I wanted to trust her judgment, but I couldn't, no matter how hard I tried. In the end I was right.

Whenever they were bored, Ross and Bobby played a game that inevitably drove me crazy.

"Hey, Ross?"

"Yeah?"

"I think we should tell Joe the seeeeecret!"

"The secret? Are you out of your mind, man? No one hears the secret. The secret is a seeeeeeecret!"

"You guys don't have any damned secret," I'd lisp, desperately hoping this time they would tell it to me. I was three quarters convinced there wasn't one, but I had to be sure, and they always knew when to nudge me when my belief was waning.

"Seeeecret!"

"The seeeeecret!"

"We got the secret and little Joe doesn't. You want me to tell it to you, Joe?"

"No! You guys are stupid."

"Stupid guys but not-so-stupid secret!"

This kind of bull-baiting went on endlessly until I would start either screaming or crying. Or if I was really in control of myself that day, I would walk regally out of the room to a chorus of "seeeeeecret!" behind me.

To this day I love to hear and be part-owner of any secret. It was easy to see India had attics full of them and that some of the most tantalizing had to do with Paul. But after the discussion in the restaurant she wouldn't say another word about why she was so sure of Paul's behavior. I constantly asked questions, but she wouldn't give an inch. She just knew.

Nor did she want us to have much contact until she had figured out the best way of reaching her husband. In the meantime, I went to all the English bookstores in Vienna and bought everything I could find on the occult. I made pages of notes and felt like a graduate student preparing for his doctoral thesis. Seances, Aleister Crowley, and Madame Blavatsky filled those days. Meetings with Remarkable Men, Lo!, and The Tibetan Book of the Dead filled my head. At times I felt as if I had entered a room full of strange and threatening people to whom I had to be nice in order to get what I needed.

It was a land of quacks and yowls, flying objects and great cruelty. I knew there were thousands of people "out there" who molded their lives around these things, and that alone gave me the chills.

Whenever I thought I had something interesting, I called India and told her what I had found. Once I burst out laughing in the middle of one of these conversations when I thought of how shocked any sane person who had been listening would be.

About the same time, I received a letter from my father. I hadn't heard from him in months. His letter was long and chatty and talked familiarly about his world. He still lived in the same town, although he had sold our old house and moved his new family to a modern apartment complex in the ritzy part of town over by the country club.

He is a calm and pleasant man, but his letters always betray a bit of the ace reporter hot for an exclusive scoop. For some reason he often talks in them about things like who's died or who's been arrested. These gory tidbits are inevitably prefaced by phrases like "I don't know if you remember . . ." or "Remember the girl who had all her teeth knocked out by her boyfriend? Judy Shea? Well . . ." and then his zinger follows – she eloped with a convict or put her child in a mailbox.

This one was no different.

Joe, I was going to tell you about this a long time ago, but you know me and how I forget to get around to things. Anyway, our old friend Bobby Hanley is dead.

I heard the whole thing, interestingly enough, on the radio. It was the first time I'd heard about him in years. I knew he'd been caught robbing a store a few years back and that they sent him off to prison for it. I guess he got out, because this time the dumbbell tried to kidnap some local girl. The police got wind of it and came. There was a big gun battle right up on Ashford Avenue by the hospital, if you can imagine that.

It happened last June, and I'm sorry I didn't tell you about it then. Not that it's the kind of news anyone wants to hear. It certainly is the end of something though, isn't it?

The letter went on, but I put it down. Bobby Hanley was dead. He had been dead for six months. Six months ago he was in a shootout, and I . . . I was a million miles away about to meet the Tates. Ross and my mother, Bobby Hanley, and now Paul. Dead.

"Where do you want to eat dinner?"

"I don't care. How about the Brioni?"

"Fine."

The Vienna winter had come, announcing its arrival with thirty straight hours of sleety rain and fog that painted everything dark and coldly smooth.

I kept the windshield wipers on full tilt and drove slowly through slick streets. Neither of us said anything. I was eager to be in a warmly lit place, eating good food, safe for a while from everything out there.

Three or four blocks before the restaurant I turned down a small side street. It was narrow; the buildings on either side were so high that a mountainous clump of fog hung down the length of it, trapped like a tired, lost cloud.

We were halfway through it when I hit the child. No forewarning. A soft, heartbreaking thud and a high scream only a child's voice could have made. In slow motion a small formless thing in a shiny yellow child's raincoat glided up and over the hood of the car. India screamed. Before it reached the windshield, the raincoat slid over the side of the hood and disappeared. India wept into her hands, and I put my head on the steering wheel, trying impossibly to fill my lungs with air.

"Get out, Joe! Get out and see if it's all right, for god-sake!"

I did what I was told, but what did it have to do with me? Joseph Lennox hit a child? A yellow raincoat, a small hand crabbed in pain, another death?

It lay face down on the black street, all limbs and pointed hood splayed out, looking like an enormous starfish.

It made no sound, and without thinking, I reached down and gently turned it over. The hand fell off. I hardly noticed because I'd seen the face. The wood was split through one of the eyes, but the head remained whole. Whoever had carved it had done it quickly, indifferently. The kind of doll you often see for sale in stores, advertised wistfully as "primitive art." Pinned to the raincoat was a little note. It had been done in thick black kindergarten crayon. Play with Little Boy, Joey.

The waiter came and went three times before we were able to order. When the food came, neither of us made a move toward it. It looked magnificent – vanillen Rostbraten mit Bratkartoffeln. I think I ate one tomato from my salad and drank three straight Viertels of red wine.

"Joe, even before this happened I was thinking about what we should do. I came to a conclusion, and I want you to hear me out before you say anything.

"We both see that Paul isn't going to leave us alone. I don't know how much it will accomplish, but I think the best thing you could do now is go away for a while. I'll tell you why. Everything has happened so fast that I haven't been able to think straight for one minute. Either I'm scared or I'm turned on, or else I'm lonely for one of you, and I don't even know which one. Maybe if you go away for a month or two, Paul will come and talk to me. I know, I know, it's dangerous. It scares the hell out of me, but it has to happen sooner or later, or else we'll both go crazy, won't we? You and I can't begin to figure out our relationship until he lets us alone and stops these grisly stunts of his. I haven't told you, but he's done a few things to me when I was alone; they were the worst.

"Another thing is, if you do go away, we'll be able to think more clearly about what we want from each other and whether or not we really want to try and make this relationship work for us. I think I do, and you said you do too, but who knows now? The whole thing is distorted. Every day is so full of tornadoes; I can't see straight anymore. Can you?