The Throat

1

I returned to my life, the life I remembered. I worked on my book, saw my friends, took long walks that filled my notebook, read and listened to lots of music. I wrote and mailed the letter I had been thinking about, never really expecting a reply. I had been gone so short a time that only Maggie Lah had even noticed that I had been away, but Vinh and Michael Poole knew that my old habits, those that spoke of peace and stability, had returned, and that I no longer paced and churned out pages all through the night. Intuitive Maggie said, 'You were in a dark place, and you learned something there.' Yes, I said, that's right. That's just what happened. She put her arms around me before leaving me to my book.

The New York Times brought news of the upheavals in Millhaven. Detective Sergeant Michael Hogan first appeared on page A6, and within two days had moved to A2. The next day, there was another story on A2, and then he landed on the front page and stayed there for a week. Tom Pasmore sent me bundles of the Ledger, two or three issues wrapped up in a parcel the size of a pre- Christmas Sunday Times, and Geoffrey Bough and a lot of other Millhaven reporters filled in the details my own newspaper left out. Once the extent of Hogan's crimes became known, Ross McCandless and several other police officials retired. Merlin Waterford was forced out of office and replaced by a liberal Democrat of Norwegian stock who had been a Rhodes scholar and had a surprisingly good relationship with the African-American community, largely, I thought, because he had never, ever said anything even faintly stupid.

Some of the less lurid portions of Michael Hogan's diarylike notes were printed in first the Ledger, then the Times. Then some of what Hannah Belknap would call the gooshier sections were printed. People, Time, and Newsweek all ran long stories about Millhaven and Hogan, Hogan and Walter Dragonette, Hogan and William Damrosch. The FBI announced that Hogan had murdered fifty-three men and women, in Pensacola, Florida, where he had been known as Felix Hart, Allerton, Ohio, where he had been Leonard 'Lenny' Valentine, and Millhaven. There were short, carefully censored stories about his career as Franklin Bachelor. Demonstrators packed into Armory Place all over again, marches filled Illinois Avenue, photographs of Hogan's victims filled the newspapers and magazines. From the cell where he was waiting for his trial, Walter Dragonette told a reporter that in his experience Detective Sergeant Hogan had always been a gentleman, and it was time for the healing to begin.

After a great deal of legal wrangling, eighteen innocent men were released from the jails where they had been serving life sentences. Two innocent men in Florida had already been executed. All eighteen, along with the families of the two dead men, filed monumental lawsuits against the police departments responsible for the arrests.

In September, a consortium of publishers announced that they were bringing out The Confessions of Michael Hogan as a mass-market paperback, profits to go to the families of the victims.

In October I finished the first draft of The Kingdom of Heaven, looked around, and noticed that the sun still beat down on the Soho sidewalks, the temperature was still in the high seventies and low eighties, and that the young market traders, in the restaurants and coffee shops on the weekends were beginning to look like Jimbo on my last evening in my hometown. Daddy had come home with ominous news about layoffs. Some of the young men in the carefully casual clothes were wearing stubbly three-day beards and chain-smoking unfiltered Camels. I began rewriting and editing The Kingdom of Heaven, and by early December, when I finished the book, delivered it to my agent and my publisher, and gave copies to my friends, the temperatures had fallen only as far as the mid-forties.

A week later, I had lunch at Chanterelle with Ann Folger, my editor. No bohemian, Ann is a crisp, empathic blond woman in her mid-thirties, good company and a good editor. She had some useful ideas about improving a few sections of the book, work that I could do in a couple of days.

Happy about our conversation and fonder than ever of Ann Folger, I walked back to my loft and dragged out of the closet where I had hidden it my own copy of The Confessions of Michael Hogan— the parcel with my name and address on it that Tom Pasmore had mailed, one window away from me in Millhaven's central post office. It had never been opened. I carried it downstairs and heaved it into the Saigon dumpster. Then I went back upstairs and began work on the final revisions.

2

The next day was Saturday, and December was still pretending to be mid-October. I got up late and put on a jacket to go out for breakfast and a walk before finishing the revisions. Soho doesn't get as relentless about Christmas as midtown Manhattan, but still I saw a few Santas and glittery trees sprayed with fake snow in shop windows, and the sound system in the cafe where I had an almond croissant and two cups of French Roast coffee was playing a slow-moving baroque ecstasy I eventually recognized as Corelli's Christmas Concerto. And then I realized that I was in the cafe where I'd been just before I saw Allen Stone getting out of his car. That seemed to have happened years, not months, before—I remembered those weeks when I had written twenty pages a night, almost three hundred pages altogether, and found that I was mourning the disappearance of that entranced, magical state. To find it again, if it could be found without the disturbance that had surrounded it, I'd have to write another book.

When I got back to my loft, the telephone started ringing as soon as I pushed the key into the lock. I opened the door and rushed inside, peeling off my jacket as I went. The answering machine picked up before I got to the desk, and I heard Tom Pasmore's voice coming through its speaker. 'Hi, it's me, the Nero Wolfe of Eastern Shore Drive, and I have some mixed news for you, so—'

I picked up. 'I'm here,' I said. 'Hello! What's this mixed news? More amazing developments in Millhaven?'

'Well, we're having a three-day snowstorm. Counting the wind chill factor, it's eighteen below here. How is your book coming along?'

'It's done,' I said. 'Why don't you come here and help me celebrate?'

'Maybe I will. If it ever stops snowing, I could come for the holidays. Do you mean it?'

'Sure,' I said. 'Get out of that icebox and spend a week in sunny New York. I'd love to see you.' I paused, but he did not say anything, and I felt a premonitory chill. 'All the excitement must be over by now, isn't it?'

'Definitely,' Tom said. 'Unless you count Isobel Archer's big move—she got a network job, and she's moving to New York in a couple of weeks.'

'That can't be the mixed news you called about.'

'No. The mixed news is about John Ransom.' I waited for it.

Tom said, 'I heard it on the news this morning—I usually listen to the news before I go to bed. John died in a car crash about two o'clock last night. It was the middle of the storm, and he was all alone on the east-west expressway. He rammed right into an abutment. At first they thought it was an accident, a skid or something, but he turned out to have about triple the legal alcohol level in his blood.'

'It could still have been an accident,' I said, seeing John barreling along through the storm in the middle of the night, clamping a three-hundred-dollar bottle of vodka between his thighs. The image was of endless night, almost demonic in its despair.

'Do you really think so?'

'No,' I said. 'I think he killed himself.'

'So do I,' Tom said. 'The poor bastard.'

That would have been the last word on John Ransom, but for a letter that I found in my mailbox, by the sort of ironic coincidence forbidden to fiction but in which the real world revels, late that same afternoon.

To get my mail, I have to leave my loft and go downstairs to the rank of boxes in the entry, one door away from the entrance to Saigon. The mail generally comes around four in the afternoon, and sometimes I get to the boxes before the mailman. Like all writers, I am obsessive about the mail, which brings money, contracts, reviews, royalty statements, letters from fans, and Publishers Weekly, where I can check on the