2

The next day was Saturday, and December was still pretending to be mid-October. I got up late and put on a jacket to go out for breakfast and a walk before finishing the revisions. Soho doesn't get as relentless about Christmas as midtown Manhattan, but still I saw a few Santas and glittery trees sprayed with fake snow in shop windows, and the sound system in the cafe where I had an almond croissant and two cups of French Roast coffee was playing a slow-moving baroque ecstasy I eventually recognized as Corelli's Christmas Concerto. And then I realized that I was in the cafe where I'd been just before I saw Allen Stone getting out of his car. That seemed to have happened years, not months, before—I remembered those weeks when I had written twenty pages a night, almost three hundred pages altogether, and found that I was mourning the disappearance of that entranced, magical state. To find it again, if it could be found without the disturbance that had surrounded it, I'd have to write another book.

When I got back to my loft, the telephone started ringing as soon as I pushed the key into the lock. I opened the door and rushed inside, peeling off my jacket as I went. The answering machine picked up before I got to the desk, and I heard Tom Pasmore's voice coming through its speaker. "Hi, it's me, the Nero Wolfe of Eastern Shore Drive, and I have some mixed news for you, so—"

I picked up. "I'm here," I said. "Hello! What's this mixed news? More amazing developments in Millhaven?"

"Well, we're having a three-day snowstorm. Counting the wind chill factor, it's eighteen below here. How is your book coming along?"

"It's done," I said. "Why don't you come here and help me celebrate?"

"Maybe I will. If it ever stops snowing, I could come for the holidays. Do you mean it?"

"Sure," I said. "Get out of that icebox and spend a week in sunny New York. I'd love to see you." I paused, but he did not say anything, and I felt a premonitory chill. "All the excitement must be over by now, isn't it?"

"Definitely," Tom said. "Unless you count Isobel Archer's big move—she got a network job, and she's moving to New York in a couple of weeks."

"That can't be the mixed news you called about."

"No. The mixed news is about John Ransom." I waited for it.

Tom said, "I heard it on the news this morning—I usually listen to the news before I go to bed. John died in a car crash about two o'clock last night. It was the middle of the storm, and he was all alone on the east-west expressway. He rammed right into an abutment. At first they thought it was an accident, a skid or something, but he turned out to have about triple the legal alcohol level in his blood."

"It could still have been an accident," I said, seeing John barreling along through the storm in the middle of the night, clamping a three-hundred-dollar bottle of vodka between his thighs. The image was of endless night, almost demonic in its despair.

"Do you really think so?"

"No," I said. "I think he killed himself."

"So do I," Tom said. "The poor bastard."

That would have been the last word on John Ransom, but for a letter that I found in my mailbox, by the sort of ironic coincidence forbidden to fiction but in which the real world revels, late that same afternoon.

To get my mail, I have to leave my loft and go downstairs to the rank of boxes in the entry, one door away from the entrance to Saigon. The mail generally comes around four in the afternoon, and sometimes I get to the boxes before the mailman. Like all writers, I am obsessive about the mail, which brings money, contracts, reviews, royalty statements, letters from fans, and Publishers Weekly, where I can check on the relative progress of myself and my myriad colleagues. On the day I heard from Tom, I went down late because I wanted to finish up my revisions, and when I finally got downstairs I saw that the box was stuffed with envelopes. I immediately pitched into the big garbage can we had installed beneath the boxes all envelopes covered with printing, all appeals for funds, all offers to subscribe to esoteric literary journals published by universities. Two were left, one from my foreign agent, the other from some foreign country that liked exotic stamps. My name was hand-printed on the second envelope in clear, rounded letters.

I went back upstairs, sat at my desk, and peered at the stamps on the second envelope. A tiger, a huge fleshy flower, a man in a white robe up to his knees in a brown river. With a small shock, I realized that the letter was from India. I tore open the envelope and removed a single sheet of filmy paper, tinted rose.

Dear Timothy Underhill,

I am late in responding because your letter took an extra time to reach us here. The address you used was rather vague. But as you see, it did arrive! You ask about your friend John Ransom. It is difficult to know what to say. You will understand that I cannot go into details, but I feel that I may inform you that we at the ashram were moved by your friend's plight at the time he came to us. He was suffering. He required our help. Ultimately, however, we were forced to ask him to leave—a painful affair for all concerned. John Ransom was a disruptive influence here. He could not open himself, he could not find his true being, he was lost and blind in an eternal violence. There would have been no question of his being allowed to return. I am sorry to write these things to you about your friend, but I do hope that his spiritual search has after so many years finally brought him peace. Perhaps it has.

Yours sincerely,
Mina