She tossed the ruined Kleenex on the floor. "Well, who was he, then?"

"Somebody with a hell of a lot more sense than you were showing, sweetheart."

She pulled her legs up on the bed, crossed them, put her head in her hands. Ricky watched her from the table, where he had his antique Epson Geneva laptop set up. He was wearing a dark-brown pinstripe vest and trousers with a pale-pink shirt and brown bow tie. With his elongated face and bighorsey white teeth he reminded her of poor Ronnie, Gregg's aide, who always disapproved of his boss's liaison with Sara. The Red Army Fraction had executed him when they kidnapped Hartmann in Berlin. She blamed Hartmann for his death.

But it was only in appearance that he resembled Hartmann's hapless aide. Ricky approved of her. He always did. Sometimes, she suspected, a bit too much.

"Do you think I'm crazy?" she asked.

"Hell, yes. Think about what if you're right, Rosie." Rosie was his pet name for her; he claimed she looked like an albino Rosanna Arquette. -Standing right up there in front of God and everybody and announcing that Senator Gregg's a killer ace-can you think of a quicker way to bring him down on your case if he is?"

"I mean it about Hartmann. Everybody treats me as if I'm a leper because I don't think Gregg's the reincarnation of Abraham Lincoln or something."

Ricky hit his lip and rubbed his chin with his fingertips. He was a pretty fair pianist in his spare time, and he had the hands for it, long and thin and fine.

"I have to say it strikes me as kind of improbable. All this ace mind control and stuff, how could he have kept it a secret all these years?" She started to cloud up; he held one hand protectively between them, fingers outspread. "But wait, wait now. You're a damn fine reporter, a damn fine person-I think your stories have maybe done more to promote understanding of jokers and their problems than Senator Gregg's posturing and his well-publicized handouts; Brother Malcolm knew all about what it means when the Man extends a helping hand. I know you're not just making this up."

"But still.. still. I know you still feel the loss of your sister very deeply. Is there any possibility that might be affecting your judgment?"

She let her face drop between her hands, seeming to hold her head up by her almost-white hair.

"When I was a child," she said, "whenever I did something cute or clever, I could tell my parents were thinking if only it were Andi. Do you know what I mean? When I was bad or clumsy, it was, Andi wouldn't do that. I mean, they'd never say anything that horrible, not out loud. But I knew. It was as if I had a wild card of my own, a poison psychic gift that let me know what they really thought."

She was crying, then, the tears rushing out as if someone had punched a big awl through her eyes and hit a giant reservoir of grief. Ricky was beside her on the bed, cradling her against his racquetball-trim chest, stroking her hair with those splendid fingers, while the mascara eroded from her face and stained his Brooks Brothers shirt in big ugly blotches.

"Sara-Rosie-it's all right now, baby, it's all right, we'll get it straightened out. Everything will be okay. You're fine, sweetheart, everything's going to be fine.."

She clung to him like a baby opossum, welcoming human contact for one rare moment, letting him murmur his soothing words, letting him hold her.

I just hope he doesn't press too far, she thought.

The passengers walking the LaGuardia concourse gave plenty of sea room to the thin young man in the faded black jacket. It wasn't just the stale smell of sweat emanating from his seldom-washed clothes and body. Mackie was so full of excitement at getting The Call that he wasn't able to keep it all in; parts of him kept going off into buzz. The subliminals were unnerving people.

He looked up at the TV monitors next to the Eastern gate. The gray alphanumerics confirmed once again that his flight was departing on time. He could actually see it there through the polarized glass, fat and white and glistening like snot in the July morning sun. The paper jacket that held his ticket and boarding pass was beginning to wilt in his hand; he didn't want to let go of it, even to slip it into a pocket.

Chrysalis was dead, Digger vanished, but he got to kill one who was even better. The woman. The Man had told Mackie about her. She had done it with the Man on the tour.

They broke up and she got crazy and might try to do something to the Man-his Man. He'd wanted to go out and find her as soon as he heard that, put a good buzz on and cut her, and watch the blood well up, but the Man said, no. Wait for my word.

It had come a half hour ago in the form of a coded call to the Bowery message drop.

He was glad there was no smoking on airplanes. He hated smokers: smokers jokers. He'd been on an airplane once, when he'd come across from Germany to be close to the Man.

He held his pass up to his face, opened it, shuffled through it. He could barely read the red type, and not just because it was blurred. He hadn't gotten what you called a good education in Germany. He never learned to read real well, even though he did learn to speak English. From his mother. The whore.

The ticket had been waiting for him when he asked at the Eastern counter. The clerk there was afraid of him. He could tell. She was a fat nigger bitch. She thought he was a joker.

You could see it in those calf-stupid eyes. People always thought he was a joker. Especially women.

That was probably why the Man sounded funny. That woman after him. Women did that. Women were shit. He thought of his mother. The fat, cognac-swilling whore. The bottleneck stuck in her mouth in his mind turned to a fat nigger cock. He watched it slide in and out for a while, moistened his lips.

His mother had fucked niggers. She'd fucked anybody with the ready, in Hamburg's Sankt Pauli district. ReeperbahnstraBe. Where he'd grown up. One of them had knocked her up. When she got drunk and beat Mackie up, she told him his father was a deserter, a GI Stockholm-bound from 'Nam. But his father was a general. He knew.

Mackie Messer was maximum bad. His father couldn't have been just anybody, could he?

His mother had abandoned him; naturlich. Women did that. Made you love them so they could hurt you. They wanted you to put that man-thing in them so they could take it away: bite it off. He tried to imagine his mother biting off the huge black dick, but it dissolved into tears that streamed down his face and dripped off his chin onto the collar of his Talking Heads T-shirt.

His mother had died. He cried for her again.

"Eastern Airlines Flight 377, for Raleigh-Durham and Atlanta, will now begin boarding passengers holding passes for rows one through fifteen," the ceiling said to him. He wiped away tears and blew his nose on his fingers and joined the big flow. He was going where he was wanted, and was content.

Spector stood in the jet's cramped restroom and splashed some water from the sink over his face. His stomach was churning and his skin was cold. He'd gone into the bathroom hoping to throw up, but no luck. He was so nervous he couldn't even manage to take a leak.

There was an impatient knock at the door.

"I'll be out in a minute," Spector said, drying the water from his face with his coat sleeve.

Another knock. Harder this time. Spector sighed and opened the door.

A hunchbacked joker in a Talking Heads T-shirt was standing outside. He pushed past Spector and closed the door. The little creep's eyes were like something dead, even worse than Spector's.

"Fuck you, too, shrimp." Spector clutched his way back to his seat without waiting for a reply.

It was the first time he'd ever flown. The plane was much smaller than he'd expected and was getting bounced around by what the captain called "some minor turbulence." He'd already put away two little bottles of whiskey and asked the stewardess to bring a couple more. She hadn't gotten back to him, though. He was sitting between a guy who had been a helicopter pilot in Vietnam and some reporter. The reporter was playing around with a lap-top computer, but the ex-pilot hadn't stopped chattering since they boarded.