The Best American Mystery Stories Part 1

The Best American Mystery Stories 2005.

Ed by Joyce Carol Oates.

Foreword.

IT IS POSSIBLE, I suppose, that there is a smarter, harder-working, more dedicated literary figure on planet Earth than Joyce Carol Oates, but someone else will have to point out who that might be. Don't ask me to do it.

When I asked Ms. Oates to be the guest editor for this volume, I didn't quite know what I was getting into. (I could rewrite that sentence to avoid ending it with a preposition, but somehow it just sounds a bit off to say "I didn't quite know into what I was getting," so I'll just let it go.) It is the role of the series editor for all the volumes in Houghton Mifflin's prestigious Best American series to select the year's fifty best stories, and then for the guest editor to select the top twenty from that group. It was a little different this year. Ms. Oates started reading before I did, and recommended stories before I even found them. She wanted batches of stories throughout the year, rather than all fifty at once, and we engaged in frequent (I might even be tempted to say relentless) correspondence, our respective fax machines humming at every hour, and eventually telephone conversations while we debated the relative merits of certain stories. This 2005 volume is certainly the most collaborative one yet. I'm not entirely certain we followed all the guidelines set by my editor at Houghton Mifflin, but I can a.s.sure you that all of the time and energy were directed at a single goal, which was to make the book the best it could be. I hope you agree that we have achieved that.

Speaking of guidelines, this is a good time to point out how great it is to work for a house like Houghton Mifflin. It is well understood in the publis.h.i.+ng world that if anthologies are to have any chance of success, they must have some big names among the contributors. Never - not once - has Houghton Mifflin suggested that these annual volumes (this is the ninth) should have bigger names. From the first day I started as the series editor, it was about the writing. The best stories (or at least those I most admired) were nominated, and the guest editors have followed that directive.

It's not about the most popular authors, and it's not about personal relations.h.i.+ps (two close friends, both at my wedding this past May, didn't make the cut, though both are accomplished writers, named Grand Masters by the Mystery Writers of America, who have been selected for this series in the past). It's about finding the best stories, by whoever happens to have written them.

It is not uncommon for excellent writers to become famous, so although there are a few extremely popular writers in this book (Scott Turow, Louise Erdrich, George V. Higgins), it is doubtful that you know very many of the others. It is equally likely, however, that you will.

Tom Franklin's first appearance in book form was in the 1999 edition of Best American Mystery Stones, with a masterpiece t.i.tled "Poachers"; he went on to publish a short story collection with William Morrow t.i.tled Poachers and Other Stories, followed by a novel, h.e.l.l at the Breech. Christopher Coake had never been published in book form until "All Through the House" was collected in BAMS last year; his short story collection, We're in Trouble, under the prestigious imprint of Harcourt Brace, launches what should be a great career. Scott Wolven, too, who makes his fourth consecutive appearance in BAMS this year, had not been published in any book before "The Copper Kings" was selected for the 2002 volume, and now he has a book issued by Scribner, Controlled Burn: Stories of Prison, Crime, and Men. With the quality of the stories contained between these covers, it is impossible to imagine that some of the authors in BAMS 2005 won't have more of their work published in the satisfying permanence of books.

You know how much fun it is to read a book that you love or see a movie that moves you and to share that with a friend who comes back and tells you how much he loved it, too. That's one of the things that makes editing this series such a great job. I get to recommend a lot of stories to a lot of people, almost all of whom seem to be pretty happy about it, even though the t.i.tle of the book is a little misleading for the literal-minded.

Few of these stories are detective fiction, a tale in which an official police officer, a private eye, or an amateur sleuth is confronted with a crime and pursues the culprit by making observations and deductions. It has been my practice to define a mystery story as any work of fiction in which a crime or the threat of a crime is central to the theme or plot. There is greater emphasis in these pages on why a crime was committed, or if it will be done at all, than on trying to discover the perpetrator, which has upset some readers. That simply can't be helped.

The nature of mystery fiction has changed over the years, and there are simply fewer and fewer works of pure detection than there were during the so-called golden age between World Wars I and II, when Agatha Christie, John d.i.c.kson Carr, Ellery Queen, Dorothy L. Sayers, and their peers were constructing ingenious puzzles and challenging readers to solve them before Hercule Poirot, Gideon Fell, Ellery Queen, or Lord Peter Wimsey did.

With authors focused more on the psychological aspects of crime, whether from the point of view of the detective, the victim, or the criminal, there appears to be greater strength of characterization and style than there was in the more cla.s.sic form of pure detection. There are exceptions, of course, and when they occur, there is a pretty good chance that those stories will make it into these pages.

No mention of The Best American Mystery Stories is complete without genuflecting to Michele Slung, the fastest and smartest reader in the world, who combs every consumer magazine, every electronic zine, and as many literary journals as we can find. She scans hundreds - no, let me correct that - thousands of stories to determine which are mysteries (if you were searching for stories for this book, would you have expected "Disaster Stamps of Pluto" to qualify by virtue of its t.i.tle? Or "Loyalty"? Or "Old Boys, Old Girls"?). She then culls those that have the vibe of having been scrawled with a crayon, and gives me the rest. She can read in a day what I'd need a month to do; without her dedication and intelligence, this annual volume would take three years to compile.

While I'm throwing thank-yous around, I'd like again to note the huge contributions of the guest editors, who so generously help make these wonderful books possible. It all began with Robert B. Parker in 1997, followed by Sue Grafton, Ed McBain, Donald E. Westlake, Lawrence Block, James Ellroy, Michael Connelly, Nelson DeMille, as well as Joyce Carol Oates this year, to all of whom I am forever indebted.

Although we are relentlessly aggressive in searching out mystery fiction for these pages, I live in dread that we will somehow miss a worthy story. If you are an editor, publisher, author, agent, or just care about this type of literature, please feel free to send submissions. To qualify for the 2006 collection, a story must be written by an American or Canadian and published for the first time in the 2005 calendar year in an American or Canadian publication. Unpublished stories are not eligible. If the story was published in electronic form, a hard copy must be submitted. When this series began, I did not own a computer. I do now, but I sure don't want to read from a screen, and there are just too many stories in e-zines to print them all out. Please do not ask for critical a.n.a.lysis of work, as I simply do not have time to do that, and please do not ask to have your material returned. If you are totally paranoid and do not believe that the postal service actually delivers mail, enclose a stamped, self-addressed postcard to confirm delivery.

Save the postage if your story was published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine or Alfred Hitchc.o.c.k's Mystery Magazine, as these are read cover to cover. I also see regularly The New Yorker, Esquire, GQ, Playboy, Harper's Magazine, Atlantic, Zoetrope, and mystery anthologies from major publishers, but it can't hurt to send your story anyway.

The earlier I see stories, the better your chance of getting a thorough reading. Any stories received after December 31, 2005, will be discarded without being read. This is not because I'm arrogant and unreasonable, or even just curmudgeonly. The book actually has a deadline, which cannot be met if I'm still reading in mid-January. If you publish in April and send me your story at Christmastime, forcing me to stay home and read while my wife and friends are out partying, you better have written a h.e.l.l of a story.

Please send material to Otto Penzler, The Mysterious Bookshop, 129 West 56th Street, New York, NY 10019.

O.P.

Introduction.

CRIMES CAN OCCUR without mystery. Mysteries can occur without crime. Violent and irrevocable actions can destroy lives but bring other lives together in unforeseeable, unimaginable ways.

In 1917, in the grim waterfront section called Black Rock, in Buffalo, New York, a forty-three-year-old Hungarian immigrant was murdered in a barroom fight, beaten to death with a poker. A few years later, in a rural community north of Buffalo, another recent immigrant to America, a German Jew, attacked his wife with a hammer and committed suicide with a double-barreled shotgun. Both deaths were alcohol-related. Both deaths were "senseless." The men who came to such violent ends, my mother's father and my father's grandfather, never knew each other, yet their deaths precipitated events that brought their survivors together and would continue to have an influence, haunting and obsessive, into the twenty-first century. Families disrupted by violent deaths are never quite "healed" though they struggle to regroup and redefine themselves in ways that might be called heroic.

It's an irony that I owe my life literally to those violent deaths of nearly a century ago, since they set in motion a sequence of events that resulted in my birth, but I don't think it's an irony that, as a writer, I am drawn to such material. There is no art in violence, only crude, cruel, raw, and irremediable harm, but there can be art in the strategies by which violence is endured, transcended, and transformed by survivors. Where there is no meaning, both death and life can seem pointless, but where meaning can be discovered, perhaps even violence can be redeemed, to a degree.

I grew up in a rural household in the s...o...b..lt of upstate New York in a household of family mysteries that were never acknowledged in my presence, and very likely never acknowledged even by the adults who safeguarded them. My father's mother, whose deranged father had blown himself away virtually in front of her, had changed her surname to a seemingly gentile name, renounced her ethnic/religious background, never acknowledged her roots even to her son, and lived among us like one without a personal, let alone a tragic, history. In this she was quintessentially "American"- self-inventing, self-defining. Her life, like the early lives of my parents, seems in retrospect to have sprung from a noir America that's the underside of the American dream, memorialized in folk ballads and blues and in the work of such disparate writers as Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, James M. Cain, Das.h.i.+ell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler. It was as if, as a child, I inhabited a brightly lighted s.p.a.ce - a family household of unusual closeness and protectiveness - surrounded by a penumbra of darkness in which malevolent shapes dwelled.

The earliest books to cast a spell on me were Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking-Gla.s.s, nightmare adventures in the guise of a childhood cla.s.sic, and Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. Both Carroll and Poe create surreal worlds that seem unnervingly real, like images in a distorting mirror, and both explore mysteries without providing solutions. Why does the Red Queen scream, at the mildest provocation, "Off with his head!"? Why are hapless creatures in Wonderland and the Looking-Gla.s.s world always changing shape? Why does the narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart" kill an old man who hasn't harmed him, and in such a bizarre manner? (Crushed and smothered beneath a heavy bed.) Why does the narrator of "The Black Cat" put out the eye of his pet cat and strangle his wife? Motiveless malignity! Individuals act out of impulse, as if to a.s.sure that irrevocable: the violent act and its consequences.

Because I grew up in an atmosphere of withheld information - a way of defining "mystery" - I can appreciate the powerful attraction of mystery as art: it's the formal, mediated, frequently ingenious and riveting simulacrum of the unexplained in our lives, the haphazard, hurtful, confusing, tragic. A crime or mystery novel is the elaboration of a riddle to which the answer is invariably less gripping than the riddle; a crime or mystery story is likely to be a single, abbreviated segment of the riddle, reduced to a few characters and a few dramatic scenes. It's a truism that mystery readers are likely to be addicts of the genre, no sooner finis.h.i.+ng one mystery novel than taking up another, and then another, for the riddle is, while "solved," never explained. But it's perhaps less generally known that writers in the genre are likely to be addicts as well, obsessively compelled to pursue the riddle, the withheld information, the "mystery" s.h.i.+mmering always out of reach - in this way transforming the merely violent and chaotic into art to be shared with others in a communal enterprise.

Of contemporary mystery/crime writers, no one is more obviously haunted by a violent family past than James Ellroy (see the memoir My Dark Places), which accounts for the writer's compulsion to revisit, in a sense, the scene of the original crime (the unsolved murder of his mother) though it can't account, of course, for the writer's remarkable and audacious talent. In an earlier generation, Ross Macdonald is the preeminent example of the mystery/detective novelist whose carefully plotted narratives move both backward and forward, illuminating past, usually family, secrets as a way of solving a case in the present. Michael Connelly's isolato L.A. homicide detective Harry Bosch, as the son of a murdered woman, is temperamentally drawn to cold-case files, as are the haunted characters of Dennis Lehane's most celebrated novel Mystic River and the narrator of his brilliantly realized short story "Until Gwen," included in this volume. Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins is a private "eye" in a racially turbulent, fastidiously depicted Los Angeles milieu of past decades in which the personal intersects, often violently, with the political. In this volume Louise Erdrich's beautifully composed "Disaster Stamps of Pluto" is, in its most distilled form, a "whodunit" of uncommon delicacy and art, set in a nearly extinct North Dakota town in which the past exerts a far more powerful gravitational pull than the present. Edward P. Jones's "Old Boys, Old Girls" is the life story of a man so marginalized and detached from his feelings that he seems to inhabit his life like a ghost, or a prisoner. (See Jones's remarkable story collection Lost in the City for further portrayals of "young lions" like Caesar Matthews.) In the unexpectedly ironic "The Last Man I Killed," David Rachel explores a n.a.z.i past as it impinges on a ba.n.a.l and utterly ordinary academic career in a midwestern state university.

While mystery novels are readily available to the public in bookstores and libraries, mystery stories are relatively hidden from view. Only a very few magazines regularly publish them - Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchc.o.c.k's Mystery Magazine come most immediately to mind; the majority of mystery stories are scattered among dozens of magazines and literary reviews with limited circulations. The inestimable value of The Best American Mystery Stories series is that the anthologies bring together a selection of stories in a single volume, with an appendix listing additional distinguished t.i.tles. While guest editors for the series appear for one year only, the series editor, Otto Penzler, remains a stable and galvanizing presence; any mystery volume with Penzler's name on it is likely to be very good indeed, as well as a responsible and generous representation of the current mystery scene.

Though the twenty stories in this selection are all "mysteries," the resemblances among them end just about there. Not one seems to me formulaic in the stereotypical way often charged against mystery fiction by people like the critic Edmund Wilson (see Wilson's famously peevish diatribe of 1945, "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?," an attack on the overplotted, psychologically superficial English-cozy whodunits by Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, et al.). Not one evokes violence gratuitously, in the way of contemporary crime/action movies and video games. Not one is, in fact, driven by plot at the expense of probability and plausibility. These are all stories in which something happens, usually irrevocably, but they are not stories in which what "happens" is primarily the point. As in Kent Nelson's collectively narrated "Public Trouble," which traces the history of an adolescent boy who has committed acts of extreme violence, Oz Spies's uncomfortably intimate "The Love of a Strong Man," which tells us how it probably feels to be the publicly identified wife of a notorious serial rapist, and Tim McLoughlin's excursion into an ironic sort of nostalgia, "When All This Was Bay Ridge," it's the effect of violence upon others that is the point. As McLoughlin's stunned narrator is asked: "Who owns memory?" The expediency of ethics among professionals - in this case, police officers - that so shocks McLoughlin's protagonist is the revelation of Lou Manfredo's "Case Closed" with its street wisdom: "There is no right. There is no wrong . . . There just is."

It's usually claimed that short stories are distilled, sleeker, and faster-moving forms of fiction than novels, but in fact, all that one can safely say about most stories is that they are shorter than most novels. Page for page, paragraph for paragraph, sentence for sentence, some of the stories in this volume move far more deliberately, if not more poetically, than many novels: David Means's elliptical "Sault Ste. Marie" is aptly t.i.tled, for its setting is its most powerfully evoked character; Daniel Orozco's stylishly narrated "Officers Weep" is a jigsaw puzzle of a story, requiring the kind of attentive reading usually a.s.sociated with poetry (or postmodernist fiction); Stuart M. Kaminsky's "The Shooting of John Roy Worth" is a fabulist tall tale that switches protagonists when we least expect it; John Sayles's teasingly oblique and cinematic "Cruisers" tempts us to read too quickly, and forces us to reread; Scott Turow's "Loyalty" is almost entirely narrated, a tour de force of suspense that uncoils with the dramatic kick of one of Turow's long, densely populated, Chicago-set novels. So far removed from its initial violent act (which occurred forty years before) is Laura Lippman's "The Shoes.h.i.+ne Man's Regrets" that the story is resolved as a study of character, tenderly and shrewdly reconstructed. Joseph Raiche's "One Mississippi" is similarly a reconstruction of violence after the fact, entirely absorbed in the mind of a man who has survived his wife, with no present-action drama: somewhere between story and elegy, convincing as a testament of our gun-ridden TV-tabloid culture. Daniei Handler's "Delmonico" is an artful variation on the "locked-room mystery" that pays homage to Hollywood noir. Sam Shaw's "Reconstruction" and Richard Burgin's "The Ident.i.ty Club" are sui generis, feats of voice, tone, perspective, and tantalizing irresolution that argue (as Edmund Wilson could not have foreseen) for the elasticity of borders between "literary" and "mystery" stories.

Another debatable claim is that the short story is likely to be more self-consciously crafted and "shaped" than the novel. Yet at least two of the most memorable stories in this volume - Edward Jones's "Old Boys, Old Girls" and Scott Wolven's "Barracuda" - defy expectations at virtually every turn, as willfully shapeless as life. "Old Boys, Old Girls" meanders like a river over a period of many years, following a vague and haphazard chronological movement; Wolven's much shorter story cuts from scene to scene with the nervous energy of a hand-held camera. Equally memorable stories by Wolven have appeared in the last several volumes of The Best American Mystery Stories, each an exploration of violence among men who have become marginalized, and thus as dangerous as rogue elephants, in an economically ravaged society that places little value on traditional masculinity. For Wolven's men - loggers, tree poachers, corrupt cops - the impulse to do terrible damage to one another is as natural as watching pit bulls tear one another to pieces for sport.

George V. Higgins (1939-1999) was a unique talent. His most acclaimed novel The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1972) has become an American crime cla.s.sic. As guest editor of this anthology I'm grateful to have the opportunity to reprint what will probably be the last of Higgins's stories to appear in this series. One might debate whether "Jack Duggan's Law" is a story or a novella, but one can't debate the verve, wit, authenticity, and wisdom of the world it memorializes: a Boston demimonde of hara.s.sed, overworked, yet quixotically zealous defense attorneys and ADAs. Higgins's ear for the rough poetry of vernacular speech has never been sharper than in this posthumously published story from a collection t.i.tled The Easiest Thing in the World.

As a concluding note, I should add that reading stories for this volume was a pleasure and that decisions were not easy to make. Both Otto and I read and reread. (I've read "Jack Duggan's Law" at least three times. It keeps getting better.) Each of us had the idea, I think, of wearing the other down by stubbornly clinging to favored t.i.tles. In some cases this worked, in others not. Where we couldn't finally agree, we decided to include the story in question. Our princ.i.p.al disagreement was over George V. Higgins: Otto preferred the even longer "The Easiest Thing in the World" to "Jack Duggan's Law." In this instance, Otto graciously deferred to me, but readers may want to decide their own preferences.

JOYCE CAROL OATES.

The Best American.

Mystery Stories 2005.

RICHARD BURGIN.

The Ident.i.ty Club.

From TriQuarterly.

SOMETIMES YOU MEET someone who is actually achieving what you can only strive for. It's not exactly like meeting your double, it's more like seeing what you would be if you could realize your potential. Those were the feelings that Remy had about Eugene. In appearance they were similar, although Eugene was younger by a few years and taller by a few inches. But they each had fine dark hair, still untouched by any gray, and they each had refined facial features, especially their delicate noses. Eugene's body, however, was significantly more muscular than Remy's.

At the agency in New York where Remy had worked for three years writing ad copy, Eugene was making a rapid and much talked about ascent. A number of Remy's other colleagues openly speculated that Eugene was advancing because he was a masterful office politician. But when Remy began working with him on an important new campaign for a client who manufactured toothpaste, he saw that wasn't true at all. Eugene had a special kind of brilliance, not just for writing slogans or generating campaign ideas, but a deep insight into human motivations and behavior that he knew how to channel into making people buy products. Rather than being a master diplomat, Remy discovered that Eugene was aloof almost to the point of rudeness, never discussed his private life, and rarely showed any signs of a sense of humor. Yet Remy admired him enormously and wondered if Eugene, who Remy thought of as one of the wisest men he knew (certainly the wisest young man), might be a person he could confide in about the Ident.i.ty Club and the important decision he had to make in the near future.

All of these thoughts were streaming through Remy's mind after work one night in his apartment when the phone rang. It was Poe calling to remind him about the Ident.i.ty Club meeting that night. Remy nearly gasped as he'd inexplicably lost track of time and now had only a half hour to meet Poe and take a cab with him to the meeting.

The club itself had to be, almost by definition, a secretive organization that placed a high value on its members' trustworthiness, dependability, and punctuality. Its members a.s.sumed the ident.i.ties- the appearance, activities, and personalities - (whenever they could) of various celebrated dead artists they deeply admired. At the monthly meetings, which Remy enjoyed immensely and thought of as parties, all members would be dressed in their adopted ident.i.ties, drinking and eating and joking with each other. As soon as he stepped into a meeting he could feel himself transform, as if the colors of his life went from muted grays and browns to glowing reds and yellows and vibrant greens and blues. To be honest with himself, since moving to New York from New England three years ago, his life before the club had been embarra.s.singly devoid of both emotion and purpose. How lucky for him, he often thought, that he'd been befriended by Winston Reems - now known by club members as Salvador Dali - a junor executive at his agency who had slowly introduced him to the club.

This month's meeting was at the new Bill Evans's apartment (who had patterned himself after the famous jazz pianist) and since Remy enjoyed music he was particularly looking forward to it. He had also been told that Thomas Bernhard, named for the late, Austrian writer, would definitely be there as well. As Bernhard was renowned for being a kind of hermit it was always special when he did attend a meeting and it made sense that as a former professional musician he would go to this one.

Quickly Remy dried off from his shower and began putting on new clothes. He thought that tonight promised to be an especially interesting mix of people, which was one of the ostensible ideas of the organization, to have great artists from the different arts meet and mingle, as they never had in real life. The decision facing Remy, which he'd given a good deal of thought to without coming any closer to a conclusion, was who he was going to "become" himself. He was considered at present an "uncommitted member" and had been debating between Nathanael West and some other writers. Nabokov, whom he might have seriously considered, had already been taken. At least, since he still had a month before he had to commit, he didn't have to dress in costume - though he rather looked forward to that. Remy had been a member for four months and it was now time for him to submit to a club interview to help him decide whose ident.i.ty he was best suited for. Sometimes these interviews were conducted by the entire members.h.i.+p, which reminded Remy of a kind of intervention, other times by the host of that evening's meeting or by some other well-established member. The new member was never informed in advance, as these "probings" were taken very seriously and the club wanted a spontaneous and true response.

One of the reasons Remy was having difficulty choosing an ident.i.ty - and why he felt some anxiety about the whole process - was that he'd kept secret from the club his hidden contempt, or at least ambivalence, about the advertising business and his disappointment with the emptiness of his own life as well. No wonder he found refuge in art and in imagining the lives that famous artists led. He'd heard other members confess to those exact sentiments, but the public admission of these feelings would be difficult for Remy. He thought it was the inevitable price he had to pay to get his members.h.i.+p in the club, and along with his work and Eugene (whose importance to him Remy also kept secret) the club was his only interest in life, the only thing worth thinking about.

Poe was waiting for him in front of his brownstone, dressed, as Remy expected, in a black overcoat with his long recently dyed dark hair parted in the middle, the approximate match of his recently dyed mustache.

"I'm sorry I'm so late," Remy said.

Poe stared at him. "Something is preoccupying you," he said.

"You're right about that," Remy said, thinking of Eugene and wis.h.i.+ng he could somehow be at the party.

"Do you mind if we walk?" Poe said. "There's something in the air tonight I crave, although I couldn't say exactly what it is. Some dark bell-like sound, some secret perfumed scent coming from the night that draws me forward ... besides," he said, with a completely straight face, as he took a swallow of some kind of alcohol concealed in a brown paper bag, "it will be just as fast or just as slow as a taxi."

"Fine," Remy said; he felt he was hardly in a position to object. In the club Remy suspected that members a.s.sumed their ident.i.ties with varying degrees of intensity. Clearly Poe was unusually committed to his to the point where he had renounced his former name, become a poet, short story writer, and alcoholic, and given up dating women his age. Because he worked mostly at home doing research on the Internet he was able to be in character pretty much around the clock.

"You need to focus on your choice," Poe said. "You have an important decision facing you and not much time to make it."

"I hope I'll know during the probing," Remy said. "I hope it will come to me then."

"Listen to your heart, even if it makes too much noise," Poe said, smiling ironically.

They walked in silence the rest of the way, Poe sometimes putting his hands to his ears as if Roderick Usher were reacting to too strident a sound. As they were approaching the steps to Evans's walkup, from which they could already hear a few haunting chords on the piano, Poe turned to Remy and said, "Are you aware that we're voting on the woman issue tonight?"

"Yes, I knew that."

Poe was referring to the question of whether or not the Ident.i.ty Club, which was currently a de facto men's club, would begin to actively recruit women. Remy had sometimes thought of the club as practicing a form of directed reincarnation, but did that mean that in the next world the club didn't want to deal with any women? "I'm going to vote that we should recruit them. How can we fully be who we've become without women? I need them for my poetry, and to love of course. I think the organization should try to increase our chances to meet them, not isolate us from them."

"I completely agree with you," Remy said.

They rang the bell and Dali opened the door, bowing grandly and pointing toward a dark, barely furnished, yet somehow chaotic apartment.

"It's Bill Evans's home. I knew it would be a mess," Poe said quietly to Remy, drinking again from his brown paper bag.

Evans was bent over the piano, head characteristically suspended just above the keys, as he played the coda of his composition "Re: Person I Knew." He also had long dark hair but was clean-shaven. From the small sofa - the only one in the room - Erik Satie shouted "Bravo! Encore!" Remy couldn't remember seeing any photographs of the French composer but judged his French to be authentic. As a tribute to his admirer, Evans played a version of Satie's most famous piano piece, "Gymnopedie," which Remy recalled the former Evans had recorded on his alb.u.m Nirvana. This was the first time Remy had heard the new Bill Evans play and while he was hardly an Evans scholar he thought it sounded quite convincing. The harmony, the soft touch and plaintive melodic lines were all there (no doubt learned from a book that had printed Evans's solos and arrangements) though, of course, some mistakes were made and the new Evans's touch wasn't as elegant as the first one's. Still, Remy could see that the new Evans's immersion into his ident.i.ty had been thorough. Remy had recently seen a video of the former Evans playing and could see that the new one had his body movements down pat. Could he, Remy, devote himself as thoroughly to the new ident.i.ty he would soon be a.s.suming?

"Encore, encore," said Satie again and now also Cocteau, who had joined his old friend and collaborator on the sofa. Continuing his homage to his French admirers, Evans played "You Must Believe in Spring" by the French composer Michel Legrand. When it ended Remy found himself applauding vigorously as well and becoming even more curious about the former life of the new Evans. All he knew was that he'd once been a student at Juilliard and was involved now in selling computer parts. He wished he'd paid more attention when he talked with him five months ago at the meeting but now it was too late, as members were not allowed to discuss their former ident.i.ties with each other once they'd committed to a new one.

After a brief rendition of "Five," Evans took a break and Remy slowly sidled up to him, wis.h.i.+ng again that Eugene were there. Though he was often aloof, when the situation required, Eugene always knew just what to say to people. What to say and not a word more, for Eugene had the gift of concision, just as Evans did on the piano.

"That was beautiful playing," Remy finally said.

"Thanks, man," Evans said, slowly raising his head and smiling at him. Like the first Bill Evans, his teeth weren't very good and he wore gla.s.ses.

"I know how hard it is to keep that kind of time, and to swing like that without your trio."

"I miss the guys but sometimes when I play alone I feel a oneness with the music that I just can't get any other way."

It occurred to Remy that Evans had had at least four different trios throughout his recording career and that he didn't know which trio Evans was "missing" because he didn't know what stage of Evans's life the new one was now living. Perhaps sensing this, Evans said, "When Scotty died last year I didn't even know if I could continue. I couldn't bring myself to even look for a new ba.s.sist for a long time or to record either. And when I did finally go in the studio again a little while ago, it was a solo gig."

Remy now knew that for Evans it was about 1962, since Scott LaFaro, his young former ba.s.sist, had died in a car accident in 1961.

"Do you play, man?" Evans asked.

"Just enough to tell how good you are," Remy said.

"So there's no chance you could become a musician?"

"No, no, I couldn't do it."

"I know this ident.i.ty thing is difficult to handle at first."

"It is for me. It really is," Remy said, touched by the note of sympathy in Evans's voice.

"Do you do any of the arts, man?"

"Not with anything like your level of skill or Dali's or any of the other members, for that matter. I write a little at my job . .. but you could hardly call it art. There's a man, a rising star at my ad agency named Eugene who's working on a campaign with me now who has the most original ideas and comes up with the most brilliant material who really is an artist. If he were here, instead of me, he could become George Bernard Shaw or Oscar Wilde."

"Have you spoken to him about the club?"

"No, no. I don't really know him that well. I mean he barely knows I exist."

"Anyway, I've been speaking to some of the other members and there's definitely growing support to include men of letters in the club, you know, critics of a high level like Edmund Wilson or Marshall McLuhan."

"Oh no, I don't know anywhere near enough to be Edmund Wilson or McLuhan either. I figure if I become a member it will be as a novelist. I was thinking of Nathanael West, or maybe James Agee."

"Either way you'd have to go young."

Remy looked at Evans to be sure he was joking but saw that he looked quite serious. A chilling thought flitted through his mind. Did the committed members have a secret rule that they had to die at the same age their "adopted artists" did? And if so, was it merely a symbolic death of their ident.i.ty or their actual physical death duplicated as closely as possible? Was the Ident.i.ty Club, which he'd thought of as devoted to a form of reincarnation, then, actually devoted in the long run to a kind of delayed suicide? Of course this was probably a preposterous fantasy, still, he couldn't completely dismiss it.

"But you'll have to die young too then," Remy said, remembering that Bill Evans had died at fifty-one. He said this with a half smile so it could seem he was joking. Evans looked around himself nervously before he answered.

"I find that Zen really helps me deal with the death thing."

Remy took a step back and nodded silently. His head had begun to hurt and after he saw that Evans wanted to play again he excused himself to use the bathroom. Once there, however, he realized that he'd forgotten to bring his Tylenol. He opened the mirrored cabinet, was blinded by a variety of pharmaceuticals but found nothing he could take. He closed the cabinet and heard Evans playing the opening chorus of "Time Remembered," one of his best compositions. The music was startlingly lovely but then partially drowned out by a loud coughing in the hallway. Remy turned and saw Thomas Bernhard, face temporarily buried in a handkerchief.

"Are you looking for something?" Bernhard said in a German accent.