The paintings weren't the only things that whetted his curiosity. The upper floor of the main house, where Whitehead had a suite of rooms, was entirely out-of-bounds to him, and he was more than once tempted to slip up when he knew the old man was otherwise engaged, to nose around the forbidden territory. He suspected Whitehead used the top story as a vantage point from which to spy on his acolytes' comings and goings. That went some way to explaining the other mystery: the sense, he had, running his circuits, that he was being watched. But he resisted the temptation to investigate. It was perhaps more than his job was worth.

When he wasn't working he spent much of his time in the library. There, if he felt curious about the outside world, were current issues of Time magazine, The Washington Post, The Times, and several other journals-Le Monde, Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung, The New York Times, which Luther brought in. He would flick through them looking for tidbits, sometimes taking them down to the sauna and reading them there. When he tired of newspapers, there were thousands of books to choose from, not, to his delight, all intimidating tomes. There were plenty of those, the assembled classics of world literature, but beside them on the shelves were tattered, well-thumbed paperback editions of science fiction books, their covers lurid, the copy on them paradigms of excess. Marty began to read them, picking those with the most suggestive covers first. There was also the video. Toy had supplied him with a dozen tapes of boxing highlights, which Marty was systematically viewing, rerunning favorite victories to his heart's content. He could sit all evening watching the matches, awed by the economy and the grace of the great fighters. Toy, ever thoughtful, had also supplied a couple of pornographic tapes, handing them across to Marty with a conspiratorial smile and some comment about not eating them all at once. The tapes were copies of storyless loops, anonymous couples and trios who threw off their clothes in the first thirty seconds and got down to the nitty-gritty inside a minute. Nothing sophisticated: but they served a useful purpose, and, as Toy had obviously guessed, good air, exercise and optimism were doing wonders for Marty's libido. There was going to come a time when self-abuse in front of a video screen was not going to be satisfaction enough. Increasingly, Marty dreamed of Charmaine: unambiguous dreams set in the bedroom of Number Twenty-six. Frustration gave him courage, and the next time he saw Toy he asked to be allowed to go and see her. Toy promised to ask the boss about it, but nothing had come of it. In the meanwhile he had to be content with tapes and their stage-managed gasps and grunts.

Systematically he began to put names to the faces that appeared most regularly at the house; Whitehead's most trusted advisers. Toy, of course, was regularly in evidence. There was also a lawyer called Ottaway, a thin, well-dressed man of forty of so, whom Marty took a dislike to when he first overheard the man's conversation. Ottaway spoke with that air of the legal fan-dancer, all tease and cover-ups, that Marty had experienced first hand. It brought back sour memories.

There was another, called Curtsinger, a sober-suited individual with an excruciating taste in ties and a worse one in colognes, who, though often in Ottaway's company, seemed far more benign. He was one of the few who actually acknowledged Marty's presence in a room-usually with a small, sharp nod. On one occasion, celebrating some deal that had just been made, Curtsinger had slipped a large cigar into the pocket of Marty's jacket; after that, Marty would have forgiven him anything.

The third face that seemed to be in regular attendance at Whitehead's side was the most enigmatic of the three: a swarthy troll of a man called Dwoskin. Here was a Cassius to Toy's Brutus. His immaculate, pale gray suits, his meticulously folded handkerchiefs, the precision of his every gesture-all spoke of an obsessive whose rituals of tidiness were designed to counter the excess of his physicality. But there was more: an undercurrent of danger about the man that Marty's years in Wandsworth had taught him to be alive to. In fact, it was there in the others too. Beneath Ottoway's frigid exterior and Curtsinger's sugar coating there were men who were not-it was Somervale's phrase-entirely savory.

At first Marty dismissed the feeling as lower-class prejudice; a nobody mistrusting the rich and influential on principle. But the more meetings he sat in on, the more heated debates he was peripheral to, the more certain he became that there was in their dealings a scarcely concealed subtext of deceit, even of criminality. Much of their talk he scarcely understood the subtleties of the stock market were a closed book to him-but the civilized vocabulary could not completely sanitize the essential drift. They were interested in the mechanics of deception: how to manipulate the law and the market alike. Their exchanges were littered with talk of tax avoidance, of selling between subsidiaries to inflate prices artificially, of packaging placebos as panaceas. There was no apology implicit in their stance; on the contrary the talk of illicit maneuvers, of political allegiances bought and sold, were positively applauded. And among these manipulators, Whitehead was the kingpin. In his presence they were reverential. Out of it, as they jockeyed for position closest to his feet, they were ruthless. He could, and did, silence them with a half-lifted hand. His every word was venerated, as if it fell from the lips of a Messiah. The charade amused Marty mightily: but applying the rule of thumb he had learned in prison he knew that in order to earn such devotion Whitehead must have sinned more deeply than his admirers. In cunning, he didn't doubt Whitehead's skills: he'd experienced his powers of persuasion already. But as time went by the other question burned more brightly: was he also a thief? And if not that, what was his crime?

Ease, she came to understand as she watched the runner from her window, is all; if not all, it was the best part of what she delighted in, watching him. She didn't know his name, though she could have inquired. It pleased her more to have him anonymous, an angel dressed in a gray track suit, his breath a flux of mist at his lips as he ran. She'd heard Pearl talk of the new bodyguard, and presumed this was he. Did it really matter what his name was? Such details could only weigh down her mythmaking.

It was a bad time for her, for many reasons, and on those defeated mornings, sitting at her window having scarcely slept the night before, the sight of the angel running across the lawn or flickering between the cypress trees was a sign she clung to, a portent of better times to come. The regularity of his appearance was something she came to count on, and when sleep was good and she missed him in the morning, she felt an undeniable sense of loss for the rest of the day, and would make a special point of keeping her rendezvous with him the next morning.

But she couldn't bring herself to leave the sunshine island, to cross so many dangerous reefs to get to where he was. Even to signal her existence in the house to him risked too much. She wondered if he was much of a detective. If he was, perhaps he had discovered her presence in the house by some witty means: seen her cigarette stubs in the kitchen sink, or smelled the scent of her in a room she had left scant minutes before. Or perhaps angels, being divinities, needed no such devices. Perhaps he simply knew, without the clues, that she was there, standing behind the sky at a window, or pressed behind a locked door when he went whistling down the corridor.