“You mean the enquiry?”

“Yes. The ‘enquiry.’ We’re so shy of words. Plain words are dangerous. But make allowances for me. I’m short of wind. Tempted to brevity. It must be difficult for you.”

“Well, I think I’ve done a respectable job.”

“Hard for a man to preside over such strangeness.”

You don’t know the half of it, Demarch thought. But Armand still cultivated his Bureau contacts: he obviously knew more than Demarch would have guessed. He said, “Of course…”

“And so many deaths.”

“Actually, there haven’t been many.”

“But there will be. And you know it.”

“Yes.” He shrugged. “I don’t think about it.”

“But you do, you know. One always thinks about it. And if you don’t think about it, you dream about it.” Armand lowered his voice until it was a rumble from the deep barrel of his chest. Demarch leaned forward to listen. “I was at the Mandan River,” Armand said, “after the Lakota rebellion. They don’t tell you about that in the Academie, do they? No, nor in any other sort of school, except to say that a menace was disposed of. Careful words. Discreet. They don’t tell you what the camps looked like with their watchtowers overlooking the prairie sloughs. How the grass goes on for miles and miles. They don’t tell you how muddy it was that spring. Or how the smell from the furnaces lingered when the bodies were burned. The bodies of men and women and children—I know one isn’t supposed to call them that, but that’s what they were, or seemed to be, whatever the condition of their souls. I suppose their souls went up with the smoke. A body is some ounces lighter when it dies … I read that somewhere.” His eyes seemed to glaze. “Everything is a test, Symeon, in our line of work.”

“Am I being tested?”

“We’re always being tested.” Armand sipped his brandy. “We’re all subordinated, not just the ones we kill. There are no victims. You have to remember that. We’re all in the service of something larger than ourselves, and the difference between us and those corpses is that we are its willing servants. That’s all. That’s all. We’re spared because we put our bodies on the altar every day, and not just our bodies, but our minds and our wills. Remember the vow you took when you joined the Bureau. Incipit vita nova. A new life begins. You leave your priggish little intellect behind.”

The brandy made him reckless. He said, “And our conscience?”

“That was never yours,” Armand said. “Don’t be absurd.”

He turned out the lights after Armand wheeled himself away. The fire had burned down to embers. He finished his brandy in the dark and then moved upstairs.

The old man’s words seemed to follow him in stuttering echoes through the chilly house. We put our bodies on the altar every day. But for what? Something larger than ourselves. The Bureau, the Church, the Protennoia? Something more, surely. Some idea or vision of the good, a republic of permissible relations, a step up from the barbarism of the Lakota and all the countless other slaughtered aboriginals.

But the corpses pile higher every day, and need to be burned.

Dorothea was asleep when he joined her in bed. Her long hair lay across the pillow like a black wing. She reminded him of a temple, serene and pale even in sleep.

He stood a moment watching the snow that had begun to fall beyond the double panes of the bedroom window. He thought about Christof. Christof still acted like a stranger. The way he looks at me, Demarch thought. As if he’s seeing something alien, something that makes him afraid.

Bisonette telephoned after five days. “We think you should go back tomorrow,” the Censeur said. “I’m sorry to cut short your time with your family, but the arrangements have already been made.”

“What’s wrong? Has something happened?”

“Only Clement Delafleur getting a little overzealous in your absence. I’m given to understand he’s hanging children in the public square.”

He kissed Dorothea good-bye. Christof was presented for a kiss and consented to it. Probably he had been coached.

He told the Haitian driver to stop at the Bureau Centrality on the way to the airport.

Guy Marris was in his office. Demarch said he was stopping to say good-bye; he had been summoned back to duty.

His friend wished him luck and shook his hand. At the door, he tucked a sheaf of papers into the pocket of Demarch’s veston. Neither man spoke of it.

It had snowed a little, the Haitian driver said, but it would snow much more before long.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Linneth arranged with the school’s principal to take Dexter Graham back to his apartment, as inconspicuously as possible, in the principal’s automobile, which he still drove from time to time although his hoard of gasoline was almost exhausted. Mr. Hoskins was wary of her intentions but understood the urgency of the situation. She was aware of the way he watched her in the rear-view mirror. The distrust was mutual, but there was nothing to be done about that.

Fresh snow had fallen, and the rear tires slipped each time they turned a corner. No one spoke during the drive. When the car stopped, Linneth helped Dex out of the rear seat. His blood, she saw, had stained the upholstery. The principal pulled away quickly and left them alone, in the twining veils of snow.

Linneth guided Dex up the steps to his apartment. He was lucid enough to use his door key but he passed out again when he reached the blood-stained bed.

Linneth had learned emergency aid during her three years with the Christian Renunciates. She stripped his shirt and unwound the sodden, dirty bandage from his arm. Dex moaned but didn’t wake. The injury under the bandage leaked blood and suppuration in lazy pulses. Linneth cleaned it with water and a cloth, as gently as possible, but the pain was unavoidable; Dex screamed and twisted away.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “But this has to be done.”

“Get me something. The aspirin.”

“The what?”

“In the bottle on the kitchen counter.”

She fetched the small tubule of pills and peered at its label. The fragmented English defied interpretation. “Is it a narcotic?”

“A painkiller. And it’ll bring the fever down.”

She shook out four tablets at his instruction and he swallowed them with water. She said, “Do you have a disinfectant, too?”

“No. Uh, wait, there’s some Bactine in the medicine cabinet…”

“For cleaning wounds?” She didn’t like the way his eyes wandered. He might not be coherent.

“For cuts,” he said. “You spray it on cuts.”

She found the Bactine and experimented until she understood the operation of the aerosol bottle. When she came back to the bed Dex had closed his eyes again. He didn’t rouse until she bathed his injury with the disinfectant; then he screamed until she gave him a wadded pillowcase to bite on.

The wound was patently a bullet wound. The missile had passed through the fleshy part of his upper arm. She would have liked to close the injury with stitches, but there was no needle or thread at hand. He did have sterile cotton in a bag in the bathroom medicine cabinet, and she used some of that to pack the wound and a clean linen bandage to wrap it. But his fever was very high.

She pulled a kitchen chair near to the bed and watched him. Within an hour the fever had subsided, at least to her touch, and he seemed to be sleeping peacefully. That was the effect of the antipyretics, Linneth supposed. Still, she didn’t like the way his wound had looked—or smelled.

The light from the window was thin and gray. The snowy afternoon had begun to wane. She called his name until he opened his eyes.