Winter's Tale Part 24

But her children's skills were as real as hers had been. And her children were daring, too. She remembered with a chill how close she had come on many occasions to a horrible deatha"taunting an enraged timber rattler; or feeding an itinerant black bear that was ten times her weight, putting berries in its mouth as if it were a racc.o.o.n, scolding it, and leading it around like a dog for half an hour or more in a meadow where, Mrs. Gamely had a.s.sumed, nothing could hurt her; climbing to the summit of the ice blocks in the icehouse; and playing with the shotgun while her mother was delivering pies. Her children were safe from such things. Or so shethought, until one day when Abby appeared on the balcony wall, walking in time to a waltz that was playing on the phonograph, unmoved by the three-hundred-foot drop.

Many mothers might have screamed and dashed out to s.n.a.t.c.h the child from the railing, but Virginia remained cool. The first thing that occurred to her was that living where they did her children were like cliff dwellers, and having known no other life, they were probably gifted, in much the same way as squirrels or mountain goats, with abilities unhindered by fear. She determined to suppress her own fear in favor of Abby's fearlessness, to put her arms around her gently, and to waltz her off the wall. She did, and she remained forever an admirer of her daughter's instinctual grace.

Walking on the balcony rails was an exceptional episode in the children's otherwise tranquil lives. Their powerlessness, innocence, and imagination fused to enable them to turn time inside out, travel on the wind, and enter the souls of animals. That they thought the city was the whole of the universe and its center, put them, in compensatory fas.h.i.+on, close to the borders of the infinite and the unexplained, since whatever was beyond the known realms of existence was therefore no farther than Fort Lee, New Jersey, or Yonkers. They had a better grasp of cosmology than the fast-talking physicists, because the physicists and their predecessors had been forced to see the universe with the tools at hand, and so devise' models that were like thimbles tasked to hold the open sky, whereas the children had skipped over the obstructions of doubt and fear, and gone directly to the heart of the matter. They were still close enough to having been born to remember in their deep dreams the perfect stillness of all things. They did not doubt that, by believing, they could rise and travel through the air, leaving at their feet a blurry trail of light like a long white gown.

They accepted from Virginia, as she had accepted from Mrs.Gamely long before, an explanation of the white curtain that sometimes walled in the city. It is nothing and everything," she had said to them during one of the storms, as they lay in their beds listening to it howl."Thereis no time in it, but only islands of time. It moves within itself in currents and contradictions, and if you get too close, it will take you, like a huge wave that sweeps someone off a rock. It swirls around the city in uneven cusps, sometimes dropping down like a tornado to spirit people away or deposit them here, sometimes opening white roads from the city, and sometimes resting out at sea while connections are made with other places. It is a benevolent storm, a place of refuge, the neutral flow in which we float. We wonder if there is anything beyond it, and we think that perhaps there is."

"Why?" Martin asked from within the covers.

"Because," said Virginia,"in those rare times when all things coalesce to serve beauty, symmetry, and justice, it becomes the color of golda"warm and smiling, as if G.o.d were reminded of the perfection and complexity of what He had long ago set to spinning, and long ago forgotten."

They were the keenest of observers. Because they stayed home all day in an apartment building that was like a vast beehive, they grew sensitive to many things that most people overlooked. For example, the building in its entirety became a musical instrument as unattended telephones rang through various parts in many tones and muted intensities (variations depended upon distance from the hearer, how many walls were in between, the wind, whether a window was open or not, the original pitch, etc.). They listened as if to the bird-song that penetrates the dark voluminous ma.s.s of a forest. The plumbinga"rus.h.i.+ng water in impenetrable cavernsa"spoke to them as authoritatively as if it had been the underground rivers of Hades. From their high perch they saw at eye level the freer movements of flight, and could sense the harmony between the birds and the blue air, something that did not exist close to the ground in the shallows and straits. They made the telephone "sing to itself" (via a feedback and interference loop) as if it were a farmyard pet. From their mountainlike redoubt they observed the subtleties of sound and light in thunderstorms, dusk, and dawn. They could tell time by the half-mile shadows of nearby buildings, and by the clouds of scented air (sweeter and heavier than half the perfumes of Arabia) which up-welled along the walls and over the terraces when professional ladies showered and bathed by the hundreds as if to sanctify the s.p.a.ce between eight and eight-thirty in the morning.

Marko Chestnut said that they were as attentive to nature as they would have been had they grown up on a farm or in the mountains."It is true," he said,"that they live in a machinea"the city itself. But if the machine can emerge from nature, then, surely, nature can emerge from the machine."

Every Sat.u.r.day, he painted portraits of childrena"either singly or in groups. His studio was downtown, near The Sun, overlooking the approach to the Manhattan Bridge. One rainy day in spring, Abby and Martin came to him in their yellow slickers. This pleased him a great deal, because the real oilskin in the Coheeries slickers was dappled with light brown, and the deep yellow was subdued by gray light from a busy sky full of rain and wind. The colors of the children's flushed faces, their young eyes and hair, and the slate-colored rain-light were just what he wanted. Not knowing exactly what was expected of them, they were embarra.s.sed and terrified, and thought of Marko Chestnut as a kind of medical personality. It was almost impossible to get them talking, and when they did speak, they spoke in whispers. He fed them cranberry juice and chocolate-chip cookies, and gave them little paint sets, magnets, matchbox trucks, and museum catalogs.

They stayed in his studio for several hours, watching the rain and the las.h.i.+ngs of the wind as intently as he watched them. All they could hear was the raina"was.h.i.+ng the gutters and the sides of buildings, das.h.i.+ng off the roofs, and flowing in the streets. Abby walked over to the canvas, grasped Marko Chestnut's brush, and said that it sounded like the rain. It did, and Marko Chestnut thought that, indeed, nature was in the beams, girders, and engines of the city; in all things and their arrangements; in a still life illuminated by an electric bulb as much as in a wheat-colored field in pure sunlight. The laws were the same, and ever-present.

Whereas in his wildest imaginings Marko Chestnut had dared to think that the city and its orphaned machines might find their origins and come awake, the children already had greater things in minda"flight and rising, the whole world rising to the perfecion beyond the ragged edges of the ragged machine in which they lived.

SOMEWHERE in the city of the poor, the white horse, Athansor was imprisoned in a mill, turning a creaking central shaft by walking a circle under a heavy beam to which he was harnessed. He rested only when the dilapidated machinery he powered broke down, or when the materials it processed were in short supply. Otherwise, he worked continuously. He could eat as much oats and hay and have as much water as he wanted, taking them on the run when he pa.s.sed a recess in the wall into which the fodder and water were fed by gravity. The wood and metal around the recess had been polished by countless horses swooping in and rubbing against it as they ate or drank.

Here, horses were run down in a month or two, and died from exhaustion often before the keepers could shoot them for stopping. The practice of working an animal until he died meant that the mill had to come by about ten horses a year, whereas, if they had kept three on alternating s.h.i.+fts, they could have worked them for the whole of the horses' natural lives. But the city of the poor had its own economics, and in the end the owners of the mill found themselves in the black, because they got their horses for next to nothinga"from carts that the horses could no longer pull, from lots where they had strayed, and from the horrible stables in burnt-out tenements to which thieves transported them from the countryside in the dead of night.

After they were worked to death, they were cut up for meat and hide. The viscera went for rendering, the hooves and bones for glue. There was profit for the workers who worked the margins, for the devilish, the greedy, and the shortsighted, and their little industry consumed horses at a terrible rate.

But not Athansor. They had taken him from the arena thinking that he could go for many more rounds than those of his innocent cousins apprehended at night in mountain pastures and trucked into the bowels of the city. Once, a prize Virginia Percheron had run the mill for five months, never stopping, with a determination that astonished even his hardened captors. They pegged the white horse ft no more than that, since he was about the same weight but was built almost like a thoroughbred. And they reckoned that he would gounder sooner than the Percheron, because he was a fighting horse and the Percheron had been a worker.

They did not know, however, that Athansor had no intention of going under, whether in the sea, drawing a junk cart, or hooked to a perpetual mill. How could they have known that he consumed perpetuity the way that the mill had consumed horses, and fed upon it much as he fed upon the oats and water that they provided? The origins of his strength were, for them, a mystery, but they saw quite clearly that the more he was driven, the stronger he got. He carried the beam in fever and sweat, in lightness and elation, in sorrow, when his heart felt as if it had stopped, through blindness and dawn, trembling with weakness, or dancing with strength. But he carried it forward, and he never missed a step.

During the first few weeks of August, it was very hot, and in the afternoon, or even at night, he would sometimes be covered with froth, and his sores and wounds would open and fester. When fall came and the air cleared, he knew what was intended for him, so he raised his head, shook his clotted mane, and looked forward. For he was the engine that pushes the seasons, and the mill that grinds the salt in the sea. In winter, half the circle that he worked was covered with snow and ice, and it was hard to get traction. But he found enough traction to take him into and through spring. And then there was that perfect June when he knew that he was in the clear, and when every step he took was another victory. Early that summer, when beautiful weather alternated with quick and stupendous lightning storms that boomed out thundercracks in a war upon the canyons, he was sustained and buoyed by many things, not the least of which was the wonder of his tormentors when they saw that he was still alive.

From a third of the circle, he was able to see westward over the plains of brick and rubble, the ridges of charred houses, and the river, to the skyline. That he could see this marvelous, s.h.i.+ning thing, no doubt sustained him as well.

A BELL tolled. It tolled for the mayor as he rode on a city launch down the East River from Gracie Mansion to City Hall. And it didnot stop tolling until he walked into his office, put on his ceremonial robes, and called on the chief marshal to announce that the mayor was "in his office at the pleasure of the people, ready to govern for the greater good, and pleased that the sun is risen over the intact and thriving city." This was an ancient ceremony that many took for granted. But every day it provided the mayor with an egalitarian perspective, a reminder of his task, and a sense of continuity.

The council of elders (on which Harry Penn and Craig Binky managed to coexist) met before the inauguration of each mayor solely to choose an appellation for him. Though the name was purely symbolic and would neither unseat him nor guarantee his reelection, it weighed heavily with the electorate and in the conscience of the man himselfa"if he had one. For he would be known in perpetuity by the name that would smother out his given name entirely and fuse his history to that of the city. Thus, mayors had resigned or committed suicide when the council of elders had called them the Ash Mayor, the Bone Mayor, the Rag Mayor, and similar names. Others had swallowed hard and continued on, despite being called the Fox Mayor, the Egg Mayor, or the Bird Mayor (since, in politics, gentle ridicule and gentle reprimands could always be borne). There were those who suffered neither ridicule nor condemnation, whose administrations were favored either by their own talents and luck, or by the felicity of the age. They had been given splendid names with which to spend the rest of history. They were the Ivory Mayor, the Water Mayor, the River Mayor, and (once, at the turn of the century, when the council of elders had decided to call attention to the approaching millennium) the Silver Mayor. How the council knew in advance the character of the mayor and his term was a mystery even to him. Certainly Craig Binky didn't know. And even Harry Penn was amazed by the strong and absolute sense of the future that permeated their meetings.

The present officeholder would finish his term either when the first ice was seen on the river (usually in late January) or when the first flower bloomed in Prospect Park (late March), and would be up for election the previous November. Considering that his predecessor had been the Sulfur Mayor, he had done rather well in winning thet.i.tle of Ermine Mayor. In the complex symbology of the t.i.tles, this signified a pleasant harmony, because the robes of office were ermine, and the council of elders seemed to be suggesting that man and office were properly suited. It pleased him very much, did not go to his head, and boded well for his reelection. True, he looked like a hard-boiled egg and had a high-pitched voice, but he was a skilled politician and a fair man who had fulfilled the responsibilities of office with balance and humor. And, lest it be forgotten, he was supported by the most awesome and omnipotent political machine that ever wasa"a virtual parallel government that worked every kind of magic, from Christmas baskets, of which literally millions were distributed, to computer recognition. Hooked up to a powerful mainframe, the mayor knew the name, nickname, and favorite food of everyone with whom he shook hands. Though his campaign conversation grew tiresome ("Hey, Jackie, how's the lasagna been treating you lately?" or,"Good to see you, Nick. Boy, do I love eggrolls!"), the technique seemed to get votes.

The Ermine Mayor had three offices, each at a different level and each for a different purpose. The City Hall office, closest to the ground, was the place for ceremony and tradition. In the Old City Hall, string quartets often played for the public, and there were many fine paintings. Each mayor could go to the gallery of his predecessors and see in their ancient portraits the smiles and eyes of men like himself looking forward from the past to offer rea.s.surance and courage, as if to say that when one was finished one could view the struggles of one's life and term with equanimity.

The high offices were half a mile up, at the top of one of the tallest towers. The city spread out below them, and clouds drifted under the windows. From these offices the city was so remote that it seemed to be only blocks and cells of color that took the sun and softly glittered. Here it was easy to make decisions that would benefit the future, for here it was not possible to see faces, or to listen to the cries of those overcome by the waves of history.

The third office was fifteen floors up, in a building on the Battery. Its wide windows gave out on the harbor, the sea, the fields of Governor's Island, the rust-colored brick of Brooklyn Heights, andthe green swards of Brooklyn's parks and cemeteries. From this office, the mayor was afforded a middle view. He could see far, and yet he was able to make out the moving forms of men below. The s.h.i.+ps which cut wolflike up b.u.t.termilk Channel were far more arresting than the little toys on blue gla.s.s that they seemed to be when he was in the high office. When he had the middle perspective, these s.h.i.+ps could speak to him of the ocean. Their bow waves were visible, rolling over, bridal veils in the wind, and with binoculars one could see the pilots' hand calls as the s.h.i.+ps made their perilous runs through the tidal shallows.

In the middle offices, with mild light coming in through the wide windows, the Ermine Mayor accomplished most of the city's business. Because they were neither as moving nor as worn as his chambers in City Hall, nor as ethereal as the higher ones, they were the best place in which to deal with the paradoxical questions that are the heart of politics. He was good when he was in the middle, in Purgatory, as he referred to it, and here he received most of his callers, including Praeger de Pinto.

The editor-in-chief of The Sun had been in this office many times, and he slumped down in a comfortable leather chair as if it belonged to him."What's going on?" he asked the Ermine Mayor.

"I don't know. What's going on?" the Ermine Mayor replied.

"I believe you do know."

"What are you talking about, Praeger? What's the matter with you? Have you caught Binky-itis or something?"

"All right, I'll be specific. Last week, you went aboard the s.h.i.+p in the Hudson. Our reporters wrote that you looked worried and miserable, and on television you had the air of a prisoner walking his last mile.

"Two hours later, the launch pulls up to the dock and the Ermine Mayor jumps out as if his legs are made of steel springs. He's smiling as if someone has put a baton between his cheeks, anda"in front of the entire citya"you, the Mayor, do a little dance on the pier."

The mayor threw his head back and laughed, probably recalling whatever it was that had made him dance.

"In the week that's followed, you haven't seen the press once."

"I've been busy."

"The city is going mad trying to figure out what's on that s.h.i.+p and to whom you talked. The Ghost, your ally, has compared your dance to Hitler's victory jig in Paris. Do you want that? Do you realize the pressure that's building up for us to unravel this whole thing, and the damage that could be done to you if the public perceives that you are in league against its curiosity?"

"My job," said the mayor,"isn't to do your work for you. If you don't know who's on that s.h.i.+p, it's not my problem. Why don't you go out there and ask? You know, hire a boat."

"We have our own boat. We were out there half an hour after the s.h.i.+p dropped anchor. I'm sure you're aware that they don't let anyone on board, that they won't even speak over the rails. But we're working on it. There are lots of ways to skin recalcitrant cats. However, since you know, you ought to give us an indication...."

"Or The Sun won't support me this fall."

"Politics is the art of equation. We very well might not support you."

"Just for that?"

"In our view, it's not a minor matter. The mayor has what the city wants and he won't put out. Why should the city put out for him?"

"What if it were in the city's best interests that I keep quiet?"

"How is anyone to judge?"

"There is no way. It's best if I keep my counsel."

"Why don't you let the people decide what's best?"

"Because, in this case, they can't."

"I don't understand what you're doing," Praeger said."Television is going to hammer you to death."

"I realize that." How do you expect to be reelected?"

The Ermine Mayor smiled."Who's running against me?"

"No one, yet."

"That's right. And by the time anyone does, it'll be too late. This is the middle of June. Who's going to match my two hundredward captains, and twenty thousand precinct workers, in three and a half months?"

"They're not an infallible guarantee."

"I'll have to take it nonetheless."

"Why?" Praeger asked, wanting not to believe the Ermine Mayor's inexplicable transformation from a statesmanlike leader to a bunker politician.

"Look," said the mayor."If you were to run against me, win, and then find out yourself about this question, you would then do exactly as I'm doing."

"That's what you think."

"That's what I know. A great opportunity awaits this city, and I'm going to deliver it. I care about history: I'm quite willing to sacrifice my career. Anyway, who the h.e.l.l will run against me?"

"Maybe I will," said Praeger.

The Ermine Mayor hesitated."That's not even a joke. This city never elects tall, clean-cut, literate mena"unless their heads are full of cotton, or they're deeply corrupt. You're too smart and too honest even to get the nomination of an idealistic fringe party. And how would you deal with the machine?"

"Maybe I'd bypa.s.s it entirely," answered Praeger, who had no idea whatsoever of running for office, and was merely following the Ermine Mayor's lead.

"Can't be done, though, I admit, it's the dream of every young man. I suppose it starts with children. They want to be President, they make wonderful speeches in the shower, they are lifted by the divine political afflatus, and they never make it. Nor should they. This is a world of savage equalities. The city has to be run by a hard man, not by someone who makes magic with a pen. And the city knows it."

"What about the Silver Mayor?"

"He wrote it all down after he did it, not before."

"I haven't written anything down," Praeger said."And I may be a bit rougher than you think."

The Ermine Mayor looked at Praeger and, for the first time, did not like what he saw. Before him was a rangy six-footer with a fighter's gleam in his eyes, and a face that was held combatively tensea" the way some hard cases get when they're mad, squinting as if in preparation for taking punishment.

"Where were you born?" the mayor asked, positive that Praeger did not have the streets in his blood, and could never call the city his own, could never a.s.sert in front of a crowd the special pride and sureness that comes from being born in the place. He had all the marks of an immigrant from the suburbs.

"I was born on Havemeyer Street, your honor," Praeger said,"almost directly beneath the Brooklyn ramp of the Williamsburg Bridge. How do you like that apple?"

"I couldn't care less," answered the Ermine Mayor, returning to his papers as a signal for Praeger to leave."You're not running for anything."

BY the middle of July, much of the ardor in the matter of the colossal platform that floated in the Hudson had disappeared. The mayor was as quiet as a slab of granite, no one came from or went to the s.h.i.+p, and uniformed men appeared on its decks only when someone attempted to board it. At first galvanized by the challenge, the press employed every kind of stratagem to figure out what the s.h.i.+p held. A dozen journalist-parachutists had drifted down onto its ma.s.sive two-acre hatches, only to be apprehended on each occasion and escorted to sh.o.r.e by mute guards. Frogmen swam about the hull and climbed the side with magnets and suction cups, and were met at the railings by the same humorless guards. Helicopters, seaplanes, balloons, floating duck blindsa"everything that could move across water or air was attracted to the s.h.i.+p during its first weeks in New York. It was scanned by infraredometers, magnetometers, and subatornic particles, but for deducing its contents the only valid calculation was one which, in comparing the s.h.i.+p's volume and displacement, determined its exact average density, including whatever was in it. This revealed nothing, since no one knew how tightly the holds were packed. The fires of the press soon died down, and were just as quickly rekindled in response to other events. Televisionhad chopped the world into tiny bits, and what had once been the gaping maw of popular interest had evolved into a hair-thin pipette through which the s.h.i.+p in the Hudson was simply too big to pa.s.s.

After returning from a frenetic search of most of the Finger Lakes, Craig Binky made sure that he outdid his rivals in trying to unravel the mystery. He, Binky, a child of the Enlightenment, commissioned most of the advanced scientific studies, going so far as to have a particle accelerator built in the west Village, and its target apparatus installed across the river, so that what he called "bideo beams" could pa.s.s through the s.h.i.+p and draw a picture of its innards. But it didn't worka"the bulkheads were impenetrable even to gamma raysa"and Craig Binky, ever aware of the public's thras.h.i.+ng insomnias, pointed The Ghost in other directions. He himself was swept up by the poetry vogue of the second week of July. (Those lucky poets whose books were published that weekend became millionaires.) It took Harry Penn much longer than Craig Binky to drop the story, but he did. The Sun staff was surprised, for it seemed out of character, but he told them to accept defeat, temporarily, and await a turn in events. Banner headlines soon devolved into tiny paragraphs on the back page. The s.h.i.+p vanished from the editorials and did not even appear in "s.h.i.+pping and Mails," since it was not tied to a pier.

So forgotten, it became a part of the landscape, a third palisade, the kind of thing that people look at and do not seea"which is to say that it became a part of the city. Peter Lake took time off from his machinery to view it, but it meant no more to him than to anyone else.

Only Praeger, Hardesty, and Virginia refused to let the matter drop, because Harry Penn had not merely advised them to wait for a turn of events, he had ordered them to discontinue work on the story. It was the first time he had ever restrained Virginia, and Praeger would have resigned had he not loved the old man as much as he did.

After many nights in the library trying to discover where the s.h.i.+p had been constructed (there seemed to be no building ways in the world big enough to accommodate it), Hardesty was so exhausted that he fell asleep at a reference table and dreamed that he was in San Francisco, in his father's house, looking over the bay. When he wasa boy, he had liked to watch the brick-red tugboats, compressed in the clean bright ring of his telescope, as they pushed a carpet of rolling white water before them. On the stacks were a gilt figure of the rampant lion of San Marco, and the name Marratta. It always sent a chill down his spine to see these boats charging across the bay, with his name written on them in the color of a golden liona"not so much because he was proud, but because they reminded him of his father's steadfastness and strength.

When he awoke, he saw Virginia bent over a thick maritime register."We're not going to find anything here," he said as Praeger emerged from the darkness loaded down with half a dozen s.h.i.+pping tomes."Why don't we just watch the s.h.i.+p. Asbury can take us over to the Jersey side, and pick us up before dawn. Now that they're off the front page, they may loosen up a little and give something away." Every evening after dark, for the next ten days, they went over to the Palisades, where they found a broad ledge halfway up a cliff, and kept the s.h.i.+p under surveillance all through the nighta"taking turns sleeping and watching. Asbury picked them up just before dawn. They saw nothing. Though Hardesty had suggested that they follow this course, he was the first to want to abandon it. But Praeger wouldn't let him. Long after Hardesty and Virginia had lost any hope of seeing anything, Praeger had bright eyes for the deserted decks, and when he was awakened for his s.h.i.+ft he always looked like a hunter antic.i.p.ating a kill. They kept at it into August, when the river was like a warm bath and mists and steam circled all about the s.h.i.+p.

And one day, not surprisingly, it was Praeger who electrified them with a call to awake. The mist had vanished, and they opened their eyes to see Manhattan outlined against the pure colors of a clear dawn. On the opposite sh.o.r.e, in the shadows of the canyons, a signal light was flas.h.i.+ng. Had they been ten feet to the left or right of where they were, they would not have been able to see its blinkered sparking. But they were directly opposite the s.h.i.+p's bridge, and the message had overshot its target. With binoculars, Praeger could see that two figures stood by a long black car on a pier across the river. One operated the light, while the other paced about. The pacer was short and fat; the signaler was in some sort of uniform.

"Let me see," Hardesty demanded.

"No. Wait a minute," said Praeger."Asbury's coming up along this bank of the river. If we're fast enough, we might be able to catch them in whatever they're about to do."

They scrambled in the half-light and reached the base of the cliff as Asbury pulled in. He was surprised, since he usually had to climb to their post. According to him, their situation was difficult If a boat were to emerge from one of the s.h.i.+p's water-level bays and strike out for the pier, they would get to the other side too late to follow whoever emerged from it. On the other hand, running the river in antic.i.p.ation of this would scare off their quarry.

They were lucky, however, because a small tanker was heading upriver from the open harbor. They let it come up even, and then moved along with it, hidden from view. Half a mile north, the tanker followed the channel to the east side of the river, and as it did they pulled forward of it and were sheltered on the starboard all the way to a long pier behind which they vanished completely out of sight of either s.h.i.+p or the pier on which the limousine was still waiting.

After they climbed a ma.s.s of rotten pilings, they ran toward the street to search for a taxi. Hardesty was in the middle of thinking that they would never find a taxi at dawn on Twelfth Avenue, when he looked into the pier shed alongside which Virginia and Praeger were still running, and saw five hundred taxis starting their engines. He didn't even have to say anything, and several empty dozen of them arrived in a gleaming phalanx.

Heading downtown toward the pier where the light had been flas.h.i.+ng, they pa.s.sed the limousine, going in the opposite direction.

"Turn around un.o.btrusively," Praeger instructed their driver.

"What does that mean?" the driver asked, veering a hundred and eighty degrees in a blaze of burning rubber.

"Nothing," Praeger replied."Just follow that limousine without him knowing."

The limousine cut a devious trail, going in circles, pa.s.sing the same place three or four times, careering through the park, and insinuating itself as often as it could in whatever traffic it encountered at that early hour. After its tour of Manhattan, it stopped in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and three men got out. They entered the museum via a little-used door embedded in the base of a huge plinth.

As Praeger and the Marrattas sped by in the taxi, they saw the three men from the limousine quite clearly. One was extremely tall, another was the fat figure who had been pacing, and the other was the signaler. The fat one was an adolescent. Even from a distance, in a moving taxi, trying to look askance with nonchalance, they were able to see that his face was so fat it made his eyes into squinting, smiling slits. At first they had thought that, since the signaler had been in a uniform of some type, he was dressed in livery and had been driving. However, as he vanished into the museum they saw that he was not a chauffeur, but, rather, a man of the cloth.

Had Peter Lake seen these people all together he probably would have lit up like an electric eel, because they were Jackson Mead, the Very Reverend Mootfowl, and Cecil Maturea"who had long ago changed his name to Mr. Cecil Wooley, and who had come in advance of the other two, posing as a street vendor who worked the area near the Brooklyn Bridge.

Hardesty, Virginia, and Praeger paid the taxi a small fortune, and repaired to the sidewalk cafe across the street from the museum to sit on its unoccupied veranda and wait for the three odd people who had gone in, to come out. While they were waiting, well concealed, another limousine pulled up, and out jumped the Ermine Mayor, known for his bald head and springy step.

"Mighta known," said Praeger.

Then another limousine pulled up.

"There are an awful lot of limousines around here," Hardesty said."You'd think this was the Upper East Side."

Its door opened slowly. A cane poked out, then a foota"obviously an old foot. Then a pant leg of houndstooth. Then all the rest of the diminutive, aged, and sprya"Harry Penn.

A LONG time before, Harry Penn had been embarra.s.sed and shamedmost to death, and had rolled in agony across the accommodating expanse of Isaac Penn's capacious dinner table, when his carefully hidden pictures of husky seminude maidens of the evening had broken through the ceiling and drifted down into the dining room like overdue mail. Nearly a century later, he still turned a bright color in recollection of the moment when the postcards had fallen onto the serving platters, and his father had actually caught some in midair. If there were such a thing as archeologists of the soul, they might reconstruct all that has gone before from shame and love, two everlasting columns that rise into time though everything else is worn away. For Harry Penn, the sting of that moment was still dreadfully hot, despite the fact that over the years it had been joined by a dozen othersa"fewer and fewer, it is true, as he grew older and more adept. Yet, now another was added to the pack, suddenly to envelop him when he least expected it. As he came out of the museum, at a little after eight in the morning, he found Praeger de Pinto, Hardesty Marratta, and Virginia Gamely (who was still known by her maiden name) standing between the limousines. He had misled and lied to them, and excluded them from important things. Hardly able to look at these people that he knew so well, he entered his car like a slope-shouldered dog. He was not used to feeling that way.

Jackson Mead glared in their direction with the not inconsequential power of his very steely, very blue eyes. He seemed to be eight feet tall (he nearly was), and almost to glowa"as if everything about him were pure, and he were not a man. In stark contrast was the semifunereal Mootfowl, who looked like a nineteenth-century missionary trying his best not to enjoy the South Seas. Though he was Lincolnesque and grave, it was easy to think that any hand that touched him would forever remain tainted with the supernatural. Complementing the white glow and the dark streak, was a fat ball-Cecil Mature. Whereas Jackson Mead was angry, and Mootfowl looked amused and wise, Cecil Mature (or Mr. Cecil Wooley, as he insisted) was a one-man mob of unrestrained affection. Virginia felt like kissing his big smiling face, and Hardesty and Praeger were tempted to embrace him with one arm and smile back as if for a photograph.

These three were so strange that Praeger, normally the model of self-possession, spread his arms with outwardly facing palms and asked, in amazement, *"Who are you? And where do you come from?

Jackson Mead seemed to think that this was a reasonable question, and he answered it."From St. Louis, and beyond, and other places," he said.