"I first thought he was a professional killer," Gerard said with a sigh. "He certainly knew the house. But I don't think a professional killer would have lost his head and tried to get through those woods at the point he did."

"Hm-m," said Bruno with interest.

"He knew the right road to take, too. The right road was only ten yards away."

"How do you know that?"

"Because this whole thing was carefully planned, Charles. The broken lock on the back door, the milk crate out there by the walla""

Bruno was silent. Herbert had told Gerard that he, Bruno, broke the lock. Herbert had probably also told him he put the milk crate there.

"Purple gloves!" Gerard chuckled, as gaily as Bruno had ever heard him chuckle. "What does the color matter as long as they keep fingerprints off things, eh?"

"Yeah," Bruno said.

Gerard entered the house through the terrace door.

Bruno followed him after a moment. Gerard went back to the kitchen, and Bruno climbed the stairs. He tossed the address book on his bed, then went down the hall. The open door of his father's room gave him a funny feeling, as if he were just realizing his father were dead. It was the door's hanging open that made him feel it, he thought, like a shirttail hanging out, like a guard let down, that never would have been if the Captain were alive. Bruno frowned, then went and closed the door quickly on the carpet scuffled by detectives' feet, by Guy's feet, on the desk with the looted pigeonholes and the checkbook that lay open as if awaiting his father's signatures. He opened his mother's door carefully. She was lying on her bed with the pink satin comforter drawn up to her chin, her head turned toward the inside of the room and her eyes open, as she had lain since Saturday night.

"You didn't sleep, Mom?"

"No."

"Gerard's here again."

"I know."

"If you don't want to be disturbed, I'll tell him."

"Darling, don't be silly."

Bruno sat down on the bed and bent close to her. "I wish you could sleep, Mom." She had purple wrinkled shadows under her eyes, and she held her mouth in a way he had never seen before, that drew its corners long and thin.

"Darling, are you sure Sam never mentioned anything to youa"never mentioned anyone?"

"Can you imagine him saying anything like that to me?" Bruno wandered about the room. Gerard's presence in the house irked him. It was Gerard's manner that was so obnoxious, as if he had something up his sleeve against everyone, even Herbert who he knew had idolized his father, who was saying everything against him short of plain accusation. But Herbert hadn't seen him measuring the grounds, Bruno knew, or Gerard would have let him know by now. He had wandered all over the grounds, and the house while his mother was sick, and anyone seeing him wouldn't have known when he was counting his paces or not. He wanted to sound off about Gerard now, but his mother wouldn't understand. She insisted on their continuing to hire him, because he was supposed to be the best. They were not working together, his mother and he. His mother might say something else to Gerarda"like the fact they'd decided only Thursday to leave Fridaya"of terrible importance and not mention it to him at all!

"You know you're getting fat, Charley?" his mother said with a smile.

Bruno smiled, too, she sounded so like herself. She was putting on her shower cap at her dressing table now. "Appetite's not bad," he said. But his appetite was worse and so was his digestion. He was getting fatter anyway.

Gerard knocked just after his mother had closed the bathroom door.

"She'll be quite a long time," Bruno told him.

"Tell her I'll be in the hall, will you?"

Bruno knocked on the bathroom door and told her, then went down to his own room. He could tell by the position of the address book on his bed that Gerard had found it and looked at it. Slowly Bruno mixed himself a short highball, drank it, then went softly down the hall and heard Gerard already talking to his mother.

"a"didn't seem in high or low spirits, eh?"

"He's a very moody boy, you know. I doubt if I'd have noticed," his mother said.

"Oha"people pick up psychic feelings sometimes. Don't you agree, Elsie?"

His mother did not answer.

"a"too bad, because I'd like more cooperation from him."

"Do you think he's withholding anything?"

"I don't know," with his disgusting smile, and Bruno could tell from his tone that Gerard expected him to be listening, too. "Do you?"

"Of course, I don't think he is. What're you getting at, Arthur?"

She was standing up to him. She wouldn't think so much of Gerard after this, Bruno thought. He was being dumb again, a dumb Iowan.

"You want me to get at the truth, don't you, Elsie?" Gerard asked, like a radio detective. "He's hazy about what he did Thursday night after leaving you. He's got some pretty shady acquaintances. One might have been a hireling of a business enemy's of Sam's, a spy or something like that. And Charles could have mentioned that you and he were leaving the next daya""

"What're you getting at, Arthur, that Charles knows something about this?"

"Elsie, I wouldn't be surprised. Would you, really?"

"Damn him!" Bruno murmured. Damn him for saying that to his mother!

"I'll certainly tell you everything he tells me."

Bruno drifted toward the stairway. Her submissiveness shocked him. Suppose she began to suspect? Murder was something she wouldn't be able to take. Hadn't he realized it in Santa Fe? And if she remembered Guy, remembered that he had talked about him in Los Angeles? If Gerard found Guy in the next two weeks, he might have scratches on him from getting through those woods, or a bruise or a cut that might raise suspicion. Bruno heard Herbert's soft tread in the downstairs hall, saw him come into view with his mother's afternoon drink on a tray, and retreated up the stairs again. His heart beat as if he were in a battle, a strange many-sided battle. He hurried back to his own room, took a big drink, then lay down and tried to fall asleep.

He awakened with a jerk and rolled from under Gerard's hand on his shoulder.

"By-by," Gerard said, his smile showing his tobacco-stained lower teeth. "Just leaving and thought I'd say good-by."

"Is it worth waking somebody up for?" Bruno said.

Gerard chuckled and waddled from the room before Bruno could think of some mitigating phrase he really wanted to say. He plunged back on the pillow and tried to resume his nap, but when he closed his eyes, he saw Gerard's stocky figure in the light-brown suit going down the halls, slipping wraithlike through closed doors, bending to look into drawers, to read letters, to make notes, turning to point a finger at him, tormenting his mother so it was impossible not to fight back.

Twenty-seven.

"What else can you make of it? He's accusing me!" Bruno shouted across the table.

"Darling, he's not. He's attending to his business."

Bruno pushed his hair back. "Want to dance, Mom?"

"You're in no condition to dance." He wasn't and he knew it. "Then I want another drink."

"Darling, the food's coming right away."

Her patience with it all, the purple circles under her eyes, pained him so he could not look in front of him. Bruno glanced around for a waiter. The place was so crowded tonight, it was hard to tell a waiter from any other guy. His eyes stopped on a man at a table across the dance floor who looked like Gerard. He couldn't see the man he was with, but he certainly looked like Gerard, the bald head and light brown hair, except this man wore a black jacket. Bruno closed one eye to stop the rhythmic splitting of the image.

"Charley, do sit down. The waiter's coming."

It was Gerard, and he was laughing now, as if the other fellow had told him he was watching them. For one suspended, furious second, Bruno wondered whether to tell his mother.

Then he sat down and said with vehemence: "Gerard's over there!"

"Is he? Where?"

"Over left of the orchestra. Under the blue lamp."

"I don't see him." His mother stretched up. "Darling, you're imagining."

"I am not imagining!"Bruno shouted and threw his napkin in his roast beef au jus.

"I see the one you mean, and it's not Gerard," she said patiently.

"You can't see him as good as I can! It's him and I don't feel like eating in the same room with him!"

"Charles," she sighed. "Do you want another drink? Have another drink. Here's a waiter."

"I don't even feel like drinkin' with him! Want me to prove it's him?"

"What does it matter? He's not going to bother us. He's guarding us probably."

"You admit it's him! He's spying on us and he's in a dark suit so he can follow us anywhere else we go!"

"It's not Arthur anyway," she said quietly, squeezing lemon over her broiled fish. "You're having hallucinations."

Bruno stared at her with his mouth open. "What do you mean saying things like that to me, Mom?" His voice cracked.

"Sweetie, everybody's looking at us."

"I don't care!"

"Darling, let me tell you something. You're making too much out of this." She interrupted him, "You are, because you want to. You want excitement. I've seen it before."

Bruno was absolutely speechless. His mother was turning against him. He had seen her look at the Captain the way she looked at him now.

"You've probably said something to Gerard," she went on, "in anger, and he thinks you're behaving most peculiarly. Well, you are."

"Is that any reason for him to tail me day and night?"

"Darling, I don't think that's Gerard," she said firmly.

Bruno pushed himself up and staggered away toward the table where Gerard sat. He'd prove to her it was Gerard, and prove to Gerard he wasn't afraid of him. A couple of tables blocked him at the edge of the dance floor, but he could see it was Gerard now.

Gerard looked up at him and waved a hand familiarly, and his little stooge stared at him. And he, he and his mother were paying for it! Bruno opened his mouth, not knowing exactly what he wanted to say, then teetered around. He knew what he wanted to do, call up Guy. Right here and now. Right in the same room with Gerard. He struggled across the dance floor toward the telephone booth by the bar. The slow, crazily revolving figures pressed him back like a sea wave, baffling him. The wave floated toward him again, buoyant but insuperable, sweeping him yet farther back, and a similar moment at a party in his house when he was a little boy, when he tried to get through the dancing couples to his mother across the living room, came back to him.

Bruno woke up early in the morning, in bed, and lay perfectly still, retracing the last moments he could remember. He knew he had passed out. Had he called Guy before he passed out? If he had, could Gerard trace it? He surely hadn't talked to Guy or he'd remember it, but maybe he'd called his house. He got up to go ask his mother if he had passed out in the telephone booth. Then the shakes came on and he went into the bathroom. The Scotch and water splashed up in his face when he lifted the glass. He braced himself against the bathroom door. It was getting him at both ends now, the shakes, early and late, waking him earlier and earlier, and he had to take more and more at night to get to sleep. And in between was Gerard.

Twenty-eight.

Momentarily, and faintly, as one re-experiences a remembered sensation, Guy felt secure and self-sufficient as he sat down at his work table where he had his hospital books and notes carefully arranged.

In the last month, he had washed and repainted all his bookshelves, had his carpet and curtains cleaned, and had scrubbed his kitchenette until its porcelain and aluminum gleamed. All guilt, he had thought as he poured the pans of dirty water down the sink, but since he could sleep no more than two or three hours a night, and then only after physical exercise, he reasoned that cleaning one's house was a more profitable manner of tiring oneself than walking the streets of the city.

He looked at the unopened newspaper on his bed, then got up and glanced through all its pages. But the papers had stopped mentioning the murder six weeks ago. He had taken care of every cluea"the purple gloves cut up and flushed down the toilet, the overcoat (a good overcoat, and he had thought of giving it to a beggar, but who would be so base as to give even a beggar a murderer's overcoat?) and the trousers torn in pieces and disposed of gradually in the garbage. And the Luger dropped off the Manhattan Bridge. And his shoes off another. The only thing he had not disposed of was the little revolver.

He went to his bureau to look at it. Its hardness under his fingertips soothed him. The one clue he had not disposed of, and all the clue they needed if they found him. He knew exactly why he kept the revolver: it was his, a part of himself, the third hand that had done the murder. It was himself at fifteen when he had bought it, himself when he had loved Miriam and had kept it in their room in Chicago, looking at it now and then in his most contented, most inward moments. The best of himself, with its mechanical, absolute logic. Like him, he thought now, in its power to kill.

If Bruno dared to contact him again, he would kill him, too. Guy was sure that he could. Bruno would know it, too. Bruno had always been able to read him. The silence from Bruno now brought more relief than the silence from the police. In fact, he was not anxious at all lest the police find him, had never been. The anxiety had always been within himself, a battle of himself against himself, so torturous he might have welcomed the law's intervention. Society's law was lax compared to the law of conscience. He might go to the law and confess, but confession seemed a minor point, a mere gesture, even an easy way out, an avoidance of truth. If the law executed him, it would be a mere gesture.

"I have no great respect for the law," he remembered he had said to Peter Wriggs in Metcalf two years ago. Why should he have respect for a statute that called him and Miriam man and wife? "I have no great respect for the church," he had said sophomorishly to Peter at fifteen. Then, of course, he had meant the Metcalf Baptists. At seventeen, he had discovered God by himself. He had discovered God through his own awakening talents, and through a sense of unity of all the arts, and then of nature, finally of sciencea"of all the creating and ordering forces in the world. He believed he could not have done his work without a belief in God. And where had his belief been when he murdered? He had forsaken God, not God him. It seemed to him that no human being had ever borne, or had needed to bear, so much guilt as he, and that he could not have borne it and lived unless his spirit was dead already, and what existed of himself now only a husk.

Awkwardly, he turned and faced his work table. A gasp hissed between his teeth, and nervously, impatiently, he passed his hand hard across his mouth. And yet, he felt, there was something still to come, still to be grasped, some severer punishment, some bitterer realization.

"I don't suffer enough!" burst from him suddenly in a whisper. But why had he whispered? Was he ashamed? "I don't suffer enough," he said in a normal voice, glancing about him as if he expected some ear to hear him. And he would have shouted it, if he had not felt some element of pleading in it, and considered himself unworthy of pleading for anything, from anyone.

His new books, for instance, the beautiful new books he had bought todaya"he could still think about them, love them. Yet he felt he had left them there long ago on his -work table, like his own youth. He must go immediately and work, he thought. He had been commissioned to plan a hospital. He frowned at the little stack of notes he had already taken, spotlighted under his gooseneck lamp. Somehow it did not seem real that he had been commissioned. He would awaken soon and find that all these weeks had been a fantasy, a wishful dream. A hospital. Wasn't a hospital more fitting than even a prison? He frowned puzzledly, knowing his mind had strayed wildly, that two weeks ago when he had begun the hospital interior he had not thought once of death, that the positive requisites of health and healing alone had occupied him. He hadn't told Anne about the hospital, he remembered suddenly, that was why it seemed unreal. She was his glass of reality, not his work. But on the other hand, why hadn't he told her?

He must go immediately and work, but he could feel in his legs now that frenzied energy that came every evening, that sent him out in the streets finally in a vain effort to spend it. The energy frightened him because he could find no task that would absorb it, and because he felt at times that the task might be his suicide. Yet very deep inside him, and very much against his own will, his roots still clung to life, and he sensed that suicide was a coward's escape, a ruthless act against those who loved him.

He thought of his mother, and felt he could never let her embrace him again. He remembered her telling him that all men were equally good, because all men had souls and the soul was entirely good. Evil, she said, always came from externals. And so he had believed even months after Miriam, when he had wanted to murder her lover Steve. So he had believed even on the train, reading his Plato. In himself, the second horse of the charioteer had always been obedient as the first. But love and hate, he thought now, good and evil, lived side by side in the human heart, and not merely in differing proportions in one man and the next, but all good and all evil. One had merely to look for a little of either to find it all, one had merely to scratch the surface. All things had opposites close by, every decision a reason against it, every animal an animal that destroys it, the male the female, the positive the negative. The splitting of the atom was the only true destruction, the breaking of the universal law of oneness. Nothing could be without its opposite that was bound up with it. Could space exist in a building without objects that stopped it? Could energy exist without matter, or matter without energy? Matter and energy, the inert and the active, once considered opposites, were now known to be one.

And Bruno, he and Bruno. Each was what the other had not chosen to be, the cast-off self, what he thought he hated but perhaps in reality loved.

For a moment, he felt as if he might be mad. He thought, madness and genius often overlapped, too. But what mediocre lives most people lived! In middle waters, like most fish!

No, there was that duality permeating nature down to the tiny proton and electron within the tiniest atom. Science was now at work trying to split the electron, and perhaps it couldn't because perhaps only an idea was behind it: the one and only truth, that the opposite is always present. Who knew whether an electron was matter or energy? Perhaps God and the Devil danced hand in hand around every single electron!

He threw his cigarette at the wastebasket and missed.

When he put out the stub in the basket, he saw a crumpled page on which he had written last night one of his guilt-crazed confessions. It dragged him up sickeningly to a present that assaulted him from all sidesa"Bruno, Anne, this room, this night, the conference with the Department of Hospitals tomorrow.

Toward midnight, when he felt drowsy, he left his work table and lay down carefully on his bed, not daring to undress lest he awaken himself again.