10

MY first book, A Beast in View, was about a false identity, and it turned out that The Divided Man was also about a mistaken identity. I was haunted by William Damrosch, a true child of the night, who intrigued me because he seemed to be both a decent man and a murderer. Along with Millhaven, I assumed that he was guilty. Koko was essentially about a mistaken identity and Mystery was about the greatest mistake ever made by Lamont von Heilitz, Millhaven's famous private detective. He thought he had identified a murderer, and that the murderer had then committed suicide. These books are about the way the known story is not the right or the real story. I saw April because I missed her and wanted to see her, also because she wanted me to know that the real story had been abandoned with the past. Which is to say that part of me had been waiting for John Ransom's phone call ever since I read and reread the Ledger's description of William Damrosch's body seated dead before his desk. The empty bottle and the empty glass, the dangling gun, the words printed on the piece of notebook paper. The block letters.

The man I killed face to face jumped up in front of me on a trail called Striker Tiger. He wore glasses and had a round, pleasant face momentarily rigid with amazement. He was a bad soldier, worse even than me. He was carrying a long wooden rifle that looked like an antique. I shot him and he fell straight down, like a puppet, and disappeared into the tall grass. My heart banged. I stepped forward to look at him and imagined him raising a knife or lifting that antique rifle where he lay hidden in the grass. Yet I had seen him fall the way dead birds fall out of the sky, and I knew he was not lifting that rifle. Behind me a soldier named Linklater was whooping, "Did you see that? Did you see Underdown nail that gook?" Automatically I said, "Underhill." Conor Linklater had some minor mental disorder that caused him to jumble words and phrases. He once said, "The truth is in the pudding." Here is the pudding. I felt a strange, violent sense of triumph, of having won, like a blood-soaked gladiator in an arena. I went forward through the grass and saw a leg in the black trousers, then another leg opened beside it, then his narrow chest and outftung arms, finally his head. The bullet had entered his throat and torn out the back of his neck. He was like the mirror image of Andrew T. Majors, over whose corpse I had become a pearl diver for the body squad. "You got him, boy," said Conor Linklater. "You got him real good." The savage sense of victory was gone. I felt empty. Below his thin ankles, his feet were as bony as fish. From the chin up he looked as if he were working out one of those algebra problems about where two trains would meet if they were traveling at different speeds. It was clear to me that this man had a mother, a father, a sister, a girlfriend. I thought of putting the barrel of my M-16 in the wound in his throat and shooting him all over again. People who would never know my name, whose names I would never know, would hate me. (This thought came later.) "Hey, it's okay," Conor said. "It's okay, Tim." The lieutenant told him to button his lip, and we moved ahead on Striker Tiger. While knowing I would not, I almost expected to hear the man I had killed crawling away through the grass.