"You haven't seen Ernie Schroeder much lately."

Bruno opened his mouth boredly to answer.

Thirty-five.

Barefoot, in white duck trousers, Guy sat cross-legged on the India's forward deck. Long Island had just come in sight, but he did not want to look at it yet. The gently rolling movement of the ship rocked him pleasantly and familiarly, like something he had always known. The day he had last seen Bruno, in the restaurant, seemed a day of madness. Surely he had been going insane. Surely Anne must have seen it.

He flexed his arm and pinched up the thin brown skin that covered its muscles. He was brown as Egon, the half-Portuguese ship's boy they had hired from the Long Island dock at the start of the cruise. Only the little scar in his right eyebrow remained white.

The three weeks at sea had given him a peace and resignation he had never known before, and that a month ago he would have declared foreign to him. He had come to feel that his atonement, whatever it might be, was a part of his destiny, and like the rest of his destiny would find him without his seeking. He had always trusted his sense of destiny. As a boy with Peter, he had known that he would not merely dream, as he had somehow known, too, that Peter would do nothing but dream, that he would create famous buildings, that his name would take its proper place in architecture, and finallya"it had always seemed to him the crowning achievementa"that he would build a bridge. It would be a white bridge with a span like an angel's wing, he had thought as a boy, like the curving white bridge of Robert Maillart in his architecture books. It was a kind of arrogance, perhaps, to believe so in one's destiny. But, on the other hand, who could be more genuinely humble than one who felt compelled to obey the laws of his own fate? The murder that had seemed an outrageous departure, a sin against himself, he believed now might have been a part of his destiny, too. It was impossible to think otherwise. And if it were so, he would be given a way to make his atonement, and given the strength to make it. And if death by law overtook him first, he would be given the strength to meet that also, and strength besides sufficient for Anne to meet it. In a strange way, he felt humbler than the smallest minnow of the sea, and stronger than the greatest mountain on earth. But he was not arrogant. His arrogance had been a defense, reaching its height at the time of the break with Miriam. And hadn't he known even then, obsessed by her, wretchedly poor, that he would find another woman whom he could love and who would love him always? And what better proof did he need that all this was so than that he and Anne had never been closer, their lives never more like one harmonious life, than during these three weeks at sea?

He turned himself with a movement of his feet, so he could see her as she leaned against the mainmast. There was a faint smile on her lips as she gazed down at him, a half-repressed, prideful smile like that of a mother, Guy thought, who had brought her child safely through an illness, and smiling back at her, Guy marveled that he could put such trust in her infallibility and rightness and that she could still be merely a human being. Most of all, he marveled that she could be his. Then he looked down at his locked hands and thought of the work he would begin tomorrow on the hospital, of all the work to come, and the events of his destiny that lay ahead.

Bruno telephoned a few evenings later. He was in the neighborhood, he said, and wanted to come by. He sounded very sober, and a little dejected.

Guy told him no. He told him calmly and firmly that neither he nor Anne wanted to see him again, but even as he spoke, he felt the sands of his patience running out fast, and the sanity of the past weeks crumbling under the madness of their conversing at all.

Bruno knew that Gerard had not spoken to Guy yet. He did not think Gerard would question Guy more than a few minutes. But Guy sounded so cold, Bruno could not bring himself to tell him now that Gerard had gotten his name, that he might be interviewed, or that he intended to see Guy strictly secretly from now ona"no more parties or even lunchesa"if Guy would only let him.

"Okay," Bruno said mutedly, and hung up.

Then the telephone rang again. Frowning, Guy put out the cigarette he had just lighted relievedly, and answered it.

"Hello. This is Arthur Gerard of the Confidential Detective Bureaua." Gerard asked if he could come over.

Guy turned around, glancing warily over the living room, trying to reason away a feeling that Gerard had just heard his and Bruno's conversation over tapped wires, that Gerard had just captured Bruno. He went upstairs to tell Anne.

"A private detective?" Anne asked, surprised. "What's it about?"

Guy hesitated an instant. There were so many, many places where he might hesitate too long! Damn Bruno! Damn him for dogging him! "I don't know."

Gerard arrived promptly. He fairly bowed over Anne's hand, and after apologizing for intruding on their evening, made polite conversation about the house and the strip of garden in front. Guy stared at him in some astonishment. Gerard looked dull, tired, and vaguely untidy. Perhaps Bruno wasn't entirely wrong about him. Even his absent air, heightened by his slow speech, did not suggest the absent-mindedness of a brilliant detective. Then as Gerard settled himself with a cigar and a highball, Guy caught the shrewdness in the light hazel eyes and the energy in the chunky hands. Guy felt uneasy then. Gerard looked unpredictable.

"You're a friend of Charles Bruno, Mr. Haines?"

"Yes. I know him."

"His father was murdered last March as you probably know, and the murderer has not been found."

"I didn't know that!" Anne said.

Gerard's eyes moved slowly from her back to Guy.

"I didn't know either," said Guy.

"You don't know him that well?"

"I know him very slightly."

"When and where did you meet?"

"Ata"" Guy glanced at Annea""the Parker Art Institute, I think around last December." Guy felt he had walked into a trap. He had repeated Bruno's flippant reply at the wedding, simply because Anne had heard Bruno say it, and Anne had probably forgotten. Gerard regarded him, Guy thought, as if he didn't believe a word of it. Why hadn't Bruno warned him about Gerard? Why hadn't they settled on the story Bruno had once proposed about their having met at the rail of a certain midtown bar?

"And when did you see him again?" Gerard asked finally.

"Wella"not until my wedding in June." He felt himself assuming the puzzled expression of a man who does not yet know his inquisitor's object. Fortunately, he thought, fortunately, he had already assured Anne that Bruno's assertion they were old friends was only Bruno's style of humor. "We didn't invite him," Guy added.

"He just came?" Gerard looked as if he understood. "But you did invite him to the party you gave in July?" He glanced at Anne also.

"He called up," Anne told him, "and asked if he could come, soa"I said yes."

Gerard then asked if Bruno knew about the party through any friends of his who were coming, and Guy said possibly, and gave the name of the blond woman who had smiled so horrifically at Bruno that evening. Guy had no other names to give. He had never seen Bruno with anyone.

Gerard leaned back. "Do you like him?" he smiled.

"Well enough," Anne replied finally, politely.

"All right," Guy said, because Gerard was waiting. "He seems a bit pushing." The right side of his face was in shadow. Guy wondered if Gerard were scanning his face now for scars.

"A hero-worshiper. Power-worshiper, in a sense." Gerard smiled, but the smile no longer looked genuine, or perhaps it never had. "Sorry to bother you with these questions, Mr. Haines."

Five minutes later, he was gone.

"What does it mean?" Anne asked. "Does he suspect Charles Bruno?"

Guy bolted the door, then came back. "He probably suspects one of his acquaintances. He might think Charles knows something, because he hated his father so. Or so Charles told me."

"Do you think Charles might know?"

"There's no telling. Is there?" Guy took a cigarette.

"Good lord." Anne stood looking at the corner of the sofa, as if she still saw Bruno where he had sat the night of the party. She whispered, "Amazing what goes on in people's lives!"

Thirty-six.

"Listen," Guy said tensely into the receiver. "Listen, Bruno!"

Bruno was drunker than Guy had ever heard him, but he was determined to penetrate to the muddled bram. Then he thought suddenly that Gerard might be with him, and his voice grew even softer, cowardly with caution. He found out Bruno was in a telephone booth, alone. "Did you tell Gerard we met at the Art Institute?"

Bruno said he had. It came through the drunken mumblings that he had. Bruno wanted to come over. Guy couldn't make it register that Gerard had already come to question him. Guy banged the telephone down, and tore open his collar. Bruno calling him now! Gerard had externalized his danger. Guy felt it was more imperative to break completely with Bruno even than to arrange a story with him that would tally. What annoyed him most was that he couldn't tell from Bruno's driveling what had happened to him, or even what kind of mood he was in.

Guy was upstairs in the studio with Anne when the door chime rang.

He opened the door only slightly, but Bruno bumped it wide, stumbled across the living room, and collapsed on the sofa. Guy stopped short in front of him, speechless first with anger, then disgust. Bruno's fat, flushed neck bulged over his collar. He seemed more bloated than drunk, as if an edema of death had inflated his entire body, filling even the deep eye sockets so the red-gray eyes were thrust unnaturally forward. Bruno stared up at him. Guy went to the telephone to call a taxi.

"Guy, who is it?" Anne whispered down the stairway.

"Charles Bruno. He's drunk."

"Not drunk!"Bruno protested suddenly.

Anne came halfway down the stairs, and saw him. "Shouldn't we just put him upstairs?"

"I don't want him here." Guy was looking in the telephone book, trying to find a taxi company's number.

"Yess-s!" Bruno hissed, like a deflating tire.

Guy turned. Bruno was staring at him out of one eye, the eye the only living point in the sprawled, corpselike body. He was muttering something, rhythmically.

"What's he saying?" Anne stood closer to Guy.

Guy went to Bruno and caught him by the shirtfront. The muttered, imbecilic chant infuriated him, Bruno drooled onto his hand as he tried to pull him upright. "Get up and get out!"Then he heard it: "I'll tell her, I'll tell hera"I'll tell her, I'll tell her," Bruno chanted, and the wild red eye stared up. "Don't send me away, I'll tell hera"I'lla""

Guy released him in abhorrence.

"What's the matter, Guy? What's he saying?"

"I'll put him upstairs," Guy said.

Guy tried with all his strength to get Bruno over his shoulder, but the flaccid, dead weight defeated him. Finally, Guy stretched him out across the sofa. He went to the front window. There was no car outside. Bruno might have dropped out of the sky. Bruno slept noiselessly, and Guy sat up watching him, smoking.

Bruno awakened about 3 in the morning, and had a couple of drinks to steady himself. After a few moments, except for the bloatedness, he looked almost normal. He was very happy at finding himself in Guy's house, and had no recollection of arriving. "I had another round with Gerard," he smiled. "Three days. Been seeing the papers?"

"No."

"You're a fine one, don't even look at the papers!" Bruno said softly. "Gerard's hot on a bum scent. This crook friend of mine, Matt Levine. He doesn't have an alibi for that night. Herbert thinks it could be him. I been talking with all three of them for three days. Matt might get it."

"Might die for it?"

Bruno hesitated, still smiling. "Not die, just take the rap. He's got two or three killings on him now. The cops're glad to have him." Bruno shuddered, and drank the rest in his glass.

Guy wanted to pick up the big ashtray in front of him and smash Bruno's bloated head, burn out the tension he felt would grow and grow until he did kill Bruno, or himself. He caught Bruno's shoulders hard in both hands. "Will you get out? I swear this is the last time!"

"No," Bruno said quietly, without any movement of resistance, and Guy saw the old indifference to pain, to death, that he had seen when he had fought him in the woods.

Guy put his hands over his own face, and felt its contortion against his palms. "If this Matt gets blamed," he whispered,"I'll tell them the whole story."

"Oh, he won't. They won't have enough. It's a joke, son!" Bruno grinned. "Matt's the right character with the wrong evidence. You're the wrong character with the right evidence. You're an important guy, f' Christ's sake!" He pulled something out of his pocket and handed it to Guy. "I found this last -week. Very nice, Guy."

Guy looked at the photograph of "The Pittsburgh Store," funereally backgrounded by black. It was a booklet from the Modern Museum. He ready: "Guy Daniel Haines, hardly thirty, follows the Wright tradition. He has achieved a distinctive, uncompromising style noted for a rigorous simplicity without starkness, for the grace he calls *singingness'a" Guy closed it nervously, disgusted by the last word that was an invention of the Museum's.

Bruno repocketed the booklet. "You're one of the tops. If you kept your nerve up, they could turn you inside out and never suspect."

Guy looked down at him. "That's still no reason for you to see me. Why do you do it?" But he knew. Because his life with Anne fascinated Bruno. Because he himself derived something from seeing Bruno, some torture that perversely eased.

Bruno watched him as if he knew everything that passed through his mind. "I like you, Guy, but remembera"they've got a lot more against you than against me. I could wiggle out if you turned me in, but you couldn't. There's the fact Herbert might remember you. And Anne might remember you were acting funny around that time. And the scratches and the scar. And all the little clues they'd shove in front of you, like the revolver, and glove piecesa"" Bruno recited them slowly and fondly, like old memories. "With me against you, you'd crack up, I bet."

Thirty-seven.

Guy knew as soon as Anne called to him that she had seen the dent. He had meant to get it fixed, and had forgotten. He said first that he didn't know how it got there, then that he did. He had taken the boat out last week, he said, and it had bumped a buoy.

"Don't be terribly sorry," she mocked him, "it isn't worth it." She took his hand as she stood up. "Egon said you had the boat out one afternoon. Is that why you didn't say anything about it?"

"I suppose."

"Did you take it out by yourself?" Anne smiled a little, because he wasn't a good-enough sailor to take the boat out by himself.

Bruno had called up and insisted they go out for a sail. Gerard had come to a new deadend with Matt Levine, deadends everywhere, and Bruno had insisted that they celebrate. "I took it out with Charles Bruno one afternoon," he said. And he had brought the revolver with him that day, too.

"It's all right, Guy. Only why'd you see him again? I thought * you disliked him so."

"A whim," he murmured. "It was the two days I was doing that work at home." It wasn't all right, Guy knew. Anne kept the India's brass and white-painted wood gleaming and spotless, like something of chryselephantine. And Bruno! She mistrusted Bruno now.

"Guy, he's not the man we saw that night in front of your apartment, is he? The one who spoke to us in the snow?"

"Yes. He's the same one." Guy's fingers, supporting the weight of the revolver in his pocket, tightened helplessly.

"What's his interest in you?" Anne followed him casually down the deck. "He isn't interested in architecture particularly. I talked with him the night of the party."

"He's got no interest in me. Just doesn't know what to do with himself." When he got rid of the revolver, he thought, he could talk.

"You met him at school?"

"Yes. He was wandering around a corridor." How easy it was to lie when one had to lie! But it was wrapping tendrils around his feet, his body, his brain. He would say the wrong thing one day. He was doomed to lose Anne. Perhaps he had already lost her, at this moment when he lighted a cigarette and she stood leaning against the mainmast, watching him. The revolver seemed to weight him to the spot, and determinedly he turned and walked toward the prow. Behind him, he heard Anne's step onto the deck, and her soft tread in her tennis shoes, going back toward the cockpit. *I It was a sullen day, promising rain. The India rocked slowly on the choppy surface, and seemed no farther from the gray shore than it had been an hour ago. Guy learned on the bowsprit and looked down at his white-clad legs, the blue gilt-buttoned jacket he had taken from the India's locker, that perhaps had belonged to Anne's father. He might have been a sailor instead of an architect, he thought. He had been wild to go to sea at fourteen. What had stopped him? How different his life might have been withouta"what? Without Miriam, of course. He straightened impatiently and pulled the revolver from the pocket of the jacket.

He held the gun in both hands over the water, his elbow on the bowsprit. How intelligent a jewel, he thought, and how innocent it looked now. Himselfa"He let it drop. The gun turned once head-over, in perfect balance, with its familiar look of willingness, and disappeared.

"What was that?"

Guy turned and saw her standing on the deck near the cabin. He measured the ten or twelve feet between them. He could think of nothing, absolutely nothing to say to her.