“Any policy in particular?”
“It could have been anything.”
“Don’t you think Hasselgard ought to be careful now? Shouldn’t he be heavily guarded?”
“Well, the attempt failed. The assassin took off. The police are looking for him, and when they find him, he’ll tell them who hired him. If anybody ought to be afraid, it’s the man who hired the killer.”
All this, too, was conventional wisdom.
“Why do you think he put the sister’s body in the trunk?”
“Oh, I don’t really care where he put Marita,” Dennis said. “I don’t see what bearing that can possibly have on anything. The man looked into the car. He saw that he’d killed his intended victim’s sister. He hid the body in the trunk. Why are we talking about this sordid business, anyway?”
“Do you remember what sort of car it was?”
“Of course. It was a Corvette. Identical to this one, in fact. I hope this is the end of these questions.”
Tom leaned sideways toward him. He took the pen out of his mouth. “Just about. Marita was a big woman, wasn’t she?”
“I can’t see any possible point in going on—”
“I only have two more questions.”
“Promise?”
“Here’s the first one. Where do you suppose that woman in Weasel Hollow got the money she put under her mattress?”
“What’s the second question?”
“Where do you think that feeling in the antiques shop came from, that feeling of knowing you were going to find something?”
“Is this still a conversation, or are we just free associating?”
“You mean you have no idea where the feeling came from?”
Dennis just shook his head.
For the first time since they had turned onto Calle Burleigh, Tom paid some attention to the landscape of sturdy houses surrounding them. “We’re nowhere near Shore Park.”
“I don’t live anywhere near Shore Park. Why would you think—oh.” He smiled over at Tom. “I live near Goethe Park, not Shore Park. Just next to the old slave quarter. Ninety percent of the houses were built in the twenties and thirties, I think, and they’re good, solid, middle-class houses, with porches and arches and some interesting details. This area is tremendously underrated.” He had by now recovered his habitual good humor. “I don’t see why Brooks-Lowood shouldn’t widen its net, so to speak.”
Tom slowly turned his head to face the teacher. “Hasselgard didn’t attend Brooks-Lowood.”
“Well, after all,” the teacher said, “I can’t see that where Hasselgard went to secondary school has any bearing on his sister’s murder.” Tom’s expression had begun to alarm him. Within a few seconds, his face had taken on an almost sunken look, and his skin seemed very pale beneath the thin golden surface. “Would you like to rest for a bit? We could stop off in the park and look at the ziggurats.”
“I can’t go any farther,” Tom said.
“What?”
“Pull over to the side of the road. You can drop me off here. I feel a little queasy. Don’t worry about me. Please.”
Dennis had already pulled up to the curb and stopped his car. Tom had bent over to rest his head on the dashboard.
“You don’t really think I’m going to drop you off on the side of the road, do you?”
Tom rolled his head from side to side on the dashboard. The gesture seemed so childlike that Dennis stroked Tom’s thick hair.
“Good, because of course I’m not. I think I’ll just take you back to my place and let you lie down for a bit.”
He gently helped Tom lean back to rest his head against the seat. The boy’s eyes glittered and seemed without depth, like shiny painted stones.
“Let me get you home,” Dennis said.
Tom very slowly shook his head, then wiped his hands over his face. “Would you take me somewhere else?”
Dennis raised his eyebrows.
“Weasel Hollow.”
Tom turned his head toward Dennis, and the English teacher felt as if he were looking not at a seventeen- year-old boy overcome by a sudden illness, but a powerful adult. He reached for the ignition key and started his car again.
“Anywhere in particular in Weasel Hollow?”
“Mogrom Street.”
“Mogrom Street,” Dennis repeated. “Well, that makes sense. Anywhere in particular on Mogrom Street?”
Tom had closed his eyes, and appeared to be asleep.
The original native civilization and culture on Mill Walk had completely disappeared by the beginning of the eighteenth century. Its only real remains, apart from the gap-toothed natives themselves, were the two little pyramidal ziggurats in the open field that had become Goethe Park. At the base of one was inscribed the word MOGROM; at the base of the other, RAMBICHURE. Though no one now knew the meaning of these enigmatic words, they had been wholeheartedly adapted by the surviving native population. At the bottom of the narrow valley that was Weasel Hollow, Mogrom Street intersected Calle Rambichure. On opposing corners were the Mogrom Diner and Rambichure Pizza. Rambichure Hardware and Mogrom Stables and Smithy flanked Rambi-Mog Pawnbrokers. On Calle Rambichure stood the Ziggurat School for Children of Indigenous Background, the Zig-Ram Drugstore, Rambi’s Hosiery, the Mogrom Adult Bookstore, and M-R Artificial Limbs.
Dennis silently drove up Calle Burleigh, turned north on Market Street and zipped past Ostend’s. He came to the rise called Pforzheimer Point. Across the narrow valley the long grey shapes of the Redwing Impervious Can Company and Thielman’s Sugarcane Refinery defined the opposite horizon. Weasel Hollow lay below. Tom still seemed to be drowsing. Dennis drove over the lip of the hill and down toward Mogrom.
“Well, then,” Tom said. He was sitting up straight, as if a puppeteer had pulled a string attached to the top of his head. He looked impatient, even slightly feverish. Dennis felt that if he drove downhill too slowly Tom would jump out of the car.
At the foot of the hill, Mogrom Street went east to Calle Rambichure and the center of Weasel Hollow. The western half of the street led directly into a maze of tarpaper shacks, tents made of blankets suspended on poles, native houses of pink and white stone, and huts that appeared to be made of propped-up boards. Two blocks down, a large black dog lay panting in the middle of the street. Goats and chickens wandered through the yellow grass between wrecked cars and ruined pony traps. Dennis dimly heard rock and roll coming from a radio.
Tom leaned forward to examine the numbers beside the porch of a native house. “Turn right.”
“You do realize, don’t you, that I have no idea what’s going on?”
“Just drive slowly.”
Handley drove. Tom inspected the houses and hovels on his side of the street. A goat swung his head, and chickens moved jerkily through the grass. They came up an intersection with a hand-painted sign reading CALLE FRIEDRICH HASSELGARD. Two small native children with dirty faces, one of them in brown military-style shorts and carrying a toy gun, the other entirely naked, had materialized beside the sign and gazed at Dennis with a grave sober impertinence.
“Next block,” Tom said.
Dennis moved slowly past the staring children. The dog lifted his head from the dust and watched them draw near. Dennis steered around it. The dog lowered its muzzle and sighed.
“Stop,” Tom said. “This is it.”
Dennis stopped. Tom had twisted sideways to look at a wooden shack. Waves of heat radiated up from the corrugated tin roof. It was obviously empty.
Tom opened the door and went through the tall yellow grass toward the house. Dennis expected him to look
