 
THE HERO

Kenneth C. Crowe

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2010 Kenneth C. Crowe

Revised October, 2012

Cover illustration

"I want you for the U.S. Army"

by James Montgomery Flagg

(Lithograph 1917)

Prints & Photograph Division

Library of Congress

Books by Kenneth C. Crowe

AMERICA FOR SALE

COLLISION

THE JYNX

THE DREAM DANCER

THE HERO

THE TRUCKERS

THE ABSCONDER

BEN CONNOLLY in the PARIS COMMUNE

This book is dedicated to

Rae Lord Crowe
Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

About the Author
CHAPTER ONE

He was halfway through the final chapter of 'A Nurse Was Called' when Mrs. Garmeis came through the door as she did every morning at exactly 10 o'clock; this time carrying a white box from Karp's Bakery, bound with blue and white string, in her left hand. He tried not to be annoyed.

From the moment he awoke this morning, he had felt inexplicably antsy as though something was about to happen in his life that he had no way of anticipating or worse controlling. He couldn't believe that his need to finish 'A Nurse Was Called' could be the source of his unease. Now Mrs. Garmeis was fluttering into the store breaking his concentration just as he was about to find out who killed Nurse Madison's patient. The pressing goal of finishing the book had interrupted his daily routine of blazing through the newspapers, The Daily Mirror, the New York Times and the Herald Tribune.

She flipped the red sign with its big white letter hanging on the glass of the front door from CLOSED to OPEN, turned and said over her shoulder: "Where's your happy face?" She raised her arms high, turned her face upwards, and sang "Oh how we danced."

"The Anniversary Song," he called getting up to greet her with the smile she demanded every morning. Mrs. Garmeis was an irrepressible singer whose life was a musical starring Mollie Garmeis.

"Happy second anniversary, Ryan," she said as she twirled past the front counter and up the four steps to the Garden Room in the rear of the store. She returned a few minutes later with a tray carrying two pieces of apple kuchen and two cups of coffee.

"Thank you Mrs. Garmeis." The regulars and the mailman and the deliverymen called her Mollie, but to him she was Mrs. Garmeis and always would be. He ignored her many invitations to cross the line to address her as Mollie. This formality was instilled in his childhood when he came to Kips Bay Books at least once a week to visit his grandparents, always getting a lollypop from her, always saying: 'Thank you, Mrs. Garmeis.' His grandparents had sold the bookstore to him for the cost of inventory with only one proviso, that Mrs. Garmeis would be employed there for as long as she wanted the job.

She sat in the high-backed oak armchair, his grandfather's favorite and now hers, angled for easy views of the front counter and Lexington Avenue outside, sipping coffee, eating the kuchen, baked that morning at Karp's across Lexington Avenue from Kips Bay Books. "I ordered three dozen cupcakes for tonight." Normally a dozen was adequate, but tonight they had been expecting a larger turnout.

'Didn't she ever listen to the weather report?' he asked that place inside his head where we all ask questions like that. The WOR morning show had reported that heavy snow was on the way. He had heard it and he knew that she listened to WOR religiously as she and her husband, Irv, ate breakfast.

Mollie loved yellow cake cupcakes with chocolate fudge icing and chocolate cupcakes with vanilla buttercream icing. His grandparents, Brendan and Laura Garrity, had served tea, coffee and cupcakes since they initiated the monthly Mystery Night in 1938. Mrs. Garmeis was a traditionalist, who didn't like change so when Ryan announced that he was adding cheese and kielbasa on toothpicks with red and white wines to the menu, she told him he was making a mistake and called his grandmother to complain. His irritation over that lasted less than a day. She was too nice, too hard a worker, too much a part of his growing up to be resented for being Mollie Garmeis.

The bells over the front door tinkled. Mrs. Garmeis was out of her chair as though it were the sound of a starting gun. Her kuchen was half eaten, her coffee half drunk. She worked so enthusiastically at sales and customer service that casual shoppers assumed she owned the store. The customer was a tall man in a tweed overcoat, who had taken off his fedora to speak to her. She walked back to her chair, saying to Ryan. "One of yours."

"I called yesterday about the Teddy Roosevelt book." The man's eyes were drawn to, and quickly averted from, the scar that ran as a crescent-shaped ridge of flesh from the lower edge of Ryan's left eye to his jaw.

"Ah yes! Theodore Roosevelt's 'Through the Brazilian Wilderness.'" Ryan went around the counter, He held up the heavily-bound book. "I've been meaning to read this for months and now it's going to float out of my hands into your library."

The customer smiled, looking down at 'Through the Brazilian Wilderness' laid before him on the counter. Ryan's comment had added to the value of the book.

He rang up the sale.

Snow began falling at 3 o'clock around the time he resumed reading 'A Nurse Was Called.' The book worked right to the end giving Ryan the pleasure of knowing that he could recommend it to the mystery aficionados who would come tonight to the gathering in the Garden Room at the back of the store. His grandparents had installed four arm chairs and two couches for the regulars in the Garden Room whose French doors opened onto a small patio surrounded by flowering bushes in the tiny backyard. There was a core of eight, three married couples and two widows, who were there every month, thrilled to be meeting an author and ready to buy an autographed book. None ever seemed to have read the mystery of the month in advance. Along with the eight regulars another dozen or so drop-ins could be expected to show up, usually friends and relatives of the writer or passers by on Lexington Avenue who had seen the placard with the name of the book and picture of the author announcing the event in the front window of Kips Bay Books.

"Got to get home for the man of the house," Mrs. Garmeis announced pulling on her long tan and black cloth coat at four o'clock. On the day Mrs. Garmeis was hired by his grandmother in 1933, she arranged to work from 10 until 4 so she could get back to Sunnyside in time to cook dinner for her husband and children, Sol and Mary, who were then college students.

"Have a good evening Mrs. Garmeis. See you tomorrow." As soon as she was out the door, he went back to his easy chair where he picked up the New York Times, glancing at the front page. None of the stories interested him. He turned through the paper. On page 21, a two paragraph story with the headline, 'Hero Dies Saving Young Woman From Tracks in Front of Subway Train,' caught him. He read, 'Jumping to the tracks of the IRT Bliss Street elevated subway station in Sunnyside right in front of an onrushing train, Robert Reilly, a shipping clerk for Oldman's Grand Department Store, rescued Mrs. Eileen Donovan, 23 years old, of 47-57 46th Street, Woodside, Queens, who had fallen onto the tracks, police said. Reilly managed to throw Mrs. Donovan back onto the platform. He was crushed by the train as he attempted to vault to safety. According to the police report, Mrs. Donovan was hurrying to catch the train coming into the station when she tripped or stumbled onto the tracks. Mrs. Donovan was taken to St. John's Hospital in Long Island City for treatment for shock and minor cuts and bruises.'

Bobby Reilly who was with him in Korea was from Queens. How many Bobby Reillys could there be in Queens?

He had awoken this morning thinking of Reilly, remembering once again his intention to invite him to lunch or dinner to thank him for saving his life. Ryan shuddered at the coincidence of recalling his unfulfilled obligation and then this Reilly's death. The bell over the front door rang interrupting his uncomfortable feeling of shame.

Mr. Henry from the newsstand on the corner came in brushing snow from his heavy jacket. "Getting heavy out there."

"Yeah." Ryan had to suppress a surge of agitation, realizing he was more interested in getting back to the newspapers than waiting on Mr. Henry. He made an effort to sound pleasant: "How can I help you, Mr. Henry? Looking for something special?"

"Do you have a book called Horton something?

"Follow me. You want 'Horton Hears a Who!' A great book for kids."

He led him to the children's section where there were three copies on the shelf. As Mr. Henry perused 'Horton Hears a Who', Ryan blurted out, "Did you see that story about the guy saving the girl from a subway train in Queens?"

Mr. Henry continued turning the pages. "The News and Mirror had big stories on it," he said distractedly, his eyes and mind on 'Horton Hears a Who.' Closing the book, Mr. Henry said, "I want to get a book for my little boy for his birthday."

"How old is he?"

"He's eight."

"This is the perfect one. Free gift wrapping for you Mr. Henry."

"Can't beat that."

He led him to the counter by the front door, wrapped the book in red, blue and green birthday paper, and rang up the sale. He went back to his chair to reread the story in the Times. The Herald Tribune didn't cover it. The Mirror's story was on page four with a three-line headline in a narrow column: 'Hero Killed/Rescues Girl/On El Tracks.'

He had to know whether the dead hero was the same Bobby Reilly who rescued him from certain death in Korea.

The telephone information operator provided him with numbers for three Robert Reillys in Queens. Two answered the phone. Neither was the right Reilly. The third number rang on and on without an answer.

Ryan turned the window sign to closed and crossed Lexington Avenue in the falling snow to get his dinner from the White Blossom Restaurant. He ordered the Number Three Special, egg foo young, egg roll and fried rice with egg drop soup, a Chinese tea bag and a fortune cookie to go.

He put the kettle on to boil and ate his dinner at the small table in the Garden Room that looked through French doors onto the small backyard. Snow had collected three inches deep on the patio and clung to the branches of the London Planetree. He cracked open the Chinese fortune cookie as he drank the tea. The little strip of paper read: 'Inner Peace Outer Joy.' 'That's not a fortune,' he thought, 'that's a philosophy of life. Maybe you're supposed to reflect on the saying?'

After he brushed his teeth, he set up 10 folding chairs in the Garden Room just in case. Along with the two couches and easy chairs, enough seating for 18 people. The publisher had delivered 50 books. That was optimistic. Ryan figured that with the weather, he would be lucky to get his eight regulars and one or two drop-ins.

The front door bell tinkled interrupting the task of laying out the cheese alongside the two bottles of wine, red and white. Ryan hurried from the back through the narrow corridor formed by six-foot-high book shelves.

A woman dressed for the cold in a long green coat, the added insulation of a brown plaid scarf and a woolen red knit hat, stood just inside the front door. "Anybody home?" she called out.

"Coming mother."

She laughed. "Hi. I'm Nicky Hancock. You must be Henry Aldrich," she said extending her hand.

"And you must be the author of 'A Nurse Was Called.'"
CHAPTER TWO

By 7:30, the Garden Room was packed. Several men had helped Ryan haul more folding chairs from the storage room in the basement. He counted 36 people in chairs and more standing around the fringe of the room. All were talking about the weather, the book, neighborhood gossip, creating a din.

"I couldn't put this book down," Ryan shouted holding up a copy of 'A Nurse Was Called.' The crowd quieted. In a softer voice: "I couldn't put this book down. I hope after tonight's program, all of you and certainly at the very least some of you will buy this marvelous book so the author, Nicole Hancock, can autograph it for you. A brief synopsis: The protagonist of 'A Nurse Was Called' is a hefty nurse, amateur detective, Irene Madison, whose boyfriend is a detective, Seamus Quinn, who says four or five times, 'I'm no Shamus, I'm the real McCoy.' I loved that line. Now I invite the author, Nicole Hancock, to come up and tell us all about her book."

She grinned. "I'm just thrilled that so many of you turned out on a night that's the equivalent of a blizzard in New York City. Where I come from, Syracuse, a six-inch snowfall would be considered a dusting." That drew chuckles. "If I look like I have a glow on, I do." She held up a glass of white wine. "This is party time for me. I'm on my second glass of wine. I'm normally a one glass gal, but I am enjoying a life-changing event today and I'm celebrating. This evening, just before I left my apartment, I got a call telling me that the deal had been closed to turn my first book, 'Death of a Sweet Old Lady' into a movie. I haven't been this happy since my divorce was finalized."

Most, but not all, clapped. A few laughed. Those uncomfortable with divorce didn't want to condone Nicky's light-hearted assessment of the end of her marriage with applause. "When's the movie coming out," a woman asked.

"I have no idea. I'm more interested in when's the check arriving in the mail. The money from this movie deal opens the world for me. I'll be able to fulfill my pent-up wants."

"Better go easy on the sauce," a uniformed cop from the local precinct called out to roars of laughter and affirmations.

Nicky grinned at the cop giving him a thumbs up. The money would mean a decent apartment, no more walking up four flights of stairs, taking a bath in the kitchen, and the gloom of a northern exposure with the sun blocked from the windows forever by the five-story building across East 88th Street. Better than moving, the money would finance her long-term dream of a baby. A baby when she found the right man. Intelligence was high on her list, and attractive, and self-assured, and physically fit, and at least five-foot-eight, which would be an inch taller than her. Those were the qualities she wanted to pass on to her boy or girl. And likeable. She almost forgot that. She would have to like the guy since she would be going to bed with him for the moment of creation. He wouldn't need money. The father of her child-to-be might never know he was the father. She would think about that when the time came. The cop leaning against the French doors leading to the snow-covered patio behind the store wasn't eligible. He was wearing a ring and she didn't want a married man. She had had enough of cops and married men.

"In case any of you are wondering why I write mysteries, I want to confess that I just love my main character, Nurse Irene Madison. She looks and acts like 80 percent of the nurses I've worked with. Only when she isn't taking care of patients she spends her time tracking down murderers with the help of Detective Seamus Quinn.

"But before getting into Nurse Madison, I always say to gatherings like this, in case any of you are from Syracuse, that's my home town, but I'm not related to Congressman Clarence E. Hancock My dad, Herman Hancock, ran a gas station on Erie Boulevard and always wondered if he were a distant cousin of Congressman Hancock. I did some research and found out we weren't related. End of that story. I'm giving some thought to moving back to Syracuse some day so I can relive my Syracuse childhood eating a hot dog with the works and an ice-cold root beer."

She told the audience that her life had ranged from interesting to exciting, from the day she graduated from Cornell's Nursing School at New York Hospital through her years in the Visiting Nurse and in Army field hospitals during the war in Europe, until she got married. "That lasted two weeks. The fun-filled honeymoon, not the marriage. The marriage went on for four blistering years. I had a husband who didn't want me to work as a nurse. His line was as long as I'm supporting you, you'll do what I tell you, and like so many women, I dumbly did what my husband told me. While sitting home in boredom one morning, I read in the paper that one of my patients from my days as a Visiting Nurse had been murdered. I looked into the case with help from a real life detective from the 23rd Precinct on the Upper East Side, I wrote 'Death of a Sweet Old Lady.' The critics describe my books as police procedure thrillers and I would agree. Now listen closely as I read the first chapter of my latest book, 'A Nurse Was Called.' Instead of Nurse Madison calling Seamus to start the investigation rolling as she did in the first book, the detective calls her. Let me say parenthetically that Detective Seamus was looking for an excuse to call Nurse Madison, because my first book ended with him in love with her and wishing he could find a reason to contact her again."

One of the regulars, a widow, called out from her comfortable easy chair, "Now it is clear that Seamus is a family man, but aren't you tempting him into adultery working so closely with a woman he admires and is obviously attracted to?"

"Adultery has been known to happen in life and in fiction. So has unrequited love. Let me read the first chapter and then you can buy the book to find out whether or not Seamus has any reason to go to confession on Saturday."

Ryan studied her as she read. She was tall and slender just beyond being too skinny with nicely rounded hips. Her curly brown hair was cut short; her lips when they weren't stretched into a grin or wide in laughter could only be described as juicy.

Nicky lingered after the last of the audience had departed from the dark warmth of the bookstore onto the snow-covered street. She was soaring. Too much to drink. Overly excited with the movie deal. Happy with her performance tonight instead of her usual reaction of discomfort saying to herself why-did-I-say-that? Besides, she was happy where she was, not ready to go home to her lonely apartment. With another glass of wine in hand, she went to the French doors to look out at the falling snow. He flicked on the garden lights. "Wonder, wonder, wonderful," she said turning to smile at him. "I wish I had French doors and a garden like this. I'd eat breakfast here every morning."

He swallowed the temptation to say, 'Stay the night and we'll have breakfast here in the morning.' He wasn't presumptuous enough to say that.

"What are you thinking?" she asked.

"Nothing." Her question made him uncomfortable. Had his thought played across his face? Was she confronting him or being playful?

"The strong, silent type eh?" His crew cut, his gentleness and lean body viewed from his right side gave him a boyish air. From another point of view, the scar on the other side of his face offered a touch of menace. She found the combination inviting. Could he be a killer or a cop in her next novel? She took the little leather pad with the holstered pencil she always carried for moments like this from her pocketbook. She made a note of her observations.

He wondered what she was writing, but didn't ask.

She saw the question on his face. "I'm the strong, but not silent type. I'm making notes. I put the pieces of life I see around me into my stories. I'd love to have another glass of wine, but I can't take the chance. Two glasses and I'm ready to fly." She smiled. "Three and I can be a very dangerous woman. So it's frightening to wonder what four would do."

"Then by all means have four," he said.

"You've got that look on your face again. But I'm not going to ask you what you're thinking, because we've established that your thoughts are your own and I think I know what you're thinking."

Both laughed. The day that had begun so miserably had ended happily. Nicole Hancock had turned out be a lusty, engaging woman who made him feel good just to have been near her.

All the way in the taxi to 88th Street, in the climb up the four flights of stairs to her apartment, and lying in bed for the longest time before sleep overtook her, Nicky thought about him. What was his story? Where did he get that scar? He had that Eastern college accent; where did he go to college? He was poised and attractive. The scar gave him character, a mysterious look. She was curious about why he had taken up a bookstore as a career. She wished she had asked him that question; she almost did. She didn't want to sound condescending as if she considered running a bookstore a demeaning career. She had to learn more about him, whether he had any hereditary diseases or mental problems. Obviously she was attracted to him. He looked like a likely candidate to be the father her child.

Ryan lay in bed waiting the longest time for sleep as he did every night, but with her face clearly in his mind he enjoyed his wakefulness tonight, thinking about her.
CHAPTER THREE

Two dreams filled his night. A persistent nightmare of a bayonet, a knife, or a spike being thrust toward his right eye. On this night he grabbed the bayonet, cutting his hands but holding the weapon just short of plunging into his good eye to blind him. He awoke screaming, sobbing, shaking. He looked at the alarm clock on the night table. Three AM. The nightmare wasn't unexpected, but that didn't make it any easier. Any remembrance of the fear-filled moments of combat in the Hürtgen Forest or Korea sparked the nightmare. As usual, he lay panting, his heart pounding. After lying awake for seemingly hours, sleep overcame him again taking him to the edge of a deep, dark pool of water in the rock quarry where he swam as a boy on summer vacations in the Catskills. HHHe stood under the light of a full moon on the cliff above the quarry wanting to dive in, but hesitating in the fear of hitting a rock. His attention was drawn suddenly to a woman emerging from the water on the far side of the quarry; first her head of short dark hair, which she shook and then ran her fingers through. Her bare shoulders, her naked back, smoothly taut around her waist adding a succulent emphasis to her haunches, rose slowly out of the darkness. He realized he was watching the mystery writer, Nicky Hancock. Ryan awoke to lie in the warmth of his bed feeling a combination of joy at so appealing a dream and disappointment that she hadn't turned around.

In the morning, Ryan flashed through the New York Times, the Daily News and the Mirror. No stories on Bobby Reilly. He looked at the clock. Nine AM. Mrs. Garmeis probably hadn't left her house yet. He dialed her number. "Good morning, this is Ryan."

"Is there something wrong?"

"No. No. I'm glad I caught you at home. You get the Star Journal don't you? I assume they had a story the man being killed while saving the girl from the train at the Bliss Street station."

She said there had been a big front page story about it in yesterday's edition, which she still had. She agreed to bring the paper with her to work.

As soon as Mrs. Garmeis arrived, Ryan took his coffee and the Star Journal into the Garden Room. The story about Bobby was under a banner headline:

Korean War Veteran Dies Saving

Young Mother from Subway Train

'A Woodside man yesterday sacrificed his life to save a young mother from certain death at the Bliss Street Station in Sunnyside.

'Robert Reilly, 23, of 48-11 47th Street, Woodside, who fought in the Korean War, heroically and without hesitation leapt onto the tracks right in front of the oncoming subway train, witnesses told police. They said Reilly exhibited amazing strength and speed as he literally tossed Mrs. Barry Donovan, 23, of 47-57 46th Street, Woodside, from the well of the tracks back onto the station platform, then almost escaped to safety himself.

'Police Sgt. William Bolger said that the first car of the train struck Reilly as he attempted to vault onto the platform. "It's hard to believe that Mr. Reilly was able to do what he did in the few seconds available, but the witnesses I interviewed said he did," Sgt. Bolger said.

'Mrs. Donovan, who once lived on the same block as Mr. Reilly and was in his class at P.S. 125, said that she had run up the stairs when she heard the train approaching, her high heel caught on the top step and she stumbled across the platform onto the tracks. "The train was right on top of me. I don't know how he got me out of there so fast. I was on my knees. He grabbed me under the arms and swung me back onto the platform."

'She said, "We were in the same class in P.S. 125. I used to walk home from school with Bobby. I knew him all my life. I'm so grateful to him. I'll never forget him.

'Mrs. Donovan, whose husband, Barry, is a police officer, has a four-year-old daughter.

'Mr. Reilly's widow, Teresa Reilly, said her husband was on his way to work as a shipping clerk in Oldman's Grand Department Store on Fifth Avenue. She said she married him because he was her hero. "The way I met Bobby was he pulled me out of the water at Rockaway. He saved my life. He was a wonderful husband, and father. He was very brave man. You know he fought in Korea, even though he didn't like to talk about it, I know he saved some other soldiers. And now the whole world knows how brave he was. How many men would have jumped in front a subway train to save someone?"

'Mr. Reilly was born on Dec. 24, 1931 in St. John's Hospital in Long Island City. A graduate of Bryant High School, he joined the U.S. Army in 1950 and saw combat in Korea. He is survived by his wife, Eileen Reilly, his 18-month-old son, Steven, and his mother, Mrs. Mary Reilly of Woodside.

'Visiting hours at the Loughran Funeral Home, 44-40 48th Ave., Woodside are from 2 PM to 4 PM and from 7 PM to 9 PM today, tomorrow and Friday. The funeral Mass will be at 10 AM Saturday in St. Mildred of Minster's Roman Catholic Church. Burial will be in Calvary Cemetery.'

Ryan closed his eyes, remembering Pvt. Bobby Reilly. He didn't like Reilly from the outset. The private was fidgety, walked with a slouch. His bushy, black eyebrows met over the bridge of his nose not a fraction of skin showing between them. They never had a real conversation. Reilly didn't like officers, that was obvious. Ryan had been an enlisted man too, so he understood. But they didn't come together in Jaguar One as friends. Ryan's job was to oversee Bull Heydecker, a fierce 30-year man who loved the Army as much as he did, whipping Jaguar One's motley crew of 12 soldiers, all branded as cowards, into a fighting unit. Bull made them roar 'aaaarrgghh' in the daily bayonet drill, when they did pull ups, when they fell in for morning roll call, and for myriad other activities and moments throughout the day.

Last August on one of those extraordinarily hot New York summer days when the blacktop is soft enough to write your initials in, Ryan was in the midst of shelving historical novels from a publisher's box when he was startled by the roar of 'aaaarrgghh.' He knew before he turned that it must be Bull, because he was the only man on earth capable of a bellow so loud that it seemed to shake the floor of Kips Bay Books. Mrs. Garmeis shouted, "You can't do that in here, sir" as a grinning Ryan and laughing Bull rushed towards one another. They shook hands and Bull slapped Ryan on the arm with his free hand. "Good God damn almighty, I couldn't come through New York without stopping to see you Captain." Ryan and Bull had exchanged Christmas cards since they had first met in Japan four years ago when Jaguar One was created.

He introduced the petite bleach-blonde standing behind him as his wife Dixie. She was no more than five feet tall and skinny, made to look all the skinnier by Bull's height and girth. Even in mufti, Bull looked like the soldier he was. He told Ryan that they were grabbing the chance for a holiday in the city on their way from Germany to Bull's new assignment as the first sergeant of an infantry company at Fort Benning.

Ryan took them around the corner to McGuire's on 27th Street, where they sat at the bar each drinking two gin and tonics while struggling through a stilted conversation about the book store, the Yankees, and the throngs on the streets of New York.

The Heydeckers turned down his perfunctory invitation to dinner with the excuse of a Broadway show that night and a full dance card for the remainder of their few days in the city.

"Got some old soldiers I want to see. And Dixie wants to see the famous whale up at the Natural History Museum and go out to the Statue of Liberty before we head on down to Georgia. So we got to spread ourselves pretty thin to see everything and everyone."

\---

Ryan decided he had to go to the funeral home tonight to pay his respects to Bobby's widow and mother. With that settled, throughout the day when he wasn't waiting on a customer or talking to Mrs. Garmeis, he thought of Nicky, of her high cheekbones and fulsome face, her easy laugh.

Mrs. Garmeis left at 4; he turned the sign in the window from open to closed at 6, switched off the lights, and went upstairs to his apartment to change into a dark suit and black tie. He walked three blocks through cold and empty streets, everyone inside eating supper or watching TV, to his car, a second-hand, blue Mercury coupe, parked in front of his parents' house on East 28th Street near Second Avenue.
CHAPTER FOUR

He parked in front of a bar on 48th Avenue directly across the street from Loughran & Sons Funeral Home. Next door to the funeral parlor was another bar, Dougherty's Irish House. Ryan stepped onto a mound of rock-hard, dirty snow looking both ways before crossing 48th Avenue; he could see the colorful neons lights of four more bars along the avenue. He went into the crowded foyer of Loughran's behind a man and woman, who had just made the transfer from the comfort of the bar to the wake as he approached.

Bobby Reilly was the only customer tonight, but the funeral parlor was packed with a mix of young and old men and women, most of them smoking, in tight groupings of three to six talking and laughing. Ryan threaded through the happy mourners to the open double doors beside which was a pedestal table holding a visitors' register. Every chair in the viewing room was taken and more people lined the walkways on either side. The front of the room was filled with bannered floral displays: 'Daddy,' 'True Hero,' 'Our Buddy,' 'Husband & Son,' 'Eternal Life.' Dozens of elaborate Mass Cards were attached to three golden poles rising from the midst of baskets of flowers.

Ryan joined a queue of four couples waiting to briefly kneel beside the open casket to say their silent goodbyes or quick Hail Marys for the recently departed. He followed the pattern of those who went before him, a familiar Irish Catholic ritual. He knelt, perhaps too long, to look at the pale-faced corpse, eyes shut, dark hair combed neatly into a pompadour, hands folded across a crucifix. No sign that this body had been crushed by a subway train. No sign that this shell had contained the soul of a hero, who saved a young mother from an awful death, who saved his future wife from a rip tide at Rockaway Beach, who saved Ryan from a Chinese bayonet in Korea. The first thrust of the bayonet had pierced his heavy field jacket slicing his right side as he lay on the ground blinded in one eye, unable to move. The Chinese soldier had placed his foot on his chest to withdraw the bayonet, then 'aaaarrgghh.' Reilly flew across Ryan's prostrate body an entrenching tool stretching before him like a bee's stinger. The oval-shaped metal blade penetrated the enemy soldier's throat almost taking off his head.

Reilly picked Ryan up and slung him across his shoulder. He tried to say thanks, but couldn't speak. Ryan awoke in pain lying on a cot in a field hospital. Bull, another casualty of the battle, told him that Reilly saved him too, along with two other Jaguars. No one else had survived.

Ryan rose from the kneeler feeling a flush of embarrassment in realizing that the line behind had lengthened considerably. He took the few steps towards the woman in a black dress, a handkerchief in her hand sitting in the first row of seats between two thick-bodied older women, also in black.

"Mrs. Reilly?" he asked extending his hand. She nodded. "I'm sorry for your loss." Usually that was the line he delivered to the surviving family members at wakes, but this occasion demanded more. "I knew your husband in the Army. My name's Ryan Garrity, I don't know if Bobby ever told you, but he saved my life in Korea."

"He told me. Happy Garrity, right? The captain?"

He never knew his men called him Happy. He nodded and continued, "I've been meaning for a couple of years now to look up Bobby to thank him for what he did for me. I got evacuated right out of Korea back to Japan and then back to the states. I feel bad that I didn't get a chance to thank him."

"Now you're here," she said, her words sounding like a reprimand. "Sgt. Heydecker came by the apartment last summer. He took us all out to dinner, to the Asia on Queens Boulevard. Bobby saved his life too and he put Bobby in for a Congressional Medal of Honor. Did you know that?"

He shook his head, no. Her hostility made him uneasy. He wanted to get away from her as soon as possible. "He was a real hero," he said in an effort to mollify her.

"You don't have to tell me. That's exactly why I married him. He was my hero. He was Sgt. Heydecker's hero; he was your hero; one time he saved a colored man from being beaten up by that gang of thugs that hangs out in the candy store across from PS 125. Not many people know about that one. And then he gave his life saving Eileen Donovan. If it wasn't for Bobby, Eileen's little Peggy would have to grow up without a mother. So he did a lot of good, my Bobby, except his little boy, Steve, doesn't have a father any more." She pressed her face into her handkerchief.

Ryan ached with embarrassment, but he didn't want to compound his failure by leaving without expressing a few words of sorrow to Reilly's mother. "Is one of you, Mrs. Reilly, Bobby's mother?" he asked two women in mourning black dresses.

"Oh God," Teresa howled. She stood turning from Ryan to look around the room. "Kevin!" her harsh shout silencing the din of conversation in the room.

A big broad man with sandy hair pushed away from a wall. He strode down the aisle. "Yes," he said looking at Ryan with a hard stare.

"This man wants to see Bobby's mother. Do me a favor and find her for him."

"Once again, I'm sorry for your loss, Mrs. Reilly."

She waved him away. A dismissal that seared his stomach, that sent burning blood rushing to his face.

"Come on," Kevin said. He led Ryan through the packed foyer to the front door. He said over his shoulder, "I think Mrs. Reilly is next door."

Rosemary Clooney was singing "Hey There" when they walked into Dougherty's whose bar was stacked with Bobby Reilly's friends, neighbors and relatives. They filled every stool, leaving many standing with drinks in their hands. Kevin paused just within the doorway to study the faces. "There she is." They went a cluster of four middle-age men, all in suits, standing and three women in black dresses sitting on bar stools.

"Mrs. Reilly..."

"Oh, Kevin," the women in the center seat said, leaning over to kiss Kevin on the cheek. "What will we do without Bobby boy?" Her front teeth were crooked with pyorrhea; her face showed the premature wrinkles of hard living and drone work.

"Mrs. Reilly this is, ah. I didn't get your name."

"Ryan Garrity."

She took his hands. "The captain. Bobby boy told me about you. He had nightmares about that Chink he killed for you, to save you."

"I'll always be grateful to him."

"You should be. Bobby boy said he got his nightmares saving an officer he didn't like." She threw her hands in the air, cackling and adding to the laughter of the group: "But he didn't like any of the officers. He didn't like the Army." She raised her glass, a signal to the bartender. "Jimmy," she called. "Get us a drink for the captain and Kevin and another round here."

Ryan took out his wallet. "Let me get this round," he said.

"No, no. You get the next one," she said.

He ordered a beer. Kevin along with the four men got boiler makers. The women had highballs. All raised their glasses in a toast. "Lord have mercy on his soul," Mrs. Reilly said, and the others responded the same. Ryan waited for the next onslaught. He would have to endure whatever Mrs. Reilly had to say until he paid for the next round and he could leave.

Mrs. Reilly introduced each of the men and women, all friends from the neighborhood. "I was telling them about Bobby boy supposed to get the Congressional Medal of Honor for saving you and all those other boys and I guess for killing that Chink. He really didn't like that. He was a sweet boy, but the Army had to make him into a killer."

Ryan realized in listening to this inebriated, homely woman, old in her mid-forties or early 50s that it had never occurred to him to put Pvt. Reilly in for a medal."

She continued: "And the nerve of that Pollack doctor telling us we had to let them do an autopsy on Bobby Boy or the Army would keep the body until we signed no matter how long we waited."

"Dr. J?" he asked.

"Yeah. Dr. Jaro something or other. Why did they have to do an autopsy? To find out what makes a hero?"

Dr. J, that's what he called him, because he couldn't easily pronounce the doctor's tongue twisting East European name. He was still in the shock of losing his eye and just having had an operation to pull a piece of shrapnel out of his head near his brain when Dr. J appeared at his bedside to question him about Pvt. Reilly's performance that day.

Ryan said to Mrs. Reilly, "Dr. Jarocewicz."

"That's the one," she said.

"Your Bobby was a brave man alright. You should be so proud of him Mary," the woman sitting on Mrs. Reilly's left side said.

"Someone told me a pension goes with the medal. Is that right?" Mrs. Reilly asked Ryan, but before he could respond she said, "I suppose that one will get it," she said with a nod of her head towards the funeral parlor next door."

"What has the Army told you about Bobby getting the medal? Ryan asked.

"Nothing. Bull Heydecker said that Bobby boy was like a hero out of a comic book, running all over the battlefield, carrying the wounded back, killing Chinks. And the thanks Bobby boy gets for it? When Bull Heydecker put him in for the medal, the powers that be said no way. Then they cut up his body after he's dead. Don't they understand the body is the Temple of Christ?"

"He should get a medal from somebody for what he did for Eileen Kane too," Kevin said.

"Eileen Donovan! Kane's her maiden name," Mrs. Reilly said. She polished off her high ball in a gulp.

Ryan signaled the bartender for another round. He was puzzled by the insistence of Dr. J to do an autopsy and the threat to hold Bobby Reilly's body hostage until the family agreed. What the hell was going on?
CHAPTER FIVE

Ryan came out of his darkened bookstore into the cold, silence of a lonely-feeling, early Sunday morning Lexington Avenue. Digging his hands deep into the pockets of his green Army field jacket, shorn of its name tag and patches, he walked with head down against a chilling wind to Henry's Candy Store on the corner. Copies of the Sunday New York Times and the Sunday Herald Tribune were piled high on the wooden newsstand outside the tiny store under a red and green Breyer's Ice Cream sign. He dropped the coins for the two newspapers into a worn cigar box and turned to cross the avenue, waiting for a single car flying towards him to pass by.

Several customers were pointing to the pastries they wanted in the glass showcase facing Karp's Bakery's front door. An elderly couple was sitting at the table furthest from the door, the most desirable location on a frigid morning. He sat down one place away from them enjoying the warm scent of the bakery.

Millie, the waitress, red-haired, spider-waisted, wrinkled face, came with her order pad not bothering to give Ryan a menu. She said, "Good morning. Today we're going to have a large orange juice, black coffee, two eggs over light, home fries, sausage and two hot rolls. Right?"

"Some day, I'm going to order something different and you'll be shocked."

"Some day my prince will come," she said smirking.

Ryan restrained himself from saying, 'I didn't know you were married to a prince.'

She wrote his familiar order on her green and white pad. "I'll be right back with the coffee."

While waiting for Millie to return with his coffee, Ryan glanced at the headlines on the front page of the New York Times: G.O.P. '56 Strategy Assumes Nominee to be Eisenhower; British Want Iraq to Join with West in a Mideast Pact; Soviet Frees 2 Americans Long Held in Labor Camps; and Third Peiping Talk on U.S. Prisoners Lasts Five Hours. He read the story about UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold meeting with Red China's Premier Chou En-lai over the fate of 11 U.S. Airmen being held as spies. "The bastards," he said aloud, immediately feeling embarrassed, hoping the elderly couple didn't hear him.

After eating his breakfast and leaving his usual tip on the table for Millie, Ryan went to the showcase counter to buy a loaf of rye bread sliced and a crumb cake to eat while drinking more coffee and reading the newspapers in the Garden Room at the back of his bookstore.

"How do you eat so much and stay so thin?" Mrs. Karp, a double-chinned, bulging vision of jolly-looking overeating, asked as she took his money for the breakfast and baked goods.

"Just lucky Mrs. Karp," he said. Every morning, he ran up the stairs linking the store to his apartment six times; and weather permitting, he ran around the perimeter of Gramercy Park six times to the stares and amusement of watching pedestrians. The Army had addicted him to running. One bent, old lady, who walked her Yorkshire Terrier along the same route, often called out to him: "You're going to hurt yourself doing that young man." He lifted weights and worked out on a speed punching bag in his cellar on alternating days.

Sipping coffee and savoring the intense sweetness of the crumb cake, which he had slathered with butter, Ryan sat reading the Sunday Herald Tribune in the upholstered chair closest to the French doors in the Garden Room. On page 26, he read a short item that told him that Montgomery Gibson, president of Oldman's Grand Department Store, planned to give Bobby Reilly's widow a check for $1,000 at a luncheon on Friday in recognition of his heroic act in sacrificing his life to save a young woman from being crushed to death under the steel wheels of a subway car. He went through the New York Times without finding a story on Bobby Reilly and Oldman's.

The front page of the Times Book Review drew a smile. Scotty Reston, the paper's Washington Bureau chief, had written a review of 'Civilization and Foreign Policy' by Louis J. Halle. Originally, he had planned to order ten copies of the book, but the publisher's rep had talked him into taking 20, pressing the notion that this was an important book and a good number of United Nations employees lived in the neighborhood surrounding Kips Bay Books. Being reviewed on the front page increased the odds of selling the 20 copies. He would stack the book beside the cash register. That often spurred sales.

Perusing the Book Review, the headline The Reason for a Hero caught him. Because of Bobby Reilly, he read the review in which the author, Marshall W. Fishwick, was quoted as writing: "We simply must have heroes. They give us blessed relief from our daily lives, which are frequently one petty thing after another." Bobby Reilly was his own personal hero because he had saved his life under dire conditions. Jaguar One under his leadership had plunged into a slaughterhouse on an open hillside churned by artillery and crisscrossed by machine gun fire. And Pvt. Reilly, the malingerer, lowest on his list of those most likely to stand up in combat, had gone up and down that hill with the dead weight of a wounded soldier on his back at least twice, maybe more if Reilly's mother were to believed, a feat in the realm of the miraculous. While Audie Murphy got his Medal of Honor for being a one-man Army, Ryan knew that Medals of Honor often went to men who saved other soldiers' lives at the cost of their own. Jumping on a hand grenade seemed to be the most common event. No one in their right mind would have risked crossing that battlefield under the conditions that Reilly did. Luck was always a factor in surviving a battle, in escaping devastating wounds.

As his commanding officer, he should have put Reilly in for the medal. He was so devastated by the loss of his eye and the scarring of his face that the significance of Reilly's feat that bloody day didn't register for a long time. His mind was on the damage done to him. As soon as he could bring himself to do it, he began looking in the bathroom mirror almost every morning, first at the smooth-skinned half of his face and then turning to examine the rough scar and the false eye. The glass eye looked pretty good actually. Army doctors had a lot of experience replacing eyes. Almost immediately, he began having the nightmares of his good eye being destroyed leaving him in darkness, forever. He dreaded blindness. He often prayed, "Please God don't let me lose my other eye."

A little further in the review of Fishwick's 'American Heroes/Myth and Reality,' another sentence leapt out at him: "Behind every hero is a group of skilled and faithful manipulators." That was so true. In almost every battle, infantrymen died performing deeds that deserved medals and maybe songs of remembrance. What they were lacking was a chorus of cheerleaders to chant their praises. Bobby had an advocate in Bull, but he also had someone in the military bureaucracy who blocked his medal. Why the hell would anyone do that? Ryan wondered.

Turning another 11 pages, Ryan came to the 'Criminals at Large' column. Among the four mysteries and police procedures reviewed was Nicky Hancock's 'A Nurse Was Called.' "If you were thrilled by Nurse Irene Madison's performance as a woman in white smarter than any gumshoe in Nicole Hancock's 'Death of a Sweet Old Lady', you'll be in ecstasy in reading her latest (and best) 'A Nurse Was Called.' I hope I'm not going too far in saying I loved this book." Ryan had eight copies still on the author's signing desk in the Garden Room. Before he reopened tomorrow, he would do a placard with the quote: 'I loved this book' and insert it in the bookstore's front window. First thing in the morning he would get on the phone to order another 20 copies from the publisher. He hoped he was making a decision based on business rather than his desire for the author.

He thought about Nicky, her easy laughter, her startling frankness about her marriage. He wanted to see her again, but couldn't imagine so worldly and successful a woman being interested in him. She was probably dating other writers or business executives. He ran his finger along the scar on the left side of his face, feeling unattractive in the process. He stared at the review in the Times for several minutes and then decided to plunge in. He would say that the great review prompted him to call, to congratulate her.

He got the Manhattan telephone book to look for her number. No listing. He called information. Her phone was unlisted. He couldn't blame her. She probably wanted to avoid calls from guys like him, who read her book or heard her talk and lusted after her. Maybe he could call her publisher's office. Playing out the inquiry in his mind, he decided, no, that would be too embarrassing.
CHAPTER SIX

The phone rang. He picked up the receiver anticipating it would be his mother inviting him for Sunday dinner at 4 as she did almost every week.

"Hi. This is Nicky Hancock. Remember me?"

"How could I forget you Miss Hancock?"

"I just finished breakfast and I was having a second cup of coffee and started reading, 'A Spray of Jasmine.'

"The new mystery set in Malibu."

"You know your books Mr. Garrity. I was hoping you would call me, but Thursday, Friday and Saturday went by, and no call. So I said to myself the woman who passively waits, sometimes waits forever. I have two tickets to this afternoon's matinee of 'Fanny' and no one to go with. Maybe I should use that as an excuse to ask that nice fellow from the bookstore to be my date. Well?"

"Great." What a dumb response, he thought. He had seen a banner pasted across the men's room mirror in McGuire's: 'Have you seen Fanny?' He had read about the nude statue of Nejla Ates, the belly dancer in the show, that had been planted in the Poet's Corner of Central Park.

"It's playing at the Majestic. So why don't we meet in front of the theater at say 2:30."

"Great. We'll find a place to have dinner afterwards."

"Wonderful. And, since we're dating, you can call me Nicky and I'll call you Ryan."

There had been little conversation in the frigid air outside the Majestic Theater after seeing 'Fanny' or in the taxi from West 44th Street to La Flor Española on Charles Street in Greenwich Village. Nicky insisted on paying for the taxi ride and told him that no matter how much he planned on resisting that dinner would be her treat too.

As he walked behind her down the steps into the small restaurant, Ryan's delight at being asked out by an attractive woman, one of the most accomplished he had ever encountered, was replaced by the perplexing question of why, prompted by her stated insistence on paying for the play, the taxi, the dinner. He hoped she was motivated by attraction rather than for some commercial reason.

The maitre d' bowed as they entered. "So nice to see you again, Miss Hancock" he said to Nicky, his eyes playing for a moment too long on Ryan. He led them to a small table for two at rear of the restaurant. "May I get you something from the bar?"

"A bottle of Rioja. White. Could you get us an order of Chorizos and a plate of those wonderful Spanish potatoes while we're looking at the menu."

He bowed to her and went through the swinging door into the kitchen, came out a moment later going to the small bar near the entrance."

"I suppose you know what's good here. What do you recommend?"

"I love their shrimp in green sauce. They serve it with rice. That's what I'm having."

"Somehow I don't find a green sauce appealing. I know I abhor green beer on St. Patrick's Day."

"Don't worry; the green sauce doesn't have green dye in it. The color comes from the parsley in the recipe. If you order something else, I'll give you a taste of mine, and you'll be sorry you didn't get the green sauce."

"Sold. I'll have white wine and shrimp in green sauce. Should I order my own bottle of wine or are we sharing."

"I could drink the whole bottle, but tonight we're sharing."

"You obviously come here quite often."

She nodded. "I like the food, the service, and the maitre d' is a fan."

"And who's your usual date? From the maitre d's expression, I seemed to be a surprise."

She smiled, almost laughing. "He asked me out once. I didn't want to hurt his feelings so I lied. I told him I was very involved with a certain man." Reaching across the table, she touched the back of his hand. "Maybe he thinks you're that certain man. Of course, he gives that look to every man I come in with."

"So tell me how often do you invite men out and then pick up the tab?"

"Rarely. Only on special occasions. In fact this is the first such occasion. I did ask a boy out in high school as a prelude to inviting him to be my prom date. He turned me down, but I have to admit I had no intention of treating him. So be thrilled. You're a first."

A waiter returned with the wine. He showed the bottle to Ryan prompting Nicky to hold up her hand. "I'm the wine connoisseur at this table," she said smiling at him.

The waiter's eye brows flickered upwards in surprise, then he uncorked the bottle, presenting the cork to Nicky who sniffed it, and then he poured a dollop of wine into her glass.

She raised the glass studying the color of the wine for a moment, swirled it, and tasted. "Fine."

The waiter partially filled their glasses. He pushed the bottle into the ice in a metal bucket on a stand that another waiter had placed beside their table. Each ordered the shrimp in green sauce with rice.

They touched their glasses. "To the girl who has exposed me to an incredible adventure." He sipped his wine. "I've never eaten in a Spanish restaurant before and I've never had a girl ask me out on a date and I never saw a belly dancer before you took me to see 'Fanny.'"

"You're one lucky duck."

"Make out you're Nurse Hancock and you're in the last chapter explaining the mystery. Tell me why you've taken Ryan Garrity on his incredible adventure. Is this a Sadie Hawkins Day event? Or some version of a spinster's ball? What's the special occasion? Explain to me why you asked me out? You are not a woman who needs to hunt up a man and pay for everything to entice him into your company."

She held her right forefinger straight in the air between them. "Never call me a spinster again. Nor an old maid. I've given the description of where I am in life a lot of thought. I'm unmarried at 34 so the cruel would call me an old maid behind my back and spinster to my face. I prefer being called a writer. Do you know where the term spinster comes from? The unmarried female who sat at a spinning wheel in her father or mother's house making cloth. And I've always attached the word maiden to old maid, as in my maiden aunt." She smiled. "That implies my aunt is a virgin. I lost that label a long time ago."

The waiter interrupted Ryan's immediate response by arriving with bread, the chorizos and Spanish fried potatoes. Conversation was suspended while he filled their empty glasses and moved away from the table.

Ryan sipped his wine, smiling at her monologue announcing that she was well beyond maidenhood and innocence.

"Why are you smiling? Are you smirking at me?"

Wow she was sensitive, and a continuous interrogator. "How can I say without hurting your feelings my thoughts are my own?"

That was an evasive answer. But then neither did she have any intention of honestly answering his question about why she had called him for a date and had assumed the dominant role of paying for everything invariably allotted to the male. She said aloud, "I'm about to respond to your question of why you and why tonight. I had the tickets to 'Fanny.' I thought you were a nice guy and I might enjoy spending an evening with you, getting to know you better." In part, that was true. She did want to get to know him better. It hadn't taken her long to find out that he was reluctant to reveal his innermost thoughts or instantaneous reactions. She read in his dirty little smiles that he would like to poke her. Sex was on her underlying agenda too for a practical reason rather than just pleasure. In her nursing school days at Cornell, having consumed several glasses of wine, she proclaimed to an intern she was dating that if she weren't married and didn't have a baby by the time she was 35, she would find some wonderful man to implant his semen in one of her eggs, that she would bear the child and all the responsibility that went with it. Motherhood was too significant an experience to be missed. Now she was approaching that crucial birthday of 35. She went on, "And honestly, I thought you were an interesting, attractive man."

He had never considered whether he was attractive to girls when he was younger, before his face was scarred by the shrapnel that destroyed his left eye, ironically on his 28th birthday four years ago. Now he assumed that women found his disfigurement repulsive or exciting. He hadn't come close enough to the few women he had dated to be openly questioned by any about the cause of his injury. He was ready with a lighthearted response, yet to be used, that the notch on his face was an unwelcome Chinese Communist birthday gift.

Nicky's thoughts were on his appearance too. She assumed from his soldierly aura, the tight crew-cut, the tautness of his figure that wedge of raised flesh that rose from his chin climbing across his cheek to his glass eye had been caused by a hot piece of metal from an enemy grenade or artillery shell. That was an Army glass eye. She had seen so many implanted during the war in Europe. Surrendering to her writer's thirst for detail, she asked what happened to his eye and face?

He asked whether she had seen the articles on Bobby Reilly, the man killed rescuing a young woman from the elevated tracks in Queens?

"The hero."

"Yes. Reilly did the same for me in Korea. I got this," he said indicating his face, "and he slung me over his shoulder and carried me to safety. If it weren't for Pvt. Reilly, I wouldn't be having dinner with you tonight." The discomfort of recalling that painful incident played across his face.

Nicky decided to turn the conversation to the happier subject of the musical they had just seen. "I decided on 'Fanny' because I saw Ezio Pinza in 'South Pacific' last year and I came away singing the songs. One Enchanted Evening. Younger Than Springtime."

"None of the songs from 'Fanny' are playing in my head, but I can still see the belly dancer."

She laughed, surprising herself by reaching across the table for the second time that evening to touch his hand. The unexpected gesture, the warmth of her flesh sent a thrill blazing up his arm and through his body.

After espresso and flan, Nicky paid the bill to the theatrical astonishment of the waiter and the discomfort of Ryan. "A special occasion?" the waiter asked.

"Just a date," Nicky replied.

"If I could only find a woman like you. Not only beautiful, but..." He winked at Ryan. "You are one lucky man."

"And I'm one lucky lady, eh." She winked back at the waiter, who bowed as she passed.

On Greenwich Avenue, Nicky hailed a taxi. She got in first immediately telling the driver to take them to Lexington Avenue and 27th Street. "Gotcha," the cabbie said as Ryan settled into the back seat.

"Are you coming in for coffee?"

She laughed. "You wish. No, I'm just dropping you off."

"I'd be more comfortable seeing you home."

Squeezing his arm, she said, "I don't want to take you way out of your way uptown just to disappoint you. All you get tonight is my thanks for a wonder, wonder, wonderful time and a sisterly peck on the lips when we say good night in front of your doorstep."

"How about giving me your phone number too," he said.
CHAPTER SEVEN

In the dream, he stared into the deep, dark water of the rock quarry. A fear of plunging into the cold water created a numb spot on the left side of his forehead. That strange expression of dread dissipated as he watched Nicky, emerging from the water on the far side of the quarry; she turned to wave, giving him a glimpse of her breasts. She laughed and was gone.

Ryan awoke to the alarm clock ringing at 6:30. He lay for a while thinking of her. Then his morning ritual began: throwing off the covers, he rolled out of bed. The cold floor chilled the bottom of his feet. In the bathroom, he brushed away the foulness in his mouth and looked in the mirror, running the back of his right thumb the length of the ridge of scar tissue on the left side of his face extending from the lower edge of the eye socket to the jawbone. After shaving, he stripped off the undershirt and shorts he had slept in, dressing in fresh underwear and in gray sweats with a hooded top, a leftover from his high school track team.

Downstairs in the Garden Room, he looked out at the London Planetree, particularly dismal in the center of the small, bricked patio on this winter gray day. After 50 sit-ups and 50 push-ups, he pulled on an old pair of brown leather, cashmere-lined dress gloves and walked the six blocks to Gramercy Park.

This morning an easterly wind stung him at the cross streets. The thermometer was well below freezing and the sky was packed with threatening grey clouds, but the sidewalks and gutters were free of ice. Walking was substituted for running when conditions were slippery. This morning, he ran around the perimeter of the park enclosed in a high, wrought-iron fence.

The arousing image of Nicky rising from the dark water dominated his thoughts in the passage around the park. As he ran, he grinned at the sight of her breasts dripping water in the dream. He wanted to see her again right away. The earliest he could call would be 10 o'clock once he was certain that Mrs. Garmeis had arrived for work in case Nicky said, 'Come on over.'

More people, cars and taxis were moving around the streets as he walked home. Snow had begun falling. He stopped at the corner newsstand to buy the Daily Mirror, the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune. The three newspapers were dropped on a table just inside the entrance to the apartment; he wouldn't read them until after breakfast. This morning, he wanted to remember Nicky in the flesh and in the dream, her full-cheeked face, her laugh, her slender body. Her skin was slightly olive, a tint that didn't go with her English-sounding name. He saw her as clearly as if she were standing before him. As never before, he was hungry for a particular woman, excited the more by her self-assurance, her willingness to take the initiative to ask him for a date.

Ryan was shelving two boxes of mixed new books when Mrs. Garmeis arrived at 10 AM. She sang an operatic "Good morning, Let's say good morning" as Ryan experienced the physical remembrance of being lifted from Bobby's back by two medics, one of them saying, "Jesus another one," and for a flickering moment seeing—with his right eye--the exhaustion on his savior's troubled face.

"Singing in the Rain," he mumbled as she moved past him to hang her winter coat and scarf in the closet near the entrance to the Garden Room.

"Right as rain," she said coming to the cash register platform. "I think of Debbie Reynolds, so full of life, whenever I hear that song in my head."

He sang, "With a song in my heart."

"That was Susan Hayward," she responded, happy that he was reacting with a tune of his own this morning.

"The writer we had for Mystery Night, Nicky Hancock, she reminds me of Susan Hayward."

"In looks or personality?"

"Both. Nicky doesn't have red hair, but she has the same shaped face, fulsome cheeks, and beautiful. And, she has that underlying toughness. No I don't like that word. What's a better word than toughness?"

"For her, I don't know. I've read her, but I've never met her."

"I saw 'Fanny' with her on Sunday and then we ate in a Spanish restaurant in Greenwich Village."

"Mmmmh."

"I don't know what you mean by that. Right now I'm about to call Miss Hancock. He dialed her number. "Are you writing?" he asked when she answered.

"I write every day, six days a week, from 8 to noon, and if I'm in a frenzy with the typewriter blazing, I write for a couple of hours after lunch."

He said he was sorry to interrupt her. Nicky replied that the only reason she picked up the phone was in hopes it would be him. She whispered, "I've thought a lot about you since last night."

"I dreamt of you."

She laughed. "I hope it was an interesting dream. There seems to be a connection between us."

That remark sent a thrill through him. He told her he had hoped to invite her for a walk in Central Park along the Literary Walk, and maybe lunch afterwards.

"That would be my dream come true in May or June, but not when we're having a blizzard.

"Why don't we skip the walk and I'll take you to lunch."

"Wonderful. Why don't you come by at one?"

"I'll be there are one sharp."

"Not a minute before."

Only three customers came into Kips Bay Books, two of them just to escape the fierce wind and the piling snow before Ryan went to the mystery section to select a book as a gift for Nicky. While he wrapped the book in a flowery sheet of leftover Valentine's Day paper, he told Mrs. Garmeis he was going out for lunch. "On a day like this?" she asked, the sound of her words carrying the implied meaning of how could you be so stupid?

Although he anticipated being back by three or three-thirty at the latest, he said, "Leave at your usual time."

"Bren would have told me to leave early in weather like this. Could take me forever to get home."

She could be infuriatingly annoying. "I'm not my grandpa in case you haven't noticed, Mrs. Garmeis." Grandma and Grandpa loved this woman. Ryan didn't. In a tactic from his time as an Army officer dealing with a recalcitrant enlisted man, Ryan stared hard at Mrs. Garmeis.

She theatrically shook her head. From a cabinet under the counter, she fetched a feather duster. "Don't worry. I'll work the whole time you're gone."

He knew if Mrs. Garmeis complained to his grandparents his grandmother would put her hand on his arm at the next family gathering for a birthday or a holiday, and say, 'Please Rye be nice to Mollie. She is such a good worker and such a sweet woman. Promise me.' Slipping the book for Nicky into a brown paper bag, Ryan said, "Leave at 3 today Mrs. Garmeis. If I'm not back just close the store for the day." He was putting on his Army field jacket with the liner inserted, perfect for a bitter cold, snowy day, when the phone rang. "I'll get it," he said, hoping it wasn't Nicky canceling their lunch date, but he preferred to hear that bad news rather then slogging through the deepening snow and taking the subway all the way to 86th Street to find she wasn't there.

"May I speak to Ryan Garrity?" a woman asked.

"This is Mr. Garrity," he responded with the emphasis on mister.

"Mr. Garrity, I'm calling from Oldman's. We know it's a late notice, but Montgomery Gibson, the president of Oldman's, is giving a luncheon on Friday to honor Robert Reilly. We understand you served with him in Korea and Mr. Oldman wondered if you could possibly attend? You may bring a guest if you like."

"I read about it in the paper," he said, pausing to overcome the surprise of the invitation, figuring Bobby Reilly's family must have put his name on the guest list. He decided he had to go to honor the man who saved his life. "I'll be there."
CHAPTER EIGHT

The foyer was narrow and dark, illuminated only by the natural light filtering through a thick window decorated with etched flowers and twisting vines. On the queue of the names, penciled or typed, inserted in imitation bronze metal frames next to the bells, Ryan found hers, N. Hancock, printed in block letters on a yellowing strip of paper. He brushed off the snow clinging to the shoulders and sleeves of his field jacket, stamped his feet on the rubber runner, and then rang the bell next to Nicky's name.

The buzzer opening the inner door was a startling rasp. In climbing the four flights of stairs to her apartment, Ryan became progressively overheated, pulling off his gloves, pushing off his hood, and unzipping his jacket.

She was waiting for him on the landing outside her door. "Normally, I would have met you downstairs to save you the climb. But this isn't a normal day."

"I noticed. I was going to suggest going to Prexy's on 86th Street or maybe the Café Geiger so we don't have to go too far for lunch."

"I have a better suggestion. This is a day made for eating at home. So let's do it. Come on in."

That decision pleased him, raising his hopes for an interesting afternoon. He instantly regretted not having a condom in his wallet. He hadn't needed one for a long time. The few women with whom he connected were experienced enough to have diaphragms in their purses or bedside tables. Nicky seemed like she would be equipped, but what a disappointment if she wasn't.

He followed her into her apartment. Over the left end of the living room couch was a print of the grinning Cheshire cat, perched on a tree branch, in a dialogue with Alice. Above the other end of the couch was a poster of 'The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes' with Basil Rathbone pointing a revolver at the onlooker.

"Are you Alice waiting to be answered or the philosophical Cheshire cat?"

"I'm impressed," she said. One of Nicky's measure's of the intellectual depth of a man was whether he had read 'Alice in Wonderland.' So, Ryan was off to a good start with her. "I'm a sort of Alice in Twentieth Century America in search of a Cheshire cat." She turned to look carefully at him for his reaction.

He thought about that for a few seconds and smiled. "I do grin a lot; people have always told me that. And, I went to Fordham where philosophy dominates the curriculum. So I have the ingredients that go into a Cheshire cat. Not the shape of course."

"Charles Dodgson's Cheshire cat would have responded with a remark that was an esoteric commentary on this world."

"Was that a test to see whether I knew the real Charles Dodgson was Lewis Carroll?" His attention was drawn from Alice and the Cheshire cat to an impressively large back cat with white on his front paws and in irregular patterns around his eyes slinking off the living room's one overstuffed easy chair. "So you're a cat lover."

Laughing, she said, "Sam is an honest to goodness alley cat who works for me. A guy, I went out with, who runs a pet store got him for me when I told him I saw a mouse in the apartment."

"Well, here's what bookmen give on their second dates," he said, handing her the book.

Holding it in her two hands, she read the title in a tone of distaste: 'Beat Not the Bones' by Charlotte Jay. I should say thanks, but I'm beginning to think there's a conspiracy to haunt me with this book."

"She won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Mystery last year."

"I know. I was one of the also rans. I bought a copy when it came out; my mother gave me a copy for Christmas; a guy I had dated sent me a copy for Christmas. I'll be honest. My book was better, but instead of whining about the failure of the judges to recognize my superior writing, I should have said, 'How romantic no date has ever given me a mystery novel before.' I guess if I were a waitress you would have brought me a tray."

"Zing, zing," he said. "My mother always said smile when you get a gift, no matter how much it disappoints you."

"Maybe you haven't noticed, I'm not your mother."

"Another zing, but I'll tell you what, even though I inscribed it, you can return 'Beat Not the Bones' to Kips Bay Books and get any book of your choice in exchange."

"Eh," she said, opening the book to the title page where Ryan had written: 'A prize winning book for the writer who gets first prize in my book, Ryan Garrity, bookman.' "Wonderful. I'll always treasure this copy. So that's who you really are: the bookman."

"There's The Superman and there's The Batman, and I wish I could claim to be The Bookman instead of a bookman, but you can tell by walking around the city, I'm not alone. There are lots of bookstores, ergo there are lots of bookmen."

"And bookwomen too."

"Can't deny that."

While Nicky busied herself in the kitchen getting together their lunch, Ryan looked over the two floor to ceiling bookcases in the combination living-dining room. On a shelf lined with mysteries and thrillers, he came across the three copies of 'Beat Not the Bones'; she wasn't kidding about his being her fourth. Deciding to look at the inscriptions, he opened one of the books. 'To my writer, Nicole, a book you should enjoy. Merry Christmas, Mom.' He shoved that copy back into place and took down another. Opening the book, he found a color photograph of Nicky in a red bikini, her arm around the waist of a tall, wide man in blue bathing shorts on a white beach with gentle waves extending into the background. The man with black tightly-curled hair, a gray mustache and sleepy eyes, his small smile half hidden by the mustache, stared straight at the camera. Nicky was grinning, looking up at her companion. He turned over the photograph: "Nicky and Monty, Hawaii, April 19, 1953.' He read the inscription in the book, 'You don't have everything if you don't have that which you desire the most. Merry Christmas, Monty.'

"Lunch!" she said.

He put the book with its photograph back in place on the shelf.

"A feast for a bitter cold winter day, Campbell's tomato soup, Ritz crackers with butter and your choice Knickerbocker beer from the Ruppert Brewery not more than two blocks from here or Italian Chianti from a sunny land across the sea."

"Chianti."

"Me too," she said turning to a cabinet to fetch two wine glasses. She poured the wine and they touched glasses. "To readers everywhere, especially those who buy mysteries. My mysteries."

"I was looking at your books. I noticed a plaque with the Aries sign. I take it you're an Aries and so am I."

"Two horny people," she said. "When's your birthday?"

"April 16."

"The year?"

"1923"

"It seems I am three years less three days older. I'm April 19, 1920."

"So that picture of you and Monty was taken on your birthday?"

She laughed. "I'm supposed to be the detective, but you're doing very well digging into my secret life."

"Is he the pet store man?"

"Goodness no, but you're in the ballpark. Monty is in the retail business too, but he owns a department store. A whole bunch of department stores."

For a moment, he hesitated, then said, "Don't tell me Monty is Montgomery Gibson who runs Oldman's."

"You are just too good a snoop. Promise me you won't tell anyone else about that picture. Monty's married and I don't want to cause him any trouble."

"That was just a lucky guess on my part. Synchronicity or coincidence, whatever you want to call it, but today I got a call from our Montgomery Gibson inviting me to a luncheon on Friday honoring Pvt. Reilly, the subway hero and my hero as I told you."

"I know. I called Monty this morning to suggest you as an appropriate guest. I thought I might go with you."

"Now I understand why they made a point of saying I could bring a guest. Am I being used as camouflage so you can meet in public and look into one another's eyes without arousing unnecessary suspicions?"

"Not at all. I haven't seen Monty in what is it? Two years now." When she dialed Monty's private number at Oldman's this morning, butterflies were whirling in her stomach. The day and the date of the last time she saw him, Nov. 30, 1953, the Sunday after Thanksgiving, were carved into a memory that reasserted itself with a disconcerting regularity. Monty had been able to come over for dinner thanks to Geoffrey Chaucer and the opening of the Christmas sales season because his wife, Jenny, who was an English professor at NYU, had left that morning for London where she was to be adorned with her latest honor by some obscure academic group for her 800-page biography of Chaucer. Monty told Jenny he couldn't possibly go with her because of the demands of his department stores at this crucial time of year. A distracted Monty came into the apartment bearing wine and flowers that Sunday afternoon. Nicky had prepared Chicken Kiev, his favorite dish from the Russian Tea Room, a place he often said he wanted to take her, but couldn't because word would fly back to Jenny. They couldn't go to the Four Seasons either, for the same reason. Prompted by that implied threat to the survival of his marriage, Nicky often said, 'Why don't you take me to the Russian Tea Room for iced vodka, caviar, white wine and Chicken Kiev.' His response would be his little smile and lingering kiss. 'Maybe someday,' he would whisper in her ear. The Chicken Kiev with fried julienne potatoes and green beans and a nicely-chilled white wine passed tastelessly across their tongues under the gloom Monty carried with him into her apartment. They endured a mechanical joining with foreplay so unexciting that Monty barely was hard enough to enter her. Afterwards he said, 'I'm sorry' and she sought to soothe him with the lie that he was spectacular as usual. The unsatisfactory fuck was followed by his delivery of an obviously prepared speech of separation, departure, ending, dumping, summed up by the sentiment that he would never forget her. Dumping was a cruel word, but that was the apt description of what he did to her. That was the last she saw of him and the last time she had taken a man to bed. She had regretted ever since not getting herself pregnant with Monty's child.

This morning, Ryan had provided her with a legitimate excuse to call Monty and to see him again. Dialing his private number at Oldman's, she felt a hunger for him that brought tears to the edge of her eyes.

"The president's office."

Resisting the temptation to say 'that's very officious sounding,' Nicky said, "This is Nicole Hancock returning Mr. Gibson's call."

"He's very busy at the moment. Could you tell me the purpose of your call?"

The ruse was being challenged. She wondered whether the secretary recognized her voice and had been instructed never to put her through. She decided to be aggressive: "Why don't you ask Mr. Gibson to tell you why he called me then we'll both know the answer to the purpose of my call. No. I have the answer. The purpose of my call is to return Mr. Gibson's call. Now put him on the line."

"Hold the line, please." A few seconds later, she returned to say, "Mr. Gibson will speak to you now."

"Miss Hancock. So nice of you to return my call. How have you been?"

"I'm not going to lie and tell you that everything has been just ducky without you, that I don't miss you." Her voice had dropped to a whisper.

Going along with her subterfuge Monty said, "I called to congratulate you on your latest book. I just finished reading it; couldn't put it down."

No parallel confession of lost love and longing. He must be standing within earshot of his secretary. The bitch. Controlling a surge of anger, she tried to keep her voice pleasant as she told him she had a friend who should be invited to his luncheon on Friday because he not only served with Bobby Reilly in Korea, but Reilly had saved his life too. "His name is Ryan Garrity; he runs a little book store on the East Side, Kips Bay Books."

"Mmmmh." Monty was calculating the risk of extending an invitation to Nicky's friend. He didn't see any problem and besides she was right, he would be an appropriate guest. "I think we can make room for Mr. Garrity."

"He might want to bring a guest."

Unease flickered through Monty. "Will you be that guest?"

"I only met him last week. I think he would be thrilled to be invited."

Monty was aware she hadn't answered his question. But she wasn't a crazy. He had never worried about her knocking on the door some night to confront him in front of Jenny, his wife. His memories of her were pleasant, images of her chest and shoulders and face turning beet red in the frenzy of orgasm. He didn't want to risk insulting her by telling her she couldn't come; even the best of women could be nasty when openly rejected. He hoped she had taken the hint that he didn't want her there. He said pleasantly, "Of course, I certainly would enjoy seeing you again. I've kept up with your career. I would appreciate it if you decide to come to autograph my copy of 'A Nurse Was Called' when I see you Friday."

"I'll resist inscribing it, 'call whenever you're in need' or maybe 'in the mood.'"

Barely getting his words out through his laughter, he said, "I'm going to put Mrs. Bachman, my secretary, back on the line. She'll tell you the time and place for the luncheon on Friday. Give her the information on Mr. Garrity. Goodbye for now."

Recalling the conversation with Monty and his obvious effort to keep her at a distance made Nicky feel exposed. She was unable to generate even a façade of interest in continuing through the afternoon with Ryan. She just wanted him gone. After one of her long silences as he tried to keep up a conversation, Nicky said, "It has nothing to do with you. I just need to be alone now. Could we skip tea and cookies and could you forgive me for being so rude."

"I didn't mean to upset you. I should have followed my mother's advice and just said, 'Thanks for arranging the invitation.'"

"And I shouldn't have said anything about Monty. At any rate, we'll meet again. On Friday to be precise. I'll see you then."

She walked him to the door and kissed him on the cheek before sending him back out into the storm.
CHAPTER NINE

Nicky was standing at the base of Holy's Tower which rose from the vast first floor of Oldman's Grand Department Store. The tower, whose clock rang out the hours of the beginning of shopping at 10, luncheon at 1, teatime at 4, and the end of the day at 8, was a scaled reproduction of Big Ben. Monty's grandfather, Holyoke Gibson, was so taken by the ancient tourist attraction when he saw and heard it in London on his honeymoon with Rachael Oldman that he had a tower of similar design installed in 1876 outside the first New York Oldman's Grand in lower Manhattan. Holyoke's son, Madison Gibson, moved it inside the store when the new Oldman's Grand was built in 1920 on Fifth Avenue. No one was certain when the Oldman's Grand version of Big Ben came to be called Holy's Tower, but everyone in New York City who shopped there, as most of the well-to-do did, had always known it by that name and often arranged to meet at its base to begin a shopping spree or lunch in the fifteenth floor restaurant with the lucky or select few getting tables by the big windows overlooking the New York Public Library.

She smiled when she saw Ryan coming through the shoppers past the young women handing out perfume samples in the center aisle. "Right on time," she said, kissing him lightly on his scarred cheek.

Next to three of the five elevators, whose doors and trim were decorated with intertwined gold and green vines and flowers, were large placards proclaiming: Express to 15th floor. Private luncheon today. The elevator that carried them up was crowded with men in overcoats, fedoras in hand, and a mix of women, some in fur coats with mid-day hats on carefully coiffured heads, or like Nicky without hats, their earmuffs or kerchiefs sunk into the pockets of their cloth coats. On the 15th floor, the outer garments were deposited at long, cloth-covered tables set up to speed the coat-check process.

As the guests filed into the dining room dominated by a huge dome of multi-colored glass filtering the natural light of this gray winter day, young men in green blazers with Oldman's Grand embroidered in gold on the left breast handkerchief pockets handed them folders imprinted with a photo of Bobby Reilly beneath a headline 'In Honor of a Hero' and containing seating charts indexed in alphabetical order. Nicky and Ryan found their name cards at places facing the dais at a prime table in the second row center.

Montgomery Gibson was seated to the right of the speaker's podium with the two Mrs. Reillys to his left. Spread along the long, green-covered table were another eight men, three of them immediately recognizable as the mayor and New York's two United States Senators, along with a woman with full cheeks, a small sharp nose, and short, curly dazzling silver-white hair. Nicky recognized her as his wife, Jenny, from a snapshot in Monty's wallet. In person, Jenny oozed sophistication and style. She looked smart and dressed expensively. Nicky wondered why Monty risked losing a woman like that to fuck her. Was he just randy? Was Jenny a flop in bed? How long had they been married? Maybe boredom had set in? She found herself feeling furious at Jenny Montgomery for having her claws dug in so deep that Monty couldn't dump her, for interrupting what had been her great love affair with Monty, the happiest year of her life, the best sex she ever had. She called him a man with a magic wand and he responded that it sounded better in French: 'Un homme avec une baguette magique.' She said that the French made it sound like something enjoyable to eat while the German version more descriptive: Ein Mann mit einem magischen Stab. He said she made love to him more times in that year than his wife had in the previous five years. Everyone makes mistakes, and hers was to tell him she would love to bear his baby, married or not. Dismay showed on his face, a prelude to ditching her. She decided that next time she wouldn't confer with the man.

The two Reilly wore corsages of pink and white flowers pinned to their dresses just below their left shoulders; both were smoking and fidgeting, the widow touching her hair with her left hand, took a snippet of tobacco from the tip of her tongue with the fingers of her right hand that still held the cigarette. The eyes of the two women skirted across the audience. The two senators seated on either side of Jenny, chatted amiably with her, smiling and laughing with her.

Shrimp cocktails with a white wine were served first. The second course was either swordfish or New York strip steak accompanied by a white or red wine of the diner's choice. After the chocolate mousse topped with a dab of whipped cream and a crisp vanilla cookie in the shape of a butterfly and coffee or tea, Monty stepped to the podium becoming with his grey mustache and tall broad body attired in a grey business suit the center of attention. The clamor of conversation fell at a stroke into silence. He smiled.

"Ladies and gentlemen, family members, especially my dear wife, Jenny, Doctor Genevieve Harcourt Gibson to her students at NYU, my fellow employees, my favorite customers, friends, officials of this great city, especially my dear friends Mayor Bob Wagner and Senators Ives and Lehman thank you, thank you so very much for taking time from your busy lives to join with me in honoring Bobby Reilly, Oldman's Grand Department Store's own hero. Let me just say to Bobby's widow and mother who are with us today," he turned towards the two women, "that Governor Harriman called me this morning to express his sincere regrets at being unable to attend this luncheon in honor of our hero."

Nicky watched Jenny Gibson, whose expression exposed her boredom. At first, she wondered whether Jenny had come to the luncheon out of admiration for Bobby Reilly, but now she realized Monty, from the effusive praise ladled on her, must have pressured her to attend. Knowing him, he certainly would have been embarrassed by his wife's absence while the mayor, two U.S. Senators, possibly the Governor, and his many mutual friends from business and society came to his table. She knew that Monty and Jenny had an understanding that each was free to escape the tedium of the other's world with the exception of an absence that might infringe on their public images.

Jenny, perhaps sensing Nicky's unconscious stare, turned to look into the audience at her. Nicky's head shifted slightly towards the speaker, a reaction not lost on the perceptive and ever suspicious Jenny. She studied Nicky. 'Cute,' she decided, 'not beautiful. Monty's type. A chubby-cheeked, brunette, in good shape. That was obvious from the tautness of her face even though the woman was seated, the lower half of her body blocked by the table. She should find a lover to teach Monty a lesson that, of course, she would have to keep to herself since she didn't want to risk divorce. She had never found a man who interested her enough to take the risk, and she considered casual fucks beneath her and unromantic.

Monty called Teresa Reilly to the podium, telling her how proud he was to have had Bobby Reilly in the Oldman's Grand family. He presented a plaque and a check for $1,000 to her and said, "Let me tell you, Bobby Reilly was a brave man." Lifting his eyes upward, he said, "Bobby this magnificent dining room seats 300 and every seat is filled today in honor of your courage. I thank you, the Oldman's Grand family thanks you, and the City of New York thanks you for the bravery you displayed on that subway track in Queens."

The audience applauded and following the example of Ryan, then Nicky, then the others at their table, rose to give him a standing ovation.

The mayor and each of the senators spoke for the maximum five minutes allotted to them in praise of Bobby Reilly, Monty Gibson and a city, state and country that could produce such men.

Returning to the podium after Senator Ives finished, Monty told the audience that Bobby's heroic act had prompted him to fulfill a long-held dream of his father's rooted in their family history. "My dad, who died last August, often talked about establishing a national award for heroism in honor of his father, Holyoke, who fought in the Civil War and died at the age of 73 in the course of rescuing a three-year-old girl from a fire. What held Dad back was a fear of simply duplicating the Carnegie Medal. When I read the news accounts of Bobby's selfless act of bravery, I hit upon the idea of fulfilling Dad's dream with what is to be called The Holyoke and Madison Gibson Award for Heroism by a Retailer. This honor will be given to a man or a woman whether he or she is the employee or the owner of a retail establishment from anywhere in the United States. A substantial award of money will be given to the recipient along with an effort to boost his or her career in retail. Maybe pay for college or advanced studies. Honor them at an annual dinner on Oct. 21, the date on which Holyoke Oldman died as a hero."
CHAPTER TEN

The luncheon ended with most of the guests, including Jenny Gibson who had a class to teach at NYU, hurrying from the dining room to pick up their coats and be on their way. Ryan and Nicky joined the queue that moved slowly past Monty and the two Mrs. Reillys shaking hands, exchanging a few words with smiles and nods.

As the line shuffled towards the host and guest of honor, Nicky mused on her substantive conversations with Monty in restaurants and in bed. Whenever she asked him what he was thinking, he told her his dreams and regrets; he even talked about his wife, whom he said he loved and admired. He never told Nicky he loved her out of respect for her often-voiced contention that she couldn't love more than one man at once, so how could Monty love both her and Jenny. She had said to him several times after a fiercely satisfying fuck, 'If you tell me you love me then you have to leave Jenny.'

"You look lost in your thoughts," Ryan said snapping her back into the moment next to him.

"I was thinking of how empty most conversations are? Howsa the kids? Whaddya think of those Yankees? Did you watch Sid Caesar last night?"

"Right you are. I'm going to have to listen to myself. Certainly from now on, I'll try to remember to speak to you about subjects with weight; maybe books, the Cold War, the corn crop in Iowa."

She touched his arm and grinned. "Exactly. When I offer you a penny for your thoughts, it would be wonderful if you gave me an honest account of what goes on in that noggin."

Her heart thumped against her chest as a smiling Monty took her hand, warm inviting flesh. "I'm so happy to see you again, Miss Hancock." He turned to Teresa Reilly. "This is the famous mystery writer, Nicole Hancock, and Miss Hancock, this is our hero's widow, the mother of his little boy." He choked a little having a bit of difficulty with his emotions in getting out the words.

Teresa took her hand, but looked past her. "Captain Garrity," she said with glee.

"I came here today because I wanted to honor Bobby for saving my life."

Teresa's eyes welled with tears.

"So he saved your life too. He was an amazing man," Monty said to Ryan.

"Bobby Reilly is more of a hero than you could imagine Mr. Gibson. I don't know how he found the strength and courage to do it, but he carried me away from sure death on a battlefield in Korea."

"And three other soldiers too," Mary Reilly interjected.

Ryan nodded to her and continued, "I don't know if you've ever been in combat Mr. Gibson, but there are fields of fire no soldier can survive, but Reilly crossed terrain like that four times, and with wounded soldiers on his back. He certainly deserved the Medal of Honor. Mrs. Reilly, here," he said indicating Bobby's mother, "said that higher ups blocked his nomination for the medal. I must say I don't understand why."

"My-my," Monty said, a combination of words he had learned to use as a young man in surprise, in admiration, or as a device to pause for time to think before reacting. He immediately feared they were trying to draw him into a campaign to get the Congressional Medal of Honor for Reilly. He didn't want to get involved with the Army or unnecessarily asking politicians for favors. They always wanted something in return. And, too many such calls would diminish the impact of his requests to benefit his business interests. He decided to change the direction of the conversation. "Rudy," Monty said over his shoulder to Rudy Engels, public relations director for Oldman's Grand, "I don't see how anyone else could match Bobby Reilly's performance in the running for the first Holyoke and Madison Gibson Award. My-my." He looked at Teresa Reilly, whose expression told him she was calculating the prospect of the money that would accompany the award. He said to her, "We'll have to go through the whole process of submitting his name and accomplishment to the independent board of judges we're setting up, but I can tell you right now that Bobby Reilly will be getting my vote."

"Yessir," said Engels breathing hard as he always did even without physical exertion. His double chin was an indicator of a body gone soft and out of shape. His receding black hair was combed straight back and flat on his head and his wire glasses, combined with a well-rounded belly pressing outward beneath his grey suit with its grey vest, said this is a conservative man with conservative ideals. Engels, sensitive to his boss' signals, stuck his hand out to Ryan, saying, "So nice of you folks to come," while gently drawing him forward past Monty. "We have quite a crowd today. A lot of people want to meet the Subway Hero's family."

Nicky's lower lip trembled, not enough for a dramatic display, but her unconscious mark of fury. She had to admit she expected Monty to give her a welcoming peck on the cheek. Instead, he treated her like a customer or one of the help. The bastard. She had loved him enough to want him to impregnate her, to have his child out of wedlock, to be willing to be the mistress in the shadows while Jenny remained his wife of record.

\---

The phone rang at five after twelve. Nicky, who had been unable to sleep, glanced at the clock. She picked up the handset, assuming Ryan would be on the other end.

"Hello stranger, it's me."

"My-my," she said mimicking his favorite expression as she recognized Monty's voice. "What a surprise."

"What a pleasure it was to see you this afternoon."

"Your wife is a very sophisticated-looking woman."

"Her face reflects what she is, a very sophisticated woman. Looking at you yesterday, I couldn't help but see a wildcat, where another man might be deluded into seeing a sweet, intelligent, giving woman."

"Very perceptive. There is a wildcat lurking between my legs Monty. I haven't had sex, in how long is it now since that last time we fucked (she chose the word carefully knowing that male term from a woman's mouth made him cringe). We're in January, 1955 so let's see, I haven't had the pleasure of a man's penis and tongue and touch in an intimate manner in approximately 14 months. So seeing you primed me. The juices flowed. You've always had that effect on me. So I'm primed and raring to go."

Hearing her increased his desire to have her again. "I can't tell you how much I've missed making love with you too. And I wish I could come right over, but..."

"Oh that's okay. I understand. The girl on the side always understands. But don't be concerned, I have someone eager to take care of my needs. Suddenly, hearing from you, puts me in the mood to be satisfied."

"The fellow you were with yesterday, Captain Garrity?"

"I call him Ryan. I can hardly wait for a decent hour to arrive this morning so I can call him to say 'Come on over Big Boy and quench my thirst.' After 14 months, a woman can get awfully thirsty. I just hope I'm not too dry." She laughed.

"Are you trying to make me jealous? Feel free to do whatever you want if Scarface appeals to you, but I want you back in my life again. Hang on until Monday, sweetheart, and I'll be free to get together with you. Jenny is going to a conference in San Diego. We can have a whole week together."

"Oh go fuck yourself," she said slamming down the phone.

The phone rang again. She picked it up saying: "Ryan darling."

"My-my you got all steamed up. I apologize for making you angry. Give me a call at the office Monday morning if you decide you still care enough about me to forgive me. You know the number."

She would never get back to sleep tonight. That bastard. She went into the kitchen to open a bottle of wine. She longed for a bathroom large enough for her to sink into a tub filled with soothing hot water. Instead she wrapped herself in a blanket on the easy chair in the living room with her feet tucked under her for warmth. She sipped the wine and pondered whether her exchange with Monty or the awareness of her approaching 34th birthday was prompting her decision to choose Ryan Garrity to father her baby rather than continuing the hunt. Time was very much an element. In nursing school, she and her friends would snicker at the elderly primiparas, the women having their first babies after the age of 35. Supposedly that was the deadline between a normal and higher risk birth. On the surface, Ryan was a good-looking man and intelligent. Short of an interrogation, how could she discover whether he was easy to anger or came from a family with a history of mental problems, alcoholism, cancer, heart disease, diabetes or high blood pressure. Every family had one or more and maybe all of those afflictions in their genes. There was no way of going through life with certainty. Recessive genes lurked in everyone and were capable of providing unpleasant surprises. Part of her life adventure would be taking the risk, to plunge ahead. Another double entendre. "I'm full of them today," she said aloud, enjoying her play on words.
CHAPTER ELEVEN

With a cup of coffee in hand, she dialed the number for Kips Bay Books at 9:30. The phone rang eight times before Ryan picked up.

"Yes," he said.

Without an introduction, she said, "I've been sitting by an unringing phone anxiously awaiting your call. Since you didn't call me, here I am. I have a question for you. Have you ever had Chicken Kiev at the Russian Tea Room?"

"I've never been to the Russian Tea Room and I don't even know what Chicken Kiev is."

"It's a marvelous dish they make there. I'm making Chicken Kiev tonight just like they do at the Russian Tea Room. I was wondering if you could join me." That was an appropriate double entendre, she thought.

"What time?"

"Say 7, and bring a nice bottle of white wine and flowers instead of a book if you don't mind. Much more romantic, eh."

The Chicken Kiev, if she enjoyed it, would be a test of whether to proceed to the next stage with Ryan. She knew that was likely because as Monty often said she loved her own cooking. Of course, the last time she made that dish it tasted like cardboard and hung high in her mind as the symbol of the end of her relationship with Monty. Perhaps enjoying it would be a mark of the beginning of a serious connection to Ryan.

After lunching on a large orange-papaya drink and two hot dogs with mustard and sauerkraut at the stand on the corner of Third Avenue and 86th Street, Nicky went shopping in the grocery store, the liquor store, the butcher's and the lingerie shop.

At precisely 7, the doorbell rang. After a light kiss on the lips in the doorway, he said, "Ice cold wine for an ice cold winter night and fresh-cut flowers from a hot house, I presume."

"Come into my lair, said the spiderwoman to her prey."

"That sounds both frightening and exciting."

"I'll have to rewrite that line. I wanted to sound exciting and mysterious, not frightening. I guess spiderwomen do kill their mates after sex."

Sex. The word sent a thrill through him.

The flowers, she put in a vase with water, while Ryan leaned against the frame of the entrance into the tiny kitchen. His bottle of wine went into the refrigerator and she extracted one of the two expensive French whites she bought at the liquor store.

He opened the wine while she finished cooking the Chicken Kiev. "Did you notice how I'm dressed for the occasion?" she asked stepping out of the kitchen and into the open space of the dining room-living room. She spun with her arms spread wide.

"Peasant skirt and peasant blouse. How Russian. I hope Senator McCarthy isn't watching"

Laughter poured out of her. Little did he realize how perfectly dressed she was for tonight's occasion. In response to her probing (another double entendre, she thought) Brien O'Brien, the homicide detective, who was her first poker after the divorce, admitted nothing turned him on more than a woman in a black garter belt without a bra, panties or stockings. Under her swirling peasant skirt, she was wearing the new black garter belt that she had purchased this afternoon and no knickers as a ripe British woman might say in a steamy novel.

Doris Day was on the stereo singing "Secret Love" as Ryan and Nicky danced slowly and closely in the living room. Monty was no longer on her mind. Ryan's lips brushed hers. Aware of the sensation of the soft flesh of her breasts against his chest, his excitement grew in the realization that she wasn't wearing a bra. Once when he was 18, feeling unbearably hot and disgustingly filthy, at the end of day laying pipe on a construction crew in the streets of downtown Brooklyn under a searing August sun, he noticed with pleasure several women bare breasted beneath light summer tops. That memory passed through his mind as they danced.

"A penny for your thoughts," she said.

"Too embarrassing."

"Ehhhh. That's better than no answer. We're making progress. And maybe I was thinking the same thing. So I understand why you might be a trace shy." Breaking away from his arms, she said, "Why don't I fetch another bottle of wine from the fridge. I suspect a little more French vino will loosen your tongue." She laughed. "Don't ask me what I was thinking."

"I must."

"Well, that was a sentence with a sexual undercurrent and a clash of languages."

Sitting on the couch sipping the wine from the second bottle, she said, "Now tell with no mental reservations, what are your regrets from the life you've lived so far?"

"The interrogator is trying to hone in on the suspect."

"There was a homicide detective from the 23rd Precinct who filled me in on the finer points of a murder investigation for my first book. That's what he called me. The interrogator."

"An easy one was that I never played college football. Of course, I might not have had the stuff that college football players are made of."

"Give me a hard one," she said, enjoying another double entendre and doubting that Ryan was sharing her fun.

"A hard one? To be honest, I killed a German soldier in the Hürtgen Forest. He had a letter addressed to his parents in his breast pocket. One of the guys who spoke fluent German translated it for me that night. The dead man said he couldn't risk sending them this letter until after the war, but he wanted to get down on paper what he felt. He said that he had had enough of war and could take no more. All he wanted from life was first peace, then warmth, then enough to eat, and finally to be left alone to do whatever he wanted. My regret is that I tossed the letter in a fire and I could have sent it to them after the war."

"Yes. They might have been comforted by his last words and his thoughts of them."

"I threw it away because I hated all of the bastards. They were good soldiers but they stood for the most rotten things imaginable, including killing American soldiers and blowing off their legs. Scrambling their brains. Ruining their lives."

She could hear anguish in his voice. "Let's not talk any more about war. Tell me about how you became a bookman?"

"After I came back from the Army the first time, I went back to college, I met a girl named Penelope, was deeply attracted to her, finished college and announced I was going to rejoin the Army to make a career out of it. To be honest, I missed being in uniform and the pomp, the camaraderie. Penelope said, 'Either me or the Army.' I chose the Army so she couldn't have been my true love, could she? After Korea, I have a string of regrets for you. I lost the Army. I didn't feel like doing anything. I spent most of 1952 at my family's cabin on Long Lake in the Adirondacks reading, fishing, sailing, canoeing, hiking, snowshoeing. All lonesome activities. My parents and grandparents were very worried about me. My grandmother would ask me what happened to the little boy who was always whistling and smiling. I almost told her the truth, Grandma you don't feel like whistling when you've lost everything you treasured including an eye. On Christmas Eve, I opened an envelope from my grandparents. Inside was a contract. If I was willing to work in Kips Bay Books for one year and found it an agreeable calling, they would give me the business. I went from indifference to enjoying the bookman's life: the books, the interesting regular customers, the easy pace of the store. Besides, even though she can be a pain in the ass, I discovered Mrs. Garmeis is a treasure, who can run Kips Bay Books when I have something else to do."

"Wonderful. I never expected to have you tell me so much about yourself. Now it's my turn. I have only one regret. Not having a baby."

"That can be corrected when you find the man you want to marry."

"Marriage isn't a necessary ingredient. I always said if I weren't married and didn't have a baby by the time I was 35, I would find some wonderful man to implant his semen in one of my eggs. But don't worry." She got up and went into the bedroom returning with her diaphragm in hand. She grinned. "I have no intention of abandoning my protector until I meet Mr. Right." She took his hand and led him into the bedroom. "Get comfortable." She held up the diaphragm. "I'll be right back."

Nicky went into the bathroom, stripped down to the black garter belt, perfumed herself, put the diaphragm into a drawer in the counter and returned to the bedroom.
CHAPTER TWELVE

On Sunday morning, Joe Swank's A View of the City column in the Herald Tribune was devoted to Montgomery Gibson, the department store magnate who always wanted to be a hero, and Bobby Reilly, the shipping clerk who was a hero.

Swank related that in addition to Reilly's impressive performance that earned him the title of The Subway Hero, he also won his wife's affections by rescuing her from certain drowning at Rockaway Beach and was nominated for a Congressional Medal of Honor for rescuing his wounded commanding officer during a fierce battle in Korea. 'Captain Ryan Garrity, who owes his life to Reilly's courage, showed up on Friday at a luncheon for The Subway Hero with best-selling author Nicole Hancock on his arm. Miss Hancock's latest book is 'A Nurse Was Called.

'In the best tradition of heroes, Reilly was very modest about his exploits in the U.S. Army during the Korean War. When I asked his widow, Teresa, what he told her about saving Capt. Garrity and three other soldiers? She said he told her, "That was just something I had to do. I couldn't just let them die."

'Teresa said that she fell madly in love with Reilly when he dove into a treacherous riptide at Rockaway Beach to save her life. "He was my hero, then and always," Teresa said.

'Two weeks ago, Bobby Reilly died in the process of saving a Woodside neighbor, Mrs. Eileen Donovan, a 23-year-old secretary and the mother of a little girl from certain death under the wheels of an oncoming subway car at the Bliss Street Station.

'Where, I wonder, did he find the super-human strength to pick up Mrs. Donovan and toss her like a rag doll from the trench of the tracks to the safety of the Bliss Street Station platform—and then to leap almost to safety himself just as the speeding train bore down on him

'Monty Gibson, all of his friends call him Monty and I like to include myself among them, told me in confidence that he was almost certain, I would say dead certain, that Reilly would be the recipient of the first Holyoke and Madison Gibson Award for Heroism by a Retailer anywhere in the United States. Monty told me that along with a solid gold medal, the award will provide the recipient with a full scholarship for him or one of his children along with a boost in his retail career. Or, in the case of someone who died in the process of an heroic act, a $10,000 check would go to survivors.

'Monty has always wanted to be a hero. America entered the First World War just two weeks before his thirteenth birthday. That atrocious war ended too quickly for him to grow into an age entitling him to venture onto a battlefield to test his mettle. He would have found his way into the military in World War II, but he had seriously injured his left leg playing polo on Long Island when he tumbled out of the saddle and under the hooves of an opponent's horse. He was told he was lucky he didn't lose his leg, which has pained him ever since and had caused him to miss another chance to star in combat, and I am sure he would have.

'In an effort to do whatever he could for his country in WW II, Monty served as chairman of the retail industry's state and city committees for War Bond Drives and was a major contributor to the USO and Red Cross. He has gone out of his way to hire veterans. That is how Bobby Reilly got his job in the shipping department at Oldman's Grand Department Store. Monty said he was glad he had that program to give preference to veterans otherwise The Subway Hero might never have been part of the Oldman's Grand Department store family.'

Ryan was eating a Danish from Karp's Bakery with his morning coffee in the bookstore's Garden Room as he read Joe Swank's column. The recitation of Bobby Reilly's heroics made him wonder, once again, why didn't he get a medal? If not the Medal of Honor, a Silver Star or even a Bronze Star for Valor. Reilly's mother said that Bull Heydecker had recommended him for the Medal of Honor, but higher ups had blocked it. Knowing how bureaucratic the Army could be, he knew that could happen on a whim. People got medals who didn't deserve them, and real heroes were denied decorations because someone didn't like them or was jealous, or more likely no one survived to tell the hero's tale. He decided he had to call Bull to find out what happened.

Upstairs in his apartment, Ryan went into one of the extra bedrooms he had turned into a storeroom. He pulled his Army footlocker from under the bed. In the tray on top was the soldier's notebook he used in Korea containing the names and serial numbers of the 12 privates and Bull Heydecker, the sergeant, in Jaguar One. Along the margin of the page was another name, Dr. Walenty Jarocewicz, and in parenthesis pronounced Yaro-se-vitch.

Information gave him Bull's home phone number in Columbus, Georgia, near Fort Benning. The usual lightweight conversation took place: Ryan was still selling books and Bull was now a first sergeant running an infantry company and Dixie was working at the Post Exchange. Then Ryan got into the purpose for his call that Pvt. Reilly's mother said that some higher up blocked Bull's recommendation for a Medal of Honor for Bobby.

Bull sighed. He had hungered to tell someone what had happened, but no one—not Dixie, not Bobby Reilly's womenfolk--had asked for the details until this moment. The words out poured out of his mouth: "Now I'm going to tell you something that could get me reamed up the ass. Now promise me you won't let this come back to me."

Bull was one of those beastly top sergeants with a looming presence and a clamorous voice that made soldiers jump to do whatever he ordered. Something strange was going on. Ryan gave his pledge.

Bull continued, "After I filled out the paper work, Furious Jim called me in and said, 'No way, sergeant. The Army doesn't give medals to cowards.' I wanted to say you must be kidding, sir, but I didn't dare. You know his temper. I did say that Pvt. Reilly was anything but a coward on that day. I owe my life to him, and so do three other men, including Capt. Garrity. He said to me, 'You owe your life to the U.S. Army and maybe Dr. Jarocewicz not that shirker.' I said 'What are you talking about, sir.' He said, 'Not another word. I'm giving a direct order not to put that paperwork in for that medal for Pvt. Reilly. The reason is national security and you are not to mention our conversation to anyone else or I'll bring you up on charges. Dismissed.'"

Ryan was puzzled. How could a medal for Pvt. Reilly touch on national security. He knew that a lowly sergeant or even a colonel wouldn't dare question Furious Jim. He could imagine the storm cloud playing across Furious Jim's face when a sergeant had the temerity to be even vaguely at odds with one of his pronouncements.

Major General James Joseph Ulmer III was nicknamed Furious Jim because he was so easily enraged. Gen. Ulmer had little respect for soldiers who fell short of his warrior standards. He lived what he preached. He graduated from West Point in 1917 and won the Medal of Honor himself as a first lieutenant a year later in the Battle of Saint Mihiel—for single-handedly blocking a German counter-attack and carrying a badly-wounded enlisted man to safety across a battlefield raked by machine gun fire after the rest of his unit panicked and ran.

Ryan said to Bull, "I just don't understand why the General came down on you and blocked the recommendation."

"Neither do I, Captain, but do me a real favor by not telling anyone we had this conversation."

After another cup of coffee, Ryan called Nicky. "Did you see Joe Swank's column in the Herald Tribune."

"I never read Joe Swank. I used to date him and got to dislike him very much." Nicky was on leave in Paris the first time she met Swank. Dazzled by his romantic image as a swashbuckling war correspondent and a lot of French wine, she went to bed with him that night. His performance was impressive. Seven terrific times through the night. He called her his wildcat. Then they went their separate ways into the rest of the war. Her agent's annual Little Christmas brunch brought them together again in 1950 and into an affair that lasted almost two years. With boredom and growing mutual distaste having set in, both she and Swank were ready to part when he introduced her to Monty at her book party in the National Arts Club on Nov. 10, 1952. She remembered the precise date as one of the happiest nights of her life. She was in love with Monty from the instant she met him. When he began calling her his wildcat, she experienced an uncomfortable throbbing in her stomach, a fear that Monty had picked that nickname up in a conversation with Swank instead of arriving at it coincidentally and spontaneously on his own.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Major General James Joseph Ulmer III (U.S. Army retired), slammed the Sunday Herald Tribune onto the heavy carved wooden table with such force that his coffee mug bounced a fraction of an inch and spilled its contents onto the thick rug of the enclosed porch overlooking the Hudson River. "God damn it," he screamed.

His wife, Linda, whom he called Sweet Pea because she was so beautiful and smelled so sweet on the night they met at a dance in 1920, came running from the kitchen. "Jimmy what is it this time," she said with the firmest inflection of annoyance that her Southern drawl allowed. "Oh my, you spilled your coffee. Let me get something to wipe it up and then you can vent your spleen." When she discovered that the General's underlings had nicknamed him Furious Jim, she laughed. She knew from 34 years of marriage how appropriate that name was.

As Sweet Pea worked with a rag on the coffee stain in the rug, Ulmer said, "I'd like to go down and kick that dumb son of a bitch Joe Swank in the ass." His face was fiery red; his rages had become more intense in retirement and in the illness that gripped him.

"Not Joey Swank again," she said shaking her head.

In the midst of the Battle of Hürtgen Forest, Joe Swank had confronted the General with the story going around the division that Furious Jim had literally kicked men back to the front when they broke under the combined agonies of flesh-killing cold and German fire. "Yes, I kicked a couple of asses and I'd like to kick yours for wasting my time with such bullshit," said the General dismissing him by turning his back to the war correspondent and saying to an aide, "Who the hell let that asshole in here. Find out and send him right up to the front line."

Swank wrote a column headlined: "Furious Jim Kicks Cans." Gen. Ulmer was a friend and favorite of Dwight Eisenhower until that column appeared. He attributed the wall his career ran into after the war to Swank's poison pen. Swank gave the bureaucrats in the Pentagon and politicians who resented his frankness about their stupidity the false courage they needed to block his rise to the very top of the Army. Based on his accomplishments in war and obvious talents he should have been promoted to at least lieutenant general and probably full general. He knew more than most men, including Dwight Eisenhower, the agony of combat. He came out of the Battle of Saint Mihiel with his Medal of Honor and two obsessions: a hatred for men who ran under fire and a burning determination to find a way of teaching runners to overcome the fear that marked them as yellow bellies. He didn't buy the crap about battle fatigue or instantaneous panic or personality disorders. The warrior swallowed his fear and fought the enemy.

"Joe Swank went over the edge again today, Sweet Pea," he said shaking the crumpled newspaper at his wife.

"What did he write this time?"

"He's making a hero out of a Goddamn coward. The man's a fraud. You're not a hero when you're operating on artificial courage. What a joke, spinning the lie that there was a Medal of Honor recommendation for a wimp who ran when real soldiers stood and kept fighting until they died, some of them. They're the real heroes." He ground his teeth as he wondered whether Garrity told Swank that that little creep was nominated for the medal. He remembered Pvt. Reilly. He didn't even look like a soldier. Garrity was at the other end of the spectrum. Garrity was a sergeant the first time he met him on the day he decorated him with his first Silver Star just before Christmas of 1944 during the Battle of Hürtgen Forest in Germany. When he saw Garrity's name on the list of honorees for the Silver Star for their performance in the Battle of the Pusan Perimeter, he was a first lieutenant. He was his kind of soldier. Two Silver Stars and ascension to the commissioned class. He decided that Garrity was the perfect officer to lead Jaguar One, an experimental unit that he had created with high hopes of using it as a template for turning cowards into fighting soldiers. He arranged to award Garrity his second Silver Star along with his captain's bars at a ceremony in Tokyo with the sun shining, with an Army band playing a stirring march and with an Infantry battalion parading past. Gen. Ulmer basked for a moment in the memory of that glorious day.

His reverie was interrupted by his wife. "You're going to upset your stomach again Jimmy over something that's beyond your control. The river looks so beautiful today with the snow on the hillsides. Calm down and enjoy life." She thought, 'What little is left.'

"Sweet Pea, it's not my fault I can't endure a travesty, an award going to a goddamn artificial hero." He was breathing hard, bile erupted from his stomach burning his chest and his throat. He was puzzled by his body's reaction. Under fire, he was cold, calm, calculating; in reaction to cowardice, stupidity, incompetence and meddling politicians, he imploded hurting himself with his ire unless he was able to vent his rage on his target. He felt better the moment he decided that Bobby Reilly would never get the Oldman's Gold Medal for heroism. He would see to that.

The General got up with some effort. His knees hurt, his back hurt, he was tired after another bad night's sleep. He leaned heavily on his cane, an instrument he needed and hated.

"Where are you going Jimmy?" Linda asked.

"I've got to call Wally."

"On a Sunday?"

"Goddamn it, leave me alone," he shouted, the anger he spewed at his wife, whose face reflected her dread of upsetting him, made him feel better. He went into his study, unlocked the top right-hand drawer of the hand-carved mahogany desk he had picked up on a trip to southern Mexico and withdrew his phone book. He dialed Wally's home number.

"Yes."

"Gen. Ulmer here. Wally have you read today's Herald Tribune."

Dr. Jarocewicz overcame his annoyance at being called at home on a Sunday morning to say that he read the New York Times during the week and on Sundays.

"Hmmphh. Read Joe Swank's column and give me a call back."

"I don't have the Sunday Herald Tribune in the house."

"Goddamn it go down to the store and get one." The General slammed down the phone.

Sometimes Gen. Ulmer's short fuse irritated Dr. Jarocewicz near to the point where he would take a chance on telling the General to go fuck himself, but he always managed to take the abuse rather than stumble into a confrontation that would risk an end to the continued funding for research on the Hero Project. Gen. Ulmer's awful temper had reached a frightening pitch with the sickness that seemed to intensify the ugliness in the man.

Dr. Jarocewicz looked out the window. Snowing again. Reluctantly, he pulled on his overshoes for the trip to the general store. If the Sunday Herald Tribunes were gone, he would have to drive into Hudson, where the newsstand near city hall or the railroad station was sure to have one. He found it very upsetting to be forced to go out in this miserable weather.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN

On Monday morning after a leisurely breakfast with Sweet Pea, Gen. Ulmer, still in his PJs, slippers, and blue satin robe, went to the desk in his study whose windows opened onto a sweeping lawn that rolled down to a line of trees on the east bank of the Hudson River. A career linking him to networks of politicians and Army officers and Pentagon bureaucrats and Army sergeants had fattened Gen. Ulmer's expandable nine-by-six-inch personal phone book to the thickness of an historical novel. His plan to cross index it upon retirement faltered when he was given six months to live last Sept. 18. The doctors told him to rest, but with his usual determination, he spent the next three months traveling across the country with his beloved wife, Linda, for his last-time visits to his children, grandchildren, brothers, sisters, and Linda's relatives. Nominally, he was chairman of Courage Farms, a biological research center financed by Army grants, but he went to the office no more than once a week when he was in town; he was able to handle the occasional minor problems from the phone in his home study. Wally Jarocewicz only called on his services when there were inquiries from the Pentagon or some nosy congressman.

He turned through the pages of his phone book waiting for a name to leap off the page. One did. Frank Baxter, president of STARS, the association of retired Army generals, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. They had served together as young officers at Fort Benning and later in their careers during the war in France and Germany.

Frank picked up the phone on the first ring.

"How the mighty have fallen. I thought you were a big man at the War College. What are you doing answering your own phone?"

"Who the hell is this?"

"Some call me Furious Jim, my wife calls me Sweetie."

"Goddamn Jimmy how are you. I thought it was my wife calling. And no, Jimmy, I don't have a secretary. I'm just another professor of the art of killing here."

Gen. Ulmer laughed and wheezed. "I won't waste your time Gen. Baxter. I need a contact in New York City who can connect me to a department store executive named Montgomery Gibson. He runs the Oldman chain."

"You called the right man. I was on the committee with Monty Gibson that convinced Ike to run for president."

"Is Gibson a military man?"

"He is one of those I-wished-I-was a soldier. But he's not a bad guy. A good American. Always willing to contribute to the right cause. I've got his home number and his direct office number in my book. Which one do you want?"

"Let me have both."

Baxter gave him the numbers and said in parting, "Tell him you're a friend of mine, that I gave you his numbers. Make sure you tell him you're General Furious Jim Ulmer. He loves colorful generals."

The connection worked. Insisting that he had to see him immediately about a matter of utmost importance, Gen. Ulmer was invited to lunch with Monty Gibson in his private dining room the next day. "Just the two of us," Gen. Ulmer said.

"Of course," Monty replied, unable to restrain a grin as he spoke into the phone. Would this be a payoff from Ike for all that he did for him in the presidential campaign? He had told Tex McCrary, who recruited him for the I Like Ike committee, that he didn't expect anything in return for his efforts on behalf of Gen. Eisenhower, nothing other than a responsible Republican president who would do his best to reverse the Democrats' New Deal falderal. Of course that wasn't quite true. Monty wanted to be asked. The prospect of an Army general dispatched to invite him into the Eisenhower Administration was thrilling.

He was glad now he had gotten rid of Nicky. Things like that had a way of being uncovered by the FBI examining a candidate's background.

Knowledge of a player's makeup, his strengths, weaknesses, and proclivities was a basic resource whether on the sports or business playing fields or at the negotiations table. Not much time to find out about Gen. Ulmer. Picking up the phone, he buzzed Rudy Engels, Oldman's public relations director. "Rudy, drop everything. Get up here posthaste."

Within half an hour, Rudy's staff was gathering information on Gen. Ulmer from easy sources like Who's Who in America and the New York Times index, calls were made to contacts in the morgues of the city's various newspapers for the latest clips, to two retired Army generals for whom Monty had done favors, and to the New York Public Library.

After dinner at home with Jenny during which Monty resisted telling her his hopes, he settled down at the desk in his den to read through data collected by Rudy and the pages on which Gen. Ulmer's name appeared in two books about the Battle of Hürtgen Forest. The General was retired. He looked at his date of birth: Nov. 11, 1895. He was 59, an age at which a soldier probably should be retired to make way for younger blood. That didn't mean he wouldn't be carrying out assignments for the White House. Monty smiled when he saw Gen. Ulmer's nickname, Furious Jim. He studied the photos of the thick-bodied General in battle garb, leaning on his swagger stick as he studied a situation map on a table during the battle, saluting a soldier to whom he had awarded a medal, and at the very center of a gathering of Army generals. The General's official portrait with showed a broad chest, wide shoulders, penetrating eyes, and ribbons climbing up his chest to a Combat Infantryman's Badge and a parachutist's insignia, and around his neck the Congressional Medal of Honor.

\---

The fragility of Gen. Ulmer shocked Monty, who stood as the General appeared in his private dining room accompanied by Rudy. 'My, my,' Monty said to himself. He had expected to see a vibrant figure in mufti, not this bent, old man, the flesh actually sagging from his face.

After an introduction and handshakes, Rudy guided the General into his chair at the luncheon table and left. At Monty's suggestion, Gen. Ulmer joined his host in ordering a pre-lunch martini.

"So you're out of the Army," Monty said to fill what he felt was an awkward silence.

"Not quite. I'm still involved in certain matters I can't discuss with you or for that matter even my wife. National security. You understand." A smile played on his lips as though he were the keeper of fascinating secrets that his host would love to know.

Monty's appetite for whatever offer the General carried with him today was intensified by the phrase national security. The old man's hard eyes studied him, obviously, he was assessing, measuring him in person, perhaps, for a delicate assignment for his country.

The martinis were consumed with small talk and a growing impatience in Monty to know the purpose of Gen. Ulmer's visit.

The soup spoon in the General's hand was shaking a bit when he said, "I'm told by a mutual friend that you have a great admiration for America's military."

The anticipation of being asked to serve on a high profile commission overseeing military readiness in the face of the Soviet threat soared through Monty's mind, his pulse pounding with excitement. "One of the few regrets I've had in life, General, is missing the first world war because I was too young and missing the second world war because of a serious injury during a very rough game of polo. So I have never been tested on the battlefield as I know you have. I hope you're aware that Oldman's gives hiring preference to veterans." What a stupid thing to say, hiring veterans. It sounded so obsequious in his own ears.

Ulmer nodded. He offered a pleasant expression as he said, "I'm pleased to hear you say that Mr. Gibson."

"Please call me Monty."

"Monty, I have come to ask you to undertake a confidential and important assignment for the United States Army."

The pleasure Monty felt in hearing those words brought an embarrassing grin to his face.

Ulmer said, "I have read in the press that Oldman's will be giving a gold medal and a large sum of money to a retail worker from anywhere in the United States who has proven himself through an heroic action."

Monty shifted into his cautionary mode, instinct telling him that Gen. Ulmer was here on behalf of himself, not President Eisenhower. Maybe the General has come to lobby for a nominee for the award, he thought. Although, he would listen to the pitch, Monty had reached a decision on that matter. The first award was going to the late Bobby Reilly. Not only was Reilly a certifiable hero, but Oldman's Grand legitimately would reap the benefit of being able to picture him in advertisements as one of the many veterans the store had employed. He felt a burning disappointment with himself for jumping to the conclusion that he was to have been recruited for some high public post as he asked, "What can I do for the United States Army, General?"

"Don't give the late Pvt. Reilly your gold medal. He doesn't deserve it."

"My, my," Gibson said. He laughed, a hollow laugh, to give himself time to further consider the General's strange statement. "Mr. Reilly was an honest-to-goodness hero on all accounts. There were all kinds of witnesses to his incredible feat. Tell me, General, did you know that his commanding officer in Korea had recommended him for the Congressional Medal of Honor. Bobby Reilly was a man with a history of heroism."

"You are absolutely mistaken. One of his buddies wanted to put him for that great honor, but was dissuaded. I am going to tell you something now in all confidence. There is such a thing as artificial courage. I'm not going to explain further. Your country needs you to accept what I am saying without question. National security prevents me from an explanation. And I must demand that what I just said to you cannot leave this room."

Dutch courage inspired by alcohol and even drugs was artificial courage. Was that what this shadow of a general was talking about? Monty thought of Edward R. Murrow's broadcast about Senator McCarthy and his ending with 'The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.' There was the physical courage of the warrior and the moral courage of the statesman. He wasn't going to be bluffed into a moral misdeed. Staring into the General's eyes, as he imagined he would a torturer, Monty said, "Unless I have an understanding of why I should deny an obviously brave man his just due, I can't do that."

"Then you will come to regret it." The General said with a sneer on his face. He threw his napkin on the table, pushed back his chair and stalked away with a surprising energy.

Monty stared after him, shaken, but proud. "Now I know why they call you Furious Jim," he said aloud, but to himself since Ulmer was gone.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Norman Dune ran his two hands across the top of his head, across his black, slicked-down hair just before he stepped into Gen. Ulmer's office at Courage Farms. In the month since he had last seen him at the office Christmas party, Gen. Ulmer seemed to have shrunk even more.

Gen. Ulmer had been built like a box car, exuding a fierce power when Dune first met him a year ago, a few weeks before he mustered out of the Army. The commanding officer of Dune's criminal investigations unit at Fort Meade had given him a letter of introduction to the General who had put out the word that Courage Farms needed a chief of security with solid credentials as a soldier and investigator. Dune, whose uniform as a criminal investigator was civvies, went to the interview with Gen. Ulmer in his class A uniform with the ribbons that told his military story spread across his chest: Combat Infantryman Badge, Purple Heart, Bronze Star with a V for valor, U.S. Army Korean Service Ribbon with silver star for the five campaigns in which he participated, the United Nations Service Ribbon, the Korean Defense Service Ribbon, the U.S. National Defense Ribbon, and the Good Conduct Ribbon. The General looked at those decorations, read aloud the glowing letter of recommendation that attested to his intelligence, deep loyalty and aggressiveness as Dune stood in front of his desk, and hired him at a starting salary of $12,000 a year, more than three times his Army pay, far more than he ever imagined he could make.

"Dune," the General said without preliminary, without small talk, "I have a delicate matter that I want you to handle for me." He paused.

Dune nodded. "Whatever you need, sir."

"I know your record, Dune. You were my kind of a soldier. I never asked you why you left the Army. I was put out to pasture. Pushed out the door or I would have stayed until the day I dropped dead."

Dune loved the Army, the camaraderie, soldiering in all its forms, even the moments of terror of combat. He hated officers. He returned to civilian life to make more money. That was the simple explanation, which wouldn't sound good to the General. Dune stretched his imagination for some way to be truthful about his departure from the Army. "I had to get out because I couldn't stand the bureaucracy, sir." That was true, he couldn't.

"Still a military man in your heart and soul, I'll bet."

"Yessir." He might not have liked serving under Gen. Ulmer in the Army, because the man was an arrogant bastard, but he was a Medal of Honor winner. That put him in a class apart, overcoming Dune's innate distaste for officers. And, Gen. Ulmer had given him this job and never bothered him other than to commend him for the precautions he put in place to protect Courage Farms from outsiders. His staff of guards was as polished and committed as an elite light-infantry unit.

"To the matter at hand. I'll never forget the circumstances surrounding the day I won this over 40 years ago." He tapped the Medal of Honor pin he wore on his suit jacket lapel. "I'm not talking about what I did that day, but the cowardice of so many of the, I don't want to call them soldiers, so I'll say of whatever they were. I really got this because I stood and fought and all the others ran. I thought it was an aberration, but I discovered in conversations with comrades in arms and in my reading that when one coward runs he can spread panic like an epidemic: a squad, a platoon, a company and even a battalion can fall apart and run. Battles can be lost by a single coward."

"I believe that sir."

"I saw it happen again in the Hürtgen Forest. The conditions there bordered on the unbearable, but real soldiers stood and fought and the yellow bellies showed their colors. The more I thought about it, the more I was determined to find a solution. General George Washington led from the front. So that was part of the answer: to put officers in the front of action, to lead their men in the face of death. But something still had to be done about the cowards. So with the blessing of the Army, I set out to create a program to transform jelly fish into sharks." He laughed. "Maybe I should say pussy cats into jaguars. The Korean War gave me the chance to try a new approach. I created a unit I called Jaguar One." He stopped to consider what he could say, to be careful about what he did say.

"Did it work, sir?" Dune asked, wondering where this babble was leading, whether the General's sickness had affected his mind.

"I had a standard for selection of the candidates for Jaguar One. Each one of these privates, I can't bring myself to call them men, threw down his rifle and ran either alone or was pinpointed as the one who started his squad or platoon stampeding away from the line. I designed a two-month program with the help of Dr. Jarocewicz to whip these bastards into shape, to ready them for combat, to weld this bunch of individuals who think only of themselves into a cohesive, high-morale fighting unit ready to kill the enemy and to die for one another."

Dune couldn't help saying, "So it went beyond advance infantry training, sir?"

"Far beyond. I can't tell you the particulars of the special element involved because that's a matter involving national security. We don't want the Russians stealing this approach, do we? Suffice to say the Jaguar One program produced what I call artificial courage."

Dune didn't believe his Courage Farms guard force needed this kind of training, but was reluctant to say that aloud. The men hated spit shining their shoes and keeping their uniforms as spiffy as he demanded. They enjoyed the quarterly trips to the rifle range, but he couldn't imagine any of them putting up with real military training, especially brought to the extreme like the Jaguar One program seemed to promise. But he would have to go along with it. He wouldn't be able to find another job that paid so well and demanded so little.

The General pushed a manila folder across the desk. "There are newspaper clippings about the supposed heroism of one Robert Reilly and the likelihood he will be the posthumous recipient of a gold medal for heroism from the Oldman's Grand Department Store family. Reilly was a product of Jaguar One. He was no hero; he was a product of artificial courage."

Dune stared at the General wondering what this had to do with him.

"I'll tell you quite frankly Dune that I personally squashed an ill-considered recommendation that Reilly be nominated for the Medal of Honor." He shook his head to emphasize how awful he considered that. "Yesterday, I went to the office of the president of Oldman's, Montgomery Gibson, to tell him that Reilly didn't deserve his gold medal. I put it in the strongest terms of national security, but Gibson essentially said that he didn't care what I had to say. The medal was going to Reilly no matter what."

"That's too bad, sir."

"No. I want you to make it too bad for Mr. Gibson, so bad that he will realize his country is more important than his ego. Gibson was never a soldier Dune so he doesn't understand men like us, men willing to give their all for their country. What I want you to do Dune, the mission I am assigning you, is to convince Mr. Gibson with whatever methods you find necessary to change his mind about giving Reilly that gold medal."
CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Norman Dune first read Gen. Ulmer's notes on his meeting with Montgomery Gibson and then the thin file of newspaper stories about Bobby Reilly. This was the most thrilling intellectual challenge of his life. He had become an Army CID investigator because he dreamed of being a detective like the Sam Spade character played by Humphrey Bogart in 'The Maltese Falcon.' He had solved a murder at Fort Belvoir and broken a drug smuggling ring in Baltimore, but both cases were more routine than exciting. To be confronted by the prospect of humbling a rich, powerful, politically-connected figure like Montgomery Gibson was like being ordered to climb Mount Everest. What an accomplishment standing on the crest would be.

He took a sheet of stationary, wrote the name Montgomery Gibson in the center and drew a circle around it. He sketched a series lines connected to boxes with elements defining Gibson with much of the information coming from Joe Swank's newspaper column: Oldman's Grand Department Store, comes from a famous family, married to college professor, never a soldier, always wanted to be a hero.

How could he attack and capture this seemingly impregnable fortress called Gibson? And quickly. He knew Gen. Ulmer would want this mission accomplished as soon as possible.

He tapped his pencil on the name in the circle, his eyes closed trying to draw from his imagination or the ether a solution to the problem. Killing Gibson, not that he was seriously considering that, probably wouldn't eliminate the gold medal for Reilly. Beating up Gibson would end up with the authorities coming after Gen. Ulmer first and then him. That would be no good. Gen. Ulmer had raised the issue of national security, but Gibson had rejected that approach out of hand.

There was the weapon he could use, he decided, national security. But it would have to take a form that wouldn't be traceable back to Gen. Ulmer, although of course Gibson would know who must be behind it.

Then he remembered reading a whiny article somewhere complaining that the newsletter, 'Controlling the Red Virus,' had been used to damage the business of a chain of supermarkets in Kansas City, contending that the company was using an actor in their ads who had been a communist or a communist sympathizer.

Dune called the city desk of the Kansas City Star. The clerk who answered the phone gave him the name and phone number of the supermarket chain. He called the supermarket asking for the chief of security who, after Dune's promise that it would not come back to him, pulled his file and gave him the telephone number for H. Ryder Saranson, the publisher of Controlling the Red Virus.'

In the morning, Dune drove to West 43rd Street near Times Square. He stopped his car in front of a seedy, four-story hotel to check his notebook for the address Saranson had given him. The number on the building matched. What a dump. He had expected an office building, something a lot fancier than this place whose entranceway looked as though it were made of poured concrete.

Just past Ninth Avenue, Dune found a narrow space just large enough to slip his 1954 Ford Sunliner Convertible between a box truck and a beat up Mercury. He struggled through the unfamiliar process of parallel parking, something he rarely did. Parking upstate was a breeze in comparison to crowded New York City. He walked back to the hotel, smiling at the pitch of the hooker who called from a hallway, "Hey handsome." He shook his head, pointing to his watch to indicate an appointment. "A quickie," she called. He laughed, but continued walking.

The desk clerk responded to his inquiry for Mr. Saranson by flashing the thumb of his right hand in the direction of a hallway to the right. "Straight down and turn right. Suite 101. Name's on the door."

The sign on the door said, 'Patriotic Publications Inc." He knocked. He could hear footsteps. The door opened a few inches. "Yes?" a young woman asked.

"Norman Dune to see Mr. Saranson."

"Wait there." She came back a minute later. "Please come in."

The wall behind the wooden teacher's school desk on the right side of the room showed a framed picture of Sen. Joseph McCarthy shaking hands with a tall, smiling man in a gray suit. On either side of the picture were blow-ups of covers of 'Controlling the Red Virus,' the centerpiece of each was a big red rat pierced by a hypodermic needle with red-white-and-blue tags imprinted with THE TRUTH in bold black letters. The one on the left had the headline: 'Don't Buy from Uncle Joe's Pal'; the leaflet to the right said: 'Don't Support This Red Supporter.'

The man in the photo with Sen. McCarthy came out of the suite's inner room. "Mr. Dune," he said extending his hand in welcome. "Right on time."

Dune settled into a leather high-backed easy chair opposite Saranson, who sat behind a cherry-wood desk. "I'm here to make a proposition that should please your pocketbook and your sense of patriotism, Mr. Saranson."

Saranson tented his fingers and nodded. He noticed the combat infantryman's pin on Dune's lapel. He put on a false smile. "I don't want to be rude, but I would like to know who I am dealing with and to see some identification."

Dune was prepared. He took a color brochure from his inner pocket with a photo of the entrance to Courage Farms Research Center. Inside were pictures of Maj. Gen. James Joseph Ulmer III with his Medal of Honor and Dr. Walenty (Wally) Jarocewicz. Ulmer's title was given as chairman of the board and Dr. Jarocewicz as president and director of research. Dune placed one of his business cards identifying him as director of security on the desk as Saranson studied the brochure.

"Phytochemicals, phytonutrients and similar research projects for the United States Army? What in heavens name are Phytochemicals and phytonutrients?"

"The simplest way of putting it is phytochemicals are chemical compounds that come from plants and stuff like that and the nutrients one is like the name implies research into plants soldiers can eat out in the wild. I can't go any further than that Mr. Saranson, because we'd treading into the swamp of national security."

Saranson, oozing mistrust, looked from the card to the brochure.

Dune was prepared for that reaction too. He put a folded sheet of paper on the desk. "There is the number for the PIO officer at Fort Meade in Maryland. He has been authorized to confirm to you that Courage Farms is a legitimate operation and I am the director of security. If you want to be even more cautious call information for Fort Meade's telephone number and just ask for the office of the chief of public information. Don't ask too many questions because of course he won't answer them. As I told you, national security."

Saranson handed Dune a copy of the latest issue of 'Controlling the Red Virus,' suggesting that he read it in the outer office while he checked with Fort Meade.

Ten minutes later he invited Dune back into his office. "What can I do for you?" he asked.

Dune slid a Photostat of a news story about the luncheon honoring Bobby Reilly at Oldman's Grand across the desk. "The General, for reasons of national security, wants Montgomery Gibson to change his mind about giving this guy Reilly a gold medal for heroism. You have a record of changing people's minds about who they employ. I thought you might find a way to change Gibson's mind."

"I'll give it some thought."

"I would think that a big department store that has a lot of competitors would be very vulnerable to the tactics you employ."

"My policy, Mr. Dune, is to provide whatever services I can legally to my advertisers. Would Courage Farms consider advertising with us? We normally publish quarterly, but in instances such as yours we consider putting out a special edition, which can be very expensive so it requires signing a long-term contract."

"I thought we might be able to handle this with a cash payment. Off the books so to speak."

"We don't do business that way. Everything we do is on the up and up."

"Of course as long as the nature of our involvement is strictly confidential. National security. You understand."

"You can assume I will treat your connection as top secret."

Dune offered Saranson a grim look as they shook hands, hoping the trash publisher would see what his former commander described after watching Dune's stare in response to a threat from one of the thugs involved in the Baltimore drug ring that he was going to torture him to death and it would take him 15 hours to die, "Norm's eyes tell you don't fuck with me."
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The following Wednesday, H. Ryder Saranson laid a proof copy of the special edition of 'Controlling the Red Virus,' on the desk of Rudy Engels, Oldman's director of public relations.

Engels quickly took in the front page: a head and shoulders shot of Montgomery Gibson on one side of the distinctive Oldman's Grand Department Store building; Bobby Reilly on the other side; and Gerhardt Eisler's face imposed on the building itself. The print under the pictures identified Monty as the president of Oldman's; Bobby as a member of the Sunnyside Communist Youth Organization; and Eisler as a Soviet spy. Underneath was a reference to see page three for a recounting of the communist connections of Bobby Reilly. Engels flipped to the page where there was a picture of a small crowd listening to a young man on a soap box. A red circle was drawn around a youth with a pompadour within a group of four teenage boys. Underneath the photo was the caption 'Bobby Reilly and other communist sympathizers at a street-corner rally of the Sunnyside Communist Cell on the corner of 46th Street and Greenpoint Avenue in front of the Chase Manhattan Bank on Aug. 18, 1947.' Below that was another photo of the same group of boys walking along 47th Street with Eisler behind them. The cutline said, 'Bobby Reilly and friends going to the rally with Gerhardt Eisler.'

The second page of the document contained the words GENERAL ULMER'S STORY in capital letters in a box in the center of the page.

"What's this?" Engels asked.

"There's a story that we haven't finished writing that will go on page two describing how Gen. Ulmer tried to warn Mr. Gibson about Reilly as a national security threat, but was ignored. I was hoping to get a reaction from Mr. Gibson to go in that story. We always get both sides for our stories."

"I'll bet," Engels said. "When Congresswoman McGuire called to ask me to see you, I never imagined I would be meeting an extortionist."

Saranson couldn't help but smiling. The first reaction was always the same.

"I think you should collect this pile of crap and get out of my office before I call security."

"Maybe you should call Claire McGuire before you jump to false conclusions. You haven't even heard what I intended to tell you. I served on Claire's staff for many years until I felt driven to personally, and at great cost, involve myself in cleansing this great nation of the red virus."

"You must be joking. I look at these photos and the kid you identify as Reilly could be anyone."

"I suggest you do a little research. Look up Reilly's address. Call a contact in the FBI, I'm sure Mr. Gibson has contacts in the White House who can help there. Ask what Gerhardt Eisler's address was on 47th Street in Woodside when the FBI had him under surveillance 24 hours a day." Saranson, who had developed an encyclopedic knowledge of American reds and fellow travelers, had almost danced when he recalled that Eisler, described by Newsweek as the top Soviet agent in the U.S., had lived in Woodside before he fled to East Germany in 1950. He immediately pulled his dossier on Eisler and discovered to his joy the FBI surveillance photos. Then the final bit of blessed synchronicity: not only did Eisler live in Bobby Reilly's neighborhood, but on the same block, between 48th and 50th Avenues, almost across the street from him.

Engels pressed the button on the intercom. "Miss Hanish. Would you please ask security to send someone to my office to eject an intruder."

"That's unnecessary Mr. Engels. I came here to help. In fact I did a little advance work when I convinced Claire McGuire to hold off scheduling a hearing on this matter until after we distribute this special edition of 'Controlling the Red Virus' on St. Valentine's Day."

Engels picked up the pamphlet to hand it to him. "We don't need your kind of help."

Saranson put up his hand rejecting it. "You may keep that copy, we'll be printing thousands more to distribute to the loyal Americans who are your customers. We'll begin on St. Valentine's Day and continue every Saturday thereafter."

There was a knock then two men in green and blue uniforms came through the door.

"No need to be rambunctious gentlemen. I'm leaving, but if they do touch me, Mr. Engels, I will bring criminal and civil charges. The story will be in every newspaper in the city by tomorrow."

Engels crumpled up 'Controlling the Red Virus' and dropped it into a waste paper basket.

Saranson laughed. "I almost forgot. One more thing." He drew six-sheets of paper stapled together from his briefcase. "You might want to show this to your legal department. Give me a call if you are interested in signing it. And I would advise you to retrieve that copy of 'Controlling the Red Virus' to show to your general counsel." He stepped to the door way between the two guards. Over his shoulder, he said, "If I don't hear from you by Feb. 2. That's a week from today, we'll go to press and then it will be too late for any kind of accommodation."

Engels waited until he heard the outer door to his secretary's office close before he picked up the stapled sheets. The top page was a Photostat of a brief newspaper story with the headline: RED VIRUS SUIT DISMISSED. The story said that a Kansas State Supreme Court had dismissed the $500,000 damages suit brought by a supermarket chain against H. Ryder Saranson, a former chief of staff for the House Subcommittee on Subversion, for loss of business stemming the distribution of his pro-national security, anti-communist publication 'Controlling the Red Virus.' The next two pages described a study of Saranson's reprehensible tactic of using the flimsiest connection to a purported violation of national security or ties to communist organizations to force retailers to advertise in his publication. The third story described a statement from the Justice Department clearing Saranson of charges of extortion. The fourth attachment was a copy of a report 'declassified' recounting the charges against Bobby Reilly for running away from the enemy in Korea and a recommendation from Gen. Ulmer that as an alternative to shooting or imprisoning Reilly that he be assigned to a unit in which he would be given special training before being returned to combat.

The final two pages were identical copies of contracts for full-page ads in next four editions of 'Controlling the Red Virus.'

Engels called Congresswoman McGuire's Washington office. She wasn't available. A staffer came on the line to say that Hank Saranson told him to expect a call from Oldman's and to tell the caller that Congresswoman McGuire had nothing but good things to say about Hank and his newsletter.

"Was she on the Subversion subcommittee?" Engels asked.

"Yes and she still is."

He hung up and picked the crumpled copy of 'Controlling the Red Virus' from his waste paper basket.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Seated at the head of the big table in Oldman's board room, Monty Gibson watched Rudy Engels, the director of public relations, Tom Farley, the general counsel, and Vinnie Costello, the executive vice president, enter in file, taking their seats without speaking. A plain manila folder awaited each participant in the meeting at his usual place on the table.

"Let's begin." Monty picked up his copy of the folder, opening it. The others followed suite. He told them that the material had been delivered on Wednesday afternoon to the public relations office by an H. Ryder Saranson, an oily creature whose business seems to be shaking down retailers, although never a retailer of their size and standing before.

Tom Farley, the general counsel, picked up the surveillance photos of Gerhardt Eisler walking down a street behind a group of young men, teenagers really, that supposedly included Bobby Reilly. "I had our chief of security look at this and compare the file shot we have of Reilly with the purported Reilly in the photo. He says he wouldn't swear to it one way or the other. It may or may not be our Reilly.

The others watched in silence while the general counsel read several documents in the file. He picked up the mock up of 'Controlling the Red Virus.' With the finger of his left hand on a line in Reilly's file and holding up 'Controlling the Red Virus' in his right hand, Farley said, "Unless my arithmetic is wrong, Bobby Reilly was 16 years old in these photos on Aug. 18, 1947."

"Old enough to be a member of the Communist Youth," Engels said.

Farley looked stonily across the table. He didn't appreciate a hack speaking out when he had the floor. "Yes. And what's he doing, Rudy? If it really is him, he is standing with a bunch of people listening to a soap box orator in one picture and walking down a street at some distance in front of Gerhardt Eisler."

"I'm sure you know Gerhardt Eisler was a communist operative sent here by Stalin himself."

"All of this means nothing. One of the shabbiest cases of guilt by association that I've ever seen," Farley said.

"Far be it from me to contradict you, Tom, but all of this means lost sales," Vinnie Costello said from his place at the right hand of Monty.

"This is not going to look good in the Journal American or the Daily News. Westbrook Pegler is going to have a field day," Engels said tapping his right forefinger on his copy of 'Controlling the Red Virus.'

Monty took the mock up of 'Controlling the Red Virus.' He studied his portrait. Finally, he broke the silence: "Could it really go that far? Should we ignore this or fight this or take some other action?"

Engels said, "I would advise sinking the problem by figuring out a way not to give Reilly the Gibson Award. With a little finesse we can do it gracefully. We give his widow walk-away money. A sum she can't refuse, say a year's salary. What's that $4,000 or so for a shipping clerk? Get her to sign an agreement to not discuss what happened with anybody at all with the threat she has to pay back the money. Maybe get her job somewhere if necessary. We just put Bobby Reilly behind us."

"That sounds like a wise course of action to me," Farley said.

"It occurs to me, we've decided that the Gibson Award should go to a living retailer," Engels said.

Nodding his head, Monty said, "I like the idea that no one gets hurt. Mrs. Reilly gets some money so she comes out okay. Let's do it. Let's move on this fast. As Rudy said, let's get this problem behind us."

"And the ads?" Engels asked.

Monty held up his copies of the advertising contract. "I hate to have anything to do with this rag. On one hand it is a surrender to an extortionist, and this vulture charges as much for a page as the New York Times. But since we all agree that it would be best to cut our losses and put this behind us, I'll go along with that decision although reluctantly. Buy the goddamn ads, Rudy."

As the others picked up their papers to leave, Monty studied the portraits of Holyoke Gibson, his grandfather, and Madison Gibson, his father, on either side of the wood paneled door at the far end of the room. Would they have done what he was doing in these circumstances? In retrospect, Monty had the uneasy feeling that he was betraying his family legacy. But life could be a war, you did what you had to do to survive, especially in retailing.

Obviously, Gen. Ulmer was behind this attack on him and his company. The General found an opening and stuck the knife in him. That hurt. A thought made worse by imagining the pleasure Ulmer must be experiencing in the humbling of someone so powerful, so well-connected as he. Monty re-experienced the unease he felt at once again explaining why he had never served in the military. He could see the sneer on Ulmer's face in their confrontation when he expressed his determination to award the Gibson Award for Heroism posthumously to Bobby Reilly. He could imagine Ulmer sitting down to plot the strategy to get what he wanted, to win once again.

A headache was coming on. He ached to even the score somehow with this arrogant general who strutted about with his Congressional Medal of Honor and who didn't want anyone else to share his perch on the heights. Monty remembered so well his father's advice to let go of any thought of evening scores quoting something Confucius said about a man seeking revenge should dig two graves.

Dad was right. Sometimes one's ego had to be sacrificed for the good of the business. He decided he should get some work done, to stop torturing himself with these negative thoughts.
CHAPTER NINETEEN

"A woman on the phone for you," Mrs. Garmeis called to Ryan who was showing the science fiction horror novel, 'I Am Legend' to an older couple.

"Excuse me," he said, hurrying towards the front desk, noticing the clock showed ten after twelve. She must have just finished writing. He happily assumed Nicky was on the line to thank him for the St. Valentine's Day flowers and the lovemaking that followed dinner at her place last night. "Happy day after St. Valentine's Day," he gushed into the phone.

"Capt. Garrity. This is Mary Reilly, Bobby's mother."

That was a shock. Why was she calling him? He hoped it wasn't something about the Medal of Honor business. He was such a dope to have told Montgomery Gibson in front of her that Reilly should have gotten the medal. He said, "Yes. How can I help you, Mrs. Garrity?" He steeled himself for a request that he recommend Reilly for the medal. He wanted to forget war. He knew that just her call would give him another bad night of the dream of his eye being poked out, of being blinded. A shudder shook his body.

She told him she was on her lunchtime at the factory where she worked in Long Island City. She felt as though she were going to explode unless she told someone how Bobby Boy was being shortchanged again, and this time, she was too. Last week, she had called in sick. Under the union contract, you get six sick days a year, and if you don't take them, you lose them. So she makes sure she takes them. At any rate, she thought she would feel better if she stopped by Bobby's apartment to see her grandson, Stevie. The boy looks just like his father.

Arriving at the apartment, she let herself in with her key, and guess who was there? Not the big man himself, but one of his flunkies, Rudy Engels. She said Engels and Teresa were sitting in the kitchen having a cup of tea together; the baby was asleep in the bedroom. The first thought that came into Mary Reilly's mind was this stiff in a suit was there to take advantage of Bobby Boy's widow. And she wouldn't have put it past Teresa to go along. She never thought much of that girl, and was so sorry Bobby married her.

"I said, 'what the hell are you doing here, Mister?'" Engels was so flustered at this surprise assault, and hearing the implication of some impropriety in it, he blurted out that he had come in person to tell Teresa that when they checked the rules for The Holyoke and Madison Gibson Award for Heroism by a Retailer they discovered to their dismay that you had to be alive to be eligible. "I said to him, 'what bullshit. It's a new medal. There are no old rules for it. You make up the rules. It's your medal.'"

Then she looked down on the kitchen table and saw a document with a check made out to Teresa Reilly lying on it. The check was for $5,000. The consolation prize. "I said, 'what's this? Am I getting one too or is that for both of us.'"

Engels explained that the money was for Teresa and her little boy and that he hoped Mrs. Reilly, the hero's mother, wouldn't mention this to anyone. He said that Mr. Gibson was a modest man who preferred that his acts of generosity be kept private.

"Bullshit I said to him. Your Mr. Gibson said Bobby Boy was the hands-down winner of your medal. So what changed his mind? He said he had no idea; there was no other reason other than the rules. He was lying, Capt. Garrity. I could see it in his eyes. Then he said to Teresa. Just sign your name on the bottom. Sign for what I said. He said just a formality, Mrs. Reilly."

After Teresa signed, Engels scooped up the paper, said it was nice to see them again and left. And Teresa wouldn't tell Mary about the contents of the paper. She refused to talk about it.

"Why are you calling me, Mrs. Reilly?"

"You're my last hope Capt. Garrity." She told him she had gone to the Anorac Club, the local Democratic Party headquarters. They told her they couldn't do anything about it. She called the reporter who had done the Star Journal story. He called back to say the PR man at the store told him they would love to give Bobby the award, but the rules were the rules. She tried the Journal American, the Daily News, and the Daily Mirror. She got quick brush offs from each. Oldman's Grand was a big advertiser in every one of those papers.

He didn't respond. He didn't know what to say.

She filled the silence. "So Bobby Boy saved your life and you didn't put him in for the medal. I bet if an officer did, he would have gotten it. So what does he get for being a hero, nightmares."

"I get them too, Mrs. Reilly." He knew he would have the dream of losing his good eye again tonight. She was foisting it on him with this reminder of the war. Why couldn't she leave him alone?

"He would scare the dickens out of me, wake up roaring like a lion."

"That probably came from the training. Sgt. Heydecker made the men roar like jaguars. That was the name of our unit, Jaguar One."

"Yeah. He said a jaguar was chasing him in the dream."

The power of suggestion, Ryan thought. He felt helpless. The department store's decision to deny Reilly its medal was really puzzling, especially after Montgomery Gibson said he undoubtedly would get it. "I wish I could help you Mrs. Reilly, but I don't see what I could do?"

"Yeah, big shots like you always wish you could help someone but you can't. You can't take the time to do anything, can you? I knew you would be a waste of time, but I called you because my Bobby Boy should be honored and no one is doing it. They gave her a check and gave me the finger and gave Bobby Boy nothing." She slammed the phone down.

She called him a big shot. What a joke that was. After he got his first Silver Star, he felt he was someone special. He was conscious of strutting around with his swagger stick under his arm after he got his commission. The second Silver Star floated him above other men. He had proof on his chest that he was a certifiable hero. He enjoyed seeing men snap to attention when he entered their presence. Now he was a bookstore clerk. To say he was anything more would be fantasy. Most of the customers assumed Mrs. Garmeis owned Kips Bay Books. She acted like she did.

The phone rang again. "Eh, lover," Nicky said, "I could hardly wait to finish writing so I could call you to tell you I'm awarding you a gold star for outstanding performance last night."

"Thanks."

"Hey just the one word is enough to make me know you're feeling down. I hope it's nothing I did."

"No you're wonderful. Just something I don't feel like talking about at the moment."

"Hey, my mission in life is to get you to talk about what's going on in your head." She laughed, "And of course to get you up. Come by for dinner and I'll see what I can do about both."
CHAPTER TWENTY

Nicky met Ryan with a kiss at the door. He handed her a white box tied with thick white string containing a dark chocolate ring cake, his favorite, from Karp's Bakery. Dinner was bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwiches on toast, potato chips, pickles, and Knickerbocker beer. As they ate, Ryan told her about Mary Reilly's call, her bitterness about the higher-ups in the Army and at Oldman's Grand for denying her Bobby Boy their medals.

They agreed that after the luncheon Montgomery Gibson all but awarded his new gold medal and the benefits that went with it to Bobby Reilly. They wondered in their conversation why Gibson would suddenly declare that the medal would only go to living retailers. So many brave souls gave their lives in rescuing others that it seemed a strange limitation. Besides, Mary Reilly was right. This was a brand new medal so how could there be a proviso on the books restricting it to a living retailer?

Nicky enjoyed hearing Ryan's account of his conversation with Mary Reilly; she knew she was opening a new horizon of dialogue with him. Monty's strange behavior in denying Bobby Ryan the medal stirred her curiosity. She would call him to ask him why? At the same time, she paused speculating whether she would be calling him out of curiosity or for another chance at reconnection?

"A penny for your thoughts."

She smiled. "You must have seen indecision on my face. I was torn between doing the dinner dishes now and maybe ruining the romance of the moment or taking you directly into my lair to conjure your magic wand."

"My magic wand?"

Too late now. She was using the same lines with him as with Monty. She took Ryan's hand: "Sweetie, I seem to be succeeding in teaching you to talk, now I want you to exercise your imagination. When a witch went flying through the air, do you seriously believe she was on some old broomstick? I'm convinced she used her womanly skills to conjure the magic wand for a ride into ecstasy."

Ryan was bewildered by the Halloween image that rushed into his mind of a withered-faced woman in black riding a broom across the night sky. Then he realized what she meant.

They laughed together going into the bedroom.

The scent of brewing coffee drew him from a deep post-coital sleep. Turning over, he discovered Nicky, her head propped on her hand propped on an elbow, watching him. He didn't remember dreaming. The alarm clock jangled. Six-thirty, the time he normally got up.

"Did any woman ever tell you that you are beautiful?"

"Scar and all."

"The scar gives you an aura of mystery." She rolled out of the bed pulling the covers with her. "Get up, get up, you sleepy head. We're eating out this morning so we don't have much time. I want to be back here by eight o'clock.

Every couple of months, she revisited Friedrich's Bakery on Second Avenue for breakfast, a continuing celebration of her divorce, her release to life she called it, from Dr. Hadrian Blume. Brien O'Brien, the Irish cop who helped her with the first novel, took her there on the Sunday after her divorce. They had arrived at 10:30, supposedly a half hour too late for breakfast. Friedrich ordered his wife back into the kitchen out of friendship or respect or fear of Brien; she was never certain which adjective applied, but she leaned toward fear. He was a tough cop with a short fuse and a reputation among his peers for punishing fists. The man watching her naked body from the covers he had pulled around himself was in contrast sweet and gentle. She couldn't imagine Ryan beating someone bloody or frightening a German baker.

Not bothering to shower, just brushing their teeth, and running all the way, Nicky and Ryan were seated at the glass-topped tables of Friedrich's by 7 o'clock. Most of the tables were filled. The waitress put plastic-covered menus in front of each. Nicky handed them back: "Zwei kaffee, zwei orangen juice, zwei bauernfruhstuck mit zwei brotchen, bitte."

The waitress held the two large menus across her chest and with a grim expression said: "You mean zwei orangensaft."

"Thank you. Zwei orangensaft, bitte."

"What did you order me for breakfast?" asked Ryan who had looked forward to fried eggs and bacon.

"Two coffees, two orange juice, two farmer's breakfasts, and two German rolls."

"What was the orangen thing about?"

"She corrected my German. I said zwei orangen juice, because I didn't remember the word for juice. It's orangensaft in case you ever want orange juice."

"What's a farmer's breakfast?"

"Eggs, potatoes, bacon, ham, a dash of milk, some tomatoes, all cooked together. A perfect meal after plowing on a cold winter morning."

"I don't believe farmers plow in winter."

Smiling, she said loud enough for Ryan to realize with discomfort that customers in the tight array of tables could hear their conversation, "I wasn't talking about a German farmer. I had a Yankee book peddler in mind. I should have said a rewarding meal. You should get some of sort an award for the plowing you did this morning."

A fleshy-faced matron in a colorless dress with a high collar stared with obvious distaste across Nicky's shoulder. She slowly shook her head at Ryan to telegraph how crude she considered his companion. The risqué metaphor had startled him. So did Nicky's image of his magic wand. He had never popped so quickly into bed with another woman. He had never experienced another one as sensuous, so ready to mouth his penis. Others had expressed disgust or reluctance when he pressed them down. She went right for it on the first night to arouse him again for a second and then a third turn. This was a woman with a lot of experience behind her. She had been married, which might explain her skills. More likely she learned from her affairs, which he suspected were numerous. He couldn't think of anything he could teach her. He was grateful for her availability and luxuriated in her praise of what he did for her.

The waitress came with their coffee, orange juice, butter, and a basket with two German rolls.

"Danke."

"Willkomen," the waitress said.

"Where did you learn German? Ryan asked.

"I took three years of German in high school and picked up a little more in Germany after the war."

After breakfast, on the walk back to her apartment, Nicky said, "I think I'm going to give Monty a call. Clear up this business of why Bobby Reilly isn't getting the department store's medal. I don't believe the explanation Mrs. Reilly was given."

"Monty? You mean your old friend, Montgomery Gibson, the head man at Oldman's Grand."

She nodded.

"Are you still seeing him?" jealousy surged through him, but he managed not to ask whether Monty had a magic wand too.

She shook her head. "The last time I saw him, I saw him with you. Besides, I haven't checked my bio lately, but I don't recall being married to you or being engaged to you. Or having to answer to you in any way." She stared at him, sucking in air to contain her anger. What right did he have to ask her about the men in her life, presuming in the process that because he wasn't the only one she fucked that she was a whore or a borderline whore. She knew the mind of man. She snickered in recalling that she had decided to put out for Ryan only after Monty tried to reconnect to her.
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

She waited on the corner of Lexington Avenue until she saw Monty get out of his limo and go into the Menemsha Bar on E. 57th Street. She counted to ten before walking the short distance to Menemsha's giving him just enough time to shed his coat. He was sitting at their favorite table near the front window, which was rigged with a pseudo blowing, raining, lightning, and thundering nor'easter. He stood showing the small smile that Nicky found so enticing as the maitre d' helped her slip from her long coat. She was wearing a new black sheath dress, which emphasized her narrow waist.

Monty took her hands, surprising her by kissing her on the cheek, something he seldom had done in public. The soft brush of his mustache against her face sent an arousing tickle through her body. He must have missed her much more than she imagined, she thought, experiencing the same awakening of desire that she sensed he was feeling.

"You look absolutely beautiful tonight."

She leaned towards him, whispering, "And you look wonder, wonder, wonderful."

The waiter arrived with two tumblers of single malt scotch. No ice. He raised his glass, "To my wildcat."

She touched his glass with hers: "To my bear." She smiled: "To the reunion of the wildcat and the bear."

He caught her double entendre. He sipped the whiskey. "I thought we might have dinner tonight."

"In the backroom of Le Pavillon?" The words sounded acid reflecting her awareness that Henri Soule, the restaurant's owner, liked Monty too much to willingly put him among the outcasts and the common folk in Le Pavillon's backroom, which was where they were led by the smiling, scraping maitre d' the one time they went there at her insistence. She was right he had called Soule to request a table in a dark corner of the backroom. In going there, he risked someone from his social circle spotting him, but he was prepared with an escape clause, that his companion wasn't some luscious chick, but a famous mystery writer, whose potboilers Jenny wouldn't dream of reading. He would say he had met her at a boring cocktail party at the Plaza, they got talking and he felt obligated to say, let's have dinner, never expecting her to say yes.

"Got you on that one, didn't I."

"No," he said evenly, a small smile showing beneath his mustache. "Rather, I was thinking of trying the Café Nicholson, if you were interested. It's almost next door. The odd kind of a place a famous mystery writer could use in one of her stories."

During the a three course dinner with three accompanying wines and cognac at the Café Nicholson, they talked about his two children, Philippa, a Vassar graduate who was studying fashion in Paris, and Geoffrey, a junior at Harvard, who wanted to be a writer, about Nicky's latest book, the movie being made, and her plans to move out of the walkup on East 88th Street with the arrival of prosperity. He put his hand on hers to ask the question that had been torturing him. "I found it rather hard to believe that a woman who liked sex as much as you do couldn't have found an appropriate man for more than a year."

"I can honestly say, I wasn't interested in finding another lover after you, Monty."

"I thought you might have taken on that Capt. Garrity."

Nicky bit her lower lip, leaned towards him, and whispered, "Do you seriously think a bookseller could fill a need as deep and wide as the Grand Canyon."

She had often whispered to him after lovemaking that she was a Grand Canyon that he had filled to overflowing. Another of her double entendres.

They took a cab to 88th Street. "Are you in the mood to climb the mountain?" she asked.

He kissed her. "My favorite sport," he said, hooking his arm in hers for the climb up the four flights of stairs to her apartment. They showered together, laughing, kissing, soaping each other, spilling water onto the bathroom floor from the tight space barely large enough for one.

Monty had bought three condoms at a drug store in anticipation of this happy event, but with Nicky making a display of inserting her diaphragm, he decided he didn't need a rubber shield against disaster.

Nicky had yet to reach the days of her next period, but she didn't want to risk confusion over who was the father of her baby if she turned up pregnant. The scotch and wine and cognac and the exhilaration of reuniting with Monty aroused the hope in her that she would pass this month without conceiving Ryan's offspring. She realized how much she would enjoy having a piece of Monty come alive within her body. The phone in the living room rang and rang as Nicky ran her hands down Monty's familiar back and around his haunches.

They made love three times during the course of the night.

When he tried to slide out of the bed just before 5 o'clock, Nicky, now sober, who had been lying awake for more than hour in anticipation of his departure, said: "So Jenny's out of town?"

He turned to kiss her.

"Can you stay for breakfast? Friedrich's opens at 6:30 we can lay here in each others arms until then, making out that you don't have to go sneaking around."

The seductress had become the bitch. "Don't spoil our wonderful time together." Those words sounded so awkward. He wished he had thought of something better to say. Next time, he would have something prepared for this inevitable moment.

She took his hand, drawing him back under the covers. "Hold me a little while longer." She decided to interrogate him, her original reason for calling him. She started with the lure: "When I saw you speak at that luncheon in Oldman's, you looked so handsome, so determined. I was thrilled when you announced the hero award, and especially your decision to give the first one to Bobby Reilly. He was a real hero in Korea and in Queens."

"Yes," he said turning away.

She took him by the shoulder. "I want to be at the luncheon or dinner or whatever when that gold medal is given to Bobby Reilly's widow."

"I don't think that's going to happen."

"What do you mean? How could you not give the medal to Bobby Reilly?"

He squeezed the mustache on his upper lip with the fingers of his right hand, a signal of his unease. "What if I told you Reilly was a communist?"

"What in the world are you talking about?"

"We received irrefutable information that Reilly was a died-in-the-wool communist. Oldman's couldn't risk giving a man like that a medal. The impact on our business could be devastating."

She was taken aback. "If he was a communist then I understand now why the Army didn't want to give him a medal."
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

The phone rang a few minutes after Mrs. Garmeis left for home at 4 o'clock. Ryan closed 'Not as a Stranger', the novel he had been reading in snatches between customers. "Hello," he said, his heart pounding, hoping it would be Nicky.

It was. Nicky told Ryan about her conversation with Monty, that Bobby Reilly's communist connections was the reason for denying him the Oldman's gold medal. "Maybe that's why he didn't get the Congressional Medal either," she said.

"Where were you when I called last night?" He had called her four times between 5 and 11 o'clock without an answer. He shouldn't have said that. He knew he didn't have that kind of hold on her. She had made that very clear.

"What business is it of yours? I'm not your dog on a leash." Despite her sharp come-back, she felt a connection to him that was making her uncomfortable as things were turning out. She had delayed telephoning Ryan for hours, experiencing a ridiculous guilt over going to bed with Monty. 'God please don't let me be pregnant,' she silently prayed. In another week or two she would know for sure, then she could go bareback with Monty using the same ruse she did with Ryan: Pretending to insert her diaphragm. She wanted Monty to father her baby whether or not he left his wife. She wanted her baby to be conceived in love, to be a constant reminder of her lover.

"You're right I'm sorry," Ryan said

She hung up. She didn't want to talk to him; she didn't want to explain herself.

He put down the phone, a strange sensation struck as though the upper innards of his body had dropped into his stomach. The anger that slammed through him when she hung up the phone was replaced by the realization that she considered him a replaceable part. He was shaken by the fear he might never again sink into the inviting softness of her body.

The front bell tinkled. A man in a striped business suit asked whether Ryan had Harrison Salisbury's new book, 'American in Russia.' Ryan said, trying to be amusing, that he did, but was uncertain whether to put the book under travel, politics, or current events.

"So where did it wind up?"

"I got three copies so I put one under each. You're the first customer to express an interest."

"I'll take the one you put under current events. If the FBI walks in behind me to ask what kind of a book I was looking for and you say it was something in travel or politics, they might figure I was interested in going to the Soviet Union or in communist politics."

They laughed together. The man glanced through the book then followed Ryan back to the cash register, where he rang up the $4 sale.

As he watched the customer exit Kips Bay Books, Ryan pondered this instance of the dark shadow of McCarthyism. Why should Americans even joke about the threat of the FBI to ordinary citizens? Of course maybe that guy wasn't ordinary and had something to hide. That was his business.

Ryan found it hard to believe that Bobby Reilly was somehow connected to the Communist Party. In Korea, Reilly was 19 or 20. Even at that age he could have been a communist sympathizer although Ryan wasn't aware of that through the grapevine or Reilly's personnel records.

He waited on four more customers and at 5:30 when he anticipated Bull Heydecker would be home from the base, he called him.

"I heard something wild today," Ryan said after a brief prelude of small talk. "I don't know if you're aware that Reilly was first in line to get a gold medal for heroism from the department store he worked for, but they aren't going to give it to him because of his communist connections."

"Goddamn. They're every where aren't they?"

"Did he ever talk politics in the barracks?"

"Not that I'm aware of."

"Do you think that's why Gen. Ulmer blocked your recommendation for the Congressional Medal of Honor?"

"If that was the reason, old Furious Jim wouldn't have told me and I sure as shit didn't ask him the reason."

As soon as he closed Kips Bay Books at 7 o'clock, he crossed Lexington to where his Mercury coupe was parked in front of Lytle's Florist Shoppe near East 27th Street. He drove uptown to the Queensboro Bridge over to Queens Boulevard through the edge of factory-filled Long Island City and residential Sunnyside into Woodside. If Bobby Reilly were a communist in Irish Catholic Woodside, he would be an anomaly that wouldn't have been missed by his family, friends and neighbors. Even if they wouldn't admit it, their faces and the tones of their voices would tell him whether it was true. Ryan didn't know if he was on this quest in search of the truth or to expose Monty as a liar using the red smear to hide his real reason, whatever it was, for denying Reilly the medal. He couldn't imagine why Monty had reversed himself. Ryan became angry the more he thought about Reilly being shortchanged by lesser or jealous or unforgiving men.

Mary Reilly opened her door a crack to Ryan's knock. After her initial expression of surprise, she turned away to cross the small room to turn off Movie of the Week. She returned to him still standing in the hallway. With a dour expression on her face, she said, "It will be on again tomorrow night. So? I'm listening; are you here to apologize again for what you didn't do for my Bobby Boy?" She paused, assuming that Mrs. Dreese across the hall would be listening. "Come in," she said, closing the door behind him. She didn't want to be civil in any way to any bastard who had mistreated her son, but there was no reason to let Mrs. Dreese into her private life. Bobby had told her how he and his buddies had been run into the ground under the supervision of Happy Garrity who was doing his best to turn them into killers.

"Could I ask you Mrs. Reilly what Bobby's politics were?"

"What in God's name are you talking about? Bobby was a registered Democrat, just like everybody else in the family and everybody else on 47th Street if I'm not mistaken."

"I'm going to tell you something I found hard to believe myself. I had a friend ask Montgomery Gibson, the head of Oldman's why was he denying his gold medal for heroism to Bobby after he said in front of everyone Bobby was the hands-down winner."

Her lips pursed. "So what did the big man say?"

He hesitated, uncomfortable over what he had to tell her, anticipating that she might flail her fists in his face over the rage he knew the words would stir. "Gibson said that Bobby was disqualified because he was a communist."

"Jesus, Mary and Joseph," she screamed. "I never heard such bullshit. I'll claw the eyes of any man who says such lies. I know my boy. He was a real American."

"Please calm down. I'm sorry I had to tell you this Mrs. Reilly. I don't believe it either."

"I don't see how they could say that. I'll tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to look that bastard Gibson in the face and say tell me the truth."

"I'd like to be there when you do, Mrs. Reilly." Ryan suggested that he pick her up in the morning, if she could miss work, to go to Oldman's Grand together to ambush Monty at his desk so he couldn't be prepared to hold them at bay or with another lie.
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

The next morning Ryan sat uneasily on the worn couch in Mary Reilly's living room with a cup of tepid coffee on the small rickety wooden table in front of him. Across the room were two windows providing a view across a dark narrow alley of the brick walls and closed Venetian blinds of the neighboring building. On the wall between the front door and the entrance to the kitchen was a print of a van Gogh painting of a yellow sun hovering over a brown and yellow field with the black figures of a ploughman and his horse or mule.

"That's an interesting painting," Ryan said when Mary came into the room in a black mourning dress and small black straw hat decorated with four red cherries and plastic greenery.

"Andy, my late husband, gave it to me for our first anniversary. I've always loved it."

"I'm sorry to hear you lost your husband too."

"Married at 17, miscarriage at 18, miscarriage at 20, a mother at 23, and a widow at 24. Bobby Boy never really knew his father. He was a wild man always ready to use his fists until he got into one brawl too many. Lord have mercy on his soul." Mary Reilly had raised her boy through the long Depression, learning never to expect much from life. She worked over a steaming machine as a dishwasher in a huge cafeteria in Manhattan until the war came and she found a friendly environment and an easy pace as a salad-maker for a defense factory caterer. Her salad-maker idyll ended with the war. Eventually, she got on the production line at the Doctor Kenney Vitamins factory in Long Island City. The bright spots of her life were dancing and beer and days off from the factory. Bobby Boy gave her so much pleasure and pain. She was so overjoyed when he came back from the war in one piece even though his nightmares bothered her. His salary added to hers gave her a chance to breathe easy for the first time since she lost Andy. Then he married that woman. Of course the grandson gave her indescribable joy.

They were crossing the Queensboro Bridge at a quarter of ten and in Oldman's Grand with the car parked in a garage around the corner half an hour later. The store was crowded with Friday morning shoppers.

Ryan and Mrs. Reilly went to the elevator marked private. "We're going up to see Mr. Gibson," he told the uniformed elevator operator.

The elevator operator, a skinny man, in a green and blue uniform with a matching two-tone kepi, looked at Mrs. Reilly in her cheap green overcoat. "You have an appointment?"

"Yes, maybe you knew my boy, Bobby Reilly."

"Mrs. Reilly!" The elevator operator bobbed in and out of a bow. "He was something. I didn't know him personally, I don't get down to shipping, but everyone knows what he did. You must be so proud of him."

She nodded. "We're here to talk to Gibson about the gold medal for what my Bobby Boy did. This is Capt. Garrity. Bobby Boy saved his life in Korea."

"I was on Okinawa," he said stepping back into the elevator to put his hand on the lever control. "Marines," he said to define himself. He rode them to the 14th floor. "To the right. The big door at the end of the hall. Pleasure to meet you Mrs. Reilly."

Mrs. Reilly stopped Ryan outside the door marked PRESIDENT in gold letters. She stripped off her overcoat, handed it to him, then nodded a signal to open the door for the mourning mother ready to rip into the big cheese who was using a string of lies to deny her Bobby Boy what was coming to him.

Ryan had expected to do the talking, but realized the steaming Mrs. Reilly, who had ridden with him in silence from Woodside to Fifth Avenue, was near exploding with rage. He followed her into the office.

"I'm here to see Gibson," she said to the startled Mrs. Bachman who managed only to rise halfway out of her desk chair before Mrs. Reilly had marched through the partially opened door into Montgomery Gibson's private office.

"Mrs. Reilly," Ryan said in explanation as he went past Mrs. Bachman.

"Oh" was her response, defusing her automatic reaction to summon security to the President's Office. "Was she expected," she said to Ryan's back.

Ryan closed the door behind him as Monty said, "Who are you?"

"You know very well who I am. Bobby Reilly's mother."

Monty stood. "Of course, Mrs. Reilly. Just that I wasn't expecting you." The snarl on her face told him this wouldn't be a pleasant visit. He looked down on his desk shuffling a few papers. "I just don't recall having an appointment to see you, which surprises me because of who you are." She stared at him and his eyes glanced at Ryan, whom he recognized realizing in an instant that Nicky must have told him that the gold medal was being denied to Bobby Reilly because he was a communist. And of course, he knew they had given Teresa Reilly, the widow, a radically different reason. And there was the third unmentioned reason: her son inexplicably didn't deserve the medal, according to a highly-decorated Army general. He wasn't about to tell the mother that. "Please sit down," he said to bring the room under his control. He pushed a buzzer.

"No," she said.

"My, my, if you prefer to stand fine. Believe me I would like to visit with you, but unfortunately right now my mind is locked on the facts and figures that make Oldman's Grand spin."

The door opened behind them. "Yes," Mrs. Bachman said.

"Mrs. Bachman could you and Mrs. Reilly get together and find a date on my calendar when we can get together for lunch. Would Mister, Mister. I'm sorry I don't recall your name. You're the bookseller right. Be joining us too, Mrs. Reilly? Well you can arrange that with Mrs. Bachman."

"No need to arrange anything. I'm here to talk to you right now." Mary Reilly had a reputation in the neighborhood of being a woman with a very nasty mouth to avoid when she was drinking and certainly not to cross at any time. The wrong done to her son had spurred her beyond vocal fury to a willingness to smash this big, soft man into a pulp. She had to restrain herself from the frenzy boiling through her head.

Sensing he was dealing with a crazy who might best be mollified by listening in sympathy, Monty sat down. "That will be all Mrs. Bachman." He waited until his secretary had closed the door to say, "How can I help you, Mrs. Reilly?"

"By telling the truth. You told Bobby's wife, Teresa, when you gave her her shut-up money that Bobby wasn't getting your brand new gold medal."

"Please, Mrs. Reilly that wasn't shut up money."

"I'm beginning to think there is a conspiracy against Bobby Boy. He saves Capt. Garrity's life and someone blocks his Congressional Medal of Honor. He saves that girl from the subway and you say, oh my God what a hero, I'm going to give him the new medal I just invented and then you invent a new set of rules that a man dying to save a young mother's life can't get your medal. Then Capt. Garrity tells me it's because he's a communist. I think you lied about changing the rules. And I know you're lying about Bobby Boy being a communist."

Monty took a deep breath. He strained to control himself, knowing this was an hysterical woman whose son was branded with a shocking stigma. He decided the simplest solution was to show her the source of the problem: 'Controlling the Red Virus.' "My failing Mrs. Reilly was in trying to spare Teresa and you the ordeal of knowing that Bobby was being branded a communist." He got up. "I'm going to show you the document that forced me to withdraw Bobby from the competition for the gold medal." He buzzed his secretary again.

When Mrs. Bachman came into the office, he asked her to fetch the confidential file on Robert Reilly. The three of them sat without speaking in the few minutes Mrs. Bachman spent getting the file and placing it on Monty's desk. After she left, he broke the red wax seal on a large manila envelope that he had taken from the thick green and blue file. He cleared his desk top of the papers he had been reading and laid out the copy of 'Controlling the Red Virus.' "I'm going to ask you to look at this, take whatever time you need to read it, but for legal reasons I can't let you have it."

Mrs. Reilly and Ryan rose from their chairs. They bent over the desk, leaning on it, to study the large booklet with its cover picturing Monty, Gerhardt Eisler, and Bobby, identifying him as a member of the Sunnyside Communist Youth Organization.

"Jesus, Mary and Joseph!" Mrs. Reilly said almost tearing off the cover in her haste to see the page for the details about Bobby's communist connections. She picked up the document studying the photo circled in red of the teenager identified as Bobby Reilly at the street corner rally and walking down a street in front of Eisler. She looked up, her mouth open to display her contempt and anger: "I don't know who this boy is, but this isn't my Bobby," she said to Monty.

"My, my," Monty said; he had expected Mrs. Reilly to claim Bobby Reilly was no communist in the face of the evidence before her.

Ryan took the booklet from Mrs. Reilly. His eyes locked on the box on in the middle of page 2 that said GENERAL ULMER'S STORY in capital letters, then he turned back to the cover. "Did you confirm that Bobby Reilly was a member of the Sunnyside Communist Youth Organization?"

"I'm sure we did," Monty replied.

"Don't tell us you are sure, show us the proof. Do you have a list of the members of this group? Do you have an FBI report saying Bobby was a member?"

"I don't get into the details of things like that."

"Call in the man who does. We want to talk to him."

"My staff is not at your beck and call, Mr. Garrity."

Ryan pointed his finger at the box on page 2. "What is Gen. Ulmer's story?"

Monty had mulled that question himself from the moment he saw that box on page 2. The connection between Gen. Ulmer's threat that he would regret his decision to give Bobby Reilly the gold medal and the threat to smear Oldman's Grand as a communist supporter was obvious to him, but he hadn't discussed it with any of his staff. With the prosperity of Oldman's Grand at risk, he reluctantly eliminated Bobby Reilly as a candidate for the gold medal and had paid off the publisher of the rag and assumed his generosity to Teresa Reilly had taken care of her. He had just wanted to get the whole mess behind him as easily as possible. Now here it was again. And worse, this homely woman in her mourning uniform had exposed him as a liar. Well, he wasn't going to explain himself to these interlopers nor could he bring himself to offer any more money to silence them. As soon he got rid of them, he would call Rudy Engels, Tom Farley, and Vinnie Costello for a brainstorming session on this problem. He reached across the desk to take the booklet from Ryan

"Gen. Ulmer's story?" Ryan said.

"Ask Gen. Ulmer," Monty murmured depositing 'Controlling the Red Virus' in the middle drawer of his desk safely away from his visitors. "I have given of my valuable time; I have shown you that paper that claimed Bobby Reilly was a communist." Then the solution to this problem struck him: He delivered his speech to Mrs. Reilly, "I have arranged to have the smear of me and Oldman's Grand and your son, Bobby, withdrawn from publication. I don't know how Mr. Garrity found out about it, but we did our best to silence it. So Mrs. Reilly, I understand your anger and your concern and we at Oldman's Grand share it, but what is done is done. If you have any further questions, perhaps you should direct them to Mr. Garrity. Ask him who told him about this communist garbage and why he went running to you." He pressed the buzzer to summon Mrs. Bachman to show them out.

The fuel of the fire in Mrs. Reilly had been dampened by Monty's explanation. She was subdued as she walked out of the office and out of Oldman's Grand. On the street, she turned to Ryan. "Well, what do you have to say for yourself?"

Nothing, he thought.

With an expression that exuded disgust, she stared at him then said that she preferred to take the subway home. She walked away without saying goodbye.

He was relieved that she didn't press him for the source of his information. Monty obviously knew who told him. Ryan decided he had to find Gen. Ulmer to ask him directly why he blocked Bobby Reilly's Medal of Honor.

Ryan walked from Oldman's Grand on Fifth Avenue to Madison Avenue, where he had a favorite coffee shop. He found a small table by the street window where he could watch the pedestrians, always a fascinating pastime, a way to move his mind away from the upset of Mrs. Reilly's obvious disappointment in him. Not quite noon, he decided to order a Spanish omelet with French Fries and coffee; he was eating only to pass the time until Nicky finished writing for the day. At 12:15 he called her from a street corner phone booth.

Nicky picked right up. "I didn't get much writing done. I was expecting your call all morning. Preparing a little speech."

He tensed not liking the sound in her voice. "And."

"I enjoyed meeting you and dating you and all the wonderful things that went with that experience, but I have decided not to see you any more."

"Oh," he said.
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

Nicky baked Toll House cookies, a favorite of Monty's in anticipation of him coming by at the end of his work day. She washed the breakfast and lunch dishes, dusted the living room, and waited through the long Friday afternoon to hear his footsteps. He didn't show up and the phone didn't ring as evening came on, then nighttime. Instead of the sadness and acceptance she usually felt in the past when he went home to Jenny, a building anger burned Nicky's insides. The reason lay in her decision, as she rose from bed this morning, that if Ryan had impregnated her she would declare Monty to be the father. He was the kind of a man who would accept responsibility, who would either divorce Jenny for her or at the very least would want to be connected to his new son or daughter. So she might end up as Mrs. Montgomery Gibson or would continue her connection to him through the child.

At 11 o'clock on Monday morning, Nicky called Monty's private line. Mrs. Bachman, Monty's secretary, told her that he was tied up in a meeting. She left a message. Monty didn't call back that day or the next. She dialed his private line on Wednesday. He said, "I just can't talk to you at the moment. I'll get back to you." He didn't on Thursday or Friday. Nicky sat at her typewriter every day of that week writing words that she found so worthless she tore up each day's pages in a rage. "You bastard," she screamed at the crumpled pages as though she were throwing him into the waste basket.

\---

After a fruitless check of information operators for the telephone number of Major Gen. James Joseph Ulmer III in Washington, D.C. and several of the communities around the Pentagon in Virginia, Ryan took Mrs. Garmeis' advice and went through the Manhattan telephone book. James J. Ulmer IV was listed on Central Park West. Assuming he was the General's son, Ryan called the Central Park West residence, got Ulmer the IV's Wall Street office number from his wife, and called him.

Ulmer the IV's secretary said that Mr. Ulmer wasn't available. Could he explain the purpose of his call?

"I don't know Mr. Ulmer personally, but I served with his father, Gen. Ulmer, in Germany and Korea. I had hoped that Mr. Ulmer could put me in touch with the general." Ryan said. He asked that Mr. Ulmer call him at Kips Bay Books.

Late on Tuesday afternoon, Gen. Ulmer called back. "I understand you have been looking for me, Capt. Garrity. Why?" The words were blunt, but the voice was missing the aura of command with which Gen. Ulmer usually spoke.

"I would like to discuss something from my Army days with you, General, something I would like to clarify."

"Before you go on, Capt. Garrity, I want to clarify something with you. I use telephones with care. They can be tapped. Do not say a word that could be a hint of anything of your service in Korea. Do I make myself clear?"

"Yessir. But I'm calling about a bureaucratic matter, not anything top secret or of any use to the Soviet Union."

"Proceed."

"I believe you must be aware Pvt. Robert Reilly of Jaguar One was recommended for a Medal of Honor."

"Don't say another word. I think we had better talk in person. Hold the line. Let me check my calendar."

Ryan waited for what seemed like a long time. Mrs. Garmeis waved goodbye as she headed home at the end of her day; two customers came into the store going to the shelves of the books that interested them. While they pulled books to glance through them, Ryan stirred uncomfortably, hoping they would keep looking long enough for him to finish his conversation with Gen. Ulmer.

"Could you be here at 0h 800 hours tomorrow? I have some free time then."

"That depends on where you want to meet me. I live in Manhattan."

The General gave him directions to his house off Route 9 a few miles north of Hudson, NY.

"I'll see you in the morning, General. Perhaps you should give me your phone number in case it snows and I get delayed."

"They do a first rate job of clearing the roads up here. I'll see you in the morning, Captain." He hung up.

After ringing up the customers' sales, Ryan checked a road map for New York State and decided to take Henry Hudson Parkway to Route 9. He figured that he had better allow three hours for the trip which meant he would have to get up at 4 AM to shave, shower and eat breakfast. Just like being in the Army again and going to the rifle range.

The next morning, dressed in his blue blazer, grey slacks and regimental tie, Ryan walked down the steps from his apartment in the icy cold of the February morning. The Mercury was parked across the street in front of the open steel doors leading downstairs to the ovens under Karp's Bakery. The scent of baking breads wafted from the underground chamber as Ryan scraped the ice from the car's windshield.

Very little traffic and people moved on the streets in the abyss of the time between the closing of the bars and the city coming alive with taxis and workers as he traveled towards the West Side where he would pick up the Henry Hudson Parkway. He turned onto 42nd Street behind a Daily News delivery truck. Outside the Child's near Grand Central Station a busboy dressed in kitchen whites was wheeling a towering metal cabinet full of breakfast pastries into the dimly-lit restaurant. A lone man in a short plaid jacket, his hands deep in his pockets, collar up and cap pulled down against the cold walked west, the way he was going.

Traffic was light on the parkway with only the rear lights of a vehicle a half mile or more in front of him in sight although there was a steady trickle of cars going south into the innards of Manhattan. The villages he passed through on Route 9 showed only the lights of diners and an occasional gas station. The first light of dawn eased the monotony of his headlights shining like a moving tunnel into the near absolute darkness of the gaps between the populated areas. With time to spare since his destination was near, he turned into Hudson to find a diner where he ate a scrambled egg sandwich with ketchup on white toast and had two cups of coffee. The food glowed in his stomach, warming and reenergizing him.

At ten to eight, Ryan turned under a sign saying The Eagle's Roost onto a long packed-dirt driveway, snow piled high on either side. In the distance, he could see the Catskill Mountains, white and blue in winter dress. Taking his time to eat up the remaining minutes, he parked in the open space between a black Cadillac and a grey and green Chevy station wagon.

Over the front door was Furious Jim's motto: 'Happy are the Brave', bordered on the left and right by infantry insignias. Mrs. Ulmer, whom he had met at a cocktail party at the General's residence in Tokyo, opened the door, welcoming him with an extended hand. "Good morning. So nice to see you again, Captain. The General is expecting you." She took his overcoat, hanging it in a hall closet. "This way," she said leading him towards a closed door at the far end of the corridor. She paused with her hand on the knob. "I suppose you know the General hasn't been well," she whispered.

He didn't, but nodded his head in a slight affirmation.

She knocked.

"Come in," squawked the voice from behind the door.

Seeing a shrunken Gen. Ulmer sitting behind his desk in a too loose blue Donegal Tweed jacket that had once fitted him before the sickness stripped his body of fat and muscle, Ryan understood that Mrs. Ulmer had been preparing him for the sight of a man moving ever closer to death.

The shock on his visitor's face amused the General. "Sit down Captain." The General answered the unspoken question: "Lung cancer. The doctors gave me six months to live a year ago. I'm still going strong. Not ready to leave just quite yet. At the moment, I don't feel bad at all. The memory of Pvt. Reilly has given me reason to fight on."

"Reilly is why I came to see you, General."

Gen. Ulmer held up his hand to silence him. "Wait until Mrs. Ulmer brings the coffee then we'll get down to serious business."

In the short time until Mrs. Ulmer returned with a wooden trolley laden with a coffee pot, cups, dishes, and a plate of pastries, Gen. Ulmer told Ryan that he had lived in Eagle's Roost when he was a boy while his father was teaching at West Point. "I fell in love with this house the day I walked into it. I can't tell you how many happy memories I have of my mother and father and two brothers from that time. I bought it almost ten years ago, knowing that some day I would retire to Eagle's Roost with its beautiful views of the Hudson and the Catskills and the happy memories."

Mrs. Ulmer poured the coffee and used a tongs to place the pastry of Ryan's choice on a dessert plate. The General waved away her offer of a pastry. "You should have something, Jimmy."

"I'm not in the mood," he said crankily.

With a teary expression on her face, she withdrew.

Waiting until he heard the door close, Ryan asked Gen. Ulmer why he blocked Bull Heydecker's recommendation for a Medal of Honor for Bobby Reilly.

"He was no Audie Murphy. In fact, he was just the opposite. That medal is supposed to be awarded for extraordinary heroism. I know he saved your life, but I can assure you he was no hero." He threw his thumb over his shoulder bringing the framed Medal of Honor on the wall to Ryan's attention. "I got one of those. You got two Silver Stars. I know I earned mine and I don't doubt that you earned yours." With some effort, Ulmer twisted his head to peer at his Medal of Honor. What Gen. Ulmer wanted to tell Ryan, but was restrained by modesty was that he earned his Medal of Honor during the Battle of San Mihiel by performing as a one-man dynamo, like a superhero when his untested platoon broke under a withering crossfire and artillery barrage. Aside from him, everyone else who wasn't dead or wounded fled. He stayed to knock out two machine gun nests and to turn back a German counter attack. Then he slung a badly wounded private over his shoulder telling two of the remaining wounded to hold on, that he would be back. He returned to his platoon's trench and cajoled and kicked the cowards back into the fight to hold onto the gains he had made single-handedly.

"General," Ryan said to bring Gen. Ulmer who had floated into memory back into the present moment.

Gen. Ulmer snorted as he turned to Ryan. He said, "I came out of that battle realizing natural courage comes from a soldier's gut. Over the years, I decided the Army had to find a source of artificial courage for the less endowed. That's what Jaguar One was all about, giving Pvt. Reilly and the other cowards a dose of artificial courage. To the uninitiated, he seemed like a hero saving you and trying to save his buddies, but by no stretch of the imagination should he get a Medal of Honor."

Considering the General's remarks through a prolonged silence with Ulmer staring at him, searching for a reaction on his face, Ryan slowly said: "I don't understand how you can call what a man got out of the Jaguar One program a source of artificial courage. It seems to me it was just an intensive combat conditioning and training program."

\---

Jaguar One soldiers began each day with calisthenics at 4:30 AM and a two mile run with Ryan leading the pack. After breakfast, hand to hand combat and the bayonet were emphasized. Every drill was done with a pseudo-jaguar growl followed by the shout of kill. The unenthusiastic got the sergeant's boot in their ass for the first two days. Afterwards everyone exhibited the focus and the jaguar growls demanded. Their M-1s seldom left their hands, they stacked them for calisthenics, but ran with them, ate with them at their sides and slept with them. They threw a lot of live hand grenades, crawled under live fire once a week, did a 20-mile forced march twice a week across hilly terrain, and had Sundays off to lounge or drink beer at a PX set up just for them. They got frequent warnings that anyone who went AWOL or failed to complete the training course would end up in Leavenworth, prosecuted for their desertions during combat. They were allowed to write one letter a week to family or friends. The letters were torn up in front of anyone who mentioned the special training. On the 28th day, they were given embroidered patches of a roaring jaguar with huge fangs. At 3 o'clock the next morning, Bull roused the 12 privates from their bunks, led them to the mess hall for a breakfast of steak, eggs and home fries, and brought them stripped down for battle to the airport where Ryan waited with a plane to fly them to Korea.

\---

"Captain, because I respect you as a soldier, I'm going to tell you that there was more to the Jaguar One than drills and exercises, something beyond your need to know. Now, I've told you more than I should have Captain. Even though you think you're a civilian, you are bound by your oath as an officer and even as an ordinary American citizen to keep your country's military secrets secret."

"I'm not satisfied with that answer, sir."

That response pierced Furious Jim like a knife. He could feel his face flaming. "Not satisfied. God damn you, Captain, you have some gall. You're out of order, Captain."

"Perhaps you could explain to me your story in 'Controlling the Red Virus'?"

A flicker of astonishment crossed the General's face. "I know nothing about that."

Ryan responded: "I don't know what's going on, but I am forced to say I don't believe you, sir. Pvt. Reilly not only was one of my men, he saved my life. I just can't let this go."

Gen. Ulmer rose to his feet, hardly able to restrain himself from slamming his heavy walking stick across the head of an obnoxious cur who was questioning his credibility. He managed to say through his rage: "Then you will come to regret it. You are dismissed Captain." He turned away, deciding at that moment, the severe punishment he would impose on Garrity for his insolence.
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

In every moment that his mind wasn't focused on customers or accounts or chatting with Mrs. Garmeis or talking to salesmen, Ryan considered the predicament he had put himself in by telling Gen. Ulmer that he couldn't let go of the smearing of Bobby Reilly's reputation and the shortchanging of his memory as a hero. In practical terms, what difference did a medal from the government or a department store make to a corpse? Ryan decided as he mulled the issue that Bobby's spirit could be in a state of eternal discomfit because of how the General and the department store scion were muddying his legacy in this human coil. He was obligated to do whatever he could to celebrate Bobby's heroics.

He looked at his watch: 12:15. She was finished writing. He dialed her number.

Nicky sang into the phone: "Oh, I've been waiting for this call all week."

Ryan said as pleasantly as he could because he didn't want to create any more gaps between them: "After our last conversation, I didn't think you wanted to hear from me again."

"Ryan? I'm sorry I thought Monty was calling me."

"Are you back with Monty?" The bitterness of jealousy spread through his being and flowed into his words: "I had a meeting with your Monty last week to find out what this communist business was all about. Your Monty who aspires to be a hero didn't dare to take the trouble to delve into the charges against Bobby. Probably so he wouldn't have to make a stand in a fight."

"That just isn't true. Monty isn't like that at all."

In his unhappiness he spewed: "Since you're back with him you should know what he is all about. He is a man who isn't willing to take chances, who wants to lead a risk-free life. You're probably the most exciting item on his agenda. And how long would you be around if the adulterer's wife found out." Immediately, he felt embarrassed over what he said.

She slammed down the phone. Adulterer. That sounded like something from scripture. If Ryan branded Monty as the adulterer, what label would he apply to her: the other woman, the mistress, the partner in sin, the tramp, the whore, the slut? That hypocritical bastard she said of Ryan. Because he didn't have a wife, he was just a fornicator. Maybe he would call himself a lover and her his piece of ass. Invariably men used women, but she smiled with the thought that she had used Ryan. While she certainly hoped she wasn't pregnant, if she were she could silently thank him for fulfilling the old adage: be careful what you wish for. Wishing she wasn't pregnant was her extant wish. It seemed she would be plagued by either failing to be pregnant or being pregnant.

Ryan's snide remarks had put her on edge. She had played the understanding woman for Monty long enough. She wasn't going to wait any longer for his phone call. She was going to find out why he hadn't called.

"Hello," Jenny Gibson said when she picked up the phone.

"May I speak to Mr. Gibson?"

"And you are?"

"This is Alice Cheshire."

"Is this a business call?"

"Why else would I be calling Mr. Gibson?" A pop quiz for the college professor. If she got the right answer, Monty would be exposed. And embarrassed? Or would he find relief in getting the truth out into the open?

Jenny didn't like the sarcasm in this Alice Cheshire's voice. She said with obvious imperiousness: "Mr. Gibson doesn't like to be disturbed at home especially on Saturday mornings."

"Then he shouldn't have called Charles Dodgson last night and given me his home phone number with a request to arrange a meeting as soon as possible." She was pleased with her ruse, but uneasy about her own cowardice, her failure to plunge ahead by saying 'this is the other woman calling.'

Jenny breathed hard through her nose to contain the fury she felt. She hated business calls at home more than Monty. She purposely spoke loud enough for Alice Cheshire to hear: "Monty there is an incredibly rude woman on the phone for you."

"Who is this?" Monty asked.

"The Cheshire Pussy from Wonderland. Meet me at La Flor at 1:30."

"This is pretty short notice. It's 12:30 already."

His response made her angrier. "If you can't make it, I'll stop by your house as soon as I can."

"That won't be necessary. I'll see you at 1:30."

Monty was sitting at a table towards the back of La Flor. He rose, taking both her hands in his intending to greet her with a kiss.

She turned her head away. "No," she said.

Nicky had hardly settled into her chair when the maitre d' arrived with a bottle of white Rioja and an ice bucket. Behind him came a waiter with plates of Chorizos and Spanish potatoes.

Monty raised his glass in a toast: "To the good times we had together."

She touched his glass, sipped the wine, and asked if he recalled the memorable night when they had made love and she asked him what was his deepest regret? The response she yearned for was that he wished he had met her before Jenny. Instead, she reminded him that he told her that he had never gotten over missing his chance to have his courage tested as a soldier in combat. "Like Bobby Reilly," she said.

It was as though she had flicked a knife across his face. Monty swallowed his half-filled glass of wine in one gulp. He held the glass up, a signal to the passing waiter to refill it. "My, my," he said using his favorite technique to calm himself in a trying situation.

Nicky recognized the tactic. She spoke as the waiter poured more wine into their glasses. "I always thought you wouldn't leave your wife because of your love for your children. I've come to realize that you're like the Lion in the Wizard of Oz. What you are missing is courage. I will always be grateful to Bobby Reilly because your shabby treatment of him exposed you as a coward. I came here to tell you I am free of you. You'll always creep into my mind of course, but whenever I think of you it will be of a talking lion. A big roar with no courage to back it up." She stood up to leave.

The waiter, trying to suppress his amusement, hurried away looking forward to telling the maitre d' about the bitter, illicit-lovers quarrel he witnessed.

Monty grabbed her arm stopping her as she was moving past him.

With a nasty expression playing across her face, she said, "You know that great line from Lowell, 'Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide in the strife with truth or falsehood for the good or evil side.' Well, Monty you failed when the moment arrived in your life. Your honor is worth a few shekels."

"The department store was at risk. That's worth more than a few shekels. Do you know how many employees we have, how many suppliers not to mention investors? I wasn't thinking of myself, I was concerned about the impact on the store of being branded communist sympathizers no matter how ridiculous a charge that might be." She had touched a button that was sending him beyond control. He blurted: "And there's more. An Army general came to me to tell me Bobby Reilly did not deserve the Gibson Gold Medal, because he wasn't the hero he appeared to be. He was a phony."

"How could he seriously say that?"

"The general said he couldn't go into detail, because national security was involved, but Reilly wasn't really a hero. There was some sort of artificial courage involved, which sounded strange to me. I asked for an explanation, but the general refused to give me details on the grounds of national security. I refused his request, then I was hit by the Red smear threat. So you see I tried."

"Not very hard." Standing there, looking down on him, she continued: "When you write a novel, you judge the protagonist's character by what he is willing to die for, what he is willing to step into the abyss for. Think about that when you are lying in bed with Jenny tonight or next year when you're giving your gold medal to the second best hero, whoever he is."

He followed her across the restaurant to the cloak room, the other diners turning from their drinks and meals to stare at the spectacle. She pointed to her coat, took it from the maitre d' and went out the door into the cold snowy afternoon on Charles Street with Monty still behind her. He grabbed her by the elbow, turning her around, to say: "You told Garrity about the communist stuff. Did you look into his eyes when you were fucking him and say, 'Darling, wait till you hear what Monty told me in confidence.' Now I know you can't be trusted. Never call me again anywhere. At home. At the office. Anywhere. You bitch."

Ryan was at the counter, where he watched Nicky emerge from the taxi outside on Lexington Avenue. "This is a pleasant surprise," he said when she came through the front door.

"I just came from lunch with the adulterer," she said drawing the attention of Mrs. Garmeis, who was showing oversized coffee table art books to a customer, who turned to listen with interest too. "I wanted to tell you that you were right, Monty isn't the man I thought he was."

"Does that mean you are not back with him?"

"Exactly! But that is not what I came to tell you."

He looked across the narrow room. "Mrs. Garmeis would you mind covering the desk. I have to talk to Miss Hancock in private." He turned to Nicky, "Let's go back to the Garden Room. We can have a cup of tea or a glass of wine. Whatever you're in the mood for."

She followed him into the back settling on wine before telling him of her exchange with Monty at La Flor.

He knew immediately that the unnamed Army general, who mentioned artificial courage, must be Gen. Ulmer. He told her that Gen. Ulmer had warned him that he would regret pursuing what he imagined was justice for Bobby Reilly's memory.

"So what are you going to do?"

"I have yet to figure out what I can do to get Bobby his Medal of Honor or his department store gold medal. Even if I can't, I want to find out what this is all about."

A bell in the corner of the Garden Room chimed. "Mrs. Garmeis is calling me back to work," Ryan said. He considered inviting Nicky up to his apartment for an encounter right then, but decided against it when the bell chimed again. He could see four customers lined up at the counter and several more perusing the shelves.

Nicky paused at the front door. "I'm thinking of making lasagna for dinner tonight. Can you join me?" She couldn't resist laughing.

"What's so funny?" he asked.

"The double entendre."

Ryan smiled. "I'll be there with something long and hard." He paused. "A double entendre to describe a bottle of wine plus if you're in the mood."

"Oh yes. I'm looking forward to both," she said waving her hand goodbye as she went out onto Lexington Avenue.
CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

Ryan was sipping coffee paging through the Herald Tribune when the call in response to his query about the procedure for reopening a recommendation for the Medal of Honor came at precisely 8:30 AM on Monday from a sergeant in the Pentagon.

He had called the Army Decorations Board on Friday to ask whether there was any way to counter Gen. Ulmer's refusal to approve Bull Heydecker's recommendation of a Medal of Honor for Pvt. Robert Reilly for his incredibly courageous feat in saving the lives of four soldiers from capture or death on a Korean battlefield? The sergeant said, "The simple answer is no on two counts. The first is that while any soldier can recommend another for an MOH, the chain of command has to approve it. So Gen. Ulmer didn't approve it. And, there is a two-year window on such recommendations and since the incident happened in April, 1951 and today's date is Feb. 28, 1955 the time frame cancels out resubmitting the paperwork even if you could get Gen. Ulmer to put a stamp of approval on it."

"There should be exceptions to rules like that," Ryan said.

"May I ask why you are so hot on this subject? Is Reilly a friend of yours?"

"I was Pvt. Reilly's CO that day. And, I was one of the soldiers whose life was saved. I can't tell you how lousy I feel that I didn't think to put Reilly in for the medal myself. At the time I was too busy feeling sorry for myself. I lost an eye, got my face smashed up, and got dumped out of the Army."

"What's Reilly doing now?"

"He's dead. He got killed rescuing a young mother from a subway train track in New York City."

"Wow. A perpetual hero. Let me tell you something on the QT. Do you know your local congressman?"

"Yeah."

"Give him a call and ask him to get involved. The rules allow a congressman to reopen the recommendation for an MOH any time they want."

The woman who answered the phone at Rep. John J. Rooney's office gave Ryan the name and address of one of the congressman's staffers with the suggestion that he put his request in writing. Ryan was in a hurry to get Bobby Reilly recognition for his valor, but he didn't have the power to pressure the congressman into action. In combat, he would look at a situation and say, 'This is what we will do.' He realized he had to invoke that state of mind to determine what tactics and strategy to apply to get Bobby Reilly his awards, both the Medal of Honor and the Gibson Gold Medal. As a start, he would write the letter requesting Congressman Rooney's help.

\---

A week later, just minutes before closing time, Norman Dune in a new London Fog raincoat and a grey fedora walked into Kips Bay Books. He smiled, a forced smile, saluting with a single finger touching his right forehead as he went past Ryan, who was standing behind the front counter going over the day's receipts.

"Good evening," Ryan said. He was tired after a bad night's sleep and hearing an angry complaint from a customer that three pages were missing from the novel she had purchased. He felt so drained that he was considering a call to Nicky to tell her he wouldn't be available for dinner tonight. They were supposed to meet at the Café Geiger. To discourage any more drop-ins, he turned off the street window lights, locked the front door, and turned the sign around to CLOSED.'

His mind was clear; Dune knew what he was expected to do; his heart was pounding. He put his right hand into the deep pocket of the raincoat wrapping his fingers around the stiletto. Sweat seeped into the palm of his hand. "Am I keeping you?" Dune called from the fiction section.

"Not at all," Ryan said trying to sound enthusiastic. "Can I help you with anything?"

He should have selected a book, any book, to carry to the counter, placing it far to the left so Ryan would turn his head exposing the right side of his face. That was the scenario Dune had practiced with a bowling ball in his basement for hours on Saturday and Sunday. He rehearsed pulling the knife with a backward motion from the deep pocket, pressing the drop button, and thrusting the blade into the thumb hole of the black bowling ball, the substitute for Ryan's right eye. The General had told him to declare: "The price of insolence" as Ryan writhed in shock and blindness. Dune had carried out a good number of orders he didn't like in his days as a soldier. That was the deal: the officers issued the orders and the enlisted men did the dirty work. He reached towards the shelf putting the forefinger of his left hand on 'Love Is Eternal' by Irving Stone. He hesitated, looking down, caught by the thought that he didn't want to blind this guy. He clenched his teeth and swept a dozen books onto the floor. He took his right hand out of the raincoat pocket and pushed the contents of another long shelf into the aisle in front of him, stepping on novels in their colorful dust jackets.

"Hey," Ryan said, startled by this baffling action. An involuntary coldness enveloped Ryan. This was the state that enabled him to make appropriate snap judgments in combat amidst noise, screams and an atmosphere filled with flying objects that could tear human flesh to pieces. He wasn't certain whether this stranger's activities were a prelude to a robbery or maybe he was a crazy. "Don't touch any more books," Ryan said, having decided that he would use the heavy bronze replica of James Earle Fraser's 'End of the Trail' statue, sitting atop the counter a few inches from his right hand, as his weapon if he had to fight the man.

The intruder walked towards the front of the store, stepping on the books, breaking the spines of several, on the floor of the aisle.

Anger burned in Ryan's chest, his hand grasping the base of the statue of the Indian warrior atop his horse, both bent in fatigue bordering on collapse. Ryan watched as the man walked slowly past the counter, saluting him again with his forefinger touching his right forehead. Dune made the gesture to show his contempt for Ryan wanting to provoke him into an attack to which he could respond. He now realized he couldn't be the initiator. He was a soldier not a strong arm man willing to poke out a combat vet's one good eye. He thought he could only manage to do it if Ryan came at him.

Ryan's heart was pounding the inside of his chest. He was having trouble controlling the rapid thrust of his breath.

Turning in the doorway as if he were struck by a sudden thought, Dune decided to issue a warning, "Hey, Capt. Cyclops, you know what would be worse than losing a couple of sales?" He paused for effect, nodding towards the books on the floor, several of them with bindings broken. "Maybe losing the other eye. Maybe never being able to read all these books again. You don't want me coming back. So forget about pushing the Army to give Runner Reilly a medal he doesn't deserve."

The threat struck Ryan's deepest fear: total blindness, plunging him into a crazed rage. He grasped 'End of the Trail,' rushed from behind the counter, and slammed the bronze statue against the left temple of his antagonist. Dune stumbled out of Kips Bay Books onto Lexington Avenue.
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

Ryan closed the door behind the strange man, hoping that he would keep going and wouldn't come back to try to force his way through the stout front door, hoping he wouldn't try to smash in Kips Bay Books' plate glass front window. He examined the bronze statue. No blood. The long lance the Indian warrior had locked under his right arm was still intact. He had slugged the intruder with the solid, heavy base of the statue. He wished he hadn't done that. But this guy was like a figure from his continuing nightmare and as in that ugly dream he wasn't going to be blinded without a fight. He put 'End of the Trail' back on the counter and went through the store turning off all of the interior lights. After waiting for what seemed like forever, but was only a few minutes, he decided the guy wasn't coming back. Tonight at least.

Upstairs in his apartment, Ryan heard a car horn blare outside on Lexington. He looked out a front window to see the man in the London Fog raincoat lying in the gutter in front of a stationary car, its headlights still on. Two men were kneeling above the figure on the ground. "Oh God," he said surveying the scene. One of the men ran to the phone booth on the corner.

A little later a siren sounded; a police car arrived followed by an ambulance.

He was in trouble now if the arrogant tough guy decided to press charges. The only lawyer he had ever hired was the one who did the paper work on the transfer of Kips Bay Books from his grandparents to him. He was a real estate lawyer; he needed a criminal lawyer, one with connections. He decided against reaching out for a lawyer, exposing his role in the assault. Instead, he would get out of his apartment; stay overnight at Nicky's if she would let him. Tomorrow was Sunday so she wouldn't be writing and he would try to spend as much of the day with her as he could. Time was passing; he hurriedly shaved and showered.

He felt relieved as he descended the stoop that led from the hallway leading up to his apartment and the two floors above it: the ambulance, the police, and the spectators who had gathered for the excitement were gone.

He walked up 27th Street to the subway station on Park Avenue catching the train just after he put his money in the turnstile. At Grand Central, Ryan crossed the platform to take the express to 86th Street.

As the train roared and banged under Manhattan's streets, Ryan remembered the interloper calling him Capt. Cyclops, a precise reference to his military rank and missing eye and warning him against pushing for the Medal of Honor for Bobby Reilly. He realized Gen. Ulmer had dispatched this guy to frighten him. The threat of losing his other eye was meant to scare him into ending his quest to get Bobby the recognition he deserved, but he had gone over the edge in his reaction. He prayed to God that this messenger from Gen. Ulmer ended with just a bad lump on his head.

\---

The Café Geiger was a short distance from the 86th Street subway. He walked into the restaurant just behind Nicky. She turned with a laugh of surprise and kissed him lightly on the lips in greeting.

The waiter came as soon as they were seated. Each chose the potato soup with leeks. Nicky ordered the Wiener Schnitzel ala Holstein, potato pancakes with both apple sauce and sour cream, and red cabbage. Ryan said, "I'll take the Jaeger Schnitzel with home fried potatoes instead of the Spaetzle."

"It comes with red cabbage, sir"

"And the red cabbage and what wine would you recommend to go with Wiener Schnitzel and Jaeger Schnitzel."

"I prefer beer, sir, but you can't go wrong with a Riesling."

"So a bottle of Riesling."

"You look distracted. Is everything okay?" she asked.

"I'm fine. I had a strange experience today. A guy came into the store, I'm sure Gen. Ulmer sent him, and he threw a bunch of books on the floor."

"What did you do?"

"I asked him to leave and picked up the books. What else could I do?" He disliked portraying himself as a man who could be bullied, but that would be his story if the police came around.

"You did the right thing," Nicky said and wanting to show her support added, "Sometimes it takes more courage to avoid a fight than to sail into a provocateur. Why did the General send him?" She was pleased that he was opening up to her. Maybe he needed the right woman to turn the key to open his normally stilled tongue that blocked the treasures of his mind from flowing into a conversation. Maybe this was a man she could fall in love with.

She was right; often the refusal to be drawn into an unnecessary fight is the appropriate response. The intruder had come into the peaceful setting of Kips Bay Books with the intention of provoking or frightening him. The smashing of the man's head was his own message that he would shed the blood of anyone intent on seriously harming him. Courage comes in many forms, fitting different settings, sometimes as an attacker, sometimes as an endurer. In combat it took guts to charge and inner strength not to be emotionally shattered under an artillery or mortar barrage.

"What are you thinking?" Nicky asked.

"That I would like to take you back to your apartment and make love to you."

"I was hoping that was on your mind."

The wine came. They touched glasses. "To happiness," she said.

After sipping the wine, Ryan said, "I have to tell you something. I was going to order the Wiener Schnitzel too."

"You should have."

"I didn't want you to think I was so unimaginative that I couldn't select from the menu myself."

"Great minds think alike."

Ryan smiled at her, hoping that he could perform so intensely tonight that she would be plunged into a deep sleep. And whenever she awoke, he would engage her again. Once started, Nicky was a fucking machine, wanting more and more, especially in the middle of the night. In the morning, he would romance her back into bed after breakfast, then suggest lunch. He didn't want to go back to his apartment tonight or until mid afternoon tomorrow at the earliest in case the intruder had sworn out a charge against him. The New York City police were too busy to sit on his doorstep if he weren't home. He would decide tomorrow whether to get into his car to drive off for a week, which would make him look guilty, or to face down the cops with a claim of innocence. Why indeed would a meek bookstore keeper like him assault a customer? He hoped no one saw the man stagger from Kip Bay Books.
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

Nicky awoke aware of her breasts; they felt swollen. She knew the significance of the date, March 2, her period was due. She slipped from the under covers, gingerly dancing on tip toes the three steps from her bed across the ice cold wooden floor to the full length mirror on the closet door. She cupped a hand under each breast feeling for a difference, knowing she might be assuming a change in her body. No blood between her legs yet, but the day was young. She took a box of Tampax from the bottom dresser drawer, got back on the bed and inserted a tampon into her vagina.

She lay under the covers, not wanting to lose the memory of this moment, perhaps her first consciousness of her pregnancy, the beginning of the process of a fertilized egg magically growing into a baby. She laughed out loud remembering the first time she had used a tampon. Right after inserting it, she had gone from her room to meet her current boyfriend at a bench on the East River Walkway. "Today, I am a woman," she whispered to him, telling him what she had done. She was 19 years old.

Now the issue she had to resolve was whether to tell Ryan, to risk hearing him say, 'Do you want to get rid of it?' or 'I guess we should get married.' Of course he could be consumed with joy. No need to worry about telling him or not until she was certain. She didn't want to jinx herself but she was glowing with happiness in the prospect of motherhood.

Ryan was crossing Lexington Avenue, carrying a mixed case of white and red wine from the liquor store when the black Chevy sedan parked in front of the bookstore. Two beefy men in dark overcoats and grey fedoras got out of the car and walked into Kips Bay Books.

"Here he is now," Mrs. Garmeis said as he entered the store.

Ryan knew before they flashed their badges that they were cops, more because he was expecting them than because of their appearances. From their looks, they could be doormen or garbage men or high school teachers.

"Lt. Hauser of Manhattan East Homicide," Det. Lt. Hermann Hauser said. He watched Ryan's face for a telltale expression: a flinch, fear in his eyes, even resignation. Hauser wore wire glasses and showed big white teeth when he smiled, which he seldom did. He was a wide-bodied six-footer with the flesh under his chin beginning to sag into a bag of puddlely skin. "This is Det. Kilgallan," he said nodding to the smaller, narrow-shouldered, rat-faced man beside him.

"You guys are a day early for Mystery Night," Ryan said placing the case of wine on the counter. His voice had trembled just a bit. He could see from the tightening of Lt. Hauser's right eye that he had picked up that indicator of nervousness.

"You a comedian," Det. Kilgallan said in a flat tone.

"We're not here for mystery night Garrity. We've got a mystery of our own to solve," Lt. Hauser said.

Mrs. Garmeis stood nearby listening to the exchange.

Ryan decided if he stood silent, they would assume his guilt. "May I ask what you mean?"

"I mean we're here investigating the death of Norman Dune." Lt. Hauser spoke purposely in front of Mrs. Garmeis in hopes she might burst out with something significant. Women often did, especially if they were involved. The lieutenant had lost count of the homicide cases he had pursued, solving almost 90 percent of them, often at the initial questioning stage. Normal humans felt very uncomfortable when they killed another, accidentally or purposely.

Ryan assumed Norman Dune must be the name of the intruder who had thrown the books onto the floor on Saturday. "I don't know anything about it. When was this guy killed?"

Lt. Hauser ignored him, directing his question to Mrs. Garmeis. "Could you tell us, lady, about Mr. Dune's visit to this store on Saturday?"

"I don't know anything about him," Mrs. Garmeis said.

"That makes two of us," Ryan said.

"Oh yeah," the lieutenant said turning the phrase into an accusation. Staring at Ryan.

They stood in silence, obviously waiting for a response from Ryan or Mrs. Garmeis. He decided to speak, another effort to portray his innocence. "I guess we can't help you Lieutenant."

"Oh yeah. I'm told the late Mr. Dune was in this store on Saturday."

"We get a lot of customers who come in, buy a book, and leave without introducing themselves. In fact, a casual customer rarely introduces himself."

He took a small black notebook from an inner pocket. He looked at a page of notes, then said, "Mr. Dune wound up in the gutter right outside your store here between 6 and 6:15 PM with the side of his head bashed in. A squad car was dispatched to the scene. First impression was an accident. An ambulance took Mr. Dune to Bellevue." He looked up from his notes.

"So he died Saturday night," Ryan said.

"No. The poor guy hung on until Monday night. When the Medical Examiner took a look at the corpse, he determined the cause of death was a blow to the temple and there were no other bruises, cuts or injuries whatsoever on the victim's body. It didn't take the ME long to figure out that this was a homicide so he got right on the phone to LE 6-6466."

"That's our number, comedian," Det. Kilgallan said.

"I did look out my window to see the police car and the ambulance the other night."

"What made you do that?" Lt. Hauser asked.

"I was upstairs in my apartment and I heard a siren."

"Did you know they had come because of Mr. Dune?"

"I don't know anything about Mr. Dune and I saw no reason to get involved. I was getting ready to go out to dinner."

"So you don't know Norman Dune. Although I think you do. And you see a man who just walked out of your store lying in the gutter, but you don't see any reason to go out to see what happened. Oh yeah." He turned to Det. Kilgallan, who responded with a smirk.

Ryan experienced the discomfort of effectively being called a liar in front of Mrs. Garmeis. So far he had managed to be truthful in answer to the detectives' questions. They had failed to ask him for a response that would force him to mislead or lie.

Then Lt. Hauser asked: "Could you tell us what time you closed Saturday night and who was your last customer? What did he buy? You must have a record of that."

"I have to admit I won't be able to forget what happened for a long time. A man came into the store acting crazy. He went over to the history section and threw a couple of dozen books onto the floor."

"And you did nothing; you're a regular Caspar Milquetoast?" Det. Kilgallan said.

"No I'm not Caspar Milquetoast," Ryan said flushing with anger even though he realized the junior detective was purposely goading him.

"So did you pick up some blunt instrument like this Indian on a horse and slug Mr. Dune for throwing your books around?" Lt. Hauser said putting his hand on 'End of the Trail.'

Ryan shivered and swallowed. "I asked the guy to leave. I don't know if he was your Mr. Dune. I told him I would call the police if he didn't leave. He left and I locked the door behind him, picked up the books and went upstairs to get ready for my date."

"So Mr. Dune was your last customer and a nasty one at that."

"I thought I had a nut job on my hands."

"And you had no idea why Mr. Dune picked your shop of all the places on Lexington Avenue to come in and give you trouble?"

"No idea."

"Maybe he was looking for a softy?" Det. Kilgallan said.

"Maybe he was," Ryan said, his face reddening.

Mrs. Garmeis exploded: "You have some nerve calling Ryan Garrity names and sneering at him and making believe he's a-a-a coward. How many wars have you fought in? What's your record?"

Det. Kilgallan hesitated, then said, "We ask the questions lady."

Mrs. Garmeis snickered at him. "How many combat medals did you win? Ryan won a Silver Star in World War II and another Silver Star in Korea. Did you get any medals, Mr. Smart Alec?"

"You go where you're sent in the Army," Det. Kilgallan said.

"Ryan was sent into combat and he has the scars to prove it. Look at his face. He lost an eye for you in Korea, Mr. Brave Detective."

"I was a real soldier too, lady, but we're here because a man was murdered not to talk about war records," Lt. Hauser said.

"Ryan, I think you should call a lawyer," Mrs. Garmeis said.

"Were you here to see Mr. Dune leave the store in one piece?" Lt. Hauser asked her.

"I left at my usual time on Saturday, four o'clock."

Det. Kilgallan wrote that in his pocket notebook.

"Are you going to call a lawyer?" Lt. Hauser asked Ryan.

"Do I need one?"

"You know the answer to that better than me."

"Then I don't see any reason to call a lawyer unless I'm being framed somehow or you guys don't care if you arrest an innocent man."

"Oh, I always like hearing that answer," Det. Kilgallan said pausing for a beat. "We've heard that song so many times before."

The lieutenant handed Ryan a business card. "Give me a call if you remember anything pertinent; maybe want to talk to me. Sometimes we get a break right away on these cases. Sometimes it takes a while, but we always get the perpetrator. A homicide case is never closed you know. That's my calling tracking down murderers.

"And he's really good at it," Det. Kilgallan said.
CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

The brief single-column story on page 14 in the Daily Mirror the next day said that New York City police were investigating the death of Norman Dune, a resident of Hudson, N.Y., found lying in the middle of Lexington Avenue near East 27th Street last Saturday night, as a homicide. At first police believed Dune had been struck by a hit and run driver. He was taken to Bellevue Hospital, but never regained consciousness. He lingered in a coma until dying Monday night. Homicide detectives said they planned to go door to door in the neighborhood searching for clues and witnesses.

Not much of a story, Ryan thought. The Times had a similarly brief account. The Herald Tribune didn't even carry it. He hadn't meant to kill Norman Dune. The great concern of his life, he would never use the word fear, was blindness. When Dune threatened to blind him, he had gone berserk. He hoped the killing of Dune wouldn't haunt his dreams and his waking memories. He looked from his chair in the Garden Room through the French doors to the patio. He loved sitting out there in June when the sun was turning the days from chill to pleasantly warm. June was the best month in New York. He wondered if he would be sitting in a Spartan jail cell instead of on the patio when this spring was turning into summer.

The detectives had come directly to Kips Bay Books yesterday; he didn't see them checking anywhere else. He assumed they decided on a frontal assault on the chance he would break down and say 'yeah, I clobbered Norman Dune over the head.' He realized if they had solid evidence they would have dragged him down to the local precinct to grill him until he confessed. He had two options: to say that Dune provoked him by threatening to poke out his one good eye or to sit tight, like he did in so many artillery barrages, with the hope that he wouldn't be a casualty. If he admitted hitting Dune, he might luck out with a jury finding justifiable homicide or he could end up serving 10 or 20 years in prison. He decided to tough it out, not admitting anything no matter how guilty he looked.

t 9 AM, Ryan, figuring a home-town newspaper would write a lot more about a local being murdered than the Daily Mirror, called information to ask for the telephone number of the local daily in Hudson. A minute later, Jeff Wheaton, a reporter at the Hudson Evening Register-Star, picked up the ringing phone.

"Did your paper carry a story about the murder of Norman Dune? I'm calling from New York City and the only thing I've seen on it was a short story in the Daily Mirror. "

"Front page news. I wrote the story. We beat the New York City papers into the dust," Wheaton said feeling excited that someone from New York was calling and proud of any comparison between his story and the huge city tabloid, the Mirror. Wheaton was a skilled reporter who had an instinct for developing sources especially among the State Troopers and Hudson City cops with whom he had coffee and doughnuts three or four mornings a week. They told him everything, even what the chief or mayor ordered to be kept confidential.

"Can I buy a copy of your paper anywhere in the city?"

"In the City of Hudson, sure. In New York City, no." Wheaton laughed at the thought of the Register-Star with a circulation hovering just above 5,000 being sold in the big city.

"Could you mail me a copy?"

"No. But what do you want to know, mister?"

"Dune was killed practically on my door step. I run a book store, Kips Bay Books, and I would like to know a lot more about Dune than the Daily Mirror wrote."

"Their story was pitiful." Wheaton read his story into the phone describing Dune as a 23-year-old former Army MP who fought as an infantryman in Korea and was employed as the chief of security of Courage Farms, a research center in Stuyvesant. Dune, who lived in Hudson with his wife, Barbara and their two-year-old son, Norman Jr., was admitted to Bellevue Hospital in a coma on Saturday night after being found in the middle of Lexington Avenue between 27th and 28th Streets in Manhattan. He died without regaining consciousness on Monday night. At first police believed Dune was the victim of a hit and run, but an autopsy showed he had been dealt a fatal wound to the head by a blunt object. Police sources said robbery obviously wasn't the motive for the killing since Dune still had his wallet and watch. He also was carrying a drop stiletto in a pocket and 9 millimeter pistol in a shoulder holster. Police were investigating to determine if Dune was the victim of an ambush. Mrs. Dune said her husband had been sent to the city on a confidential assignment from James J. Ulmer III, the retired Army general, who is chairman of the board of Courage Farms, which does biological research. Ulmer could not be reached for comment. Dr. Walenty Jarocewicz, president of Courage Farms, was unable to explain what Dune was doing on Lexington Avenue that night.

The names of Gen. Ulmer and Dr. Jarocewicz rang like clanging bells in Ryan's ears. Ryan decided the best way to use this reporter while seeming to thank him for reading the story to him was to give him more material for an ongoing story about Dune and to encourage him to dig even deeper. So he told Wheaton about the two New York Police detectives visiting his store yesterday to question him. He recounted his exchange with the detectives adding that he served under Gen. Ulmer in Korea in a special combat unit for which Dr. Jarocewicz provided medical care. "I can't tell you any more about it than that, but you might ask the General and Dr. Jarocewicz about the unit. I should emphasize that Dune never identified himself or told me that the General had sent him to see me."

Ryan ended by telling Wheaton that he would call him when he learned more about the investigation.
CHAPTER THIRTY

Just after Mrs. Garmeis left for the day, Lt. Hauser and his sidekick, Det. Kilgallan, walked into Kips Bay Books. Ryan had been expecting them. Regulars coming into the bookstore had been talking through the day about the uniformed and plainclothes cops who were going door to door looking for witnesses to the death of Norman Dune.

"Hey Ryan," Lt. Hauser said in greeting "You don't mind if I call you Ryan, do you?" He smiled.

Ryan, who had come from the rear of the store when the bell over the entrance door tinkled, stood in silence, not responding. He didn't like this cop calling him by his first name, but didn't say so.

"I guess you noticed we were canvassing the neighborhood this morning looking for someone to shed light on what happened here."

"The strong silent type," Det. Kilgallan said when Ryan didn't respond.

"No. He's gotten a real education from Mystery Night. Ryan knows anything he says can be used against him."

"Why would he be worried if he didn't do anything wrong?" Det Kilgallan said with a sneer on his face and a hard stare at Ryan.

"Ryan, do you mind if Det. Kilgallan looks around the store for the murder weapon. Murderers, no matter how smart they think they are, are often dumb enough to leave items like that lying around." He grinned.

"You seem to consider this situation amusing, lieutenant," Ryan said.

"I always feel good when I solve a murder and I'm just ecstatic when the perpetrator agrees with me and makes closing the case so much easier. Are you going to help us out on this one, Ryan?"

"Sounds like I need a lawyer."

"Are you telling me you did the deed?"

"No I'm not telling you anything."

"Then why do you need a lawyer?" Det. Kilgallan said.

"On second thought, I don't think Det. Kilgallan should spend his valuable time looking for the murder weapon. You can tell us what happened to it, because I don't think you're dumb enough to leave a murder weapon lying around. At any rate, we'll come by tomorrow to ask Mrs. Garmeis if she's noticed anything missing from the store like a baseball bat or a paperweight." Lt. Hauser picked up 'End of the Trail' hefting the bronze statue. "Something like this. But first things first. We would like you to come down to the station for a little friendly talk."

Det. Kilgallan stepped beside Ryan. He slipped his right hand under Ryan's arm.

Ryan shook him off. "I'm not going anywhere without talking to a lawyer."

The detective grabbed the back of the belt around Ryan's trousers. He jerked it upward mashing the testicles and grasped Ryan's left arm twisting it behind his back. "We're going over to the precinct tough guy," Det. Kilgallan said rushing his prisoner through the front door, held open by Lt. Hauser, across the sidewalk to a four-door green and white police car. A uniformed officer opened the car door and Ryan was shoved into the rear compartment, where he slammed his head against the inside of the opposite window. There were no interior handles on the doors and a tight mesh cage divided the back from the front seats. "Take him to the stationhouse. We'll be right behind you," Det. Kilgallan said.

\---

In a small, sparsely-furnished second-floor office at the 13th Precinct, Lt. Hauser sat across a narrow wooden table from Ryan. "Did you lock my store?"

Det. Kilgallan, who was leaning against the frame of the closed door behind Ryan, said, "We ask the questions, you answer them."

"I want to make a telephone call."

Lt. Hauser smiled, "You don't need to make a phone call. You're not under arrest Ryan. This is just a friendly get-together. We want to give you a chance to tell your side of the story. Maybe Dune, who was handy with his fists, let you have one and you hit him back. A little too hard maybe. You could probably walk away from this without a day in jail if you played it right."

"May I call you by your first name lieutenant?"

"Sure you already have. It's lieutenant."

Det. Kilgallan laughed and then said, "Mine's detective."

"Well, lieutenant and detective since I'm not under arrest, and you certainly don't want me to lie to you about something I had nothing to do with, there's no reason to continue our chat. Don't bother to call me a car, I can walk to the store."

"You fucking wise ass," Det. Kilgallan said as he slammed his open hand against the back of Ryan's head.

Ryan twirled onto his feet knocking over his chair and in an immediate assessment of the enormity of the odds against him caught control of himself. There were probably 20 cops with guns in the building each one, with few exceptions, ready to pile into a fight with him even if he got past the lieutenant and the detective. The little smile on Det. Kilgallan's face told him he was trying to draw him into a chargeable assault on an officer. "You saw what he did lieutenant. I want him arrested."

Lt. Hauser roared with laughter. The lieutenant waved a forefinger up and down. "Sit down Ryan. Just answer our questions and you can get out of here. The first is why did you kill Norman Dune?"

Ryan shook his head, a negative gesture. He sat down, deciding he would say as little as possible, nothing if possible.

The lieutenant held up a small piece of paper. "I think I have a motive here. We found this in Dune's wallet. A simple phrase that speaks volumes. You want me to read it?"

He nodded.

"Right eye." Lt. Hauser turned the paper so Ryan could see the two words. "The motive? Losing your other eye. God, you lost your eye for your country then this thug comes along and threatens to poke out the other one unless you do what the General wants."

Ryan had to restrain himself from expressing admiration for Lt. Hauser's investigative theory based on the thinnest thread of evidence. He said, "Did Gen. Ulmer tell you why he sent Dune to see me?"

"National security prevents him from the disclosing the reason."

"You're a great detective so I'm sure you'll figure out what the General is covering up with national security," Ryan said.

Lt. Hauser was unsure whether Ryan was mocking him. When he was a young cop, he might have punched him just on the suspicion of being ridiculed. Instead he moved to his next weapon. He took a photograph from the case file. "A murder is like a contagious disease. It can hurt a lot of people. Here's just two." He slid the photo across the desk.

Ryan looked down at the glossy print of Dune, his wife and their little boy on a blanket at a beach against the background of a calm sea.

"No more picnics with Daddy for Mrs. Dune or Norman Jr.," Lt. Hauser said searching Ryan's face for a reaction. He didn't find one. "Could you describe your feelings towards Mr. Dune Ryan?"

He wasn't going to be led into saying anything derogatory. So he shook his head. The iciness he experienced in combat had settled on him. He was in a battle for his life with these two.

"Maybe you could explain something for me." Lt. Hauser took a typed sheet of paper from the file. "I have here a statement from a woman who was walking her dog a few minutes after six on Saturday night. She swears she saw a man stagger out of your store, stumble into Lexington and almost get hit by a car."

Ryan looked down considering how the woman's statement impacted him. If she had seen him hit Dune or even standing within the store as Dune staggered away, he was sure he would be under arrest for murder. The cops needed him to incriminate himself. He decided he would offer a challenge of his own: "I'm assuming she must have seen whoever hit Dune and I'm sure she didn't tell you it was me."

"How do you know that wise guy? We don't tell a perpetrator everything we got," Det. Kilgallan said.

Ryan realized Lt. Hauser was playing the good cop with his undertone and piercing questions. If he were to be punched around, he knew Kilgallan would do the hitting and would enjoy the process. He had to steel himself with the hope things wouldn't go that far, but if they did and his good eye was touched, he would even the score, somehow. "Can I see that lady's statement?"

"No."

"Then how can I be sure you're just not making up a witness?"

"Your lawyer will get to see her statement after we charge you." The picture and the statement were slipped back into the file. Lt. Hauser continued interrogating Ryan for the next eight hours, having him repeat his version of what happened Saturday night again and again, asking variations on the same questions he had asked before. Det. Kilgallan variously offered sarcastic and insulting remarks, acting at times like an attack dog ready to plunge his fists into Ryan's face. Lt. Hauser would check his partner's move towards violence with a shake of his head or raising his hand. They allowed him to go to the toilet only after he threatened to urinate on the floor of the office.

Shortly after midnight, they let him go.

Outside the 13th Precinct, Lt. Hauser said, "Ryan, give me a call if you remember anything pertinent. And whatever you do, don't leave town without notifying me."
CHAPTER THIRTY ONE

In the morning, Ryan found a note from Garrison Morca, author of 'Whittle and Waite', saying that when he and his wife arrived at 6:30 to find Kips Bay Books open with no one in charge, he waited until 7, became concerned and called the local precinct. The sergeant on the desk, who had known Morca for years, told him in confidence that Ryan Garrity was being questioned as the leading suspect in the murder of Norman Dune. Morca, a Daily News reporter, called his city desk to pass along the tip, then set up the Garden Room, turning on the coffee urn and uncorking the wine bottles, for his Mystery Night. He wasn't going to miss this chance to plug his book, the only such opportunity he had. Afterwards, Morca had turned off the lights and locked the front door; he put away the leftover crackers and cheese, but didn't clean up the cupcake papers or wash the cups and wine glasses.

After Ryan took care of the mess, he walked to the corner newsstand to buy the Daily News along with his regular papers. Mr. Henry came out from his perch behind the soda fountain. "I saw a story about you in the News. None of the others had it."

The report on page two under the headline 'Bookie Questioned' was fairly short saying that Ryan Garrity, operator of Kips Bay Books was being questioned last night by homicide detectives at the 13th Precinct in connection with the murder of Norman Dune, director of security for Courage Farms, a biological research facility in Hudson, N.Y. Dune was found dead in the middle of Lexington Avenue on Saturday night. Police refused to say why Garrity was being interrogated.

Ryan called the Daily News. A clerk told him that Morca would be coming to work at 4 o'clock. He found Morca's home number in the Bronx on a card in the small metal box where kept the names of business contacts, customers and friends. His wife answered. After asking if Ryan were okay without mentioning the ugly experience of his being questioned by the cops, she thanked him for hosting Garrison's book party. "He sold 75 books. Everybody from the News was there. If it wasn't you calling, I wouldn't dare wake him up, Mr. Garrity."

Without any preliminary small talk, Morca said, "Are you calling to thank me?"

"For not cleaning up?"

"No for getting you out of the 13th Precinct last night."

"How did you do that?"

"I called the cops every hour on the hour from ten o'clock until one AM when the desk sergeant told me they sent you home. If I didn't do that you'd still be there."

"I thought they let me go because they became convinced I'm innocent and beside their shifts were probably up."

"Lt. Hauser thinks you're as guilty as sin and he's never gonna let go. He's a real bulldog. So whether you did it or not, you're in trouble. So tell me did you do it? Remember confession is good for the soul."

"Of course not."

"Tell me, is there a bigger story here? What's your connection to Dune?"

Ryan told him that Norman Dune had been sent by Gen. Ulmer to deliver a message to him, but instead of giving him the message, whatever it was, he acted crazy throwing books on the floor and mumbling about communists. He told him that Gen. Ulmer had been his commanding officer on his last assignment in Korea where he headed a special unit called Jaguar One, but he couldn't tell him anything more.

"Who can?"

He suggested Morca call Gen. Ulmer and maybe Dr. Jarocewicz, who was assigned as the medical officer for Jaguar One.

"How do you spell Jarocewicz?"

Ryan went through an uneventful day aside from Mrs. Garmeis asking whether it was true as she had heard from customers that the police took him away and aside from a telephone call from Lt. Hauser in midafternoon asking whether he had anything to confess. He replied, "You mean tell you."

"No I mean confess," Lt. Hauser said.

Garrison Morca called at 5:30. "We have two clips on Jarocewicz and nothing on the General."

"What did the Jarocewicz stories say?"

"They're really about his wife. Listen to this: Dated June 12, 1938. That was ten days before my 21st birthday. Headline: 'Jumper Kills Catcher.' A recent German immigrant leapt from the Chrysler Building killing not only himself, but a Good Samaritan tourist from Chicago. In a strange twist, Jimmy Burke, a bus driver who witnessed the incident, said that Marzen Jarocewicz, an anthropologist at the University of Chicago, raced across 42nd Street dodging his bus and taxis and cars as if she were trying to catch the jumper, identified as Hyman Schwartz 56, who arrived in New York from Waldkirch, Germany only two days ago. Mrs. Jarocewicz suffered fatal injuries. As she lay dying, she told Officer Joseph Antonelli, 'Tell my husband, I couldn't stop myself.' Dr. Walenty Jarocewicz was too upset to talk about the accident other than to say that he and his 26-year-old wife were strolling along 42nd Street when she saw Schwartz plunge from the Chrysler Building."

"That's a wild story," Ryan said.

"The next day we ran an obituary saying the wife was the University of Chicago's youngest PhD in anthropology, traveled a lot to Mexico and Central America and was doing research on warriors in a pre-Mayan civilization centered in southern Mexico and northern Central America. She was born in Poland. Her father, Count Stanislaw Bielski, was a Polish officer killed fighting the Soviets in the Miracle at the Vistula, the Battle of Warsaw. She emigrated to the U.S. via Paris in 1925 with her mother."

"She was an interesting lady, but I would like to find out more about the General and Dr. Jarocewicz."

"Well that's all we have. What you could try is the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature and the New York Times index. Any decent library should have them."

"I have a very good library within walking distance. The New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue."

"There you go. They should have the Times on microfilm too. And while you're there check out their names in the library's card files. I've come up with amazing finds in that card file."
CHAPTER THIRTY TWO

Everybody in the neighborhood seemed to be buying books that Saturday morning. The rush eased around noon and as soon as Mrs. Garmeis finished her lunch, Ryan took a taxi to the New York Public Library past workers unloading boxes and crates from trucks and shoppers with their heads bowed against a fine, blowing snow. The last time he had climbed the broad steps, guarded on either side by stone lions, between the soaring columns and through the high-arched entrance, he was doing research on poet W. H. Auden's early years in the United States, first going through the thick New York Times' indexes year by year starting in 1945 and working backwards to 1939. Then he went to the card catalogues where he found references to three books analyzing the poet's career and a doctoral dissertation by a Columbia University English literature professor. He intended to follow the same path in search of information about Dr. Jarocewicz and Gen. Ulmer.

The 1953 New York Times index was the most current available. There were no citations. He searched the heavy books year by year through the 1950s, through the 1940s without any luck. Ryan opened the 1939 book, went to the Jays and found nothing. He put the 1938 index on the counter, opened it and came across two citations about Dr. Marzen Jarocewicz: her death on June 13, 1938 and her obituary on June 14, 1938.

A clerk helped him thread the microfilm into the machine. The June 13, 1938 story paralleled the Daily News version. The obituary in the next day's paper described Marzen Bielski- Jarocewicz, an anthropologist, as the wife of Dr. Walenty Jarocewicz, a visiting professor of ethnobotany at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and the daughter of Countess Ania Bielski of New York City. The obituary noted that Dr. Bielski-Jarocewicz, who was 26, was the University of Chicago's youngest PhD in Anthropology and until recently had been doing field studies on a jaguar warrior cult in the pre-Olmec civilization centered in southern Mexico and northern Central America.

Jaguar! Ryan stared at the word jaguar. Was that the reason the unit he commanded in Korea was named Jaguar One? He had never questioned the source of the name. When the time came to call the unit something, he assumed someone in the Army attached ferocity to jaguars resulting in the gutsy name Jaguar One.

After buying prints of the stories on the microfilm, Ryan walked to the Catalog Room, where he checked the card indexes for both Jarocewicz and Bielski. Her dissertation "The Werejaguar Cult" was the only item under their names. Everyone knew what a werewolf was. Popping immediately into mind was the image of a tortured Lon Chaney Jr. turning into a werewolf under the glow of a full moon in the film 'The Wolf Man.' He filled out a form requesting Marzen's dissertation. While waiting for the document, he looked up werejaguar in a Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. Not there. The reference to werewolf said, 'Folklore. A person transformed into a wolf in form and usually in appetite, or a person capable of assuming a wolf's form.' The source of the word was a combination of the Anglo Saxon words wer for man and wulf for wolf, according to the dictionary. So werejaguar must mean a combination of a human being and a jaguar. Lon Chaney Jr. transformed into a jaguar.

For the next 20 minutes, he sat at a long heavy wooden table in the library's Art Deco Reading Room going over the New York Times stories of Marzen's strange death and her obituary and glancing at the occupants of nearby tables scribbling notes on index cards and yellow legal-sized tablets from books and documents. Assuming enough time had passed, he went to the pick up desk. A clerk handed him a large, slate-colored, hard-covered folder several inches thick.

Ryan settled into his seat and opened the folder. Inside, instead of Marzen's dissertation, he found a black binder entitled, 'Alexander Hamilton, Patron Saint of Foreign Investment in the United States' by Myles Wender, New York University. All of the pages were blank. Perhaps someone made a mistake, but he had the uneasy feeling that Marzen's dissertation had been removed on purpose. He returned to the call desk, spoke to a supervisor, who theatrically declared, "This is very strange. I'll look into it as soon as I have time." Ryan gave him his card and took the supervisor's direct number.

Suspecting that the supervisor would put his problem at the bottom of his to-do list, Ryan checked the index in the Catalog Room for Wender, Myles. There were no listings. The missing document whetted his appetite to read Marzen's dissertation. Nicky could write one of her mysteries based on the multiplying coincidences: Dr. Jarocewicz' wife who wrote about a mysterious jaguar cult in pre-historic Mexico and Central America and her academic dissertation missing from its New York Public Library file.

As soon as they settled into the booth at the Café Geiger that evening, Ryan told Nicky about his afternoon at the New York Public Library and the missing dissertation. He showed her the two stories from the New York Times.

"I love a mystery. Why are you tracking down doctoral dissertations on werejaguars? Why are you digging up stories that are more than a quarter of a century old?"

Not wanting to arouse her curiosity any further by alluding to national security, Ryan said, "Unfortunately, this is a confidential matter. You're going to have to trust me when I say I can't get into the nitty gritty of what this is all about."

"Then why show me this stuff?"

"I thought a mystery writer could tell me how to proceed."

"Well putting myself in the mind of my protagonist, Nurse Irene Madison, she would call the University of Chicago, tell the public relations office she was doing research for a book on the strange death of an alum, Dr. Marzen Bielski, so could they please send her a copy of Dr. Bielski's or Dr. Bielski-Jarocewicz' dissertation. And she would call that Mexican college where Dr. Walenty Jarocewicz taught to find out the name of someone who knows all about his work."

"I don't speak Spanish."

"Find someone who does." She held up her right forefinger. "Wait a second, my bloodhound, Nurse Madison, is hot on the trail. She says find someone who went to the University of Chicago, ask to see their alumni directory and another angle, call Marzen's mother, Countess Bielski. Could you imagine a mother not having a copy of her little girl's doctoral thesis?"

"Yes."

"So could I, but it's worth the effort."

The waiter came. Each picked the potato soup with leeks, the Wiener Schnitzel ala Holstein, potato pancakes with both apple sauce and sour cream, and red cabbage.

Ryan said, "I'll bet you would drink a beer with this meal."

The waiter smiled. "I remember you well sir. Shall we have another nice cold bottle of Riesling?"

"Sounds good to me."

The wine came. They touched glasses. "To the hunt and happiness," she said.

After sipping the wine, Ryan told Nicky that he was going to call the University of Chicago and Countess Bielski as soon as he could.

"Since we seem to have similar thoughts, I'm going to assume without you telling me that since the day is over and you can't pursue the Countess and the University of Chicago at this late hour, you are thinking how nice it would be if I invited you back to my place to pursue a little happiness."

"Great minds think alike."

"Another toast. To the coming quest for happiness at my place this evening." Another double entendre, she thought.
CHAPTER THIRTY THREE

He snapped awake when the alarm went off. He looked at it: Six-thirty. The other side of the bed was empty. He swung into a sitting position, pushed down the button ending the irritating noise, and went into the bathroom. When he came out, Nicky was waiting with a thick, diner coffee cup with steam rising in her hand.

With an exaggerated scan of his naked body, her eyes wide, she said, "What every woman dreams of, a beautiful naked man, primed to go, in her bedroom in the morning. Eh." She grinned.

Looking down at himself, Ryan said, "Right you are. I'm ready if you're interested."

"Another time, lover," she said handing him the cup. "I want to eat breakfast, take a shower, and get ready to start writing at eight o'clock. I'm saving my energy for the typewriter."

"Oh, I think you could spare a few minutes for pleasure."

"That would be wonderful and part of feeling wonderful is drifting into a cozy sleep. That's the part I can't afford. Besides, you have work to do too. While you were sleeping I looked in the Manhattan telephone book, and guess what? I found an A. Bielski on Fifth Avenue. Get dressed; I'm making the specialty of the house, bacon and Nicky's own scrambled eggs, this morning."

"You were terrific last night."

"Lover, you were wonder, wonder, wonderful. Now get dressed, because temptation often overcomes good sense. The bacon's cooking. The eggs don't take much time at all. What do you want, toast, English muffins, or a seeded roll?"

"I'm always ready for a roll."

"That clinches it. Something else we have in common, you're addicted to sex and double entendres like I am."

"Don't make my life any harder than it is."

After a burst of laughter, she said, "And that's enough. It's breakfast time."

The first sale of the day was being rung up by Ryan and another customer was waiting with a book and a birthday card in hand as Mrs. Garmeis came through the front door of Kips Bay Books.

"Opened early today," she said in greeting and to emphasize that it was just ten o'clock, that she wasn't late for work.

"Good morning to you, Mrs. Garmeis," Ryan sang out.

"Morning Mollie," the waiting customer said.

As soon as Mrs. Garmeis had deposited her coat in the closet, Nick called the number listed for A. Bielski. The phone rang ten times before an answering machine picked up with an East-European-accented voice saying: "The countess is delighted you called and sorry she is not available at the moment. Please leave your message at the tone." So it was the countess' apartment. One minor mystery solved.

"Hold down the fort, I'll be back as soon as I can," Ryan said hurrying past Mrs. Garmeis at the cash register with a customer. Another customer held the door open to allow him to exit, prompting Ryan to wonder what was behind this mid-morning onslaught of business. Maybe it was a sign that his luck was on an upswing.

"May I help you?" a man in a black suit, sitting at a desk, asked Ryan as he entered the dark lobby of Countess Bielski's building. There wasn't a bank of doorbells in sight so he realized he had to tell this man whom he wanted to see.

"Countess Bielski."

"She's not in and won't be for several days."

Deciding to fall back on the techniques employed by movie private eyes, Ryan pulled a $5 bill from his wallet. "Do you know where I might reach her?"

The deskman got up, stepping close to Ryan, he took the money and said in a soft voice, as though expressing a confidence, "She spends most of her time in Palm Springs in the winter and on her estate in Huntington in the spring, fall and summer. She's only upstairs when she's going to the theater or the opera or somebody's dinner party in the city."

That was a lot of information for $5. He hated to spend so much money, but decided a $10 investment might save him a lot of time. He took another $5 bill out of his wallet. "I don't suppose you have her phone numbers. Save me a lot of time."

The man went to other side of the desk, sat down and checked a leather-covered phone book. He wrote three numbers on a slip of paper, slid it across the desk, and took the other five.

Back at the book store, Ryan called the Palm Springs number. After another ten rings, the answering machine picked up with the same message as the one at the Fifth Avenue apartment. He dialed the Huntington number.

One ring and a response, "Countess Bielski here."

Ryan told her he was doing an article on Dr. Jarocewicz whom he met while he was a soldier in the Korean War. In the course of doing his research he came across the New York Times stories about her daughter's accidental death. He told her that he had gone to the public library to read Marzen's dissertation, but the document was missing, replaced by a bound folder full of blank pages. "Would you have a copy?"

"Yes I do."

"Would you be willing to let me read it?"

"I don't know who you are Mr. Garrity. Who do you write for? What have you written before? And most importantly, what does Wally Jarocewicz have to say about all this."

"I've been trying to get a hold of him, but I couldn't get a number for him in Mexico City." He tossed that out in hopes it would prime her to respond with additional information.

Her voice had a hard edge to it as she said, "He was only in Mexico for a couple of years. Now, he lives upstate in Stuyvesant."

"I didn't know he lived in Stuyvesant. Is that where his lab is?"

"I really have no idea, Mr. Garrity. Are you really a journalist? If you are come and see me tomorrow. If not, I warn you to stay away. There's a train from the city, gets into Huntington around 11:30. If you can make that train, I'll pick you up at the station."

"Right you are. I'll be there. How will I recognize you?"

"I'll be in a station wagon. And let me warn you again, you had better not be some sort of trickster."
CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR

Ryan was among the dozen travelers who exited the train at the Huntington Long Island Rail Road station. The cold air shocked him out of the grogginess that had overcome him in the overheated train car. He paused, scanning the small parking lot enclosed by high banks of freshly-plowed wet March snow for Countess Bielski.

Within a minute, a wooden-sided Pontiac station wagon pulled up to the platform. A short, stocky man with a grim expression, wearing a heavy jacket and a white and red knitted woolen cap, emerged from the driver's seat; he walked bow-legged around the back of the car to open the rear door. He extended a hand to guide a small woman, dressed in tan Jodhpurs and a short jacket, an outfit that showed off her trim figure, from the back seat. Despite the damp cold of the late winter day, she wasn't wearing a hat, her way of displaying her strawberry blonde hair.

Ryan walked down the steps to where she waited. "Countess Bielski?"

She stood staring at him for what seemed the longest while as though she expected to learn something about him just from his presence. The driver watched too. Finally, she extended her hand to be shaken.

"You ride even in the snow," Ryan said, offering her the bouquet of cut flowers he had picked up at Karminsky's Floral Shoppe across from the bookstore.

"I ride all the time." She took the bouquet. "I love flowers all the time too. You must have asked someone about me?" Her voice was that of a suspicious interrogator.

Feeling compelled to respond to her question, Ryan said, "I don't know anyone who knows you. I brought these because I have yet to find a woman who doesn't enjoy flowers in the midst of winter or the midst of summer for that matter. I might have brought a cake or chocolates under other circumstances."

She smiled. "Shall we get on our way? Lunch is waiting and I'm starved."

Sitting as far apart as possible in the back of the station wagon, the silence between felt like a wall to Ryan. "A lot more snow out here than in the city," he said, his gesture at small talk sounding particularly meaningless to him and obviously to the countess.

Turning just her head towards him, with a mix of curiosity and contempt, she said, "You have an interesting face. Where did you get that scar?"

"In the Orient," he said surprised at her directness, realizing that she was purposely being confrontational." A gift from the Chinese in Korea."

"You were a soldier?"

He nodded.

"Those communist bastards. My husband, Count Bielski, was a soldier too, in the Polish army. He died fighting the Soviets in the Battle of Warsaw in 1920."

"The Miracle at the Vistula, where they stopped the Red Army from advancing across Poland into Germany. How different the world would be if the Reds had succeeded."

"That was not the first time that the Bielskis helped save Europe from Asian hordes."

"Does that mean the Bielskis were with King John at the gates of Vienna?"

"I don't think I've met another American with so great a knowledge of Polish history. My side of the family, the Mirskis, were well-represented at that battle as well."

Her infatuation with the military was obvious so he decided to entice her with a glimpse of his background. "I was a career soldier before I lost my eye in Korea so I've read a lot of military history, especially about the Soviet army." He looked at her hair, sparkling strawberry blonde. 'Colored. Beautifully so. Made her look young,' he thought. "You must have been a girl when your husband died."

The driver turned the station wagon onto a narrow lane between old trees that hugged the drainage ditches beyond the shoulders. "Not so. In 1920, I was 28 and Zenna was nine. That was a terrible time for me, Mr. Garrity, and not the last one. Life can be so cruel."

Sensing she was softening her attitude towards him, Ryan seized the opportunity to melt her a little more. "Please call me Ryan. Sounds like a last name, but it's my given name. My mother was a Ryan." He assumed Zenna was a nickname for Marzen. He could hear the root of Zenna in Marzen.

"My Christian name is Ania. But only the family and the closest of friends may call me Ania."

"I would hope we can become very close friends, but until we cross that divide, I'll continue to address you as countess."

She smiled at him. "You have a way with the ladies, don't you Ryan."

The station wagon turned onto a dirt driveway that rose along a half frozen stream to a two-story, wood-timbered house, surrounded by towering oaks and pines. A black limousine, Countess Bielski's city car, was parked in an open space large enough for eight or nine vehicles beside the house. The driver stopped in front of a short flight of wooden steps leading up to a wide porch. He got out, opening the rear door for the countess. Ryan managed his own door.

She led the way up the steps across the porch through the kitchen and into a small living room with three overstuffed chairs crowded around a stone fireplace. "I'm out here alone Ryan. This is where I come to think, to meditate on my life. I get such pleasure sitting on the porch with a nice glass of vodka or a cup of tea watching the snow or the rain, the stream roars in a good rain, or the birds. I love the birds. But I do get lonely, maybe a little harebrained when I've been alone too long. Perhaps that is why I invited you to visit me, hoping you might turn out to be an amusing diversion."

"What about your place in Palm Beach. I would think you would be down there in the winter."

"I come to Long Island to separate myself from the usual. From people and memories if you must know. I thought I would go crazy after Zenna was killed. There were times when I would wake up in the morning in the apartment in the city or in our house in Palm Beach and I would wait in bed, expecting Zenna to come into my bedroom, laughing, carrying the coffee tray, saying 'Dzien dobry Matka.'" She pursed her lips, looking down, hearing good morning, mother in Polish as if her daughter were saying it. "I decided I had to have a place where I wouldn't be waiting to see her and hear her and be with her. So I got my Long Island retreat on Sept. 8, 1939, exactly one week after Hitler invaded Poland and ten days before Stalin invaded. I could come here and escape the radio with the news of that awful war."

"So what brought you out here in the midst of winter?"

For a minute she didn't respond as though she were considering whether she should answer. "I was in Palm Beach for a couple of weeks after Christmas, then I had the uneasy feeling that only my Long Island retreat can ease." Waving a hand around the room, she said, "This is my confessor and my psychiatrist rolled into one."

The driver, now in a plaid shirt and woolen pants, came into the room to set about stirring the embers back to life in the fireplace. He was short with blond hair and thick, callused hands that insinuated hard work and strength. A Grandfather's clock in the hallway leading from the front door, chimed the noon hour.

"Now I can play the gracious hostess. Would scotch be acceptable, Ryan?"

"Perfectly."

"Pawel," she said to the driver.

He went to a cabinet topped with half a dozen bottles of liquor. After half filling two crystal tumblers with scotch, no ice, Pawel, a scowl on his face, handed each of them a glass and left the room.

The countess raised her glass: "To the memory of Zenna." After sipping her scotch, she said, "May I see your press card or whatever form of identification you have, Ryan."

Her voice was too pleasant; she was performing. If he failed the test of genuineness, he suspected that Pawel was lurking somewhere nearby ready to tear into him at the countess' signal. Ryan handed her his business card, identifying him as the owner of Kips Bay Books. "To answer your question of yesterday about my background as a journalist, I must admit I've never written for any publication. I could tell you I was intending to free lance an article about Dr. Jarocewicz. The operative word would be intend. That wouldn't mean I would have to actually write one. I have a book store near Gramercy Park. As I said my career as a soldier was interrupted by the loss of my eye in combat. What brings me to you is that a couple of weeks ago, I found out that a recommendation for a Medal of Honor for a soldier who saved my life in dire circumstances had been blocked by a general called Ulmer."

"You disappoint me, Mr. Garrity, I only invited you here because I thought you were a journalist and perhaps could expose a conspiracy that I don't understand, other than it frightens me. I've never met General Ulmer, but I know he is an associate of Wally Jarocewicz whom I know only too well. So tell me, what has Gen. Ulmer and this Congressional Medal of Honor to do with Zenna and her dissertation?"

Uneasy as he felt about discussing an issue that he had been forewarned involved national security, he knew he had to prime her with an explanation of why he needed to look at Zenna's dissertation. "My unit sergeant recommended that soldier who saved my life be awarded the Medal of Honor for what he did that day. Since then, I've discovered that Gen. Ulmer blocked the awarding of the medal. I asked the General why? And he told me that that the soldier in question shouldn't get a medal for heroism because he did what he did because of artificial courage. And even years later that soldier was required to report to Dr. Jarocewicz on a regular basis for physical tests, blood tests, that sort of thing. The General wouldn't explain what he meant by artificial courage so I set out to find Dr. Jarocewicz to ask him for an explanation of this artificial courage and why he continued to do tests on that soldier. And tying it all together is the title of Zenna's dissertation, 'The Werejaguar Cult.' Our unit was called Jaguar One. I wanted to ask Dr. Jarocewicz about that too."

Raising her glass, she said, "To that voice that speaks uncalled: intuition." After draining the remnants of her scotch, she said, "My intuition told me that you might carry the answer to something that has been gnawing at me which is why I invited you here, Ryan. There were two copies of Zenna's dissertation in our apartment. One in the bookshelf in her room and one I had in a bookcase in the apartment library. After not hearing from Wally for 16 years, since the day Zenna was buried, he invited me to lunch last June to ask me if he could have both copies of Zenna's dissertation and her journals from 1935, 36, 37 and 38 as well. Why this sudden interest, I asked. He said he wanted to show the material to colleagues, who had expressed an interest in Zenna's work. I said, 'I wouldn't dream of parting with these mementos of my daughter's life. Those are family treasures.' A couple of months later, I came across my housekeeper in the library going through the books on the shelves when she should have been in the kitchen and I said, 'What are you doing in here Irenka?' She had a sheepish expression. She said, 'I didn't take anything, Countess.' She couldn't look me in the face. She left that night and never came back. All of my jewelry and silver were accounted for; I just couldn't understand her obvious shame. It wasn't until some months after that, I realized Zenna's dissertation was missing from her room. So I came to the conclusion Wally must have paid Irenka to steal it. I called him and he denied it. I took my copy along with Zenna's journals and hid them. The story gets better, Ryan, last October while I was in Paris, my apartment was burglarized, and my house in Palm Beach was burglarized and this place was burglarized. All three places were obviously searched, but nothing was taken. I told the police someone was after my Zenna's doctoral dissertation and her papers. I asked them to investigate and they treated me like I was a crazy old lady. Then in November, a man called Norman Dune visited me to tell me I must give my daughter's dissertation and journals to him to prevent the material from falling into the hands of Soviet agents. I said that I wanted to discuss this with my lawyer before making a decision. And he said that because this was an issue of national security, I could talk to no one about it—not even my lawyer."
CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE

Lunch, made and served by a wide, silent woman in a heavy sweater and peasant skirt, was grilled cheddar cheese sandwiches, crackly Polish pickles and a white burgundy. Countess Bielski and Ryan sat catty-corner to each other, close enough to talk comfortably, at the long dining room table. After a chat in which Countess Bielski described how she and Zenna first emigrated to Paris in 1922 and then to New York in 1925, she led him back into the living room where black tea and cupcakes with coconut icing were laid out on a coffee table in front of the fireplace.

"I have some correspondence to deal with. Pawel has the papers you want to see in the dining room. I suggest you read the dissertation first and then Zenna's diary. Dinner will be at seven. You should be finished by then. If not, you can spend the night. Take your time. I want to know why the dissertation is so valuable that someone is willing to commit crimes to try to steal it and to try to frighten me with bogey tales about Soviet spies. That's where they made their mistake, Ryan. They irritated me enough to find Pawel to protect me and whatever I have. Till dinner, then." She left the room.

The lunch dishes had been cleared and Pawel sat at the dining room table. He waved a hand indicating the small pile of documents in the middle of the table: Zenna's dissertation, "The Werejaguar Cult"' bound in a heavy, green leather cover with an imprint of a drawing of a naked man with a Jaguar's head and long claws on each hand. A diary, a much smaller book, had similar green leather binding with the name Zenna and the year 1938 embossed in gold on the cover.

Ryan opened the diary. He glanced at the careful, clearly-written script. Half the diary was filled, the last entry was dated June 11, 1938.

Pawel tapped a thick finger on the table top drawing Ryan's attention. "The big book first. Countess Bielski said you can read, but take no notes. A command not a suggestion. He wore a heavy metal ring on the middle finger of his right hand that would do punishing damage to a face.

Putting down the diary, Ryan opened "The Werejaguar Cult" In the dry language of such college papers, Zenna began the results of her research with a definition of the 'flight or fight response and the chemical reactions that occurred in the human body during that the moment of choice. She said that 40 glyphs from a pre-Olmec era around 1,500 BC found in the highlands of the west coast of Guatemala near Abaj Takalik, showed a series of scenes:

(Elaborately-gowned shamans, wearing jaguar masks, picking herbs and flowers);

(The shamans grinding their harvest and mixing it into concoctions in shallow stone bowls);

(Six kneeling naked men, ropes around their necks indicating they were captives, consuming the concoctions from the shallow bowls);

(The six being transformed into werejaguars: human bodies with jaguar heads and claws);

(The werejaguars being pushed into a deep pit where six naked girls were being stalked by huge jaguars);

(The werejaguars engaging the real jaguars in mortal combat while above and around the pit heavily-armed warriors laughed, grimaced, and gesticulated);

And the final scene: (The werejaguars and the girls are torn apart and consumed by the real jaguars, whose lithe bodies are torn and bleeding from the wounds inflicted by the werejaguars).

Zenna's interpretation of the data was that rather than telling the tale of a warrior myth, the glyphs were a history of an effort by the shamans to use the plants collected from the forest to transform ordinary men into fierce and fearless warriors.

In her journal entry of Feb. 8, 1938, Zenna described how on her third expedition investigating the werejaguar cult, Miguel Ventas, a somber man known to be a shaman, whose slight, muscular body and worn face confused the issue of his age, perhaps he was 30, perhaps 80, had appeared in her room with Jose Galvez, her guide and interpreter, just before dawn on Feb. 5, 1938 at a guest house in the highlands. Miguel told her with Galvez translating that he had had a vision in which he took her to the sacred hill to collect herbs and flowers enough for six tastes of The Way without Fear. He had risen from the comfort of his bed to fetch her and fulfill the quest laid out in that vision. He warned her to expect days of hiking across rough terrain. "We must go right now," Miguel said.

While Miguel and Galvez waited outside her door, she dressed and filled a rucksack with notebooks, pencils, a camera along with an extra pair of slacks, a shirt, a few changes of underwear and six pair of socks. She had been warned that Miguel was a shrewd, dangerous Indian who disliked, almost to hatred, European bloods, especially Gringos, but she had cultivated him because of his reputation as a shaman of unparalleled knowledge. She had been cautious in her approach to him, using Galvez as an intermediary. Galvez knew many of the indigenous languages and dialects and had worked for at least a decade with earlier expeditions from the University of Chicago. She asked Galvez whether her associate, Aran Khotsikian, was going with them or at least had been notified of their imminent departure. He shook his head, no. She scribbled a brief note to Aran, leaving it on her dresser, telling him that she was going with Miguel and Galvez deeper into the highlands, where Miguel promised to collect the ingredients for the Way without Fear. "Don't know when I'll be back," she wrote.

First they rode in a ramshackle truck to a mountain village, where Miguel was well-known and had stored a rifle and ammunition. They purchased food, canteens, and blankets and hired a mule with a muleteer to haul these minimal necessities. The four of them trekked for two days into the wild countryside. On the first night, they slept around a small fire. On the second night, the men built a huge fire and took turns on guard until morning. During the night, the guttural roar of a jaguar startled Zenna from sleep. That day, the mule, its keeper and Galvez were left behind. Miguel took Zenna on a twisting trail to a deep oval-shaped depression, rimmed by squared blocks of stone. He ordered her in Spanish to wait for him and disappeared into the woods.

An hour later, a span in which Zenna feared she had been abandoned, Miguel appeared with a sack of herbs and flowers. He mixed the fresh ingredients with a dry, gray substance, then crushed and ground everything in a shallow pot. He divided the concoction into six neat, even piles on large, thick leaves. He said, 'There is a price to pay Senorita Zenna.' He knocked me to the ground, tied a noose around my neck, choked me when I struggled and tore off my clothes. 'Don't rape me,' I begged him. He laughed. He forced me to kneel, then he poured the contents of one of the unrolled leaves into a cup with a little water. Next, he pressed his knife again my throat. 'Swallow,' he said, forcing me to drink the awful tasting mixture. When I gagged he held my mouth shut. He dragged me by my hair to the depression, shoving me down the steep side into a hollow overgrown with bushes and trees. He shouted in Mixe-Zoquean: "Come jaguar she awaits without fear to fight you."

Zenna trembled praying to her god that a jaguar wouldn't be drawn by Miguel's invitation. Otherwise, she felt nothing special—not ferocious nor brave nor strong. She looked up at Miguel stood on the edge of the pit waving his arms above his head and grinning down at her.

After a few minutes of soul-racking fear, she climbed out of the pit. Miguel sat on his haunches, a happy expression on his face, watching her move uncertainly towards her clothes. She dressed without speaking to him; she wanted to rage and curse at him, but was fearful of provoking him into physical and sexual violence.

He rolled the leaves into tight cylinders that he put into her rucksack. 'Let's go,' he said when she finished dressing.

Zenna followed him down the mountain trail with contrasting feelings of relief at not being raped and anger at the manner in which he treated her with such cruelty, stripping her, forcing her to drink the potion, and then dumping her into the near-overgrown hole in the ground. Neither spoke on the long hike back to the campsite where Galvez and the mule waited.

Miguel said to Galvez, 'She got what she wanted.'

Her unrelenting fear of Miguel prevented her from telling Galvez about her experience on the mountain as they ate before breaking camp and through the long, hot walk towards civilization. She found she was afraid even to look at the purported shaman. Several times she became conscious of him staring at her with his strange happy expression.

That night, Zenna dreamt she was back in the pit, where she sensed something frightening coming towards her through the vegetation. Suddenly, a huge jaguar appeared, roaring as he lunged towards her. She awoke screaming from the nightmare, rousing Galvez from sleep; Miguel had been sitting on guard, his back against a tree, his rifle across his lap.

'The Jaguar,' he said, a statement, not a question.

'Yes.'

He nodded. Then he stood, the rifle poised for action. 'Feed the fire,' he said to Galvez.

At first light, they ate breakfast and continued hiking until they reached the village, where Miguel left them without saying goodbye.

She wrote, "Almost every night, I dream of the Jaguar. I look in the mirror every morning. My features haven't changed. The claws haven't appeared on my hands. Will the potion change my innards? Maybe I'll be the bravest woman in the world. But I have to admit I don't feel any difference. In the society in which I live, there is no compelling reason to be brave. Maybe I should go to the civil war in Spain as a volunteer, not for ideological reasons, but to put the substance to a reality test."
CHAPTER THIRTY SIX

After making love and sleeping for an hour, they sat down to a midnight dinner of Irish stew, dark bread from a German bakery on 86th Street, and the remains of a bottle of red wine. As they ate, Ryan described his trip that day to Long Island, the burglaries of Countess Bielski's various residences, and Zenna Bielski's account of her search for the potion that turned men into werejaguars.

"You are joking. The University of Chicago gave Zenna a PhD for what amounts to a plot for a bad movie."

"Her doctorate was for the werejaguar cult. She was an anthropologist. Her research must have convinced her that a witch doctor could put together a potion from herbs and flowers that made men think they were jaguars and were ready to fight them. In her diary, she expressed surprise that the potion didn't make her feel more powerful or stronger or whatever."

Nicky clapped her hands, "Eh, lover, don't you see the connection. Ethnobotany. Zenna's husband, your Wally Jarocewicz specializes in ethnobotany. Where do you think we get all of our wonderful drugs from? Guys like Wally steal the ideas from guys in loincloths who figured out long ago what plants can cure whatever illness. You've got all of my juices going, lover, including those that propel Nicky the writer. I can see werejaguars and a beautiful, adventurous woman swallowing what she thinks is a magic potion in my next Nurse Madison mystery."

"The big hole in solving my personal mystery is Dr. Jarocewicz. I need to talk to him." Ryan couldn't say it aloud but he assumed there was a connection between the werejaguar potion and artificial courage even though Zenna's diary said that the potion didn't seem to work.

"Have you tried the guy who went along with Zenna to Guatemala, Aran Khotsikian?"

"Great minds think alike. Countess Bielski told me that Khotsikian works at the Rockefeller Institute. I'm going to call him tomorrow.

\---

Ryan reached Aran Khotsikian at the Rockefeller Institute. He told him he had long been fascinated by the strange death of Zenna Bielski having come to know of her because of being involved with an experimental unit in Korea with Dr. Jarocewicz.

"The Jaguars," Khotsikian said. "Were you a soldier or a scientist?"

Ryan hesitated because of the cloud of national security. "A soldier," he said with a feeling of discomfort.

"Wally Jarocewicz told me all about the three Jaguar units. You must be one of the survivors, one of the lucky ones. Has he been taking samples of your body fluids?"

The tone of Khotsikian's voice projected a sneering anger. Ryan said, "No." He didn't know there had been three Jaguar units.

"So, I assume you weren't given the drug. Lucky you."

"Would it be possible to sit down for a cup of coffee or a beer for a little conversation, Dr. Khotsikian? I'm free this afternoon or tomorrow or the next day or whenever you say. The sooner the better, of course."

"Listen, I'm in my busy season. I have to prepare a lecture for a symposium at Columbia and I don't know what you want or if there is anything I can tell you. And let me ask you something else before we go any further. How did you get my name or even know of my existence."

"Zenna Bielski mentions you in her diary. She said you were with her on a trip to Guatemala in 1938."

"Where did you read Zenna's diary? Is it published somewhere?"

"Her mother, Countess Bielski made it available to me."

"I haven't seen her since Zenna's funeral. Let me ask you something else, are you working for Wally now?"

"No. I'm trying to track him down to talk to him about artificial courage, if you know about that."

"I know all about it. Now let's see. I'm free for lunch today. If you can make it, I'll meet you for lunch, say at one o'clock this afternoon at the Vina Cava on York Avenue between 67th and 68th Streets."

"How will I recognize you?"

"I'm wearing a dark suit with a red tie. I've got an Armenian look about me, tall, dark, handsome, a hooked nose. I'll be eating a hamburger with French fries if you're late. I have to be at the Rockefeller institute at 2:15 sharp so if you're late, you'll be cutting into our time together."

"Then, I'll be there before you."

"How will I recognize you?"

"Crew cut. Scar on the left side of my face. I've got an Irish look about me, tall, light skinned, handsome, a perfect nose."

\---

Across a small, shaky table, over a luncheon of hamburgers with pickles, raw onions and ketchup along with piles of crisp French fries, Aran Khotsikian listened to Ryan's retelling of Bobby Reilly's day of extraordinary heroism in carrying four wounded soldiers, two of them fatally, to an aid station from the frenzied battlefield.

"Is that where you got that scar and lost that eye?"

Ryan nodded.

Holding up his cane, Khotsikian said, "I've got a lifetime reminder of war too. I got my bad leg in Yugoslavia. That's why I'm talking to you. This turd named Norman Dune showed up at my office last November to inform me how dangerous it would be to my career and hinted at bodily harm if I ever mentioned Zenna's research to anyone inside or outside the scientific community. He said if I did so, at the very least the people who employ me would become concerned about my loyalty to the United States. They would be alerted to the facts that I helped the Commies capture control of Yugoslavia and that some of my relatives in the old country fought in the Red Army."

Ryan reached under his chair to extract a book from the paper bag he had carried into the Vina Cava. "I thought your name sounded familiar, so I looked you up and found I had a copy of your book, 'Mission to Yugoslavia,' in the military section of my store, Kips Bay Books."

Khotsikian's angry expression was replaced with a smile. "I actually spoke at Kips Bay Books when 'Mission to Yugoslavia' was published in 1948."

"I can't help but wondering how Norman Dune could question the loyalty of someone who served in the OSS."

"Well, I shook hands with Tito and I do have relatives in Armenia. That's all the Red hunters need to smear you. I certainly don't want someone whispering around that I'm a Commie. I must say that Dune concerned me. I considered him a dangerous man. I was looking over my shoulder every time I walked down the street until I read that he had been murdered."

"Then you must have read that I was questioned by the police. Dune was killed after he came to threaten me too."

Khotsikian said, "I'll tell you how I got in trouble with the General. Last summer Wally invited me to participate in a symposium at Courage Farms on the pioneering work of Dr. Marzen Bielski-Jarocewicz in her search for the source of artificial courage of the Werejaguar Cult. After a luncheon of brook trout, white wine, apple pie ala mode and coffee on a lawn with a stunning view of the Hudson the table was cleared and the discussion began. There were five people present: Wally, Gen. Ulmer, a researcher from Southern Methodist University whose specialty was medical anthropology, a Johns Hopkins professor whose focus was the breakdown and synthesis of herbs, and me. In the course of the luncheon conversation, I became aware that I was the only person at table who was not employed by Courage Farms. The guests from SMU and Johns Hopkins had grants from Courage to do independent research on the hero drug. After retiring from the Army at the beginning of the year, Gen. Ulmer had been named chairman of the board of Courage Farms; everyone laughed when the General assured them that the $50-million research contract awarded to Dr. Jarocewicz for the Hero Drug Project was not a going away gift from his friends in the Pentagon.

"Gen. Ulmer announced this was to be a brain-storming session aimed at shattering the wall between where the Hero Drug Project was and victory! I asked him to define victory? He said the ideal goal would be the creation of a simple drug in a form like an aspirin to be given to infantrymen as they entered battle; the drug would spur the soldiers to fight with absolute courage, greater physical strength, and superlative reactions.

"The seed for the concept of the Hero Drug came from Zenna's work with me on the potion that transformed men into werejaguars in Guatemala. As a result, through the years, Wally kept me informed on his progress. In 1940 with war approaching, the Army gave Wally a $25,000 grant for his research. By 1950, Gen. Ulmer had become interested, using his influence to get Wally some serious money, $15 million. Wally invited me to participate, but I had moved on to more interesting research. I had no desire to help create a drug that turned docile American boys into berserk beasts. From our conversations, I was aware that the interim results of over a decade of research and synthesis of the known herbs and plants in the shaman's potion were administered in Japan to soldiers who had run from the battlefields of Korea and should have been executed for cowardice. The results were mixed: all of those who were given the potion were either killed or demonstrated extraordinary bravery under fire—not in fighting the enemy, but in rescuing wounded comrades. I considered that admirable. Two of the human guinea pigs survived. One is currently in a mental institution in Texas; the other was the fellow killed rescuing that young woman from the subway train in Queens a couple of months ago. At our gathering by the Hudson, the General said, 'There is something we are missing, Mr. Khotsikian. As these gentlemen can tell you all of the elements of the witch doctor's brew have been broken down and synthesized. We're getting heroes of a sort, but not the kind we want. We all know that in combat that there is no shortage of men willing to give their lives to save comrades. And, civilians perform just as heroically. Look at all of the medals awarded by the Carnegie Foundation to people who risk their lives for strangers. So it is human nature to be willing to give your life for another man. We want a drug that will turn out a tear-ass soldier who wants to kill the enemy. The United States Army needs a witch doctor's drug whose main attribute is artificial courage in the face of insurmountable odds. These gentlemen have committed themselves to developing that drug. I, we I should say, the American people are asking you today to join us in this venture. You will be well compensated along with being recognized as a true patriot.'

"Now I knew why I had been paid a hefty honorarium to attend what was portrayed as a symposium on Zenna's work in Guatemala. Wally knew I would never voluntarily do anything to help him in his research. We had been rivals for Zenna's affections and Wally because he was jealous had urged Zenna to find another associate to accompany her in the field in Guatemala. And Wally knew I had nothing but contempt for what he was trying to accomplish. As I sat at the luncheon table, I realized my contempt was not for the work but for the man. I realized that I hated Wally.

"I said to the General, 'Could you be more explicit? He said, 'Khotsikian, we want you to return to Guatemala to find that witch doctor and get further information from him, if not the answer to our problem.'

"I said, 'Let me be frank, General. I assume Wally has tried himself or sent others to search out Miguel Ventas, the shaman, the one you refer to as a witch doctor. And of course they didn't find him. He won't be found unless he is willing to be found and I would say the same for his successor if Miguel Ventas has died. He spoke to Zenna and gave her the substance you are spending so much time and money to reproduce because he was driven by a dream; that's what drives shamans, not money or sex or high office. Miguel Ventas doesn't share our greeds. So my answer to you is no. I won't waste your money and my time. Let me say in parting, you should be grateful you have a drug that inspires men to be saviors not killers.'

"The General responded, 'I'm disappointed in you Khotsikian. Remember everything discussed here today is top secret. And be informed that I have instructed Dr. Jarocewicz to no longer keep you apace of our efforts. And, I am ordering you in the interest of national security to never discuss this meeting or Dr. Jarocewicz' work with anyone.'

"I said to him, 'General, do you seriously believe that Soviet intelligence hasn't been swift enough to uncover the contracts financing the research on your so-called hero drug and that their operatives haven't read Dr. Bielski's dissertation on the werejaguar cult? You can pick it off an open shelf at the University of Chicago library and for all I know there are copies in the New York Public Library and wherever she decided to plant them. There was an item in the Times when Wally got his first contract from the U.S. Army way back when, just before the war. I clipped it myself. So what great secrets are we talking about?' I got up, walked out of the room and out of the house."

Finishing the dregs of his coffee in the Vina Cava, Khotsikian said to Ryan, "The amusing thing is that my luncheon with Wally and the General provided me with the Rosetta Stone of the werejaguar glyphs. I drove straight to the museum, got out the impressions of the glyphs and realized for the first time that the prisoners were given the werejaguar potion as part of a human sacrifice ceremony, not to make them into heroes."

Ryan said, "I think you might have stirred the General into action too. If you go to the New York Public Library to look up Zenna's dissertation, as I did, you'll find it has disappeared. And, one copy has been stolen from Zenna's personal library, and someone burglarized Countess Bielski's three residences in New York, Long Island and Palm Beach apparently with the intention of stealing her copy of the dissertation and Zenna's journals."

"I wonder if there is still a copy at the University of Chicago library?" Khotsikian said.

CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN

The sun was high, glistening off the broad fields of snow on either side of the country lane that led to Courage Farms. The rocks topping the country wall barely showed above the banked snow. A large wooden box, painted orange with the logo of a yellow telephone and a sign directing visitors to use the phone to announce themselves, was set atop a decorative stone column to the left of the closed cast-iron gate. The arrangement forced Ryan to get out of his car to step cautiously across the traces of ice in the grooves of the cobble stone driveway.

Ryan picked up the phone, noticing as he did that a camera atop a pole was trained on him. After a brief conversation, he was told he was expected. The gate swung open.

A short distance onto the farm, out of the sight of the country lane, a long wooden arm painted with red and white stripes blocked the road. A man dressed in a heavy blue jacket and matching woolen cap with a holster on his hip came out of a coffin shack. He asked for identification and checked his clipboard. "Okay. You're clear to go, sir. Follow the signs to visitors parking. Someone will meet you there."

He drove past the entrance to a large parking lot with a sign saying 'employees only.' Four long Quonset huts radiated from the side of the parking lot, which was filled to capacity. The visitors' parking lot, with spaces for 12 vehicles, was set on the right side of a two-story farm house with a wrap around porch. The visitors' lot was empty. A skinny man in a black wool commando sweater wearing a shoulder holster waited atop the porch steps, feet planted wide, hands on his hips. He stared at Ryan from the moment he got out of his car until he started up the steps.

Why the display of guns? Ryan wondered.

"Garrity? You're expected. Follow me."

No introduction. Was he acting a role, imagining he was a character in a thriller? Rather than intimidating Ryan, if that were his purpose, he amused him.

The hallway floors were highly-polished wood. The walls, painted a light green, were lined with photos on one wall of infantrymen in combat and on the other a mixture of water colors and photos of plants and herbs. They went into an anteroom, where a secretary, wearing glasses her brown hair pulled back in a bun, sat behind a wide metal desk with an intercom and in and out baskets; a typewriter on a rolling table to her right side. She rose. "Mr. Garrity? Right on time. I'm Gloria Ives. We spoke on the phone. Dr. Jarocewicz is expecting you." She stepped from her chair to the door behind her and knocked lightly. Ryan followed her into the room.

Gen. Ulmer, leaning his weight forward his two hands planted on his cane was sitting in a high-backed leather chair, by a window looking out onto the Catskills, laced with the remains of the winter snows across the Hudson River.

"Mr. Garrity has arrived gentlemen," Mrs. Ives said and quickly exited.

The General stared straight ahead as if lost in thought. He didn't respond to Ryan, who could barely contain his annoyance as he said, "I didn't expect to see you here General." He had hoped to ask Dr. Jarocewicz what he knew about Norman Dune's mission to Kips Bay Books before he confronted Gen. Ulmer. The old bastard had outmaneuvered him.

Dr. Jarocewicz had grown a little plumper since Ryan last saw him four years ago. He still had his twinkling eyes and the drawn back lips of a smile that showed his upper and lower teeth emphasized the more by the overhang of his gray mustache. He came from around his desk with his hand extended palm up to show the way as if he were a maître d'. "Come join us by the window. I always have my afternoon tea by the window so I can look at the Hudson. Does wonders for the psyche." He shook Ryan's hand before urging him into a seat opposite Gen. Ulmer.

"May I ask you, doctor, why the intense security? Are you doing something here that requires armed guards?"

Without looking at Ryan, Gen. Ulmer said, "You of all people, Garrity, must be aware that one of our men was murdered." He turned to Ryan: "Did you do it, Garrity?"

"No."

"Then we have to protect ourselves from the unknown assailant." He paused. "Of course the police believe you are the murderer. And so do I."

A knock on the office door interrupted the conversation. "Come in," Dr. Jarocewicz called. Mrs. Ives entered the room followed by a white-jacketed steward pushing a cart laden with a porcelain teapot decorated with violets, matching cups and cake plates, and a three tiered tray of sweets.

Mrs. Ives poured three cups of tea, serving Gen. Ulmer first and then Dr. Jarocewicz. Ryan said, "No tea for me, thank you." To sip tea and nibble sweets with the General, who possibly intended to have him blinded would be bizarre.

"Perhaps coffee?" Mrs. Ives asked.

Ryan's pressed his lips together tightly and shook his head.

"I'll leave the goodies and the tea pot here in case anyone has a change of mind," she said then left the room with the steward following her out.

Stirring the cream in his tea, Dr. Jarocewicz asked, "Why are you here today, Capt. Garrity?"

"I went over to see Gen. Ulmer a couple of weeks ago. We talked about the experiment in Korea, but he didn't mention you were still working on the werejaguar project."

Dr. Jarocewicz took a small notebook from the inner pocket of his sports jacket. He wrote a few words in the notebook. "Where did you come across the term werejaguar?"

"I've read Zenna Bielski's dissertation on The Werejaguar Cult and her journal about her trip to Guatemala to get the potion from the shaman. I assume you developed a drug from the potion and I'm also assuming you the injected drug into some or all of my men in Japan."

"You have a fine military record, captain, but I have no idea what your security clearance is now so I really can't talk to you about my work."

Gen. Ulmer interjected, "He doesn't have clearance, doctor."

"While I can't discuss my work with you, Captain, I would appreciate it if you would do us one small favor?"

"And what would that be, doctor."

Dr. Jarocewicz retrieved a leather folder from the desk. "The General asked me to get your signature on this document." He handed the folder to Ryan, who opened it and read the sheet of paper with a single typewritten sentence inside: 'I pledge on my honor as an officer of the United States Army, that I will never reveal any information to anyone about the so-called Hero Project or Jaguar One.'

Although he considered crumpling the paper and throwing it on the floor at the feet of Furious Jim, Ryan closed the folder handing it back to Dr. Jarocewicz He had never understood before why some people refused to sign loyalty oaths.

"There's no reason a loyal American who has not betrayed his country would not sign," Furious Jim said, his slack-skinned face trembling with rage.

Ryan stood. His mouth turned down at the corners. "Tell me, General, did you send Norman Dune to poke out my eye?"

"Please, gentlemen, let's not let our emotions overcome common sense," Dr. Jarocewicz said. "General, we both served with Capt. Garrity and I have no doubt of his loyalty." He proffered the folder to Ryan. "Capt. Garrity, if you would please sign the document, everyone will be happy."

"Questioning my loyalty is beneath contempt. Answer my question, General."

"Your loyalty! I consider you a goddamn traitor, Garrity, and a goddamn murderer. Now get the hell out of here," Gen. Ulmer said in a voice that had shrunken into a squeak just as the flesh of his face had been reduced to a minimum of skin stretched across his skull.

Ryan's ego overflowed propelling words from his mouth that he normally would have quelled. "You have lived too long Ulmer. From now on I'll call you Feeble Jim. How long have the doctors given you, another week?"

"You yellow-bellied bastard. You wouldn't dare talk to me like that when I was fit."

"When you were fit, you didn't try to have my eye poked out. I could throw you through that window and roll you down into the Hudson, but I'd rather think of you drowning in your own spit. And you're right, there was a time when you were frightening and a time when you demanded respect. Now you're just a shriveled up, sinister thing waiting for death. From now on, I'll call you Creepy Jim, whose fury is a joke."

"That's enough, Capt. Garrity. Please leave now or I'll be forced to call security," Dr. Jarocewicz said as Gen. Ulmer spewed Goddamn you and you bastard and you fucking traitor.

Ryan gave Dr. Jarocewicz a hard look. He said, "Ulmer is passé. Send any more trouble my way and there'll be bloodshed."
CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT

Gen. Ulmer sat slumped in the chair staring out the window, aware of an exhaustion that so consumed him that his body ached. The name Creepy Jim Garrity had thrown at him was a festering sore that burned his innards and head. Calling him passé and threatening Wally Jarocewicz had given Garrity's face an ugly caste. He was always aware of his own facial expressions—raging at battlefield setbacks, raging at the stupidity of politicians, raging at a sloppy enlisted man. A little smile eased his pain. He liked being called Furious Jim. He liked Linda's twist on his nickname even better. He grinned, his head bowed, his eyes closed envisioning Linda when she joined him for a weekend in Paris after the war. She was 43, at the peak of beauty with an unlined face, beautiful breasts, haunches of solid, curved flesh, and hungry for sex after a drought of almost a year. Linda looked up at him, her face red in heat, and yelled fuck me furiously Jim. Then they exploded in mutual climax and she was panting so hard she could barely get the words out: "Don't ever let me catch you doing that to another woman, Furiously Fucking Jim." He laid back on the bed, looking at the ceiling, and laughed like he had rarely laughed before.

Dr. Jarocewicz watched the display of various emotions crossing the General's face, fearful of speaking, of hurling the old man into another temper tantrum. In May their partnership in the search for a drug to turn weaklings into warriors would be ten years old. Just two more months, but he didn't think the General would last that long. He had never liked the old man, who was a foul-mouthed bully, a perfect overseer of a war machine in which men are fed into battle to be destroyed physically and mentally. But the connection to Gen. Ulmer had enabled him to do his research to move towards a drug that would be a work of art.

The General was musing about being on the edge of fulfillment and death. He would be 60 in November if he lived that long. Despite the pain, the constant fatigue that was so ravaging he couldn't sleep, the sense of being ancient, he had a reason to continue living: the Viking Drug, which would instill a mopey soldier with a fierce battle spirit enabling him to go into combat without any concern over dying. The Viking Drug, which was Dr. Jarocewicz' next generation of the Hero Drug, had been tested only on mice a month ago. They would need another war before having a pool of cowards or ordinary soldiers to test.

The intercom on Dr. Jarocewicz' desk buzzed. He flicked the on switch. "Yes."

Mrs. Ives said, "Just a reminder 11 is approaching and you have that staff meeting."

"Thank you, Mrs. Ives." He checked his watch: 10:45. He looked at the General. "Going to go over the status of the Viking Drug at 11." He had ordered Mrs. Ives to call him about this imaginary the meeting within 15 minutes after Ryan left, at whatever time that would be. He needed a gracious way to ease the General out of his office or the old man would sit there interminably while expecting Jarocewicz to listen to his monologue of memories of the wrongs done to him during his military career by politicians and officers who had outranked him.

"Forget the meeting. I have a plan of action. I want to put the Viking Drug into play."

"General, that's just impossible."

"Goddamn it. I'm not going to let a mealy-mouthed bureaucrat stand in my way," Furious Jim said giving him his fiercest look.

"I am a scientist, General." There were limits to what Dr. Jarocewicz' ego could endure. "No researcher worth his salt would permit you to inject the drug into a human being if that is what you hope to do." The dread of a greater danger to his career and to another human being prompted Dr. Jarocewicz to seriously disagree with Gen. Ulmer for the first time since they met a decade ago. "We are years away from using a human subject, General."

"You are years away. I'm ready to take the risk now."

The old bastard wouldn't be risking anything. He could be dead of his cancer within days or weeks. Dr. Jarocewicz could imagine the disgrace that would be visited upon him, not the General, by the scientific community. He said, "General you saw the impact on the mouse we injected."

The tiny animal had been placed in glass-sided cage with three other mice, two males and a female. The Viking mouse almost immediately tore into the other two males and then the cowering female. The next day, the same mouse was sent into a cage with a feral cat. Without hesitation, the mouse rushed the cat biting and clawing its huge adversary. Although startled at the ferocity of the insignificant attacker, the cat quickly subdued and killed the mouse.

"That was a marvelous show of courage," the General said.

Dr. Jarocewicz knew that Gen. Ulmer's mind had been muddled by the cancer consuming him or he would have grasped the obvious. "The mouse had the battle spirit we want, but unfortunately he went berserk when confronted by adversaries. We need to work on getting the drug to a level in which the subject can exert intelligent control on his urge to fight, rather than being crazily fearless."

"Yes. A soldier wouldn't last long running up against a tank or an automatic weapon, but in hand-to-hand combat with an otherwise equal enemy, I could see this would be a very effective tool as it is."

"As I said, General, there's a lot of work to be done. Years of it, I'm afraid."

The plan had flashed into Gen. Ulmer's mind like a lightning strike at the moment when the homicide detective told him that Norman Dune had been murdered. The time for implementation was now. He had anticipated that Wally Jarocewicz would be too weak-kneed to proceed so he had thought out Operation Viking with two scenarios: with Wally and without Wally. He took the two pages outlining the steps from his inside pocket. He crumpled the "with Wally" into a ball, which he tossed to Dr. Jarocewicz. "Throw that in your wastepaper bin please."

Dr. Jarocewicz did as instructed.

Gen. Ulmer pushed himself to a standing position. Dr. Jarocewicz hurried across the room to help him. The General waved him aside. Clutching the "without Wally" document in his left hand, he moved slowly across the room to the chair behind the desk. He sunk into it, resting for a few minutes to regain strength, then picked up the phone. "This is Gen. Ulmer. Put Conrad O'Malley on the line."

Dr. Jarocewicz stood silently in front of his own desk, watching the General sitting in his chair using his phone. He didn't know who Conrad O'Malley was or why the General was calling him.

"O'Malley. This is Gen. Ulmer. I want you to immediately come to Dr. Jarocewicz' office to escort him off the premises."
CHAPTER THIRTY NINE

Conrad O'Malley had his .38-cal. revolver drawn but pointed downward at his side as walked three steps behind Dr. Jarocewicz, escorting the former president of Courage Farms to his car as instructed by Gen. Ulmer. He had been present as Gen. Ulmer fired the doctor from his position. When Jarocewicz yelled that the General was out of his mind, that he couldn't do this to him, Gen. Ulmer told him to be quiet or that O'Malley would use his weapon to silence him. Although he was tortured by uncertainty, O'Malley put his hand on his .38, an automatic response from the month-long training course run by a retired New York State trooper for Courage Farms. There were only two cadets in the class. His teacher was right. The movement towards a gun that can maim and kill was enough to instill obedience in any normally nonviolent civilian.

With his eyes riveted on O'Malley's hand gripping the butt of the .38, Dr. Jarocewicz shut up. He had dealt with enough uneducated young men with military training to realize that he was in serious danger if an order to shoot were given. He listened while Gen. Ulmer with renewed vigor in his manner and voice declared his firing and ordered O'Malley to escort his prisoner to his car and to ride with him to the exit of Courage Farms and not to hesitate to shoot if necessary. Dr. Jarocewicz decided on the spot that his first concern was his own safety, and then to make two phone calls: the first to his lawyer to determine whether he could be dismissed without cause and the next to the Inspector General of the Pentagon Office of Special Contracts to express his opinion that Gen. Ulmer's illness had effected his mind.

The tension that had gripped Dr. Jarocewicz' chest in a vise released like a tire deflating and his heart, which had seemed frozen, began pounding, as he drove onto the road outside the Courage Farms gate. Up until that point, he had feared that O'Malley might be taking him to his death. That was how crazy he believed the General to be. He didn't dare protest to O'Malley because he felt anything he said could provoke a tragedy.

A white jacketed lab worker was leaving the president's office when O'Malley returned. The lab worker raised his eyebrows in a quizzical expression and rolled his eyes toward the office he had just exited as he passed O'Malley.

"Did you see him out the gate, O'Malley?" the General asked.

"Yessir."

"Sit down O'Malley. I have a proposition for you that could open up a bright future. Are you interested?"

Who wouldn't be? "Yessir."

The General picked a sheet of paper from the folder on his desk. He glanced at the conclusion reached by the psychologist based on a battery of personality and career tests: 'Conrad O'Malley is a gentle, good-natured Caucasian male, who is submissive and suffers from a mild sense of guilt for missing out on the combat experience of his two older brothers in Korea. While O'Malley is acceptable as a member of Courage Farms' protective service, his talents would be better expressed in an office administrative or sales position. I recommend hiring O'Malley for the basic protective position for which he has applied.' Dr. Jarocewicz had written a note saying that O'Malley would be a perfect subject for the human trial of the Viking Drug if he were a soldier in a combat situation.

Gen. Ulmer tapped his right forefinger on the report in front of him. "I don't know the extent of your knowledge of the research being down in Courage Farms' labs, O'Malley."

"No one talks about it, sir, so honestly I don't know much except they use up a lot of mice."

"Good, good. That's an answer I am happy to hear. Your file tells me that Dr. Jarocewicz had chosen you as a likely candidate for the trial runs of the Viking Drug. The research shows that a man injected with the drug will have an increased sense of courage, well-being, and strength."

O'Malley nodded. He didn't say it out loud, but he had no intention of volunteering to be injected with some experimental drug. He hated needles.

"Your personnel file shows that you served in the United States Army as an enlisted man for two years, posted to Germany, rising to the rank of corporal. No combat experience. That is something every man should have, but that's neither here nor there at the moment. You came highly recommended, discharged from the Army in December and joining our staff in January. So you've been here, what, two months."

"My platoon sergeant served with Mr. Dune."

"You were hired at $80 a week for a 40-hour week with one week's vacation and three sick days after a year of service and of course health insurance and $10,000 life insurance from the outset. If my arithmetic is correct, you are currently earning $4,160 a year. I am about to offer you the opportunity to receive a $10,000 bonus and the position of director of security for Courage Farms at a salary of $8,500 a year."

"Wonderful, sir, but what's the catch?" O'Malley's father periodically preached at the supper table to be careful of anyone who offers too good a deal.

Gen. Ulmer held up a clear plastic case containing a hypodermic syringe and other paraphernalia. "I have here two vials loaded with the Viking Drug. This is an experimental drug O'Malley being developed for the United States Army. The lab work shows there are no adverse side effects from the Viking Drug. But I don't have to tell you that life is filled with unexpected and unanticipated risks."

O'Malley interrupted his monologue. "Did Mr. Dune take the drug?"

Furious Jim, who had little experience with underlings questioning him, seethed, but managed to force a smile. He clenched his teeth and said, "No. He didn't take the drug. Whoever is first will go down in the history books. I am offering you the opportunity to be first?"

"That's the price for the bonus and the big promotion?"

"That is the price for propelling yourself into a promising career with a bundle of cash in your pocket and a chance to serve your country. What do you say, O'Malley?"

"What's the reason behind doing this now?"

"Unless you accept my offer, I can't tell you." The time left to him to punish Capt. Garrity and to see the fulfillment of his dream to develop a drug that would transform a mediocrity like O'Malley into a fierce fighting man was sliding away. He dreamt of his mother and father last night; he was running across the parade ground at West Point, his smiling mother and father walking hand in hand behind him. He awoke knowing that the end was near.

"Were you and Dr. Jarocewicz arguing over this experiment?" O'Malley asked deciding that he wasn't going to be a guinea pig no matter what the price offered. He needed a job, but he would find another.

"Of course not. I dismissed Jarocewicz because I suspected his loyalty. I have been informed he was in contact with Soviet agents, who are willing to pay millions for the Viking Drug. I anticipate the FBI will arrest Jarocewicz when he reaches his home. I didn't want him arrested at Courage Farms because of the embarrassment that would cause. But his betrayal forces me to jump ahead to try the drug on human subjects." That wasn't true, but sometimes misinformation is a necessary tool in war.

"What happens after I take the drug?"

Fatigue was moving through the General's body and mind. "Over there on that table, there is a leather folder, O'Malley, fetch it here." He shouldn't have used those words. He sounded as though he considered O'Malley a dog, a retriever. A smile flickered across his face at that thought.

The smile unnerved O'Malley; he did what he was told. He knew from Dune that the General was an overbearing bastard who considered enlisted men digits.

"Open the folder, O'Malley. Read the document."

He read it aloud: "I pledge on my honor as an officer of the United States Army, that I will never reveal any information to anyone about the so-called Hero Project or Jaguar One."

"The plan is we will drive to Manhattan to Kips Bay Books and we will press Capt. Ryan Garrity to sign that document or face the consequences."

"What consequences?"

The General nodded to the pistol in the holster at O'Malley's side.

His reaction was immediate, uncontrolled: "What the fuck are you talking about?"

"You wanted to see combat, soldier. Now I'm giving you your chance to fulfill your dream and to serve your country," the General said in the command voice he had used so many times in his career in directing subordinates to undertake missions they dreaded.

"I'm not a soldier any more, General. I don't know what this is all about, but I do know I'm not getting involved, no matter how much money you offer me."

Gen. Ulmer stood, the chair hurtling backwards from his body. "God damn it, you are involved. Now you know about the Hero Drug and the Viking Drug. You can't back out now."

"Yes I can."

"Jesus Christ Almighty," the General screamed. "Consider yourself under arrest. Give me your weapon soldier." He extended his right hand, his left hand on the desk to support himself.

O'Malley shivered. This shriveled up old man was wacky enough to shoot him. He turned without speaking and left the room.

"God damn it. God damn it. You God damn coward," the General shouted after him.

Mrs. Ives came into the office. "Gen. Ulmer is there something I can do?"

"Yes. You are my witness I would never ask any man who served under me to perform an action I would not willingly undertake myself. He slipped off his sports jacket, rolled up his left sleeve and injected himself with the Viking Drug. He put down the syringe, looked at Mrs. Ives. "Order a car for me. I have to go into Manhattan immediately."

"Yessir." She went to her desk. She stood with the phone in hand uncertain of whether to call Dr. Jarocewicz, who must be home by now, or to order the car. Her torturous indecision was interrupted by a gurgling sound. Stepping into the office doorway, she saw Gen. Ulmer staggering towards her, foaming at the mouth, and falling to the floor. She screamed before kneeling beside him to turn him over. His eyes were wide; he wasn't breathing; Gen. Ulmer was dead.
CHAPTER FORTY

A week after Gen. Ulmer's obituary appeared in the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune, the phone rang at the customer desk of Kips Bay Books. Ryan answered.

Mrs. Hanish, secretary for Rudy Engels, public relations director of Oldman's Grand Department Store, was on the line asking Ryan to hold on for Mr. Engels.

A moment later, Engels after wishing Ryan a good morning, asked if he could tell him in confidence that Montgomery Gibson would be announcing the name of the first recipient of The Holyoke and Madison Gibson Award for Heroism by a Retailer at a luncheon on April 22, a Friday.

"Of course," Ryan said, bitterly amused. He anticipated Engels inviting him to the luncheon because of some twisted notion in Gibson's mind that he would care enough about an heroic retailer to take time out of his day to fill the audience.

"We're putting together a panel of speakers. Mr. Gibson thought you would be a perfect candidate. We have a Medal of Honor winner from the retailing community, isn't that marvelous. He'll say a few words about the meaning of the Medal of Honor and then we hope you can recount your experience of being saved by Bobby Reilly from the battlefield in Korea. We're only asking you to speak for five minutes. There will be five speakers including Mr. Gibson so we don't want people dozing off after lunch with too long a program. And of course, people can give only so much time even for something as significant as an important announcement such as this."

"Who are you awarding your gold medal to?"

"Why Bobby Reilly, of course. And if you join us on April 22, Mr. Garrity, you'll discover Mr. Gibson is extending his efforts to recognize Bobby Reilly's heroism beyond the Gibson Award."

"I've never given a speech at a formal luncheon or in an auditorium."

"The trick is to be honest in your remarks, keep them simple, write out your speech, read it aloud, time it and pare it down. Practice, practice, practice, but bring along a copy you can refer to in case you forget your lines. I'm sure you'll do fine. Can we count on you?"

How could he refuse. "Can I bring a guest?"

"Of course. Then I'll expect to see you on Friday, April 22 at 12:30 seated at the head table in Oldman's Grand 15th floor dining room. Your guest, of course, will be in the audience."

Ryan assumed that with Gen. Ulmer certainly buried by now in an oblong box under six feet of earth, Monty Gibson had put his fear of his business being damaged behind him. He checked the clock: 11 AM. He couldn't call Nicky for another hour. He could hardly wait to hear her reaction to Gibson's change of heart.

\---

Ryan was pushing the cash register drawer closed when Dr. Jarocewicz walked into Kips Bay Books just before noon. Mrs. Garmeis was in the Children's Section helping a grandmother select a birthday present for her daughter's daughter. "I saw his obituary in the Times," Ryan said as Dr. Jarocewicz came up to the customer counter.

"Can I say in confidence, good riddance."

"Why are you here, doctor?"

"To clear up any misunderstanding about my involvement in Norman Dune's attack on you."

"He never attacked me, doctor." Ryan's mental guard went up, wondering whether Lt. Hauser had equipped Dr. Jarocewicz with a recording device to entrap him into a casual admission. "If you're here to buy a book, pick one out, pay for it, and leave. And, don't come back again." He didn't say aloud what he thought: 'Unless you are looking for trouble.'

From the expression on Ryan's face, Dr. Jarocewicz knew he was implying a lethal reaction to any subsequent visit. He knew from Ryan's psychological profile and military record how dangerous he could be in combat or when provoked. He assumed, just as the police did, that this book seller was a murderer. He wanted to sound pleasant, perhaps friendly, but there was a tremble in his voice: "You'll never see me again, Capt. Garrity, unless you come after me." That sounded awful. He wished he had phrased in a more neutral way. "I came here today to tell you that I have a deep feeling of guilt over everything that's happened. I must admit that I told the General in one of our many conversations that if I could draw a serum from Capt. Ryan that would emulate his character, I could create a soldier who was brave without being stupidly fearless, who was calm under the worst of circumstances, and who was fierce in a fight." He didn't add unforgiving, as he did to the General, or that Ryan had the eyes of a killer. 'The eye,' the General had corrected him and had laughed so hard he had to gasp for breath. Ryan started to speak, but Dr. Jarocewicz held up his hand to tell him, "My great sorrow was in telling the General that your Achilles Heel was a fear of losing your good eye."

Ryan stared at him, a cold hatred for the doctor consuming him, because no matter what this soft man with his phony pleasant demeanor said in explanation he shared the guilt of sending Norman Dune to blind him and the consequences that flowed from that evil act. "Please leave. I don't have a security force to call, doctor. I don't imagine I need one. Do you?"

"Of course not, Capt. Garrity. I intended this as a courtesy call. A clearing up of accounts. I didn't want you to misconstrue my involvement with Gen. Ulmer. I never liked the man from the start. I just wanted a source of funding for my research."

"A drug that takes the meaning out of courage."

"I don't want to insult you, Capt. Garrity, but you are viewing the potential of what drugs can accomplish from the perspective of a traditional military mind." He successfully avoided saying 'a limited military mind.' "Honor doesn't enter into modern warfare. Ask anyone who has been visited by the agony of a nuclear bomb or any of its smaller deadly cousins. If I can enable our soldiers to go into combat without fear, but with considerably more aggressiveness then I think I have served my country."

"And made the Medal of Honor and the Silver Star and whatever meaningless."

Dr. Jarocewicz was accustomed to keeping his research as secret as possible so he wasn't tempted to tell Ryan about the Viking Drug nor his intention now to move his research into potions that could increase the performance of athletes, their strength, their speed, their endurance. He realized the broader potential of the potion when Zenna ran across the street with a speed that was breathtaking. That was 17 years ago in 1938. The use of the drug for civilian purposes resurfaced in his consciousness when he read a confidential report that Russian athletes could attribute some of their Gold Medals in the 1952 Olympics to certain drugs. "Let me ask you a question that will bedevil the thinking man in generations to come when scientists produce performance-enhancing drugs: Should we continue awarding medals if any man can take a pill for courage and strength."

Ryan with a welling of disgust for Dr. Jarocewicz said, "Until I met you, I would have said without hesitation that a medal should be awarded for the act of heroism no matter the man's character or background. Now I understand why  
Gen. Ulmer was so frenetic about blocking Bobby Reilly from getting any medals."

"The General was a purist. I am a pragmatic. What difference does it make if a man acts bravely because of say the Hero Drug or a bottle of whiskey or fear of the embarrassment of being called a coward? Or come to think of it, by acting automatically because of rigid training. Wasn't that what you were trying to do when you drilled the motley crew the General gathered for Jaguar One."

"I never thought of it that way. I wish I had never met you doctor. You are an ill-wind that is dirtying the very air I breathe."

Dr. Jarocewicz smirked, "What's the counterpart to that cliché? I believe it's an ill wind blows somebody good."

"Why don't you leave, doctor, before I call security."

Dr. Jarocewicz laughed, a nervous impulse in the face of danger. He said in parting, "Before I go I should tell you that I talked to Montgomery Gibson after Gen. Ulmer's timely death. I believe he is in the process of reconsidering Bobby Reilly as the recipient of his gold medal."
CHAPTER FORTY ONE

Jerry O'Shea followed Ryan into the detectives' squad room where Lt. Hauser and Det. Kilgallan sat chatting, leaning back in ancient office chairs with their feet up on a worn wooden desk stained from decades of spilt coffee, ketchup, and mustard.

As he swung his feet to the floor, Det. Kilgallan said, "Look who's here. The nigger lover."

O'Shea shook his head and smirked at the cop.

Overcoming the bristle of his initial reaction, Lt. Hauser forced a smile as he shook O'Shea's hand. "Is there some reason you're accompanying Mr. Garrity today?" he said immediately, their hands still joined.

Speaking with the trace of a brogue that newspaper stories reported as more distinctive as St. Patrick's Day approached and in summations to any jury laced with New York Irish, O'Shea said, "I've know Ryan since he was ten years old. Met him the first time I walked into Garrity's Ice Cream Parlor in what year was that Ryan? Nineteen-thirty-three. I heard they made the best banana splits in New York City then, and I can testify they still do."

"Is that why you're here today, counselor, pushing the banana splits at Garrity's Ice Cream Parlor?" Lt. Hauser asked raising his eyebrows and putting a theatrically phony smile on his face.

"I tasted your detective work in the Ben Washington case so when Ryan told me that you and your esteemed associate were pursuing him, I suggested that it might be wise to escort him to any meeting you called." Ben Washington, an 18-year-old black commercial laundry worker, had confessed to raping and strangling a pretty white Columbia University coed in Central Park four years ago after 48 straight hours of questioning without sleep, with one cup of water, but no food. The homicide detectives took turns going over and over Ben's version of the night of the rape/murder. Although Ben had a pretty good alibi, he agreed to sign anything they wanted for a hamburger with fried onions and a coke. Det. Kilgallan fetched the snack. Six months later, O'Shea had the entire courtroom audience, including the judge, the jury, and prosecutor, roaring with laughter in his cross examination of Det. Kilgallan's trip to a nearby all-night diner and his conversation with the counterman about his order for the hamburger with fried onions and a coke. The jury returned a not guilty verdict and outside the courthouse, O'Shea held a press conference with Ben Washington and his mother on either side of him to express his sympathy for the victim's family and his outrage that racist cops, blinded by his client's color, had ignored leads to other suspects allowing a killer to roam free.

"This isn't your kind of a case, O'Shea. Our leading suspect is white," Det. Kilgallan said.

"Come on. Let's get this over with," Lt. Hauser said. He led them downstairs to a back room.

After a half hour of sitting around in silence, a light was turned on revealing an adjoining room behind a two-way mirror. Five men, each in a neat blue suit, each holding a gray fedora in his right hand, one was unshaven, his hair uncombed, and appeared exhausted, lined up against a yellowish wall. Lt. Hauser and his sidekick, Det. Kilgallan, stood behind Ryan leaning over the chair in which he sat.

"One of those men has been identified by the dog walker as the murderer of Norman Dune," Lt. Hauser said. "We're hoping you might make our case even more solid by telling us if you might have seen one of those men on the night of the murder or maybe walking around the neighborhood around the time of the murder."

"Pick him out and let's get this over with," Det. Kilgallan said.

An uneasy sensation flowed through Ryan; not a fear that he would blurt out his own guilt, but that these two fearsome detectives would railroad that poor slob, who would be the obvious suspect, just to close the case. How could he remain silent then? Jerry O'Shea had warned him when his father had taken a day off from the ice cream parlor to go with him to the downtown law office of O'Brien, Polsky & Gugliermo that Hauser and Kilgallan were capable of remarkable efforts to force confessions and pressure witnesses. "I've never seen any of those men before," Ryan said turning to Lt. Hauser.

"That's disappointing," Lt. Hauser said. "Perhaps you could do a process of elimination for us. Tell us which of those men you are certain you have never seen before?

"Perhaps if you put the uniforms on the patrol officers in the lineup, Mr. Garrity would recognize any cops on the beat," O'Shea said.

"We're wasting our time on this bozo," Det. Kilgallan said.

O'Shea smiled. "A feint is never a waste of time when you have nothing else to go on. You learned something today and we learned something today."

"And what did we learn counselor?"

"That my client is not easily tricked or led into false witness, lieutenant. We'll be going now."

"And what did you learn O'Shea."

"That you two are like a cook who has one recipe and as I said, I have tasted it before, Det. Kilgallan."

Lt. Hauser walked them through the station house to the front steps and down to the sidewalk. "We wrap up this case you won't be seeing me any more. So let's shake goodbye as friends," he said to Ryan.

O'Shea laughed. "Do you know what day today is Ryan?"

He shook his head, then the question jogged his memory: "April first."

"Yes April Fool's Day. The lieutenant here is quite the joker. I'm surprised the fellows in the line up were able to keep straight faces."

"You are a very cynical man, Mr. O'Shea."

"Yes. Do you think that's a sin we need to confess, Lt. Hauser?"

"I would have to give that some thought, Mr. O'Shea, but I do know that lying and murder are definitely high on both the Lord's list and mine as serious sins that could haunt a man in his dreams and in his day dreams. My work shows me that the guilty always feel better when they confess."

O'Shea took Ryan by the arm to encourage him to move away from the lieutenant and the station house. He didn't look back, but he sensed the homicide cop was watching them as they walked up the street towards Third Avenue. "Let's get away from here before he decides to arrest you."

"I thought he had a suspect."

"Yes. You. He's playing games with you. Trying to break you down. Hoped you would say, please don't arrest an innocent man and collapse in tears saying, I did it. I did it. Just like in the movies," O'Shea said.

"Then you think I did it too."

"You're innocent until proven guilty. And because I'm your lawyer, they know they better have an ironclad case before they bring you in. I'm going to repeat what I told you in my office. Don't ever talk to those guys without me being present. If they bring you in for questioning, the only thing you say is, 'I have a lawyer his name is Jerome O'Shea.' That's the answer to every question they ask. If you think you've seen the last of Hermann Hauser then you're a gullible fool."
CHAPTER FORTY TWO

Monty Gibson bit his lower lip as he stepped to the podium to look out at his 300 guests in the Oldman's Grand Department Store dining room. "Thank you so much for coming here today. I know everyone is very busy and wants to get back to work and shopping as soon as possible." The shopping drew a burst of laughter. "My darling wife, Jenny, took time out from her busy, busy schedule at NYU to be here today. I didn't have to beg her, that's how important she considered what I am, what we are doing here today: honoring a hero with whom I had the honor to work."

'What bullshit,' Ryan thought. Recently, he had begun noticing the thickening of Nicky's waist and the swelling of her breasts. Last night, as he watched her come naked from the bathroom after washing herself off, he realized her nearly flat stomach had grown a bump. She was pregnant. As he listened to Monty, he wondered whether he or Monty or some other unknown man was the father.

Monty told the audience that he had reproductions of two great paintings, Winslow Homer's "The Gulf Stream" and Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks", in his private dining room so he could reflect on them and to use them to open the conversation with guests during a lunch or dinner. "They are two forms of loneliness—the man facing death and straining away from it; the man and woman looking straight ahead, not speaking, seemingly lost in their own thoughts. But their fingers are touching."

Ryan thought, 'Are you thinking of your wife or Nicky in the fantasy of fingering?'

"I always wanted to be a hero. America entered the First World War just two weeks before my thirteenth birthday. That atrocious war ended too quickly for me to grow old enough to venture onto a battlefield to test my mettle. Just before World War II began fate intervened. I seriously injured my left leg playing polo on Long Island when I tumbled out of the saddle and under the hooves of an opponent's horse. I was told I was lucky I didn't lose my leg, which has pained me ever since, but worst of all prevented me once again from being tested in combat."

Ryan thought, 'What an astonishingly dumb thing to say. And he says it over and over.'

Monty continued: "Among the speakers who will address you today are three veterans of combat in our last three major wars. Mark Rosenbauer, a retailer from a family like mine, who is president of Rosenbauer's Department Store in San Diego. Mark won his Congressional Medal of Honor in France in World War I when he was just 20 years old."

The audience interrupted him with a standing ovation for Rosenbauer. Monty turned to clap in Rosenbauer's direction. He raised his hands for silence and as soon as everyone returned to their seats, he continued: "And we have on my left, Master Sergeant Bull Heydecker who was awarded a Bronze Star for Valor in the Korean War. And next to him, Ryan Garrity who won two Silver Stars; the first in World War II, the second in the Korean War. And seated right here on my right, between Mr. Rosenbauer and me, is Mrs. Mary Begley Reilly, the mother of the hero we are here to honor today."

Ryan smiled, addressing Monty in his mind: 'I'll bet you were afraid to keep her off the dais.'

"First let me announce what you expected to hear: the first Gibson's Gold Medal for heroism is being awarded, posthumously to Robert (Bobby) Reilly. Bobby, who worked with us at Oldman's Grand, performed heroically fighting the Reds in Korea and then returned home to continue his heroic acts, giving his life in January to rescue a young woman from an oncoming subway train. Our medal goes to Bobby Reilly for that unselfish act. This first gold medal carries with it a $10,000 award, which will be paid to Bobby's widow, Teresa McHugh Reilly. When Bobby's son and only child, Steve, grows older Oldman's Grand will be honored to pay his tuition to a college of his choice and to offer him a career in retailing if he so desires."

He was interrupted again by a standing ovation with several shipping department employees whistling to show their pleasure.

"And as the saying goes, that's not all folks. Some of you are aware that I was on the original committee formed to urge Ike to run for president and of course the newspapers had to tell the world that I made major contributions, in the form of time and money, to the I Like Ike presidential campaign. A number of political reporters found it hard to believe that I wanted nothing in return, but good government, that I swore to myself I would never ask that great man to do me a favor in return for the little I did. But I must confess that confronted with the great injustice done to Bobby Reilly in a bureaucratic snafu denying him the opportunity to be considered for the Congressional Medal of Honor, I decided to go against my own grain. I have called someone in the White House, I can't say who, and I have called several significant someones in the Congress to right this terrible wrong."

The audience was puzzled, not understanding what he was talking about. Then Rudy Engels stood to applaud. Other Oldman's Grand employees took the hint to stand, clapping their hands. The rest of the audience rose to join the applause.

Monty raised his hands. "Thank you, thank you. I'm sure I can count on your support. But now let's listen for a few more minutes to a short list of speakers whose words will give an understanding of my comments about Bobby Reilly and the Congressional Medal of Honor. First you will hear from that great American hero, Mark Rosenbauer."

As Rosenbauer spoke proclaiming that he got the medal, but so many thousands of others who faced death and destruction on the battlefield deserved to be equally honored. Of course his medal made him proud, but sad as well, remembering the young men who died around him, those whose bodies were shattered, those whose minds were scarred by horrible memories of combat.

Mrs. Reilly was so overcome with the memory of her son that she was unable to deliver the little speech she had written. Bull Heydecker described Bobby's rescue of his wounded comrades and his attempt to start the process of awarding the Medal of Honor to Bobby. He didn't identify the higher up who squelched his recommendation.

For the past three weeks, Ryan had wrestled with the quandary of using the public platform of this luncheon to raise the issue of whether a Medal of Honor should be awarded to a soldier whose courage was boosted by a potion injected into his veins. Listening to Rosenbauer express the thought that while medals went to a few almost every frontline infantryman deserved to be equally honored, Ryan decided he didn't want to spoil the sweet memory that Mary Reilly and the widow and son would savor of Bobby Reilly as a hero.

When he arose to speak, he recalled Bobby's unselfish courage in rescuing him and three other wounded soldiers. "I wish you success in your campaign for a Medal of Honor for Bobby Reilly, Monty. Bobby Reilly was a frontline infantryman; I must say there can be no higher accolade."
CHAPTER FORTY THREE

Nicky arrived at Kips Bay Books just after one o'clock carrying a brown bag from the White Blossom Restaurant across the street. Mrs. Garmeis and Ryan were at the counter bagging books and ringing up sales for two sets of customers, a mother and her 11-year-old girl and an elderly couple. Other customers were browsing the shelves throughout the store.

She waited until Ryan had finished with his sale. Another customer with a cheerful expression was walking towards the counter with four books in her hands. Nicky held up the brown bag. "Lunch! I'm going to steal him away from you for a quick bite, Mrs. Garmeis."

With surprising vehemence, Mrs. Garmeis said, "As you can see, we're very busy today Miss Hancock." She had grown to dislike Nicky for the interference she caused in the operation of the bookstore. Ryan was constantly running out to meet this woman burdening her with the business he should have been running and looking after. She had become so frustrated that last week she called Laura Garrity, his grandmother, to express her concern that Ryan was neglecting Kips Bay Books in favor of visiting this woman for whatever reason. Laura said she would talk to him. She did. The following day, he stopped speaking to Mrs. Garmeis and the usually happy store was icy with resentment.

"I'm sorry Mrs. Garmeis but some things in life are more important than selling books," Nicky said.

Ryan turned to stare at Mrs. Garmeis. He had to restrain himself from firing her on the spot. He knew his grandmother loved her too much to allow that. Allow wasn't the right word. He couldn't go against the deal with his grandparents to keep Mrs. Garmeis employed in the store, she cherished as much as they did, for as long as she wanted a job. "Take the counter. I don't know how long I'll be."

"We've already had lunch," Mrs. Garmeis said, her voice weak with the fear of the anger she saw on his face. She hadn't meant to say that, to sound as though she were in charge.

He slipped past her, suppressing an urge to shove her into the counter. He could never do that to a woman, especially one he had known from childhood.

The mother and daughter, Mrs. Garmeis was waiting on, stood uncomfortably watching the exchange, feeling the displeasure on exhibit before them.

"Hi Ryan," the happy woman with the four books said to him.

"Mrs. Garmeis will take care of you," he said. He walked to the rear of the store, through the Garden Room and onto the backyard patio with Nicky following. He turned to kiss her on the lips.

"That's a relief. You were really steaming in there. I thought you were going to fire her."

"I can't. My grandparents wouldn't hear of it. But Mrs. Garmeis would dump me on the spot if she could."

"Maybe she'll quit."

"This place is the meaning of her life."

"I'm sorry, but it's too chilly for me out here. Could we go inside and maybe you could dig up a bottle of Mystery Night wine and we could talk and maybe have something to eat if you're not too full."

He fetched two wine glasses, plates, knives, forks, spoons, and several bowls for the Chinese food Nicky had brought. He uncorked a bottle of white Bordeaux.

"The day of the egg," she said, unloading containers of egg drop soup, egg foo young and egg rolls from the brown bag.

He poured the wine. They touched glasses. "To courage when it counts," he said, ignoring a customer who had wandered to the back of the store within sight of their bookstore picnic.

After sipping her wine, she said, "Was that toast about Monty? I had dinner with him at La Flor last night. He wanted to me to celebrate his birthday with him."

"Where was his darling wife, Jenny?" He sounded spiteful. He felt jealous. He would have to control himself.

"Now there's the basis of a good plot. Jenny is leaving him for a Spanish poet who lives in Argentina. They met at one of her innumerable conferences on Chaucer in England."

"Then why was she at the luncheon yesterday."

"The plot grows more intense. She fondled him upon waking; she fucked him to celebrate his birthday; and she laughed at him when she said goodbye at the luncheon."

"He told you all that?" he asked, offended by a man who would describe his sex life with his wife to another woman, or man for that matter, and by Nicky's use of the word fuck.

"How else would I know? I lie when I write. All writers do. That's the nature of fiction. But I'm getting to the best part. Monty actually took my hand to tell me that Jenny must have sensed his love for me even though he tried to deny it to himself. He asked me if I would marry him after his divorce."

"That would solve a lot of problems," Ryan said, a bitter reflection on his assumption that she was pregnant.

She froze with a forkful of egg foo young halfway to her mouth. "What do you mean? What problems?"

He failed to come up with a quick response that wouldn't make him seem envious of Monty or wimpy, whining over his suspicion she was pregnant with the question outstanding of who was the father? In the silence, she glared at him, moving from lightheartedness towards anger, a devious answer occurred to him: "I'm playing my role as the Cheshire Cat."

"Are you going to disappear on me? Am I going to be left alone with the memory of your lame cliché: That would solve a lot of problems." She poured herself a second glass of wine.

He found a way to broach his fear of that soft, arrogant and rich bum taking her away from him: "I'm not a good loser."

"It would be so nice if you would make sense."

"I love you. I know I can't give you everything in the world like Monty..."

Her face brightened. "You've given me more in two months than any man has even dreamed of giving me ever. More than all the men I've known collectively. I have a little oral test for you with the questions being four words and the answers a single word. I'll ask the questions. The first: Are you a murderer?"

"What is this? If I say yes, I get the chair and if I say no maybe I'm lying."

"Give me the answer."

"No," he said remembering the lesson Sister Catherine taught him in the sixth grade. She asked him a question based on the last night's homework. He stood beside his desk as required when called upon. He didn't know the right answer. She strode the short distance along the aisle. Stood close to him and asked, 'Garrity did you do your homework?' He replied, yes Sister. She countered by slamming her open right hand across his face, followed by her left hand across the other side of his face. After three or four full strokes of left/right, she was breathing heavily; she was wrinkled and old so that the effort tired her. After catching her breathe, she said, 'Tell me the truth now Ryan and I'll stop hitting you. Did you do your homework?' No Sister, I didn't. 'You liar,' she said resuming the back and forth slams; they weren't slaps, for another five full strokes until she exhausted herself. Ryan had learned a lesson for life: If he told a lie, he stuck to it.

"Next question: Would you move upstate?"

"I'm assuming that's a shorthand question for 'Would you move upstate with me to Syracuse?' My answer is yes."

She slipped out of her chair, came around the table to sit on his lap and kiss him, a deep lingering kiss, which the browsing customer watched with fascination. "Next question: Will you marry me?"

That cleared up the enigma of the father. He grinned at his conclusion and her proposal. "I never expected a woman, a beautiful, sexual, accomplished woman to ask me a question like that, but my single word answer is yes."

He kissed her, knowing generally what she would say next.

"Since you gave the right answer, I'll tell you why I emphasized eggs in our 'lunch. Egg drop soup, egg foo young, and an egg roll. I wanted to say something clever spinning off my egg, but the four letter answer I can give you is: Pregnant with your child."

"Then you shouldn't be drinking wine should you?"

"No more for the duration after today, but I'm going to have a third glass of wine to celebrate this life-changing event and then I'm going to take you upstairs for some fantastic loving. I can't tell you how much you have turned me on."
CHAPTER FORTY FOUR

Leaving Nicky in a profoundly deep sleep, Ryan went downstairs to the bookstore just before four o'clock. Mrs. Garmeis was at the counter with three customers lined up to pay for their books and several more browsing amongst the shelves. He joined her in ringing up sales and bagging or wrapping the books. They didn't speak to one another. At four, she looked up at the clock and slid past him to fetch her topcoat and handbag from the back.

As Ryan watched Mrs. Garmeis walking towards the front of the store, her face fixed with a rocky expression of annoyance, he reflected on what a royal pain she had become in reaction to his casual care of Kips Bay Books in the few months since Nicky had come into his life, while at this moment he saw in her a solution. She passed without looking at him, without her usual goodbye of 'have a good evening, Ryan.' As she opened the front door, Ryan said, excuse me to his customer, to catch up to Mrs. Garmeis, taking her by the elbow. "Could you wait just a few minutes? I need to talk to you about something very important."

Her face dropped in fear, her lips trembling.

He guided her back to the counter and shouted to the customers among the shelves. "Closing early today, folks. In five minutes."

"I'm sorry Ryan. I know you're the boss," she said shaken by the assumption he was about to fire her."

"Just go back and take your coat off, Mrs. Garmeis. I have something to talk to you about and I don't want any distractions."

A regular stopped Mrs. Garmeis as she went towards the back. "Anything wrong Mollie?"

She shook her head, but tears were streaming down her face. She continued to the back.

With the store cleared and the door sign turned to 'closed,' Ryan went back to the Garden Room where Mrs. Garmeis sat slumped in an easy chair, still in her coat, a handkerchief in her hand.

"I've worked in Kips Bay Books for 22 years. When Bren and Laura had Kips Bay, it was the happiest place on earth; I looked forward to coming to work."

"And now?"

"I'm sorry. I don't like to say this, but I can't stand your indifference to Kips Bay. You don't care about the books or the customers or me."

Kips Bay. He never realized before, but Mrs. Garmeis never called it the business or the store, always Kips Bay. He felt terrible seeing her tears, hearing her dismaying view of his relationship to Kips Bay Books. He understood, an understanding fostered by his intention to leave. He knelt beside her chair. He put his arms around her.

"Don't feel sorry for me. Unwelcome change comes into every life. I have to face this. I couldn't go on with my feelings all twisted up. I'll get another job somewhere. Don't worry about me." She pushed him away.

"You're right about me and Kips Bay Books. This was just a stopping off place until I found out what I wanted to do, Mrs. Garmeis. Another change has come into my life. Nicky and I are getting married; we're moving to Syracuse. I'll get some kind of a job up there or start a little business of some sort. But I want you to stay at Kips Bay Books for as long as you want, forever for that matter. You're the one who makes this place work."

She was confused. "You just can't leave a business to operate on its own," she managed to say, the words coming out like an admonition.

"Here's the deal." He had thought about it while lying awake upstairs with Nicky snoring beside him. "You pay yourself twice the salary you're making now; you run Kips Bay Books any way you want. At the end of the year if there are any profits, we split them. You might need to hire help. If you do so, then that's a business expense deducted from the gross before the profits are figured. I'm not going to charge you any rent for the store, but I am going to rent out the apartments above the store. How does that sound?"

"My heart's pounding so much I can't think. I was sure you were going to fire me. Now you're giving me Kips Bay?"

"No. I'm letting you run it. When you retire, I get it back. I might want to run it again or one of my cousins might want it. My grandparents had a vision of Kips Bay Books extending as far into the future as there were Garritys to run it. What do you say?"

"I'm going to have to talk to my husband and a lawyer."

He had to laugh. "You just demonstrated how much of a better businessman you are than I am. I probably would jump at an offer like I just gave you. Well, Nicky and I are moving to Syracuse on June 1 or thereabouts. Let me know by then. No. Today is April 22. I'll give you two weeks and then I'll either find someone else to take over the store and maybe you can work for them or I'll close the place."

"You couldn't do that," she said, reaching out to touch his arm.

"Now it's up to you Mrs. Garmeis. Of course I'll call my grandparents to ask them what they would like, but I'm not missing out on my chance for happiness because of a bookstore."

"I don't have to talk to anyone. It's a deal. I trust you. We'll work out the details."

"We already have. Let's shake on it."

She felt awkward; she had never shaken a man's hand before. As she did, she decided that she would keep the wine and cheese for the Mystery Nights. The regulars really liked that change.
CHAPTER FORTY FIVE

The week after he retired from the New York City Police Department, Hermann Hauser set out for Oneida Lake from his steamingly-hot apartment in Brooklyn. He told Ronnie Kilgallan at his retirement party in Blister's, the East Harlem bar, favored by Manhattan East Homicide detectives for a quiet drink or a late night pizza, that the first venture of his golden years would be a homicide detective's holiday.

"What are you talking about?" Kilgallan asked amid the uproar of the juke box and several dozen half-drunk cops laughing, shouting, and talking almost in shouts to be heard over the noise.

Hauser leaned close to him, "I'm paying one last visit to our old friend Ryan Garrity, a parting shot at closing the Norman Dune file."

In a brain fogged by three boilermakers, Kilgallan felt a touch of concern. For the past five years, on every anniversary of the killing of Dune, Lt. Hauser had dialed Ryan Garrity's number in Syracuse to stay in touch, as he said, then asking whether he slept well at night. Confession was good for the soul, especially for Catholics, he would say. In the first telephone conversation that Lt. Hauser brought up the confessional, Ryan asked him whether he had confessed to extorting a false admission of murder from Ben Washington. "You and Washington share the same stain, guilty as sin, guilty of murder," Lt. Hauser said. "Stick to the question, have you confessed what you did to Washington to your priest." "I'm a Lutheran. I pray directly to God. I talk directly to my God." In the next four annual conversations when Lt. Hauser raised the issue of confession, Ryan would respond, "God knows everything. Ask Him next time you have a dialogue." Lt. Hauser would say, "I know you are guilty." And Ryan would slam down the phone, an ending that would be an acid bubble in Lt. Hauser's stomach whenever the memory popped into his mind in the passing year.

A contact in the Syracuse Police Department called Lt. Hauser just after the Fourth of July weekend two years ago to tell him that Ryan had opened a hot dog stand in Sylvan Beach on the east end of Oneida Lake and had bought a beautiful summer home in Constantia, another community on the lake.

In setting out from Brooklyn as the heat was building at 10 o'clock on a Monday morning, Hauser had three addresses in his red file folder for Garrity's houses on the North Side of Syracuse and on the lakeside in Constantia and for his hot dog stand in Sylvan Beach. He decided on the simplest route: the New York State Thruway to Exit 33, straight up Route 13 to the motel room he reserved on Main Street in Sylvan Beach. He assumed Garrity would be at his hot dog stand in August. If not, he would check out the house in Constantia, ask the neighbors what they knew about him and do the same in Syracuse. Build heat on the bum. The cracking point for murderers with guilty consciences was unknown to science, but experience had shown Hauser that every perpetrator had one. He would have liked to have done a similar canvass of Garrity's neighbors and acquaintances every year on the anniversary of Norman Dune's death, but that was a February day, a time of deep snows in Syracuse. The NYPD wouldn't authorize or underwrite a trip to Syracuse on a cold case without some bit of hot new information. And, he couldn't do it on his own time without risking his shield, although he was sorely tempted.

Garrity's Sausages & Cream was a short walk from Hauser's motel. The college girl on the motel desk told Hauser that it was a great place to have a Krainerwurst with French Fries and a cold pint in the beer garden overlooking the sandy beach on the edge of Oneida Lake. As he was walking out the door, she called after him, "If you're lucky you might see the Northern Lights. Sometimes we get them in late August."

Hauser was too tired after six and a half hours in the car to wander around planting ill will against Garrity. There was no table service so he looked over the menu posted in big red letters behind the counter: hot dogs, kielbasa, Krainerwurst, French Fries, coleslaw, Congress Beer & Ale on tap, coke and root beer. Frozen custard was sold at a separate counter. "Give me a Krainerwurst, French Fries, coleslaw and a pint of ale."

"Nicky's delight," the kid behind the counter called out.

The meal was handed to Hauser on a round red metal tray. He ate in the soft warmth of the evening, becoming comfortably drowsy from the drive and the food and the ale. The lake extended into the distance. It would be nice to come here after dark to see the stars. He asked the teenager who retrieved the tray and his empty mug and swept away the detritus of his meal if she knew what time Ryan Garrity came to work in the morning.

"Probably ten o'clock in time for the noon rush."

"What time does he leave?"

"You a cop?" she said pausing to scan him.

"How can you tell?"

"My dad's a detective in Syracuse."

"I just got off the job. I was the chief of homicide in New York City." That was an exaggeration. He ran after murderers only on the East Side of Manhattan."

"Wow," she said and walked away.

"What time does he leave?" he called after her.

"Maybe four o'clock, maybe when he feels like it," she said over her shoulder.

\---

In the morning, a cool breeze blowing off the lake, birds chirping, cars rolling along Main Street, Hauser strolled back to Garrity's Sausages and Cream.

Ryan was at the counter, laughing, talking, taking orders for coffee and pastries from customers in shorts and bathing suits. He became grim when he spotted Hauser on line.

"Coffee, a cheese Danish, and some of your time," Hauser said.

Ryan put two cups of coffee and two Danish pastries on a tray and told a young woman in a white apron over her shorts to take over for him. "Come on Javert, we'll have this out back," he said picking up the tray.

They settled around a small table next to the beach. "Javert? The name's Hauser and you know it," Hauser said, taking off his glasses to wipe them clean with a Kleenex.

"Nicky calls you Javert."

"Why?"

"Aren't you familiar with Inspector Javert in Les Miserables?"

"Oh yeah. I saw the movie. I've got a big head and kind of double chin, but I don't look like Charles Laughton."

"You remind her of the character who won't let the innocent man go, not the actor."

"Correct me if I'm wrong, but the man Charles Laughton was after was guilty, just like you."

"No Jean Valjean was an ex-convict. I've never been to jail not even for stealing a loaf of bread. But tell me, what are you doing here?" Ryan's heart was pounding with the fear that Lt. Hauser had found something or manufactured something he could use as a reason to arrest him.

Hauser showed his big teeth in a broad grin. "I came bearing good news. I got my 30 years in and retired from the job last week."

"Are you here to tell me you're not going to bother me any more?"

"I'm sure every once in a while someone from the squad will be checking in with you to see if your conscience has kicked in and you're ready to help close the case."

Ryan's first impulse was to ask what Hauser was going to do in retirement, but he restrained himself. He had no pleasant feelings toward this reincarnation of Javert; he just wanted him gone from his life.

Hauser sipped his coffee and leaned across the small table. He said in a low voice, as though shielding the words from being overheard. "Between you and me, did you do it the way I envisioned it?"

Ryan looked into his eyes and said, "Honestly, no."

Hauser sat back. He smiled. "Not only are you a killer, you're a liar."

"In the sixth grade I had a teacher named Sister Catherine who taught me a lesson about lying and telling the truth I have never forgotten."

"And what was that lesson?"

Ryan remembered his face being slammed from side to side after admitting he lied. He laughed and came up with a new interpretation of the experience: "Don't trust anyone who wants you to change your story."

Hauser smirked. He said, "So how's the wife. I hear she bought you a new house on the lake here." That was a guess. Hauser had read that Nicky's third book, another best seller, was being made into a movie.

"You'll love her next book. It's based on a kind of dumb cop with big teeth and a double chin, who won't let go of his groundless belief that this rather handsome war veteran killed a creepy guy who came around to threaten him. The story raises the question of real innocence and artificial innocence. The artificial kind is the guilty man who is presumed innocent until convicted."

"So the point of the book is our war hero falls under artificial innocence because the dumb cop has an accurate hunch but can't come up with the evidence for a conviction."

"A pretty good plot, huh?"

"But the war hero must suffer from a guilty conscience and maybe bad dreams."

"Nicky and I have knocked that back and forth. Her conclusion was that it is better to suffer a guilty conscience and nightmares in pleasant surroundings than in a cage. Take your time finishing your coffee, Hauser. Maybe I'll see you next year. Right now I've got a business to run and a life to live."

THE END

About the author

Kenneth C. Crowe was a journalist for 40 years including 36 at Newsday. From 1976 to 1999, he covered labor for Newsday and New York Newsday.

His novels include THE JYNX, THE DREAM DANCER, OOOEELIE, THE HERO, THE TRUCKERS, THE ABSCONDER, and BEN CONNOLLY in the PARIS COMMUNE.

In addition, he is the author of two nonfiction books: COLLISION/How the Rank and File Took Back the Teamsters and AMERICA FOR SALE/An alarming look at how foreign money is buying our country.

Crowe won an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship in 1974 to study foreign investment in the United States. He was a member of the Newsday investigative team whose work won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal.

Website: www.kennethccrowe.com

Blog: www.kennethcrowe.blogspot.com

If you enjoyed THE HERO, I would appreciate you writing a brief review and rating it on the website from which you ordered it. And, please encourage your friends and relatives to read it too.

