"What about the others in his chapter?"

"They died," he said ruefully, "and that's all I've ever known about them. I don't remember any of their names. I only heard them the one time, when Homer read the list and burned the paper it was written on. He made a real point of never mentioning any of their names again. As far as he was concerned, the chapter was closed, period. I don't know how long they lived or how they died." He laughed shortly. "For all I know, they never even existed."

"What do you mean?"

"It's a thought I haven't entertained in years, but it came to me late one night and I've never entirely forgotten it. Suppose there never was a chapter before ours. Suppose Homer picked those thirty names out of the phone book. Suppose he made up the whole kit and caboodle, including the man who'd fought in the Mexican War, along with the legends about Mozart and Isaac Newton and theHangingGardens ofBabylon. Suppose he was just a nut with a gift of gab who thought it would be interesting to eat beef once a year with a group of young fellows while he waited for the man with the scythe."

"You don't really believe that."

"No, of course not. But what's interesting is that there's no real way to disprove it. If Homer had any written records of the previous chapter, I'm sure he destroyed them after our first meeting. If any of his chapter brothers left anything on paper, I suppose what their heirs didn't throw out is moldering in some attic somewhere. But how would anyone know where to look?"

"Anyway," I said, "it doesn't really matter, does it?"

"No," he said. "Because if there's a destiny operating, genetic or otherwise, I don't suppose there's anything to be done about it. And if our membership in the club is killing us by poisoning our psyches in some insidious fashion, well, it's probably too late to look for the antidote. And if Homer was a sly old duffer and ours is the first club of thirty-one in human history, well, so what? I'll still turn up at Keens the first Thursday in May, and if I turn out to be the last man alive, I'll make it my business to pick out thirty honorable men and keep the old flame burning." He snorted. "I could say that it gets harder every year to find thirty honorable men, but I don't know that it's true. I have a feeling it was never easy."

I said, "You think the members are being murdered."

"Yes."

"Because the actual deaths have been so greatly in excess of probability."

"That's part of it. That's what got me looking for an explanation."

"And?"

"I sat down and made a list of our deceased members and the various ways they died. Some of them very obviously had not been murdered, their deaths could only have been the result of natural causes. Phil Kalish, for example, killed in a head-on on the LIE. The other driver was drunk, he'd managed to get on the wrong side of the divider and was speeding eastbound in the westbound lane. If he'd lived he might have been prosecuted for vehicular homicide, but it doesn't sound like something some devious mass murderer could have arranged."

"No."

"And some Viet Cong or North Vietnamese soldier killed Jim Severance. Death in combat isn't something you usually think of as a natural cause, but I wouldn't call it murder, either." His fingers just touched the bowl of the snifter, then withdrew. "There were some natural deaths that couldn't have been anything else. Roger Bookspan developed testicular cancer that had metastasized by the time they caught it. They tried a bone-marrow transplant but he didn't survive the procedure." His face darkened at the memory. "He was only thirty-seven, the poor son of a bitch. Married, two kids under five, a first novel written and accepted for publication, and all of a sudden he was gone."

"That must have been a while ago."

"Close to twenty years. One of our early deaths. More recently, there were a couple of heart attacks. I mentioned Frank DiGiulio, and then two years ago Victor Falch dropped dead on the golf course. He was sixty years old, forty pounds overweight, and diabetic, so I don't suppose you'd call that suspicious circumstances."

"No."

"On the other hand, several of our members have been murdered, and there have been other deaths that could conceivably have been murder, although the authorities didn't classify them as such. I mentioned Alan Watson, stabbed in a mugging."

"And the fellow inChelsea who was killed by a sexual partner," I said, and scanned my memory for the name. "Carl Uhl?"

"That's right. And then of course there was Boyd Shipton."

"Boyd Shipton the painter?"

"Yes."

"He was a member of your club?"

He nodded. "At our initial meeting he said that the most interesting fact he could tell us about himself was that he'd painted a wall of his apartment to look like exposed brick. He was a trainee on Wall Street at the time, and he made it sound as though painting was just a pastime for him. Later, after he'd quit his job and made his first gallery connection, he admitted he'd been afraid to let on just how important it was to him."

"He became very successful."

"Extremely successful, with an oceanfront house inEast Hampton and a state-of-the-art loft in Tribeca. You know, I've often wondered what became of that faux-brick wall Boyd painted. He slapped a couple of coats of flat white wall paint on it before he moved, so that the landlord wouldn't have a fit. Well, whoever's living there now has an original Boyd Shipton trompe-l'oeil mural under God knows how many layers of Dutch Boy latex. I suppose it could be restored, if anyone knew where to look for it."

"I remember when he was killed," I said. "Five years ago, wasn't it?"

"Six in October. He and his wife had come into the city for a friend's opening and went out to dinner afterward. When they returned to their loft downtown they evidently walked in on a burglary in progress."

"The wife was raped, as I recall."

"Raped and strangled, and Boyd was beaten to death. And the case was never solved."

"So you've had three murders."

"Four. In 1989 Tom Cloonan was shot to death at the wheel of his cab. He was a writer, he published quite a few short stories over the years and had a play or two produced Off-Off-Broadway, but he couldn't make a living at it. He'd make up the difference working for a moving company or renovating apartments for an unlicensed contractor. And sometimes he drove a cab, and that's what he was doing when he died."

"And they never cleared that case, either?"

"I believe the cops made an arrest. I don't think the case ever went to trial."

It wouldn't be hard to find out. I said, "Thirty men, and four of them have been the victims of homicides. I think that's more remarkable than the fact that sixteen of you have died."

"I was thinking that myself, Matt. You know, when I was a kid growing up, I don't think my parents were acquainted with a single person who'd been murdered. And I didn't grow up in some storybook town inSouth Dakota, either. I grew up in Queens, first inRichmond Hill and then we moved to Woodhaven." He frowned. "I'm wrong, because we did know someone who was murdered, although I couldn't tell you his name. He owned a liquor store onJamaica Avenue and he was shot and killed during a holdup. I remember how upset my parents were."

"There were probably others," I suggested. "You're less aware of that sort of thing when you're a kid, and parents tend to shield you from it. Oh, there's no question that the homicide rate's higher than when we were kids, but people have been killing each other since Cain and Abel. You know, in the middle of the last century there was a sprawling tenement complex in Five Points called the Old Brewery, and when they finally tore it down the workmen hauled sack after sack of human bones out of the basement. According to informed estimates, that one building averaged a murder a night for years."