That night LuEllen and I drove the station wagon out to the Holiday Inn, which had the trendiest bar and best dining room in town. It was also the most expensive. Crossing the park ing lot, I noticed a white BMW parked at the corner of the inn, nudged LuEllen with my elbow, and nodded toward it.

"I like the boat better," she said.

Inside the restaurant a dozen couples were scattered around at other booths and tables, peering at each other in the half-light of little red candle bowls. We raised a few eyebrows when we came in, especially since I was carrying a leather shoulder bag. Men's shoulder bags are not a big fashion along the river. But we needed a place where we could meet with John Smith, Marvel, and Harold, and we also needed a reason to go there. Like drinking.

I finished most of a bottle of wine during dinner and could have gotten thoroughly pissed in the bar afterward if I hadn't been dumping most of the drinks into a planter. We were still building the image: If the rented Chevy was often seen in the parking lot, it was just the drunk painter in the bar, or, if not in the bar, then the dining room. If not either, then probably in the can.

I stopped at a phone on the way out, carrying my shoulder bag.

"On the way," I said.

John had a room on the ground floor. We walked out of the bar toward the parking lot, took a left instead of a right, down an empty hallway, and knocked once on a door that opened instantly. John shut it behind us. Marvel was on the bed, cool as always.

"Whoa," I said when I turned around.

"Sharp-dressed man," John said a little awkwardly. He plucked at the seams of his trousers. "How do I look?"

"Like a thirties nigger from Harlem," said Marvel.

"Supposed to look a little like that," John said. He was wearing a dark blue double-breasted suit with pinstripes, a white shirt, a wine-colored power tie, and slightly pointed black wing tips. The jacket's padded shoulders were a hair too wide, the waist a bit too narrow. The piI de r‚sistance, a toupee with long straight hair, sat on top of his head. It fitted him well and had been combed through with an oily dressing until it shone. He looked sharp, like a subtle parody of a banker. Like a gangster.

"Think you can do it?" I asked.

"Yeah. I been in street politics long enough, and Marvel's backed me up with some people who'll say they know my name. People down in the capital."

"OK. How about-"

Marvel interrupted. "Did you rob Dessusdelit and Ballem and Hill?"

I was ready for it. I glanced at LuEllen, my forehead wrinkling, then back to Marvel. "What?"

"Did you hit the mayor and Ballem and Duane Hill's house?" She was watching me closely, but I can tell a lie.

"No. What the hell are you talking about?" Behind me LuEllen was shaking her head.

"Somebody hit their houses, really fucked them up," John said. "Two nights ago. We thought-"

"Not us," I said. "This could complicate things. If the cops are tearing up the town, looking at new people."

"No, no, they're not," Marvel said. "Matter of fact, we've mostly heard rumors. There hasn't been any official police report. A couple of white boys been picked up and squeezed, but that's about it."

"I don't know," I said. "We'll have to watch it. Can you have your people-"

"Sure. We'll stay in touch," Marvel said. She was still suspicious.

I turned back to John. "How about the rest of it?"

"I called this Brown guy, the landowner. He didn't make any bones about the land being for sale. He sounded pretty anxious; he was also curious about why anybody would want it."

"That's an element in a good con job," I said. "Somebody suddenly sees value where nobody else could see it. It makes them wonder what's going on."

"I hope," John said. He had been taking in my costume and now cracked a smile. "You look like you're in a movie, like an artiste. You oughta dab some paint on your shirt."

"We all look like we're in a movie," I said. "We've gotta be careful not to overdo it."

"You see the Beemer out in the parking lot?"

"Yeah."

"Love that car. It turns the head of every goddamned good-looking woman in Memphis-"

"A small exaggeration," Marvel said.

"I didn't know the power of cars on women," John said, a light in his eye. "I really didn't."

"Just drive carefully," LuEllen said. "That thing is costing us a fortune."

"Did you check Ballem's office?" Marvel asked LuEllen.

"Yeah. Going into the building could be tough. The door is right out in the open. People in small towns keep an eye on strangers. Especially at night."

"This help?" Marvel asked. She tossed a key ring with two keys on it to LuEllen. "The brass one's for the building door, and the other one's for the outer office door. Couldn't get one for Ballem's personal office without asking somebody we were afraid to ask."

"This is great," LuEllen said. "Once I'm inside, I can handle his office."

"When are you going to do it?"

I shrugged. LuEllen hated to give away any kind of security. "Sometime this week probably," I said. I picked up my shoulder bag, opened it on the bed, and took out LuEllen's Nikon F4, along with an instruction book.

"The camera's all set up," she said to John as I handed it over with the book. "The film is loaded, and it's on silent mode. You'll have to focus it when you get there and lock in the exposure." She dipped into my bag and took out another piece of gear. "This is the radio control."

John peeled his coat off, and Marvel moved forward on the bed to peer at the camera. "Show me how to do this, exactly," he said. "I don't want to fuck up."

Small-town people tell a story on themselves, an illustration of their closeness to their neighbors. Folks in small towns don't use the turn signals on their cars, they say, because whoever is behind them knows where they're going to turn.

Longstreet wasn't that small. It was a city, with better than twenty thousand good citizens and a few hundred rummies, bums, and lowlifes. It was not quite big enough to have a real slum, but it did have Oak Hill, which wasn't so much a hill as the back end of the white cemetery. The city also had a lot of middling and a couple of good neighborhoods in both the black and white areas and one upper-middle-class subdivision spread around the Longstreet Golf and Country Club. During our stay a half dozen people mentioned that two black families lived out by the club: a doctor and a veterinarian.

One thing Longstreet didn't have was apartment buildings. Most of the town's apartments were in the business district, above stores. That was a problem.

When we left the Holiday Inn, we went straight back to the boat and changed. Gym shoes and jeans. LuEllen wore a deep red long-sleeved blouse, and I put on a long-sleeved navy blue polo shirt with a crushable white tennis hat. When we got close to the target, I'd pull off the hat and stick it in my pocket.

We'd put the computers out of sight, but now I needed them and got down the portable IBM clone and a piece of gear called a Laplink. With the Laplink, I could dump the contents of one computer's hard disk to the hard disk in the portable. The whole works fitted in a black nylon bag that looked like a briefcase.

"Ready?" LuEllen asked. She was carrying the leather shoulder bag I'd had the camera in. It looked better on her than it did on me.

"Let's go."

"Don't try to hide when we get to the door," she said. "Don't look around; don't get up next to the wall; don't touch me; don't stand too close to me. Try to slump a little bit. Look tired."

"All right."

The night was hot, and the flying insects were fluttering up from the weeds around the marina into town. The streets were well lit; we walked from one pool of orange sodium-vapor light to the next. We passed one man, a black man, who nodded and disappeared around a corner.