"You ask of me? I've given you my word!"

"Then why is this learned man from America here following me with a blank face and inquisitive eyes, monseigneur?"

The deep, hollow roll of a throated cough filled the silence, and then the Jackal spoke. "The great professor of law has transgressed, inserted himself where he should not be. He's a dead man."

Edith Gates, wife of the celebrated attorney and professor of law, silently opened the door of the private study in their elegant town house on Louisburg Square. Her husband sat motion less in his heavy leather armchair staring at the crackling fire, a fire he insisted upon despite the warm Boston night outside and the central air conditioning inside.

As she watched him, Mrs. Gates was once again struck by the painful realization that there were ... things ... about her husband she would never understand. Gaps in his life she could never fill, leaps in his thinking she could not comprehend. She only knew that there were times when he felt a terrible pain and would not share it, when by sharing it he would lessen the burden on himself. Thirty-three years ago a passably attractive young woman of average wealth had married an extremely tall, gangling, brilliant but impoverished law school graduate whose anxiety and eagerness to please had turned off the major firms in those days of the cool, restrained late fifties. The veneer of sophistication and the pursuit of security were valued over a smoldering, wandering first-rate mind of unsure direction, especially a mind inside a head of unkempt hair and a body dressed in clothes that were cheap imitations of J. Press and Brooks Brothers, which appeared even worse because his bank account precluded any additional expenses for alterations and few discount stores carried his size.

The new Mrs. Gates, however, had several ideas that would improve the prospects of their life together. Among them was to lay aside an immediate law career-better none than with an inferior firm, or, God forbid, a private practice with the sort of clients he was bound to attract, namely, those who could not afford established attorneys. Better to use his natural endowments, which were his impressive height and a quick, sponge-like intelligence that, combined with his drive, disposed of heavy academic workloads with ease. Using her modest trust fund, Edith shaped the externals of her man, buying the correct clothes and hiring a theatrical voice coach who instructed his student in the ways of dramatic delivery and effective stage presence. The gangling graduate soon took on a Lincolnesque quality with subtle flashes of John Brown. Too, he was on his way to becoming a legal expert, remaining in the milieu of the university, piling one degree upon another while teaching at the graduate level until the sheer depth of his expertise in specific areas was incontestable. And he found himself sought after by the prominent firms that had rejected him earlier.

The strategy took nearly ten years before concrete results appeared, and while the early returns were not earthshaking, still they represented progress. Law reviews, first minor and then major, began publishing his semi-controversial articles as much for their style as for their content, for the young associate professor had a seductive way with the written word, at once riveting and arcane, by turns flowery and incisive. But it was his opinions, latently emerging, that made segments of the financial community take notice. The mood of the nation was changing, the crust of the benevolent Great Society beginning to crack, the lesions initiated with code words coined by the Nixon boys, such as the Silent Majority and Bums-on-Welfare and the pejorative them. A meanness was rising out of the ground and spreading, and it was more than the perceptive, decent Ford could stop, weakened as he was by the wounds of Watergate; and too much as well for the brilliant Carter, too consumed by minutiae to exercise compassionate leadership. The phrase "... what you can do for your country" was out of fashion, replaced by "what I can do for me."

Dr. Randolph Gates found a relentless wave on which to ride, a mellifluous voice with which to speak, and a growing acerbic vocabulary to match the dawning new era. In his now refined scholarly opinion-legally, economically and socially-bigger was better, and more far preferable to less. The laws that supported competition in the marketplace he attacked as stifling to the larger agenda of industrial growth from which would flow all manner of benefits for everyone-well, practically everyone. It was, after all, a Darwinian world and, like it or not, the fittest would always survive. The drums went bang and the cymbals clanged and the financial manipulators found a champion, a legal scholar who lent respectability to their righteous dreams of merger and consolidation; buy out, take over and sell off, all for the good of the many, of course.

Randolph Gates was summoned, and he ran into their arms with alacrity, stunning one courtroom after another with his elocutionary gymnastics. He had made it, but Edith Gates was not sure what it all meant. She had envisioned a comfortable living, naturally, but not millions, not the private jets flying all over the world, from Palm Springs to the South of France. Nor was she comfortable when her husband's articles and lectures were used to support causes that struck her as unrelated or patently unfair; he waved her arguments aside, stating that the cases in point were legitimate intellectual parallels. Above everything, she had not shared a bed or a bedroom with her husband in over six years.

She walked into the study, abruptly stopping as he gasped, swerving his head around, his eyes glazed and filled with alarm.

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to startle you."

"You always knock. Why didn't you knock? You know how it is when I'm concentrating."

"I said I'm sorry. Something's on my mind and I wasn't thinking."

"That's a contradiction."

"Thinking about knocking, I mean."

"What's on your mind," asked the celebrated attorney as if he doubted his wife had one.

"Please don't be clever with me."

"What is it, Edith?"

"Where were you last night?"

Gates arched his brows in mock surprise. "My God, are you suspicious? I told you where I was. At the Ritz. In conference with someone I knew years ago, someone I did not care to have at my house. If, at your age, you want confirmation, call the Ritz."

Edith Gates was silent for a moment; she simply looked at her husband. "My dear," she said, "I don't give a damn if you had an assignation with the most voluptuous whore in the Combat Zone. Somebody would probably have to give her a few drinks to restore her confidence."

"Not bad, bitch."

"In that department you're not exactly a stud, bastard."

"Is there a point to this colloquy?"

"I think so. About an hour ago, just before you came home from your office, a man was at the door. Denise was doing the silver, so I answered it. I must say he looked impressive; his clothes were terribly expensive and his car was a black Porsche-"

"And?" broke in Gates, lurching forward in the chair, his eyes suddenly wide, rigid.

"He said to tell you that le grand professeur owed him twenty thousand dollars and 'he' wasn't where he was supposed to be last night, which I assumed was the Ritz."

"It wasn't. Something came up. ... Oh, Christ, he doesn't understand. What did you say?"

"I didn't like his language or his attitude. I told him I hadn't the vaguest idea where you were. He knew I was lying, but there wasn't anything he could do."

"Good. Lying's something he knows about."

"I can't imagine that twenty thousand is such a problem for you-"

"It's not the money, it's the method of payment."

"For what?"

"Nothing."

"I believe that's what you call a contradiction, Randy."