One Coffee With

piles of professional journals, unanswered letters, discarded panty hose, airline itineraries and butt-filled ashtrays. Anne's departures were perennially hurried. Schedules always surprised her.

'The plane leaves at noon?' she'd wail. 'But it's eleven now! Who's got the car? Where's my coat? My camera bags?'

Some people found her disorganized, chaotic air appealing. Sigrid preferred order and calm; but because she'd lived apart from her mother since college, it was not a source of friction any longer. Now they could look at each other fondly-if somewhat quizzically-across the generation gap.

Like many untidy people, Anne Harald kept surprisingly meticulous records. Five large steel file cabinets followed in her wake wherever she moved. Couches, tables, bric-a-brac and rugs had become battered and shabby from occupying haphazard spaces on those do-it-yourself moves organized and executed by the youthful neophyte photographers who clustered around Anne; but the file cabinets were always the last on and first off those rental trucks. Admittedly Anne's filing system was peculiarly her own and not always logical; but sooner or later she could lay her hands on any of her negatives, or her magazine and newspaper articles from the last twenty-five years.

Under the S's was a file with Sigrid's name on it, begun in her fifth year because Anne had obtained and then managed to misplace three separate copies of her daughter's birth certificate, and the kindergarten wouldn't enter Sigrid without proof that she'd been born the proper number of years before. The folder still contained Sigrid's immunization and dental records and the pediatrician's careful listing of childhood diseases, report cards and-though Anne always denied being sentimental-every Mother's Day card Sigrid had ever labored over in grade school and all her letters from boarding school and college, which strangely touched Sigrid the first time she had stumbled upon her folder.

She located the old Life article on her first try, pulled it out and started to close the drawer when another folder nearer the front caught her eye.

It was labeled simply 'Leif', and it was not very thick. Inside were a couple of letters addressed to Miss Anne Lattimore in her father's masculine scrawl, a birth certificate, diplomas, a driver's license, a medal and its accompanying posthumous citation, some police-department forms dealing with death benefits and a handful of pictures.

Sigrid had seen most of the pictures before but not in several years. She had difficulty locating her father in a group-graduation pose, one skinhead rookie out of a whole class of uniformed look-alikes. There was a formal studio portrait-how very young he looked-and a close-up of herself at six months, sitting on his lap, wearing his patrol- man's hat and gnawing on the handle of his service pistol.

In the last picture he was as she could just barely remember him: laughing directly into the camera, his fair hair slicked back, tall and handsome and utterly self-assured. A man's hand rested on his shoulder, and a closer look revealed that someone had been cropped from the picture. Odd. Idly she wondered who it was, and why he'd been cut away. Along the right border was a date and in her mother's hasty script the words: 'First day in plain clothes.'

Two months before he'd been gunned down.

It was disorienting to look at the date and suddenly realize that she was now older than he had been. Somehow one never expects to grow older than one's parents. It upset life's natural order. Then she remembered the time when she was still in uniform and had been sent to tell an elderly mother that her son had been killed in a car wreck that evening.

The old woman had just stared at her numbly, shaking her head over and over in mute denial that finally came out in soft bewildered cries, 'But he isn't old enough. He's not old enough to die.'

Sigrid knew it must feel much more unnatural to outlive a child than a parent; nevertheless, she gave a final uneasy glance at her father's unlined face before replacing the folder and closing the drawer. The Life article she kept out to take back to her own apartment, where she could relax finally with a bourbon and cola, her one southern mannerism.

As she moved through the apartment switching off lights, Sigrid was suddenly alerted to a furtive noise at the front door. Adrenaline flowing, but without panic, she quickly doused the remaining lights and positioned herself behind it. Another soft click and it opened slowly. Light from the hallway spilled in along with a case of some sort. A figure followed, someone who carried a small penlight that flashed along the floor and walls and hesitated on the Anne-figure hat rack.

Moving to catch him off balance, Sigrid yanked the door all the way back.

'That's far enough!' she told the dark figure silhouetted in the bright doorway. 'Hands on the wall, mister, feet spread. Now!'

The penlight jerked across her face, touched on the gun she held in her right hand. There was a sharp intake of breath, then the penlight wavered and slipped to the floor from limp fingers. The man himself followed close behind, crumpling softly, almost noiselessly.

Sigrid had never had anyone faint on her before. Bemused, she switched on the lights again, pulled the man all the way across the threshold, then closed the door and turned to examine her catch.

Male Caucasian, she thought, automatically falling into official-report jargon. Age? Late thirties? Hair (what there was of it) a sandy brown, almost no gray. Long on the sides and probably usually brushed forward to augment a hairline that had receded to the dome of his head. Eyes closed now, of course. Well nourished but not actually fat. He was dressed rather like someone out for a day of elephant hunting in the Serengeti: wide-brimmed canvas hat, rumpled khaki safari suit, open-necked shirt and leopard-print silk scarf. Instead of boots he wore fawn-colored suede shoes with thick crepe soles.

Since he wasn't actually carrying an elephant gun, Sigrid put her own.38 away and slipped her hand inside his breast pocket. She came out with a wallet, an airline folder and a passport. Passport and wallet indicated that the man was Roman Tramegra, age forty-two. According to the ticket stubs in his Alitalia folder, his flight had arrived at Kennedy International an hour or so earlier: but the whole trip had originated with a flight from Sardinia.

Which came very near to explaining everything. Her mother was at last report in Italy on assignment for Eyewitness. The newsmagazine planned to devote a fall issue to the state of worldwide violence and terrorism, and Anne and two other freelance journalists were gathering background material and local color on how kidnapping had become almost a cottage industry in Italy.

Another of Anne's displaced persons, and she had just terrified him into fainting.

Ever since Sigrid could remember, an odd assortment of characters had wandered in and out of her mother's life. Anne attracted them the way some people attract stray dogs and cats; and just as an animal lover always manages to find good homes for his waifs, Anne was equally successful at finding homes or jobs or sanctuary of some sort for her strays. Sigrid wondered what category Roman Tramegra would fall into.

She rolled him onto a small Turkestan rug and dragged it across the vinyl-tile floor to a couch in the living room. There she shoved aside a couple of Anne's geopolitical maps, hoisted him onto the couch and slid cushions under his feet. Returning from the bathroom with a cold cloth for his forehead, she found him blinking heavy-lidded blue eyes in her direction.

'Oh, good, you're awake,' she said. 'Can I get you something? Coffee, tea or bourbon?'

'Don't bother. You've done quite enough already,' he said coldly, sitting up and adjusting the leopard-print scarf at the neck of his shirt. His voice was unexpectedly deep, a bit pompous and with more than a touch of affronted dignity.

'Look,' Sigrid told him, 'I do apologize for what happened. My mother didn't tell me she was lending the apartment, and I thought you'd picked the lock. I'm sorry.'

He smoothed the long piece of side hair carefully into place across the top of his head. 'She said you were a policewoman, so I quite understand your reaction. Please don't give it another thought. My fault for not ringing the doorbell first. Still it never occurred to me that anyone was inside. Anne said the place was here going idle, and I thought-' He took a deep breath and gave her an abashed smile, which made him look more human. 'I'm simply chattering, aren't I? I always talk too much when I've been upset. Reaction, I expect. You mentioned tea. I do hope it's souchong.'

Sigrid shook her head. 'Lipton.'

'Loose?' he asked, clutching at straws.

'Sorry, only tea bags, I'm afraid,' Sigrid said gravely, privately amused rather than insulted by the man's air of having landed among savages.

There was a brief internal struggle, then he shrugged his shoulders in a what-more-can-one-expect gesture of