"I know that Southern redhead type," Bruno said, poking at his apple pie.

Guy was conscious again of an acute and absolutely useless shame. Useless, because nothing Miriam had done or said would embarrass or surprise Bruno. Bruno seemed incapable of surprise, only of a whetting of interest.

Bruno looked down at his plate with coy amusement. His eyes widened, bright as they could be with the bloodshot and the blue circles. "Marriage," he sighed.

The word "marriage" lingered in Guy's ears, too. It was a solemn word to him. It had the primordial solemnity of holy, love, sin. It was Miriam's round terra cotta-colored mouth saying, "Why should I put myself out for you?" and it was Anne's eyes as she pushed her hair back and looked up at him on the lawn of her house where she planted crocuses. It was Miriam turning from the tall thin window in the room in Chicago, lifting her freckled, shield-shaped face directly up to his as she always did before she told a lie, and Steve's long dark head, insolently smiling. Memories began to crowd in, and he wanted to put his hands up and push them back. The room in Chicago where it had all happeneda He could smell the room, Miriam's perfume, and the heat from painted radiators. He stood passively, for the first time in years not thrusting Miriam's face back to a pink blur. What would it do to him if he let it all flood him again, now? Arm him against her or undermine him?

"I mean it," Bruno's voice said distantly. "What happened? You don't mind telling me, do you? I'm interested."

Steve happened. Guy picked up his drink. He saw the afternoon in Chicago, framed by the doorway of the room, the image gray and black now like a photograph. The afternoon he had found them in the apartment, like no other afternoon, with its own color, taste, and sound, its own world, like a horrible little work of art. Like a date in history fixed in time. Or wasn't it just the opposite, that it traveled with him always? For here it was now, as clear as it had ever been. And, worst of all, he was aware of an impulse to tell Bruno everything, the stranger on the train who would listen, commiserate, and forget. The idea of telling Bruno began to comfort him. Bruno was not the ordinary stranger on the train by any means He was cruel and corrupt enough himself to appreciate a story like that of his first love. And Steve was only the surprise ending that made the rest fall into place. Steve wasn't the first betrayal. It was only his twenty-six-year-old pride that had exploded in his face that afternoon. He had told the story to himself a thousand times, a classic story, dramatic for all his stupidity. His stupidity only lent it humor.

"I expected too much of her," Guy said casually, "without any right to. She happened to like attention She'll probably flirt all her life, no matter whom she's with "

"I know, the eternal high school type." Bruno waved his hand. "Can't even pretend to belong to one guy, ever."

Guy looked at him. Miriam had, of course, once. Abruptly he abandoned his idea of telling Bruno, ashamed that he had nearly begun. Bruno seemed unconcerned now, in fact, whether he told it or not. Slumped, Bruno was drawing with a match in the gravy of his plate. The downturned half of his mouth, in profile, was sunken between nose and chin like the mouth of an old man. The mouth seemed to say, whatever the story, it was really beneath his contempt to listen. "Women like that draw men," Bruno mumbled, "like garbage draws flies."

Two.

The shock of Bruno's words detached him from himself. "You must have had some unpleasant experiences yourself," he remarked. But Bruno troubled by women was hard to imagine.

"Oh, my father had one like that. Redhead, too. Named Carlotta." He looked up, and the hatred for his father penetrated his fuzziness like a barb. "Fine, isn't it? It's men like my father keep *em in business."

Carlotta. Guy felt he understood now why Bruno loathed Miriam. It seemed the key to Bruno's whole personality, to the hatred of his father and to his retarded adolescence.

"There's two kinds of guys!" Bruno announced in a roaring voice, and stopped.

Guy caught a glimpse of himself in a narrow panel mirror on the wall. His eyes looked frightened, he thought, his mouth grim, and deliberately he relaxed. A golf club nudged him in the back. He ran his fingertips over its cool varnished surface. The inlaid metal in the dark wood recalled the binnacle on Anne's sailboat.

"And essentially one kind of women! "Bruno went on. "Two-timers. At one end it's two-timing and the other end it's a whore! Take your choice!"

"What about women like your mother?"

"I never seen another woman like my mother," Bruno declared." I never seen a woman take so much. She's good-looking, too, lots of men friends, but she doesn't fool around with them."

Silence.

Guy tapped another cigarette on his watch and saw it was 10:30. He must go in a moment.

"How'd you find out about your wife?" Bruno peered up at him.

Guy took his time with his cigarette.

"How many'd she have?"

"Quite a few. Before I found out." And just as he assured himself it made no difference at all now to admit it, a sensation as of a tiny whirlpool inside him began to confuse him. Tiny, but realer than the memories somehow, because he had uttered it. Pride? Hatred? Or merely impatience with himself, because all that he kept feeling now was so useless? He turned the conversation from himself. "Tell me what else you want to do before you die."

"Die? Who said anything about dying? I got a few crackproof rackets doped out. Could start one some day in Chicago or New York, or I might just sell my ideas. And I got a lot of ideas for perfect murders." Bruno looked up again with that fixity that seemed to invite challenge.

"I hope your asking me here isn't part of one of your plans." Guy sat down.

"Jesus Christ, I like you, Guy! I really do!"

The wistful face pled with Guy to say he liked him, too. The loneliness in those tiny, tortured eyes! Guy looked down embarrassedly at his hands. "Do all your ideas run to crime?"

"Certainly not! Just things I want to do, likea"I want to give a guy a thousand dollars some day. A beggar. When I get my own dough, that's one of the first things I'm gonna do. But didn't you ever feel you wanted to steal something? Or kill somebody? You must have. Everybody feels those things. Don't you think some people get quite a kick out of killing people in wars?"

"No," Guy said.

Bruno hesitated. "Oh, they'd never admit it, of course, they're afraid! But you've had people in your life you'd have liked out of the way, haven't you?"

"No." Steve, he remembered suddenly. Once he had even thought of murdering him.

Bruno cocked his head. "Sure you have. I see it. Why don't you admit it?"

"I may have had fleeting ideas, but I'd never have done anything about them. I'm not that kind of person."

"That's exactly where you're wrong! Any kind of person can murder. Purely circumstances and not a thing to do with temperament! People get so fara"and it takes just the least little thing to push them over the brink. Anybody. Even your grandmother. I know!"

"I don't happen to agree," Guy said tersely.

"I tell you I came near murdering my father a thousand times! Who'd you ever feel like murdering? The guys with your wife?"

"One of them," Guy murmured.

"How near did you come?"

"Not near at all. I merely thought of it." He remembered the sleepless nights, hundreds of them, and the despair of peace unless he avenged himself. Could something have pushed him over the line then? He heard Bruno's voice mumbling, "You were a hell of a lot nearer than you think, that's all I can say." Guy gazed at him puzzledly. His figure had the sickly, nocturnal look of a croupier's, hunched on shirtsleeved forearms over the table, thin head hanging. "You read too many detective stories," Guy said, and having heard himself, did not know where the words had come from.

"They're good. They show all kinds of people can murder."

"I've always thought that's exactly why they're bad."

"Wrong again!" Bruno said indignantly. "Do you know what percentage of murders get put in the papers?"

"I don't know and I don't care."

"One twelfth. One twelfth! Just imagine! Who do you think the other eleven twelfths are? A lot of little people that don't matter. All the people the cops know they'll never catch." He started to pour more Scotch, found the bottle empty, and dragged himself up. A gold penknife flashed out of his trousers pocket on a gold chain fine as a string. It pleased Guy aesthetically, as a beautiful piece of jewelry might have. And he found himself thinking, as he watched Bruno slash round the top of a Scotch bottle, that Bruno might murder one day with the little penknife, that he would probably go quite free, simply because he wouldn't much care whether he were caught or not.

Bruno turned, grinning, with the new bottle of Scotch. "Come to Santa Fe with me, huh? Relax for a couple days."

"Thanks, I can't."

"I got plenty of dough. Be my guest, huh?" He spilled Scotch on the table.

"Thanks," Guy said. From his clothes, he supposed, Bruno thought he hadn't much money. They were his favorite trousers, these gray flannels. He was going to wear them in Metcalf and in Palm Beach, too, if it wasn't too hot. Leaning back, he put his hands in his pockets and felt a hole at the bottom of the right one.

"Why not?" Bruno handed him his drink. "I like you a lot, Guy."

"Why?"

"Because you're a good guy. Decent, I mean. I meet a lot of guysa"no puna"but not many like you. I admire you," he blurted, and sank his lip into his glass.

"I like you, too," said Guy.

"Come with me, huh? I got nothing to do for two or three days till my mother comes. We could have a swell time."

"Pick up somebody else."

"Cheeses, Guy, what d'you think I do, go around picking up traveling companions? I like you, so I ask you to come with me. One day even. I'll cut right over from Metcalf and not even go to El Paso. I'm supposed to see the Canyon."

"Thanks, I've got a job as soon as I finish in Metcalf."

"Oh."The wistful, admiring smile again. "Building something?"

"Yes, a country club." It still sounded strange and unlike himself, the last thing he would have thought he'd be building, two months ago. "The new Palmyra in Palm Beach."

"Yeah?"

Bruno had heard of the Palmyra Club, of course. It was the biggest in Palm Beach. He had even heard they were going to build a new one. He had been to the old one a couple of times.

"You designed it?" He looked down at Guy like a hero-worshiping little boy. "Can you draw me a picture of it?"

Guy drew a quick sketch of the buildings in the back of Bruno's address book and signed his name, as Bruno wanted. He explained the wall that would drop to make the lower floor one great ballroom extending onto the terrace, the louver windows he hoped to get permission for that would eliminate airconditioning. He grew happy as he talked, and tears of excitement came in his eyes, though he kept his voice low. How could he talk so intimately to Bruno, he wondered, reveal the very best of himself? Who was less likely to understand than Bruno?

"Sounds terrific," Bruno said. "You mean, you just tell them how it's gonna look?"

"No. One has to please quite a lot of people." Guy put his head back suddenly and laughed.

"You're gonna be famous, huh? Maybe you're famous now."

There would be photographs in the news magazines, perhaps something in the newsreels. They hadn't passed on his sketches yet, he reminded himself, but he was so sure they would. Myers, the architect he shared an office with in New York, was sure. Anne was positive. And so was Mr. Brillhart. The biggest commission of his life. "I might be famous after this. It's the kind of thing they publicize."

Bruno began to tell him a long story about his life in college, how he would have become a photographer if something hadn't happened at a certain time with his father. Guy didn't listen. He sipped his drink absently, and thought of the commissions that would come after Palm Beach. Soon, perhaps, an office building in New York. He had an idea for an office building in New York, and he longed to see it come into being. Guy Daniel Haines. A name. No longer the irksome, never quite banished awareness that he had less money than Anne.

"Wouldn't it, Guy?" Bruno repeated.

"What?"

Bruno took a deep breath. "If your wife made a stink now about the divorce. Say she fought about it while you were in Palm Beach and made them fire you, wouldn't that be motive enough for murder?"

"Of Miriam?"

"Sure."

"No," Guy said. But the question disturbed him. He was afraid Miriam had heard of the Palmyra job through his mother, that she might try to interfere for the sheer pleasure of hurting him.

"When she was two-timing you, didn't you feel like murdering her?"

"No. Can't you get off the subject?" For an instant, Guy saw both halves of his life, his marriage and his career, side by side as he felt he had never seen them before. His brain swam sickeningly, trying to understand how he could be so stupid and helpless in one and so capable in the other. He glanced at Bruno, who still stared at him, and, feeling slightly befuddled, set his glass on the table and pushed it fingers' length away.

"You must have wanted to once," Bruno said with gentle, drunken persistence.

"No." Guy wanted to get out and take a walk, but the train kept on and on in a straight line, like something that would never stop. Suppose Miriam did lose him the commission. He was going to live there several months, and he would be expected to keep on a social par with the directors. Bruno understood such things very well. He passed his hand across his moist forehead. The difficulty was, of course, that he wouldn't know what was in Miriam's mind until he saw her. He was tired, and when he was tired, Miriam could invade him like an army. It had happened so often in the two years it had taken him to turn loose of his love for her. It was happening now. He felt sick of Bruno. Bruno was smiling.

"Shall I tell you one of my ideas for murdering my father?"

"No," Guy said. He put his hand over the glass Bruno was about to refill.

"Which do you want, the busted light socket in the bathroom or the carbon monoxide garage?"

"Do it and stop talking about it!"

"I'll do it, don't think I won't! Know what else I'll do some day? Commit suicide if I happen to feel like committing suicide, and fix it so it looks like my worst enemy murdered me."

Guy looked at him in disgust. Bruno seemed to be growing indefinite at the edges, as if by some process of deliquescence. He seemed only a voice and a spirit now, the spirit of evil. All he despised, Guy thought, Bruno represented. All the things he would not want to be, Bruno was, or would become.

"Want me to dope out a perfect murder of your wife for you? You might want to use it sometime." Bruno squirmed with self-consciousness under Guy's scrutiny.

Guy stood up. "I want to take a walk."

Bruno slammed his palms together. "Hey! Cheeses, what an idea! We murder for each other, see? I kill your wife and you kill my father! We meet on the train, see, and nobody knows we know each other! Perfect alibis! Catch?"

The wall before his eyes pulsed rhythmically, as if it were about to spring apart. Murder. The word sickened him, terrified him. He wanted to break away from Bruno, get out of the room, but a nightmarish heaviness held him. He tried to steady himself by straightening out the wall, by understanding what Bruno was saying, because he could feel there was logic in it somewhere, like a problem or a puzzle to be solved.

Bruno's tobacco-stained hands jumped and trembled on his knees. "Airtight alibis!" he shrieked. "It's the idea of my life! Don't you get it? I could do it sometime when you're out of town and you could do it when I was out of town."

Guy understood. No one could ever, possibly, find out.

"It would give me a great pleasure to stop a career like Miriam's and to further a career like yours." Bruno giggled. "Don't you agree she ought to be stopped before she ruins a lot of other people? Sit down, Guy!"

She hasn't ruined me, Guy wanted to remind him, but Bruno gave him no time.

"I mean, just supposing the setup was that. Could you do it? You could tell me all about where she lived, you know, and I could do the same for you, as good as if you lived there. We could leave fingerprints all over the place and only drive the dicks batty!" He snickered. "Months apart, of course, "and strictly no communication. Christ, it's a cinch!" He stood up and nearly toppled, getting his drink. Then he was saying, right in Guy's face, with suffocating confidence: "You could do it, huh, Guy? Wouldn't be any hitches, I swear. I'd fix everything, I swear, Guy."

Guy thrust him away, harder than he had intended. Bruno rose resiliently from the window seat. Guy glanced about for air, but the walls presented an unbroken surface. The room had become a little hell. What was he doing here? How and when had he drunk so much?

"I'm positive you could," Bruno frowned.

Shut up with your damned theories, Guy wanted to shout back, but instead his voice came like a whisper: "I'm sick of this."

He saw Bruno's narrow face twist then in a queer waya"in a smirk of surprise, a look that was eerily omniscient and hideous. Bruno shrugged affably.