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Seeing the box in my hands, he wiped his hands on tattered overalls. “Sure.”

We walked to the Kiss plot. It was another clear, gentle evening, fragrant with autumn. A southbound
V
of geese squawked overhead as I stood on Ethel’s grave. “What’s your name?” I asked.

“Hiram Littlefield.”

“I know you’re not a preacher, but could you say something?”

He removed his cap. “I am the resurrection and the life.” He waited. “Praise God Almighty!”

King of all jungles. I handed over the box. “Scatter that for me, would you?” I whispered.

Hiram tossed Fausto high in the air, in several handfuls. The wind took most of him but a few big pieces hit Ethel’s stone
and bounced into the flowers. When the box was empty, Hiram repeated, “Praise God Almighty! Amen!”

Ah, what might have been. I would never fill in the final date on Fausto’s grave: he wasn’t dead yet. Just frozen. Tucked
a few bills into Hiram’s crusty pocket. “Keep the grass cut for me, would you?”

We walked back to the chapel. The dogwoods surrounding it had already lost their leaves. The heaps of garbage had disappeared.
“Trucks came by the other day,” Hiram explained. “Some lady senator startin’ a committee to put everythin’ back in its proper
place.”

Don’t stop righting those headstones, Hiram: your patron saint quit this morning. Then he said, “I told them to start with
the chapel. I know for a fact there’s an antique piano in the basement. Seen it goin’ in with my own eyes just a few weeks
ago, before they board the place up. What a waste.”

Beyond the hedges, an ambulance wailed toward the hospital, a police cruiser flashed toward the jail. I bade Hiram good night
and left the neglected dead. Back to noise, color, mischief: dear life. Traffic crawled past the Jefferson Memorial as if
it had been unveiled only yesterday. Got even slower as I neared the airport.

Flag outside the terminal at half-mast. I doubted that was in honor of Vicky Chickering so I joined the somber huddle beneath
the nearest television. Jojo Bailey was dead. His heart had finally gotten tired of giving blood and never getting any of
it back. I stood through long, reverent footage of his life from Boy Scout to vice president: compared with Jojo, George Washington
was just a hack. Tonight, anyway. Next week at this time, Bailey would be just another obstacle for the graveyard lawn mower.
The news anchors were already getting tired of acting personally bereaved for an ineffective drunk, especially when there
was so much more exciting and unexpected news, like Vicky Chickering’s tragic accident, Senator Perle’s resignation, and,
this just in, Justine Cortot’s fall from her Georgetown balcony. She was not expected to live. What a hellish week for the
Marvels! No one had seen Paula since yesterday but her doctors, the official ones anyway, reported her to be resting well.
As for Bobby, the day had taken its toll. When he’d made his first announcement that morning following Aurilla’s resignation,
he’d looked numb. Early that afternoon when he’d made his second announcement about Jojo, he’d looked worse. But when he made
the last announcement moments ago about Justine Cortot, I felt for him. He had lost his bedrock … join the crowd, sugar. Sorry
I couldn’t be there for you tonight. Soon as Bobby could handle it, Maxine would let him know what had really happened. He’d
calm down once he realized what a favor I had done for him.

As I walked to the gate, the wayside televisions puzzled over Justine’s mysterious fall. She had been under impossible stress
lately and had perhaps developed a dependency on alcohol and chemical relaxants. Flash to a psychologist explaining what normal
Americans could do about job-related stress besides topple off balconies. Nice move, Cecil: a man had to protect his investment
and Justine had definitely crossed the line from slingshot to loose cannon. Poor Duncan.

I called Maxine. “I found Barnard.” Told her where to look and who was responsible then, time being short, boarded my flight
with a load of Germans who had more interest in the booze cart than the sorrows of young Amerika. I didn’t look out the window
as the plane lifted over the Potomac, a dark thread through a city of splendorous, unnatural light.

c
URTIS PICKED ME UP
at the airport in Berlin. Hadn’t seen his calm, black face in aeons. I had missed him. He stared for just a second at my
swollen jaw, then my eyes: damage assessment. I could have looked worse, all things considered. At least this time I wasn’t
returning from the field with two dead lovers and a pack of reporters on my tail. For that, I got a long, strong hug. “Good
flight?” he asked, taking the violin. “Where’s Duncan?”

“Stuck in Cleveland. He should be back tomorrow.” In fifty pieces.

Beautiful autumn morning, just nippy enough to warrant fur collars and felt hats. Curtis looked superb in both. As we walked
to the car, my manager told me where and with whom I was supposed to be playing in the next few weeks. All orchestra dates,
thank God: I wouldn’t be needing an accompanist. Neither Duncan nor I was ready for that yet.

Pulling out of the parking lot, Curtis noticed the rock on my left hand. “Souvenir of Washington?”

It wasn’t a trophy. “From Fausto. He drowned in Belize four days ago. No one knows yet.”

“Sorry.” Curtis wedged the M6 into heavy traffic on the ring road. Instead of conversing, we listened to the radio: even the
Germans were trying to figure out why Aurilla Perle had left Washington hours before Jojo finally ceded his job to her. Family
reasons? Very few correspondents even knew she had a daughter. Ah well, after the cold war fizzled, no European could figure
out American politics. Its only recent constant seemed to be Bobby Marvel’s libido. Rumor was he had been wandering again,
with a much younger woman. “Tired?” Curtis asked, shutting off the radio before we might hear my name mentioned.

“No. Maxine around?”

“She just left. Back in a day or two.”

I inhaled Berlin. It was so much …
older
than Washington. More compact, razed more often: rodents here foraged closer to the ground. Dahlem looked like Fausto’s neighborhood
but not as hilly and my neighbors never threw breakfast parties. Shut my eyes as Curtis parked the M6 next to my Harley in
the garage. Home. That’s where I had wanted to be. Now that I was here, I wasn’t so sure.

He brought my things upstairs and left me alone to pull out the computer and send Maxine a travelogue. When I came down again,
he was in the kitchen making apple strudel: my appetite would eventually return. I sat at the table watching his thick, expert
fingers at work. They were like Fausto’s but a different color. A few people from the papers called, asking if I had been
in Washington recently. Curtis would only tell them I had played a concert at the White House then had moved on to New York
and no, I had nothing to say about either occasion. I opened mail, practiced, napped, waited: Duncan came barreling in that
evening as we were eating supper. I had never seen him look this bad, not even after his comeback recital bombed last spring.
If he had bathed recently, it had been in sour milk. He wore a strange outfit that seemed to come half from Justine, half
from his mother. “Have you been listening to the news?” he screeched, plopping into a chair.

“Sure. They’re expecting riots during the Oktoberfest.”

“American news, you horse! Justine’s in a coma!” He collapsed over a placemat. “ It’s my fault! I should have taken her back
to Berlin!”

I put an arm around his quivering shoulders. “She had a lot of problems that Berlin wouldn’t have solved.”

“Oh shut up! You never liked her!” He thunked the tabletop with his cast. “I don’t believe for one minute she fell. We had
too much to look forward to!”

“She was spaced-out, Duncan.”

“No! The pager did it! She was terrified of the pager!”

I tried to look mystified. “You mean that guy who called her at six in the morning?”

“He called her all the time! She was supposed to be keeping an eye on him. A secret witness or something. Justine said he
was extremely dangerous and all hell would break loose if anyone knew about him. She was a total wreck. We had an awful time
in Cleveland. Shit! I
knew
this would happen!”

“Did she tell you his name? What she was doing with him?”

“No. It was for my own protection. I’m going to find out who he is. Then we’ll see who falls off whose balcony.”

I sighed: another half-assed Lancelot. “I’d be careful, Duncan. You’re going to need proof first.”

“I’ve got proof. That morning Justine rushed out of my house to get back to Washington, she dropped her diary. My mother found
it wedged in the car seat. She’s sending it to me Express Mail.”

Curtis slid a dish of strudel in front of the distraught lover. “I’d take a few days to calm down before doing anything rash.”

“You don’t understand! Justine was all I had! Someone’s going to pay for that!”

Correct, Duncan: you were. I filled my dry mouth with apples. “When’s your cast coming off?”

“Tomorrow.”

“You two can get back to work, then,” Curtis said cheerfully.

“How can you be so obtuse? Can’t you see I’m in
mourning?”

“Get a grip, Duncan. Justine’s not even dead yet.”

My accompanist raged out, slamming many doors. After a moment, Curtis slid Duncan’s untouched strudel onto his own plate and
began eating it. “Is that diary trouble?”

“Depends on what she wrote. I can’t imagine it’s going to be a model of clarity.” The grandfather clock in the hall struck
eight. If Maxine had flown right to Washington after I called her yesterday, she could have hauled that piano out of the chapel
in the cemetery by now. She could have had a chat with Wallace and maybe Bobby and be on her way back to Berlin. I wondered
if she’d get back in time to intercept that Express Mail package or whether I should start thinking about blowing up the post
office: if nothing else, Agent Smith was a thorough girl.

Helped Curtis with the dishes then practiced violin a few hours. The phone rang four times but my housemate wasn’t putting
any calls through. After the fifth, he came to the music room. “Maxine’s on her way.”

Already? I didn’t know whether that was good news. “How’d she sound?”

“Normal.” Curtis delicately cleared his throat. “President Marvel phoned a while ago. I told him you were asleep.”

Queen’s orders, of course. “How’d
he
sound?”

“Wouldn’t know. I’m not as familiar with the man as you are.”

Ah Curtis, still protecting me after all these years. He would be crushed to know I had married someone else, however briefly.
“Bobby was part of the job,” I said, putting away my violin. “The job’s over.”

I was polishing the chrome on my Harley when I felt the air change in the garage. No forewarning footsteps, no scents, just
a dip of the antennae followed by a
whap
of adrenaline: I was in the jungle again, running for my life. Looked up. “Hey.”

Maxine straddled my narrow workbench. “Thanks for finding her.”

I had only provided directions. Didn’t have the stomach for lifting the lid: even Barnard wouldn’t have looked good after
three weeks in a piano. “If it’s any consolation, Chickering almost got me, too. I should have figured it out sooner.”

“You were concentrating on Louis,” Maxine said diplomatically. “He’s back in Belize, I take it.”

Saw green, felt tons of water crash on my chest. Kept buffing chrome. “Working on Tuna’s poison. He was also working on a
cure for Fausto’s seizures. That’s why the two of them needed him out of jail and back in the saddle.”

“They went to a hell of a lot of trouble to do it. The sheer gall of impersonating a president does impress me, though. I
suppose that was Fausto’s style.”

Why play Chopsticks if you could hack
Clair de lunel
“You’d have to be a philosopher to appreciate it.”

“Who would have thought Louis and Fausto were just your starting point?” Maxine handed me a fresh chamois cloth. “This job
needed a traffic controller. So many 747s going for the same landing strip. But that’s Washington.”

I buffed the rear fender until it felt hot. “Bendix and Aurilla almost got away with it. I would never have figured out the
mosquitoes if they hadn’t dragged Gretchen to that dengue ward in Belize. They probably couldn’t find a baby-sitter.”

“I had a chat with Wallace,” the Queen said. “She confessed that she and Chickering moved the piano out of Watergate to the
cemetery. On Paula’s orders.”

“Someone’s got to protect that buffoon of a president.”

“Wallace and Chickering were old friends. Aurilla knew that when she hired Wallace. She probably thought she’d be getting
a direct feed to the First Lady. Never considered that Wallace might be spying in the opposite direction. Which brings us
to our next pair of misfits.” A short pause. “Did you really have to off Chickering?”

“Pardon me. I was paralyzed, if you recall.” Checked the Harley’s rearview mirrors. “Rhoby did the dastardly deed.”

“After you egged the old girl into a fight. You could have walked out without a scratch.”

“Look, you told me to find out who killed Barnard. Did you really expect me to stop there? These cocky Rasputins think they
can get away with everything all the time. If it weren’t for me, they would have.”

“What can I say? Bravo.”

At least I hadn’t killed anyone on purpose. I just had a special gift for handing the knife to the lunatic with a better grasp
of black and white. So was I evil? Couldn’t answer that without a philosopher. “No doubt you visited Bobby. How’d he take
your horror story?”

“He was stunned, to put it mildly. He had no idea Aurilla was about to screw him. Or that you had no intention of doing so.
He wasn’t pleased about the double.” Maxine sighed. “Which takes us back to Fausto. Bobby wants his head.”

“He ain’t gonna get it.” I swung a leg over the leather pillion. “Fausto’s dead.”

“Accident?”