At a hospital several blocks away, the surgeon pushed back from the conference table. The charts and X-rays only confirmed what he'd earlier feared.

The grafts weren't taking. Blood had quit circulating, oxygen was no longer reaching Commander Dixon's arm.

The best space-age microsurgical procedures had failed and the only alternative left to them was but ac ouple of levels up from the sort of butchery.practiced in the Stone Age.

"No point in letting it go gangrenous," the surgeon told his staff grimly. "Might as well get it over with."

13

BY four-thirty, Elaine Albee's yellow marks on the pairings lists indicated that they had seen and spoken with everyone in the Bontemps Room who had been anywhere near Table 5 the night before. They had even spoken to several from the front tables who hadn't come close but who wanted to go on record as being opposed to terrorist tactics and personally outraged that such things could happen here. The detectives had listened to a dozen different theories of how the boards were switched and when and why, but no one said, 'Yes, I saw it happen.'

Someone would have to chase down the tournament contestants who hadn't returned today, listen to more theories, and hope that one of the missing had witnessed something tangible. In the meantime. Lieutenant Harald was ready to call it a day.

"Unless something unexpected turnsu p, I'll see you nine o'clock in my office Monday morning," she told Lowry and Albee. "We'll compare notes with Peters and Eberstadt. Will you have anything from your people?" she asked Lieutenant Knight.

"Probably," he answered. "What about Molly Baldwin? Want me to contact her?"

"No, I'd like to see her face myself when we tell her we know she lied."

From across the ornate room, Jill Gill waved good-bye to Sigrid as they left the cribbage players in the midst of the afternoon's final round before the supper break. They walked down the Maintenon's wide graceful staircase. Jim Lowry and Elaine Albee offered lifts back downtown. When Sigrid shook her head and Alan Knight drawled a vague refusal, the detectives headed across the lobby for the elevator to the hotel's basement garage.

Outside, the slashing rain made the hour feel later than it really was. Sigrid sheltered under the Maintenon's canopy to get her bearings, unsure of the nearest subway entrance.

"Buy you a drink. Lieutenant?" asked Alan Knight.

Across the street a comfortable looking tavern promised a warm dry interior with wide oak tables and man-sized drinks. The offer was tempting.

"A nice tall Dickie-and-Coke would be welcome right now," she told him regretfully, "but I can't mix alcohol with the stuff I'm taking for my arm."

"A raincheck then," he said with one of his appealing lopsided smiles. "I'm sure there must be a long story to explain why a Yankee cop drinks bourbon and Co'-Cola."

"I have a Southern grandmother, that's all. It's in the genes. See you Monday, Lieutenant Knight."

He touched the brim of his white cap in a half salute and darted across the street alone, dodging curbside puddles.

By the time Sigrid splashed the short distance to Grand Central Station, her blue scarf was sliding down, so she tugged it off and crammed it into the pocket of her jacket, letting her hair hang loose. A seat near the rear wall of the crosstown shuttle kept her arma way from traffic and the downtown train wasn't very crowded either, so she made it to her stop on lower West Side without getting jostled. There, she climbed the damp and dirty metal steps up to street level to find the rain had slackened to a misty drizzle.

No sign of the sun though. If anything, the leaden skies looked as if they were only catching their second wind and would soon pour down even more rain. She knew she ought to call Roman, ask if there were groceries she should pick up on her way for supper tonight or tomorrow, but the apartment-she still thought of it as the new apartment-was several blocks from the subway, tucked among the commercial buildings near the dilapidated piers that lined the Hudson. She was afraid that rain would arrive before she did if she lingered along the way.

As it was, she had just unlocked the tall wooden street gate when the heavens opened and a new flood descended. She splashed across the flagstones to the sheltered doorway.

Sigrid was no gardener, but Roman

Tramegra fancied himself a Renaissance man on a modest scale and would enthusiastically turn his hand to any task. ('Renaissance man indeed!' sniffed Grandmother Lattimore when she swept into town for one of her semiannual trips north. 'More what we always called a jackleg, if you ask me, which you won't, I suppose.') At any rate, Roman had transformed the tiny courtyard into a formal herb garden. At least it started out formal. By October the scented geraniums had grown tall and leggy, the borage and bee balm flopped, and the purple basil and coleuses Roman had stuck in for color were tattered and going to seed.

Not that Sigrid cared. Nature in any form seldom interested her except as it interfered with her normal routine. As she fumbled for the door key, it did occur to her that the marble Eros that Roman had lugged home in late August looked a bit uncomfortable standing there naked in this first chill rain of autumn.

She was a little chilly herself but as she opened the door, she saw a light in the kitchen, heard Roman banging saucepans and cutlery as he unloadedt he dishwasher, and best of all, she smelled the homely aroma of his most successful soup.

Roman Tramegra aspired to gourmet chefdom. He bought the freshest raw materials and would spend hours slicing, peeling and dicing. But he chased a will-o'-the wisp of creativity around the kitchen with Portuguese wines, Chinese herbs, Greek cheese, or French mustards, constitutionally unable to follow a recipe without yielding to the temptation to improve it.

Few of his creations were totally inedible and over the course of time Sigrid had learned to be diplomatic. She did not like to cook and possessed an undemanding appetite. Before Roman Tramegra entered her life, she either stopped by a take-out place, fished something from the grocer's freezer, or opened a can of soup. There were times when Roman's culinary excesses made her long for those simpler meals

– she would never get used to his broccoli-and-chutney curry for instance

– but she usually repented when he miraculously came up with somethinga bsolutely delicious.

Such as the mushroom and barley soup she could now smell simmering on the stove in the green-and-white tiled kitchen they shared.

"Is it soup yet?" she asked from the doorway, shaking the rain from her soft dark hair.

"Sigrid, my dear! How are you? How is your arm? Why didn't you call? I've been so worried about you! Anne said you were simply slashed to ribbons."

His voice was several tones deeper than anyone's Sigrid had ever heard, yet he still managed to talk in italics half the time.

"I'm okay," she said. "A little tired, though. And ravenous."

"Then sit, sit!" Roman boomed, clearing a space at the breakfast counter with one swoop of his arm. He wore a long white linen shirt over tailored gray denim slacks with rolled cuffs and a heavy silver and turquoise necklace that clanked against the ceramic topped counter when he bent across to lay out a bowl and spoon. He was a large man, in his mid-forties. Not fat exactly, but with an aura ofs oftness about him akin to that of a large pampered Persian cat. He moved like one, too, with a certain finicky grace and deliberation.

His sandy hair was thinning on top and the high dome of his hairline was echoed by the arch of his eyebrows and the curve of his hooded eyes.