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“Carmine, no! It’s only been a month!”

He gazed around, located the work basket and a tablecloth that was being finished more rapidly than it would have been in her hiking days. “Why,” he demanded, mood darkened to utter discouragement and in need of someone to lash out at, “are you such a miser, Desdemona? Why don’t you spend money on yourself? What’s with this frugal living? Can’t you buy a nice dress once in a while?”

She stood absolutely still, a white line about her compressed lips, her eyes displaying a grief he hadn’t seen there even for Charlie. “I am a spinster, I save for my old age,” she said levelly, “but more than that. In five more years I’m going
home
— home to a place with no violence, no gun-toting cops, and no Connecticut Monster. That’s why.”

“I’m sorry, I had no right to ask. Forgive me.”

“Not today, and perhaps not ever,” she said, opening the door. The outdoor clothes followed their owner, tossed in a heap on the floor. “Goodbye, Lieutenant Delmonico.”

Carmine came over to see the Hug for himself, as thankful as John Silvestri that the winter was proving a hard one after all; the real racial turmoil wouldn’t explode until spring. Only two black men had braved the elements to brandish placards already torn to tatters by the wind. One’s face was familiar; he halted outside the entrance and studied it. Its owner was small, thin, insignificant, very dark skinned, neither handsome nor sexy. So where, where,
where?
Buried memories tended to surface suddenly, as this one did; once things were in Carmine’s mind, they stayed there, resurrected when given a nudge by events. Otis Green’s wife’s nephew. Wesley le Clerc.

He tramped across to le Clerc and his companion, another would-be-if-he-could-be who looked less determined than Wesley.

“Go home, guys,” he said pleasantly, “otherwise we’ll have to dig you out or plough you under. Except, Mr. le Clerc, a word first. Come in out of the cold. I’m not arresting you, I just want to talk, scout’s honor.”

A little to his surprise, Wesley followed him docilely while the other man scuttled away as if let out of school.

“You’re Wesley le Clerc, right?” he asked after they moved inside, stamping the caked snow off their boots.

“What if I am, huh?”

“Mrs. Green’s nephew from Louisiana.”

“Yeah, and I got a record, save you the time looking me up. I’m a known agitator. In other words, a nigger nuisance.”

“How much time have you served, Wes?”

“All up, five years. No stealing hub caps or armed robberies. Just beatin’ on redneck nigger haters.”

“And what do you do in Holloman apart from demonstrating in a peaceful manner and wearing a Black Brigade jacket?”

“Make instruments at Parson Surgical Supplies.”

“That’s a good job, takes some manual and intellectual skill.”

Wesley shaped up to the much bigger Carmine like a bantam rooster to a fighting cock. “What do you care what I do, huh? Think I painted that stuff out there, huh?”

“Oh, grow up, Wes!” said Carmine wearily. “The graffiti’s not Black Brigade, it’s kids from Travis High, you think I don’t know that? What I want to know is why you’re out there freezing your ass off while the weather’s too bad to attract an audience.”

“I’m there to tell Whitey that it’s time to worry, Mr. Smart Cop. You won’t catch this killer ’cos you don’t want to. For all I know, Mr. Smart Cop, you’re the one killing black girls.”

“No, Wes, he’s not me.” Carmine leaned against the wall and eyed Wesley with unmistakable sympathy. “Give up on Mohammed’s way! It’s the wrong way. A better life for black people isn’t going to come through violence, no matter what Lenin said about terror. After all, a good many white people have terrorized black Americans for two hundred years, but has that destroyed the black spirit? Go back to school, Wes, get a law degree. That will help the black cause more than Mohammed el Nesr can.”

“Oh, sure! Where am I going to get the money for that?”

“Making instruments at Parson Surgical Spplies. Holloman has good night schools, and there are bunches and bunches of people in Holloman eager to help.”

“Whitey can shove his lordly patronage up his ass!”

“Who says I’m talking about Whitey? Many of them are black. Businessmen, professional men. I don’t know if they exist in Louisiana yet, but they sure do in Connecticut, and none of them are Uncle Toms. They are working for their people.”

Wesley le Clerc turned on his heel and left, flinging his right fist into the air.

“At least, Wes,” said Carmine, smiling at Wesley’s retreating back, “you didn’t flip me the bird.”

But Wesley le Clerc wasn’t thinking of rude gestures as he scrunched through the worsening snow. He was thinking of Lieutenant Carmine Delmonico in a different way. Bright, very bright. Too cool and sure of himself to give anyone an excuse to cry persecution or even discrimination; his was the soft answer turned away wrath. Only not this time. Not my wrath. Through Otis I have the means to feed Mohammed information he will need come spring. Mohammed looks at me with a little more respect these days, and what’s he going to say when I tell him that the Holloman pigs are still nosing around the Hug? The answer is inside the Hug. Delmonico knows that as well as I do. Rich, privileged Whitey. When every black American is a disciple of Mohammed el Nesr, things are gonna change.

“The way is hard,” said Mohammed el Nesr to Ali el Kadi. “Too many of our black brothers are brainwashed, and too many more have been seduced by Whitey’s greatest weapons — drugs and booze. Even now the Monster has taken a real black girl, our recruitment isn’t picking up enough.”

“Our people need more provocation,” Ali el Kadi answered; that was the name Wesley le Clerc had chosen when he espoused Islam.

“No,” said Mohammed strongly. “Our people don’t need, the Black Brigade does. And not provocation. We need a martyr, Ali. A shining example who will bring us men in tens of thousands.” He patted Wesley/Ali on the arm. “In the meantime, go to your job, do good work there. Enroll in night school. Cultivate that infidel pig, Delmonico. And find out everything you can.”

“He wears some kind of protective suit,” Patrick said to his cousin. “It’s made of a fabric that doesn’t shed any fibers, and whatever he wears on his feet have smooth soles that don’t make footprints unless he steps in mud, which he doesn’t. The suit has a close-fitting bonnet or hood that covers his hair completely, and he’s gloved. With this night abduction, obviously everything he wears is black. He may blacken his face. I’m picking that the suit is rubber and form fitting, like a diving suit.”

“They’re clumsy to move in, Patsy.”

“Not these days, if you can afford the best.”

“And he can afford the best, because I think he has money.”

Corey and Abe’s investigations in Groton had yielded nothing; New Year’s was always rackety.

“Thanks, guys,” Carmine said to them.

No one stated the obvious: that they would know more when Margaretta’s body turned up.

“No, I was up at my place on Cape Cod. The Chathams. When I heard the weather forecast, I decided to come home today.”

So Satsuma had a place in the Chathams, did he? A three-hour drive in that maroon Ferrari. But shorter if the drive had begun in Groton.

“Your courtyard is beautiful,” Carmine said, going over to the transparent wall to gaze through it.

“It used to be, but there are imbalances I am trying to correct. I have not yet succeeded, Lieutenant. Perhaps it is the Hollywood cypress — not a Japanese tree. I put it there because I thought a strand of America was necessary, but perhaps I am wrong.”

“To me, Doctor, it makes the garden — taller, twisted around itself like a double helix. Without it, there’s nothing high enough to reach the top of the walls, and nothing symmetrical.”

“I take your point.”

Like hell you do, thought Carmine. What does a
gaijin
know about gardening the universe?

“Sir, will you give me permission to have someone look at your house on Cape Cod?”

“No, Lieutenant Delmonico, I will not. If you so much as try, I will sue.”

Thus had Monday ended, with nothing to show.

“Half golden labrador, half German shepherd,” said Charles, hanging up the clothing. “We call her a labrashep, and her name is Biddy. It’s okay, sweetheart, the Lieutenant is a friend.”

The dog wasn’t so sure. It decided to allow him in, but it kept a wary eye on him.

“We’re in the kitchen, starting to make a Beethoven dinner. Numbers three, five and seven — we always prefer his odd-numbered symphonies to his even-numbered. Come through. I hope you don’t mind if we sit in the kitchen?”

“I’m glad to sit anywhere, Dr. Ponsonby.”

“Call me Chuck, though for form’s sake, I’ll stick to your official title. Claire always calls me Charles.”

He led Carmine through one of those genuinely 250-year-old houses that sag at the beams and have floors full of undulations and jogs, into a more modern dining room that opened into what was definitely the original kitchen. Here, the wormholes, the fading paint and the splintering wood were authentic: eat your heart out, Mrs. Eliza Smith.

“This must have been separate from the house in the old days,” said Carmine as he shook hands with a woman in her late thirties who looked just like her brother, even to the watery eyes.

“Sit over there, Lieutenant,” she said in a Lauren Bacall voice, waving a hand at a Windsor chair. “Yes, it was separate. Kitchens back then had to be, in case of fire. Otherwise the whole house burned down. Charles and I joined it to the house with a dining room, but oh, what a headache the building process was!”

“Why’s that?” he asked, taking a glass of amontillado sherry from Charles.

“The ordinances insist that we have to build in timber of the same age as the house,” Charles said, seating himself opposite Carmine. “I finally located two ancient barns in upstate New York and bought them both. Too much timber, but we’ve stored it for any future repairs. Good, hard oak.”

Claire was standing in profile to Carmine, wielding a thin-bladed, supple knife that she was using to prepare two thick cuts of filet steak. Awestruck, Carmine watched her deft fingers get the knife under a tendon and strip it off without losing any of the meat; she performed the task better than he could have.

“Do you like Beethoven?” she asked him.

“Yes, very much.”

“Then why not eat with us? There’s plenty of food, I do assure you, Lieutenant,” she said, rinsing the knife under a brass tap over a stone sink. “A cheese and spinach soufflé first, a lemon sorbet to clear the palate, then beef fillet with Bearnaise sauce, new potatoes simmered in homemade beef stock, and petits pois.”

“Sounds delicious, but I can’t stay too long.” He sipped the sherry to find it a very good one.

“Charles tells me another girl is missing,” she said.

“Yes, Miss Ponsonby.”

“Call me Claire.” She sighed, put the knife away and joined them at the table, accepting a sherry as if she could see it.

The kitchen was much as it must always have been, save that where once the great chimney would have held the spits, hooks and bread oven of eighteenth-century cooking, it now held a massive slow combustion stove. The room was too warm for Carmine.

“An Aga stove? I don’t know it,” he said, draining his sherry.

“We bought it in England on our one adventure abroad years ago,” said Charles. “It has a very slow oven for all-day baking, and an oven fast enough to do justice to pastry or French bread. Lots of hot-plates. It supplies us with hot water in winter too.”

“Oil fired?”

“No, it’s wood fired.”

“Isn’t that expensive? I mean, heating oil is only nine cents a gallon. Wood must cost a lot more.”

“It would if I had to buy it, Lieutenant, but I don’t. We have twenty acres of loggable forest up beyond Sleeping Giant, the last land we own apart from these five acres. I cut what I need each spring, replant the trees I take down.”

Jesus, here we go again! thought Carmine. How many Huggers have these secret retreats tucked away? Abe and Corey will have to go up there tomorrow and comb his twenty acres of forest — how they’ll love that with all this snow on the ground! Benjamin Liebman the undertaker has a mortuary so clean that we’d have to catch him in the act and the Prof has a basement full of trains, but a whole goddamn forest —!

A second glass of the Ponsonby sherry made Carmine conscious that he hadn’t eaten breakfast or lunch: time to go.

“I hope you won’t consider my question rude, Claire, but have you always been blind?” he asked.

“Oh, yes,” she said cheerfully. “I’m one of those incubator babies got fed pure oxygen. Blame it on ignorance.”

His rush of pity made him look away, up to where on one wall hung a group of framed photographs, some of them old enough to be sepia daguerrotypes. A strong family resemblance ran through the faces: square adamantine features, fiercely marked brows and thick dark hair. The only different one was clearly the latest of them: an elderly woman whose face was far more reminiscent of Charles and Claire, from its wispy hair to watery pale eyes and long, lugubrious features. Their mother? If so, then they were not in the Ponsonby mold, they were in hers.

“My mother,” Claire said with that uncanny ability to pick out what was going on in the sighted world. “Don’t let my prescience bother you, Lieutenant. To some extent, it’s legerdemain.”

“I can tell she’s your mother, and that you both resemble her rather than the Ponsonby line.”

“She was a Sunnington from Cleveland, and we do take after the Sunningtons. Mama died three years ago, a merciful release. Very severe dementia. But one cannot put a Daughter of the American Revolution in a home for senile old ladies, so I cared for her myself until the bitter end. With some excellent help from the county authorities, I add.”

So it’s a D.A.R. household, Carmine thought. Ponsonby and his sister probably don’t vote for anyone left of Genghiz Khan.

He got up, his head spinning slightly; the Ponsonbys served their sherry in wine glasses, not little sherry glasses. “Thanks for the hospitality, I appreciate it.” He glanced across at the dog, lying with eyes fixed on him. “So long, Biddy. Nice to meet you too.”

“What do you think of the good Lieutenant Delmonico?” Charles Ponsonby asked his sister when he returned to the kitchen.

“That he doesn’t miss much,” she said, folding stiff egg whites into her cheese and spinach sauce.

“True. They’ll be tramping all over our forest tomorrow.”

“Do you care?”

“Not a bit,” said Charles, scraping the raw soufflé into its dish and putting it in the hot oven. “Though I do feel sorry for them. Futile searches are exasperating.”