opaque and wind-lashed sheets of rain where one direction was like another.

* * *

In a violent gray world less than a hundred yards across, they floated face to face with the rim of the life ring between them, eyes half closed against the beating of the rain. Thunder exploded on the heels of a jagged flash of lightning.

‘Why do you suppose she was going that way?’ Karen asked. ‘They couldn’t be looking for us?’

‘No,’ Goddard said. It was brutal, but raising false hopes was even more so. Lind would still be in command, even now that she was afire; there were at least six of them, and they’d all be armed. ‘She could be out of control, or they changed course to keep the fire off the midships house.’

‘Well, they couldn’t find us, anyway. You can’t see fifty yards.’

‘Did you ever see anything of Rafferty?’ he asked.

‘No.’ She wiped water from her face, and shivered. ‘Why do you suppose he did it? One of his own men?’

‘Rafferty was stupid. Lind would probably have killed him later, anyway. I mean, if the thing had worked. They’d never trust a secret like that to some two-bit punk who’d spill it in the first bar he hit.’

There was also a good chance Lind had done it with the knowledge her reaction would be just what it had been, to get her to the rail, but he saw no point in saying so.

‘Do you suppose he was a Nazi too? An American?’

‘Probably,’ Goddard said.

The squall was kicking up a sharp and confused sea atop the swell. Spray blew off it to mingle with the rain. There was so much water in the air that breathing was difficult.

‘It’s strange,’ she said, ‘but I don’t even know if you have any family or not.’

‘A brother in Texas,’ he replied. ‘And an ex-Mrs. Goddard, somewhere in Europe. We communicate through a power of attorney and a bank account; if the dollar holds firm, it’ll be years before she hears about this.’

‘You didn’t have any children?’

‘A daughter,’ he said, ‘by a previous marriage. She was killed in a car crash.’ Then he was surprised. Had he really said that?

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It was five months ago.’

Why? he wondered. Was it the imminence of death, or some latent tendency to spill himself he’d never suspected before, just waiting for a captive audience with no bra to get in the way? Since he’d walked away from the hospital that afternoon in his private and invisible bubble he’d never said anything to anybody except to call Suzanne and tell her that Gerry was dead, he would be home in three hours, and not to be there.

People had asked occasionally, and he’d said he had no children. Once or twice during that marathon drunk some more convivial and inquisitive type had forgotten and asked the question twice, to receive a brief smile that left him with an impression his martini was freezing to a lump of solid ice in his hand. Well, yes, I did have a daughter, but her stepmother and I killed her. How about a refill?

Her arms looked very soft and round on the rim of the life ring. Somehow he wanted to touch them. Water coursed down her face.

‘Did you have any?’ he asked.

‘No.’ Then, without knowing why, she added, 'I had abortions instead. Two of them.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘They were induced. My husband didn’t want children.’

‘I’m not a professional Angeleno,’ Goddard said, ‘but don’t they have the pill in San Francisco?’

‘They were still experimental then.’ She said nothing else. Well, it was an unlikely place to hold a seminar on planned parenthood. But at least neither of them had anybody else to worry about, and if they didn’t start slopping over about each other— So why had he come back here? He didn’t know.

‘I’m sorry I said that,’ he apologized. ‘It must have been left over from some cocktail party. And God damn your husband.’

She gave him a strange look, but said nothing. That was understandable, however; he wasn’t making sense even to himself. If he wanted to stamp his foot and stick out his tongue at somebody, why not Lind, instead of some anonymous dead man?

'I mean, it’s degrading,’ he said, still floundering. ‘For Christ’s sake. I don’t know what I mean.’

‘It’s all right,’ she said gently. 'I don’t even know why I said it.’

We gotta do something with this scene, fellas; it’s fuzzy as hell and the dialogue stinks. Maybe what the script meant was our boy Shrdlu—we got