13

For Tim Underhill that night, periods of unhappy wakefulness alternated with alarming dreams in which everything around him, including the ground he stood on, proved, when scrutinized, to be a collection of CGI effects. He fled across fields, he wandered through vast empty buildings, he walked slowly through a haunted city, but all of it was as unreal as a mirage. The cobbles and mosaics beneath his feet, the long slope of the hill, the sconces and the walls on which they hung were shiny, cartoonlike computer effects.

He got out of bed feeling worse than when he had climbed in. A shower, usually an infallible cure for the disorders that afflicted him on arising, left him feeling only partially restored. Groaning, he toweled himself dry, pulled clothes out of various drawers, and sat on the edge of his bed. At that entirely ordinary moment, his memory finally delivered to him the events of the previous morning.

He was holding open a sock with both hands. The sock made no sense at all. It was only a tube of cloth. The angel’s foot had come down on the sidewalk, and that foot had been astonishingly beautiful. And he had seen that smooth passage of white flesh at the groin, the giant wings creaking open, the bright and powerful ascent. Sudden, stinging tears leaped to the surface of Underhill’s eyes. When he had tugged the sock onto his foot, he ran to the windows on Grand Street and looked down. Between rain showers on a dark gray morning, people holding folded or upright umbrellas hurried this way and that on the pavement. He saw no lurking angel, no feral Jasper Kohle. A glimpse of yellow in the refuse bin on the corner reminded him of Kohle’s discarded books.

I couldn’t have seen all that, he told himself. He knew what had happened: Jasper Kohle had affected him more than he had known. Soaked through, anxious, angrier than he had wanted to be, Tim had let his mind pull him into the surreal. No wonder he had dreamed of wandering lost through slippery landscapes made entirely of illusion. Tim wanted to think that yesterday’s vision of an angel was the product of an overdeveloped imagination.

He decided to eat breakfast at home for once, and to avoid looking out the window.

         

But when he sat down before his computer, he immediately found himself in trouble. On the preceding day, he had needed the amnesia produced by concentrated absorption in his story and covered page after page with his heroine’s difficulties. Now his language had turned leaden and clumsy, and her problems seemed contrived.

Abandoning the struggle, he brought up his e-mail. By now, this was a dubious act, akin to talking to shiny-eyed fans who metamorphosed into aging, unclean madmen. As he’d feared, a number of letters without return addresses had appeared in his electronic mailbox. Tim deleted the spam, read his real e-mail, answered what had to be answered, and only then retrieved the messages from Nowhere.

Byrne615 wished to communicate the following:

not rite, not fair, you pansy

i dont know where i AM

Sorry, but I know less than you do, Tim thought. (But something about Byrne615 snagged in his mind.)

Cyrax told him:

b patient. u will know all soon.

watch listn. i wl b yr gide.

And kalicokitty weighed in with:

breth was taken frum my bodee

I see only veils of fog or smok

with sounds of greatr engines

som never liked u

I did

The last message, in some way the most disturbing, came from phoorow:

u aint soch

bastrd no

mor ha ha

“Phoorow”—how many Phoorows could there be? The only one Underhill had ever known had been a fellow grunt in Lieutenant Beevers’s band of merry men, his real name being Philip Footler, but known everywhere as Phoorow, a sweet-faced young redneck who had participated in Lieutenant Beevers’s second-greatest fuckup, a military exercise that took place in Dragon Valley, or down in Dragon Valley, as they used to say, them what was there. Phoorow had disliked Tim, but having seen what Tim did to a very few others who objected to his “flowers,” he kept his objections to himself. Maybe he had been a bastard, Tim allowed. For sure he had been a loudmouth show-off, and a country boy like Phoorow would never have met anyone like him.

Unfortunately for him at the time, and unfortunately now for Tim Underhill, Phoorow had been cut in half, literally, by machine-gun fire during their platoon’s sixth or seventh hour under fire down in Dragon Valley.

Tim stood up, a number of internal organs trembling slightly, and walked from his desk to his fake fireplace with a gas fixture capable of making it look exactly like a real fireplace, should he ever turn it on, and thence to the handsome bookcases to its right. There he drew comfort from the rows of familiar titles and names. Martin Amis, Kingsley Amis. Raymond Chandler, Stephen King. Hermann Broch, Muriel Spark, Robert Musil. A couple of yards of the black Library of America volumes. Then more fiction, imperfectly alphabetized: Crowley, Connelly, Lehane, Lethem, Erickson, Oates, Iris Murdoch. Iris was dead; so were Kingley Amis, Chandler, and Hermann Broch. Dawn Powell, you’re gone, too. Are you folks going to start getting in touch? Where Phoorow rushes in, will you fear to tread?

He moved to the window and gazed, unseeing, down. How could the Phoorow of today be the barely remembered Phoorow of 1968? He couldn’t.

In the hitherto semipeaceable kingdom of Timothy Underhill, things appeared to be falling apart. Yesterday he had hallucinated seeing his sister and a gigantic, pissed-off angel; yesterday he had been rattled by a crazed stalker posing as a fan; today a dead man had sent him an e-mail. Down on the street, cars and trucks crawled eastward through rain as vertical as a plumb line.

There could actually be another person called Phoorow, he supposed. According to the person called Cyrax, Tim would know what was going on fairly soon. Cyrax, it could be, had orchestrated all these messages. Tim could not persuade himself that this Cyrax was capable of arranging everything that had happened in the Fireside and on the street, but undoubtedly a single, deeply misguided individual could send out tons of bizarre e-mails under a variety of names.

Tim had largely succeeded in calming himself down, and as he returned to his desk he remembered what had struck him about the first of today’s crop of mystery e-mails. The center on the Holy Sepulchre football team had been one Bill Byrne, a 250-pound sociopath who from time to time had referred to Tim Underhill in the terms of today’s e-mail. “Pansy,” “queer,” all of that. At seventeen, Underhill had not known himself well enough to be angry; instead, he had felt embarrassed, filled with an incoherent sense of shame. He had not wanted to be those things. Acceptance had come only after his first experience of sex, with, as it happened, the spookily sophisticated, Japanese-American seventeen-year-old Yukio Eto, who had become the template for the “flowers.” After Yukio, he had done his best to feel guilty and ashamed, but the effort had been doomed from the start. The experience had been so joyous that Tim was totally incapable of convincing himself of its wickedness.

Bill Byrne, on the other hand, had no problem in accepting his natural bigotry, and during the whole of their years at Holy Sepulchre, Tim had never heard any utterance from his teammate that did not contain a sneer. Was Bill Byrne still alive? Of course, Tim had no proof that Byrne615 was his old adversary of the high school locker room, yet he did want to know what had happened to Byrne. His best friend in Millhaven, the great private investigator Tom Pasmore, could have told him in a minute or less, but Tim did not want to waste his friend’s time on a question like this. Surely he could discover Bill Byrne’s fate by himself.

The name of the one person in the world who could tell him exactly what had become of his high school class, Chester Finnegan, floated into consciousness. Many high school graduating classes contain one person for whom the previous four years represent an idyllic period never to be equaled in adult life, and those persons often take on the role of class secretary. They went to different schools than the rest of their classmates, and in their imaginations they want to stroll through their beloved corridors as often as possible. Chester Finnegan was the self-appointed Class Secretary for Life of Tim’s year at Holy Sepulchre, a man generally to be avoided, but not now.

Information gave him the telephone number, which he promptly dialed. After retiring from State Farm Insurance a couple of years ago, Chester Finnegan had turned to the full-time organization of his Holy Sepulchre “archive.” Tim imagined him sitting at home day after day, screening other people’s home movies of football games and commencement exercises.

(Despite Tim’s attitude, it should be noted here that Finnegan had enjoyed a long career as an insurance executive, a loving marriage of thirty-four years, and was the father of three grown children, two of whom were graduates of excellent medical schools. The third, Seamus, reckoned a failure within the family, had taken the handsome face he had inherited from his father to Los Angeles, where he worked as a massage therapist in between acting jobs. All three children had graduated from Holy Sepulchre. On the other hand, Chester Finnegan talked like this:)

“Hey, Tim! It’s great to hear from you, really great! Gosh, this is like ESP or something, because I was just thinking about you and that stunt you pulled in chemistry class our junior year. I mean, talk about stink! Whoa! Worser’n a family of skunks. So how are things, anyhow? Written any good books lately? You’re probably our most famous alum, you know that? Jeez, I remember seeing you on the Today show, when was that, last year?”

“The year before,” Tim said.

“Cripes, I looked at you and I said to myself, Boy that’s the same guy who damn near asphyxiated Father Locksley. The good father passed away this March, did you see that? I put it in the class newsletter.”

“Oh, yes,” Tim said.

“Eighty-nine, he was, you know, and his health was all shot to hell. But if he caught you talking to Katie Couric, not saying he did of course, I sure know what went through his mind!”

“In a way, that has something to do with the reason I called.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Tim. You missed the memorial. We had ten, twelve of us there. You were mentioned, I can say that. Oh, yes.”

“Actually, I was wondering about Bill Byrne, and it occurred to me that you could probably fill me in.”

Finnegan said nothing for a moment that seemed longer than it was. “The colorful Bill Byrne. I suppose you were wondering about how that happened.”

Tim closed his eyes.

“Tim?”

“Well, I wasn’t sure.”

“The obituary in the Ledger ran only two days ago. What, you saw it online, I guess?”

“Something like that.”

“The Ledger couldn’t say much about how Bill died. Of course, I won’t be able to be much more specific in the online newsletter. You do get those, don’t you?”

Tim assured Finnegan that he received his online newsletter, without mentioning that he always deleted it unread.

“Well, you want to know about old Wild Bill. Well, it was pretty bad. He was in this bar downtown, Izzy’s. A lot of lawyers hang out there, because it’s near the Federal Building and the courthouse. This is about one, two in the morning, Friday night. Leland Rose comes up to Bill and says, ‘I believe you’re messing around with my wife.’ Leland Rose is some fancy financial adviser, big office downtown. Bill tells him he’s crazy, and he completely denies having anything to do with this guy’s wife, who by the way is of the trophy variety and pure trouble from top to bottom.

“So they get into an argument and by and by this Leland Rose, this pillar of society, pulls out a gun. Before anybody can stop him, he takes a shot at Bill. Even though he’s about two feet away, he misses Bill completely, only Bill doesn’t know it. He thinks he was shot! He throws a punch at Rose and knocks him out cold. Then he falls down, too. This is pure Bill Byrne. He’s at least as drunk as Rose, and he imagines he’s wounded, which is because in his fall, he smashed the hell out of one of his elbows. Bill got up to about three hundred pounds there toward the end.

“An ambulance shows up and takes both of them to Shady Mount Hospital. They’re strapped onto gurneys. This whole time, Bill is carrying on, trying to get at Rose, who’s still out. They get to Shady Mount and unload Bill first, only he’s rolling around so much that they actually drop him, and that’s the last straw. Poof! Whammo! Massive heart attack, huge heart attack, a heart explosion. No way they could revive him.”

“So he died drunk, on a gurney outside the emergency entrance of Shady Mount.”

“Actually, at that point he wasn’t on the gurney.”

“Was Rose right? Was Byrne having an affair with his wife?”

“That fat little Irishman was always screwing someone else’s wife. Women ate him up, don’t ask me why.”

Tim thought of Phoorow and had the sudden desire to stop talking to Chester Finnegan.

“I was just remembering that day you and I drove up to Random Lake,” Finnegan said. “Remember? Boy, that was one of the best days of my life. Did Turner come with us? Yes, he did, because Dicky Stockwell pushed him off the pier, remember?”

Tim not only failed to remember the great excursion to Random Lake, he had no idea who Turner and Dicky Stockwell were. Unchecked, Finnegan could fill another hour with golden moments only he remembered, and Tim began making noises indicative of the conversation’s end.

Then he remembered that Finnegan could, for once and all, banish the specter that had shimmered into view. “I suppose Byrne was on your newsletter list.”

“Naturally.”

“So you have his e-mail address.”

“Not that I’ll ever use it anymore.”

“Could you please tell me what it was, Ches?”

“Why would you want a thing like that?”

“It has to do with my work,” he said. “I’m ruling out some possibilities.”

“Oh, I see,” said Finnegan. “Hold on, I’ll get my database. . . . All right, here we are. Wild Bill’s e-mail address was Byrne, capital B, 615 at aol.com.”

“Ah,” Tim said. “Yes. Well. How unusual.”

“Not really,” Finnegan told him. “A lot of AOL addresses are like that.”

The specter had come shimmering back into view, and Bill Byrne, who had died of not being shot to death, had a fairness issue on his chest. Besides that, Bill felt lost.

“Ches, if I give you the first part of some e-mail addresses, can you see if they are in your database?”

“You mean the names, right?”

“I’m just testing something out here.”

“Hey, if I help you, I expect a cut of your royalties!”

“Talk to my agent,” Tim said. He went to his e-mail screen. “How about Huffy? Do you have a Huffy? Capital H?”

“I don’t even have to look for that one—Bob Huffman. Huffy at verizon.net. Nice guy. Cancer got him about three months ago. Had two remissions, and then it went nuclear on him. This is a dangerous age, my friend.”

Tim remembered Bob Huffman, a lanky red-haired boy who looked as if he would remain sixteen forever. “Is there a Presten?” He spelled it.

“Presten at mindspring.com, sure. That’s Paul Resten. You have to remember him. Strange story. Paul died right around New Year’s. Gunshot wound. Poor guy, he was an innocent bystander in a liquor store holdup, wrong place, wrong time. Paul was a very successful guy! Every year, he gave a generous contribution to the school.”

The remark contained a quantity of reproach, but Finnegan’s attention had shifted to another point.

“These e-mail addresses are all for dead people, Tim. What’s going on?”

“Someone must be messing with my head. In the past few days, I got some e-mail that was supposedly sent by these people.”

“I’d call that obscene,” Finnegan said. “Using our classmates’ names like that.”

“I just figured out another one,” Tim said. “Rudderless must be Les Rudder. Don’t tell me he’s dead, too.”

“Les died in a car crash on September 11, 2001. I’m not surprised you never heard about that one. Anyone else?”

“Loumay, nayrm, kalicokitty, and someone called Cyrax.”

“I know two of those right off, but let me look up. . . . Okay. This guy’s a real bastard, whoever he is. Kalicokitty was Katie Finucan, year behind us, remember? Cutest little thing you ever saw. God, I used to have the hots for Katie Finucan. Better not let my wife hear me say that, hey? Katie died in a fire last February. She was visiting her grandkids in New Jersey, and no one knows what happened. Everyone got out but her. Smoke inhalation, I’d say, but hey, I was in the insurance business, what do I know?”

Tim was appalled by the ease with which death had moved through the ranks of his classmates at a mediocre little Catholic school in Millhaven.

“Okay, same deal goes for loumay and nayrm, Lou Mayer and Mike Ryan. Ryan died in Ireland last year, and Lou Mayer drowned in a sailing accident off Cape Cod.”

“Oh, Christ,” Tim said.

“I hear he was a lousy sailor. What was that last name?”

“Cyrax.”

“He doesn’t seem to be here. Nope. So maybe that one’s real.”

“He said he wanted to be my guide.”

“That’s your joker, right there.” Finnegan’s voice rose. “Here’s the guy who’s sending you this crap. It has to be someone we went to school with. Who else would know about these people? He’s picking the names of people you cared about.”

Except I didn’t, Tim thought. “That crossed my mind, too.”

“There has to be someone who can pin down this creep.”

“I know a couple of people who might be able to do something,” Tim said. “Thank you for your help.”

         

Now his computer seemed like a hostile entity, exuding toxins as it crouched atop his desk. If Cyrax was sending him e-mails using the Internet names of dead classmates because Cyrax had been a classmate himself, how did he know about Philip Footler? No one in Tim’s life was familiar with both his life in high school and his Vietnam tour. The one and only intersection on earth of Bill Byrne and Phoorow was Timothy Underhill.

He went back and started over. Someone calling himself Cyrax had been rooting through his past and using what he found there to send these crazy e-mails. Tim could see no other explanation. Cyrax had already appointed himself as guide, so let him make the next move. Since without full addresses these e-mail conversations could be only one-way, he would make the next move anyhow. When Cyrax showed himself again, Tim would decide how he wanted to respond. He could always start deleting any e-mail that came without an @ sign and domain name.

He remembered the astonishing sight of his sister, a little Alice in Wonderland girl leaning forward to hurl the words Listen to us at him, and for the first time connected April’s command with the e-mails. An uncontrollable shiver went through his body. Helplessly, he looked at the computer, squatting on his desk like a sleek black toad. From below it, the voices of the dead bubbled up to print their inchoate words on the screen, one after another, emerging from a bottomless well.

He had to get outside.

         

But when Tim Underhill left his building to walk aimlessly down Grand, then turn left on Wooster Street, then right on Broome, his hands in the pockets of his still-damp Burberry, his head covered by his still-damp WBGO cap, he felt no release from the phantoms that had driven him into the streets. In the passing cars, the drivers scowled like the officers of the secret police in a totalitarian state; on the sidewalks, the people who passed gazed downward, sloping along mute and alone.

Down Crosby he went, that street of cobblestones and sudden windy spaces, now as empty as it had been twenty years before, when he had first moved into the neighborhood. Loneliness suddenly bit into him, and he welcomed it back, for the loneliness was a true part of him, real, not a fearful phantom.

A few days before, Tim had been leafing through his volume of Emily Dickinson’s letters, and for some reason a phrase from one of the “Master” letters—written to a man never identified—came into his head: I used to think when I died—I could see you—so I died as fast as I could. It had been a long time since he had loved someone that way. This gloomy recognition came to him wrapped in the unhappiness that seemed to leak from every blank window and closed door on the street. Underhill tried to reject it and the unhappiness both. Because he thought he would fail, he failed, and loneliness and sorrow thickened around him.

Something set him off, and after that he was, for all purposes, back in his generation’s war. Phoorow, phoorow, Private Philip Footler had been the trigger. Gliding toward him, shifting back, sliding under his defenses, a particularly unhappy vision had flooded Tim’s mind, whether or not he could actually see it at any given moment. Tim Underhill had been something like six feet from Phoorow’s grotesque separation from himself. It had been granted him to witness every one of the four or five seconds it had taken the boy to die—reaching down to pull his body back into connection, his mouth opening and closing like that of an infant seeking the nipple. Tim was grateful not to have seen Phoorow’s eyes.

He longed for the reassuring sound of other people’s voices. He could have gone to the Fireside—okay, not the Fireside, but any one of the little bars and restaurants scattered throughout his village: for over the previous two decades that was what the territory bounded by West Broadway, Broome Street, Broadway, and Canal Street had inevitably become: his hometown, the one place where he felt truly comfortable.

He turned around, and a hint of movement caught his eye. On a street where only he was in motion, the idea of movement seemed a little spooky. Tim Underhill turned back, then spun his head again, scanning the sidewalks and the anonymous facades. It was as if the street had been evacuated, specifically for the purpose of stranding him in it.

Thin, foggy, impenetrable veils hung like sheets of cloud-colored iron at both ends of the block. The ordinary sounds of the city were muted and distant, walled out. If he looked hard at the cobblestones, he thought, he would see unreality’s slick, cartoonish sheen. Everything that had happened to him over the past two days had been designed to get him here, to this empty block on a false Crosby Street.

Now it had happened for real, Tim thought. His mind had rolled past its own edge. Even the gray air seemed to resist him as he turned around once again to face north: uptown, the direction that would take him back to Broome Street. And as he turned, he thought he detected a hint of movement closer to him than the first time. Tim scanned the storefronts and windows and this time really noticed that every one of them was dark. The hypothetical movement had been off to his right and behind the large plate-glass windows of a vanished art gallery. He looked more closely at the window and saw only the murk of an empty room.

Once, the gallery had been dedicated to minimalist installations that featured simulated body parts, piles of dirt, and reams of text. Behind the scrim of the dirty enormous window, the bare walls receded into darkness. When he shifted his glance to the cloud-gate at the top end of Crosby, something in the gloom at the rear of the empty gallery revealed itself, then slid back into invisibility. Whatever it was had been looking at him. He snapped his head back and stared into the window. Then he moved forward across the sidewalk, bringing more of the interior into view.

At the far end of the room, a dim shape materialized out of the darkness and seemed to move forward, matching his movements.

Jeez, he thought, stung by a recollection, didn’t I write this somewhere?

He took another reluctant step forward. In either mockery or challenge, the figure inside matched him again. In the darkness and obscurity at the back of the immense room, its shape, which was not human, seemed to waver, swelling and shifting like smoke. A long, wide body lowered itself a few inches, as if crouching. There was the suggestion of ears. A silvery pair of eyes swam into view and focused intently on him. A kind of blunt force streamed toward him. Tim gasped and stepped back. He felt as though he had been pinned by a pair of flashlights. Unrelenting and soulless, made entirely of will and antipathy, the creature’s eyes hung in the gloomy air.

He found himself moving backward and off the sidewalk, into the middle of the cobbled street. It seemed important not to turn his back.

Knowing that his terror was ridiculous did nothing to tame it. He continued to move across the street, eyes locked with the creature’s, pushed himself up onto the far sidewalk, and whirled to sprint north toward Broome Street. Around him, the atmosphere tingled and snapped. He once again became aware of the rain. Before he had taken two long strides, a door opened in what had seemed a blank wall, and a couple emerged from a tall iron-fronted building. The world around him had solidified into its old unreliable self. He reached Broome with the sense of having broken through an invisible but palpable barrier.

Because the people who had reappeared on the sidewalk were staring at him, he slowed his pace. By the time he was crossing Broadway, he had brought himself down to a walk. His heart was knocking in his chest, and he could hear his own ragged breathing. A pair of shiny young men with rain-resistant hair turned their heads to see how much trouble he was in.

“I’m okay,” he said.

The young men snapped their heads forward and began walking a little faster, leaking disdain.

Strange, how normal the world seemed to him now, after Crosby Street. Those young men, what would they say if they knew he was getting e-mail from dead classmates? No more. Underhill was turning his back on all that nonsense. He resolved to concentrate on his work. From here on out, he would delete, unread, all e-mails without domain names. He wanted order and productivity.

He reached this decision with the sense of having established the ground rules for the next six months of his life. He would create a clearing, and in that clearing, free of uncertainty and disorder, he would write his book. Within imagination’s protective confines, he would set his heroine in motion. She was supposed to be in emotional extremity, not he. He needed to get in balance again.

With this resolve in mind, Tim turned the corner of Wooster and Grand, looked through the drizzle to the entrance of his building, and noticed a tall man in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt emerging through the open door. Oh, no, he thought, without being entirely certain why he should react this way. Then he looked more closely beneath the edge of the hood and saw what part of him had already registered, the face of Jasper Kohle. Kohle was grinning at him.

Tim stopped moving. For a second or two, Kohle’s face seemed to slide over its bones, and the bones themselves to shift. All that remained steady was the grin. Kohle’s face disappeared when his body turned, and he began to move in a deliberate slow jog toward West Broadway, where a wet young woman with green hair and facial piercings slouched past a steady stream of cars.

“Hey!” Tim shouted. “What are you doing?”

Kohle jogged around the corner, and Tim followed. For a moment he saw Kohle’s back moving purposefully away from him; then it slipped around a group of policemen staring at the entrance of a shop, and was gone. Tim thought of calling out to the cops, but he realized that he had no crime to report.

“Oh, shit,” he said. “Oh, hell.” One of the cops turned his head and gave him a look that said, Do you really want to mess up my day?

He spun around and raced back to the entrance of 55 Grand, as if haste could alter whatever he was going to find in his loft. The key jittered in the lock, demanding extra body English before it slid home. Though Tim’s mind was empty of nearly everything but anxiety, he managed to wonder how Kohle had gotten inside without a key. Callers could not be buzzed in: loft holders had to go downstairs and open two sets of doors for their visitors. This reality created a possibility for hope. Maybe Kohle’s visit had been no more than the act of a stalker pushing the envelope.

Tim ran past the elevator and charged up the staircase. His heels rang on the metal steps. He was breathing hard by the time he reached his door, and he had a sharp stitch in his side. He placed his left hand over the pain, with his right inserted his second key into the slot, and the door swung open by itself. Instead of unlocking it, he had almost locked it.

“Bloody hell,” he said, trying to remember if he had locked the door on his way out. The memory would not come. In fact, he could not even remember if he had taken the elevator or walked down the stairs, but he could not imagine forgetting to lock his door when he left the building.

Holding his breath, he pushed the door open, stepped inside, and flattened his back against the wall. From this position, at the end of a long, narrow corridor lined on one side with framed photographs and a row of coat hooks on the other, he could see only a small vertical slice of the loft itself. He realized that he was being absurdly cautious. Tim unpeeled himself from the photographs and called out, “Anybody here?” He moved to the end of the narrow corridor and surveyed his loft. No furniture had been overturned, and nothing seemed to have been destroyed.

Then he noticed that ten to fifteen feet of the floor in front of the wall of books at the rear of his loft was covered with ripped papers. When he moved closer, he saw lines of type on the papers. They were pages ripped from books. He took in that about half of the sheets were scattered throughout a shining yellow pool a half second before he registered the stink of urine.

Underhill walked up to the ruined pages and saw familiar words in familiar sentences. The pages had all been torn from copies of his most recent book. Groaning, he placed his hands on the sides of his head and looked up at the shelves. The five copies of lost boy lost girl still on hand to be given out as gifts were more or less in their proper places, but looked rumpled and hard used. Tim moved gingerly around the pool of urine and pulled down two of the copies. Long runs of pages had been ripped out of each book.

“I don’t believe this,” he said. He went to his phone and dialed Maggie’s number.

“Maggie, did you let someone in the building a little while ago?”

“Funny question. Ask another one.”

“I’m sure you didn’t let anyone into my loft.”

“Uh-oh, this isn’t sounding good.”

“I had a break-in,” he said. “A guy ripped up some books and pissed on the floor.”

“You think I let him in?”

“No, no. It’s possible I even left my door unlocked. I just wondered if you saw anything.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Go out and get some cops,” he said.

She laughed. “You going to buy them at the deli?”

“I just saw a bunch of policemen around the corner. I’d rather talk to them than call the station. It’ll work faster.”

“Ride ’em, cowboy,” Maggie said.

Tim ran back down the stairs and discovered that the rain had stopped. The streets had already begun to dry, and damp patches of dark gray lay across the sidewalk. He made an end run around a group of Japanese men and women consulting an astonishing number of guidebooks and trotted around the corner. The policemen were just beginning to disperse. The first one to notice him was the cop who had given him the warning look.

“Officer,” he said. “Excuse me, but I could use your help.”

The plate on the policeman’s uniform said BORCA. “What’s the problem, sir?”

“Someone broke into my loft and did some damage. He pissed on the floor. I know who did it, I can tell you his name. He was leaving the building when I came up.”

“This is another resident at your building?”

“No, it’s someone I barely know.”

Borca motioned to an officer who looked much too fat to be effective, and the man waddled up to him. Tim always wondered where policemen like that bought their uniforms. “Your name, sir?” Borca asked.

Tim told him his name.

“This is my partner, Officer Beck. Let’s go have a look.”

After making the call to the precinct, Beck produced a battered little notebook and wrote down various details on the walk back to 55 Grand.

“K-O-H-L-E,” Tim said, “and no, he isn’t a friend of mine. I’m not sure what he is.”

“How did he get in the building?” Borca asked.

“You got me.”

Inside, Tim automatically went to the staircase. When he put his foot on the first step, Officer Beck asked him, “What floor are you on?”

“Three.”

“We’re taking the elevator,” Beck said. He pushed the button.

The three men stood in silence until the elevator arrived and the doors opened. They stepped in.

“What’s your relationship to this Kohle?” Borca asked.

“I’m a writer. Kohle presented himself as a fan. He brought some books for me to sign. That was the same book he ripped up and urinated on.”

Simultaneously, Borca said, “I guess he didn’t think much of your writing,” and Beck said, “Everybody’s a critic.” They were still laughing at each other’s wit when the elevator doors opened to reveal Maggie Lah standing in the darkness of the hallway, her weight balanced on one leg and her arms folded in front of her. Both officers fell silent.

“How bad is it?” she asked.

“Mostly, it’s embarrassing,” Tim said.

The policemen were staring at Maggie. She said, “At least we have these handsome officers to keep us safe from riffraff.”

Borca switched his gaze to Tim. “You’re a writer, huh? My wife reads books. Would she know your name?”

“It’s not impossible,” Tim said. He unlocked the door.

“You can smell it, all right,” Borca said. “Actually, it stinks pretty good.”

“Like tiger piss,” Beck said.

Tim led them down the corridor.

“I remember that smell from the zoo when I was a kid,” Beck said, walking sideways to avoid rubbing against the coat hooks.

The odor had doubled and redoubled upon itself in the past few minutes; now it had become so intense that it stung the eyes.

Maggie groaned when she saw the damage.

Borca and Beck strolled around the loft, writing in their notebooks, examining the books, looking at everything they found curious.

“Don’t worry,” Maggie said. “I know a great cleaning service. They practically specialize in tiger piss.”

Borca had been eyeing her. “Where are you from, anyway?”

“Where do you think I’m from?” Maggie asked.

“Well, not from here. China or Japan, some Oriental country. Asian, you’re supposed to say now.”

“Actually, I was born in a small town in rural France.”

Borca was nonplussed by this information. “Uhhh . . . do you have any idea who might have done this? Did you see anyone enter or leave the building?”

“Mais non,” she said.

He turned to Tim. “Presumably, you can give us a description.”

“I can try. White male, about six feet tall, a hundred and eighty pounds. I have no idea how old he is. The guy kept getting older every time I looked at him.”

The policemen exchanged glances.

“Can you remember what he was wearing?”

“A gray sweatshirt with a hood. Blue jeans. Sneakers, I guess.”

“What do you mean, sir, he kept getting older every time you looked at him?” Beck asked.

“In the beginning, I thought he was a young guy, in his early forties, say.”

Beck and Borca, who were in their early thirties, glanced at each other again.

“But every time I looked at him after that, he seemed to be older. I mean, I saw wrinkles I hadn’t seen before.”

“We have his name,” Borca said. “Mr. Kohle won’t be hard to find.” He handed Tim a card, paused for a second, and gave another to Maggie. “Give me a call if you think of anything else. We’ll be back in touch when we locate your perp. He didn’t steal anything, did he?”

“Apart from my peace of mind?” Tim said.

“Look, it’s not so bad. Get a cleaning company in here, you’ll be good as new. All you lost was a couple of your own books.”

“But how did he get in?” Tim asked.

“When we find your guy, we’ll ask him,” Beck said.

“You should be hearing from us soon,” Borca said.

“Not to make any promises,” said Beck. “But this sort of stuff usually gets cleared up in a day or two.” Like Borca, he was having trouble not staring at beautiful little Maggie. Unlike his partner, he was no longer struggling with the impulse.

The elevator doors closed, and before Tim could say anything, Maggie said, “If I were Mrs. Officer Beck, I could live out on Long Island and give French lessons.”

“Marriage might not be what he had in mind,” Tim said.

“Dommage,” Maggie said. “Now let’s get up as much of that stuff as we can, okay?”

They mopped up what they could with paper towels, and when they ran out, they went to the deli for more. When eight rolls of Bounty and Brawny had been stuffed into a black plastic garbage bag, and the bag sealed up to keep in the stink, they brought out a mop and a bucket and washed the floor in front of the bookshelves, over and over, for half an hour. Tim sprinkled white wine and baking soda—an anodyne of his own invention—over the infected area and scrubbed that into the wood before rinsing it off. The ruined books went into another black bag.

“What do you think?” Maggie asked.

“I can still smell it.”

“Should I call the super-duper-A1 cleaning service?”

“Please do.”

Maggie floated away to the loft she shared with Michael Poole, leaving him attempting to ignore the lingering odor of feline urine, now compounded with the aroma of spilled chardonnay, while he summoned the courage to face his computer. He made himself a cup of peppermint tea. He removed a low-carb no-fat cookie from a container of puritan design and took both to his desk. A flashing little icon at the lower-right-hand corner of his screen informed him that he had received one or more e-mails. Not now, thanks, nope. Dutifully, he evoked his document, clicked to the last page he had written, and did his best to continue. His heroine was about to reach a great turning point in both the book and her life, and to discover the details that would bring breath, air, and light to the scene, Tim had to work with unalloyed concentration.

Over the next hour and a half, he succeeded in writing two paragraphs. The unseen e-mails ticked away at the back of his consciousness, interfering with the process of magical detail discovery. All right, he thought, I give up. He minimized his document and called up the day’s eight new arrivals. Two were from writer-editors inviting him to contribute to theme anthologies. Three were spam; he deleted these. He also deleted the three e-mails from encoded strangers that had arrived bereft of subject lines and domain names. One new e-mail remained in his in-box. Also absent subject line and domain name, it had nonetheless been sent by Cyrax, the most authoritative of all his phantom correspondents. Tim clicked it open and read Cyrax’s message:

now are u ready 2 listn

2 yr gide?

Experimentally, he moved his cursor to Reply and clicked on it. Instead of the conventional e-mail reply form, a large blank rectangle, pale blue in color, appeared at the center of his screen. It reminded Tim of the instant-message windows he had seen on other people’s computers.

All right, he said to himself, let’s give it a whirl. Within the blue box he typed “yes.”

In less than a second these words appeared beneath his acceptance:

Cyrax: good deshizn, student myn, u stpd buttsecks!

(LOLOL!) ok. let me tell u abt deth, fax u will need 2—

or, to speak YOUR language, little buddy, and your language is a bit closer to what mine used to be, it’s time you learned a few facts about death!