“Penance for what?”

“That,” said Drake with a twisted smile. “is between me and God.”

“Then why pick this method of finance, if it’s so personally repugnant to you? Why don’t you just-”

“I do it this way because it’s the only way. I’m locked in.”

With a sudden, horrible sinking of despair, he realized that Drake had just explained why he had come here, why he had done everything.

“Are you all right, Mr. Dawes? You look-”

“I’m fine. I want to wish you the best of luck. Even if you’re not getting anywhere.”

“I have no illusions,” Drake said, and smiled. “You ought to reconsider… anything drastic. There are alternatives.”

“Are there?” He smiled back. “Close this place now. Walk out with me and we’ll go into business together. I am making a serious proposal.”

“You’re making sport of me.”

“No,” he said. “Maybe somebody is making sport of both of us.” He turned away, rolling the bills into a short, tight cylinder again. The kid was still sleeping. The old man had put his cup down half empty on the table and was looking at it vacuously. He was still humming. On his way by, he stuffed the roll of bills into the old man’s cup, splashing muddy coffee onto the table. He left quickly and unlocked his car at the curb, expecting Drake to follow him out and remonstrate, perhaps save him. But Drake did not, perhaps expecting him to come back in and save himself.

Instead, he got into his car and drove away.

He went downtown to the Sears store and bought an automobile battery and a pair of jumper cables. Written on the side of the battery were these words, printed in raised plastic:

He went home and put them in the front closet with the wooden crate. He thought of what would happen if the police came here with a search warrant. Guns in the garage, explosives in the living room, a large amount of cash in the kitchen. B. G. Dawes, desperate revolutionary. Secret Agent X-9, in the pay of a foreign cartel too hideous to be mentioned. He had a subscription to Reader’s Digest, which was filled with such spy stories, along with an endless series of crusades, anti-smoking, anti-pornography, anti-crime. It was always more frightening when the purported spy was a suburban WASP, one of us. KGB agents in Willmette or Des Moines, passing microdots in the drugstore lending library, plotting violent overthrow of the republic at drive-in movies, eating Big Macs with one tooth hollowed out so as to contain prussic acid.

Yes, a search warrant and they would crucify him. But he was not really afraid anymore. Things seemed to have progressed beyond that point.

January 15, 1974

“Tell me what you want,” Magliore said wearily.

It was sleeting outside; the afternoon was gray and sad, a day when any city bus lurching out of the gray, membranous weather, spewing up slush in all directions with its huge tires, would seem like a figment of a manic-depressive’s fantasies, when the very act of living seemed slightly psycho.

“My house? My car? My wife? Anything, Dawes. Just leave me alone in my declining years.”

“Look,” he said, embarrassed, “I know I’m being a pest.”

“He knows he’s being a pest,” Magliore told the walls. He raised his hands and then let them fall back to his meaty thighs. “Then why in the name of Christ don’t you stop?”

“This is the last thing.”

Magliore rolled his eyes. “This ought to be beautiful,” he told the walls. “What is it?”

He pulled out some bills and said, “There’s eighteen thousand dollars here. Three thousand would be for you. A finder’s fee.”

“Who do you want found?”

“A girl in Las Vegas.”

“The fifteen’s for her?”

“Yes. I’d like you to take it and invest it in whatever operations you run that are good to invest in. And pay her dividends.”

“Legitimate operations?”

“Whatever will pay the best dividends. I trust your judgment.”

“He trusts my judgment,” Magliore informed the walls. “Vegas is a big town, Mr. Dawes. A transient town.”

“Don’t you have connections there?”

“As a matter of fact I do. But if we’re talking about some half-baked hippie girl who may have already cut out for San Francisco or Denver-”

“She goes by the name of Olivia Brenner. And I think she’s still in Las Vegas. She was last working in a fast-food restaurant-”

“Of which there are at least two million in Vegas,” Magliore said. “Jesus! Mary! Joseph the carpenter!”

“She has an apartment with another girl, or at least she did when I talked to her the last time. I don’t know where. She’s about five-eight, darkish hair, green eyes. Good figure. Twenty-one years old. Or so she says.”

“And suppose I can’t locate this marvelous piece of ass?”

“Invest the money and keep the dividends yourself. Call it nuisance pay.”

“How do you know I won’t do that anyway?”

He stood up, leaving the bills on Magliore’s desk. “I guess I don’t. But you have an honest face.”

“Listen,” Magliore said. “I don’t mean to bite your ass. You’re a man who’s already getting his ass bitten. But I don’t like this. It’s like you’re making me executor to your fucking last will and testament.”

“Say no if you have to.”

“No, no, no, you don’t get it. If she’s still in Vegas and going under this Olivia Brenner name I think I can find her and three grand is more than fair. It doesn’t hurt me one way or the other. But you spook me, Dawes. You’re really locked on course.”

“Yes.”

Magliore frowned down at the pictures of himself, his wife, and his children under the glass top of his desk.

“All right,” Magliore said. “This one last time, all right. But no more, Dawes. Absolutely not. If I ever see you again or hear you on the phone, you can forget it. I mean that. I got enough problems of my own without diddling around in yours.”

“I agree to that condition.”

He stuck out his hand, not sure that Magliore would shake it, but Magliore did.

“You make no sense to me,” Magliore said. “Why should I like a guy who makes no sense to me?”

“It’s a senseless world,” he said. “If you doubt it, just think about Mr. Piazzi’s dog.”

“I think about her a lot,” Magliore said.

He took the manila envelope containing the checkbook down to the post office box on the comer and mailed it. That evening he went to see a movie called The Exorcist because Max von Sydow was in it and he had always admired Max von Sydow a great deal. In one scene of the movie a little girl puked in a Catholic priest’s face. Some people in the back row cheered.

January 17, 1974

Mary called on the phone. She sounded absurdly relieved, gay, and that made everything much easier.

“You sold the house,” she said.

“That’s right.”

“But you’re still there.”

“Only until Saturday. I’ve rented a big farmhouse in the country. I’m going to try and get my act back together.”

“Oh, Bart. That’s so wonderful. I’m so glad.” He realized why it was being so easy. She was being phony. She wasn’t glad or not glad. She had given up.” About the checkbook…”

“Yes.”

“You split the money right down the middle, didn’t you?”

“Yes I did. If you want to check, you can call Mr. Fenner.”

“No. Oh, I didn’t mean that.” And he could almost see her making pushingaway gestures with her hands. “What I meant was… you separating the money like that… does it mean…”

She trailed off artfully and he thought: Ow, you bitch, you got me. Bull’s eye.

“Yes, I guess it does,” he said. “Divorce.”

“Have you thought about it?” she asked earnestly, phonily. “Have you really-”

“I’ve thought about it a lot.”