“Well, Betty tells it better, but I can give you the short version.” Malcolm stood back from the statue and regarded it with a half-smile. “Jason Trebec wanted a male heir to carry his name. But after Augusta was born, Nancy couldn’t have another baby. She was barren. And Catholic – no divorce. Jason was a cruel old bastard, and every last day of Nancy’s life, he found some new way to punish her for not giving him a son.”

“The old man was nuts. I’ve met Augusta. She’s twice the man I am.”

“Oh, you don’t know the half of it.” Malcolm had seemed cold sober only a moment ago, and now he split his face with the wide smile of a happy drunk. “Augusta has balls, all right.” He grabbed his crotch. “They used to be mine.”

He was laughing as he sank down to the stone pedestal at Nancy’s feet. “Augusta snipped them off me in court. Sued me for damaging a bird habitat. Then she moved on to the chemical plants, snipping off trophy testicles in courtrooms up and down the Corridor. Now she has enough balls to set up a damn pool table.”

Riker sat down on the cold stone slab at Nancy Trebec’s feet. “Naw, I don’t think that’s Augusta’s style. I see her banging ‘em across a net with a paddle.”

Malcolm nodded as he considered this. “Or baseball?” He nudged Riker’s arm. “Splat with a bat?”

Riker winced and leaned back against the statue. In the benign afterglow of a long night’s boozing, he studied the man beside him. When they had first met over a watered-down whiskey in Owltown, he had not known what to make of Malcolm. But very quickly, the personality had jelled into a man’s man with a taste for Riker’s unfiltered cigarettes and an unlimited capacity for drink. Riker’s approval had grown with each glass he downed on Malcolm’s tab.

And now the hip flask came back to him again. The scotch was smooth, and it warmed him. Life was good.

Ah, wait. Here’s a snag. He upended the silver bottle and one golden drop hit the ground. “Aw, you killed it,” said Riker, perhaps ungraciously.

“That’s no problem.” Malcolm took it out of his hand. “I’m in the resurrection business.” He turned his back and said a brief prayer to Bacchus. When he offered the hip flask to Riker again, it was full.

“Praise the Lord,” said Riker, wishing he could remember the words to Malcolm’s prayer so he could try this stunt at home. “I’ve seen the light.”

“Sooner or later, they all do.”

“I hear you’ve got quite an act, Mal.”

“Well, I’ve been working on it for thirty years.”

“You don’t look much over thirty now.” According to the roadies, Malcolm was only a few years his junior. In the better light of an Owltown bar, he had searched for signs of a face-lift, but found none. “What’s your beauty secret?”

“Clean living,” said Malcolm, tilting back the flask. “Got another cigarette?”

Riker fished in a side pocket where the package had fallen through the torn lining. Impatient, Malcolm plucked a cigarette from the air. He snapped his fingers, and a flame appeared to spurt out of his thumb.

Riker was about to say he had seen Charles Butler do that same trick a hundred times.

Well, he had definitely had enough to drink for one night.

Not wanting to lose face with a fellow boozer, he put the silver bottle to his lips but didn’t drink before he handed it to Malcolm. But after a few more passes, the flask hadn’t lightened any. And now Riker realized he had been drinking alone tonight.

Shit.

Either that or Malcolm was the Second Coming.

“The roadies tell me you can turn water into wine.” And cops into babbling idiots.

“Yes, sir. Now that’s a real crowd pleaser.”

“But they think you’re really making wine out of tap water. These guys go on the road with you. They do the setups for the act, right? So how can they believe it’s for real?”

“Most every religion demands faith in impossible acts.” He pointed to the crucifix on the tomb next to them. “People believe that man on the cross was begotten by a god. He could heal the sick and raise the dead. How magical.”

The pointing finger moved on to another stone house. “That’s the tomb of a local woman in the same trade.” The walls were marred with graffiti and the base was littered with colored bits of broken glass, ribbons and pins. “The drawings are voodoo symbols. The things on the ground are religious offerings. She’s a hundred years dead, but some people believe she’s still got the power.”

Malcolm stood up, his arms lifting into a crucifixion pose, and his hands spread wide on the rising wind. The air was blowing cold, and his long hair flew back to reveal the shape of his skull. As he spoke, his smile was dazzling – even in the dark. “This part of the world is ripe with magical thinking.”

A more pragmatic, enlightened thinker of the late twentieth century, Charles Butler, Ph.D. stood at the edge of the cemetery, holding a jar of blood – still warm from the recent sacrifice of a chicken’s life.

He waited in uneasy silence. Finally Malcolm walked down the gravel path and through the circle of trees with one arm thrown around Riker’s shoulders. Evidently, the seduction was a great success, for Riker was laughing as the salesman of wonders led him away.

Charles turned to face Henry Roth, and together they moved on to the avenging angel and proceeded to bind her wings with rope. They worked quietly through the next hour, exchanging one piece of sculpture for another. They worked faster toward the end of the hour, for it was getting light, and the believers would be coming soon.

How disappointed they would be.

Henry wiped the sweat from his brow as he walked back to the tomb of Jason Trebec and turned an old-fashioned key in the lock on the door. He stored his tools alongside the chicken blood and a block of dry ice.

Charles was staring down at the sad face of barren Nancy Trebec.

“Henry, do you think Babe Laurie could have been sterile?”

“Possible. Most of the Lauries are as prolific as rabbits, but Babe’s only child was a bastard.”

“What do you think of a bastard child as a motive for murder? Suppose Babe took it out on the boy, Fred’s son? Maybe Fred retaliated?”

“Ugly things have been done on account of bastards.” He looked up at the bas-relief of a man’s crumbling face above the door. “Jason Trebec once hauled his wife into court and tried to have Augusta declared illegitimate.”

“Do you believe Augusta was a bastard?”

“No, and neither did the judge. The resemblance was so obvious. If this stone portrait was in better shape, you could see it, too. I think Jason just wanted an annulment so he could get on with the business of begetting a son by another woman.”

For a long time after Henry had gone home, Charles was still searching the stone likeness of Jason Trebec, looking for traces of Augusta. He found them in the shape of one uncrumbled eye and what remained of the mouth.

He turned away and walked along the path heading east. The sun was a pale white disk behind the cloud cover. The birds had begun to sing again, but he discerned another sound above the racket, footsteps on gravel. He glanced over one shoulder.

Riker was back, slogging down the path, as though his legs weighed a hundred pounds each. The sky was light gray now, and so was the detective.

“Hey, Charles. Given any more thought to helping me with my problem?” Each word was very distinct. The man took great pride in never slurring his speech, no matter how much he’d been drinking.

Charles regarded the slack face, the poor color, and wondered why his old friend didn’t fall down. Between the liquor and the chain-smoking, Riker had never been in the best of shape. “You need to get some rest.”

“I take that as a no.” Riker was suddenly in thrall to the angel recently restored to her pedestal. “Oh, Jesus. Charles, you gotta stop this. It’s weirding me out.”