered in the large house, looking for answers. In the closets, much of Clara's clothing still hung. With the doors thrown open, he stared at the garments; they seemed as mystical as relics. The empty hangers, remaining from the items Kate and Marta had packed away, waited now like the skeletons of birds.

After Marta left, he moved into her room to sleep. His own bedroom seemed disturbed, torn apart; here he felt by some bare margin more at peace. When he entered the master bedroom to gather up an item or two, the stillness was overpowering. With even a few days of disuse, a shrouded, dusty quietude had come over it. It' was like examining a photograph: a bounded portion of an unreach-able past, inanimate but preserved. He took his socks, his collar stays, and rushed back out the door.

He was shown a ceremonial kindness by neighbors and families from the synagogue. The suicide's spouse was too gruesome for the dinner table-how do you explain to the children? But the women came by with pots of stew, various chicken dishes, for him to consume alone. The freezer was jammed. Most evenings, he wOUld place something in the microwave, open a bottle of wine, eat and drink, and roam about the household.

On the refrigerator was a note to phone Nate Cawley. He had tried a number of times, hoping to dispel the question of Clara's medical bill, but Nate, busy after his week away at the medical conference in Canada, had not yet responded.

Softened by the wine, Stern took calls-friends or Marta or Kate checking intoand then resumed his movements. He sat in chairs he had not bothered with for years. He went from room to room, stared at the furnishings, the pictures. This tiny porcelain bird. Where had it come from?

Occasionally he was asked out, generally in groups, and usually by other lawyers, a kind of conventional solicitude that reflected.more his stature in the legal community than.any particular intimacy, This was the sort of social commerce which the Sterns had always minimized.

Clara, with her quiet, firm manner, had no interest in people or occasions that offered little substance. Now free to go on his own, he could not bring himself to the pretense these encounters would demand, an evening of vagrant chatter in which everyone would stare at him with unvoiced questions about his wife.

The only outings which he made willingly were to be with his children.

In the first two weeks after Marta's departme, he went to Kate's house twice for dinner, and she and John met him once downtown. But the suburban sprawl of Kindle County meant that they were almost an hour apart, and in the work week the travel was exhausting, particularly for Kate, who was wearied by the early phases of her pregnancy. And even with her, he sensed that her attentions required some self-conscious effort; Kate, always unreflec-firely loving, now seemed vaguely frightened to deal with her father on his own.

Peter, no doubt acting at the instruction of his sisters, also called, and at Stern's suggestion they had dinner one evening. "Something quick," as Peter put it, accepting.

They met at a delicatessen downtown, but Clara's absence loomed between them, enormous, agonizing. She had been pained by their estrangement-and for her sake they had always done their best. Now it was suddenly clear that the tie had not survived her; they were both playing roles in a production which had closed. After a few minutes ill at ease they lapsed completely into silence amid the ringing plates and voices of the restaurant.

So for the most part he was alone. One night there was an unexpected interruption. A woman from the neighborhood phoned, claiming to be a friend of Clara's. She went on without a pause to describe her husband's repeated failures in the bedroom:-the man had many problems-and ended their conversation saying, simply, "Call me." Stern, of course, did not. Yet the incident provoked a storm of odd feeling, He had heard the same stories as everyone else, of the unattached females who accosted widowers with striking boldness, but given the circumstances of Clara's passing, he was sure that would not happen to him. Oh, perhaps there had been a card'or two, a few calls of sympathy from widows and divorcees of somewhat remote connection. Yet, suddenly, something seemed clarified. People were lonely; women, in particular, were lonely like him. But who knew about all of that-women? Certainly not he. And to what purpose, anyway?

The thought of all this left him feeling worse, baffled and inept, stuck within himself, like something buried.

Whatever the distractions, these evenings in the end always found him roaming. He drank wine, told himself he would work, and wandered about the house. As soon as this routine began, he realized that this, not working, was the primary business of his day. He suffered terribly-at sea with tender recollections and volumes of harsh selfrecrimination-and yet he receded to these moments almost 'urgently, as the years swam over him.

His memory of the past was of a million pages observed by a single incandescent light, and of doors falling open as he arrived, burdened with heavy cases, in a hundred different courtrooms. In the decades he recalled, it was always late at night or the morning of a trial, his emotions an intense admixture of determined concentration and stilled anxiety.

He puzzled in his hours at home; his children spoke and went unanswered as he nursed motions in his mind, a particular careful tack for cross-examination, and reached forth with a tender hand, meant to hush them, while he thought of something else. Oh, he had achieved. He was in his office with his cigars, his books, his phone, his clients, from seven in the morning until nine or ten at night. He came home then to a quiet house. The children were bedded down, gone. Clara waited with a book on her lap in the quiet living room, the aroma of his warming dinner through the house: an image of order, resourcefulness, sufficiency.

Was he persuaded by that pose? For how many years had he comforted himself with the thought that they did not quarrel, that she seldom voiced the Criticisms of other wives? That would have struck Clara as common. True, he treated her with unsparing courtesy. He rarely disregarded her wishes. But, of course, he had chosen wisely, for she seldom spoke up in her own behalf. Oh, they had had their rough spots.

Who didn't? The period when the children had gone off to college was one of intense disruption for Clara. When Kate, the last, departed, there were times when he found her in the dark, in tears. It was there each day, the quiet insinuation, throbbing like a bruise: she did not like her life, no part of it. When he tried to soothe her, she turned on him openly, livid with decades of previously unspoken complaints. But they had stumbled on, and Clara had eventually reverted to her strict self-control, her taut smile, and her insistence that she was bearing up. She was like some Swedish minister enduring existential torment in silence and low light.

On these evenings when he wandered, the wine made him sleepy-he had never been a drinker. He jolted awake to find himself upright in a chair, dry-mouthed, the lights blazing. One night a particularly vivid dream startled him out of his sleep. He was bathing at Wolf's Point in the Kindle River. Unnoticed, the water grew turbulent, and soon he was kicking and struggling while the white froth seethed about him. On the shore, amid the trees, his mother, father, and older brother, dressed in heavy dark woolens, watched, each immobile as a statue. Although he was moving backwards, he somehow Caught sight of Clam and the children through the bare branches. They were in a schoolroom. The children were seated at desks while Clara, with a finger raised, offered instruction. Churning his limbs in the powerful waters, he called, but they did not notice him fighting off the current, being driven farther and farther away.

Fiona Cawley, his next-door neighbor, greeted him, highball glass in hand.

"Sandy!" she cried. From the first. word, Stern knew she was drunk.

Fiona let her front door fly open and stood with her arms thrown wide, backlit by the burning lamps of the living room. Nate, Fiona's husband, also drank more than he should have. Perhaps that was what kept them together. For 'the present, Stern was struck uncannily by a sudden understanding of what motivated Fiona. Loosened by the liquor, she was more attractive; her posture had an alluring pliancy. Clearly, she savored her liberty. She was handsomely dressed as ever in a robin's-egg knit suit that showed off her small figure to advantage. Her hair and makeup were flawless, and she wore jewelry for her evening at home, a large diamond piece between the clavicles. Fiona spent her days caring for herself. She shooed the dog away and pulled Stern into the house by the hand, assuring him, in response to his question, that he was not interrupting dinner. She seemed delighted to see him.

"How are you, Sandy." She touched his face, a drunken, excessive gesture. "We think so much about you." Already he had taken up certain inscrutable mannerisms in response. He had always been good at this, wordless flexing of the brow to suggest complex feelings. Now his look was more pinched, more allusive of pain.

"I am as well as could be expected, Fiona. Is Nate about for just a moment? I was hoping to have a word with him." A personal appearance, Stern had decided, might catch Nate's attention. After hearing from Cal, Stern was determined to be more direct in attempting to unravel Clara's knotted affairs.

"Hasn't he called you? I gave him the message twenty times.

Well, he's out for the evening, Sandy, but stay for a second.-Have a drink with me. There's something I wanted to ask you about. I'm glad you're here."

Without awaiting an answer, she walked halfway down the hall to drive the dog back to the kitchen. Fiona was one of those people who always got what they wanted. She'd given him no chance to make an excuse.

For nineteen years, the Sterns had lived beside the Cawleys. They had watched the Cawleys' modern ranch go through three separate expansions, so that it now wore a somewhat awkward-looking second story, resembling a small top hat on a large-headed man. They had witnessed the coming of age of 'the Cawley children, both of whom were now in college.

They had enjoyed weekend conversations over the fence; an occasional drink or barbecue; two decades of holding mail and exchanging garden tools-but the Cawleys as a couple, like many others, were treated with reserve. Years before, with the retirement of the obstetrician who had delivered the Sterns' children, Clara had begun to visit Nate as her gynecologist and principal physician. In an emergency-a fall from a tree, a minor infection-he was the unofficial medical adviser to the entire family. Somehow, this professional relationship suited the Sterns well, since it offered a diplomatic means of enjoying Nate without Fiona.

As a doctor, he was knowledgeable, relaxed, and affable; at home, he was apt to be overwhelmed by his wife..Younger, Fiona had no doubt been a greatbeauty, and she was still a fine-looking woman, handsomely slender, with arresting light eyes that were almost yellow. But she was, in a phrase, hard to take: nervous, high-pitched, forever striving, striving.

Fiona nursed a hothouse conservatory of internal competitions and visible resentments. A good person to avoid.

"Highball?" Fiona asked now.

Stern put himself down on a love seat upholstered in a fabric of peonies. The Cawleys' living room was decorated in what Stern took to be Irish modern fashion, a selfconscious upgrading of American colonial style. The rooms were crowded with dark tables and commodes, most of the 'Pieces beset with shawls of lace. Fiona occupied herself in a small adjoining den, where she'd set up a tea cart with booze. She drank in elegance; the liquor was in cutglass snifters, and a large sterling-silver ice bucket had been set down like a centerpiece.

"Some dry sherry, if it is there, Fiona. On a cube of ice.

I really must do some work this evening."

"Work?" she asked. "Already? Sandy, you should give yourself a chance."

This was a frequent comment. But no one mentioned alternatives.

Danring? Nightclubs? He must have missed the boat somewhere. What was the etiquette of grieving? To disdain useful labor and watch addlepated fare on TV?

Really, Stern was tiring already of these conventional efforts to orchestrate his feelings.

As she handed him his drink, he asked if she was well. "Oh, me? I'm just ducky," said Fiona, and looked into her glass.

Stern recalled now that he had determined years ago, without reflection, not to ask Fiona such questions. The dog was pawing about and growling in the kitchen, where he had been shut up; you could hear his claws racing on the tiles. "What is it you wanted with Nate?" 'I merely had a question or two concerning Clara. Tell him I need only a moment. I wanted to know if he was treating her for any ailment."

"There was something," said Fiona. She used her glass and gestured with a rummy lushness.

"Was there?"

"He used to stop over there in the morning. She needed medication or something." Fiona waved her free hand about, suggesting the way Nate, probably, had put her off.

"Ah-ha." As he suspected. Stern held still. Then, fortitled to Iearn he was right, rose to go.

"Oh, you can't leave yet. Remember? I wanted to ask you somethings"

"Just so," said Stern. He had indeed forgotten.

She went into another room and returned with a small package.

"Sandy, you're probably not ready for this yet, but when you are, you have to let me introduce you to Phoebe Brower.

She is charming. And you'd have things in common. Her husband, you know-" Fiona fiddled a hand and wriggled her features. "Sleeping pills."

He could not quite remain silent-some sound escaped him, a noise of sorts. If Fiona were not drunk, or Fiona, he might have actually taken offense. Perhaps she thought he was starting a club. Unbearable Spouses Anonymous. He recognized the wrapper of the local camera store on the package Fiona was holding. Photos, too? There should be a sign up on his house. Decommissioned. Shipwrecked. Out of use.

"As you say, Fiona. It i's much too soon."

She shrugged. "I would Really, Stern was tiring already of these conventional efforts to orchestrate his feelings.

As she handed him his drink, he asked if she was well. "Oh, me? I'm just ducky," said Fiona, and looked into her glass.

Stern recalled now that he had determined years ago, without reflection, not to ask Fiona such questions. The dog was pawing about and growling in the kitchen, where he had been shut up; you could hear his claws racing on the tiles. "What is it you wanted with Nate?" 'I merely had a question or two concerning Clara. Tell him I need only a moment. I wanted to know if he was treating her for any ailment."

"There was something," said Fiona. She used her glass and gestured with a rummy lushness.

"Was there?"

"He used to stop over there in the morning. She needed medication or something." Fiona waved her free hand about, suggesting the way Nate, probably, had put her off.

"Ah-ha." As he suspected. Stern held still. Then, fortitled to Iearn he was right, rose to go.

"Oh, you can't leave yet. Remember? I wanted to ask you somethings"

"Just so," said Stern. He had indeed forgotten.

She went into another room and returned with a small package.

"Sandy, you're probably not ready for this yet, but when you are, you have to let me introduce you to Phoebe Brower.

She is charming. And you'd have things in common. Her husband, you know-" Fiona fiddled a hand and wriggled her features. "Sleeping pills."

He could not quite remain silent-some sound escaped him, a noise of sorts. If Fiona were not drunk, or Fiona, he might have actually taken offense. Perhaps she thought he was starting a club. Unbearable Spouses Anonymous. He recognized the wrapper of the local camera store on the package Fiona was holding. Photos, too? There should be a sign up on his house. Decommissioned. Shipwrecked. Out of use.

"As you say, Fiona. It i's much too soon."

She shrugged. "I would think that's something most men would look forward to. Being on the loose again."

Well, they had done fairly well until now, but Fiona was veering off the road. Stern slapped his thighs, a sign he was ready to be on his way.

"Perhaps you are correct, Fiona. Women always know better about men."

"Don't humor me, Sandy. You do that too much. I have a reason for asking."

She was masterful, no doubt about that. Stern sat silent, watching, as Fiona at last drew herself together.

"Sandy, I want you to look at this. I need to ask you a question." She offered the package.

"What is it, Fiona?"

She shook her head. Just look at it, she said. She had no wish to explain. Somehow he had a powerful sense of Clara's absence. This scene could never have taken place a few weeks ago. Fiona, even drank,. would have felt less free to prevail upon him.

When he opened the package, he found a videocassette.

"Watch it." She gestured through an arch toward the small adjoining family room. Stern, thinking of resisting further, abandoned the notion. With Fiona, there was no point. lie found the VCR and pushed the buttons; he was good with machines. The images jerked onto the screen in the midst of some sequence. The picture was of poor quality, homemade.

The skin tones were far too rosy. But they showed enough.

The first frames were of a young woman. She zoomed in and out of focus, but she remained naked as the day of her birth. She was slender and small-breasted-seated on a bed, and smiling at the camera in a harmless way. He was too taken aback at first to understand what consequence this naked woman could be to Fiona. But then he recognized Nate's voice on the sound track; the words were not clear, and Stern, as he stood there,.suddenly nipping at his sherry, had no wish to boost the volume and further intrude. He understood enough: Nate was the cameralilan.

Strangely, his first impulse was to feel sorry for his neighs, bor. How could he have done this to himself?. There was nothing particularly salacious about the girl's poses.

She crossed a leg casually at one point; she had on black high-oheeled shoes, and as Nate moved the camera about her, the dark pubic triangle was more visible, split with the bright pink lick of her labia. There was something almost innocent about these pictures. Certainly relaxed.

Nate and the young lady, whoever she was, were well acquainted. She smiled as if she were on a beach.

Then, as Stern had a finger poised over the stop button, the picture flipped; the screen went black, then raced with fuzz, and finally filled once more with figures. It took him an instant to sort things out, and a sense of disturbance preceded his willingness to name what he was seeing. Nate, it seemed, had turned the camera on himself.

Out of focus, the white shaft of his erect penis was nonetheless recognizable; perspectives were hard to discern, but Nate appeared to be a man of generous proportions. Then, without warning, the image jumped again and settled finally on what Nate likely had been meaning to portray all along. The distances were too short for the camera's focal range, and you saw mostly the young woman's hair, which, blurred, looked like some matted bathroom rug.

But there was no mistaking her reddened lips fixed over the end of Nate's member. "This is great," Nate said on the tape. "This is great." Stern could understand that much.

Nate's blow job was preserved forever.

"I see," said Stern. He had stopped the recorder.

Fiona had remained by the tea cart, with her back to the screen.

"Pretty nasty, don't you think? The son of a bitch told me he was going to AA at night. How do you like that?"

"Fiona-" he said, but he had no clue as to what else he should add.

"Here's what I want to know, Sandy." She threw cubes quickly into her glass; she still had not faced him. "If I file for divorce, can I use that in court?"

Stern at once turned elusive. He was not about to get caught between his neighbors. His practice did not include matrimonial work, he told her. Different courts often followed different procedures.

She interrupted, making no effort to hide her harsh look.

"Don't give me a song and dance, Sandy. Yes or no? What do you think?

I want to know where I stand."

He realized that he was highly alarmed. The tape had upset him. And it bothered him more than he would have expected to find that the Cawleys, one more fixture in his life, were coming apart. Eventually, however, he answered.

"I would think it is likely to be admitted in court." There was really no question. Any lawyer with half a brain could think up a dozen ways to get the tape into evidence.

"Well, he'll be a sorry little bastard that day, won't he?

I've told Nate for years he can't afford to divorce me. Now he'll really see what that means." Fiona had her chin erect; defiant. It was hard not to be frightened by her obvious relish in the pain she meant to inflict. "Do you know where I was the first time I saw that, Sandy? At the store. Nate actually asked me to take the camera in to have it fixed. And the boy behind the counter showed me the cassette in there and said, 'What*s this?" He played it in the camera -you know how you can do that?-and he gave me this look. This twenty-year-old kid. And you know what I did? You won't believe it. I pretended, Sandy. I couldn't think of anything else. I actually pretended they were pictures of me."

She cried then. Stern was surprised she had held up as long as she had.

It struck him that Fiona was right. The young woman looked a good deal like her. The same slender, highcheeked prettiness. Was that a hopeful .sign, or something dismal? Or just one more indication that some people always made the same mistake? Certainly there was no wondering now what distractions had kept Nate from returning his calls.

"Fiona, you are upset," said Stern.

"Of course, I'm upset!" she screamed. "Don't patronize me, damn it."

Thinking he might soothe her, he had started to edge forward. But now he held his place.

"Nate doesn't know I've seen this. I couldn't stand to listen to him explain." She looked fiercely at Stern. "And you don't say a thing. I'm still not sure what I'm going to "No, no, of course not," answered Stern, although it was difficult to think that Nate, who after all had handed her the camera, was innocent at every level. But Fiona was not one to adhere to complicated views of human intention. She had a narrow vantage, a limited rangewher emotions moved only between mild hostility and absolute rage. She was at the point now of flailing, and was likely as a result to do herself serious harm, as she had just now by urging Stern to look at this tape, thinking she would shame Nate before the respectable neighbors, and finding instead that the humiliation was worse than she could bear. It probably was best that she avoid the confrontation with her husband. In humor, Clara and he had promised over the years that they would never disclose their infidelities to one another. A joke, but not without its point.

It was hard to imagine a loving explanation of this sort of business. At any rate, he had been lucky enough to limp through his marriage without unfaithfulness-at least, not of the carnal variety.

Stern tried to be solicitous. Couples have gone on, 'he told Fiona, but she was paying no attention. She sat on the corner of a lounger, a few feet from where he was standing, sobbing into her drink. He could see the spots of rouge on her cheeks, the perfect part in her colored hair.

"You know what I resent the most? That he would do this now. Now.

Twenty years ago, there was always some fellow around. I got out of the car and men watched me walk down the street. They ogled me." She pronounced it with a soft o, so that the word rhymed with 'google." "I could feel it," said Fiona. "But he has to go looking for the fountain of youth. For what? What does he think is so wonderful?

What does this do for him? Can you believe that last business? The big goddamn stud." Fiona cried harder. She held the highball glass up to her cheek. "Don't you think I can do that, too? I always thought he wanted me to have some dignity. I can do that. I'll let him take movies. I don't care. Pull your pants down, Sandy, I'll do it to you.

Here."

For the faintest instant, Fiona's look became far more purposeful than the liquor would have seemed to allow, and Stern was convinced that she meant to move toward him.

Perhaps she even started and he faltered. Something happened-the quickest moment, in which he did not observe things clearly, given his sense of alarm.

"Oh, what do you care," she murmured. She had come to her feet, but she sank down now. He was not sure precisely what she meant by the remark-probably that he was without compassion; but there was some strange insinuation in her voice, in her usual domineering tone, an odd suggestion that he was an abject thing with no right to resist. "Fiona," he said.

She waved a hand. "Go home, Sandy. I'm losing my mind."

He waited a moment or two until she had composed herself a bit.

"I'll tell Nate You were looking for him."

"Yes, please," he answered, and they parted on that odd note of propriety.

That night, he could not sleep. Throughout their marriage, Clara had suffered prolonged bouts of insonmia, and often went through the days with a worried look and smarting eyes. Occasionally, in. the depth of night, he woult muse himself to find her wide-awake beneath the reading lamp on her side of the bed. In the early years, he had asked what ailed her. Her reply was always reassuring but elliptical, and in time he responded to these episodes only by muttering that she should turn out the light. She complied, but sat upright in the dark. Now and then, when this went on for nights, he had made the mildest suggestions, but Clam was much too circumspect to lay her head, or troubles, on any psychiatrist's couch..She, like Stern, believed that, in the end, one must master these matters on one's own. So be it. Now the troubled nights were his.

He sat up with his pillow propped against the headboard, the single directed beam on his bedside lamp the only light in the house. He took up a Braudel history, and then replaced it on the night table. This episode with Fiona would not pass easily. From his body a mild force field seemed to rise, an almost electrical aura. In the dark he made his way to the sun room for a drink. Vodka and soda, something he had seen a client order in a bar. He pushed aside the curtain, looking to the Cawleys'. Nate's BMW was in the circular drive, and the only light was borrowed from the street lamps and the moon crazing the dark windows. Was Fiona also restless, or did she sleep soundly, spent by ire and impulse?

He roamed back to the bedroom with the drink. With the liquor, the sensations had become stronger and more localized. His genitals were almost singing. With a certain shyness, he reiterated in his mind the tape recording. One image seemed to fascinate him, a peculiar lateral alignment in the camera's eye as it looked down to the woman's head in Nate's lap and caught the white part in her hair, the shining ridge of her nose, and the glistening pale stalk growing out between her lips as she drew back. Slightly drank, he had no power to resist his own excitement. His organ throbbed, lifting the bedcovers. Three weeks ago, he would have assumed that he was dead forever to such stimulation.

He thought suddenly: What happened there at the end? If anger and despair had emboldened her wildly, would he have stopped her? 'Oh, what do you care?" He still had no idea what Fiona had meant, but recollected, her remark set up a shiver, as if it were a tantalizing message of libertine permission. What did he care?

"Absurd," he said aloud, and tried to sleep, galled to think that he was taken up with half-drunk fantasies of Fiona. Fiona! She was one of those creatures he had never found appealing. But now, as he crept in and out of a dusky night-town on the borders of sleep, she appeared in his mind alarmingly confused with the young woman for whom Nate had spumed her. Clara had been twenty pounds overweight since Peter's birth, and Stern did not recall wishing even for a second that that were not so. But now he dwelled on the slim body of that much younger woman, transposed in dreaming moments to Fiona. Near five he slept solidly and then bolted awake. He had had the crudest and most direct of dreams that he had supplanted Nate; his penis stood erect, burning with sexual and urinary urgency. What nimble ges-lure, he wondered with sudden languor, would have been utilized to speed his response? He imagined, somehow, the fingering of a flute.

Before six, he drove down to the office. The sky was beginning to be colored, gray and rose, a certain prairie feel to it. The night of sleeplessness left him feeling shattered; he concentrated poorly, while the sensations of his smoky dreams persisted, leaking over him. Behind his desk, he remained stimulated, so that even his fingertips, the hairs atop his knuckles, were quick with sensation. And he heard, remote but insistent, that insinuating voice:

Oh, what do you care?

THREE years ago, Stern had been retained to represent the chief deputy in the Kindle County Prosecutor's Office, who was charged with murdering a female colleague. It had been the tri-cities trial of the decade, revealing tawdry passions and political intrigues, and Stern's role had briefly fiveted attention on him across the nation. In the aftermath, his practice, never insubstantial, had grown significantly. While formerly he'd had one associate, Stern now employed three younger lawyers, all of whom insisted lately that at least one more attorney was needed. One of the lawyers working for Stern, Alec Vestos, dealt exclusively with civil matters and was 'largely on his own; Stern, even three decades along, felt little confidence with the endless rigmarole of civil procedure-depositions, interrogatories, and requests to admit.

The other two lawyers-Raphael Moya and Sondra Duhaney-were both former state defenders and had come to Stern about the same time, two years ago. They followed criminal files in the state court, while Stern usually took principal responsibility for the federal criminal work.

Alec, Raphael, and Sondra were capable of handling most matters without guidance, and since Clara's death, they had been piloting the ship.

Stern's hours here were significantly reduced. After his broken nights, he would find himself in the mornings stricken by morose visions from his dreams, often too forbidding to fully recollect.

He would lie in bed, feeling as if he were coated by film, seeing himself in a distant, abstracted way as some figure on air, like one of the dybbuks dancing through the background of a Chagall, or an astronaut barely tethered to his capsule, someone who was nowhere, in no field of gravity, able at any instant to drift off forever into the limitless universe. When he managed to rouse himself, he felt enervated as soon as he passed through the office door.

The dispositions of a lifetime.made it impossible for him to treat legal problems with indifference; the law would ever amaze him, the way some children were always fascinated by a certain toy. Even now, his abilities struck him as unimpaired; yet his commitments were lagging.

Clients with their problems, their urgencies-it all seemed beyond his present reserves. There was a limited number of matters to which Stern was inalterably committed. The rest were shifted to the younger lawyers. Each day here he would receive reports from his associates, meet with those clients he was required to see, examine pleadings, make the necessary phone calls or court appearances, and spend the remainder of the day in aimless desultory reflection. He would say he was thinking of Clara, but that was not completely so. He meditated on virtually anything: TV advertisements, graffiti on an alley wall; the children and their miseries; groceries he needed; bills; planting he still had time to do; the four or five occasions he had promised to return with Clara to Japan and had failed to make the trip, or even preparations. Last week he had read brochures on a new word-processing system for an entire day.

He had closed the cover on his case, preparing for his night of wandering at home, when Alec appeared with a telecopy that had.just arrived in the mailroom. It was near seven,. and the office was still, only the Iawyers present, surveying what remained now that the phones had stopped ringing. The message Stern had received-a cover sheet and a letter-identified Dixon as its sender, transmitting from his magnificent stone home in Greenwood County,. where his study was replete with gadgets: fax, computers, tickers, modems. A modem executive, Dixon was never out of touch. The phone rang then, Stern's private number. 'You get that?" Dixon asked.

"I am studying it now." As promised, Dixon's case was one of the few matters to which Stern had given continuing attention. He had tracked down the three clients of Dixon's mentioned in the govemment's subpoena whom he had not reached before. Their lawyers continned that each had been contacted by the FBI, but only one was willing to provide Stern with copies of the records the grand jury had subpoenaed. Then, earlier this week, AI Greco, from Dixon's office here in DuSable, had called with the names of two large local customers who had received subpoenas for the same kinds of documents. The govemment's specific con-ceres were no more apparent.

The letter.Dixon had faxed, however, offered some insight.

It was from his personal banker at First Kindle, who announced that yet another grand jury subpoena had been served on the bank more than a month ago. According to the letter, agents had visited the bank and briefly reviewed the statements for Dixon's checking accounts. Then, pursuant to the subpoena's command, they had required copies of all items Dixon had deposited and the checks he had written over the last year. This was an exhaustive task, requh-ing clerks to search through reels of microfilm, but the bank was scheduled to finally produce these items next week. The FBI, as usual, had requested confidentiality, yet the banker, after consultation with his lawyers, had determined to advise Dixon should he wish to venture any objection. The letter portrayed this gesture as an act of heroic defiance in behalf of a valued customer, but it was, in truth, routine.

"What does it mean?" asked Dixon.

Many things, Stern knew. Certainly that Dixon was the target of th9 government's inquiry; and that somehow they had figured out where Dixon banked. At this point, a few months ago, Stern would have lit a cigar as a way to gather a moment to think. His fingers still wandered toward the handsome crystal ashtray on his desk, as if the nerves had some instinct of their own. It was twenty-nine days, by his calculation, since he'd had his last cigar, the day he flew off to Chicago. This was a lugubrious South American notion, he knew, the idea of a penance, moth-eaten Catholic baggage he was still lugging around from his adolescence, and he a Jew at that. It was typical of the entirely unpredictable ways that Argentina would episodically haunt him.

"It me's office here in DuSable, had called with the names of two large local customers who had received subpoenas for the same kinds of documents. The govemment's specific con-ceres were no more apparent.

The letter.Dixon had faxed, however, offered some insight.

It was from his personal banker at First Kindle, who announced that yet another grand jury subpoena had been served on the bank more than a month ago. According to the letter, agents had visited the bank and briefly reviewed the statements for Dixon's checking accounts. Then, pursuant to the subpoena's command, they had required copies of all items Dixon had deposited and the checks he had written over the last year. This was an exhaustive task, requh-ing clerks to search through reels of microfilm, but the bank was scheduled to finally produce these items next week. The FBI, as usual, had requested confidentiality, yet the banker, after consultation with his lawyers, had determined to advise Dixon should he wish to venture any objection. The letter portrayed this gesture as an act of heroic defiance in behalf of a valued customer, but it was, in truth, routine.

"What does it mean?" asked Dixon.

Many things, Stern knew. Certainly that Dixon was the target of th9 government's inquiry; and that somehow they had figured out where Dixon banked. At this point, a few months ago, Stern would have lit a cigar as a way to gather a moment to think. His fingers still wandered toward the handsome crystal ashtray on his desk, as if the nerves had some instinct of their own. It was twenty-nine days, by his calculation, since he'd had his last cigar, the day he flew off to Chicago. This was a lugubrious South American notion, he knew, the idea of a penance, moth-eaten Catholic baggage he was still lugging around from his adolescence, and he a Jew at that. It was typical of the entirely unpredictable ways that Argentina would episodically haunt him.

"It means, I would think," said Stern, "that the government is attempting to trace money. They believe, Dixon, that you somehow unlawfully profited from these enormous trades they are scrutinizing."

Dixon was quiet.

"It's a bunch of crap," he said finally. "What do they think? I stole all fhis money and mailed it right into my checking account so I could be sure someone would notice?

How stupid am I supposed to be?"

Stern did not answer. In his indignation Dixon was convincing, but the sequence of events described'by the banker-the fact that the agents had reviewed the statements first-gave every indication that they believed they were on the right track. Dixon had admitted last time that the orders the government was investigating were large enough to significantly alter market prices. Perhaps Dixon had been paid off by traders on the market floor for informing them about his customers' plans. That would fit.

The prosecutor would want to examine any personal checks Dixon had received from other members of the exchanges.

"And if they're tracing money I deposit, what do they need my goddamn canceled checks for?" Dixon asked.

"Generally, your checks are desired not for what is on the frOnt but on the rback." Dixon did not seem to under stand.:'By examining the endorsements, Dixon, they are able to identify other accounts, other financial institutions with whom you have dealings. If they do not find what they are seeking in this account, they will move on to the others."

"Great," said Dixon. He went quiet again/Stern, in the interim, scribbled a quick draft of a letter to the bank, asking for copies of the subpoena and whatever they produced to the government. As the bankers' lawyers well knew, there were no grounds to prevent the bank from complying.

"This gal is really a pistol," Dixon said. He was speaking apparently of Klonsky. "She wants everything. Margy told me the records they subpoenaed already take up half a room." A few boxes, is what Margy had said to Stern, but he would see for himself. He was going to Chicago next week to review the documents before turning them over to the government. "You know what they call her, don't you?" Dixon asked.

"Klonstadt? Have you heard this? The Titless Wonder." Dixon laughed.

On Friday nights at Gil's, within whose mock-elegant foil walls the federal practitioners gathered to pass information about ongoing trials and the tribulations of practice, Stern had heard the nickname.

That kind of emel humor had never been much to his taste.

Dixon was deeply aggrieved. Aggravated. Hounded. Ms. Klonsky's resourcefulness exceeded his expectations. And in his gruff effort to insist that this vulgarity was funny, Stern, for the first time, detected a familiar tone. Stern had listened to it for decades. The willies or the creeps.

Call it what you like. It was the sound of incipient internal corrosion, of inner fortifications giving way.

That abandoned edge in Dixon's voice touched Stern himself with the cold trickle of something close to fright.

Clearly, given his new knowledge of the prosecutor's nickname, Dixon had found himself unable to obey Stern's advice not to' talk about the investigation. Instead, in the steam bath at the club, or in some corner of the locker room where he usually talked grain prices or the girls on the floor he'd like to screw, Dixon had bellied out his troubles to somebody-a lawyer probably, given the information he had retrieved. One could only hope it was someone discreet.

"Do you know what the latest is?" Dixon asked. "I'm not supposed to have heard this, but two FBI agents have been up at Datatech all week looking over records on one of the MD accounts. I picked that up today."

Stern made a deeper sound. No wonder Dixon was feeling surrounded.

Datatech was Dixon's data-processing vender, Which prepared the computer tabulations on all of MD's accounts.

"Which account, Dixon?"

"The house error account."

"What is that, please?"

"Just what it sounds like. Where we clear up mistakes.

Customer wants to buy two cars of herons and we buy him corn instead.

When we notice what we've done, we'll buy him beans and move the corn into the house error account, so we end up owning the corn instead of the customer."

"And the government wants the records of this account?"

"Better than that. The jokers asked Datatech to Put together a special computer run. They just want errors made on trades on the KCFE." The Kindle County Futures Exchange.

"Kindle?" asked Stern.

"Right. It doesn't make sense, does it??"

"No," answered Stern simply. The customer trades about which the government had been subpoenaing information previously had all been executed on the Chicago Exchange.

The errors which the government now wished to examine arose, according to Dixon's information, from trades placed on the smaller exchange here.

It was like investigating transactions on the New York Stock Exchange by requesting records from the Pacific Stock Exchange in San Francisco.

Baffling. But there was something in Dixon's uneasy tenor which suggested to Stern that the government was on the right trail. "From whom do you hear these things, Dixon?

About the FBI at Datatech?"

"I got that on the QT. They fouled their britches over at Datatech when they saw the subpoena. I pay those jagoffs three hundred thousand dollars a year, and now they promise to keep this a secret from me."

"Just so," said Stern. "But you have reason to believe in the accuracy of this information?"

"A young lady," said Dixon finally. "I've known her for some time. She wouldn't give me any malarkey. I promised this wouldn't come back on her. I don't want Titless hearing about it."

"Of course." For Dixon, like the others on the exchanges, his word given was exalted. To someone's back a knife could be freely applied, but a deal made eye to eye could not be broken.

"How long is she going to keep this up, anyway," Dixon asked,

"what's-her-name, Kronstadt?"

"Klonsky," said Stern. "There is no telling."

"Months?"

"Years, in theory."

"Jesus. And they can just go on sending out one subpoena after another?

Even to me?"

"If there is any legitimate investigative purpose, yes."

Across the phone lines, Stern heard the little metal click of Dixon's lighter. "Do I take it you have a particular concern, Dixon?"

"It's nothing," he said. He emitted a heavy breath.

"Can they get anything with a subpoena?"

"I am not following, Dixon."

"Suppose I have some personal stuff. Can they subpoena that?"

Stern waited. What was Dixon telling him?

"Where are these private items housed, Dixon?"

Stern could hear his brother-in-law drawing on his cigarette, weighing how much to admit.

"My office. You know. There's a small safe. It fits in the bottom of my credenza."

"And what is in it?"

Dixon made an equivocal sound. "Generally," said Stern.

"Personal," said Dixon. "Stuff."

Stern ran his tongue along his mouth. Dixon needed no education in being less chatty. At times, there was a peculiar fellowship between Stern and his brother-in-law.

Dixon was a clever man with a winning sense of humor; it was easy at moments to enjoy his company. He and Stern attended ball games together; engaged in such athletic competitions as Stern could manage.

Both men were lovers of gadgets, and there were two stores on East Charles which they visited only. together, one afternoon a year. And yet there had always been absolute boundaries, guarded by some rumbling unspeaking rivalry, disapproval, distrust. Stern was content to let Dixon leave him often in the dark. He did not want a rundown on Dixon's illicit rendezvous or his borderline business practices. Over the years, this relation of lawyer and client had proved more agreeable to both of them than some jovial effort to feign any kind of filial intimacy. Stern asked only what the law in its rigors and proprieties demanded, and Dixon listened carefully and answered narrowly, and as he liked.

"Are we speaking of truly personal materials,. Dixon?

Items which are yours alone and not the corporation's, which were prepared outside the corporation and to which you do not give corporate personnel access?"

"Right. Can they get that with a subpoena?"

Stern pondered. He never liked providing these kinds of saddleback opinions. The client was always holding on to some detail which changed everything.

"In general, you cannot be compelled to produce personal items, absent a grant of immunity. That is not likely to occur at this point in the investigation. A search warrant, of course, is another matter."

"A search warrant?"

"These investigations of brokerage houses are sometimes most unpleasant.

Depending on what the prosecutors are seeking, they may find it convenient to attempt to grab up all your records at once. If they start in the office and believe items are missing, your home would be next."

"I better move this stuff?. Is that what you're telling me?"

"Only if you're concerned about it falling into the government's hands.

If that thought troubles you for some reason, you might think about storing your safe somewhere less likely to be searched."

"Which is where?"

"How big is it?" Stern asked.

A foot quare, Dixon said.

"You could send it here, then. Federal prosecutors are more reluctant, even these days, to search attorneys' offices.

The warrant requires special approval from the Justice Department in Washington, and the conduct smacks of a violation of the right to counsel. It is very unfdy, from their perspective."

"And how do I get to the safe, if I need something?"

Stern declined to state the obvious. Dixon had already made it clear that he had no wish to share the contents.

"I shall give you a key to the office. Come and look as you like. Or better yet, what about another lawyer Who is not involved in this present matter? Wally Marmon's office would serve excellently." This was the large firm which represented Dixon on the routine business matters that Stern declined to handle, but Dixon grunted at the notion.

"He'll charge me rent," Dixon said, "by the hour. And he'd get too nervous. You know Wally."

On reflection, Dixon was probably correct about that. "If this arrangement makes you uncomfortable, then leave the safe where it is, Dixon. Or take it home. As your lawyer, I prefer to see it here."

It would be best to have Dixon's zone of privacy clearly bounded. Lord only knew where they'd end up if Dixon had continuing access to some black box into which he could stuff any document the government sought whose contents made him uncomfortable. Both the client and the lawyer, could come to substantial grief that way.

Dixon at last said that he would send the safe next week.

"Handle the arrangements yourself," said Stern. "If no one but you knows where the safe is, no one can tell the government where to search for it."

"What does that mean?" asked Dixon.

Stern waited again. He did not want to alarm him. On the other hand.

"'Dixon, I must tell you, I am convinced the government has an informant."

"An informant?"

"Someone close to you or the business. The government's information is too precise. The trades. Where you bank. Who your dataprocessing vender is. And there is an odd order to what they are willing to have known. I suspect they are interested in misleading you about their sources of:information."

"I think they're interested in showing how fucking clever they are," said Dixon.

"You must reflect on this matter, Dixon. The identity of this informant could be of great significance to us."

"Forget it, Stern. You don't have the picture.. Every jackal at the Kindle Exchange that's ever wanted to sink his fangs in my hindquarter is probably feeding stuff to those guys." Dixon's tone was bitter as he spoke of his critics and competitors. "And I'll have the last laugh.

You mark my words. Just wait," he said. "I'll keep my mouth shut now, because you say I've got to. But when this thing is done, I'll still be standing here. And there'll be some bills coming due."

Dixon was unaccustomed to being vulnerable-or restrained.

The need for both enraged him. He hung on the line a moment longer, with the heavy breath of a bull. His bold promises of triumph and revenge behind him, he seemed to have no more to say. Perhaps he recognized their futility. The government would go on, notwithstanding, demanding his records, scaring his clients, courting his enemies, prying into exery worldly connection he valued. Across the distance of two counfles, Dixon seemed to consider his world of dwindling secrets. That was what had always protected him-not his friendships or alliances; he had few-not even his wealth or the power of his personality.

Dixon was like Caliban or God-unknowable. The insult of his present circumstance was profound.

"Just wait," said Dixon once more before he put down the phone.

"DON'T do anything," the woman said at the other end of the line. "I'm bringing you dinner."

"Who is this?" asked Stern. "Helen?"

"Yes, of course, it's Helen. Will that be a bother?

I'll just drop it off and go. I have a meeting."

She must have been calling at fifteen-minute intervals, for he had been home only moments.

"You are most kind," said Stern, eyeing the unidenfi-fiable casserole dish already thawing on the counter. "Come ahead."

So, thought Stern, the female nation heard from, once again. Helen Dudak, of course, probably had no interest in being forward. The Dudaks and the Sterns had been exchanging favors for twenty years. As couples, they had been connected principally by their children. Kate, through most of her life, was the best friend of Helen's oldest, Maxine.

The two families had the same ideas about things that seemed to matter substantially when you were rearing a family: about asking to be excused before leaving the table; the number of sweets allowed in a day; the right age to drive alone or to go out for the evening with a boy. The Dudaks were fine people, principled, with reasonable values, and concern for their children. So the relationship had stood on this solid, if narrow, footing. His knowledge of Helen's inner realm was nodding, at best. Clara had never seemed to regard Miles and Helen as an interesting couple, and in the last few years, in the face of many changes, relations had drifted a bit. Maxine had gone to business school, married, and worked in St. Louis; and Helen had been divorced from Miles Dudak for three years now. She had a wised-up, funny, independent air, resolved to exceed the bathes and humiliation of the sad circumstance in which her husband of twenty-odd years, the wealthy owner of a box-manufacturing concern, had moved out and, only a few months later, married his thirty-year-old secretary.

From the kitchen window, Stern observed her arriving with a large purse and an armory of aluminum-foil containers. Buy bauxite, Stern thought as he watched her under flag, proceeding to' the front door with the trays pyramided beneath her chin.

"Helen, my Lord, I am one person." Stern unburdened her and showed her to the kitchen. "There's enough here for six.

Sixteen." Peeling the foil wrapper back from a tray of chicken, he was braced by the aroma. Garlic and thyme. Had he been required to wager, he would have bet that Helen Dudak was a good cook. It was part of her image of substance. "You must join me. It would be a pity to see all of this consumed from the freezer. Do you have time for dinner before your meeting? Please stay. I would welcome your company."

Helen faltered, but eventually was persuaded to surrender her coat. Had this been planned? Stern doubted' it. Helen was not a schemer, although she was clearly pleased to be asked. He took her raincoat to the closet, a fawn-toned garment with a famous label-Miles had not bought his freedom cheaply. She'd already found plates and flatware and was setting the kitchen table when Stern returned. He admired Helen's good sense in not promoting this into a more auspicious encounter in the dining room, but, notwithstanding, there was a certain animated excitement as Helen traveled from the cabinets to the table. Here. they were, people in their middle years. His wife was five weeks dead. But he was single, she was unattached, and because of that, they both seemed strangely, almost painfully enlivened.

And he was interested; there was no concealing that from himself. Since his evening at Fiona's, he was aroused in some measure by every woman he saw. For Stern, it was a disconcerting fixation. As he put it to himself, he had not recently tuned in this channel. Oh, he thought, of course.

He admired a hundred women in a day, just moving about downtown. But he had practiced such deliberate oblivion. He was one of those men glad for middle years, the settled portion of life, when sexual preoccupation could comfortably be left behind without some slur on masculinity. Now he received, almost in spite of himself, an eager, exhilamnt message from his own systems. He could not truly envision himself as the companion of another womanwit was much too soon-but he nonetheless cast a somewhat naughty eye on Helen when he went down the corridor to draw a bottle from the wine, closet.

She was, all in all, a handsome person-her midriff had given way somewhat, but Stern could hardly be critical on that score-and even if she looked a little rougher/ed by experience, there was something in that which was admittedly attractive. Her hair was reddish, the color of a fox, enhanced somewhat by a coloring agent these days, but drying with age and verging therefore on a kind of unmanageableness. Her legs were well turned; she had no bottom to speak of; her face was large-pored, heavily made up, but in its own way comely. Helen had her well-worn look-humor, anguish, and dignity. Stern's impression was that she had been utterly lost when Miles departed, but she was a strong person, perhaps not an intellect, but well grounded. She had carried on bravely, rightly convinced that she was not deserving of abuse.

"Well, this is an unanticipated pleasure," he said when the meat was set out before them both. "What did you do to these potatoes, Helen?

Really. They are quite remarkable."

Helen described the process. Stern listened carefully. He was fond of potatoes.

She told him about her business. She had been trained. as a travel agent along the way, but longed for something less mundane and had become a convention planner. Large organizations.hired her to arrange sites, hotels, presentations. She worked out of her home, with a fax machine and a telephone console. A rocky start, but now she was well under way. She delivered the tale with good humor,. an entertaining talker and willing to take the lead in maintaining this fragile, convivial air.

The doorbell rang. Glancing through the panes beside the front door, he saw Nate Cawley. Stern seemed to have caught him in a moment of reflection. On the slate stoop, he had turned to look into the wind. He was a smallish man, narrow. His hair was gray and most of it was gone; a few longer hairs stood up straight now in the breeze. Rain was in the offing; late April here was always wet. Nate had mn out without a coat and he jiggled a bit to keep himself warm. He wore a golf cardigan and a pair of blue pd by experience, there was something in that which was admittedly attractive. Her hair was reddish, the color of a fox, enhanced somewhat by a coloring agent these days, but drying with age and verging therefore on a kind of unmanageableness. Her legs were well turned; she had no bottom to speak of; her face was large-pored, heavily made up, but in its own way comely. Helen had her well-worn look-humor, anguish, and dignity. Stern's impression was that she had been utterly lost when Miles departed, but she was a strong person, perhaps not an intellect, but well grounded. She had carried on bravely, rightly convinced that she was not deserving of abuse.

"Well, this is an unanticipated pleasure," he said when the meat was set out before them both. "What did you do to these potatoes, Helen?

Really. They are quite remarkable."

Helen described the process. Stern listened carefully. He was fond of potatoes.

She told him about her business. She had been trained. as a travel agent along the way, but longed for something less mundane and had become a convention planner. Large organizations.hired her to arrange sites, hotels, presentations. She worked out of her home, with a fax machine and a telephone console. A rocky start, but now she was well under way. She delivered the tale with good humor,. an entertaining talker and willing to take the lead in maintaining this fragile, convivial air.

The doorbell rang. Glancing through the panes beside the front door, he saw Nate Cawley. Stern seemed to have caught him in a moment of reflection. On the slate stoop, he had turned to look into the wind. He was a smallish man, narrow. His hair was gray and most of it was gone; a few longer hairs stood up straight now in the breeze. Rain was in the offing; late April here was always wet. Nate had mn out without a coat and he jiggled a bit to keep himself warm. He wore a golf cardigan and a pair of blue plaid slacks.

"Welcome, Nate." Helen had stood up from the table in the breakfast nook, and peered down the hall toward Stern and Nate in the foyer. In spite of the distance, Stern attempted the introduction. "Do you know Helen Dudak?" asked Stern.

"Certainly." A moment of decided awkwardness occurred. Nate did not move. Clearly, he thought he had interrupted, and Stern had an instant aversire response, old-fashioned but strong, that he was not happy to be seen alone with a woman in his home. This was not the message he wanted Nate to take back to Fiona, who would put it out promptly over the neighborhood wire. Stern swung out a hand magisterially, a hammy bit, to gather some forward momentum "We are in the midst of a splendid repast Helen has provided, Nate. Do you care for some wonderful Chicken Vesuvio, or may I get you a drink?"

"No, Sandy. I just ran over for a second. Fiona said you were looking for me." Nate apologized for being hard to reach. Much, he said, was going on. Yes, indeed, thought Stern. The Lord only knew what Fiona said they had discussed, but clearly she had offered an edited version.

Preoccupied as he seemed, Nate did not wear the predictable air of a man who knew you and his wife had spent a moment commenting on videos of his erection.

Stern showed him to his study, where he had filed the lab's bill.

"Have you any idea what that might have been for?"

"Huh," said Nate. "Westlab." He studied the invoice at length before handing it back. "I don't use them much."

"Apparently, Clara had visited a physician in the last month."

Nate took a second to absorb that. "Where do you get that idea?"

Stern explained the notations on Clara's calendar.

"Frankly, Nate, I assumed it was you. I found no doctor's bills." Nate, a physician and neighbor in the old tradition, often worked on the cuff, billing Clara episodicall, if at all. After the meeting in Cal's office, Stern had been through Clara's checkbook carefully. And, necessarily, he had also sifted through the mail. It had occurred to him, he offered, that Clara might have been ill. "Something grave," said Stern, then added, more quietly, "Unendurable."

Nate, mercifully, picked up the thread. A softer look came over him, the gentle eye of a practiced bedside manner.

"No, no, Sandy, there was nothing like that, nothing I know of."

"I see." They faced one another in the study, under a strangely burdened air. Perhaps Nate found Stern's rummaging through his wife's papers unseemly; or he may have been discomforted by Helen's presence. "I was misled, I suppose, by Fiona's mention that you had brought Clara medication from time to time."

"Fiona," said Nate, and a distinct expression of distaste passed by swiftly. It was an error, Stern saw, to have repeated any of her intoxicated blather. "Clara's knee gave her some trouble this winter, Sandy. I dropped Off an antiinflammatory."

"Ah," said Stern. The two men continued to look at one another.

"Sandy, why don't I give Westlab a call for you? I'll find out what's cookin'."

"I can do that, Nate."

"Neh," said Cawley. "Let me. They'd be happier to talk to me than you.

Assuming they'll talk to anybody. If it wasn't for you guys-" Nate, in his gentle, familiar way, was about to assail Stern with a doctor's typical complaints about the legal profession and its recent impact on medical practice, but he cut himself off. "You know," he said, "could be just a mistake. I've seen billings. get awful bol-lixed up. Maybe they crossed one Stern with another."

The idea struck Stern as farfetched. Then, just as quickly, it was all entirely clear.

"Oh, my." Stern covered his mouth with one hand. "I have a thought."

Clara had received the bill-but not the test.

That would havebeen, as Nate's point suggested, for someone else-for Kate. Pre-pregnancy. Pre-something. Kate had said that there had been problems along the way. She had probably shared them with her mother, Who, as she often did, would have insisted on helping with the expenses.

That was another reason that Kate was so sabered that Clara had died not knowing there had been a medical success-and why no doctor's bill had arrived here. Something rose, something sank, but it all settled in him with the solidity of a correct answer. "I suspect, Nate, this may have had something to do with Katy's pregnancy."

"Oh, sure," said Nate. He brightened considerably. "That must be it."

He headed at once for the door, happy to have the matter resolved.

"Perhaps, Nate, if I have further questions, I might ask you to call the lab nonetheless."

"Sure thing," said Nate. "No problem. Just give me a buzz."

On his way out, Nate turned back to wave briefly to Helen.

She still had one hand raised, with a sad look of her own, as Stern approached. She had sat alone, not eating. She seemed to know that whatever spell had loomed was broken.

The conspicuous presence of Clara's mystery, the many complications were obvious about him. He was a fish in a net. Nothing now would change that.

"I apologize," said Stern. "Questions I was required to ask. He was Clara's doctor."

"Mine, too," said Helen.

"Ah," said Stern, "so that is your acquaintance." Helen began to eat.

There was music from the radio, Brahms. He sat in the caned chair with a full sense of his weight, his earthly substance. As so often, grief was here in its essential character.

"Had Clara been sick, Sandy? I didn't know that."

"Apparently not." He explained briefly. The bill. His thoughts. Helen, who had known them both so long, nodded with each word, eyes quick, intent.

"I see," she said. They were both silent.

"I have no idea why this occurred, you know," Stern told her abruptly.

To the thousands of other inquiries, tacit and overt, he had maintained a dignified silence which implied, not falsely, that he found the subject too painful for discussion. Helen Dudak, however, was too trustworthy a soul, too familiar, to be dealt with so briefly. "I take it people talk about this?" He had wanted to ask someone that question for some time.

"Would you believe me if I told you they didn't?" He smiled warmly. "And they say what?"

"Dumb things. Nice things. Who knows about anybody's life, Sandy?

Really. At the core. People are baffled, naturally.

No one is quite certain they knew Clara. She was very contained."

"Just so," said Stern softly. He allowed himself the traces of a wry expression.

Helen, wisely, took her time with the remark.

"You must be very angry," she said at last.

To the wheel of seething emotion, the bristling anxiety, the dense miserable sensations, Stern had not heretofore put that name. But of course she was correct. Buried deep in his bones, like a dose of radiation, he could feel the burning away of intense high-level emotion, and anger was the right word for it. It was not a feeling with which he had taken much conscious comfort throughout his life. Being the son of his mother, the brother of Jacobo, he had grown up believing that anger was an emotion allotted to others by prior arrangement. He was the steady one. Now a certain decorousness made him reluctant to fully agree.

"I suppose," he said.

"It would be understandable," Helen continued. Chewing slightly, he shook his head.

"That, however, is not what predominates," he said. "No?"

He shook his head again. The powerful volatility of his emotions, the way they were always at hand, made it impossible to observe his usual reserve.

"I doubt myself," he told her. "I failed," he said and, with the words, and their deadlye accuracy, felt as if he had shot himself through with an arrow. "Quite obviously."

"And what about her?" asked Helen. She looked up adroitly, over her fork, but he could see that she was measuring her questions, testing the regions of tenderness to see how far she might probe. It was, Stern decided, an impressive performance.

"Did Clara fall?"

Helen did not answer. She looked on while he considered the question.

He understood her suggestion, but he was unable to say aloud the word somehow hanging here like smoke: betrayal. The mystery of it was deeper than that to him, and more complicated. He realized then, for the first time, how much he had dedicated himself to making no judgments in this matter for the present. Again, wordlessly, he wobbled his head: something not to know or to say. Helen waited'an instant.

"You can't let everything rest on the end, Sandy." Stern nodded: That was a thought, too.

"I speak from experience. You accomplished a great deal with one another. And you made a marvelous couple."

"Oh, yes," said Stern. "I loved to speak, and she did not."

Helen smiled, but leaned back to regard him from a distance.

"You're too harsh with yourself." She took his wrist and he reacted, even in this mood, to the sensations of a female touch. "How good a friend am I? May I make a suggestion?"

Her hands were tan and strong, the nails unpolished. "Are you seeing someone, Sandy?"

Lord, again! What was contemporary morality? "Helen, certainly not."

Looking into her plate, Helen Dudak suppressed a smile. "I meant a therapist."

"Ah," he said. His initial impulse was categ'orical, but he answered simply, "Not for now."

"It might help," she said.

"Is that an informed opinion?"

"Of course. A middleaged divorce is harder than a hockey match."

Her delivery was lighthearted and Stern smiled. He could see that Helen was from the self-improvement school of life. Very much a citizen of the late century. She believed in the power of Will, or, as it was thought of in contemporary terms, self-determination. Existentialists one and all, we could be whomever we chose, with proper instruction.

Something about yourself that bugs you? Chuck it out. Let the shrink refurnish. A deeply conserX, ative strain in Stern distrusted these conclusions. It was all a good deal harder to bear than that. He could see that Helen and he subscribed to different philosophical services. He chose a joke as a diplomatic exit.

"I shall talk to you, instead."

"Sold," said Helen.

They smiled, celebrating the survival of a difficult instant, but then lingered a few seconds in the gloom.

Helen at last asked about Kate. For the remainder of the meal, they trod reliable ground, speaking of theft children.

At nine, promptly, she stood. She was late for her meeting.

Stern saw her to the door, thanking her lavishly for the meal.

"You are a friend, Helen."

"I mean to be," she answered.

"This was the most pleasant evening I have had in some time." He found, upon saying this, that it was a considerable truth and, out of a sudden swell of gratitude, he added, "We must do it again."

"Let's," responded Helen. They stood looking at one another. He was too new to this business to have realized before he spoke what he had gotten himself into, and now, otherwise at a loss, he took her hand and in the briefest, politest way kissed it.

Helen rolled her eyes as she opened the door,

"Oh, my God," she said. "Charming, charming!" She shook her head and, with her large purse and fawn-colored coat, went off laughing down the walk.

O the distant subdivision where Kate and John had bought a compact suburban home, newly constructed and as weakly made as a child's toy, Stern ventured on occasion for a meal.

This house was so far from the urban center that there were still cornfields about, and the clods ran clear to the front door, as Kate and John had not yet been able to afford sod. In the front lawn, near the parkway, a single skinny sapling stood, its tiny leaves riffling like a fringe whenever there was wind.

Kate scurried about her father, attempting to comfort him, but as ever, the best of her attention went to her husband.

Every now. and then, the newspapers reported on twins so preoccupied with one another that they developed a language of their own. So, too, Kate and John. They were forever lost in their small sounds: whispers, murmurs, Katy's wispy laugh. A universe of two. Stern had known other couples like this, tuned in to each other's peculiarities like some strange music, and high on it like Opium smoke.

They had been together since high school and, so far as Stern could tell, were the only man or woman the other had ever really known. This na'ivete had its own beauty. To one another they were the entire realm of otherness: Adam and Eve. Yin and Yang.

It was difficult to imagine the entry of a child into this world of two dimensions, but Kate's pregnancy, if anything, seemed to have intensified the thrill of love. John raced behind his wife's chair to help her up, kissed her with abandon as they slid into the kitchen, clearing plates.

Watching his daughter's dark eyes fast upon her husband, Stern felt strangely affected by her love for him. Poor John was a schlepper of the first order. His most important achievement to the world at large would probably remain having been the best tight end in a decade at a high school that traditionally fielded mediocre teams. The higherpowered jocks, with greedy visions of agents, bonuses, and the NFL, had literally run over him at the University of Wisconsin. John, the coaches said, had the size and talent, but not the drive. This was hardly news to Stern, who had come back with his own scouting report years before. But here was an important late addendum: he treated his wife with unfailing kindness. In a hard world, where decency seldom thrived, a realm full of the brutish, the harsh-or even those well-meaning but emotionally landlocked, like Stern himself-John was a standout, a man of gentle disposition and great tenderness. If he had failed to find in himself a killer's ruthlessness, he had discovered something else, which he nurtured with Kate. Who among us might not be willing to trade?

As John trekked through the yard with the evening trash, Stern stood with his daughter in the kitchen. She and John had just finished washing up the dinner dishes and she sopped a cloth.

"Cara, I have been meaning to ask," said Stern. "An item came through in the mail the other day which made me wonder if there was any recent occasion when' your mother went with you to the doctor?"

Kate looked at him uncomprehendingly. Even in sandals, she was an inch or two taller than he, dark and beautiful, with her straight hair and perfect features.

"Recently?"

"Within the last few months."

"No. Of course not. I told you, she had no idea."

"But perhaps-is there no way your mother might have received the bill for one of your tests, some procedure?"

"Daddy, what in the world?" Kate had stepped back from the sink. She remained tense and emotional at any mention of Clara, and he suddenly thought better of going on. She had provided a sufficient answer.

He touched her on the shoulder to soothe her and stepped into the family room, still furnished with boxes and card chairs, and joined John, who had gone straight to the TV set upon reentering the house. At these instants Stern found himself full of almost religious ratitude for the invention of television sports, which could occupy the few moments he felt obliged to pass with his son-in-law.

Tonight, the Trappers, the tri-cities' traditionally woeful big-league baseball team, were on the air, and Stern and John swapped thoughts about the prospects for the season just under way. The story with the Trappers was always the same: young stars traded away when their salaries increased, pitchers who hit it big as soon as they escaped the Trappers' pocket-sized park. Stern, who had made baseball one of his most passionate studies in learning the American way of life, enjoyed his son-in-law's insights.

John had an athlete's eye for the nuances of physical performance: the shortstop threw off-balance. Tenack, the magnificent right fielder, was trying, as he did each April, to upper-cut the ball. Wearing glasses for his TV viewing, John poked his frames back up on his nose from time to time as the images of the green field floated on his lenses. He appeared transfixed, childlike, still bound heart and soul by the grace and glory of the fields of play; when John watched, you could almost hear the hot roar of the stadium crowd in his ears.

Long moments passed while Stern awaited John's occasional observations, to which he could add some knowing comment of his own. Stern rarely asked John about work; it had become clear long ago that he would never answer honestly, fearing that his responses, which were likely to verge on complaint, would find their way to Dixon. John had had a slow start at MD, passing bewilderedly through the accounting and compliance departments before finding a home on the order desk, where, Stern took it, his performance was still not stellar. They sat on either side of the glowing screen, John's zombie-like attention to the game undoubtedly increased due to the presence of his father-inlaw, while Stern recalled similar dumbstruck reactions, at the same period in his life, to his own imposing father-inlaw, Henry Mittler. In these reflections, he felt for John, especially since at heart Stern always remained half ready to revile him for not being better, smarter, more adept, more able to rouse in Kate something laudable, rather than, as it seemed, allowing her to drift to rest on the soft seabed of the commonplace.

A sufficient time passed to suit all proprieties, he bade John good night and, ready to be on his way, found Kate in the kitchen. Seeing her, though, it occurred to him once more how vexed his last exchange with her had left him. If the bill from Westlab was not for Kate, then what? He was back to point zero.

"Katy," he said, releasing her from his parting embrace, "are you quite sure there was no bill for you that might have come to your mother?"

"Daddy, there is no way. What's wrong with you?" She looked at him, incredulous, and he shrugged, somewhat defensively.

It had seemed so obvious, so characteristic of Clara that the children were involved.

With the next thought, Stern, halfway across the kitchen, stood absolutely still.

He knew now.

He had blundered past it. But he knew now why Clara had received no doctor's bill; why Peter had been so orerwrought that day about the prospect of an autopsy.

Because it was he, Stern's son, who was the physician, Peter who had ordered the lab test, and Peter who remained, even now, resolved to honor some prior commitment of confidence he had made to his mother.

Stern understood the need to maintain professional secrets, but he could not help suspecting that his son would enjoy this advantage over his father, having exclusive hold, in the end, of one last scrap of her life. Might the others know as well?

"Katy." She was facing him, her attention evidently drawn by her father's abstracted look. "Do you know anything of your mother receiving medical care from Peter?"

"What?" Her mouth had fallen open a bit and her face was rigid with alarm. She obviously took the suggestion as baroque. The question that rose in her eyes was easily discemed: Was her father derailed, off his trolley, losing hold? She looked gravely concerned that these ideas, wildand improbable, were coming from him, one after another.

Was he wrong? The kitchen light seemed suddenly intense.

For the first time in his life, he felt a sensation of dislocation, which he knes way, found Kate in the kitchen. Seeing her, though, it occurred to him once more how vexed his last exchange with her had left him. If the bill from Westlab was not for Kate, then what? He was back to point zero.

"Katy," he said, releasing her from his parting embrace, "are you quite sure there was no bill for you that might have come to your mother?"

"Daddy, there is no way. What's wrong with you?" She looked at him, incredulous, and he shrugged, somewhat defensively.

It had seemed so obvious, so characteristic of Clara that the children were involved.

With the next thought, Stern, halfway across the kitchen, stood absolutely still.

He knew now.

He had blundered past it. But he knew now why Clara had received no doctor's bill; why Peter had been so orerwrought that day about the prospect of an autopsy.

Because it was he, Stern's son, who was the physician, Peter who had ordered the lab test, and Peter who remained, even now, resolved to honor some prior commitment of confidence he had made to his mother.

Stern understood the need to maintain professional secrets, but he could not help suspecting that his son would enjoy this advantage over his father, having exclusive hold, in the end, of one last scrap of her life. Might the others know as well?

"Katy." She was facing him, her attention evidently drawn by her father's abstracted look. "Do you know anything of your mother receiving medical care from Peter?"

"What?" Her mouth had fallen open a bit and her face was rigid with alarm. She obviously took the suggestion as baroque. The question that rose in her eyes was easily discemed: Was her father derailed, off his trolley, losing hold? She looked gravely concerned that these ideas, wildand improbable, were coming from him, one after another.

Was he wrong? The kitchen light seemed suddenly intense.

For the first time in his life, he felt a sensation of dislocation, which he knew, instinctively, was typical of the elderly. Kate was correct. Given over to his preoccupations, he had lost his bearings.

What had happened to his lifelong habits of caution, tact, discretion?

He could not simply mn with this knuckleheaded notion and confront his son. If Peter was wrongly accused by his father of even the most wellzintenfioned manipulations, his predictable response would be outrage; the reverberations would shake what little family structure remained. He would have to hunt down Nate Cawley once again and ask him to make inquiries at the lab. That was the best and most discreet alternative.

"An idle thought," he said to Kate. "Allow it to pass." He took his daughter's hand and kissed her on the temple. He thanked her for dinner and waved off her inquiries about whether he was all right. But he found himself increasingly irritated as he walked into the mild night.

Driving along the highway in his Cadillac-this was his car, a Sedan de Ville;

Clara's had been towed away by the dealer in part of that procession of changing scenes and backdrops at the time of her death which he recalled now like a cinema montage-he felt the same rise of difficult emotion.

He was tiring of Clara's gruesome surprises, her hidden world, with enormous sums expended and secret illnesses. In his confusion, he had now even begun to suspect his children. This was her fault, Stern thought suddenly, her fault! The declaration almost rang in him.

Still in this mood, he stopped near home at a convenience store. Certain household tasks remained beyond him. Claudia called in his grocery list from the office and the store obligingly delivered the bags to the back door. But there were always items missing: cream cheese, milk. He never had enough orange juice. Waiting in line, he observed with admiration two young black women who were ahead of him, in halter tops despite the chill of spring, talking high-speed bebop slang, disarmingly casual With their obvious sexuality. He felt again the high-voltage transmissions of sensual energy. What was all this? he wondered. Signs of life, he told himself; natural, he thought, but there was something wild and unpredictable in this urgency. He was so deeply stimulated by virtually any female. Was it some racist conceit to think that he would be as strange as some Martian to these women? He imagined, nonetheless.

What really was the look and feel of those heavy brown breasts, smooth-skinned, heavy-nippled? His imagination rushed on to these thoughts. He stood unmoving in the store, his mouth slightly agape, aroused.

Back in the parking lot, he sat in the car, a bit shocked at himself.

How could he really? You would think, observing his adolescent eagerness, that he'd had no passionate life with Clara, which was not true. As a young man he had craved her more, in fact, after they were married than before, when so much else seemed to be involvedi and even as age and time had tempered the pulse of things, that hunger had never been wholly lost. A man and a woman in the end were always that to each other, opposites and mysterious, and in the act, with its joining and exploring, things more magical and solemn than the most ancient ritual forever resided. Certain other couples, his age and older, made allusions to the extinction of these impulses. Dick Harrison, a neighbor, remarked to Stern one night, 'I hold it up, the sunlight passes through." But three or four times a month Clara and he struck this fundamental compact-creaky, lumpy old bodies as she said, moving toward each other across the bed and, as ten thousand times before, melting together. Lately, he had tried to recall the last occasion and found, almost certainly, that it had been more than a month 'before her death. One more sign of what he should have noticed. But he was on trial, fraught and distracted, and who after the years does not know better than to foment small crises? They move apart and then rejoin.

The image is of some X-ray shadow, a form in negative space; opening and breathing, closing, clinging, like the wings of a moth in the dark, the walls of the heart.

Now that same woman had turned him loose in late-century America, where standards for sexual performance were touted on the covers of the magazines sold at the checkout stand right there behind the broad store window. Was he prepared for this? The uncomfortable truth was that he had no past to brag about, no comforting memory of the wild oats sown by young Alejandro Stern. Geography, as he thought of it, had been against him. Argentin. a, with its gauchos and machos and so forth, probably would have been a more propitious place to pass his adolescence. Male, lust was better accepted there, a legacy of the nation's Italian and Spanish forebears. His brother, even at the age of fifteen and sixteen, was an impressive roue. He had many women, or at least claimed to: whores, Indian girls, older women lusting for youthful energy. Stern could still clearly recollect listening awestruck to Jacobo's account of his initiation, at the age of thirteen, with a very thin young woman attired in a black strapless evening gown, who had met him in the lobby of the Roma, a seedy downtown hotel in B.A. Months later, Jacobo contended he recognized her on the sweet in a habit, walking with her sunken eyes, amid a row of novices leaving the Convent of Santa Margarita.

Stern, forty-five years after the fact, found the thought of this woman as imagined, with her sunken eyes and small breasts, disturbingly provocative.

But his youth in America in the fifties had contained nothing so exotic.

The Puritans reigned once more here, and sexuality seemed to be a particularly unbecoming trait for a dark foreigner, a suspect impulse like fellow traveling.

Lust was one more wild hunger that he willingly constrained for future satisfaction, even with Clara, with whom he would not have slept before their wedding but for her insistence that they were more likely to enjoy the honeymoon if they could leave this particular anxiety behind. And so, two weeks before the ceremony, in Pauline Mitfier's parlor full of Oriental brocades and Viennese glass, with all the lights still burning for fear that someone in the house might notice, Clara had wriggled from her girdle and her hose, lifted her skirt, and lain back on her mother's red divan. For many reasons, that had struck Stern as an act of astonishing trust. And he? He was terrified and, because of that, also somewhat affronted, angered by the indignity 'of these shabby mechanics.

Thirty-one years later, those emotions remained real to him, near at hand in the dark auto, the peculiar residue of a night of high feeling in which he had been confused and stimulated and put out. But he had proceeded; he remembered that as well. He had fiddled interminably to release his erect penis from the bindings of his trousers, and Clara Mittlet had become the first-the only-woman in his life.

Stern had first seen Chicago when he was thirteen, near the end of the overland passage his mother and Silvia and he had made from Argentina.

That journey had been impelled by his mother's involvement with a man named Gmengehl, a lawyer who had been showing her great interest since, it seemed, the moment of his father's death. Gruengehl was a figure in one of the few anti-Peronist unions, and following his jailing, his friends and colleagues had swept into his mother's house to help them pack, their mute for exile already arranged. In 1947, with displaced persons throughout Europe claretring for entry to the United States, and Argentina's diplomatic ties to the U.S. questionable after the war, legal immigration was problematic. Instead, they traveled by train to Mexico City, and then were driven across the border, looking like one more family of braceros. In Brownsville they boarded a train North.

Stern even so young, had known that Argentina was not his destiny. His father, a physician, had left Germany in 1928 and forever mourned that the Nazis prevented his return.

Papa always unfavorably compared life in Argentina to what he had known before: the quality of goods, of music, of building materials, of people was sadly lacking in his eyes. Jacobo, whom Stern so admired, had become an ardent Zionist and preached from the time Stern was nine or so the glory of Eretz Israel. When Stern stepped off the train in Chicago, he believed his life had started. They went on to Kindle County, where cousins of his father's were waiting, but Chicago would always be what he thought of as America, with its massive, soot-smeared buildings of brick and stone and granite, full of smokestack arms and sullen, teeming throngs, the land of Gary Cooper, of steel, skyscrapers, automobiles. He recognized in every face that day the striving.children of immigrants.

More than four decades later, Mr. Alejandro Stern returned, a man of prominence with his own troubles. On the fifth floor of the Chicago Exchange, he sat in the walnut conference room at Maison Dixon, thumbing through documents he could not comprehend. Outside, the vast trading room of MD burned on, eighty young men and women, casually dressed, each behind a telephone console blinking with the action on twenty lines, and a pillar of cathode-ray tubes. Across these glowing screens darted figures, flashing by briefly like fish in the sea, a matrix of dollars and cents, beans and oil, fast markets and bulletin items, high, low, open, volume, change. The telephones chirped like crickets, and different voices occasionally gained ascendance. "Anybody here want to buy old bonds at 6 plus?… It's moving, it's moving."

"I'm going to hedge you up on the D-marks."

Between calls, these young people, working customer and managed accounts, would offer to the entire room a hip, sardonic commentary. One fellow whined in a mock accent of some kind, "Oh, the market, she is just like a woo-man, first she wants you, then she don't, she won't never make up her mind." An attractive young blonde beside him inclined her middle finger in response.

"Got it all figured out?" Margy Allison, Dixon's chief operating officer, had returned for a moment to check on his progress. She had been in this business most of her adult life, almost exclusively for Maison Dixon, and, apparently, still found it thrilling. Nothin' to it, she seemed to suggest, as she motioned to the stacks of paper around Stern-even a silly old Okie gal could git it. Margy loved to do routines like that, for the amusement of her friends up North. An M.B.A., she preferred to come on like an oilfield roughneck. 'Mar-gee,' she would say, when introducing herself. 'Hard g. Hard girl."

"I believe we shall need an accountant," Stern told her.

Margy made a face. She was the paymaster in these parts and a legend for her tightfistedness. Every time she signed a check, she told you what a dollar used to buy in the country.

"I can put all that stuff together for you."

She was capable, no question, but unlikely to find the time. With the advent of overseas trading, and night sessions of the markets, Maison Dixon was open twenty-four hours a day, and there were problems to solve at every juncture. At her door at any hour, there was usually a line: clerks and secretaries and boys up from the floor in the unstructured jackets with the large square plastic badges on the pockets. Stern, accordingly, told her she could not afford to spend the hours this job would require.

"If you're billin' us your usual hourly rate, Sandy, I can afford a lotta time." She smiled, but her point, of course, was made. "I'm sure you got one of those hotel rooms like you usually do when we're payin, big enough to hold the opera with the elephants. We can take this whole mess there and look it over. Assumin a' course"-Margy hooded her shadowed eyes-"you're willing to chance bein alone with me." She cast herself in a vampy role, a female sexual braggart. It was part of her 1ov routine, coming on tough and crude, like the kind of woman you imagined finding smoking a cigarette at the bar of some mid-city lounge.

Stern had no idea where the truth resided, but she had laid it on thick with him over the years, perhaps as a way to flatter him, or simply on the assumption he was harmless.

Now, of course, the mere suggestion inflamed his new libidinal itch.

Being himself, he changed the subject.

"Do any of these records, Margy, have anything to do with the house error account?" He had Dixon's recent phone call in mind.

"They want that now, too?" Margy, nearly as irritated as Dixon by the government's persistence, went off at once to find a clerk to gather the records. This was why he traveled to the documents, Stern thought.

Something else was always needed.

Stern took it that, sometime in the past twenty years, Margy had been one of Dixon's women. She was far too attractive not to have drawn Dixon's attention. But it had not gone along happily. The amount of surmise and conjecture which Stern had quietly made about thais matter surprised even him. Gradually, he had filled in the blanks, tested these guesses against what was observable, and taken them as true. He had long assumed that Margy had waited interminably for Dixon to leave Silvia; that she was somehow the focus of the crisis that had erupted years ago when Silvia briefly ejected Dixon from the household; and that she had declared the struggle lost when Dixon moved back in with his wife. For a year or two, Margy had disappeared to work for another house. But there really was no way to run MD without her. Even Silvia would have recognized that.

Instead, she was offered Chicago as a domain of her own, and the title of president of half a dozen of the subsidiaries, not to mention an enormous annual salary. So she had labored under those terms, devoted to Dixon's business, and probably still to him, the deprived and rejected heroic woman of one of the country ballads she had grown up humming. That was whom Margy reminded you of-those downhome ladies who stood onstage, with their twangy voices, their coiffed hair and stage makeup, sad and glamorous, hard and wise.

Eventually, the clerk arrived. The records of the house error account were laid on the table with the rest. Stern glanced through the papers, but he knew he was getting nowhere. Every time Stern found himself facing a room full of documents, he cursed the avarice that led him to do what was decorously referred to as white-collar work, and to a clientele of con artists in suits and ties who hid their crimes by laying waste to forests.

Margy reappeared in time, placing her face against a brightly manicured hand and leaning languorously on the metal door-frame. His bemusement was apparent, but Margy smiled indulgently; she had always liked Stern.

"You want me to help you out? I really am willin. We'll do like I said. Get the hell out of here. Gimme fifteen minutes. ' '

It was more than an hour and a half, but eventually one of the messengers had brought down four transfer cases of documents and loaded them into Margy's car. She tore off down the Loop streets for the Ritz.

She handled her automobile, a red foreign model, like a stock-car driver. His mother had been high-strong, hysterical. Clara was soft and dignified. That, to Stern, comprised the familiar range for female behavior. This woman, if truth be told, was stronger than he was. She could sprint an obstacle course faster or hold out longer in the face of torture. Watching her behind the wheel, he felt admiring and daunted.

This evidence of Margy's capacities was, Stern.suddenly thought, instructive about Dixon. It was a mistake to see him merely as some smutty conquistador seeking notches on his gun, butterflies for his collection. Dixon valued women, trusted them, counted on their counsel.

In a woman's presence, his charm and humor, and an enormous, almost electrical human force beset him. Even Stern, whatever his innate sense of rivalry, felt he liked Dixon more. And women responded to Dixon's attention. It was one of the symmetries of nature.

Of course, this interest was not detached. With Dixon, one was always well advised to remember the base elements.

The markets, the pits, tense, fast, trying, were full of coke-heads and types lost in the bottle; Dixon's release was more natural: fucking. The quickest zipper in the West, someone had once called him. Not that Stern was often treated to the details. He was the brother-in-law, Silvia's blood ally, and Dixon had better sense than to test Stern's loyalties. But no one, least of all Dixon, could make a complete secret of so persistent a preoccupation.

Occasionally, his pure delight overcame him, and he confided to Stern, as he did to so many other men. Dixon, for example, engaged in a personal sport in which he kept track of the exact number of women he saw in a day who inspired his most basic fantasies. 'Thirty-one,' he'd say to you, as you were greeted by a hotel clerk. 'Thirty-two,' when he looked out the window to see a woman getting on a bus. At the Rose Bowl one year, amid the coeds and cheerleaders, he claimed to have reached two sixty-three by half-time, despite giving complete attention to the game.

Usually, the extent of Dixon's interest was less amusing.

Stern had been with him at the airport, passing through the metal detector, when Dixon emptied his pockets into the tray meant to receive valuables and tossed in a package of prophylactics as naturally as a pack of gum. This was a few years ago, when such items were still not the subject of polite discussion. From subsequent commentary, Stern took it that in these matters of personal hygiene, as in so many other things, Dixon was a pioneer, meticulous about. protecting himself long before the current mania. But the security guard, a young woman, reddened noticeably far more horrified than if Dixon had pulled a knife. Even Dixon, walking toward the airport gate, was chagrined. 'I should just have my thing coated in plastic." Like a membership card or a snapshot. Neither abstinence nor restraint apparently suggested themselves as alternatives.

Witnessing these misadventures, Stern attempted to evince no interest.

But he paid attention. Who wouldn't? It 'sometimes seemed as if he could recollect the details of each one of Dixon's randy stories. And Dixon, never one to miss a point of vulnerability, had made note of Stern's penchant long. before. Once, when the two of them were traveling in New York, Dixon carried on with special animation with a young waitress, a smooth-featured young Puerto Rican woman of haunting beauty who seemed to be responding to Dixon's sly smiles and lascivious humor. He watched her trail away from the table and caught in Stern a look not much different from his own.

'Do you know what it feels like to touch a woman that age?" 'Dixon, please." 'It's different,' 'Dixon!'

Stern recollected that he took his knife and fork to what was on his plate with particular vigor, chewing with bovine single-mindedness. But when he glanced up, Dixon was still watching, shrewd and handsome, made merry by the sight of the disturbance he had caused.

At the hotel, Margy made herself at home. She had kicked off her shoes before the bellman had dropped the cases, and.threw the straw-colored silk jacket to her tailored suit on the bed. Grabbing a menu, she called room service for dinner, then ack of gum. This was a few years ago, when such items were still not the subject of polite discussion.

From subsequent commentary, Stern took it that in these matters of personal hygiene, as in so many other things, Dixon was a pioneer, meticulous about. protecting himself long before the current mania. But the security guard, a young woman, reddened noticeably far more horrified than if Dixon had pulled a knife. Even Dixon, walking toward the airport gate, was chagrined. 'I should just have my thing coated in plastic." Like a membership card or a snapshot. Neither abstinence nor restraint apparently suggested themselves as alternatives.

Witnessing these misadventures, Stern attempted to evince no interest.

But he paid attention. Who wouldn't? It 'sometimes seemed as if he could recollect the details of each one of Dixon's randy stories. And Dixon, never one to miss a point of vulnerability, had made note of Stern's penchant long. before. Once, when the two of them were traveling in New York, Dixon carried on with special animation with a young waitress, a smooth-featured young Puerto Rican woman of haunting beauty who seemed to be responding to Dixon's sly smiles and lascivious humor. He watched her trail away from the table and caught in Stern a look not much different from his own.

'Do you know what it feels like to touch a woman that age?" 'Dixon, please." 'It's different,' 'Dixon!'

Stern recollected that he took his knife and fork to what was on his plate with particular vigor, chewing with bovine single-mindedness. But when he glanced up, Dixon was still watching, shrewd and handsome, made merry by the sight of the disturbance he had caused.

At the hotel, Margy made herself at home. She had kicked off her shoes before the bellman had dropped the cases, and.threw the straw-colored silk jacket to her tailored suit on the bed. Grabbing a menu, she called room service for dinner, then opened the minibar. "God, do I need a drink!" she declared. Stern asked for sherry, but they had none, and so he drank Scotch with Margy.

As Stern began emptying the document cases, she took his hand.

"So how you doin, Sandy Stern?" She had a sweet solicitous look, seated on the bed. No mention had been made of Clara's death;, Stern had wondered if she even knew. Now, at once, she seemed soft enough to cry on, with the beckoning availability of an open field. He was never quite sure what to make of her. She had an imposing appearance, the kind other women referred to as 'put together." Her hair was frosted and curled; she was expensively dressed.

Her eyebrows were penciled so that they extended almost to the corners of her eyes, lending her the mysterious look of a Siamese cat. She was a large, handsome woman, strongly built, with a pleasant, expansive bottom-something happened across Margy's hips that Stern, for whatever reason, had found notable for a number of years, watching her march about in her tweed skirts or bend over a cabinet.

She was bright and ambitious; in her career, she'd moved from secretary to top executive. But she had a look of being written on by life. I am the blank slate. Inscribe.

The message left was sad.

"I am making do, Margy," Stern said. "There have been better times, of course. It seems to be a matter of adjustment. Day by day."

"That's right," said Margy. She nodded. You could tell that she regarded herself as an expert on tragedy, well informed. "You are a sweet fella, Sandy. It's always the ones that don't deserve it that get all of life's troubles. '

This country formulation made Stern smile. He looked at Margy, slumped somewhat and sitting on the bedside in her stocking feet.

"I shall survive," he said. Even this prediction, he recognized, struck some note of improvement.

"Shore," she told him. After a second, she dropped his hand. "Life goes on. You're gonna have all those softhearted old gals just hovefin around pretty soon, so you don't feel so lonely. You know, widows and divorcees just stopping to say Hi, hope you ain't too blue, on their way home from the beauty parlor."

Margy always thought she had everybody's number. Stern laughed out loud. In spite of himself, he recalled Helen Dudak's visit. Even Margy, it seemed, was more flirtatious than she would have been two months ago. In any event, he was unaccustomed to this kind of attention. Women had always found him solid and charming in a social way, but he had never sensed any allure.

They worked for some time before dinner arrived. Stern stacked the documents on the carpeting in the categories called for by the subpoena and showed them to her. She lay casually on the bed, chin down, shoes off, tossing her legs around girlishly. She had found a can of p!stachio nuts in the minibar, and she pried them open with her bright fingernails, the shells making a tinny drumming noise as each hit the bottom of the wastebasket. Arriving with dinner, the room-service waiter rolled in a small cart and lifted the sides to form a table.

Margy had ordered wine, too. The waiter attempted to pour Stern a glass, but his head was whirling already from the Scotch.

She threw the documents down and began as soon as the waiter lifted the steel warming top on her dish, eating robustly. People teased her, she said, about how fast she ate, but she had grown up with four older brothers and had learned better than to wait. Done, she threw her napkin down on the bed and pushed herself back.

"So what-all is this thing about?" she asked. "I can't get much out of Dixon."

Stern, with his mouth full, shook his head. He was enjoying his meal, lingering. He seldom of late had anything worth eating at this hour, when he preferred it.

"You thinkhe got his toe in the bear trap? That old boy is too smart to let them catch him." Margy, like anyone else who knew Dixon well, did not presume that he walked straight lines. They all knew better.

"My concern," said Stern, "is not so much witl Dixon's discretion as with that of others." Margy cocked her head, not comprehending. "From the recision with which the government is moving, I suspect they have an informant."

"Those Exchange compliance types," said Margy, "they do a lot with their computers."

"That is what Dixon assumes. But they have too much personal information. I would look to someone who once enjoyed Dixon's confidence. A business colleague." As evenly as he could, Stern added,

"A friend." A part of him, on guard, watched her for any telltale response; in this sort of matter, no one was ever above suspicion.

"Naw," said Margy. "I don't think you'll find a lot of folks on the street too eager to take out after Mr. Dixon there. They all heard the story. They know better'n that."

"What story is that?" asked Stern.

"Mean you never heard that?" Margy hooted. She poured more wine for both of them. Stern demurred but picked up his glass as soon as it was filled. It seemed to him she had drunk a great deal, three Scotches before dinner and most of the wine, but you would hardly notice. "This is a great one." She laughed again.

"I am the brother-in-law," said Stern. "over the years, I have no doubt missed many stories."

"You can bet on that," said Mar'gy with a knowing, heavylidded look. She sat up on the bed, legs crossed, seemingly indifferent to her daytime image of the businesswoman vamp, her touseled hair, heavy makeup, and perfume. Instead, she seemed jazzed up, high, inspired, Stern realized, to be speaking confidentially about Dixon. "Let me tell you about Mr.

Dixon Hartnell. Old Dixon, he can take care of himself, Sandy. You remember the IRS thing? You were the attorney, right?"

The problem, as Dixon liked to put it, was that his wife had refurnished, as the cost of readmitting Dixon to the household. When Silvia was done, the decorator presented them with a final bill, not counting payments along the way, for $175,000; according to the financial records of both Dixon and the decorator, this sum was never paid.

Instead, the decorator; an amiable, high-strung fellow who annually spent every sou that passed through his hands, inexplicably took an interest in the currency futures markets and opened a Maison Dixon account in which an astonishing flurry of activity took place. In a ten-day period, he traded sixty times. When the dust settled, $15,000 equity was now $190,000 and change, a clear profit of $175,000, most of it a long-term capital gain, taxed.at two-fifths the rate it would have been' had Dixon simply written the decorator a check. The IRS spent nearly two years trying to unravel the devices they suspected Dixon of employing-the intervening brokers, the offshore trusts-before giving up. Dixon remained cheerful throughout, while Stern was on pins and needles, having discovered, as the IRS had not, that Dixon's Mercedes dealer and the contractor who had added an addition to his home had also gone unpaid, while experiencing great success as traders of futures in heating oil and cotton, respectively.

"You know how that thing got itself started? You ever hear that tale?" asked Margy.

"I did not receive what I would call vivid detail," said Stern. "As I recall, it was Dixon's position that the Service had received information from an employee. A tip.

Brady? Was that his name?"

"Right. You remember Merle. With this little mustache sort of split in two. He ran all our operations for a while. A computer.wizard, hack-off, hacker, whatever that is."

Margy flapped a hand. "Remember?"

Stern shrugged: vaguely. Dixon's people came and went. So far as Stern recalled, Mefie's departure, in a dispute over a raise, had been oddly timed with the start of the IRS inquiry. Apparently, he had fulminated and delivered threats before he left: What I know, what I can do. He was out to scuttle Dixon's ship.

"My assumption," said Stern, "was that Merle must have been the person who received certain critical' instructions. ' ' "No, no," said Margy,.with an evasive smile. "Dixon isn't the kind to hand anyone a rope. But Brady, you know, he'd look at that little o1' cathode-ray tube. He'd figure out all sorts of everything. That's how he got Dixon's number."

Stern uttered a sound. This made sense. Brady knew enough to make trouble, but not to deliver the coup de grace.

"Anyway fast forward two years. The IRS had done its own proctoscopy on Dixon-"

"His term," she said. They smiled at one another. Dixon, with his quirks and passions, and his well-concealed inner core, was secret terrain they had both explored. They were initiates. Acolytes. In their shared understanding of this phenomenon, there was a strange intimacy.

"This, as they say back home, this is the good part." Port, she said.

"One day Dixon's in the Union League Club in DuSable, and guess who's there? Why, it's ol' Brady. You'd think Dixon'd pick up an ashtray or somethin and bang this boy on the head, but no, sir, he's downright friendly.

Dixon shakes his hand. Tells him how glad he is to see him, too, sorry they lost touch, all kinds of buddy-boy sweettalk. And Brady, you know, he's like everybody else, he never knew whether to smile or pee in his pants when Dixon showed up, he's' quite relieved. Dixon takes his business card. Brady's working as a back office consultant, and Dixon starts sending Brady work, I couldn't believe it when I saw the cheeks, I got on the phone, I said, 'Dixon, what the hell are you doin now?" He just says, you know, 'Leave me be, lady, I know my business." I figure maybe he's had a character transplant or somethin, he's become forgiving, maybe he's been hearin Billy Graham."

She took a drink and Stern lifted his glass with her. He had never seen this side of Margy before. She was a storyteller in the old tradition.

She needed a porch and a jug of corn whiskey. He had a sense, listening to her, of the way she had grown up watching men, admiring them, taken in by them in a certain way. That perhaps was the key to her longtime attachment to Dixon and the swashbuckling privateers of the markets.

"Anyway, next thing I hear, Dixon and Brady are quite chummy again.

They're goin out, them and the wives. Brady's one of these types married to a skinny little lady who always wants more. You know what I'm talking about? She's got to make up for something. I don't know what it is. But they're at plays, havin dinner. I tell you. Maybe they went out with you and Clara."

"I never heard a word," said Stern.

"No," said Margy, correcting herself, "I wouldn't think.

Then one day I'm talkin to some old boy, I don't remember who, and he says, 'Word is Brady's comin back to MD to run your operations in Kindle." Dixon won't answer me, you know how he gets, but I check, everybody's heard it. Sure enough, word comes from the Kindle office, there's gonna be a big announcement. Dixon sets up this fancy luncheon over at Fina's. He gets all his key people around.! flew my little Oklahoma fanny in there. You know, we're all sittin there havin a nice time. Then Dixon looks at Brady. 'By the way,' he says, right in front of everyone. Cheerful as a chickadee." Margy took a drink and looked straight at Stern with her bright, hard eyes. "'I fucked your wife last night." Just like that. And he had, too. No doubt about that with good-buddy Dixon. Can you imagine this? He's got eight folks around the table to hear this. Lunch was over before they served the soup. I'm not kiddin. Believe me, that made some ripples around here. So that's why I'm tellin you: nobody's sayin diddlydoo about Dixon."

Stern was quiet. He took the bottle and finished off the wine.

"Remarkable," he said at last. He meant it. The story filled him with a peculiar sense of alarm. The truth about Dixon was always uglier than Stern could quite conceive of on his own.

"Ain't it, though. Old Dixon, boy, sometimes I think he oughta have himself a peckerectomy. He's got an unusual way of doin things."

Stern chuckled, but Margy passed him a meaningful look, liquor-loosened and reproving, as if to warn him of the amount he did not understand.

This woman, he knew, comprehended things about men and women, about carnality, that were remote from him.

"Let's get goin with these boring old papers." She smiled, sat up, smoothed her skirt and blouse. But she was not quite done. She looked lost for a moment, glancing away.

Somewhere along in the telling, much of her own pain about Dixon had emerged from hiding. Distress had reduced her good looks, brought a wincing closeness to her features.

"That son of a bitch," she said suddenly. She was somehow penetrated by her forlorn tone and the thought of glamorous Margy, here in her forties, with her career and life in the shadow of Dixon's mountain.

Stern reached out and briefly held her hand.

"WelI, you're a kindly o1' boy, ain't you?" she asked.

Stern knew what was going to happen now. Now that he'd had enough to drink, he realized that he'd known for hours, since she looked at him that way and asked with apparent disinterest about the women hovering around him. Beneath it all perhaps was the polar tug of loneliness, the sore yearning of the isolated soul, but now, adrift on the ether of the alcohol, he was suddenly filled by the hot itch of anticipation. There was a racing tempo in his hands as he waited for the next move.

He did not have to wait long. Margy reverted for a few moments to the papers; she spoke; mumbled; then suddenly peered at him with a drunken intense look of heat, appetite, disorder. If he had been sober, perhaps he might have found it comic, a woman turning a gaze on him hot enough to scale paint. But he wasn't. He simply held his ground and watched as she stood and then leaned down and kissed him as he sat in the brocaded hotel armchair. Her lips were chapped, and, as he would have imagined, somehow erustexl hard. There was a taste of salt from the meal she had eaten.

"How do you like that?" She laid his head against her breast. Dove-soft.

The strong sweet smell of her perfume was all around him, and on his cheek he felt a silky undergarment shifting beneath her blouse. He did not move.

He was certain he would receive further instruction.

She kissed him again, then released him and strode off to the bathroom, the water splashed. Stern moved to the edge of the bed, bracing himself. Dear God, he was drunk. The room had not begun to move, but he sensed that it was unglued, starting to become slippery in the peripheral world just beyond the corners of his eyes. What was the old line? A drop of courage. Well, he felt courageous. He was willing.

The lights went out. Margy was poised by the switch. She wore nothing now but her jasmine-colored silk blouse, which was unbuttoned and parted an inch or two over her chest and hung at the length of a negligee. Her legs were bare, her hair was down, and without her fashionable attire and highheeled shoes, she looked far more delicate. Her skirt and a silky flag of lingerie were bundled in her hand. She tilted her head.

"Well, look who's gettin lucky," Margy said.

Stern turned off the lamp behind him. Moving across the room to meet her, Stern kicked through.two or three piles of records. She was much smaller than she appeared, an inch or two shorter than he, but solid in his arms. Her mouth was raw and smoky.

How strange and friendly this all seemed. She even drew back at one point to laugh. He swept aside her shirt, touched her breast, and then bent gallantly to kiss the small dark button where his years with Clara had taught him to expect more. Drunk as he was, this was awkward, and they rolled almost at once onto the bed. Body to body, there was in the small details-the texture of flesh, the precise location of elbows and knees-the exciting news of contact with a different female structure, but over him swam, surprisingly, the sensation of something familiar; he was more relaxed at this than he would ever have imagined. It was this old mysterious human thing relived, man and woman, nothing larger than that. She worked off his tie, opened his shirt. Her leg was up over him as she embarked on this enterprise, and almost casually his hand came up to the warm slick arena at her bottom. She had washed there and his fingertips slid in a bit, and this, this ancient sweet warm feel, this! sent a spectacular surge through him so that he suddenly .groaned.

In a few minutes they were joined. Margy for her part slid into a transport of her own. Her eyes were closed, and as Stern rolled, she made a peculiar internal hum, pulling herself down into him with every stroke. There was something oddly practiced and isolated about it;

Margy knew how to look after herself. Near the end, she put one hand on his butt and held him where she wanted him, dove onto him a final time and then approached the peak and reached it with a terrible tremolo whinny, setting both hands and their long red nails groping in his back.

The thought of those crimson-tipped hands pressed into the loose pale flesh of his own back-the image reached him as something remarkably tantalizing, and that, as much as Margy's agitation, the rising pace of her breath, set him off finally, so that he momentarily losi'track of her, still struggling against him, and then waked to her, this soft, sweet-smelling woman beneath him going still at almost the same second as he did. She pulled him to her in a kind of gratified, comradely hug. ,Terrific," she said, a remark which Stern heard as praise of the process really, rather than him. Her eyes were still closed and she smiled faintly; her makeup was messed. Her familiarity with all this, her comfort in a strange man's arms, was a phenomenon. Somewhere long ago she had vowed to take whatever was to be had for herself.

She kissed him beside the ear and rolled away, grabbing the pillows on her.side of the bed. Familiar as any man's wife, she arranged her rump solidly, so that it found some part of his flank, and then she disappeared into sleep, so quickly that Stern somehow recognized that, more than anything which had gone before, it was this moment of refuge which had been the goal for Margy. To her, he was a man she could calmly sleep beside. In her drowse, she murmured. The light, Stern supposed. He leaned closer to the strange, intimate smell of her, to catch her whisper.

"Oh, God," he said when he heard her, and then embraced her, fit himself to her, and, once the lights were out, slept.

Don't bill us, she had whispered. Don't bill us for the time.

Sometime he woke. He bolted upright, staring blindly in the dark. He had no idea, no inkling where he was, until he recognized a chair where his suit hung and remembered the hotel, Chicago, Margy. He could still feel the weight of her form beside him, but he dared not. reach for her. There was a distinct line of pain boring inward from his temple.

He groped for his watch on the bedside table, then realized he could read the hieroglyphics of the blue digital numbers on the clock radio: 3:45. That was not what struck him, though. It was the calendar, also there in smaller figures.

He sat at the edge of the bed, calculating as Margy's heavy sounds came to him in the dark.

Forty, he thought. Since the day he came home to find her.

Forty days, exactly.

When he woke, she was sitting on the bratified, comradely hug. ,Terrific," she said, a remark which Stern heard as praise of the process really, rather than him. Her eyes were still closed and she smiled faintly; her makeup was messed. Her familiarity with all this, her comfort in a strange man's arms, was a phenomenon. Somewhere long ago she had vowed to take whatever was to be had for herself.

She kissed him beside the ear and rolled away, grabbing the pillows on her.side of the bed. Familiar as any man's wife, she arranged her rump solidly, so that it found some part of his flank, and then she disappeared into sleep, so quickly that Stern somehow recognized that, more than anything which had gone before, it was this moment of refuge which had been the goal for Margy. To her, he was a man she could calmly sleep beside. In her drowse, she murmured. The light, Stern supposed. He leaned closer to the strange, intimate smell of her, to catch her whisper.

"Oh, God," he said when he heard her, and then embraced her, fit himself to her, and, once the lights were out, slept.

Don't bill us, she had whispered. Don't bill us for the time.

Sometime he woke. He bolted upright, staring blindly in the dark. He had no idea, no inkling where he was, until he recognized a chair where his suit hung and remembered the hotel, Chicago, Margy. He could still feel the weight of her form beside him, but he dared not. reach for her. There was a distinct line of pain boring inward from his temple.

He groped for his watch on the bedside table, then realized he could read the hieroglyphics of the blue digital numbers on the clock radio: 3:45. That was not what struck him, though. It was the calendar, also there in smaller figures.

He sat at the edge of the bed, calculating as Margy's heavy sounds came to him in the dark.

Forty, he thought. Since the day he came home to find her.

Forty days, exactly.

When he woke, she was sitting on the bed, legs crossed, wearing his shin. Pillars of photocopied records had, slid into a slatternly mess before her.

Margy s head was on one hand.

"Well, I figured it out," she said. "He's a peckerhead, okay."

Stern, naked, found his shorts beside the bed, and narrowly parted the drapes. The sun had only begun to rise in an overcast sky. He went briefly to the bathroom. There was a woolen feeling in his mouth and head. A hangover?

He groped in his jacket pocket for his reading glasses.

"Now, what is this?"

"House error account doesn't look very good." Margy flopped over onto her belly. Her bottom was bare and her position on the bed pressed up an.appealing d6colletage. Stern for a second tried to take account of events. He was a widower, in his underwear, engaged in a business conference, and his penis was already growing firm. She picked up a copy of the subpoena and penciled check marks beside four trades, large positions, four different dates. "Now, these guys are gonna move the market, right?"

Perhaps because of the distraction, he was momentarily confused. Then he recalled Dixon's explanation last month: large orders, a thousand contracts at a time, would cause a sharp movement in the price of the future.

"Supply and demand," said Stern.

"Right," she said. "Now, suppose you got a customer's gonna be comin into the pit with a huge buy order that'll run up prices through the roof. And you're a big peckerhead and wanna make a buck or two. What'd you do?"

Stern thought. "Purebase what the customer intends to 'buy?"

"Dang right."

"Prior to the customer?"

"Dang right."

"And then sell once the market has risen.."

"You betchum. They got all kinds of names for it. 'Front tannin." 'Tindin ahead of the customer." But they been playin this game ever since there was a market." Margy looked up. Ungroomed, her hair was darker, and her eyes seemed bloated a bit by the short night. She remained, however, a pretty sight, this large hearty woman, smart and energetic. Stern noticed that she had never removed her earrings, little berries of gold.

"I would assume that the compliance staff of the Exchange is alert to this?"

"Shore. Exchange catches you at it, you're out on your keester in a big goddamn hurry. And they're always lookin."

"And how, then, were such precautions avoided here?"

"Error account."

"The error account," said Stern, merely for the sake of repetition.

Somehow, as she snaked along on her belly, the shirt had came away completely from one breast, which rested pale and round on the bedclothes. He had momentarily fallen into their discussion, but this new sight revived other inclinations. Libido was like a rusty gate, he decided; finally open, it was difficult to close. He picked up a piece of paper on the bed and casually hid his erection.

"I gotta give it to ole peckerhead. I'd never have figured this one.

The house error account is where we clean up mistakes. Right? Sometimes we buy or sell a contract on one commodity, customer wanted another. We buy three cars, customer only asked for two. Any dumb o1' mistake.

Account number isn't right or somethin. Soon as somebody notices the error, down on the floor or in accounting or when the customer complains, trade gets moved to the error account.

If we can't get the trade where it belongs, we close out the pOSition-you know, sell what we bought or buy what we sold. Okay?"

Okay, said Stern.

"Now suppose I'm a real clever peckerhead and I wanna trade ahead of my customers and I don't wanna get caught. t buy a little in Kindle of what I know they're gonna buy a lot of in Chicago. Price'll move tick for tick in both places. All I gotta do is wait for the market to jump.

And I don't do it in my name. I make a mistake. Deliberately. Wrong account number, say. Then, after the market runs up, I sell out the position."

"Once more, with a wrong account number?"

"Right. Couple days later, when the smoke clears, both trades are sittin over in the house error account. Compliance'll never be lookin at Kindle, and even if they do, they won't find anybody buyin ahead of the market. All they see is some dumb ole mistake. But when we close out the two positions, the buy and the sell, we got a hell of a nice little profit in the error account."

Stern wagged his head in amazement. How nice a profit, he wanted to know.

Margy shrugged. "[haven't finished lookin yet. Four trades here made close to a hundred thousand, though. I'd say you probably got six times that. Not bad, you' know, for a few phone calls while you're scratchin your fanny."

Six hundred thousand, thought Stern. Ms. Klonsky was not pursuing a petty offense.

"Only thing," said Margy, "is this little scheam still doesn't seem much like our friendly peckerhead."

That had been Stern's thought as well, that the rewards were not Worth the risks for a man of Dixon's wealth. But Margy laughed at the idea when Stern said that.

"Oh, he'd screw you in the ground for a buck and a quarter, let alone half a million. Naw, it isn't that. Just doesn't seem like Dixon. Our customers? That's his religion. I can't figure him makin them suckers.

He's loyal." Lawl. She grabbed Stern's hands. "But I know he done it," she said.

"Because he must be informed before any large order is traded?" This fact, which Dixon had admitted in Stern's office, had already come to mind.

"That's one thing. But lotsa folks in house know what we're doin. Only, ifI stole five, six hundred thousand bucks, am I gonna hide it in your pocket? It's the house error account. And o1' Dixon Hartnell is shore enough the house.

He owns MD Clearing Corp, MD Holding Corp, Maison Dixon.

The whole shootin' match is his. This is probably some dumb old game he was playin, seein' if he could get a laugh or two up his sleeve."

Stern contemplated the notion of Dixon committing crimes for his own amusement. It was not impossible. With Dixon, of course, nothing was.

"And what became of the money?" Stern was thinking about the subpoenas the government was serving at Dixon's bank.

Margy turned onto her back and wobbled her head a bit to indicate that she did not know. Her breasts went loose and splayed against her chest; beneath her chin, where the blush-on ended, a pale rim of flesh was visible, oddly pallid, as if the years of cosmetic treatments had drained her complexion of color. These flaws meant little to Stern; he remained in heat.

"I can't tell without a lot more lokin. But you want my guess about what he did with the money?"

"Please."

"Nothim"

"Nothing?"

"Nothin. Just leaves it there. That's What I'd do. Error account always runs at a deficit. That's because when you.goof on an order and the customer makes money on it, he won't tell you it's an error. He just accepts the trade.

You only hear about the losers. And that's okay. Cost of doin business. But you can lose forty thousand a month, and if you start makin some profits, all of a sudden you're only losin two thousand a month. See? Nobody knows the difference. Except oe peckerhead. Cause, at the end of the year, that six hundred thousand's gonna end up on the bottom line. Sort of like he give himself a bonus."

"Very clever," said Stern of the entire scheme. "And quite adept of you, Margy, to figure all this out." He kissed the back of each of her hands.

"Oh, I am a clever harlot," she said, smiling up at him.

Stern wondered whose phrase that was, who had called her that before; it seemed to be something she was repeating.

He, naturally, might guess. "But I'm not the smartest one."

"No?" asked Stern, sitting beside her now on the bed, where she waited sunny-side up to face him. "Who is that?"

"Ole you-know-who. They won't never catch him. All he had todo was call the order desk to put on these positions that ended up in the error account. He only does that twenty times a day. Nobody's gonna remember him doin it. And there isn't one piece of paper in this mess with so much as his initials on it. He's gonna point to forty other people Shoulda done it instead of him. Phone clerks. Customers' reps. Coulda been me." Margy smiled then. "They may think it's him. They may know it's him. But they ain't gonna prove it's him." Margy had watched television, heard these lines; perhaps she was imitating Stern. She had certainly convinced herself. Dixon was confident too, Stern thought, recalling Dixon's predictions of vindication on the phone.

His client was fortified by his prior successes with the IRS and his knowledge that the government had run off to rangack his checking accounts when the mqney had never really left the company. Stern, however, was hardly as sanguine. The Assistant U.S. Attorneys were often adroit financial investigators. They might blunder about at first, but if Margy was right in her suspicions about how Dixon had handled his ill-gotten gains, the prosecutors would find them eventually, in his hands, and draw the same conclusions as she had about who was responsible. Dixon remained at substantial risk.

"I should speak to the MD employees in Kindle who received these orders on the desk to be certain their memories are as vague as you suppose," said Stern. It would be wise to remind whoever might have dealt directly with Dixon of how long ago these events occurred, and the confounding volume of orders received. each day; Stern would have to do that promptly, before the FBI unearthed contrary recollections.

Margy promised to recall the order tickets from storage and have them sent to Stern; he could identify the order takers and contact them directly. She would send a memo to Kindle, asking all employees on the desk to cooperate with their lawyer.

"Course, this still isn't what I'd call comical," said Margy. "The Exchange'll bang the bullpucky out of the company. They'll give us a whole bunch of fines and censures and make a big stink. Then they'll hand it over to the CFTC and let them make some stink, too. But ole youknow-who, he'll be okay. He'll be fussin and stinkin along with the rest of them, makin out like how'd this awful thing happen right under my nose. And then he'll turn around and fire someone to cover his hillbilly fanny."

Margy inclined her head slightly so that she was more or less eye to eye with the excited area of Stern's shorts.

Looking back, she gave him a little knowing grin, which he thought was at his expense, but it was not.. She was still thinking about whom Dixon would fire. "Prob'ly me," she said with a sad little buttoned-up smile. "Probably me," she repeated, and laughed then, laughed and raised her arms to Stern again and pulled him down to her for comfort. parting at the hotel-room door, he promised to call her.

"That'd be nice," Margy answered simply. Clearly, she did not believe him; men said that all the time. As soon as the cab had deposited him at O'Hare, he thumbed through the yellow pages and sent an enormous bouquet, without a card, to her office. Seated in the cramped booth, behind the perforated stainless-steel partitions, he was visited by images of the night and morning and he almost shivered with the staggering thrill of it all. Had that truly been he, Ale-jandro Stern, gentleman lawyer, child of a Catholic country, humping his brains out a few hours ago? Yes, indeed. His spirit was on alert, his flag unfurled. He had Margy's smoky taste on his lips, the touch of her silks in his palm. When was he returning? He laughed out loud at himself, so that a woman in a booth across the way actually looked straight at him. Slightly shamed, he found suddenly the splinter of something more abiding buried closer to his heart. Gratitude. Oh yes, he was grateful to Margy, to the entire race of women, who, unbelievably, had seen fit to take him in once more. With his hand still on the telephone, he pondered the sheer blessing of another human being's embrace.

At the gate, the attendant announced that the plane for his short flight back to the tri-cities was delayed. "Equipment problems." As usual!

Stern, even in his buoyant mood, could not pull free of his hatred for this airport, with its endless corridors and sickly light, its teeming, hurtling bodies and worried faces. He located the airline's executive lounge, all black leather and granite, and telephoned his office.

".Claudia, please call Ms. Klonsky and schedule an appointment for Friday. Tell her I wish to deliver the documents she has subpoenaed from MD." Stern had not spoken with the prosecutor in a month now.

Raphael had called to beg an additional week on the return date, and reported that Klonsky sounded on the verge of rage. Stern did not like to beard the Assistants-it was not his style, and more to the point, enmity among lawyers complicated a case.

He would have to make amends somehow with Klonsky. The lawyer's life, he thought, always toadying. Judges.

Prosecutors. Certain clients.

"You want your messages?"

Stern was seated on a sofa; the telephone console was cleverly inserted in the granite top of a cocktail table.

Claudia reported a call from Remo Cavarelli, an old hustler under indictment, who wanted the status date for his next appearance before Judge Winchell. There was also a message from a Ms. Helen Dudak, who wanted to speak to Stern: a personal matter. And Cal Hopkinson had phoned.

Developments, he thought with a sudden surge of something undefined, interest or apprehension, when he heard Cal's name. He had Claudia put him through, but Cal's secretary said he was on another call. Stern held a bit, then decided to call back and punched in the number Helen had left. She had told him she worked at home, with a headset plugged into the phone-connected earpieces and a tiny suspended mike, smaller than a thimble. He imagined her like that.

"I'm picking up on the end of our conversation the other.night," said Helen.

"Yes, of come," he answered, not truly certain what she meant.

"I wanted to invite you to dinner here. Two weeks from Saturday. The two of us."

"Ah," said Stern, and felt his heart palpably squirm. Now what? Helen meant well, he thought. And she was charmning.

But could he manage these complications? Yes, said some voice suddenly.

Yes, indeed.

Yet, having accepted, he dwelled on Margy and quarreled with himself as he put down the phone. Eating, after all, was not a formof sexual intercourse. But then again, he slyly thought, he was becoming quite a fellow. In the crowded airport lounge, with the stalled travelers murmuring around him, he once more laughed aloud.

This time he got through to Cal.

"Sandy!" Cal cried. "Where are you?" Cal told him the story of his most recent unscheduled layover at O'Hare. Stern eventually asked about the bank.

"That's why I was calling," said Cal. '-'Just to let you know the story." River National, Cal said, was being perfectly neurotic about this transaction in Clara's investment account. Any time a will was involved, the bank worried over everything: the probate court, the Attorney General's Office. They insisted on retrieving every single piece of paper before they would meet. Cal was pressing for a conference in the next week. He spoke with the selfcongratulatory air that Stern himself often assumed with clients, describing his communications with the bankers and file clerks as if it were mortal combat.

"Really, Cal," said Stern. He did not want to be one more complaining client, and ended the conversation rather than speak his mind. Cal was too fussy to be forceful-he, too, would want to see each paper-and besides, he was probably in no position with the bankers, who in all likelihood sent him business-wealthy customers who needed trusts drawn, wills updated. But it was unfair, Stern decided in a moment, to blame Cal for the complications Clara had made.

Stern had lived decades never wholly knowing what was occurring behind Clara's composed and gracious facade. And still the wondering went on.

All that old simmering frustration was boiling up in him again.

He redialed his secretary's number.

"Claudia, did Dr. Cawley return my call?" Following his evening at Kate and John's, Stern had chased Nate about, leaving word at the office, the hospital, at home, asking Nate to call the lab. It was not clear that Nate had even gotten the messages, and Stern remained unsure that he would follow through, in any event. Nate, after all, had other worries.

"Should I try someone at his office?" asked Claudia. Stern drummed his fingers on the tabletop and did not answer. Out the window, the view was obstructed by a 747 which was being washed by workers mounted on a series of movable scaffolds-Stern was reminded of zookeepers and a giraffe.

He certainly could venture to Westlab himself-wherevei: it might be. As Clara's executor, he had a legal right to inquire. But if the administrators at Westlab were sticklers about privacy, as Nate suspected, Stern would need credentials, which would mean involving Cal.

Better patience, Stern thought. Nate would get to it eventually.

But there was a soreness here, more persistent than his curiosity about Clara, which seemed to rise and fall with the tide of his grief. It took Stern an instant to fix upon it: Peter. The suspicion born at Kate and John's that he had been outdone by his son had not proved easy to put aside. Oh, he knew it was unfair, unlikely, unbecoming to believe that Peter in his great anguish had had the presence of mind, or the cunning, to manipulate his father about the autopsy. But Peter, to Stern's memory, had been so insistent-he could still recall his voice resounding down the corridors at its wailing pitch as he upbraided that poor bewildered cop, the frantic glint in Peter's eyes. Questions lingered. With Peter, Stern supposed, questions always would."

"Claudia, connect me, please, with the general switchboard of the Kindle Municipal Police." As soon as Stern said it, he knew it was probably an error. ThroUghout his professional career, he had been alert for any opportunity to avoid the police. They always made trouble in the end.

He gave the operator who answered the name and precinct he wanted and comforted himself with the thought that the old policeman was probably not there. As the saying went, they never were.

"Ray Radczyk."

"Alejandro Stern, Lieutenant."

"I'll be damned. How are you, Sandy?"

"Continuing." He heard the beep on the line then, over the usual. tumbling of the police station in the background. The old cop sounded positively alight to have heard from him. For the life of him, Stern could still not recall the connection.

He had puzzled on it once or twice, a vagrant thought that came along with many others when he remembered that late afternoon. "Do you still have that file with my name on it, Lieutenant?"

"Hey, come on," said Radczyk, and laughed. "I got a job, just like you.

Never was a file. You know that."

"Of course," said Stern. This Radczyk, he recalled, was not really a bad fellow. Minding his profession, naturally.

"Say, where you at? Sounds like we're talkin over two tin cans. ' '

Stern explained: O'Hare. Stuck.

"Oh, sure," said Radczyk.

"Lieutenant, there is a question with which I would probably never bother you were I not waylaid with a moment on my hands."

"No bother," said the cop. "Shoot."

Stern paused.

"I was wondering if of mind, or the cunning, to manipulate his father about the autopsy. But Peter, to Stern's memory, had been so insistent-he could still recall his voice resounding down the corridors at its wailing pitch as he upbraided that poor bewildered cop, the frantic glint in Peter's eyes. Questions lingered. With Peter, Stern supposed, questions always would."

"Claudia, connect me, please, with the general switchboard of the Kindle Municipal Police." As soon as Stern said it, he knew it was probably an error. ThroUghout his professional career, he had been alert for any opportunity to avoid the police. They always made trouble in the end.

He gave the operator who answered the name and precinct he wanted and comforted himself with the thought that the old policeman was probably not there. As the saying went, they never were.

"Ray Radczyk."

"Alejandro Stern, Lieutenant."

"I'll be damned. How are you, Sandy?"

"Continuing." He heard the beep on the line then, over the usual. tumbling of the police station in the background. The old cop sounded positively alight to have heard from him. For the life of him, Stern could still not recall the connection.

He had puzzled on it once or twice, a vagrant thought that came along with many others when he remembered that late afternoon. "Do you still have that file with my name on it, Lieutenant?"

"Hey, come on," said Radczyk, and laughed. "I got a job, just like you.

Never was a file. You know that."

"Of course," said Stern. This Radczyk, he recalled, was not really a bad fellow. Minding his profession, naturally.

"Say, where you at? Sounds like we're talkin over two tin cans. ' '

Stern explained: O'Hare. Stuck.

"Oh, sure," said Radczyk.

"Lieutenant, there is a question with which I would probably never bother you were I not waylaid with a moment on my hands."

"No bother," said the cop. "Shoot."

Stern paused.

"I was wondering if the coroner reported anything unusual in connection with his examination of my wife?"

"Huh," said Radczyk. Listening to himself, Stern realized how extraordinary this question would sound, arriving out of the blue.

Radczyk took his time. "I know he ruled it suicide, a' course. I was gonna give you a call, then I thought, hellw"

"Certainly," said Stern. Neither of them, for an instant, spoke. Stern waved off a waiter in white coat who approached to offer him a drink. "I realize this is a peculiar inquiry-"

"No problem. Lemme dig up the case report. Just come back from dictation a week or two ago. Gimme a number.

I'll be back to you in two shakes." Stern read the number from the console. What would Radczyk do? Perhaps he would motion for someone else to pick up the other extension; or check to be sure the call-taping system was functioning.

A woman passed by, tall, near fifty, dressed entirely in red-she wore a silk suit with a tight straight skirt and a black-welted bolero hat which matched her outfit; her hosiery was black; a handsome figure. She looked vaguely in Stern's direction, then turned away, but even the instant of contact with her dark eyes somehow reminded him of Margy, and he fell back fully into her grasp, as if he suddenly had passed through the doors of a movie and was flooded over by the light and images of the screen: Margy, as she stood by the light switch, bare-legged and heavybottomed, her blouse undone, the black triangle visible below; her bright fingernails roaming to certain of his parts; the way her mouth lolled open, and her hue, in the profuse light of the morning, increased even across the frail skin of her closed eyes as she traveled along the channels of sensation.

A peculiar sound arose, a beeping: the telephone, he realized.

"Here we are," said Radczyk. "Let's see. Now wha'dya need?"

"It is merely curiosity, Lieutenant. I thought there may have been something unusual the coroner remarked on."

"Not much here. No autopsy. That's what you wanted. I told him there was religious objections. Couldn't figure out anything else."

Stern realized then that Radczyk had called back on a private line. No beeping signal; no tape. Supposedly, at any gate. Stern made no response.

"It's short and sweet, Sandy. Blood test with a C.O. level.

And a copy of the note. And the coroner's ruling. Nothin' in the police reports. I looked at them when they come through."

"I see."

Radczyk took a breath. "Mind if I ask what's up?"

"A minor matter, Lieutenant. It's unimportant."

"Sure," said Radczyk. "What kinda matter?" With tbes questions, he assumed a certain authority. He was, after all, a policeman, and this was, after all, his case. Stern cursed himself and then launched into a concertedly tidy explanation: a medical-laboratory bill had arrived and could not be accounted for. It was, Stern said again, no doubt unimportant.

"I could go over there and check for ya," Radczyk said.

Stern found the idea startling-particularly its appeal In theory, medical records were not to be disclosed without a subpoena. But most hearts knocked at the sight of a policeman's star. Records clerks would tell a cop most anything, if not surrender the paper. Radczyk could learn as much as Nate, perhaps more. But Stern was too much on edge with the policeman, especially his peculiar would-be intimacy. "I could not trouble you, Lieutenant."

"No trouble," said Radczyk, then lowered his voice somewhat. "I still owe ya, you know."

Stern hung on the line.

"Westlab, right?" asked Radczyk. "I'll go over there myself, Sandy.

Keep it between you and me that way. I'll find out what's doin. Gotta get all the loose ends tied up for the case report, right?"

Stern waited. "Certainly," he said.

"Sure," said Radczyk. "Should have something Friday, Monday latest.

I'll call. Good trip back."

Stern cradled the phone gently. There was a sharpness to the objects-ashtrays, lamps-he saw about the lounge. He had the congested feeling he had known all the way back to childhood.

He was certain he had just done something wrong.

The reception area of the U.S. Attorney's Office was shabby. From the looks, one would have thought he was visiting a solo practitioner down on his luck. The shag carpet was reminiscent of an animal afflicted with the mange; the wooden arms of the rectilinear furniture had begun to splinter; and the inhabitants were the usual townsquare gathering. A nut or two sat huddled in the corners, glancing about furtively and writing out lengthy, incomprehensible complaints about various politicians or the FCC's plot to lobotomize them through the airwaves.

Witnesses and prospective defendants, too poor or too untutored to be accompanied by lawyers,.sat with grand jury subpoenas in their hands, awaiting the Assistants who would make use of them. Now and then federal agents, or an occasional defense lawyer, looking hangdog and disappointed, would emerge from the offices. And of course today Mr.

Alejandro Stern, prominent member of the federal criminal bar, sat here as well, surrounded by two ponderous document cases as he awaited Ms.

Klonsky, who the receptionist said was on the phone.

This office had always struck Stern as a happy place. The lawyers were young and inspired, and almost all of them knew they were merely passing through. They did not remain AUSAs for long-five years, six was the average. Enough time to learn to try a jury case, for each to feel she or he had made a sincere effort to improve community wellbeing, before the greener glades of the private sector, of what Stern still thought of as real practice, beckoned. It was a good job, Stern thought. He had lost the best younger lawyer he'd ever had, Jamie Kemp, to the U.S.

Attorney's Office in Manhattan, where Kemp had gone to try cases on his own and work on a rock musical which resurrected certain songs Kemp had composed two decades before when he had briefly been some kind of musical star.

Kemp was quite nearly not the only one to join federal employment.

Before the present United States Attorney, Stan Sennett, had been returned here from San Diego by the Justice Department, Stern had been approached about taking the job. The top aide of the state's senior senator had invited Stern to breakfast at one of the downtown clubs.

This young man, who looked something like the singing star Garfunkel, with a head of shocked whitish hair that stood erect like a dandelion gone to seed, had thrown around every corny platitude known'to man; it was worse than an obituary. This offer was a compliment to Stern's abilities, the young man insisted, and to the wisdom, Stern knew, of a life in which he had never been politically aligned. While Mayr Bolcarro was not allowed by the senator to reward his retainers with federal appointments, his known enemies were rarely elevated.

For Stern, the prospect of being the federal prosecutor was not easily dismissed. This was an advocate's job of sweeping power. For four years Stern could command the nonuniformed armies of the IRS,, the DEA, the FBI, and deploy them as he saw fit. No more of the drag agents' gruesome shenanigans. An end to the heartless prosecutions of widows and firemen for failing to report the income from part-time jobs or CDs.

But, of course, he would have to be a prosecutor. Stern would have to dedicate himself to apprehension, accusation, punishment, that triad of unmentionables that by long-nurtured reflex he despised.

Could Alejandro Stern rise magisterially in court and excite ajury's ugly passions, could he beg them to inflict suffering they would quail to bear themselves? He could not. No. Could not. The imagery unloosed in Stern a real feeling of illness. Oh, he did not hate prosecutors. He had gotten over that early in his career. He admired at times the incandescent zeal of these young people as they attempted to smite evil for the sake of life on the straight and narrow. But that was not his role, not his calling. He was Sandy Sternwa proud apologist for deviation. No perton Argentine by birth, a Jew alive to hear of the Holocaust could march in the jackboots of authority without intense self-doubt; better to keep his voice among the voices, to speak out daily for these frail liberties, so misunderstood, whose existence, far more than any prosecution, marked us all as decent, civilized, as human.

He could not abandon the credo of a lifetime now.

Ms. Klonsky was off the phone. Beyond the single office door, opened electronically by a solemn guardian behind yellow-tinged bulletproof glass, lay a half block of clatter. Telephones pealed; typewriters, still used in this era of word processing, banged. The Assistant United States Attorneys, distinguished young lawyers with law-review backgrounds, were made into ruffians by the atmosphere and stood in the hallways shouting to one another.

Stern came to this office often, generally with a singular mission: to hinder, to thwart, to delay. On occasions-rare occasions, usually at the very start of an investigation he arrived to offer an openhearted portrayal of what he believed to be the truth. But most often the defense was one of avoidance. It was his goal to learn as much as possible while revealing only what the prosecutor already knew, would never care about, or which might trouble or distract her.

There were those prosecutors who believed in candor, who would lay their case out as a bare challenge. But, for most, the appeal of secretiveness was irresistible. Stern could merely float notions, ask questions, lighting from fact to fact, like some pest nibbling at fruit.

"My best wishes to you," said Stern to Ms. Klonsky, as he entered her small office. Robust-looking and dark, she had come to her feet to greet him. To Stern's surprise, she wore a maternity dress, a blue cotton jumper of plain finish which as yet hung loosely. Observed in an abstracted way, Ms. Klonsky was quite attractive-large eyes, a straight nose, prominent cheekbones, the sort of routine good looks one would expect to see in a restaurant hostess.

She presented a full figure of peasant proportions, strong legs and arms, and an ample bust, although the latter feature, according to nasty bruiting, was somewhat misleading. At Gil's it was said that Ms.

Klonsky had undergone a single mastectomy while she was a law student.

Ergo, the Tiff ess Wonder. Stern had never been convinced of the verity of this information-at Gil's the jokes at the prosecutors' expense seemed to grow crueler as the night wore on-and his doubts rose again now. Would a former cancer patient risk pregnancy, with its hormonal surges and vast bodily changes?

"My daughter is also in this wonderful condition," he said.

"Our first grandchild." Stern heard himself say 'our,' but had no will to correct himself. He would have to search some time to know how else to put it.

Klonsky also appeared to take in this odd note. She congratulated Stern, and inquired about Kate's conditit;n-Stern had noticed long ago that the affinity of women for each other was never greater than in the process of childbearing, this circle no man could enter. But then she added, by the unpredictable logic that always brought people to it, "My condolences on your loss."

He nodded without a word. The two document cases, each the size of an accordion, were beside him. They waited, amenities' exhausted, on the outskirts of adversity. He took a seat before her desk.

"You seem, Ms. Klonsky, to have misconceptions about my client."

She summoned a small, sealed smile, meant to reflect poise and fearlessness. As the years had passed, Stern found himself practicing against young men and women close to his children's ages. In general, it was his impression that they found him charming; his accumulated attainments lent him an almost statesman-like stature. The Assistants were often deferential, without abandoning the poses required by conflict. At moments, Stern would find himself wondering how Peter or Marta would react if they could see the naturalness, the virtual honesty he brought to his relations with persons just like them. What would they think? Would this be the stuff of epiphany, or would they seize on the obvious?

These people were not his children.

"In what way, Mr. Stern?"

"I know you suspect him of a crime. Yes?" She seemed to nod. "Tell me, Ms. Klonsky-"

"You can call me Sonia, Mr. Stern."

Stern took her graciousness as a sign that she believed she could hold her own.

"You must do the same, then. Please call me Sandy."

"Thank you."

"Certainly."

She smiled at him so suddenly, with a flash of such remarkable open amusement at their maneuvering, that Stern himself was taken aback.

"You are inclined to tell me nothing?"

"I can't, Sandy."

"Is there an informant? Is that the reason for your hesitation?"

"No comment."

"Because I have already assumed as much."

"If there's an informant, Sandy, I haven't the foggiest idea who it is."

This, Stern knew, was a Clever response. The Assistants were often in the dark about the identity of informants, particularly those who had been promised they would never have to testify. The secret remained with the FBI agents, who would conduct covert meetings with their source and write reports to the U.S. Attorneys identifying the "c/i"-cooperating individual-only by a number assigned at Bureau headquarters in D.C.

"Mr. Hartnell is not a retiring sort," said Stern. "The business landscape is no doubt replete with those he-has offended. Persons fired. Jealous competitors. You are aware, I am sure, that the comments of such persons have to be evaluated carefully."

Ms. Klonsky laid her pretty face daintily upon her fingertips and smiled agreeably. She was taking it all in, watching him work.

"He's had his troubles before," she said. "The CFTC. One of the exchanges, or was it two?" She took a beat. "Not to mention the IRS."

Oh yes, thought Stern, she had developed a thick file. To be expected.

"I represented Dixon on all of those occasions. There are times that he has put business expansion before recordkeeping. Candidly, Ms. Klonsky, the Exchanges and the IRS enforce a punctiliousness that the U.S.

Attorney's Office itself would have difficulty adhering to." Stern gestured out the door. At times, in this office, you could learn the gravest grand jury secret simply by moving at deliberate speed in the corridors. The young Assistants stood in their doorways, gossiping about investigations. Names were tossed about. Old files were stacked like refuse, without regard to the confidences they contained. Some years ago Stern had seen two large accordion folders with the name of Mayor Bolcarro on them, waiting for storage, and felt a painful twinge of regret for the government's apparent lack of success. His observation made Ms. Klonsky laugh.

"You are wonderful. Stan Sennett said you'd walk through the door and just charm the pants off me, and here you are doing it."

"Me?" He maintained a look of humble innocence, but he registered the mention of Sennett's name with some concern.

Stern.and the present United States Attorney were not mutual admirers.

The relationship went back at least a dozen years, to the period when Sennett was a state court prosecutor and could not seem to win a jury trial when Stern was defending. If anything, the wound had deepened of late. In one of his rare courtroom appearances, Sennett, in January, had prosecuted a case in which Stern represented a local city councilman charged with extorting sexual favors and cash payments from members of his staff. Stern had viiifled the government's chief witness, whom he characterized as a professional informant, a so-called private investigator who seemed to find someone prominent to tattle on whenever his own questionable activities brought him to grief. The councilman was convicted only of one count-a tax misdemeanor-and remained in office, while Sennett lamely claimed victory, a boast openly scoffed at in the press.

In passing, they were cordial-Stern was with every-one-but Stan's memory was long and the rancor deep. As meaningful, for present purposes, was Ms. Klonsky's inadvertent admission that the U.S.

Attorney had been consulted about this case. With five hundred indictments every year, and three times the number of grand jury ivestiga-tions, only matters of prime significance reached the front office. All in all, this was a most unwelcome word. Dixon was making the wrong enemies.

Ms. Klonsky asked for the documents she had subpoenaed, and Stern lifted the cases onto the desk one by one. She rose with some awkwardness, apparently no longer able to judge her body's dimensions confidently, and headed to the hallway to retrieve her file. Left by himself, Stern circumspeetly examined the possessions in her narrow office. Working the endless hours of a young trial lawyer, she observed no distinction between home and workplace; the passions of her private life spilled out here. Amid the inevitable diplomas and licenses, a large Kandinsky-like oil hung, and a banner from a world-peace parade was stretched across her bookcases. The books themselves were not merely the usual ponderous legal treatises and casebooks, but also rows of paperbacks. There seemed to be a good deal of Continental fiction and many political works. Stern saw the name of Betty Friedan a number of times; also Carl Jung. The bottom shelf appeared to be the place of honor. On one side was a single photograph of Ms. Klonsky and a broad, curly-headed man, noticeably younger than she. Four books were centered between silver bookends: three slim volumes that had the look of poetry, all by a man named Charles, and a hardcover book called Illness As Metaphor. On the other side, in a Lucite frame, was a snapshot of a gap-toothed boy; taped to it was a bright; sloppy child's drawing of a figure, over awkward lettering: S, O, N, N, Y. Both N's were drawn backwards.

"Your son?" asked Stern, gesturing to the boy's picture when Klonsky returned. She lugged a brown expandable file across her body. As Stern feared, it was of considerable bulk.

"Sam is my husband's son. He lives with his mother. This is our first."

Wonderful, said Stern. A special joy. He remained deeply attuned to his desire to move onto a friendly footing with her.

"Wonderful or crazy," she said. "I refer to this as a geriatric pregnancy. My obstetrician is absolutely paralyzed. A forty-one-year-old lawyer with a medical history! He's afraid his malpractice premiums will double."

Stern smiled amiably, but naturally offered no comment. A medical history, he noted. "Sometimes I think I'm nuts getting started at this age."

"Well, you say your husband is experienced."

"Oh, Charlie? I'm not sure he's noticed that I'm pregnant."

She laughed, but her eyes veered away as she measured some private thought, so that Stern knew they had abruptly reached the end of this road.

Instead, she reached for the documents, sorted and rubberbanded, which Stern had piled on the desk. They had been organized trade by trade, and she checked them off the subpoena. As she worked, Stern again began quietly asking questions. He had closely examined the records, he said.

They disclosed nothing exceptional. No apparent market manipulation, no passing off bad trades to discretionary ppeared to be the place of honor. On one side was a single photograph of Ms. Klonsky and a broad, curly-headed man, noticeably younger than she. Four books were centered between silver bookends: three slim volumes that had the look of poetry, all by a man named Charles, and a hardcover book called Illness As Metaphor. On the other side, in a Lucite frame, was a snapshot of a gap-toothed boy; taped to it was a bright; sloppy child's drawing of a figure, over awkward lettering: S, O, N, N, Y. Both N's were drawn backwards.

"Your son?" asked Stern, gesturing to the boy's picture when Klonsky returned. She lugged a brown expandable file across her body. As Stern feared, it was of considerable bulk.

"Sam is my husband's son. He lives with his mother. This is our first."

Wonderful, said Stern. A special joy. He remained deeply attuned to his desire to move onto a friendly footing with her.

"Wonderful or crazy," she said. "I refer to this as a geriatric pregnancy. My obstetrician is absolutely paralyzed. A forty-one-year-old lawyer with a medical history! He's afraid his malpractice premiums will double."

Stern smiled amiably, but naturally offered no comment. A medical history, he noted. "Sometimes I think I'm nuts getting started at this age."

"Well, you say your husband is experienced."

"Oh, Charlie? I'm not sure he's noticed that I'm pregnant."

She laughed, but her eyes veered away as she measured some private thought, so that Stern knew they had abruptly reached the end of this road.

Instead, she reached for the documents, sorted and rubberbanded, which Stern had piled on the desk. They had been organized trade by trade, and she checked them off the subpoena. As she worked, Stern again began quietly asking questions. He had closely examined the records, he said.

They disclosed nothing exceptional. No apparent market manipulation, no passing off bad trades to discretionary accounts, no double-charging of customers, no bucketing, by which the customer would pay a worse price than the house had on the floor.

"It is most difficult from these documents to imagine What your informant is alleging. You have not.subpoenaed records of a single account that Dixon controls. Nothing here is tied to him." There was some flicker, a reflexive contraction within her serious brown eyes.

Stern made no mention of the house error account, or the documents that Klonsky was trying to obtain from Dixon's bank. He would never belie the impression that he was as ignorant as the government wished to keep him.

"Can I ask?" she said abruptly.

"Of course."

"Why does it matter whether there's an informant? Assume there is."

Indeed, thought Stern.

"Do you not think your target is entitled to know what wrongdoing this informant is claiming against him? He was about to use her name, but he did not feel comfortable with 'Sonia' and thought it would be too stiff reverting to 'Ms. Klonsky." "Is Mr. Harmell obliged to stand by idly while the government determines if it can puzzle together one scrap of paper here, another there, until it has its case and is ready, quite literally, to destroy his livelihood and his life?"

"I don't see how he'll be hurt by waiting now."

"He may' assist. If I understand what your informant says, I might be able to bring pertinent matters to your attention."

"And you might also be able to identify the witnesses in advance, try to influence them, and do YOUr best to control the flow of information."

He stared at her a second.

"Just so," said Stern quietly. He could not prevent a momentary scowl.

The barroom wags were right about her. Not that she was incorrect in her estimate of Stern's intentions; hardly. But there was something naive in the way she presumed to inhibit him. Whether Ms. Klonsky knew it or not, she was engaged in a contest, a process, not the search for the Holy Grail. When she brought witnesses quailing into the grand jury room, where their lawyers could not accompany them, where the thought of every indiscretion, every lapse, accosted them like bogeymen, so that these persons were slavish in their eagerness to please the prosecutors, this, per Klonsky, was not influence. It was the government at work.

But if the target's lawyer spoke to the witnesses himself, reviewed their records, and tried to keep their recollections balanced, that bordered on subornation. The problem was simple: she was still new to her job. Poor Sonia Klonsky.

Past forty and still so much to learn. He found himself quite disappointed. "You're angry," she said.

"Not so."

"I wasn't suggesting that you would do anything unethical."

"Nor did I take it that way."

Stern spent a further moment unloading his cases, withdrawing bundles of documents with their blackened edges of copier murk. Ms. Klonsky was still disconcerted by the change of mood.

"I thought we were having"-she waved a hand-and exchange."

"We disagree," said Stern. "Consider it a matter of obligation, of our respective roles." He stood. "Where might I expect you to go next?" She looked at him a moment.

"I don't feel satisfied, Sandy."

How in the world had Stan Sennett hired this woman? Did she want to have sensitivity sessions in the grand jury? What a remarkable person.

In spite of his reluctance to admit it, she had some quality of magnetism. Her smile, especially in its sly aspect, was endearing; a deep, serious intelligence glinted in her eyes. But he felt braced by the recognition of a moment before. With Sonia Klonsky, one had the sense that, for all her woman-on-the-go composedness, a fragment of her soul remained on the verge of hysteria. There was something seething, molten, uncontrolled, unknown. That had a touching quality as well-a woman past forty, still on the voyages of a teenager.

"Ms. Klonsky," he said, "we really do not need to engage in hand-wringing. I assure you, we shall remain on cordial terms." He offered his hand. Instead, she sank down in the chair behind her desk, her face still dark and troubled, and rattled open a drawer.

"There's one other thing. Since you represent Mr. Hartnell, we can't agree to serve you when we subpoena other witnesses from MD. The potential for conflict is too great."

Something new was coming, Stern realized. Klonsky was saying, in effect, that she would soon be setting sails for Dixon's employees, attempting to get them to testify against the boss. If the government had its way, each would have a different lawyer. This was the prosecutors' usual stance. Divide and conquer. Under the guise of concern about professional ethics, they tried to ensure that anyone who might have something to blab to them would not be under the influence of the target's lawyer. Stern agreed wholeheartedly about the ethical precepts, but believed that the right to determine conflicts in the first instance was his, not the U.S. Attorney's. He protested now, but Ms. Klonsky reverted to her firm look, forbidding. further discussion.

"Anyway," she said, "Stan thought there was one subpoena that should be served on you. As a courtesy." Klon-sky opened a manila folder and removed a single sheet of paper, offering it to Stern. "We gave him a long date-almost a month-so you'll have plenty of time to help him arrange for separate counsel." Dumbly, Stern nodded. When he looked back, Klonsky was filling out a return of service on the back of her file copy, recording on whom and when the subpoena had been served.

He had been having such a buoyant spell, Stern thought with sudden fodomness, gibing with this able young woman, assaying her character.

Now this. His arms, as he looked at the subpoena, were leaden with alarm. Some primitive curse rose up in him against Dixon and his inevitably tortured courses. From the way this was being handled, the acknowledged special treatment, Stern suspected at once what was afoot.

"Are there other persons from the order desk whom you expect to call?" he asked offhandedly, hoping the import of the question would slip past her, and Klonsky simply shook her head as she wrote. Stern, at once, felt his condition grow worse. The order tickets Margy had promised to request from the Kindle office had not yet reached him, but he knew now what they would show. Dixon had not called just anyone on the order desk to trade ahead, as Margy had speculated; that, apparently, Would have entailed too much risk, the chance that someone shrewd and less obedient might speak up, object. Instead, Dixon had conveyed the orders to a single compliant sap, the only soul on the order desk with whom the government needed to speak. And, of course, his daughter had married him. Stern folded the subpoena into three even parts. "John Granum" had been typed on the dotted lines reserved for name and address. His son-in-law now had a date certain for.grand jury testimony. Klonsky's guile, her fear of undue influence on the critical witnesses, was growing more understandable. "Is he a target?" asked Stern.

"Maybe he has something to tell us."

"Immunity is a possibility?"

"I think so." Klonsky once more glanced downward; she was saying too much. "I understand your interest, Sandy. But this would be more appropriate with whoever represents him.

As I say, this is a courtesy to you. Start didn't want another incident like the one at your home."

"Most considerate," said Stern. "My thanks to both of you."

He did not wish to sound particularly curt, but he was experiencing a fading lack of control.

Ms. Klonsky looked at him sadly. He could see who he was to her-a home-wrecked widower with one more enormous family problem. He had her sympathy, which was not at all what he had come here expecting to obtain.

Outside the U.S. Attorney's Office, the elevator arrived, opened, and then refused to move. Stern, still spinning with anger, threw down his empty cases and pounded on all the buttons. Up. Down. Door open. Door close: The new federal building had been completed ten years ago, with every contract sprinkled- down on cronies from the fingertips of Mayor Bolcarro like a confectionery topping.

The structure had been intended as a courthouse, but the judges, after a brief period of occupancy, issued various orders and injunctions and moved themselves back into the ancient Federal Square building across the street. Nothing here worked. The elevators. The heat. The windows popped out in high winds or low temperatures and showered glass off the pedestrians below. It had taken six years to complete con-stmction, and the litigation was still ongoing a decade later. The architect, the engineers, the general contractor, and virtually every tradesman who had touched the place were co-plaintiffs, co-defendants, or crossparties in four or five separate suits. Now and then, Stern would see the herd of lawyers arrive for the various status calls. They would stand before the judge, twenty and thirty abreast, and bicker. In the meantime, the building grew so brisk during the occasional periods of Arctic cold that gripped this city that one federal judge, during the short period when court had been held here, mounted the bench in mittens and instructed the lawyers that they were not required to remove their hats.

At last, the steel box began to move. After the delay, it stopped at every floor. Stern, who had an appointment to meet Lieutenant Radczyk for lunch, simmered at the edge of outburst. Dixon. John. Gevalt.

What an ugly mess his brother-in-law had made!

Headed down, with lunch at hand, the tiny space was jammed.

The elevators, naturally, had been stintingly designed, too small for the bu'fiding's population. In his state of high agitation, crashed against the rear partitions, Stern took an instant to react when a woman in front of him, a tall brunette in her thirties, stepped back and made contact.

Indeed, that put matters somewhat delicately, for she had not merely brushed against him or inadvertently driven her spike heel into his toes. Rather, this young woman had laid the cleave of her rear end firmly against his hand. And would the Sandy Stern of a month ago have politely pulled away? No question. Today he remained still; he was certain that she took him for the wall. But at the next stop the elevator stuttered on its cable, minutely rocking. And did she ease back even farther? So it seemed. And did Stern, as the floors went by, find himself, almost involuntarily, inching his hand by the most subtle degree? He did. He did, so that by floor 4, his fingers, two or three, were delicately pressed against the parting of her buttocks and the filmy folds of her green dress and the elastic ridges of her undergarments below. By the natural movement of the car, this arrangement provided the most discreet stroking each time the elevator jolted to a halt.

From behind, Stern tried to study this young woman. Was she one of his casual courthouse acquaintances, another lawyer having fun in an offbeat fashion? He did not recogn'tze her: Her eyes were green; one cheek was blemished. A professional person, he assumed, in an expensive green silk dress, carrying her briefcase. With each stop, she seemed to lean back a little more. Her jaw was set in a largely abstracted manner, but save for paralysis, there was no way she might not have noticed what was occurring. At the ground level, she let all her weight come back into him, so that for the briefest instant his hand fit snugly inside and-possible?-was vaguely squeezed before she stepped forward to exit.

Across the metal threshold, she looked about for hearings, and when her view crossed his, her expression was far too indefinite to be called a smile.

Hiking away, she reached back and gave a quick jerk at her skirt to free it from the rear cleavage where the material was gathered.

Dizzy and aroused, impressed, even inspired by this boldness, Stern followed her from the elevator. So this was the life of men and women in the modern day! It was Cincinnatus who was called back to battle from the plowfield, -rearmored, remounted, and placed in charge of war and strategy. That was Stern-except that Cincinnatus had been a hero and an officer in his youth and Stern was never more than a buck private. He'd had more diverse sexual experience in the last four days than in his entire prior lifetime. And there was no hiding his pleasure from himself. His sweet interlude with Margy had revived him like a dose of water on a thirsting plant-he felt the strength of his own vitality from root to leaf. No wonder people so easily made fools of themselves. If he'd never known, he did now-this was fun. How did one pursue these leads? Coffee. A hotel room? What happened next? Amazed by himself, still toting his cases, he actually followed the young woman for a block before he recalled Radczyk. She never once looked back; apparently, she took her gratification from teasing. And yet, even when he'd stopped, he had no sure knowledge of his own capacities. He did not know what excesses were within him; he might sprout wings and fly, he might dance naked in the intersection. He felt like some soaring bubble, a thin surface containing the exciting weightlessness of freedom.

By the Kindle River, near the docks on the Kewah-nee side, an underground world had grown up. Stern always marched down the iron stairwell from the boulevards above with a sense of significant descent, somehow related to entering darkness in the daytime. These piers where the bargemen would unload their cargoes of fruit, rice, and coal brought up from the South retained an economic importance for Kindle County well into this century. In the 1920s, the local movers and shakers, full of the improbable hope that the tri-cities, like an urban Cinderella, could be made to resemble Paris, decided to pretend the docks were not here.

On concrete pilings driven down into the sandy banks of the Kindle, the downtown section of Ke-wahnee was extended; great roads were built and modest skyscrapers rose.

Beneath, the gritty dockmen and barge hands continued to.work in a netherworld barely reached by daylight, while the suit-and-tie crowd rushed about above, dealing, suing, buying and selling the labor and commodities being delivered to the city in the dark below.

These days, Lower River, as this area was known, was eerie with the garish yellow glow of sulfur lamps. Abutting the streets, the docks of the trucking concerns which had located here originally to carry off what the barges brought and which eventually had supplanted them were littered with crates and spoiling produce. The air sang with the racing pitch of fires on the roads above and the windy commotion of that traffic. For many years, this was the locale where bodies were dumped and drug deals done.

The flow of hot merchandise across the tracking piers, by rumor, was still steady. In his early years in practice, Stern was always going about down here to visit one crime scene or another. A thousand people passing by and nobody knew nothin'. The situation was usually far more frustrating to the police than to Stern.

Rather than.joust in the noontime traffic, he had walked across the bridge, carrying his two large empty cases. He met Radczyk at a place called Wally's. It was hardly scenic. As with each establishment in Lower River, one entered from the rear. The windows at the back of the restaurant faced the river, which was otherwise inaccessible, looking out to the pilings and the iron underpinnings of the roads. Toward the top of the horizon, a line of daylight broke through and, depending on the angle of the sun, sometimes lit the slaty surface of the water brightly enough to show the floating silt and the industrial debris.

Radczyk was at a table smoking a cigarette and, for unknown reasons, studying his shirt when Stern approached.

"Ah, Sandy!" The copper's roddy country-boy 'face was radiant. This warmth, whose source Stern still could not recollect, continued to make him uneasy. Radczyk had phoned this morning, Saying he had some results. He suggested Wally's, a policemen's hangout, which suited Stern, who was always just as happy not to walk into the station house.

Here Stern was more impressed by the size of the man than he had been in his home; Radczyk barely fit into his chair, a hulking figure being slowly diminished by age. He wore a tweed sport coat and the bright red golfing shirt he had been examining when Stern arrived. He explained now that it was an Easter gift from his children. "You get the grandkids over and they tear the place apart, makes you glad you can send them home."

Stern smiled obligingly. It occurred to him that he, too, would soon be entitled to these fond complaints. The prospect today seemed considerably less consoling. The thought of John briefly scuffed at Stern's heart.

"So," said Stern. "You had success?" He sought to bring Radczyk to the subject. He was the kind who would chat about anything else.

The old cop reached to the inside pocket of his sport coat and came up with a single grayish page, a copy of something. He put on his reading glasses and considered the paper as if he had never seen it before. Then he removed his eyeglasses and pointed the temple at Stern.

"You give any thought to talkin with her doctors? That's what I'd do in your shoes."

Immediately, Stern felt the same vexation that had overcome him on his way from the U.S. Attorney's Office. Why had he bothered with this policeman? He was old, and probably never terrifically competent. Trust Radczyk to suggest a starting point where Stern had already been. He was not fully able to conceal his irritation.

"Lieutenant, I am afraid I have already attempted that COurse. ' ' "Mind if I ask what come of it?" asked Radczyk. "What came of it," said Stern, "was that Clara's personal doctor tells me he did not order this test, and I have been unable to determine which physician did."

"Huh." Radczyk looked back down to the sheet he held. "No name here," he said. "Suppose I coulda asked when I was out there." The notion that the name of the treating physician might have been relevant occurred to Radczyk remotely, a far-off idea, like the notion of life on the planets. Stern was finding it increasingly difficult to stifle himself.

"You were at Westlab?"

"Oh, sure, sure. Done just like I told you. Went out-there, got the administrator, you know, showed her my star. Nice gal. Liz something or other. Very professional, you know.

Looked to be a little 'Mexican or Italian gal. I said I was doin routine follow-up, what records did they have? She showed me the whole file right there in her office. Give me a copy of the results." Radczyk hoisted the paper in his hand, and Stern, without invitation, reached across the table and quietly took it.

The hangdog waitress came by with her green pad, saying only "Yours?" to each man. Stern ordered as he studied the copy. It was a half sheet on the letterhead of Westlab. The rest of it contained computer-printed figures. Numbers.

Codes. A meaningless scramble. In his frustration, Stern nearly groaned.

"Did they tell you, Lieutenant, what this test was for?"

"Sure," he said." 'Viral culture." "He took the paper back and with a dirty fingernail showed Stern a tiny box which had been x'd. "A virus?" Radczyk nodd.S. Attorney's Office. Why had he bothered with this policeman? He was old, and probably never terrifically competent. Trust Radczyk to suggest a starting point where Stern had already been. He was not fully able to conceal his irritation.

"Lieutenant, I am afraid I have already attempted that COurse. ' ' "Mind if I ask what come of it?" asked Radczyk. "What came of it," said Stern, "was that Clara's personal doctor tells me he did not order this test, and I have been unable to determine which physician did."

"Huh." Radczyk looked back down to the sheet he held. "No name here," he said. "Suppose I coulda asked when I was out there." The notion that the name of the treating physician might have been relevant occurred to Radczyk remotely, a far-off idea, like the notion of life on the planets. Stern was finding it increasingly difficult to stifle himself.

"You were at Westlab?"

"Oh, sure, sure. Done just like I told you. Went out-there, got the administrator, you know, showed her my star. Nice gal. Liz something or other. Very professional, you know.

Looked to be a little 'Mexican or Italian gal. I said I was doin routine follow-up, what records did they have? She showed me the whole file right there in her office. Give me a copy of the results." Radczyk hoisted the paper in his hand, and Stern, without invitation, reached across the table and quietly took it.

The hangdog waitress came by with her green pad, saying only "Yours?" to each man. Stern ordered as he studied the copy. It was a half sheet on the letterhead of Westlab. The rest of it contained computer-printed figures. Numbers.

Codes. A meaningless scramble. In his frustration, Stern nearly groaned.

"Did they tell you, Lieutenant, what this test was for?"

"Sure," he said." 'Viral culture." "He took the paper back and with a dirty fingernail showed Stern a tiny box which had been x'd. "A virus?" Radczyk nodded.

Stern took this in: Clara had seen the doctor for a virus.

So here was the outcome of nearly two months' pursuit. His wife had the sniffles. A persistent cough. No wonder she had bothered only Peter.

He smiled faintly. For all the pain, it had the quality of a burlesque.

"And they had no more to report?"

Radczyk seemed to have settled himself elsex,here. He considered Stern with his pleasant, rosy look and huddled closer.

"Still don't remember me, do you?"

Stern, who would ordinarily go to considerable lengths to avoid adrmtting something so unflattering, simply shrugged.

He had better sense than to try to fool an old policeman.

"Didn't think so." The cop edged forward. "Marv Ja-coby."

It hit Stern like lightning. "The brother," said Stern. The orphan, he thought. "That was some time ago."

Childishly pleased to be recalled, Radczyk sat there smiling. "Hadn't taken the tags off my sergeant's stripes yet."

So this was the orphan. Stern instantly recalled the entire tale.

Radczyk had been raised by his grandfather, who ran a paper stand, one of those metal shanties on a street comer; in the winter, they took heat from a fire in an oil dram.

One day two young neighborhood hoods, looking for nickels and dimes, tried to stick up the grandfather, and ended up shooting him dead. The beat cop was Harold Jacoby-Jews did not become lieutenants in those days-and he took the grandson home and raised him with his own. Harold had two natural sons, as Stern remembered, and all three became policemen. Ray was the eldest. Eddie eventually quit the force and went to California, where he'd done well in the security business. It was the youngest son, Marvin, who became Stern's client.

Lord, what a thug he was, Stern thought when he remembered Marvin.

Gum-cbewing,' wisecracking, with little black eyes and, as they said on the street, an attitude. Marvin was a wrong cop from the day he got his star. And a daily heartache to Ray here, who took over Marvin's guidance when the father passed away.

Almost a dozen years ago, certain police officers, disgruntled by the usual departmental rivalties, had begun to assemble evidence of wrongdoing in the city's North Branch district. This effort required no intrepidhess. The North Branch was wide open: cops on the pad; bail bondsmen steering cases; judges on the take. Marvin was not the worst offender, but one of the least popular, and at the time he first met Stern he had a subpoena to appear before a state grand jury that was looking into allegations that Marvin had taken monthly payments from certain narcotics dealers to warn them of ensuing police raids.

"I still owe you for all of that;" said Radczyk.

Stern shook his head. It had not been much. He had simply touched the pressure points. Like someone who knew jujitsu.

Stern had paid discreet visits to certain politicians whose alliances he'd estimated would be disturbed by sudden havoc in the North End. The county prosecutor, Raymond Horgan, who had friends like everybody else, had seen fit to quash the investigation. For these efforts, Radczyk had been unreasonably grateful; he had attended each of Marvin's visits, fretting like a mother; he was as garrulous then as now. Marvin simply sat there in his uniform, cracking his gum, while Ray went on reinterpreting every remark and arguing in behalf of Marvin's exculpation. He seemed determined not to believe the worst, the kind of devoted big brother every man should have. None of it had done any good for Marvin, who was discovered a few years later in the trunk of a car being towed from a parking lot in the North End. As Stern heard it,'

Marvin was stark naked, with blowtorch holes burned black through his privates.

Stern said that out loud, that he might not have been much help to Marvin in the end.

"Gave him a chance," said Radczyk. "He was three times seven. Can only give a leila a chance." Stern and he both pondered that observation. "I shoulda known he'd never make a cop. Hell," said Radczyk, "I don't even know what kind of cop I made." Radczyk, caught in his own tender reflections, smiled crookedly. There was something unavoidably touching about this confession-the very plainness of it. Radczyk was pushing retirement but remained in doubt about these fundamental judgments. His woe Stern did not feel; he had no question about his fitness for his calling, no regrets about what he would have done with greater diligence or harder work. It was the costs of that kind of dedication he was now attempting to assess. The thought brought him back to where they had started. Glancing about to find his cases, Stern stood.

"I thank you for all your good work on this matter, Lieutenant. I am in your debt."

Still apparently anchored in the past, Radczyk considered Stern with a tentative, sad amp;ned look and for the first time had no comment.

"Did my wife have a virus, by the way?" Stern asked. He wondered how remote the glimmer was that he had been chasing.

In answer, Radczyk showed the paper. His thick finger lay in the findings section of the form. Stern squinted across the table: "HSV-2 Positive." When Stern looked to him inquiringly, Radczyk shrugged.

Whatever that meant. Medical gibberish.

"Maybe I oughta go back there and get that doc's name for you," said Radczyk.

This time Stern caught it, a, savvy flash that passed through Radczyk's worn cheerful face, sharp and sudden as the reflection off a blade-something you see, then don't.

He had seen this clever gleam in Radczyk before, Stern realized, and let it go by. It amazed him, after all these years, that he could still be taken in by the police.

Stern set down his cases and resumed his seat. He spOke precisely, as he would in court,

"You must excuse me, Lieutenant, but I believe you did not answer my question."

Radczyk's happy mug took on an oafish expression. Caught, he looked both ways and weighed something, probably an impulse to try another feint: What question? He did not do that.

"Yea, verily," said Radczyk at last- "I did not."

"What was this test for?"

"Oh," said Radczyk. He pushed the few clumped strands of hair over his red scalp. "That's what the doctor should be telling you, Sandy. I'd rather not."

"I see. Are you refusing?"

The pOliceman looked around, big and unhappy.

"No, I ain't refusin' you, Sandy. You ask, I'll tell ya the truth."

"Well, then?"

Radczyk's old face was soft and drained.

"Herpes," Radczyk said.

"Herpes?"

"I asked the lady. That's what she told me. Herpes."

Radczyk passed his hand over his mouth, wiping it in a fashion, and said, "Genital herpes."

Stern found himself pondering the dirty river, the flecks of wood pulp, disintegrating cardboard, whitish foam that floated by. He had felt just this way recently, he thought with idle precision. When was it?

Then he remembered opening the door to the garage. Peering down, he noticed that one of his hands was gripping the dirty gray table by the edge.

"The test was positive?" he asked. Of course, he knew what the paper had said.

"Sandy, you're askin a guy who don't know a thing. I'm repeating what the lady told me. Who knows? Who knows what we're talkin about? I'm goin right back there. I'm gonna get this doc's name, I'll have it for you in no time fast."

"Please do not bother, Lieutenant."

"No bother."

"You have done enough." Of course, it came out the wrong way. stern stood there, reeling, suffering, unable just now to do anything to make amends.

My God, Clara, he thought.

Stern insisted on paying the check. He grabbed the old policeman's rough hand and shook it solemnly, and Rad-czyk, in some kind of conciliatory gesture, took the copied page and placed it in the pocket of Stern's suit. Then Mr. Alejandro Stern, with his empty cases, turned to go, wondering where so early in the day he could find a place to be alone.