I was being called to account for my father's sins; old scores were being settled. I decided to do whatever he said. I didn't see a gun, but I didn't have time to give the setup much careful consideration. I simply surrendered.

"Just kidnap me, okay?" I said. "It'll work. I know how my father thinks."

"Let's go," he said. He seemed reasonable. He smiled again. His front tooth was chipped.

"What is this, Art?" said Valerie.

"It's Gangland," said the biker.

"I might need a few days off," I said.

He pulled me from the register stand and dragged me out to the sidewalk. I looked back into the store and saw Valerie going to the telephone. Ed and Joey lumbered out behind us and hesitated for a moment.

"It's okay," I said. "Don't make trouble. Punch my card for me."

"Who is that guy?" said Joey. He looked more interested than ready to roll.

"I'm Death," said the biker.

"Come on, man," I said. "Let's go. I can walk."

"I can walk," he said in a squeaky voice.

Climbing onto the gigantic black saddle, I began to tremble, and clutched the hot bar behind me. I imagined being taken to some Bloomfield garage and thrown up against the grimy wall and shot. They would have to drag the Monongahela to find my riddled corpse. My father would get on the phone and plead with his bosses for an eye for an eye. My cousin Debbie would play the guitar and sing "Blackbird" or "Moonshadow" at my funeral.

We pulled out onto Forbes Avenue, and when we finally hit a red light he reached his right hand around behind him and held it out for me to shake. I shook.

"Art Bechstein," said my potential executioner, "how the hell are you?" He laughed, the light turned green, we headed toward Highland Park, he didn't stop laughing: He actually went "Hee hee."

" Cleveland," I shouted.

Arthur had told me the story of Happy, the most beautiful dog in the world, and of her ruin by Mrs. Bellwether, who was insane.

One day several years ago, Happy had appeared at Jane's feet, collarless, playful; a large puppy, perhaps ten or eleven months old, almost completely white, housebroken, well-behaved, and breathtakingly lovely. The family made no effort to discover who had lovingly trained then lost her, and adopted her immediately into its tortured bosom, giving her her tragic and idiotic name. Wrapped in her extravagant fur, with her long, noble face and elegant walk, Happy was, in every way, the Anna Karenina of dogs, even expressing, Jane claimed, a distinct mixture of fear of and fascination with the trains they would have to stop for in the course of the marathon walks they took together. When Jane took Happy out, people slowed their cars to watch the dog's perfect gait, her leash superfluous, slack, vulgar.

Jane loved the dog and had cared for her well, letting her take the firm white remainders of strawberries from between Jane's own lips, unleashing her for three-hour chases across the Highland Park cemetery (since, she said, dogs love graveyards), and painting pink the collie's black toenails; unfortunately, however, Happy spent most of her days with Jane's mother, so, in time, the dog developed both colitis and a skittish fear of women, even of the sound of their footsteps, and her coat began to turn the tan that now, years later, had become a fragile, shifting brown.

Thus the dog became a genuine Bellwether, visiting Dr. Link, the veterinarian, as often as migrainous Mrs. Bellwether visited Dr. Arbutus, her internist; as eczematous Dr. (of Philosophy) Bellwether consulted Dr. Niyogi, his dermatologist; as imprisoned, fearful Jane went to weep before Dr. Feld, her psychotherapist. Though it may seem a silly conceit to view Happy's consignment to a doctor's care as an inevitable result of her adoption into the Bellwether family, it may seem less so when one learns that Jane one day descended into the basement to rummage among her father's abandoned five irons and woods, and found her mother administering blows to Happy's unbearably beautiful head with a ball-peen hammer, because the dog had managed to void her agonized bowels onto the basement floor.

Well, unhappy families may each be unhappy after their own fashion, but their houses are always alike, at least in my experience. The Bellwethers lived in the only ordinary-looking house in a wooded, wealthy section of Highland Park that was otherwise filled with period pieces, stylistic excess, and eccentric ornamentation. Peaked roof, red brick with white siding, white "lace" curtains blowing out through the open windows of the kitchen, azalea bushes, concrete driveway, a French horn of garden hose in the front yard. Nothing I'd heard about the Bellwethers prepared me for the discovery that the house in which Jane bad grown up looked exactly like my grandparents'. Cleveland parked the bike in the street, and as I swung off the seat and did a couple of stiff deep-knee bends, I sequentially settled on each of the neighboring houses as being the probable residence of the crazy Bellwethers, before Cleveland, with some amusement, grabbed me by the elbow again, as though we were still playing Crime, and tugged me onto the slate path of stepping-stones that made its typical way to the Bellwethers' front door.

"It's this one; this is the nice normal house where Arthur is living for the Bellwethers while they're 'on holiday.'"

I took my first good look at him. He did not at all have the face I'd expected. Wrongly but quite naturally, I'd assumed that he would look just like Arthur, blond and rosy. Not at all. He had, to a degree, the head of a biker: uncombed, red-skinned, heavy, with the chipped incisor. But his hauteur and his Clark Kents threw everything off; they made him peculiar.

" Cleveland," I said, as we walked up to the front door, "how did you know about my father?"

He turned his head toward me for an instant, and his eye was bright and crafty.

"Everyone knows," he said. "Don't they?"

"Nobody knows," I said, grabbing hold of his leather sleeve. "Absolutely no one."

He turned toward me and threw off my hand, so hard that it slapped against my hip.

"Your cousin David Stern knows."

"He isn't my cousin," I said. "We used to play G.I. Joe together. A long time ago."

"Well, he grew up into a real asshole."

"He has a big mouth." I thought for an instant, then said, "How do you know Dave Stern? You work for his father?"

"I don't work for anybody. The Sterns are simply associates of mine."

"It's nothing to brag about."

"I get to make my own hours," Cleveland said. He dashed up the steps, then whirled to face me. "And"-he gave me a menacing, humorous look-'"Nobody knows. Absolutely no one.'" He rattled the aluminum screen door like a maniac, and it came off in his hand. "Whoops," he said.

"Jesus," I said. "You're a monster."

"I'm walking destruction," he sang. "I'm a demolition man."

We went inside, where it looked nothing like my grandparents' house, and I relaxed. The most immediately memorable feature of the decor was the carpeting. A "soothing," embarrassingly synthetic flavor of sky blue, it illuminated the whole floor of the place, like a lit ceiling; and so from my first minute in Jane's house I felt subliminally but undeniably upside down. The furniture had been accumulated, rather than chosen. An empty wicker birdcage hung in the corner of the living room, its bottom still lined with newspaper and its water bottle a quarter full. They had partitioned the dining room from the living room with an ugly brown stack of metal shelves that held Jane's many golf trophies and pictures of Jane and her dad, who looked like a frail Alec Guinness. I liked seeing the photographs of Jane, with her strawberry of a face and her remarkably fine posture.