He carries two bananas in a paper bag and he takes them out and gulps them down before the bus reaches customs. He figures fruit is not allowed across the border and the last thing he wants now is another tussle with authority.

4 October

Mary Frances pushed the vacuum cleaner across the living-room floor. She was feeling bloated and hormonal. It was an effort just to exist, to put one heavy foot ahead of the other. Friday, after school, and she had to vacuum around Suzanne, who knelt on the floor watching cartoon rabbits on TV. She vacuumed over the bump between the living room and dining room. She vacuumed around the table and under the oak sideboard. There was so much drag on her body today, so many resisting forces.

Win walked past the doorway with a knife in his hand.

She pushed the vacuum cleaner back into the living room. It was a five-year-old Hoover with a receptacle unit shaped like a space satellite. Funny, she thought, how she could vacuum back and forth in front of Suzanne and the girl never complained. The girl looked right through her. The girl heard the cartoon voices through the noise of the Hoover.

After dinner Win went down to the basement to investigate a noise. He watched himself come down the plank stairs, head tilted slightly, fingers of the right hand extended. Houses make noises, Mary Frances said. He smelled turpentine and understood how you could become hooked on the smell of turpentine, give yourself up to it, volatile, sticky, piney, your whole life centered on spirits of turpentine. Mary Frances told him that houses shift and settle all the time.

Thanks. But there is sometimes more to it.

He went back up to the living room and sat with her, listening to the radio. She liked the revivalist preachers, men of a certain creepy eloquence.

"Don't you feel well?" he said.

"I'm all right."

"I want you to be well."

"I'm all right."

"Because it would be devastating if you weren't well. That mustn't happen, understand? I actually couldn't bear it."

She had a Sears catalogue on her lap. She'd used catalogues to shop when they were posted to remote areas. isolation tropic. He wondered what the hell had happened to Mackey.

"Don't be so solemn," she said.

"Don't you like being fussed after?"

"Not the way you do it."

"The housewife who never has time for herself. Doesn't she relish a little attention?"

"Not the way you do it. Looking so stricken. It chills my blood."

He laughed. They heard Suzanne walk through the kitchen singing a rhyme popular with local kids. Mackey had eluded all attempts by Parmenter to trace him. What did it mean? Larry said he probably just walked off. Doesn't want to do it. Wants to change careers. It's over. We tried.

"Beans, beans, the musical fruit The more you eat, the more you toot."

Parmenter himself was in Buenos Aires getting a preview of his new job. This is the future of the Agency, he said to Everett. Keeping track of world currencies. Moving and hiding money. Building reserves of money. Financing vast operations with complex networks of money.

Lancer is coming to Texas.

"Did you notice the casual tone?" Mary Frances said.

"It's a kids' jingle. What sort of tone?"

"No but the way she sort of rehearsed the casualness. So we wouldn't know we were supposed to hear."

"It was casual because it was casual."

"Where's the steak knife you were using to scrape paint? We keep losing knives."

Premonition. The story about the President's trip was in the Record-Chronicle a week ago. A brief tour of Texas in November, after his swing through Florida. Stops at Houston, San Antonio, Fort Worth and Dallas. Buried inside the paper. Three or four lines that only a person with a compelling interest in the President's whereabouts might take note of. Win thought it was eerie that President Jack would be headed in this general direction. The plot coming to the plotter. Assuming he made it past Miami. Because Parmenter might be wrong. Something might still be in force, some movement, a driving logic.

"I can't find the paint scraper," he said.

"Just leave the knives alone."

"There's something about a paint scraper. You know it's there. You're looking right at it. But you can't quite pick it out of the background. Let's face it, the background is vast and confusing."

He wanted a way out of guilt and fear. He was not strong enough to survive the damage this operation might cause if it developed a second life. He half yearned to be found out. It would be a deliverance in a way to be confronted, polygraphed, forced to tell the truth. He believed in the truth. He feared and welcomed the chance to be polygraphed. The Office of Security had models designed to fit in suitcases. You could be fluttered in your home. They would arrive with a two-suit Samsonite case. Unpack the machine, mix some control questions in with the serious stuff. His body would do the rest, yield up its unprotected data. The machine intervenes between a man and his secrets. There is something intimate about the polygraph. It measures skin conduction and hears you sweat. It allows you to give yourself away. Lies quicken the breath. They make the blood pound. It was such an old-fashioned idea, dated and quaint, but he'd seen himself how well it worked. Failed one test. Broke down at the start of another. Polygraph. A nice technical sound to it, a specialist's sound, but still traditional, decipherable, from the Greek.

"Where is she?" He called out, "Where's my little girl?"

"In her room," Mary Frances said.

He called out, "But we want her down here. We need some serious cheering up."

"Once she's in her room, the subject's closed. The day is definitely over."

"I had to share a room," he said.

"I had my own, thank God."

"I think you'll find that the great figures of history rarely had their own rooms."

"I loved my room," she said.

"Are you saying nothing ever again has been quite so nice?" He called out, "Come down and talk to us or we'll be very unhaaaap- py."

He went out to the porch to investigate a noise. He stood there smoking. He could hear the radio faintly. An old voice, a radio voice from another era can bring back everything. This was a house that nurtured memories. The curved porch. The oak posts furled in trumpet vines.

He knew all the techniques ever devised to beat the machine but he also knew he would be helpless to bring them into play. He believed in the polygraph. He wanted to cooperate, show everyone the machine was working well. Devices make us pliant. We want to please them. The machine was his only hope of deliverance after what he'd done, what he'd loosed into the crowd. A way out of death. Because in time a pity would fall across their faces. They would all see he only wanted what was right for his country. He loved his country. He loved Cuba, knew the language and the literature. He would go beyond yes and no. Tell them about the deathward-tending logic of a plot. T-Jay is out there somewhere, chewing gum and squinting in the light. They would nod and understand. A forgiveness would come to their eyes. Because they are not, after all, unmerciful men. Say what you will about the Agency. The Agency forgives.

God is alive and well in Texas.

He went inside and turned off the radio. The day wasn't half done and it was time to go to bed again. He checked the front door and turned off the porch light. He walked down the hall for the millionth time, checked the back door, checked to see that the oven was off. The last thing downstairs was the oven, except for the kitchen light. He turned off the kitchen light and began to climb the stairs.

He slipped near the top of the stairway, an ordinary misstep, no harm, no deeper meaning, but Mary Frances was out of the bedroom in a silent burst to take him by the elbow and lead him inside.