Unspeakable

morning on paperwork and answering her emails, and she ate a Swiss cheese sandwich at her desk. At three o'clock, as she left the office, she met George Greyeyes in the corridor, impatiently waiting for an elevator.

'Any more news about Daniel Joseph?' he asked her. He looked tired.

'I called the hospital this morning. He's stable but still critical. They're going to operate on his eye tomorrow, if he's well enough.'

George checked his watch. 'Shit, I'm running late again.'

'Another committee meeting?'

'This month's update on anti-Indian prejudice in the Portland Public Schools.'

'Uh-huh.'

George checked his watch yet again. 'These damn elevators. By the way, somebody was asking me about you.'

'Oh, yes?'

'An attorney from Mayfield & Letterman, I think it was. He was interested to know who you were.'

'Did he say why?'

George shrugged. 'I don't think it was anything to do with any particular case. He asked me if you were married, which I thought was kind of strange. And then he asked me where you lived. I didn't tell him, of course.'

'What was he like, this attorney?'

'Young, thirtyish. Black hair, smart suit. Quarter Hispanic, maybe. Red and yellow necktie, silk.'

'And he didn't give you his name?'

'Not that I recall.'

The elevator arrived at last, but they still had to wait while a janitor maneuvered his cleaning cart out of it, all dangling mops and disinfectant sprays and brushes.

'Are you in town for the weekend?' asked George as they descended to the lobby.

'No? I'm going to Mirror Lake with Katie and Doug.'

'Oh, that's a pity. The National Indian Child Welfare Association is holding a traditional Wallowa cookout Sunday afternoon at Henry High Elk's house. Face decoration, carving displays, rain dancing. I was hoping that you could have come.'

'Maybe some other time, George,' she said, standing on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. 'Sorry.'

She left the building and walked out into the breezy street. She still had half an hour before she was due to meet Mickey, so she crossed over to Schnadel's German-Style Bakery and bought two of the frosted apple strudels that Daisy liked so much.

'You want the extra whipped cream, Ms. Summers?' asked Mr. Schnadel. There were so many mirrors behind his counter that it looked as if there were twenty Mr. Schnadels, all fat-bottomed, with white aprons and white paper hats. 'A few hundred calories- what harm did that ever do? Just look at me: I always have the extra whipped cream, and did you ever meet anybody as happy as me?'

Holly smiled. 'Happiness? It's that easy? A little extra whipped cream?'

'Sure. The secret about happiness is, don't expect too much from it. It's like luck. People always say, 'I never have good luck.' But they're alive, right? And they have their own teeth. What more good luck do you want than that?'

'What aboutbadluck?'

'Oh,no.' Mr. Schnadel noisily licked his fingers. 'Bad luck is something different.'

'What do you mean?'

'Bad luck, itfollowsyou. Bad luck is like one of those sniffing dogs, like they use for chasing criminals. Once bad luck picks up your smell, it keeps on coming after you, day after day.Sniff-sniff-sniff. Never lets up. Never lets you alone.'

'So how can a person shake it off?'

Mr. Schnadel tied a neat bow on top of the cake box and curled the ribbon with his scissor blades. 'Shake it off? You can't. You can only hope that one day it's going to grow bored of you and go sniffing after some other unfortunate soul.'

Holly stepped out of Schnadel's onto the sidewalk, into the wind. Before she crossed the street, she turned back to see Mr. Schnadel talking to another customer. She felt oddly disturbed by what he had said to her. What did a man who baked cream cakes for a living know about bad luck, and how it came panting after you, and never gave you peace?

She was halfway across the road when her eye was caught by a quick, flickering movement in front of the office building. At first it looked like somebody running across the entrance to the parking levels in the basement. A panel van sped in front of her, blocking her view for an instant. By the time the van had passed, the figure was already running down the parking ramp. It wasdancing,maybe, rather than running, and it was more like a shadow than a real person: black, and distorted, and very tall, with ragged arms and legs. She saw it dance against the concrete wall at the back of the ramp, and then it was gone.

She took a step forward and it was then that a bicycle hit her and she was thrown sideways into the road, jarring her shoulder against the asphalt. Her ribbon-tied box of apple strudel flew across the road and a car drove over it and emphatically squashed it. At first she didn't understand what had happened to her. She saw sky? asphalt? and somebody leaning over her, a man with a gingery mustache. He was saying something to her but she couldn't tell what it was.

The man with the gingery mustache took her by the elbow and helped her onto her feet. He smelled of cigarettes and cheap aftershave. She wasn't badly hurt, but all the breath had been knocked out of her. The bike rider was sitting only a few feet away, a young hawk-nosed man in a shocking-pink space-age cycling helmet and tight black cycling shorts. He was frantically spinning his front wheel, around and around, and saying, 'Oh God. Oh God. Don't tell me the spokes are out of alignment.'

Holly turned around to the man with the gingery mustache and said, 'Thanks. Thank you.' He lifted his cap with old-fashioned courtesy and said something in reply, but again she couldn't quite catch it. She went over to the bike rider and smacked him on the shoulder. He looked up at her irritably and said, 'What?'

'You hit me,' she said. 'You ran me down, you maniac.'

'Hey, I rang my fucking bell, didn't I? I shouted, 'Look out!'-didn't I? What are you, deaf?'

The Other Side of Luck

When she walked into the Compass Hotel, Mickey was almost too sympathetic.

'Hey, what the hell happened to you?' he said, putting his arm around her.

She winced and pointed to her shoulder. 'I had an argument with a cyclist and the cyclist won.'

Mickey stopped and turned back toward the street, his neck as taut as a Doberman's. 'Where? Where is he? I'll break his fucking legs.'

'He'sgone,Mickey, and in any case it was my fault for crossing the road without looking.'

'What did he look like? Give me a description and I'll have him pulled in.'

'Forget it, will you? I'm okay. All I need to do is tidy myself up.'

Holly went to the hotel restroom. She took off her coat and pulled up her pale green sweater to check her shoulder. Her skin was reddened and slightly grazed, even though her coat and her sweater hadn't been torn. She dabbed it with a wet towel. It looked as if she was going to have an attractive multicolored bruise on her back when she went up to Mirror Lake that weekend, a map of Alaska in varying shades of purple.

She leaned on the basin and stared at herself in the mirror. She didn'tlookshaken, even though she was- and badly. It wasn't just being knocked over that had upset her: It was the feeling that the world around her had suddenly been altered, and that she had lost her sense of certainty. It was at times like these that her deafness frustrated her to the point of screaming, even though she wouldn't have been able to hear herself. She felt as if she were sitting alone in the next room while the rest of the human race giggled and whispered and conspired together. Why did everybody rush out and buy a pop song one particular week? Holly would never know, because she couldn't hear it, and she didn't know why it had caught everybody's mood. Not only that, she would never have a favorite love song.

You're feeling sorry for yourself,she told her reflection in the mirror.

No, I'm not,her reflection replied.I'm afraid, but I don't exactly know why.

She brushed her hair, fixed her lipstick, and then rejoined Mickey in the glossy black-marble foyer. He was talking on his cell phone. 'They found a shoe? Where? Well, I'm coming back to headquarters later; I'll take a look at it.'

He snapped his phone shut and said, 'Sarah Hargitay. They think they found one of her shoes up near Bridal Veil.'

'All the way up the valley? What was she doing there?'

'Hobbling, I expect.'

They walked through to the Sternwheeler Bar. Mickey guided her off to the left, into a semicircular booth upholstered in chestnut-brown leather with a brass-bound mahogany table. The bar was decorated to resemble the saloon of an old-style riverboat, with gilded pillars and railings and paintings of voluptuous nudes stretched out on divans, and there were huge mirrors on every wall. A pianist in a green eyeshade was playing Scott Joplin melodies as if he were more used to chopping up spare ribs. Through the panoramic windows on the right-hand side of the bar, Holly could see the whole of the Portland waterfront, with white yachts dipping and bobbing at anchor and a large oceangoing timber ship slowly gliding past, its flanks streaked with rust.

'Krauss is sitting behind that plant on the far side of the piano. He knows what he's doing. The CCTV can't cover him from there, and the piano's too loud for us to pick him up clearly with a directional mike.'

Holly stood up and looked airily around the bar as if she were expecting somebody. She could just see Merlin Krauss sitting at a table by the window, wearing a