The Hellfire Club

'Dan, what am I going to do?'

He shoved his hands in his pockets and stepped toward her, the playfully ironic manner instantly discarded. 'First of all, we have to see if the police pick up Dart, or, even better, find his body. Then we want to find out if the FBI is still after you.' He put his right hand on her shoulder.

'You don't think I should try to see this doctor?'

'Aren't I good enough for you?' He tried to look wounded.

'The one Dick Dart wanted to kill.'

'The only thing you should do, if you still care about Davey, is tell him the Chancel House lawyers are selling them down the river. That might straighten out your problems with the old man.'

Dan Harwich seemed to have admitted fresh air and sunlight into a dank chamber where Nora had been spinning in darkness.

'If I were you,' Harwich said, 'I'd take his father for everything I could get. That tough old number from up the road in Northampton, Calvin Coolidge, wasn't wrong: the business of America is business.'

Nora closed her eyes against a wave of nausea and heard the shuffling of a gathering of demons. 'Don't do this to me,' she said. 'Please.'

Harwich put an arm around her waist and guided her to the side of the bed. 'Sorry. You need rest, and I'm talking your ear off.'

'I'll be okay.' She clasped her hand on his wrist, feeling completely divided: one part of her wanted Harwich to stay with her, and another, equal part wanted him to leave the room. 'I should apologize, not you.'

'Stretch out.'

She obeyed. He went to the foot of the bed, untied her shoes, and pulled them off. 'Thanks.'

'You remember this doctor's name?'

She shook her head. 'Something Irish.'

'That narrows the field. How about O'Hara? Michael O'Hara?'

She shook her head again.

'The man you want is gay, isn't he?' He began kneading the sole of her right foot with his thumbs. 'I can't think of more than three gay doctors in the whole town, and they're all younger than I am.' What he was doing to her foot set off reverberations and echoes throughout her body. 'Did you hear his first name?'

She nodded.

'What letter did it start with?'

Without any hesitation at all, Nora said, 'M.'

'Michael. Morris. Montague. Max. Miles. Manny. Mark. What else? Monroe.'

'Mark.'

'Mark?' He dug his thumbs into her left foot, and a tingle wound all the way up her backbone. 'Mark. With an Irish last name, and gay to boot. Let's see. Conlon, Conboy, Congdon, Condon, Mulroy, Murphy, Morphy, Brophy, O'Malley,

Joyce, Tiemey, Kiernan, Boyce, Mulligan, this isn't easy. Burke. Brannigan. Sullivan. Boyle.'

'Hold on. That was close. Sounds like Boyle.' She held her breath and closed her eyes, and a name floated toward her out of the darkness. 'Foyle. His name was Mark Foyle.'

'Mark Foil?'

That's the name.'

He laughed. 'Yes, but you were thinking F-o-y-l-e, which is why you thought it was an Irish name. Mark Foil is about as Irish as the queen of England, and his name is Foil as in tinfoil. Or as I heard him say once, Foil as in fencing.' He spoke the last: phrase in a mincing, affected voice.

'You know him.'

'Foiled again,' Harwich said, using the same swishy voice.

'Is he like that?'

'He couldn't afford to be. The man was a GP for upwards of forty years, and this isn't the most liberated place on the face of the earth.'

'Where does he live?'

'The good part of town,' Harwich said. 'Unlike we lesser mortals, Dr Foil can behold a great many trees when he glances out of his leaded windows.' He patted her foot. 'Look, if you want to see the guy, I'll take you over there. But the guy's one of those patrician queers.'

The word queers chilled Nora. It sounded ugly and wrong, especially coming from Dan Harwich, but she pushed aside her distaste. 'You think he wouldn't have time for me?'

'Foil never had time for me, if that's any indication. God, you should see his boyfriend.'

The telephone down the corridor began ringing. 'You could probably use a nap,' Harwich said.

'I could try.'

Released, he gave her foot a last pat, went smiling toward the door, and closed it behind him. Nora heard his footsteps racing toward the telephone, which must have been in his bedroom. A moment later, in a voice loud enough to be overheard through the door he said, 'Okay, I know, I know I did.'

She thought she might as well take a bath. On the marble shelf beside the antique sink in the bathroom lay three new toothbrushes still in their transparent pastel coffins and a pump dispensing baking soda and peroxide toothpaste. Nora struggled with one of the toothbrush containers until she managed to splinter one side. Above the tub, modern fittings protruded from the pink-tiled wall. Checking for the necessary supplies, Nora saw a tall, half- filled bottle of shampoo and a matching bottle of conditioner, both for dry, damaged hair, surrounded by a great number of hotel giveaway containers. A used shower cap lay over the shower-head like a felt mute over the bell of a trombone.

Lark had moved out of Harwich's bed before she had moved out of his house. On a shelf above the towel Nora saw a deodorant stick, a half-empty bottle of mouth wash, a Murine bottle, a nearly empty aspirin bottle, an emery board worn white in a line down the middle, a couple of kinds of moisturizer and skin cream, and a tall spray bottle of Je Reviens, almost full. She began pulling the T-shirt out of her jeans.

Someone behind her said, 'Hold it,' and she uttered a squeak and jumped half an inch off the ground.

'Sorry, I didn't mean to…'

She turned around, her hand at the pulse beating in her throat, to find and apologetic-looking Dan Harwich inside the bathroom door.

'I thought you heard me.'

'I was getting ready to take a bath.'

'Actually,' Harwich said, 'maybe we ought to get in touch with Mark Foil. In case Dart did get away, as unlikely as that is, we have to make sure Mark is protected.'

'Well, fine,' Nora said, unsure what to make of this sudden reversal.

'We might be able to go over there this morning.' His whole tempo had sped up, like Nora's pulse. Smiling in an almost insistent way, he went sideways through the bathroom door, silently asking her to come with him.

'You changed your mind in a hurry.'

'You know my whole problem? I can't get out of my stupid patterns. I think Mark Foil looks down on me, and I resent that. An egotistical voice in my head says I'm a hotshot and he's only a retired GP, who does he think he is, screw him. I shouldn't let that kind of crap keep me from doing what's right.'

Nora followed him into a huge bedroom with a four-poster bed and a big-screen television set. Clothes lay scattered across the floor. 'What was Dart going to say to these people? How was he going to get into their houses?'

'I was supposed to be writing something about that summer at Shorelands - the summer of 1938. Everybody knows about Hugo Driver, but the other guests have never been given their due. Something like that.'

'Sounds good,' Harwich said. 'If I have a talent for anything besides surgery, it's for bullshit. Who do you want to be?' He kicked aside a pile of old socks and sweat clothes on his way to a bookcase.

'Gosh, I don't know,' Nora said.

'What's a lady-writer kind of name? Emily Eliot. You're my old friend Emily Eliot, we went to Brown together, and now you're writing a piece about whatsit, Shorelands. Let's see, you got a Ph.D. from Harvard, you taught for a