Then why was he still looking for something suitable a year later?

Roger loosened his tie, closed his resume, clicked his way onto the Web, logged on to the Puzzle Club.

>MODERATOR: Welcome, Roger.

Roger made no reply; he never said anything on the Web. The next day's Times of London crossword was up, and beside it in the Puzzletalk section some live-time discussion was taking place. Roger checked the time-12: 31-and began the puzzle. One down: a six-letter word for disorder. He typed in ataxia. Two down: seven letters, pugilist-bruiser. Three down: nine letters, to cut an X-decussate. So one across must be abduct, and four down . . . he tapped away at the keys, completing the puzzle at exactly 12: 42. Not his best.

Roger scanned the discussion in progress.

>MODERATOR: But what do you mean, Flyboy, by a quote perfect crime????

>FLYBOY: One they cant finger you for it, of course.

>MR. BUD: Finger you? Sounds like a bad EdGRobinson flick.

>REB: No such animal. But perfect crimewise you cant be anywhere near the scene, not w/DNA and all that shit.Flake of dandruff falls off your head, you fry.

>MODERATOR: So you get someone to do it for you, is that it?

>FLYBOY: Right = and they get busted for some other caper and rat you out rotb.

>MR. BUD: You are a bad movie Flyboy.

>MODERATOR: rotb????

>FLYBOY: right off the bat.

>MR. BUD: Jesus.

>REB: But he's right. A perfect crime = it's got to be absolutely unconnected = like someone in China pushed a button. Click. You're dead.

>FLYBOY: Or a penny drops off the Empire State Building. Goes right through your skull to the sidewalk.

>MODERATOR: A penny drops off the Empire State Building????

Roger left the Puzzle Club, switched off the screen, removed his tie and shoes, lay down on the couch, pulling a blanket over himself. He laughed aloud. The vulgarity, the ignorance displayed on the Web for everyone to see: had they no self-awareness at all? He closed his eyes, called up the image of his completed Times of London puzzle, word for word, perfect, done. Ataxia: that was the problem with the world these days. Perhaps he could slip it in during his breakfast interview.

A window table at the Ritz.

"Roger?"

"Sandy?"

"You haven't changed a bit."

Roger made himself say, "Neither have you."

"That's a crock," said Sandy, sitting down. Roger hated that expression, hated when men patted their paunches and said "What do you call this?" as Sandy was doing now, especially since he didn't have much of one. The waiter poured coffee; Roger left his alone, afraid that his hand would shake.

"Still playing?" asked Sandy. Sandy had been number two on the tennis team, thrashed by Roger in challenge matches every spring. Now he ran the third-biggest venture capital firm in New England.

"Infrequently," said Roger. Perhaps he should ask Sandy whether he still played, but that might lead to some sort of loathsome rematch twenty-five years after the fact, so he reached for his coffee cup and said nothing. The cup clattered against the saucer; he put it down.

"Can't remember the last time I had a racquet in my hand," Sandy said. "Fact is, we've taken up rock climbing, the whole bunch of us."

"Rock climbing?"

"You should try it, Roger. It's a great family activity."

Roger had nothing to say to that. He tore his brioche into little pieces.

"How's Francie, by the way?"

"You know my wife?"

"Slightly. She gave a talk a few months ago on this new sculpture we've got in the lobby. I don't pretend to understand the sculpture, but your wife had us all eating out of her hand."

"Did she?"

"That combination of looks and brains, if I can say so without being politically incorrect . . . but I don't have to tell you, do I, you lucky devil?"

Roger picked up his butter knife, dipped it into a bowl of raspberry jam, spread some on a scrap of brioche, trailing a glutinous spill on the white tablecloth. Sandy gazed at the red stain for a moment, then said, "I hear there've been changes at Thorvald."

"Yes." How to explain it to Sandy? Sandy wasn't very bright; Roger retained a memory of him frowning over some tome in the Widener Library. No doubt best to say something vague and diplomatic, and move on. Roger wiped the edges of his mouth with the napkin and readied something vague and diplomatic. But the words that issued were: "They were very stupid."

Sandy sat back. "In what way?"

"Isn't it obvious? They were such idiots, they-" He smothered the end of the sentence: fired me.

"They what, Roger?" Sandy asked.

It occurred to Roger that in the past year Sandy might have begun doing business with Thorvald, have his own sources inside. "It's not important," he said. What's important is giving me a job, if you're not too dim-witted to see how much I can help you.

Sandy sipped his coffee in silence. Did Sandy resent him for those weekly drubbings, so long ago? Was it possible he didn't understand that there'd been nothing personal, that it was simply how the game was played? This was a negotiation to be handled with care.

"Sandy?"

"Yes, Roger?"

"I could use a job, goddamn it." Not what he'd meant to say at all, but Sandy was one of those pluggers-a baseliner, as he recalled, with no imagination-and pluggers exasperated him.

And now Sandy was giving him a long look, as though he were sizing him up, which was ridiculous due to the disparity in their intellects. "I wish I could help, Roger, but we've got nothing for someone of your level."

That was a lie. Roger knew they were looking or he wouldn't have set this up. But too tactless to say; Roger substituted: "You know how many times I've heard that?" His orange juice spilled, perhaps because of a convulsive jerk of his forearm; he wasn't sure.

After the waiter was done mopping, Sandy said, "None of my business, Roger, and please don't take this the wrong way, but have you ever considered early retirement? I know that Thorvald gave-that Thorvald usually does the right thing with their packages, and with Francie doing so well, maybe-"

"What's she got to do with this?"

"I just thought-"

"Do you know how much she grossed last year? Fifty grand. Barely enough to cover her hairdresser. Besides, I'm too young-"

"We're the same age, Roger. I stopped thinking of myself as young quite some time ago. The promising stage can't last forever, by definition."

Roger felt his face go hot, as though reddening, although surely no change was visible. He composed himself and said, "I wasn't aware that stage had occurred at all, in your case."

Sandy called for the check soon after. Roger snatched it from the waiter's hand and paid himself. Sandy met someone he knew on the way down the stairs, stopped to talk. Roger went out alone. On the street, he realized he had forgotten to leave a tip. So what? He had the feeling-strange, since he had been going there since boyhood-that he would never eat at the Ritz again.

Roger bought a bottle of Scotch in a shop where they called him sir, although not today-there was a new clerk who could barely speak English-and took a taxi home. The driver had the radio on.

"What's on tap, Ned?"

"Thanks, Ron. Male infertility is the topic today on Intimately Yours. In the studio we'll have one of the foremost-"

"Mind turning that off?" Roger said.

"Pliss?" said the driver.

"Radio," said Roger. "Off."

The driver turned it off.

In his basement office, Roger drank Scotch on the rocks and played Jeopardy! on his computer. The first European to reach the site of what is now Montreal. The economic unit of Senegal. The largest moon of Neptune. Who was Cartier, what is the C. F. A. franc, what is Triton? All too easy. He tried to get into his old computer at Thorvald but couldn't pass the firewall.

He refilled his glass, had another look at his resume. Too bad, he thought, that IQs weren't standard CV material. Why shouldn't they be? What better measure? He rose, opened a file drawer, dug through press clippings, photographs, ribbons, trophies, down to a yellowed envelope at the bottom, addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Cullingwood. He read the letter inside.

Enclosed please find the results of your son Roger's Stanford-Binet test, administered last month. Roger's intelligence quotient, or IQ, as measured by the test, was 181. This places him in the 99th percentile of all those taking the test. It may interest you to know that there are several schools in our area with first-grade programs for gifted children which may be appropriate for Roger. Please do not hesitate to contact us for further information.

Roger read the letter again, and once more, before putting it away. He topped off his glass, logged on to the Puzzle Club. The Times of London crossword hadn't appeared yet, but there were others, including Le Monde. That one took him almost an hour-his French was rusty. When he had finished all the puzzles, he gazed at the on-line discussion that had been scrolling by the whole time.

>MODERATOR: How did we get onto capital punishment????

>BOOBOO: The Sheppard Case. What they based the fugitive on.

>RIMSKY: Yeah, yeah. But how about it when it works the other way = coldblooded killers on parole?

>MODERATOR: I don't think that happens very often, do you????

>RIMSKY: Let me tell you something I'm a corrections officer down here in Fla.

>BOOBOO: So?

>RIMSKY: So I know what I'm talking about when it comes to coldblooded k's.

>BOOBOO: : ).

>RIMSKY: : ) yourself. Ever heard of Whitey Truax, for example?

>MODERATOR: ????.

>FAUSTO: What's this got to do with the $ of apples?

>MODERATOR: Let Rimsky tell his story. Rimsky = what's w/Whitey Truax?

Roger followed the discussion until footsteps overhead made him take his eyes from the screen. Francie. He was surprised to see night beyond the little window high in the basement wall.

And the bottle almost empty, although he was sober, completely. Sandy's worst moment had been his salivating over Francie. There had been lust in his eyes, beyond a doubt. What a complete-what did the Jews say? Putz. That was it. He didn't even want to work for-with-a putz like Sandy.

But something about that lustful look, Francie, Jews, and the word putz itself-a lubricious mix-gave Roger a sudden urge to sleep upstairs tonight, something he hadn't done since . . . he couldn't remember. Donning his crimson robe, he poured what remained of the Scotch into his glass and a second one, and carried them upstairs. "

Francie?" he called. "Is that you, dear?"

3.

His first day in the halfway house, Whitey Truax went looking for whores. This was nothing he had planned: no one planning would have considered it, since the job they'd found Whitey-spearing trash on the I-95 median-ended at five, and he had to sign back in at six.

Just before dawn, the DPW pickup began dropping off the crew one at a time, stringing them out a few miles apart. Whitey was last. Riding alone in the back, he saw the sun coming up between two high-rises, and started trembling. He'd been facing west for seventeen years, or maybe it was just the morning chill.

The pickup pulled over on the north side of exit 42, Delray Beach, and Whitey climbed down. Then it drove away, and there he was on dewy green grass, a free and unsupervised man. He shrugged on his reflective vest, stuffed the tightly folded orange trash bags in his pocket, stabbed a Mars bar wrapper with his steel-tipped pole.

Stab, stab, stab: Whitey was full of energy. By four, he had filled a dozen bags, all they'd given him, and worked his way almost down to exit 41. With nothing more to do, he stood leaning on his pole, sweat slowly drying, and watched the cars go by, most of the models unfamiliar. Was this a bad way to make a living? Too hot-he'd never liked the heat-but otherwise not bad at all. No watching your back, no taking shit: cake.

Rush hour now, and traffic was stop-and-go. A woman in a convertible looked at him, not twenty feet away. She had a ponytail, damp at the end, and wore a bikini top-must be coming from the beach, thought Whitey; but he wasn't really thinking, just staring at her tits, heavy, round, mesmerizing. The combination of visual overload and complete tactile deprivation made him start trembling again, just a little. He opened his mouth to say something to her, but the only word he could think of was fuck, and he knew that wouldn't work. Traffic lurched ahead and she was gone, leaving him with the memory of those big tits. Her shoulders had been heavy, too; in retrospect, it was possible she was fat, even grossly so, but this realization barely surfaced in Whitey's mind. Retrospection wasn't one of his strengths.

Instead his mind wandered, not very far, to those sounds women made when they got excited. He'd heard them in movies. No X-rated stuff allowed inside, of course, but even in normal movies women made those sounds. Melanie Griffith, and who was that other one he liked? Whitey could see her face clearly, mouth open, but he was still fishing for the name when he felt something stir against his ankle. He jumped back-he was very quick-thought snake, thrust the steel tip at the reptilian head, right through, pinning it wriggling to the ground. Hadn't lost his quick, not one little bit.

As it turned out, the creature was not a snake, not a reptile at all, but a bullfrog. Too late to do anything about that. Whitey watched it die, blood trickling into a crown pattern over its eyes, wriggling becoming sporadic, those pop eyes growing dim. Whitey felt bad, but not too bad: the frog's own damn fault, after all, for making him panic. Whitey panicked sometimes, especially if he was surprised. That was simply the way he was-didn't make him weak or anything. But the syndrome-word he remembered from the testimony, so long ago-combined with his quickness, could lead to trouble, as he knew well.

Which was why he had to stay calm. He took a few deep breaths to settle down, placed his foot on the bullfrog's back, withdrew the steel tip. The bullfrog hopped up on its hind legs.

"Jesus fucking Christ," Whitey said, and let him have it again. The frog lay still after that, facedown, legs spread flat on the ground. That was when the possibility of whores arose in Whitey's mind, whores that very day.

A DPW truck picked him up a few minutes later, left him outside the depot at five.

"Hey, you."

Whitey, walking off, stopped and turned.

"Where you think you're goin'with that?"