We sat in the living room."Whose furniture?”"Rented," I said."What do you have to eat?”"Nothing. We'll go out.”"When?”"Eight-thirty, nine.”"You live like me," she said. "Hard to believe I'll be home in a day or two. I actually enjoyed the bus trip here. The bus was going somewhere. I knew where it was going.”"You lost weight.”"California. I need to tone up my orgasm. What is this I'm drinking, Jim? Jeem, I should say." I took this to be her pronunciation of the Arabic letter jim. "Did you have a nice day at the office, Jeem? Is this marble floor real marble, Jeem?”She wore boots, jeans and a sweatshirt with the arms cut off. Her feet rested on the coffee table. She was drinking kumquat brandy, which I'd been trying to get rid of for months."Where is Frank?" I said."Where is Frank. All right, since you're buying me dinner and letting me spend the night. Is that all right with you, Jeem? I spend the night? Separate rooms? Just so I don't have to go to another hotel?”"Of course.”"Well, he's still there. He's crisscrossing the mountain. Andahl didn't show up where he was supposed to. There was no meeting, no sign of him or them or anyone. The first week Frank kept saying he'd give it one more day. Pathetic. I really wanted to stay. I tried very hard. One more day, one more day. He started exploring the area north of the towers. Up where the range broadens and you lose the sea. Terrible roads, no roads at all. Rusty oak trees, gunshots all the time. I began to feel there was something deeply wasteful in all this. But what can you say to Frank once he's in? First I went with him. Then I stayed in the hotel. The second week he didn't say much of anything and neither did I. He kept finding another dirt track, another village. Asking people, making gestures, pointing to names on the map. I felt there was something dead, there was an emptiness at the center of all this. I tried to explain but I didn't know how and he wasn't listening anyway. So I just thought to hell with it. Let the man do what he has to. And I went to see about getting myself on out of there.”"I wonder about Andahl, if they found him, if he decided to disappear.”"Nazi backpackers. That's all they are.”"I think about the movie now and then. I see it at times. As Frank described it. Strong images. That landscape. He'll never find them, we'll never know if he was right.”"You mean that it works as a film, the way they live?”"Yes, that it fits the screen. I do see it at times, powerfully.”"Film. Why do I want to throw up when I hear the term 'personal film'? 'He does personal films.' 'He makes personal statements.' 'He has a personal vision.'‘"I knew they wouldn't meet him. How could people like that be interested in somebody's film, somebody's book?”"You were right. They were true to themselves.”I noted the dry tone. I told her it was strange, how right I'd been. I'd been right all along. I figured out the pattern. I figured out Andahl was a runaway. I told Frank the cultists wouldn't appear and they hadn't appeared.She looked at me in the dimness."What pattern?" she said."The way they work. The whole mechanism. The whole point. It's the alphabet.”"But you didn't tell Frank.”"No, I didn't.”"You kept it to yourself.”"That's right." ‘We sat there. I liked watching the large room turn dark as evening deepened. She didn't say anything. I thought she must be cold, being bare-armed, the heat only beginning to rise through the building. The phone rang twice."I'm not sure what was behind it," I said. "I guess Kathryn. Whatever there was between them.”"What was there between them?”"I'm sure he talked about us, all three of us. You would know better than I.”"All these years you've nursed this thing? Not letting either of them know you suspected an affair, or whatever you suspected? A night? An afternoon?”"I let her know. She knows.”"But when you had a chance to get back at him, you took it.You knew something he didn't know, something important to him. How did it make you feel, Jeem, keeping the secret?”"That's part of it. The secret. It meant something to me, discovering the secret. I wasn't in a hurry to pass it on. I felt this knowledge was special. It had to be earned. It was too important to be given away. He had to earn it. Owen Brademas wouldn't tell him either. He only hinted to Frank. It would have been easy to tell him. But he didn't tell him. The knowledge is special. Once you have it, you find yourself protective of it. It confers a cult-hood of its own.”We sat quietly for a while."All right. Do you want me to tell you what there was between them, what went on, if anything?”"No," I said."You'd rather nurse it along.”"I'd rather not know. Simple as that.”After dinner we returned to sit in the same chairs. I left the hall light on. She described her apartment, how it seemed these past months to be the only settled thing in her life, the only stillness. Small, furnished sparely, in soft light, waiting. A woman's things. She might have been the woman who comes walking into that room across the courtyard, the serene space I had watched from my balcony. Maybe this is why I went to sit on the sofa, leaning toward Del to hold her face in my hands, framing the perfect features, the wide mouth and tilted eyes, the cropped hair tailing over her ears."You like me, Jeem? Maybe you think I give you good time. Tell me what you like. You like dirty, you like filthy? What we do, Jeem? Say to me in little words. I don't do all the words. Some words I can do, some I don't like to do so much. They are very big, these words, hard to do. But some men like. You must tell me, Jeem. We do big words or little words?”"I thought all the words were little.”"You are funny man, Jeem. They did not tell me this in the mountains.”"He won't stay two days," I said. "The search is as good as over.”"Why this is, Jeem?”"You're not there anymore. You go, he goes. He'll do a certain amount of serious bitching and moaning. Then he'll give in to it. He'll give in to knowing he has to have you with him. That's when he'll pack and leave.”"I think I must be real woman, if it is true what you say.”Deadpan, a humorless voice. The moment was false. It had a specious feel to it. I realized I'd approached her, touched the edges of her face, moved my thumbs across her lips (listening to the whorish voice) not for the touch itself or because I wanted something simple from her, the scant body folded in mine. Her voice went on, mocking both of us. I sat back in the sofa, my feet on the table at a right angle to hers, my hands folded behind my neck. She folded her hands behind her neck.I'd wanted to strike at Volterra. Sex with his woman. How primally satisfying. I didn't tell her this. She would be unsurprised, prone to make a joke, invent another voice as I'd invented voices during the week of the 27 Depravities. But it pained me to be silent. I always want to confess to women.Completing your revenge. Hiding it even from yourself at times. Not willing to be seen taking your small mean everyday revenge.She had one last thing to say before we went to our separate beds. If there was something I hadn't told Volterra, there was also something he had kept from me."He had no plans to shoot in sequence except for the ending. The ending would be the last thing he'd shoot. He told me how he'd do it. He wanted a helicopter. He wanted the cult members and their victim arranged for the murder. The pattern has been followed to this point, the special knowledge you talk about. The old shepherd is in place and the murderers are in place, with sharpened stones in their hands. Frank shoots down from as close in as the helicopter can safely get. He wants the wind blast, the blast from the rotor blades. They murder the old man. They kill him with stones. Cut him, beat him. The dust is flying, the bushes and scrub are flattened out by the rotor. No sound in this scene. He wants the wind blast only as a visual element, The severe angle. The men clutched together. The turbulence, the silent rippling of the bushes and stunted trees. I can quote him almost word for word. He wants the frenzy of the rotor wash, the terrible urgency, but soundless, totally. They kill him. They remain true to themselves, Jeem. That's it. It ends. He doesn't want the helicopter gaining altitude to signal the end is here. He doesn't want the figures to fade into the landscape. This is sentimental. It just ends. It ends up-close with the men in a circle, hair and clothes blowing, after they finish the killing.”I stayed in the living room for a while after she went to bed. I thought of Volterra in the mountains, hunched in his khaki field jacket, the deep pockets full of maps, the sky massing behind him. Sentimental. I didn't believe a word she'd said. He wouldn't follow it that far. He'd followed other things, gone the limit, abused people, made enemies, but this hovering was implausible to me, his camera clamped to the door frame. The aerial master, the filmed century. He wouldn't let them kill a man, he wouldn't film it if they did. We have to draw back at times, study our own involvement. The situation teaches that. Even in his drivenness he would see this, I believed.It was interesting how she'd made me defend him to myself (as Kathryn used to do, defend him). Not that Del had intended this. I didn't know what she'd intended. The lie had a violence of its own, a cunning force she might have meant to direct against any or all of us, ironic, ornately motivated. How rich it was, a setting for any number of interpretations. I would have to reflect a long time before I could even begin to see what she had in mind, what complex human urging caused her to invent the story.The story, if I thought it was true, would only make me want to fix a drink, feeling obscurely pleased.When I passed the guest room I saw the door was ajar, the lamp still on, and I paused to look inside. In jeans and sleeveless shirt, her feet bare, she knelt on the floor. Her upper body was bent well forward, chest against knees. Her legs were together, buttocks resting on her heels. The arms pointed back along the floor, palms up. A compact gathering of curves. The curve of the head and upper body folded into the curve of the upper legs. The curve of the back and shoulders extended to her hands. The arms repeated the curve of the lower legs. Her head touched the floor. She remained that way for a considerable time. In the morning she told me the exercise was called Pose of a Child.