The Throat

on after I go. Don't mention this to him, by the way. I've been trying to figure out a way to bring up the subject without alarming him.'

We started down the stairs. Halfway down, he turned around to stare up at me. 'I'm going to be all right for my daughter's funeral. I'm going to be all present and accounted for.' He reached up and tapped my breastbone. 'I know something about you.'

I nearly flinched.

'Something happened to you when I was telling you about my grandmother. You thought of something—you saw something. It didn't surprise you that I saw my grandmother because'—here he began tapping his forefinger against my chest—'because—you—have—seen—someone—too.'

He nodded at me and moved back down a step. 'I never thought there was any point in missing things. You know what I used to tell my students? I used to say there is another world, and it's this world.'

We went downstairs and waited for John, who failed to appear. Eventually, I persuaded Alan to salt away the money on the kitchen table in various pockets of his suit. I left him sitting in his living room, went back to the kitchen, and put the revolver in my pocket. Then I left the house.

Back at Ely Place, I put the revolver on the coffee table and then went upstairs to my manuscript. John had left a Post-It note in the kitchen saying that he had been too tired to go to Alan's house and had gone straight to bed. Everything was okay, he said.

PART SIX

RALPH AND MARJORIE RANSOM

1

Just after one o'clock, I parked John's Pontiac in front of the Georgian house on Victoria Terrace. A man on a lawn mower the size of a tractor was expertly swinging his machine around the oak trees on the side of the house. A teenage boy walked a trimmer down the edge of the driveway. Tall black bags stood on the shorn lawn like stooks. John was shaking his head, frowning into the sunlight and literally champing his jaws.

'It'll go faster if you get him,' he said. 'I'll stay here with my parents.'

Ralph and Marjorie Ransom began firing objections from the backseat. In their manner was the taut, automatic politeness present since John and I had met them at the airport that morning.

John had driven to the airport, but after we had collected his parents, tanned and clad in matching black- and-silver running suits, he asked if I would mind driving back. His father had protested. John ought to drive, it was his car, wasn't it?

—I'd like Tim to do it, Dad, John said.

At this point his mother had stepped in perkily to say that John was tired, he wanted to talk, and wasn't it nice that his friend from New York was willing to drive? His mother was short and hourglass-shaped, big in the bust and hips, and her sunglasses hid the top half of her face. Her silver hair exactly matched her husband's.

—John should drive, that's all, said his father. Trimmer than I had expected, Ralph Ransom looked like a retired naval officer deeply involved with golf. His white handsome smile went well with his tan. —Where I come from, a guy drives his own car. Hell, we'll be able to talk just fine, get in there and be our pilot.

John frowned and handed me the keys. —I'm not really supposed to drive for a while. They suspended my license. He looked at me in a way that combined anger and apology.

Ralph stared at his son. —Suspended, huh? What happened?

—Does it matter? asked Marjorie. Let's get in the car.

—Drinking and driving?

—I went through a kind of a bad period, yeah, John said.

It's okay, really. I can walk everywhere I have to go. By the time it gets cold, I'll have my license back.

—Lucky you didn't kill someone, his father said, and his mother said Ralph!

In the morning, John and I had moved my things up to his office, so that his parents could have the guest room. John armored himself in a nice-looking double-breasted gray suit, I pulled out of my hanging bag a black Yohji Yamamoto suit I had bought once in a daring mood, found a gray silk shirt I hadn't remembered packing, and we were both ready to pick up his parents at the airport.

We had taken the Ransoms' bags up to the guest room and left them alone to change. I followed John back down to the kitchen, where he set out the sandwich things again. —Well, I said, now I know why you walk everywhere.

—Twice this spring, I flunked the breathalyzer. It's bullshit, but I have to put up with it. Like a lot of things. You know?

He seemed frazzled, worn so thin his underlying rage burned out at me through his eyes. He realized that I could see it and stuffed it back down inside himself like a burning coal. When his parents came down, they picked at the sandwich fillings and talked about the weather.

In Tucson, the temperature was 110. But it was dry heat. And you had air conditioning wherever you went. Golfing—just get on the course around eight in the morning. John, tell you the truth, you're getting way too heavy, ought to buy a good set of clubs and get out there on the golf course.

—I'll think about it, John said. But you never know. A tub of lard like me, get him out on the golf course in hundred-degree weather, he's liable to drop dead of a coronary right on the spot.

—Hold on, hold on, I didn't mean—

—John, you know your father was only—

—I'm sorry, I've been on-All three Ransoms stopped talking as abruptly as they had begun. Marjorie turned toward the kitchen windows. Ralph gave me a pained, mystified look and opened the freezer section of the refrigerator. He pulled out a pink, unlabeled bottle and showed it to his son.

John glanced at the bottle. —Hyacinth vodka. Smuggled in from the Black Sea.

His father took a glass from a cupboard and poured out about an inch of the pink vodka. He sipped, nodded, and drank the rest.

—Three hundred bucks a bottle, John said.

Ralph Ransom capped the bottle and slid it back into place in the freezer. —Yeah. Well. What time does the train leave?

—It's leaving, John said, and began walking out of the kitchen. His parents looked at each other and then followed him through the living room.

John checked the street through the slender window.

—They're baa-ack.

His parents followed him outside, and Geoffrey Bough, Isobel Archer, and their cameramen darted in on both sides. Marjorie uttered a high-pitched squeal. Ralph put his arm around his wife and moved her toward the car. He slid into the backseat beside her.

John tossed me the car keys. I gunned the engine and sped away.

Ralph asked where they had come from, and John said, They never leave. They bang on the door and toss garbage on the lawn.

—You're under a lot of pressure. Ralph leaned forward to pat his son's shoulder.

John stiffened but did not speak. His father patted him again. In the rearview mirror, I saw Geoffrey Bough's dissolute-looking blue vehicle and Isobel's gaudy van swinging out into the street behind us.

They hung back when I pulled up in front of Alan's. John locked his arms around his chest and worked his jaws as he chewed on his fiery coal.

I got out and left them to it. The man on the tractor-sized lawn mower waved at me, and I waved back. This was the Midwest.

Alan Brookner opened the door and gestured for me to come in. When I closed the door behind me, I heard a vacuum cleaner buzzing and humming on the second floor, another in what sounded like the dining room. 'The cleaners are here already?'

'Times are tough,' he said. 'How do I look?'