"How do you know?" Mark insisted.

Bobbys eyes filled up with rage and humiliation as he said, "I know because I pissed in my pants when I first heard the voice. Right here in this booth. Right in front of Susie."

There was a long silence among us. Mark, Pig, and I had all placed our hands beneath the table, a subconscious gesture, because we did not want to taunt or hurt Bobby with our rings.

"Who was it, Bobby?" Mark asked at last. "Who was the motherfucker?"

"I saw him when he got up. I didn't recognize him but Susie asked a friend of hers who's a bartender in here. The guy's name is Dan Molligen, and he's in his last year of law school at Carolina."

"He was the first battalion commander our knob year," Pig remembered. "A real first-class prick."

"No shit," Bobby said.

"He can tell us where the house is. We'll find out from Molligen."

"One more question, Bobby," I asked. "Just one more. I know this has been real hard for you. But how many of those guys were in the room that night? Do you remember the number?"

He drained a glass of beer and rose to leave. A light sweat covered his forehead. He said one brief, unequivocal word, "Ten," stood, and said good-bye.

"What do we do now?" I asked when he had gone. "We've got all weekend."

Mark slammed his fist down on the table and said, "Molligen."

Chapter Thirty six.

We spent the rest of the day learning all there was to know about Dan Molligen. I was surprised by how quickly we adapted to the tactics of surveillance. Mark, in particular, displayed extraordinary-heretofore unperceived-skills in the craft of reconnaissance. In five phone calls to friends, he discovered that Molligen was unmarried and lived alone in a section of small brick duplexes on a hill above the University. He was in the top ten percent of his class, an assistant editor of the Law Review, and had a job waiting for him in the prestigious Columbia law firm of Sanders and Quackenbush when he graduated. He was engaged to a girl from Converse whose father owned a large department store in Spartanburg. Mark also discovered that Molligen was left-handed, smoked unfiltered Lucky Strikes, had worn braces until he was fourteen, and drove a late model XKE with the South Carolina license plate CL39-260.I found out that he was cordially disliked by most of his classmates at the law school, hung around mostly with Institute graduates, and still practiced sword manual in front of his bedroom mirror.

Pig found something more important still; he found Dan Molligen. He was studying in the law library, hunched over a set of massive brown books, and making careful notations in a small black book. Pig and I watched him for an hour, feeling ill-dressed and uncomfortable in the wrinkled civilian clothes we had brought with us. Mark left to go shopping. I kept reminding Pig that we didn't want to hurt Molligen; we just wanted him to reveal the location of the house where The Ten took those freshmen marked unworthy to wear the ring.

It grew dark, and still Molligen remained fixed at his desk, poring over his law books with remarkable powers of stillness and concentration, oblivious to our hostile presence. Mark returned with a shopping bag held tightly in his hand. We gathered outside the law school, and Mark whispered a plan.

"Will, you stay here and watch Molligen," he said. "When he gets up to leave, follow him to his car without being seen. You call this number and tell us he's on his way home."

"How will I know he's on his way home?" I asked. "What if he has a date or something?"

"He's different from you, Will," Mark said. "He'll probably do something odd like take a shower before he goes out. Anyway, we've got all night."

"What number is this?" I asked, staring at the piece of paper Mark had handed me.

"It's Molligen's number," Mark explained.

"You can't break into his fucking house, Mark!" I protested.

"You just call when he gets into his car," Mark answered.

"How are you going to make him talk?" I asked, growing more and more frightened.

"I wanted to kick his nuts in, but Pig had a better plan," Mark said.

"We used to catch guys in our neighborhood from rival gangs," Pig said delightedly. "We devised a sure-fire way to make 'em talk, and it's perfectly humane. That is, if they survive."

"Why are we doing all this?" I asked. "Let's stop now before we get into trouble we can't get out of."

"Now's the interesting part," Pig said, his excitement mounting. "What if the cavalry turned back to the fort when they heard the Indians attacking the wagon train, paisan? There wouldn't be nothing running around today but a bunch of bare-assed Indians hassling buffalo. Just think of it, no pizza parlors, no Volkswagens, no weight rooms. See, we're the cavalry and this is like a movie. It's fun, man. Fun. Look here, Will."

From the large paper bag Mark held, Pig snatched a huge coil of thick rope.

"We came here because you brought us up here, Will," Mark said. "You dealt us into the game, and now we're going to finish it. You can help us if you want or you can pussy out on your roommates. It's your choice. But I want you to remember that Pig and I were the ones that grabbed Poteete off the railing that night. I know you think you're a lot more sensitive than us, but we'd like to find those guys as much as you would. Maybe more."

"We're not responsible for what The Ten does," I said desperately. "We're getting in too deep. We're not responsible for stopping it."

"I want to know what they did to Poteete," Mark said darkly, "and I want to know who did it. Pearce, I don't give a shit about. I've never even talked to Pearce, but Poteete was in my platoon."

"We've got to find out who the Indians are, paisan," Pig added. "We're the heroes, man. The fucking heroes. We can break The Ten just by getting Molligen in there to talk some good shit to us."

"Will," Mark said, cupping the back of my head with his large right hand and drawing me closer to him, "do you remember how scared we all were after Hell Night? Do you remember being so scared that none of the knobs would go down to the latrine because we thought we might meet an upperclassman? Do you remember us peeing in the sink and then cleaning the sink with Ajax? Do you remember being that scared? Well, how scared do you think you'd have been if someone had thrown gasoline on you and threatened to set your ass on fire? I'm not going to hurt Molligen, Will. I promise you that. But I'm going to scare him as bad as he scared Bentley. And I'm not going to lose one night's sleep over it."

"Don't pussy out on us now, paisan," said Pig.

I said, "I'll call you when Molligen leaves the library."

I came to admire my quarry's powers of concentration during the next two hours as I studied him from across the room. Once he looked up and saw me watching him, but I quickly diverted my eyes to a point above his gaze, as though I were engaged in some indissoluble dilemma of the law myself. I worried, fearing that he could recognize me later, but he did not seem the least bit suspicious of me. Why should he? I thought. There was no reason for him to believe that three seniors from the Institute were stalking him. It was hard enough for me to believe. He was a portrait of stillness for the most part. He studied in perfect silence with his small, narrow eyes . . . cadreman's eyes.

At ten o'clock he began collecting his legal pads, placing them carefully into his briefcase; then he returned the law books to their places on the shelves. He checked his watch. Then to my amusement, he gave himself a military shirt tuck, put on his sport coat, and walked briskly out the front door of the law school. I watched him from a library window as he made his way to the parking lot and unlocked his Jaguar. The phone was ringing at his house before he left the parking lot. It rang only once. Mark Santoro answered it.

"It's all set, Will," he said. "As soon as we get him in the trunk, we'll pick you up behind the gymnasium."

"The trunk?"

"It's the part of the automobile where the spare tire is usually found."

Mark was laughing as he hung up the phone.

It was over an hour before I saw my car pull into the parking lot behind the gymnasium. During my wait, my mind teemed with infinite dramas and innumerable possibilities of things that might have gone wrong at Molligen's house: suspicious neighbors, dogs, cruising patrol cars, a desperate struggle in the darkness that could have left my roommates badly injured, or even the simple bad luck of Molligen spending the night out with his fiancee. It also occurred to me that what we were doing could not only get us kicked out of the Institute; we could also be sent to prison. The law, unless it had changed significantly during the last unnerving hour, insisted on rather stern treatment for kidnapers. Pig was driving and barely slowed down as I climbed into the front seat. I was shaking.

"Did you get him?" I asked breathlessly, hoping they had not.

"It was a work of art," Pig said. "I wanted to take him down in my famous death hold but the number one paisan here"-he motioned with his thumb at Mark-"crumpled him without a fucking sound using his handkerchief."

"A handkerchief?" I said, puzzled.

"Soaked in chloroform by the master chemist," Mark said. "Chemistry majors learn some useful shit, Will. You'd probably have tried to knock him out with a Norton anthology."

"When will he wake up?" I asked.

"He's probably awake now but he won't be too active for a while. Anyway, he's tied up, gagged, and stuffed in his mattress cover," Mark said, as we passed through Cayce, nervous about cops.

"Where are we taking him?" I asked.

"Do you remember when we went hunting with Commerce and Tradd in the Congaree swamp? That was Thanksgiving break of our sophomore year," Mark answered.

"That's where we're going," Pig said. "Me and Mark figured out a little scenario to get Molligen to talk."

"Are we going to bury him up to his neck in quicksand?" I asked nervously. "No kidding, boys, why don't we let him go now before this thing gets any more serious? We've already stepped into some deep shit and if anything goes wrong . . ."

"I just wish we were near the ocean," Pig said, ignoring me completely. "Did you ever see that movie where they buried Blackbeard up to his neck in the sand and watched the tide come in and drown his ass? I bet we could get Molligen to talk then."

"He'll talk and he'll talk fast," Mark assured us.

My hands were trembling against the dashboard and my eyes followed the sweep of the headlights as we moved along the soft rolling hill country of the South Carolina Piedmont and inhaled the resin smells of dense pine forests. We were streaking down back roads and sparsely traveled highways that cut through a wilder, more primitive South Carolina. We were twenty miles outside the Columbia city limits when I spoke in a voice I barely recognized. "Pig, Mark," I said, "I want us to stop this right now. I'm asking you to stop it. Before we do something we can never undo. I know I was the one that got you to come up here, but I thought we were just going to talk to Bentley. I didn't know it would lead us to Molligen. I didn't know it would lead us to all this. 1 thought it would just prove how goddam smart I am. I didn't mean for it to go this far. I swear I didn't and I'm scared. I'm scared worse than I've ever been in my life."

Mark reached under the seat and pulled out a bottle of Jack Daniels he had stolen from Molligen's house. He took a long deep swallow, tilting his head back against the seat. Passing the bottle to me, he said, "Shut up, Will. I don't want to hear you whining for the rest of the night. It makes me nervous."

Angrily I snatched the bottle from him and said, "This is what I get for rooming with the fucking Mafia."

"Drink some bourbon," Mark muttered. "It'll help kill that bird who lives in your stomach."

"What bird?" I asked.

"That chicken," he said.

I took a long swallow, too long. I gagged and spit the bourbon onto the floorboards. I took another drink and another.

"What's the plan?" I said, wiping my chin with my sleeve, calmer now. "I've got to know the plan so I can help."

We were entering the deep swamp country of the Carolinas, an ominous unsteady land threaded with ink-black creeks and covered with virgin groves of cypress and water oak. The sharp, pure blaze of starshine illuminated the swamp. Far from cities, we moved into the heart of the Congaree. The liquor was making me brave, and I faced the world with a strange, exhilarating wildness unknown to me, known only to those who have stepped into the realm of lawlessness and found an unnatural strength and power in the taste of its forbidden fruits. We could hear Molligen begin to thump around in the trunk like a large fish we had thrown in alive and fresh from the sea.

"Do you remember the railroad tracks that ran by the place where we camped with Commerce?" Mark asked.

"Sure," I answered. "We put pennies on the tracks to let the train flatten them out."

"We're going to tie him on the tracks and wait 'til a train comes," Mark said calmly. "Then we'll find out about the house, about his sex life, and about how many warts his mother has on her fat ass."

"That's nuts," I screamed. Even liquor could not grant me that much courage in a single night. "That's fucking crazy and you and Pig have gone out of your goddam dago gourds."

"Shhh, Will," Mark warned, making a motion toward the trunk, "speak lower so that bastard doesn't hear."

"Hey, paisan," Pig whispered. "We're not going to really tie him to the tracks the train uses. Don't you remember that old set of tracks that hasn't been used for years that runs right beside the new tracks? We're going to tie him up on the old tracks. It's perfectly harmless, paisan."

"If he doesn't die of a heart attack," I said. "Why don't you guys get a summer job with the Inquisition?"

"I thought of it myself," Pig boasted. "We did it to a guy in my gang who broke the code up in The City. He cussed in front of my mother. I was just going to kill him, but I wanted him to suffer before he died and have time to repent. We hogtied him to a siding where the trains run out to Long Island. He fainted when the train came by. We thought he was deader than shit. But I revived him."

"How?" Mark asked.

"I pissed in his face."

"Jesus Christ," I said. "Give me a chance to kill myself if I ever cuss in front of your mother."

"That's an even greater crime than cussing in front of Theresa," Pig explained. "That's probably the greatest crime a man can commit."

"We're almost there," Mark said, peering out the window. "There. That's the dirt road. Turn, baby. It's almost show time."

We drove for over three miles on the dirt road. The railroad tracks ran out through the southern edge of the swamp and the road we were on went up to the tracks but did not cross them. Pig stopped the car and for a brief moment we listened to the innumerable sounds of the Congaree and the muffled thump of Dan Molligen beating rhythmically against the top of the car's trunk like a damaged heart.

"He could have a fife and bugle corps with him out here and no one would ever hear," Pig said. "When do you think we'll get a train, Mark?"

"We've got all night and you know they make the run from Charleston to Columbia pretty often," Mark answered, looking at his watch. "Let's get Bimbo tied to the track. We don't want to miss a train."

"Here," Pig said, reaching into a brown shopping bag in the back seat. "Ol' Mark thought of everything. Put one of these on, Will."

They were Halloween masks, grotesque and out of season, that fitted over the entire head. They smelled like decomposing inner tubes. We exited the car as three, monstrously warted ghouls, a matched and awful trinity. As Pig opened the trunk I breathed in the rancid smell of cheap rubber. The smell and the liquor sickened me.

Lifting Molligen roughly, we carried him struggling and moaning to the old rusted tracks that ran parallel and three yards away from the new ones. The tracks still in use had the silvery health of steel polished by the weight and awesome friction of trains at full throttle hurtling through the Carolina darkness. Mark cut him out of the mattress cover with a butcher knife commandeered from Molligen's house. He was blindfolded, gagged, and trussed securely in what appeared to me to be a professional manner. Working with speed and efficiency, Pig and Mark laid Molligen across the tracks and tied him at the throat and thighs. Then Mark removed the gag and the blindfold to begin the interrogation.

The three of us crouched around him as his eyes adjusted to seeing again. We could measure the precise speed of the adjustment from the time the blindfold came off to the time we heard him gasp with a kind of desperate fear when he focused on our masks.

"Who are you?" he said. "What do you want from me?"

Then he quickly changed his tactics and said in a more controlled voice, "I'm a professional lawyer. There could be some serious consequences to your actions."

Pig giggled, enjoying himself immensely.

"You're going to be dead within an hour, Mr. Molligen," Mark said in a high-pitched voice that sounded like a blend between an adolescent girl and the death-screams of the rabbit I had killed on that long-ago Thanksgiving Day. He was disguising his voice so that Molligen would never recognize him in the same way that Bentley had recognized Molligen. Pig and I followed Mark's example instinctively and with a certain pride in the thoroughness of our roommate's canniness under pressure. We took on the unnatural voices.

Pig wailed, "You gonna be cut in half by a train, Toecheese motherfucker."

"You guys are crazy," Molligen answered in his deep lyrical drawl, still making a superhuman effort to control his panic. It was easy to understand why Bentley never forgot the timbre and quality of that voice. There was a contemptuousness and sonorous menace that must have made him particularly feared among the plebes.

"You've hurt a friend of ours," I said in the changeling voice.

"Who did I hurt?" he screamed, tensing against the ropes, lifting his neck toward us, veins extended in his throat and forehead. "I didn't hurt anybody."

"Answer our questions, Molligen, and we'll let you go," Mark said. "Fuck with us and we're going to feed you to the first train that comes along."

"I'll answer any question you want to know," Molligen said, his eyes peering into the darkness down the track toward Charleston. "Hurry up and ask it. Hurry up."

"Are you a member of an organization called The Ten?" Mark asked.

"No," Molligen answered. "I've never heard of that organization."