coat, hide the Trojan Horse disk in it, then leave both behind? Did he run to the back door thinking he could break for the fields and avoid the claustrophobic tunnel altogether? Did he nearly run smack into the deputies who must have been waiting in the backyard even as Drewe and I ate breakfast? Would that have frightened him enough to make him drop the jacket and dart down the tunnel without it? No. Would he take one of my treasured possessions without asking? I remember him admiring the coat sculpture in my office, but-
I stand suddenly. As though sleepwalking, I move up the hallway to my office. I can’t believe the deputies did so much damage in so little time. They dragged furniture away from the walls, pulled guitar cases out from under my bed, and generally trashed anything large enough to conceal a hamster.
But the sculpture of my father’s coat-mounted on long bolts driven into wall studs-remains pristine and untouched, just as Miles must have guessed it would. I stand before it like a votary before an icon, wondering whether this inanimate object that has so long preserved my father’s memory could have provided the spark Miles sought during a desperate moment. The coat sculpture looks impossibly real, the wine-colored “cashmere” slightly wrinkled, as though the coat had just been slipped off after a night of music-making in a smoky club. Even the fine stitching is rendered in the wood. The outer pockets have flaps, but they do not open. One of the deputies probably bruised his knuckles trying to check them.
But the inside breast pocket-thanks to the sculptor’s painstaking technique-is there, somehow cut into the black “silk” lining. With a steady-handed certainty unlike any I’ve ever known, I reach between the wooden lapels and slip two fingers down into that pocket. A thin edge of plastic slides perfectly between my fingertips. When I withdraw my hand, it holds a 3.5-inch floppy disk labeled “TROJAN HORSE.”
“Son of a bitch,” I whisper.
Without hesitation I take the disk over to my Gateway, push it into the floppy drive, and scan the contents of the disk. It contains only two files. One is a WordPerfect file of 10,432 bytes called “Harper.” The other is labeled “E.jpg”-the “.jpg” signifying a graphic file encoded by the standards of the Joint Photographic Experts Group. This must be the Trojan Horse. Hoping for an explanation, I boot up WordPerfect, hit SHIFT, F-10 and retrieve “Harper.” The page-long letter begins:
“Thanks in advance,” I mutter. “Thanks but no thanks.”
The rest of the letter gives detailed instructions for transmitting the JPEG file via EROS. There are almost no typos in that section; Miles must have typed it as soon as he finished the Trojan Horse. Though he doesn’t explain exactly what the Trojan Horse is designed to do, he does say that he based his plan around the likelihood that Brahma would use the new EROS UUEncoder-Decoder program to decode the image file. The Trojan Horse code will probably be visible as a small black line somewhere in the photo when Brahma views it, which I am to explain ahead of time by saying that the picture was digitized with an inexpensive hand scanner.
The problem is that Miles omitted the most crucial fact from his letter: a description of the image contained in the JPEG file. My EROS program will decode JPEG images, but since the Trojan Horse is buried inside this particular file-and I have no idea what destructive function it is designed to carry out-I have no intention of disabling either of my computers by trying to view it.
Since Miles didn’t tell me what the image was, he must have thought the answer would be self-evident. What image could Brahma want badly enough to download into his computer?
A chill races across my shoulders. Would Miles really suggest that I send a photo of my sister-in-law to Brahma? He would. I was willing to use Erin’s personality-at least parts of it-to seduce Brahma, and Miles hasn’t half my moral scruples. But even if he
Then it hits me. He wouldn’t have to use the real Erin. Miles’s latest project was expanding EROS’s software interface to facilitate transmission of graphic images between subscribers. He probably had dozens of digital photos on his hard drive or on disks in his computer bag. As long as one showed a beautiful woman who looked something like I described “Erin,” he would have been set.
Despite my assertions to Miles that our game with Brahma is through, I feel a quickening in my blood. It’s 8:50. Brahma will be checking the Blue Room for “Erin” in ten minutes. I shove my chair away from the Gateway and stand up. The closed-in feeling is on me again, and the disordered room only adds to my anxiety. The closets are the worst. Worthless guitar pedal effects and expensive rack-mount units have been spilled out with equal disregard. Even my video camera lies on the floor beneath a pile of old shoes and boots.
As I pick up the camera, I wonder what it was doing in my closet. We usually keep it on the top shelf in the hall closet, within easy reach if we want to tape Holly during a visit. Drewe couldn’t have put it here; she doesn’t even put
And Miles.
With a hollow feeling in my chest, I pan my eyes across the room. The scattered junk looks indigenous to my office, much of it stuff I’ve sworn a dozen times to throw out, then kept for no defensible reason. But something must not fit this picture.
There. On the right side of the EROS computer table lies a photo album that belongs in the den with all the other albums Drewe meticulously maintains. But this is no ordinary family album. It’s a portfolio from Erin’s modeling days.
I cross the room and open the portfolio with a familiar twinge of guilty knowledge and discovery. A few nights over the past three months-since Erin told me the truth about Holly-I have slipped quietly into the den and brought this album back to my office, where I pored over its pages in a state of time dislocation. It is a strange and terrible thing to know your genes have blended with another’s in the person of a beautiful child that can never be acknowledged.
I know every photograph in the portfolio intimately. The first pages are magazine covers:
Not so with Erin.
Miles was right, the bastard. The feeling never goes away. It never goes away because Erin is life lived too close to the cycle of birth and sex and death that we in the West have tried to deny for too many centuries. A woman who walks among repressed twentieth-century males projecting the tidal power of the moon and the sexual energy of the harvest is like a human low pressure zone. An eye waiting for a hurricane. And I, like so many others, was sucked into it as inexorably as a palm uprooted from an island shore.
Paging quickly through the portfolio, I come to an empty plastic sleeve. I know what belongs here, and I find it at the back of the portfolio, torn by a hasty reinsertion. It’s an eight-by-ten-inch black-and-white photograph. In it, Erin stands in quarter profile on wet stone steps before an arched doorway. She wears a diaphanous black gown, a silver necklace, and silver earrings. Her hair is gathered upon her head, revealing her graceful neck, bare shoulders, and seemingly virginal bosom. Both arms are extended toward the door, offering a silver chalice to a shadowy figure standing just inside the arch. One pale hand is visible in the blackness, waiting to receive the chalice. The great stones forming the arch suggest a castle or cathedral, and they seem to suck the very light from the air, so that even Erin’s dark skin, hair, and eyes appear translucent, as though limned by some inner radiance. The image is a study in contradiction: the gaze of a saint on the face of a harlot, a black gown on a bridal body, warm light flowing from darkness in a scene of carnal communion. The image projects a timeless power that Miles must have recognized the instant he saw it.
I let the album fall shut with a sigh.
My video camera is lying out because Miles used it to reproduce this photograph in digital form. Then he somehow transferred that video image-one frame of it-onto the floppy disk I found in the sculpted coat. He probably had some kind of video-capture device in his computer bag. Miles said his Trojan Horse would be true to its name,
