'You look scared,' Lemke said. 'It's too late to be scared, white man from town.'

He took a pocketknife from his jacket and opened it, performing the operation with an old man's grave and studied slowness. The blade was shorter than the blade of Ginelli's pocketknife, Billy saw, but it looked sharper.

The old man pushed the blade into the crust and then drew it across, creating a slit about three inches long. He withdrew the blade. Red droplets fell from it onto the crust. The old man wiped the blade on the sleeve of his jacket, leaving a dark red stain. Then he folded the blade and put the knife away. He hooked his misshapen thumbs over opposing sides of the pie plate and pulled gently. The slit gaped, showing a swimming viscous fluid in which dark things – strawberries, maybe -floated like clots. He relaxed his thumbs. The slit closed. He pulled at the edges of the pie plate again. The slit opened. So he continued to pull and release as he spoke. Billy was unable to look away.

'So … you have convinced yourself that it is … What did you call it? A poosh. That what happened to my Susanna is no more your fault than my fault, or her fault, or God's fault. You tell yourself you can't be asked to pay for it – there is no blame, you say. It slides off you because your shoulders are broken. No blame, you say. You tell yourself and tell yourself and tell yourself. But there is no poosh, white man from town. Everybody pays, even for things they dint do. No poosh.'

Lemke fell reflectively silent for a moment. His thumbs tensed and relaxed, tensed and relaxed. The slit in the pie opened and closed.

'Because you won't take blame – not you, not your friends – I make you take it. I stick it on you like a sign. For my dear dead daughter that you killed I do this, and for her mother, and for her children. Then your friend comes. He poisons dogs, shoots guns in the night, uses his hands on a woman, threatens to throw acid into the faces of children. Take it off, he says – take it off and take it off and take it off. And finally I say okay as long as he will podol enkelt – get out of here! Not from what he did, but from what he will do – he is crazy, this friend of yours, and he will never stop. Even my 'Gelina says she sees from his eyes he will never stop. “But we'll never stop, either,” she says, and I say, “Yes we will. Yes we will stop. Because if we don't, we are crazy like the town man's friend. If we don't stop, we must think what the white man says is right – God pays back, that it's a poosh.”'

Tense and relax. Tense and relax. Open and close.

“'Take it off,” he says, and at least he don't say “Make it disappear, make it not there anymore.” Because a curse is in some way like a baby.'

His old dark thumbs pulled. The slit stretched open.

'No one understand these things. Not me, either, but I know a little. “Curse” is your word, but Rom is better. Listen: Purpurfargade ansiktet. You know that?'

Billy shook his head slowly, thinking the phrase had a richly dark texture.

'It mean something like “Child of the night-flowers.” Is like to get a child who is varsel – changeling. Gypsies say varsel is always found under lilies or nightshade, which blooms at night. This way of saying is better because curse is a thing. What you have is not a thing. What you have is alive.'

'Yes,' Billy said. 'It's inside, isn't it! It's inside, eating me.'

'Inside? Outside?' Lemke shrugged. 'Everywhere. This thing – urpurfargade ansiktet – you bring it into the world like a baby. Only it grows strong faster than a baby, and you can't kill it because you can't see it – only you can see what it does.'

The thumbs relaxed. The slit closed. A dark red rivulet trickled across the mild topography of the pie crust.

'This curse … you dekent felt o gard da borg. Be to it like a father. You still want to be rid of it?'

Billy nodded.

'You still believe in the poosh?'

'Yes.' It was only a croak.

The old Gypsy man with the rotting nose smiled. The black lines of rot under his left cheek dipped and wavered. The park was nearly empty now. The sun was nearing the horizon. The shadows covered them. Suddenly the knife was in Lemke's hand again, the blade out.

He's going to stab me, Billy thought dreamily. Going to stab me in the heart and run away with his strawberry pie under his arm.

'Unwrap your hand,' Lemke said.

Billy looked down.

'Yes – where she shot you.'

Billy pulled the clamps out of the elastic bandage and slowly unwrapped it. Underneath, his hand looked too white, fishlike. In contrast, the edges of the wound were dark, dark red – a liverish color. The same color as those things inside his pie, Billy thought. The strawberries. Or whatever they are. And the wound had lost its almost perfect circularity as the edges puffed together. Now it looked like …

Like a slit, Billy thought, his eyes drifting back to the pie.

Lemke handed Billy the knife.

How do I know you haven't coated this blade with curare or cyanide or D-Con Rat-Prufe? he thought about asking, and then didn't. Ginelli was the reason. Ginelli and the Curse of the White Man from Town.

The pocketknife's worn bone handle fitted comfortably into his hand.

'If you want to be rid of the purpurfargade ansiktet, first you give it to the pie … and then you give the pie with the curse-child inside it to someone else. But it has to be soon, or it come back on you double. You understand?'

'Yes,' Billy said.

'Then do it if you will,' Lemke said. His thumbs tightened again. The darkish slit in the pie crust spread open.

Billy hesitated, but only for a second – then his daughter's face rose in his mind. For a moment he saw her with all the clarity of a good photograph, looking back at him over her shoulder, laughing, her pom-poms held in her hands like big silly purple-and-white fruits.

You're wrong about the push, old man, he thought. Heidi for Linda. My wife for my daughter. That's the push.

He pushed the blade of Taduz Lemke's knife into the hole in his hand. The scab broke open easily. Blood spattered into the slit in the pie. He was dimly aware that Lemke was speaking very rapidly in Rom, his black eyes never leaving Billy's white, gaunt face.

Billy turned the knife in the wound, watching as its puffy lips parted and it regained its former circularity. Now the blood came faster. He felt no pain.

'Enkelt! Enough.'

Lemke plucked the knife from his hand. Billy suddenly felt as if he had no strength at all. He collapsed back against the park bench, feeling wretchedly nauseated, wretchedly empty – the way a woman who has just given birth must feel, he imagined. Then he looked down at his hand and saw that the bleeding had already stopped.

No – that's impossible.

He looked at the pie in Lemke's lap and saw something else that was impossible – only this time the impossibility happened before his eyes. The old man's thumbs relaxed, the slit closed again … and then there simply was no slit. The crust was unbroken except for two small steam vents in the exact center. Where the slit had been was something like a zigzag wrinkle in the crust.

He looked back at his hand and saw no blood, no scab, no open flesh. The wound there had now healed completely, leaving only a short white scar – it also zigzagged, crossing lifeand heartlines like a lightning bolt.

'This is yours, white man from town,' Lemke said, and he put the pie in Billy's lap. His first, almost ungovernable impulse was to dump it off, to get rid. of it the way he would have gotten rid of a large spider someone had dropped in his lap. The pie was loathsomely warm, and it seemed to pulse inside its cheap aluminum plate like something alive.

Lemke stood up and looked down at him. 'You feel better?' he asked.

Billy realized that aside from the way he felt about the thing he was holding in his lap, he did. The weakness had passed. His heart was beating normally.