Thunt! The sound of a silenced thirty-eight firing through a paper bag.

Kruger was spun around and slammed into the corner between two windows on which "Cuban Imports" was written backward. He stared at Jonathan with total astonishment.

Jonathan watched him narrowly, expecting a movement toward him.

Kruger lifted his hands, palms up, with a touching gesture of "Why?"

Jonathan considered firing again.

For two terribly long seconds, Kruger remained there, as though nailed to the wall.

Jonathan began to smart with discomfort. "Oh, come on!"

And Kruger slid slowly down the wall as death dimmed his eyes and set them in an infinity focus, the repulsive white dots of mucus still visible. Never having met Kruger before today, and not having any apparent motive, Jonathan had no fear of identification. He folded up the ruptured bag and placed it and the gun inside the fresh bag he had brought along.

People never carry guns in brown paper bags.

Outside in the glare of the street, the children still played around the stoops. Little Jacques saw Jonathan emerge from Kruger's building, and he waved from across the street. Jonathan made a gun with his finger and shot at the boy, who threw up his hands and fell to the pavement in a histrionic facsimile of anguish. They both laughed.

While he waited for the plane to taxi off, Jonathan laid out his briefcase and papers on the seat beside him and began taking notes for the long-overdue article on "Toulouse-Lautrec: A Social Conscience." He had promised it to the editors of an art journal with a liberal bent. He could spread out in comfort because it was his practice, when on CII expense account, to purchase two adjacent seats to insulate himself against unwanted conversation. On this occasion, the extravagance may have been unnecessary, as the first-class compartment was nearly empty.

His line of thought was severed by the paternal and plebeian voice of the pilot assuring him that he knew where they were going and at what altitude they would fly. His interest in the Lautrec article was too fragile to survive the interruption, so he began glancing through a book he had promised to review. It was a study of Tilman-Riemanschneider: The Man and His Times.Jonathan was acquainted with the author and he knew the book would be a compromise between academic and general readerships—an alternation between the turgid and the cute. Nevertheless, he intended to give it a handsome review in obedience to his theory that the surest way to maintain position at the top of the field was to advance and support men of clearly inferior capacities.

He sensed the brush of her perfume, a spicy but light fragrance that he recalls to this day, suddenly and when he least wants to.

"Both of these seats are yours?" she asked.

He nodded without looking up from his work. To his great disappointment, he had caught a glimpse of a uniform out of the tail of his eye, and he rejected her, realizing that stewardesses, like nurses, were something a man made do with in strange towns when there was not time to seek women.

"Veblen had a phrase for that." Her voice was like a flow of warm honey.

Surprised by erudition in a stewardess, he closed the book on his lap and looked up into the calm, amused eyes. Soft brown with harlequin flecks of gold. "The phrase would apply equally to Mimi in the last act."

She laughed lightly: strong white teeth and slightly petulant lips. Then she checked his name off a list on a clipboard, and walked aft to deal with other passengers. With unabashed curiosity, he examined her taut bottom with its characteristic African shape that lifts black women to so convenient an angle. Then he sighed and shook his head. He returned to the Riemanschneider study, but his eyes moved over the pages without the words getting to his brain. Later he took notes; then he dozed.

"Shit?" she asked, her lips close to his ear.

He woke and turned his head to look up at her. "Pardon me?" The movement brought her bust to within three inches of his nose, but he kept his eyes on hers.

She laughed—again the harlequin flecks of gold in the brown eyes—and sat back on the armrest.

"You didbegin this conversation by saying 'shit,' didn't you? he asked.

"No. I didn't say it. I asked it."

"Does that go along with coffee, tea, and milk?"

"Only on our competitors' lines. I was reading over your shoulder, and I saw the word 'shit' with two exclamation points on your notepad. So I asked."

"Ah. It was a comment on the content of this book I'm reviewing."

"A study of scatology?"

"No. A shoddy piece of research obfuscated by crepuscular logic and involute style."

She grinned. "I can stand crepuscular logic, but involute style really makes my ass tired."

Jonathan enjoyed the raised oriental corners of her eyes in which a hint of derision lurked. "I refuse to believe you're a stewardess."

"As in: What's a girl like you doing in...? Actually, I'm not a stewardess at all. I'm a high-jacker in drag."

"That's reassuring. What's your name?"

"Jemima."

"Stop it."

"I'm not putting you on. That's really my name. Jemima Brown. My mother was hooked on ethnic lore."

"Have it your way. So long as we both admit that it's clearly too much for a black girl to have a name like that."

"I don't know. People don't forget you if your name is Jemima." She adjusted her perch on the armrest, and the skirt slipped up.

Jonathan concentrated on not noticing. "I doubt that men would forget you easily if your name was Fred."

"Goodness me, Dr. Hemlock! Are you the kind of man who tries to pick up stewardesses?"

"Not normally, but I'm coming around to it. How did you know my name?"

She became serious and confidential. "It's this mystic thing I have with names. A gift of sorts. I look at a person carefully. Then I concentrate. Then I check the passenger list. And voila! The name just comes to me."

"All right. What do people call you when they're not hooked on ethnic lore?"

"Jem. Only they spell it like the jewel kind of gem." A soft gong caused her to look up. "We're coming in. You'll have to fasten your safety belt." Then she moved aft to deal with the less interesting passengers.

He would have liked to ask her out to dinner or something. But the moment had been lost, and there is no social sin like poor timing. So he sighed and turned his attention to the tilted and toylike picture of New York beyond the window.

He saw Jemima briefly in JFK terminal. While he was hailing a taxi, she passed with two other stewardesses, the three walking quickly and in step, and he remembered his general dislike of the ilk. It would not be accurate to say that he put her out of his mind during the long drive home to the North Shore, but he was able to tuck her away into a defocused corner of his consciousness. It was oddly comforting to know she existed out there—like having a little something keeping warm on the back of the stove.

Jonathan soaked in the steaming water of his Roman bath, the tension of the past few days slowly dissolving, the cords of his neck unknotting, the tightness behind his eyes and in his jaw muscles melting reluctantly. But the knot of fear remained in his stomach.

A martini at his bar; a pipe in the basement gallery; and he found himself rummaging around in the kitchen for something to eat. His search was rewarded with some Danish biscuits, a jar of peanut butter, a small tin of kimchee, and a split of champagne. This gastronomic holocaust he carried to the wing of the transept he had converted into a greenhouse garden, and there he sat beside the plashing pool, lulled by the sound of the water and the brush of warm sunlight.