Typrose

Typrose du jour: "Seethe little baby lying in the manger ..."

'Cause having a Christmas birthday always sucks ...

Typrose

Typrose du jour: "Sixteen men on a dead man's cheat ..."

Yo ho ho and an ace up the sleeve?

Today's Early Five

1. Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy (Arthur Fiedler)
2. Rockin Around the Christmas Tree (Knudson Brothers)
3. Go Tell It on the Mountain (Oakridge Boys)
4. For Unto Us a Child is Born (Mormon Tabernacle Choir)
5. Rudolph the Nose (Canadian Brass)

Typrose

Typrose du jour: "... heavy thunderstorms, chance of jail ..."

The weather is positively criminal

Typrose

Typrose du jour: "One Bitten, Twice Why"

... a big hit in '87 for Great What, right?

Typrose

Typrose du jour: "... and Bong Crosby ..."

Oh, yeah -- he did all those 40s and 50s "Road" movies with Bob Hemp ...

Typrose

Typrose du jour: "Away in a manager ..."

No price check for his bed

Today's Early Five

1. I'm Checkin' Out (Meryl Streep)
2. Eh, Cumpari (Julius La Rosa)
3. Saturday Night in Toledo Ohio (John Denver)
4. Bucimis (unidentified Macedonian band)
5. This Ain't a Scene (Fall Out Boy)

Today's Early Five

1. Love Stinks (J Geils Band)
2. A Tisket A Tasket (Ella Fitzgerald)
3. I've Done Everything Hank Williams Did But Die (Keith Whitby)
4. Day is Done (Peter Paul and Mary)
5. Call of Cthulu (Metallica)

Typrose

Typrose du jour: "... Spring musical production will be My Fir Lady ..."

No doubt a wooden performance

Today's Early Five

1. Drill Ye Tarriers (Mitchell Trio)
2. Waking Up in Vegas (Katy Perry)
3. Duetto di due gatti (Dames Felicity Lott, Ann Murray)
4. Smoke on the Water (Deep Purple)
5. Anthem (Tommy Korberg)

Typrose

Typrose du jour: "all airlines have raised heir prices over Christmas"

(unless you give birth to them in a stable ...)

Typrose

Typrose du jour: " ... no blinding moment of luck, no Hair Mary pass ..."

Unless you're talking about Troy Polamalu ...

Today's Early Five

1. You Shook Me All Night Long (AC/DC)
2. No Matter What Shape (T-Bones)
3. Hawaiin War Chant (Jack De Mello)
4. Cleopatra, Queen of Denial (Pam Tillis)
5. Steppin' Out With My Baby (Swingle Singers)

Typrose

Typrose du jour: "... I'm ovo-laxo vegetarian ..."

And, honey, I am the s**t!

Today's Early Five

1. Sisters (Bette Midler, Linda Ronstadt)
2. Way I Am (Eminem)
3. Science Fiction Double Feature (Richard O'Brien)
4. Overture, Flower Drum Song (Original B'way Cast)
5. Cat Macro (Tom Smith)

Typrose

Typrose du jour: "Thou therefore grind up thy loins ... "Jer 1:17

Yow. No wonder Jeremiah is considered a bad news kind of prophet.

Today's Early Five

1. Jumping Jack Flash (Rolling Stones)
2. Woman's God a Mind to Change (Bacon Brothers)
3. My Ding a Ling (Chuck Berry)
4. Mandy Lane (Chad Mitchell)
5. Friends in Low Places (Garth Brooks)

Typrose

Typrose du jour: "Holy infant so tender and milf ..."

Places I just do not want to go, images I do not need in my head ...

Today's Early Five

1. One at a Time (Who)
2. Kansas City Star (Roger Miller)
3. Rednecks (Randy Newman)
4. When You Say Nothing at All (Alison Kraus)
5. Papa Don't Preach (Madonna)

Today's Early Five

1. Old Abe Lincoln (Pete Seeger)
2. Windy (Association)
3. Mein Herr Marquis (Charlotte Church)
4. Dog Police (Dog Police)
5. Lie to Me (Eminem)

Typrose

Baaack, after hiatus of misery ...

Typrose du jour: " ... WANTED, DEAD OR ALICE ... "

But not Susie.

Typrose

Typrose du jour: "... and other frat house drinking parities ..."

One beer for you, and one beer for you ... wait your turn now ..."

Today's Early Five

1. Blackbird (Beatles)
2. Humoresque (JoAnn Castle)
3. It's a Sin to Tell a Lie (Something Smith and the Red Heads)
4. Anchors Aweigh (Robert Shaw Chorale)
5. Shine Jesus Shine (Brassmen)

Typrose

Typrose du jour: " ... sustaining a blood clit, otherwise known as a thrombus .."

Isn't that more a throbbing than a thrombus kind of thing?

Today's Early Five

1. Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves (Cher)
2. Tonight You Belong to Me (Patience and Prudence)
3. The Gambler (Kenny Rogers)
4. Pancreas (Weird Al Yankovic)
5. Rockin' Little Angel (Ray Smith)

Typrose

Typrose du jour: "... mad with lust, forsaking his sacred cows..."

Wine and the light of a full moo will do that to you

Today's Early Five

1. From Me to You (Beatles)
2. Middle Age Blues Boogie (Saffire Uppity Blueswomen)
3. Bucimis (Unknown performers)
4. Caro nome (Joan Sutherland)
5. When You Say Nothing at All (Alison Kraus)

Typrose

Typrose du jour: "... when the Human Gnome Project was completed ..."

by Rumpelstiltzkin, PhD?

Today's Early Five

1. Amazing Grace (Canadian Brass)
2. Pancreas (Weird Al Yankovic)
3. Sisters (Bette Midler, Linda Ronstadt)
4. Put Down the Duckie (Muppets and friends)
5. Ticks (Brad Paisley)

Typrose

Typrose du jour: "... his previous album, 'One Trick Poky'... "

by Simon and Gumby?

Today's Early Five

1. All You Need Is Love (Beatles)
2. I Like to Fuss (Patti LuPone)
3. The Rising (Bruce Springsteen)
4. Drop That Name! (Bells Are Ringing OBC)
5. It's a Heartache (Bonnie Tyler)

Typrose

Typrose du jour: Sun Tzu's “The Arf of War”

As in, “Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of ... ”?

Today's Early Five

1. Java (Al Hirt)
2. Top of the World (Carpenters)
3. Imagine (John Lennon)
4. Diggy Diggy Lo (Doug Krenshaw)
5. Touch a Touch a Touch Me (Susan Sarandon)

Typrose

Typrose du jour: "... celebrate the season with the ick of the crop ..."

For Halloween, maybe ...

Today's Early Five

1. Chantilly Lace (Big Bopper)
2. Love and Marriage (Frank Sinatra)
3. Funkytown (Alvin and Chipmunks)
4. Superstition (Stevie Wonder)
5. It's a Long Way to the Top (AC/DC cover by the Wiggles. Really)

Typrose

Typrose du jour: "Charmin Mao"

He's a Commie! He's fluffy! He won't stick to your butt!

Today's Early Five

1. Silver Beaver (Saffire)
2. Another Reason I Don't Keep a Gun in the House (Christopher Smith)
3. Shook Me All Night Long (AC/DC)
4. Call Me Al (Paul Simon)
5. Ghost Riders in the Sky (Johnny Cash)

Typrose

Typrose du jour: "... shorts were exchanged in the predawn hours ..."

And probably a bodily fluid or two.

Today's Early Five

1. Porcupine Pie (Neil Diamond)
2. Little Spring Song (Hudson Shad)
3. Honesty (Billy Joel)
4. Slow Boat to China (Bette Midler, Barry Manilow)
5. Anything Goes (Carolyn O'Connor)

Typrose

Typrose du jour: " ... famous, flab led walls of Jericho ..."

That sorta bounced when they fell down?

Today's Early Five

1. Snakes (Wiggles)
2. Stupid Cupid (Neil Sedaka)
3. Highway to Hell (AC/DC)
4. Bad Things (Jace Everett)
5. Love the Way You Lie (Eminem, Ehianna)

Typrose

Typrose du jour: " ...trembling on the egg of adulthood .."

Just like Humpty Dumpty?

Today's Early Five

1. Video Killed the Radio Star (Buggles)
2. Weasel Stomping Day (Weird Al Yankovic)
3. Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da (No Doubt)
4. Bad Things (Jace Everett)
5. Kitty (Presidents of the US of A)

Mondegreen Monday

"Great misshapen Mony, Mony ..."

(Correct words: "Wake me, shake me, Mony, Mony ...")

Typrose

Typrose du jour: "Usage, eggs, and rye toast..." Breakfast of Grammar Goons

Today's Early Five

1. How Does That Grab You Darlin'? (Nancy Sinatra)
2. Save the Last Dance For Me (Drifters)
3. Take Five (Dave Brubeck)
4. St. James Infirmary (Cab Calloway)
5. Runaway (Del Shannon)

Typrose

Typrose du jour: "... alas, he was farted never to return.."

Hmm, and Charlie rode the MTA in Bean Town. Makes sense.

Today's Early Five

1. Funeral of a Good Grrl (Bif Naked)
2. Laendler (OBC, Sound of Music)
3. Somebody Stole My Gal ("Crazy Otto" [Johnny Maddox])
4. I'll Fly Away (George Jones)
5. Nobody But Me (Human Beinz)

Typrose

Typrose du jour: "serving the homeless and indignant of Hamilton County ..."

I'd probably be a little touchy, too.

Today's Early Five

1. Winchester Cathedral (New Vaudeville Band)
2. Bristol Stomp (Dovells)
3. In dulci jubilo (Swingle Singers)
4. You've Lost That Loving Feeling (Righteous Brothers)
5. I Don't Believe You Like My Shirt (Lou and Peter Berryman)

Typrose

Typrose du jour: "... ignited a firestorm of outage.."

Harder I try to wrap my mind around this one, the weirder it becomes

Today's Early Five

1. Silver Beaver (Saffire)
2. Tweedlee Dee (LaVern Baker)
3. Black Magic Woman (Carlos Santana)
4. The Stripper (David Rose)
5. On the Road Again (Willie Nelson)

Typrose

Typrose du jour: "... ¼ lb. hamburger panties ..."

Like that edible underwear stuff? Only raw?

Today's Early Five

1. Achy Breaky Heart (Billy Ray Cyrus)
2. Syncopated Clock (Leroy Anderson)
3. Cowtown (They Might Be Giants)
4. Merry Minuet (Kingston Trio)
5. Hoedown (Emerson Lake and Palmer)

Typrose

Typrose du jour: "... best stored in an insulted carrier. .."

Those carriers can be so damn touchy

Today's Early Five

1. Belly Up to the Bar, Boys (Debbie Reynolds)
2. Come Together (Beatles)
3. Fur (Muppets)
4. Cat Macros (Tom Smith)
5. Moskau (Dschinghis Khan)

Typrose

Typrose du jour, thanks to Jan: "meat processors can eek out a few more percent of profit..."

Making laws, making sausages ... same-same

Today's Early Five

1. Tammy (Debbie Reynolds)
2. One More Minute (Weird Al Yankovic)
3. Rednecks (Randy Newman)
4. Sorry her lot (Glyndebourne Opera Company)
5. Smoke on the Water (Purple Haze)

Typrose

Typrose du jour: "... all that Strum and Drang... "

Metallica?

Today's Early Five

1. Magic Moments (Perry Como)
2. Sunshine, Lollipops (Lesley Gore)
3. Husbands and Wives (Roger Miller)
4. Wild One (Bobby Rydell)
5. Stuck Like Glue (Sugarland)

Typrose

Typrose du jour: ".. Relax with a warm bath or a hot show ..."

Annnd this relaxes me how?

Today's Early Five

1. At the Hop (Danny and the Juniors)
2. Handy Man (Jimmy Jones)
3. The Drunken Sailor (Swingle Singers)
4. Lost Chord (Vocal Majority)
5. Hot Patootie - Bless My Soul (Meat Loaf)

Typrose

Typrose du jour, presented without comment: "... now with Spandex for a snigger fit."

I'm sorry, If you saw my behind you'd see the humor ...

Today's Early Five

1. For the Longest Time (Billy Joel)
2. Lost in the Fifties Tonight (Ronnie Milsap) This is "our song."
3. Sweet Soul Music (Arthur Conley)
4. Bad Romance (Lady GaGa)
5. Can't Help Lovin' That Man of Mine (Charlotte Church)

Today's Early Five

1. Mr. Roboto (Styx)
2. Closing Time (Semisonic)
3. You Don't Have to Say You Love Me (Dusty Springfield)
4. Ballad of Irving (Frank Gallop)
5. Blah Blah Blah (Rockapella)

Typrose

Typrose du jour: "... nor iron bars a cafe ..."

Except at the San Quentin Starbucks

Typrose

Typrose du jour: "failed Intermediate Tying"

So they kicked her out of Bondage Club?

Today's Early Five

1, You Got to See Mama Every Night (Tennessee Ernie Ford)
2. Radio Ga Ga (Queen)
3. Mr. Mom (Lonestar)
4. Funky Town (Alvin and the Chipmunks)
5. Dancing in the Streets (Martha and the Vandellas)

Typrose

Typrose du jour: "Elands, aoudads, and kudos ..."

Same backatcha!

Today's Early Five

1. Chi mi frena in tal momento (Pons, Domingo, Rayson, Hecht, et al, 1961)
2. Mean Kitty Song (Safety Man Films)
3. Marie (Mandy Patinkin)
4. Glow Worm (Spike Jones and his City Slickers)
5. Enter Sandman (Metallica)

Typrose

Typrose du jour: "Stroke up the band..."

Isn't that what groupies are for?

Today's Early Five

First 5 MP3s of the day:
1. Highway to Hell (AC/DC)
2. Love Lifted Me (Statler Brothers)
3. Crying (Roy Orbison)
4. Lead On, O King Eternal (Haven)
5. Milord (Theresa Brewer)

Adventures in Closed Captioning

"two court pirates bowl" = "two quart Pyrex bowl"

In case you're still looking for Jack Sparrow or Long John Silver to bake your casserole in

Typrose

typo/spell-check fail du jour: "Bright Lights, Bug City"

Like moths to a flame?

Today's Early Five

1. Where Is the Love? (Helen Reddy)
2. Need Your Loving (Queen)
3. Mississippi Mud (Bobby Darin, Johnny Mercer)
4. Georgia (Ray Charles)
5. Way I Am (Eminem)

A Serpent's Tooth

A Serpent’s Tooth

Germany and Belgium

October, 1987

They could have been any two elderly gentlemen, swathed in overcoats against the autumn chill and sharing a bottle at a café on the seedier side of Hamburg. Armand Brecht, of course, would have argued that Hamburg had no non-seedy aspects, but that was Armand for you.

They were that rarity: old and wealthy mercenaries.

Armand, who for most of his postwar career had operated under the trade name Janvier, poured himself another glass of schnapps. “The weather is far too damp this year,” he groused. “It will be an evil winter.” Brecht had leveraged a modest inheritance, a family name well-known in financial circles, and a series of shrewd investments based on insider knowledge into a reputable company that specialized in real estate and dabbled in venture capital.

His host that evening had operated under the trade name Friedrich. Without an embarrassingly successful family to trade on, he had slowly built himself an empire of strip clubs and brothels in eleven countries. “I plan to winter with my daughter and her family,” he said. “She has purchased a resort property in Haiti.”

“A fine move. Is she still with—“

“No, he’s flown the coop. Boys these days—“

“I agree. Unable to stay the course.”

Friedrich picked at the remains of his sausage. “I should stay away from this stuff, she says,” he confided, with angry emphasis on the pronoun. “She wants to keep me alive by making my life a living death.”

“My problem is the reverse; my wife would probably suggest I take up bungee-jumping or skateboarding if she thought that I would take her seriously and that it would hurry me along a little faster toward her inheritance.”

“So you’re here in our beautiful city to escape her charms?”

Armand allowed himself a canny grin. “And to see a beautiful, ah, professional, if you get my meaning. One who relieves me of many cares.”

Friedrich chuckled and raised his glass in a mock toast.

Armand acknowledged the compliment shamelessly.

The professional, however young and admittedly beautiful, worked at a local clinic specializing in alternative medicine, including a magnetism-and-hot-oil treatment that Armand found alleviated some of the pain in his arthritic hands and feet.

“And speaking of cares,” Friedrich said, “I was, of course, saddened to see that your protégé, Esau, had met with a bad end.”

Armand gaped at him. “Esau?”

“God in heaven, you were not aware? Janvier, my friend, I am so dreadfully sorry! I had not planned on being the bearer of sorrowful news.”

Esau? Dead? How could that possibly be?

Brecht’s vitals twisted with shock and sorrow, but he tried to keep his tone light. “That’s quite all right, my dear Friedrich. At our age, we often have to say farewell, do we not? Naturally, we assume that we will predecease those who are so much younger than ourselves, but—” He cleared his throat. “I dare not suppose that you happened to hear how—“

“Well, apparently—he was young, after all, and boys will be boys—apparently he was following his dick around, as they say, and got himself involved with a Kuwaiti lass. I gather that she came from one of those families that one does not cross lightly. The way I hear it, the two of them were executed quietly by family retainers.”

“Astounding.”

It was more than astounding. Armand was a great believer in having at hand for emergency use fables which would fake his death. Such fallbacks occasionally proved necessary when it was important not only to drop out of sight, but to discourage anyone from ever looking for you again, and death was the ultimate discouragement. He had helped the very bright, very deadly young man whose working name was Esau to arrange his own fables.

Neither scenario had anything to do with Kuwait.

“It’s a small world we live in nowadays, but some things never change, do they?” Friedrich continued. “You had quite a hand in his training, did you not?”

Armand nodded.

“I always thought so! Talented lad, from all I ever saw or heard of him. Milanese, was he not?”

“Indeed.”

“I thought perhaps he might have been. My first wife was from Milan, and the accent is unmistakable.”

Armand drank deeply of schnapps. Within him, grief and rage warred. His face reflected merely an old man’s pragmatism. “It was I who discovered him, you know.”

“I had no idea.”

“Oh, yes.” He tried to infuse his voice with a casual, but bittersweet tone. “A wild child, a little street rat, but with extraordinary potential, once I got him cleaned up and slapped some manners into him. But enough reminiscence! What is this I hear of you? Is it true that you are a great-grandfather?”

***

When he returned to Brussels, he kept his own counsel for two days. On Sunday, he invited his wife to the city—he and Simone had not inhabited the same house for the last eight years of their marriage—and took her to the ballet. On Monday, he got his hair cut (strange how, as his hair dwindled, the time and expense required to groom it increased!). He consulted his tailor about a pair of new suits and a coat with a fur-trimmed collar for the winter season.

On Tuesday, he visited his office. He reviewed the week’s numbers, flirted briefly with his receptionist, and returned a few phone calls.

As lunchtime approached, he gripped his cane tightly and stalked down the hall to his great-nephew’s office. “Mathieu,” he said.

Mathieu looked up from the spreadsheets he was reconciling and brushed back the hair from his eyes. He took the pencil from between his teeth, rose respectfully from his chair and smiled. “Welcome back, Uncle Armand. I’ve met with the people from the Hilgess Corporation.”

Armand did not return the smile. “My office. Two minutes.”

He turned and left without further word.

His nephew appeared in the doorway of his office exactly on time, probably to the second. He could be assiduously anal like that when the mood struck him.

“Mathieu,” Armand said heavily. He did not ask the young man to sit down, and Mathieu knew better than to take a seat without an invitation.

Mathieu bowed his head, ever so slightly. “Uncle.” Nevertheless, he lounged in the doorway with his arms folded and one hip against the jamb.

Armand Brecht had, in one way or another, been responsible for much of the rearing of the boy. Little Matti was twenty-two now and built along the lines of his dancer mother and his acrobatic great-uncle: short in stature, but lean, agile and hard-muscled. The mulishness that had been so adorable in the puppy-eyed child was now merely infuriating.

“Close the door,” Armand said, “and stand up straight. What in the name of all that is holy have you done with your breeding?”

Mathieu muttered an apology. He shut the door, and when he stood before the desk, his posture was perfect.

“I had an interesting trip,” Armand began, watching his nephew’s face carefully. “My arthritis is better, not that you have inquired after my health. Oh, do try not to be so obvious about trying not to sigh and roll your eyes! Make an effort to live down your immaturity for a minute or so.”

“I’ll do my best,” Mathieu said, ill-concealing his petulance.

“You can imagine my surprise when I learned this past week that you are dead.”

Mathieu barely batted an eye. “I thought it better not to tell you,” he replied. “I was not sure whether you would need some sort of deniability.”

It was true that Armand had always walked a bit of a fine line, passing off his own family, the grandson of a younger brother whom Armand particularly loathed, as an Italian child of the streets. Nevertheless, their shared vocation was based on lies. The only individuals likely to be angered by the deceit were various members of the, oh, so conventional Brecht family and their annoying American counterparts, the Colthanes.

And the Witherspoons, of course, but they danced to the Colthanes’ tune.

“More likely, you feared that I would stop you.”

“Not at all, Uncle. You could not stop me without killing me—and since that would have the same effect, your prior knowledge was irrelevant.”

“Irrelevant?”

“Except, possibly, in terms of your own contacts in the business.”

“How very kind of you.” Armand sat back in his chair. Eighty years of hiding his emotions enabled him to maintain a calm tone and a blank face. “You know, I have given you all of the tools at my command. I have offered you skills and contacts beyond most people’s imagination.”

“I remain deeply grateful, Uncle Armand.”

“Do you, now?”

“Yes.”

The boy was refusing to be shaken. It was maddening: For almost twenty years Armand had toiled and slaved to turn aside the boy’s fire and train him to be stone. Now that Armand actually needed a little bit of the flame, the boy had suddenly gone all granite on him. Armand cleared his throat several times to give himself the luxury of devising a new way to get to Mathieu. He needed rage, complaints, or excuses—not this damnable calm.

“I confess that I am shocked,” the old man said at last. “I see in you no evidence whatsoever of gratitude; only of an ambitious little boy who will do whatever it takes to get himself where he wants to be. I took your modest gifts and turned you into an agent who could have reached the highest levels of power. Now, I suppose that you have some idiot fantasy of making a killing in the American stock market or managing leveraged buyouts or whatever the bean-counting hordes fancy this year. It is business, is it not? You don’t imagine yourself trading on your mother’s name and dancing, or playing that ridiculous fiddle of yours?”

“It’s a double bass, Uncle Armand. And I know that I have neither the talent nor the drive to make a career for myself in music or dance.” Mathieu replied. “And, yes, sir, business interests me.”

“And life doesn’t? Power doesn’t? God in Heaven, I have made you a young prince and you prefer to be a nebbish—“

Mathieu’s brows knit.

“Yiddish. A useful word. A timid, mousy, ineffectual creature.”

“Aha. Thank you.”

“And the use of the word does not even insult you.”

“It’s a word, Uncle.”

“So is whore.”

His nephew nodded. “So it is, Uncle.”

At the last minute, Armand decided to abandon that line of conversation. It had failed to hit its mark. Worse, any exploration of the various meanings of the word whore could lead to tiresome and awkward accusations and counter-accusations about small favors that Armand had asked the boy to perform for certain powerful persons in the past.

Time for the heavy artillery.

“After all these years, Mathieu, it grieves me that you care so little for what I have given you. I am, after all, the only adult male who has ever shown the slightest interest in treating you like a son.”

The boy’s face remained impassive, but Armand could tell from his eyes that he had found the chink in his armor.

“I have made you my son and my heir, Mathieu. I have no intention of going back on my promises to you. Nevertheless, I wish you had honored your promises to me in the same way.”

“Touché,” Mathieu murmured.

“And yet, given a chance to take my place at the world’s banquet table, to drink deep of life and reach for the stars, you appear to be more interested in grubbing for gold, like your pathetic nebbish grandfather and his brothers.”

There was a long, painful pause.

“Yes, sir.”

“I am deeply disappointed.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Is this point where I play the monster and deny you the inheritance that I have promised you all of these years?”

The boy’s eyes darkened, and for the first time Armand saw flashes of anger. “Sir, if I stayed beside you, it was not because of any promise of an inheritance.”

“Yet clearly your staying has very little to do with respect for my livelihood, my friends, with everything that I stand for.”

Another pause. Mathieu had to use silence as a weapon, because, alas, he would never be as verbally astute as his uncle. Sometimes Armand thought he could actually watch the thoughts forming behind his eyes.

“As you said, Uncle,” Mathieu replied, his voice even, “you are the only person who has shown any interest in being a father to me. Is that not enough reason to stay?”

Armand made a dismissive gesture. “Leave me. Clear out your desk and get out, you self-centered little ingrate! Damn you, you have betrayed me. Considering all that you know about me, for my own—and my wife’s—protection, I should arrange to have you genuinely eliminated.”

Oh, dear. Bad move. Exceptionally bad move.

Fire flashed behind the ice, but only a coldly polite smile showed on the boy’s face. “You are welcome to try,” Mathieu said in a dangerously civil tone. His posture changed only infinitesimally, but Armand read the coiled-snake intensity behind the shift.

The boy knew everything that Armand knew about the arts of surveillance and murder; moreover, Mathieu’s strength and agility now far outstripped Armand’s—and the boy had managed to arrange his own fable. God only knew how many contacts Mathieu had developed on his own in the business, or for what reason.

Time for an orderly withdrawal.

“Have I taught you all of this, given you a lifetime’s worth of knowledge and experience, all for nothing?”

The challenging intensity faded, and the boy had the good grace to bow his head. “To the extent that your life tends to rule out some of the things I want—“

“You want? You want? You think yourself old enough to make that kind of decision alone? You think your wisdom equals mine? An abacus, is that what you want? To sit in your little room and count your coins and play it safe?”

“To the extent that I want a wife, and children, and an end to the pretend, and the fear, and the second and third and fourth identities, yes.” The boy looked at him, and his expression was harder than Armand had ever seen it before. “I am not constructed like you, Uncle. You thrive on that life. I don’t.”

“You could, if you wanted to.”

“That may be true. But I want the other things more.”

“More even than pleasing me?”

Ice in his eyes. “Yes, Uncle.”

“So, what do you want of mine? Have I anything that you value?”

“Your good will. Shall I leave you now?”

Armand gave up. “No, Mathieu. You will always have my good will, in this life, or any life. However, since you are determined to chain yourself to the abacus, then let us send you out on your own in search of challenges more to your liking. If you must count beans, which of my beans interests you the most?”

No hesitation. “Margate-Broussard.”

“A poor choice.”

“I disagree. I see a lot of potential there, if it’s managed properly.”

“It’s in the United States. You have always said that you preferred not to live in the same country as your father’s family. Has that changed?”

“I think I’m ready to face them now.”

“Very well, then. Do you have a business plan?”

Mathieu smiled. “I do.”

“Bring it here.”

“No, Uncle.” As Armand stiffened, his nephew continued, “Allow me and Belle to take you and Simone to dinner tomorrow night, and afterward, I will show you what I think we can do with Margate-Broussard.”

“Belle, eh? Has she moved in with you yet?”

The boy looked faintly abashed. “Yes.”

“So this is a serious relationship?”

“Not really.”

Ah, good. Something he could understand. “Just less tedious and expensive than having to buy it, eh?”

A faint grin. “That was the idea, but—“

“In practice it’s a little stickier, eh?”

“Yes—and a lot more expensive.”

“It’s good you’re learning this now. You were entirely too idealistic about your love life.”

“You may be right, Uncle.”

Armand gazed into Mathieu’s almost-black eyes, the Dugas eyes: his mother’s eyes, his brother’s eyes, his niece’s eyes. His own. Certainly the closest he would ever come to parenthood, to immortality. The one human being who knew everything—well, a good deal, at least—about what Armand had needed to do in order to survive and prosper in his life. Recipient of both Armand’s boasts and his confessions.

“So,” he said heavily. “Why are you standing there like a stunned goat? Get us some brandy, and tell me what you learned in your meetings with the Hilgess people.”

Typrose

Typrose du jour: "Glow gently, sweet Afton ..."

Or, as Randy Newman would sing, "Burn on, big river ..."?

Today's Early Five

1. Don't Stop Me Now (Queen)
2. Stay (Frankie Valli)
3. The Joker (OBC, The Roar of the Greasepaint, the Smell of the Crowd)
4. My Way (Frank Sinatra)
5. I've Done Everything Hank Williams Did but Die (Keith Whitley)

Typrose

typo/spell-check fail du jour: "... keeps your toilet blow clean and fresh ..."

Preserving the puke? Ah, good show.

Today's Early Shuffle

Top 5 MP3s this morning:
1. The Happening (Supremes)
2. Nessun dorma (Placido Domingo)
3. Buttons and Bows (Doris Day)
4. Jumping Jack Flash (Rolling Stones)
5. I Palindrome I (They Might Be Giants)

Typrose

typo/spell-check fail du jour: "... continue to display the Stars and Sprites proudly ..."

And pixies. Don't forget the pixies.

Today's Early Shuffle

Top 5 this morning:
1. A New Argentina (Original B'way Cast)
2. Julida Polka (Polka Family)
3. Stranger on the Shore (Mr. Acker Bilk)
4. Generic Up-Tempo Folk Song (Limeliters)
5. Dock of the Bay (Otis Redding)

Today's Early Shuffle

Top of the MP3 player this morning:
1. Peaches (Presidents of the United States of America)
2. Marshall Mathers (Eminem)
3. SIde by Side (Kay Starr)
4. Hey, You in the Crowd (Harper's Bizarre)
5. Strike Up the Band (Ella Fitzgerald)

Typrose

Double-scoop, almost too good to be true typo/spell-check fail du jour: "The House of the Sven Garbles."

Oy. What can I possibly say?

Typrose

typo/spell-check fail du jour: "... with the assistance of Glinda, the Food Witch ..."

And her ruby red suppers.

Today's Early Five

First up on the MP3 player this morning:
1. Tell Old Bill (Mitchell Trio)
2. Evolution Mama (Even Dozen Jug Band)
3. In enterprise of martial kind (D'Oyly Carte Opera Company)
4. Part-time Lover (Stevie Wonder)
5. Let the River Run (Carly Simon)

Typrose

typo/spell-check fail du jour: "Toady, while the blossoms still cling to the vine ..."

And make it good.

Today's Early Five

Top of the ol' Rhythm Box this morning:
1. Thriller (Michael Jackson)
2. Walk on the WIggly Side (Wiggles)
3. Dirty Deeds Done Cheap (AC/DC)
4. Drive My Car (Beatles)
5. Personal Jesus (Depeche Mode)

The Transparent Boy

The Transparent Boy

Lausanne, Switzerland

March, 1973

This is how bad it was: His parents could not even agree on which language they would use for their arguments.

Matti rolled to his side and gnawed at the cuticle of his left thumb.

One floor below, Claudine screamed in her artsy, la-de-da, annoyingly poetic-reference-laden Parisian French. Her stiletto heels clicked on the carpet, on the parquetry directly under the boys’ bedroom, and on the stone floor. She shut herself up in her sitting room and slammed the door. His father followed her in his thick-soled shoes and flung open the door. He shouted at her in his Midwestern American, with its monosyllabic curses and brutally drawn-out R sounds; its aggressive, snarling vowels. Then Big Cy’s shoes reversed the direction, across stone, parquetry, and carpet. He shut himself up in the music room and slammed the door.

Matti punched at his pillow quietly, hoping not to rouse his elder brother. Matti was not quite eight and still a day student. Juni had just turned eleven — was home this weekend, in fact, to celebrate his birthday — and in his second year of boarding school. Matti hated for his brother to hear the fighting. He suspected that a good brother, a competent brother, would have kept the household calm for Juni’s occasional visits.

After a moment, the sitting room door opened, and once again his mother made her way toward the music room for one last word, one last tap-tap-tap-slam.

Recently, this drama was playing out almost every evening that his father arrived home from the lab before his mother retired for the night.

Juni was already awake, however, and sitting upright with his arms folded across his chest. “They’re arguing about you, Goose-boy,” he whispered. “Can you hear that? They’re arguing about you and Uncle Armand.”

Matti had not known, but he would not be surprised, either. In his parents’ angry, poisonous world, he made as likely a target as anything – likelier than most, in fact. Did they not, after all, when they thought the boys could not hear, refer to Juni as The Perfect One and to Matti as The Impossible One?

For the moment, he said nothing. He adjusted the covers over his shoulder and returned to what he had been doing to block out his parents’ argument. He had been imagining that he was holding his violin, pretending to play one of the songs his father played on his big black stereo in the music room -- a cheerful tune that featured someone whistling the melody line. Even now Matti smiled as his fingers danced over imaginary strings.

Juni seemed to be listening as hard as he could. “Hey, Goose-boy, what are they saying? Are you still going away for trips with Uncle Armand?”

“Yes.”

“An old circus clown?” Juni’s voice barely concealed his scorn. “God, you are such a goose! What does he do? Does he perform tricks for you? Does he juggle rings and ride about on a unicycle? Does he let you honk his big red nose?”

That was a tough one to answer, and Matti considered it carefully. Uncle Armand said that often the best answers weren’t really answers at all. “Uncle Armand did a lot of different things with the circus,” he said finally. “He wasn’t just a clown.”

“Maybe when you grow up, you’ll—“

They both heard it then, the sound of footsteps on the stairs. The tread was that of Mlle Dorothee, who covered a lot of ground for the family as both a governess and nanny when needed, and a sort of auxiliary housekeeper when the boys were away.

She padded down the hall and tapped on the boys’ door. “Mathieu,” she called in a soft voice. “Mathieu, your father wishes to speak with you.”

Matti swallowed hard. “I’m coming, Mlle Dorothee,” he called back.

He climbed out of bed and reached for his robe and slippers.

“Remember that it’s a bathrobe,” Juni hissed at him. “I called it a dressing gown last time I was here and he—well, you can imagine.”

“I know.” Speaking English to their father could be a tricky business, because at school they were taught British English. Big Cy, however, called British pronunciations and vocabulary posh talk and faggot-speak. He expected Midwestern Standard from his boys when they were at home.

The differences were not as dramatic as, for instance, the difference between the High German spoken in Germany and the dialectic variants that one heard in German-speaking cantons of Switzerland. Navigating the differences in English was a subtle task, certainly harder than pleasing their mother, whose French was only a handful of words and a tiny tweak of a vowel or two from what was taught in their schools.

As Matti knotted the sash on his gown—sorry, robe—and reached for the door, his brother whispered, “Good luck, man,” in English.

“Thanks,” he replied in the same language. “I’ll need it.”

* * *

Cyrus Witherspoon sat with his wife on the sofa in the sitting room. “Good evening, Matti,” his father said in English.

This was not a good sign.

Usually when they were together everyone spoke French. Big Cy was fluent in French—had been excellent in it even before he first came to Switzerland in 1961, according to what people said. Claudine considered herself fluent in English. She was not, but she tended to grow enraged when anyone tried to point that out—or when she lost track of a conversation, which happened rather often.

How American are we going to get here? Are you “papa,” or “Dad”?

Matti decided to avoid the question altogether. “Good evening,” he said, nodding to both of his parents in turn.

“Your mother tells me that you’re still taking treks with your great-uncle.”

Matti kept his face as blank as he could manage. “Yes, sir.”

“Would you mind telling me what Armand does when you’re out there, just the two of you?”

“Mostly, he checks on his properties and his investments, sir. Sometimes he looks at buildings and things he might buy.”

“I told you,” Claudine interrupted, “This is all business.”

Mr. Witherspoon ignored her. “Your mother says that whether you make it to class or not, you always know your dancing routines.”

“I practice every day.”

“And Madame Charvat says that your violin lessons have not suffered. You take your instrument with you?”

Matti nodded.

“I didn’t hear you.”

“I take it with me, sir. I practice every day.”

Big Cy scowled. “Your assessment letter from the school arrived yesterday. It’s in the mail basket in the foyer. Go and get it for me.”

Mathieu’s heart sank. He did his best, but he knew that there were some things he simply could not grasp. He nodded and turned to obey.

When he arrived in the hall, he noticed that the envelope had not yet been opened. He was not completely surprised that his mother had been afraid to look at his grades; on the whole, Claudine preferred to leave things academic to Big Cy. However, he had presumed that his father was upset at his going off on adventures with Uncle Armand because it was making his school work suffer. A sealed envelope meant that this whole inquisition was not contingent on his grades. There was something else going on.

He handed the envelope to his father without a word. Big Cy slit it open with a ballpoint pen from his pocket. He shook the folded paper out and narrowed his eyes.

“I see that reading is still something of a problem. And nothing is happening with your spelling or your penmanship.” He glared at Matti. “Apparently you still don’t find it worth your time and trouble to improve.”

Matti bowed his head and said nothing. He knew that there had been very little improvement. He had put forth an effort, of course, but some things were appallingly difficult, and there were so very many other things that were both more interesting and less frustrating—there just wasn’t enough time to do everything.

“It's the letters,” Matti said. He pressed his thumb and first two fingers together and moved them as though picking up and putting down a chess piece repeatedly. “They keep boinging around on the paper and changing direction.”

“You need to try harder,” his father said. “You're a smart boy. I know you can do better.”

“Yes, sir.”

Yeah, right, he added to himself.

“You know,” Big Cy said in a conversational tone, “back home when I was your age, everything was expressed as a letter grade. Just little rectangles of cardboard with some letters on it — that was all. And you had best believe that my father would have tanned my hide if I had brought home anything less than an A.”

Matti tried to picture Dr. Witherspoon, a slightly-built retired anthropologist in Kansas, a man with the thickest glasses Matti had ever seen on a real person, trying to tan the hide of Big Cy, a man well over six feet tall, with a thick torso and an American-style football player’s shoulders. “Yes, sir,” he said as neutrally as he could.

“Top marks in physical development—that’s just your genes coming through there—ahead of the class in geography, significantly advanced in history. History?”

“Um, Uncle Armand tells me about the places we visit—about the famous people who lived there and the famous things that happened there. And I read the maps for him.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes, sir.”

“See, I told you, Cyrus,” Matti’s mother said. “Armand has only the child’s very best interests at heart.”

“Hmm, this is interesting.” Matti’s father stared at the report for a long minute, and then studied his son with renewed interest. “It says here that you are significantly ahead of your class in mathematics. It says you multiply to three places, you’re working with percentages, and you’ve mastered long division.”

Matti hesitated: This was an area where British versus American English could trip him up disastrously. “When we travel,” he began, watching his father’s face for any sign that he was using the wrong word. “Uncle Armand has me cal—“ He saw no warning twitch on his father’s face.

“Cal—“

Still nothing.

“—Calculate how many kil—miles. How many miles from city to city, and how much—gasoline we expend in our travels. And when he—calculates—things about his investments or his taxes, he asks me to do some of the work. He says my eyes are better.”

To his relief, Cyrus Witherspoon nodded his head. “This is good,” he said. “This is very good. You’re not completely wasting our time and money out there.”

He leaned forward, his arms on his knees. “But I must know: Does Armand touch you?”

Matti whipsawed instantly from relief to confusion. “I beg your pardon, sir?”

“I said, does he touch you?”

“Um, he—he cuts my hair sometimes. And when he was teaching me to walk the wire, he held my hand—“

“That’s not what I mean, Mathieu. Does he touch you inappropriately?”

“Cyrus, such a question to ask the chi—“

“Claudine, this is between men, you understand?”

Matti opened his arms. “I’m sorry, Papa, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Big Cy seemed to have lost interest. “Yes, well, go back to bed,” he growled. “I have to talk to your mother.”

A minute later, Matti stood between the beds removing his robe. “It was very strange,” he told Juni, both of them still speaking English although they considered French their native language. “He wanted to know whether Uncle Armand touches me.”

“Well?”

“Well, what?”

“Does Armand touch you?”

Matti threw his slippers at the chair. “I don’t know what Papa means. Does he touch me? He cut my hair. He held my hand when he taught me to walk the wire—“

His reward was a cascade of giggles. “Matti, you are the stupidest little goose-boy in the world! Papa wants to know whether Armand touches you inappropriately.”

“Yes, that’s the very word he used: inappropriately. What does he mean?”

“I don’t believe that you don’t get it.”

Matti was losing patience. “Believe it.”

The giggles continued unabated.

“Hey! Hey, you! Hey, Cyrus Montgomery Witherspoon, Junior. Believe. It.”

Ah. Blessed quiet.

Matti rarely hauled out the big gun of Juni’s given name, but he felt that he had already had more than enough stress for the evening.

Juni rolled to his side and looked his brother straight in the eye. “He wants to know—Elmer Mathieu, Elmer Fudd—whether Uncle Armand ever touches your, you know, your pee-pee.”

Matti thought that he had fairly good control of his facial muscles, but he was unable to suppress a look of disgust. “Oh, yuck!”

Juni fell back against the headboard, chortling again. “Oh, God, look at the goose-boy’s face!”

“But you didn’t have to say pee-pee. I’m not a little boy any more. I know penis. And phallus. And dick. And that’s just in English. I know a lot of languages.”

I know more languages than you could ever imagine, Little Cyrus.

Feeling that he had perhaps regained a bit of his dignity, Matti blew his nose and drank some water, then climbed into bed, waiting for his brother’s glee to wind down. When it did, Matti asked, in as careful and as grown-up a tone as he could manage, “Why would he want to do that anyway? He already has a penis; I see it whenever he has to make water out in the country—“

Whatever he had said (and he thought that he had sounded very reasonable and mature), his brother was lost again in paroxysms of laughter.

* * *

The following afternoon, Uncle Armand and his restored Bentley arrived just as Madame Witherspoon and Mlle Dorothee got Juni, his books, and his laundry out into the drive to wait for his ride back to school.

Armand Brecht knew how to make an entrance. He was actually their mother’s uncle, the flamboyant black-sheep elder brother to her father. Armand had played at dozens of professions, from the family-scandal circus gig (and that was as an acrobat, in spite of what the family claimed—Matti had seen the old posters) to only slightly less scandalous turns as an actor, a nightclub singer, and an artist working in pastels, before settling down in his twilight years to the kind of stodgy capitalism that the Brecht family understood. He might have won a measure of respectability, had he been able to find one woman and stick to her. Unfortunately, Yvette was the sixth Mrs. Armand Brecht, and that relationship was starting to look shaky.

To Matti’s dismay, before Uncle Armand came to him, he bent over and studied Juni. “You have grown,” Armand said in a serious voice. “I don’t see you enough. I hope that you will come to my house for a few days this summer.”

Juni tried to look cool, but there was no doubt that he was totally blown away by the invitation. He absolutely strutted out to the van. Once he and his bags were inside, Mathieu could see him happily pointing out both his great-uncle and the Bentley to his classmates.

Matti said good-bye to his parents and picked up his violin case and his own small suitcase. Armand beamed at him, but this time he did not return the pleasantry. His face as still as stone, he climbed into the Bentley, fastened his seat belt, and braced his shoes on the metal box in the well before his seat, the box that he knew was full of candy and games and toys.

“Ah, we are a little sphinx today,” Armand murmured as he pulled out of the drive, waving gaily. As always, the gravity of his voice and the joy on his face seemed unrelated. “But know this, young man: That house is poisonous enough without the two of you boys playing jealousy games. I’m an old man. In a few years, I will be gone, and that boy will be your best source of sanity.

“Now Little Cy—“

Armand broke off while Matti snickered at the name his brother hated above all other names. “Yes, go ahead, laugh, but don’t do that to his face. He can’t help what your parents decided to name him any more than you can help your own name. Little Cy deserves a little break, too. So he will come to the chateau this summer. He’ll play in the pool, we’ll go sailing on the lake, and perhaps I will even see if it’s too late to teach him the wire.

“And that is all, my little friend. He will never be a part of our secrets. Not ever. Our journeys and our games belong to us, and to nobody else, Mathieu—my promise will be good until the day I die. He will visit the chateau, and that will be the end of it.”

A massive weight lifted from Matti’s shoulders and heart as his uncle spoke.

“Better now?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m glad to hear it.” Armand spun the wheel and slid into the heavy traffic headed toward Geneva. “Now, young man: Blow it away. Blow away everything that you are, everything that you think, everything that defines you.” Matti began taking deep, deep breaths and releasing them lustily at the dash as his uncle spoke. “Visualize the little gnome. Do you see him?”

Matti nodded, picturing the heavy glass gnome-shaped candy container his uncle kept on the hall table adjacent to the room where Matti slept when he visited.

Armand’s voice became lower, slower, and more seductive. “You must blow away everything, little Matti—your family and your history, your likes, your dislikes, your dreams, your beliefs, and your name. Be empty, Matti. Be empty and utterly transparent.”

There was nothing but the vibration of the Bentley, and the wind whistling in through a partially opened window, and his uncle’s low, magical voice.

“Now,” he said, but he spoke in a coarse country dialect of Flemish, a language that nobody else in Mathieu’s family would recognize. He spoke slowly, with lengthy pauses between sentences. “My name is Andre Liebling. I am an old man now, a farmer, and in poor health. I had a wonderful wife and six children. I raised root vegetables in a rural district much like the one that you and I visited near Marseilles around the New Year, but now I must find my youngest son. I hear that he is in terrible trouble and I am afraid. I must look everywhere for him. I promised his wife that I would do so.

“My daughter-in-law Nikki has sent with me their son. His name is Bruno. He was born on the fifteenth of April in the year nineteen-sixty-seven. He is almost six, and although he is not very clever, he has a good heart. I will try to find a good school for him while I am in the city.”

Uncle Armand waited three minutes and then repeated everything he had said.

Then another pause. Then one last repetition.

Matti kept his eyes squeezed shut tight and let his imagination run wild.

Thinking. Planning. Becoming.

Armand’s tone changed, although the language did not. “What is your name?”

“Bruno Andre Liebling,” Matti answered in the same dialect. His eyes were still tightly closed. “I’ll be six soon!”

“Oho, Bruno Andre, eh!” Armand said with a chuckle.

“Yes, sir,” Matti said with dreamy confidence. “I was named after my grandfather, and his father before him.”

“Very good. And when is your birthday?”

“I will be six — this many — in April. I have a kitty,” he added, his tone gaining an edge of excitement. “Her name is Bijou and she is going to have baby kitties!”

“And what color is she?”

“Gray, sir, with one white paw and a little white flag on the tip of her tail.”

“Oh, very good, Bruno. I love kitties, too. Now, tell me about your mother.”

“My mama? Her name is Niccolina. My father is away; my sister says that he is in jail, but mama says only that he is looking for work.”

“I do believe that you are the best and cleverest boy in the world. Tell me what your mama does.”

He saw the small farm, all browns and grays, too much rain, too much mud, not enough money. Saw his mama biting her lip in the kitchen, looking at bills. A lonely woman, counting on her little boy. Proud of him. Blue walls and a white enameled metal table.

Matti opened his eyes and drank in the warmth and the light. “My mama grows hops and cares for the neighbors’ geese.”

“Geese? Is that the truth?”

“I am sure, sir. They are old (the neighbors, not the geese) and mama helps them, and I help her.” Matti gifted his uncle with a smile of utter delight. “She calls me her little goose-boy — Grandpapa, look at the sports car!”

“Don’t get distracted, my little Bruno. It’s a pity, you know, that you’re clumsy and not very well coordinated.”

The boy in the passenger seat felt his muscles go just a little looser, felt his reflexes slow ever so slightly. “Yes, sir.”

“It is a pity that you are not gifted with agility, for you will be required to climb the back of a three-story building for me. Do you think that you will succeed in being my little monkey?”

“Of course, grandpapa, if it will make you happy.”

“It will indeed, because I will need someone to get my tools to me.”

“Your tools.” Matti drank in the sunlit landscape. “Then this is an assassination.”

“Yes, but we must not speak of it that way.”

“Of course, grandpapa.”

Utility poles swished as they passed them. The waters of Lac Leman glittered in the mid-afternoon sun. From the radio in the dash of the Bentley came the voice of Edith Piaf, raw and powerful and weirdly exciting.

Bruno Liebling was a happy little boy.

Typrose

Typo/spell-check fail du jour: "I open my mouth and pants, longing for your commands." [Ps 119]

Just ... one ... little ... letter ...

Today's Early Shuffle

First five on MP3 player:
1. Acme Forgetting Service (Lou and Peter Berryman)
2. Jambalaya (Doug Kershaw)
3. Hooked on a Feeling (Blue Swede)
4. I'd Like to Go Home (Kossoy Sisters)
5. From Every Kind of Man (D'Oyly Carte Opera Company)

Courting Rituals of a Monk

Courting Rituals of a Monk
Jefferson City, Missouri
February 1997



His heels clacked on the hardwood floor. The sound reverberated off the walls, the high ceiling, the curtainless cathedral windows. When he reached the fireplace around which the others were gathered, he opened his appointment book.

Before he could speak, one of his guests snapped a cellular phone shut. "That fireman died," he announced.

"And which fireman would that be?" he drawled back, continuing to page through a blizzard of old memos and Post-It notes.

Was there an indrawn breath of impatience from someone? If so, tough. Peter Booth never hesitated to confess his ignorance when he was unsure what was going on -- and often when he knew exactly what the score was.

Some called him The Monk in reference to the austerity of his lifestyle and his lack of noticeable vices. To others, he was known as Shockley's Shadow or Shockley's Bastard as tribute to his absolute loyalty to his master. His personal history had become the stuff of legend. The Marines had been his ticket out of Ozark squalor. A brush with heroism had attracted the attention of Shockley, then an entrepreneur with political aspirations. Under Shockley's tutelage he had leached the last of the hillbilly from his voice and his manner.

The boy from the unheated backwoods shack had already occupied an office in the governor's mansion; now man and master eyed the White House as an attainable goal.

Better educated, more sophisticated staffers learned quickly to respect him or stay the hell out his way. Frequently, a combination of the two seemed the wisest course.

"The Memphis arson," Dave Martinez prompted. The youngest and newest of Argos Shockley's political advisers, he cultivated a mustache to offset his lack of seniority.

“That doesn't help me, son."

A muscle in Martinez's jaw twitched at the thinly veiled paternalism, but he hastened to explain himself. Early December, he said. Christian bookstore just a few days prior to its grand opening. Looked like electrical problem but turned out to be arson. One fireman dead at the scene, another lingering until an hour ago. High passions and rhetoric, finger-pointing at pro-choicers, the Reverend Buzzy Brainard all over it like stink on shit.

The assembled staffers swarmed over the issue like cats to a can opener. Booth closed his appointment book, folded his arms across his chest, and watched the fray heat up. A lean, elegantly graying blond in a Ralph Lauren suit, he survived by keeping his distance from the actual decision-making process. The experts tweaked the issues: that was their job. They shaped the policy path and Argos Shockley trod it, with Peter Booth up in front walking point for him.

The question under discussion was whether Shockley should attend the fireman's funeral. There were promises and pitfalls in every angle, and staffers' personal priorities were exposed as well. At one point, Booth's own aide, Lisa, who should have known better, tried to engage him in the battle.

"You talk to him," she pleaded, referring to Shockley himself, who was not present..

"I don't do policy."

"But he listens to you."

"Yeah, well, he shouldn't."

Two voices other than Booth's remained silent in the debate. For both of them, it was their first visit to his apartment. First time visitors were often rattled by the fishbowl effect of towering naked windows and unadorned cherry wood paneling, by the bare windows even in his bedroom, through which they had to pass to access the bathroom. Those not spooked by the lack of privacy were often spooked by Booth himself. There was nothing quite like a man with no apparent secrets to make one uneasily aware of one's own.

Christine Youngblood sat on the far end of the longer couch. The wife of a seasoned congressman and mother of two teenagers, she had an accounting degree and political connections of her own. Rosy-cheeked and gently rounded, she always appeared rumpled, but the overall effect suggested an afternoon's romp in the boudoir rather than slovenly habits. Peter Booth's presence muted her natural exuberance, and he felt that he knew the reason why.

There were women to whom his odd blend of power, inaccessibility, and mysterious lack of obvious mystery acted as an aphrodisiac. Although his monastic lifestyle was a choice rather than a pose, Booth was prepared to make an exception for Mrs. Youngblood if she was so inclined. It would be tricky and fraught with risks, but one of the Monk's best kept secrets was that he savored living his life on the edge. That was the most important lesson Vietnam had taught him.

The other silent guest was more of a puzzle. Roman McClure was a dabbler, an East Coast Ivy League import-export man with close ties to the diplomatic and intelligence communities. He appeared approximately Booth's age, early fifties, but might be older. He sat on the near end of the smaller couch, right in the thick of debate, and said nothing, watching each speaker with lizard-lidded eyes and the merest breath of contempt. Had Abraham Lincoln descended from aristocracy and worn Armani, he could have passed for McClure's brother. He had sat in Booth's living room for an hour now, and Booth still knew only two things for sure about him. He knew that he didn't know what McClure's purpose was in attending what was after all a strategy meeting, and he knew clear to the base of his spine that he wouldn't care for the answer when he found out.

"Moving right along," Magda the publicist intoned dryly. She had financed her college education by working summers as a camp counselor, and it still colored her voice at the oddest moments. All she lacked was a whistle on a woven plastic lanyard, and rumor had it that she had a drawer full of them at home. "Worldview Weekly is doing a cover on crime, on the upswing in random crime."

"Let me guess -- they're featuring that first draft of the poverty speech, the one--"

"Hush, Dave! The attack on Emerson and Shockley and what's-his-name and the rest of them will be mentioned only in passing -- I couldn't get it shifted to a better spot -- but there will be a 'Where Are They Now' sidebar that will feature you prominently, Peter."

"Oh, not again," Booth sighed. “Come on. That was a million years ago.”

Magda ignored him. “So expect a call from them within a week."

"What's that all about?" Christine Youngblood piped up. "What do you have to do with random crime, Peter?"

"Back in 'seventy-one, some nut started shooting into a crowd of people. Peter was the one passing by who grabbed the gun, the one who wrestled the gunman to the ground," Magda replied. "That's how he met Shockley; Shockley was one of the targets."

"Now, I don't know that that's true," Peter admonished her. "Trowbridge died. Rolland Emerson was the most seriously wounded. He seemed to be firing randomly to me." He felt Roman McClure's eyes boring into him and it jarred him. He scrambled to take control, to shape and pitch the story in his own way. "I was the first one to the gunman, but I can't take much credit for it. I should have realized he was going to shoot himself next. I was so out of it, so taken by surprise, that I thought he had decided to hand over the gun."

"Haven't you seen the picture?" Magda demanded of Mrs. Youngblood. "It won awards. I'll pull a copy and send it over to you."

Booth cringed inwardly. He hated that photo of himself, gaunt and scruffy in fatigue jacket and post-military beard, kneeling on the sidewalk with grief on his face and Gordon Early's brain matter on his sleeve. He hated, in fact, any reference to that frosty February afternoon in Dayton, Ohio, even though without that afternoon, without that photograph, God only knew where he would be today.

Managing a KFC franchise or ticketing speeders in and out of Branson, probably, like his brothers, he figured. Maybe selling sporting goods, like his ex-brother-in-law.

Nevertheless, he contented himself by growling, "Fool -- if he'd jumped instead of fumbling with his light meter, there might have been a few less injured. If he'd tried to administer first aid instead of snapping that damn picture, maybe Trowbridge wouldn't have bled to death. Hell, I should have kept it together and tried to render assistance. It wasn't as though I was a stranger to combat, after all."

Roman McClure spoke at last. In a deep voice with overtones of sarcasm, he murmured, "A most becoming modesty, Mr. Booth."

Booth allowed a little heat to creep into his own tones. "No modesty to it. I was only two months home from a third tour of 'Nam. I walked point there; it was my specialty, what I was best at. In the jungles I was able to spot men in camouflage hundreds of yards away -- men concentrating all their skill on not being seen by me. I saw them all, Mr. McClure. But on a city street, in broad daylight, smack-dab in the middle of civilization, I missed some lunatic waving around a couple revolvers as big as Christmas fruitcakes. This is not a show of modesty, sir. That was head-up-your-ass stupidity, and until the day I die I'll be ashamed of it."

Bingo.

He could feel the temperature in the room changing as the regular staffers, even those with no great love for Shockley's hatchet man, united against the outsider who attacked one of their own. He had done that speech better in the past, but he felt that he had given it just the right notes tonight. Something else he had learned from Shockley was the art of making the same song sound custom designed for a series of audiences.

A curtain of icy urbanity fell over McClure's features as he reassessed his position. "I meant no disrespect," he rumbled with a thin smile of conciliation.

"Of course not," Booth replied with equal sincerity.

In Christine Youngblood's bright eyes he saw the glow of hero worship. Beneath her designer peasant blouse her breasts shifted with her quickened breathing.

Bingo, indeed.

Minor as it was, the Booth-McClure confrontation nevertheless seemed to goose the strategists into action, and the rest of the agenda was dealt with quickly and efficiently. Everyone agreed that Argos Shockley should remain active with the Ethical Labor-Management Options Board, but only if offered one of the co-chairs. He would probably insist on staying anyway -- he was absurdly fond of the fangless advisory group -- but a chairmanship would position him for favorable international attention at the worldwide conference in Orlando in October.

Al Cassidy volunteered to descend on the guy tasked with coordinating support among Suncoast Latinos. Martinez seemed a little miffed that he had been passed over, but he would have been equally nettled had he been chosen for the assignment. There were always some battles which couldn't be won, regardless.

The impasse regarding the funeral for the dead fireman in Memphis was broken by a phone call to Cassidy from one of the money men out of Chattanooga. The guy wanted reassurance that Argos Shockley would make an appearance because it was a law and order issue blah-de-blah-de-blah, talking all around the fact that the Reverend Buzzy's ever-growing empire needed a lot of construction done, and construction was this guy's chief source of income. Shockley's organization was not in a financial position to thumb its corporate nose at its backers, so Shockley would go. Schedules would be shuffled, a statement would be drafted coming down hard on the theme of public servants laying their lives on the line, and Shockley could continue to duck and weave on the can't-please-anyone abortion issue for a little while longer.

Throughout the discussion, Roman McClure reverted to his expectant silence. Mrs. Youngblood made voluminous notes in a spiral notebook and volunteered to assist with the new batch of focus groups when Irv got off the dime and set them up. Booth broke out the wine and grudgingly produced a single ashtray for Al and Magda, although he banished them to his minuscule kitchen to use it. Lisa served a banana-squash bread she had baked herself, sweet and thick with date and cashew pieces.

The Monk basked in the comfortable blend of worldliness and down-home hospitality. He lounged against the marble mantel and nursed a single glass of wine, covertly watching Roman McClure covertly watching Lisa in her ethnic African patterned dress.

The gathering broke up when a gust of wind sent a spattering of ice droplets crashing against the western windows. The storm that the weather service had forecast for the early morning hours was upon them ahead of schedule.

As Booth presided at the coat closet, he experienced both relief that McClure would be out of his apartment, and regret that he had not yet devised an excuse to get Christine to stay. It was probably just as well -- the roads would be murderous within the hour. He herded the group down the stairs and found himself walking shoulder to shoulder with Roman McClure.

"A striking place you have here," McClure commented as their footsteps echoed in the stairwell.

"Thank you. This was the Beecher place back in railroad baron days."

"How many units did they break into?"

"Seven."

"I should think there would be more."

"The others are much bigger, two and three bedrooms. I don't need that kind of space."

"Quite an improvement over your origins, I would say."

"True."

And on nights like this one when the wind whistled audibly, he often thought about his first few years, before his father got his act together and started supporting the family -- when six of them huddled in two rooms thick with bacon grease and wood smoke and hung blankets on the walls and layered old clothing on the floor to keep out the cold that crept through the cracks.

"You owe a lot to Argos Shockley."

"Yes." But not everything, his pride insisted. He had graduated from high school, the first ever in his family, and first in his class. Maybe there had only been seventeen in the class, but first was first. He had a drawer full of combat citations, and he still placed respectably in pistol matches. He had been prepared when his moment of opportunity arrived.

He had earned the subliminal assurances of wealth and permanence he derived from the sound of echoing footsteps.

Booth did not recall dawdling on the stairs, but when he and McClure reached the front door the others were already on the porch and one auto engine was roaring to life.

For an instant he was disoriented, wondering where everyone had gone. Particularly, he wondered how Christine Youngblood had slipped past him without so much as a special farewell.

Maybe he was losing his edge.

He nodded at the night security man in his cubbyhole by the door and thrust his hand out at McClure. "It's been interesting meeting you."

"Same here."

Coatless, he stepped out on the broad porch with McClure. Cold as a son of a bitch it was, and ice already clung to the branches of the trees and glistened on the pavement. "It's going to be nasty driving. Where are you staying?"

"With friends. Al Cassidy brought me tonight."

Interesting.

He jammed his hands in his pockets and hunched his shoulders against the storm, determined to see McClure enter Al Cassidy's Town Car. McClure removed his Russian-style hat and chuckled self-deprecatingly as he lowered the ear flaps. "My girls would be howling about now," he confided once it was snugly returned to his head. "Saying, 'Oh, Daddy, you look like a such a dweeb!'"

Booth turned away. He barely knew his kids. The nuts and bolts of marriage and of fatherhood had taken a back seat to his duties in the service of Argos Shockley. It was a necessary loss in his view. That sacrifice had enabled them to go to the best schools, to grow up without want. Their step dad was a great guy, ran the pro shop at the Hecate Glen Country Club. Peter saw him from time to time when Shockley connected with that crowd. He was good for Prissy and civil to Booth. Who could ask for more?

He leaned over the rail and peered up the drive toward the old carriage house. "I think Al's having trouble getting the car -- no, he's got it now."

"Do you think the truth will ever come out about the shooting?" McClure said to his back.

He didn't think he jumped. He was shivering too much against the cold to show any outward sign, he figured. His face wasn't a problem, either, contorted into a grimace as it was. "What do you mean?"

"Just what I said."

"I've heard that Early's widow says there are some unanswered questions," Booth offered carefully. "Is that what you're talking about?"

"You know what I'm talking about."

"The one fellow -- Prettyman, wasn't it? -- he was shot again a few years ago. Is that what you're referring to?"

McClure uttered a sound of impatience in a visible cloud of moisture around his lips. "A petty squabble," he said dismissively. "Prettyman died in a power struggle over who would command a dying fringe group."

"Then you've lost me."

McClure gave an abrupt and uninformative nod, and turned toward Al Cassidy's car purring in the driveway.

Booth sketched a wave at them and escaped back to the warmth of the foyer. He stood for a minute or so by the ancient wheezing radiators, rubbing his hands together. Then he climbed the stairs again.

There certainly was more to the Gordon Early shooting incident than was generally known, but Booth was privy only to tiny pieces of it. Since little of it impacted on his own role, he had never felt moved to pursue it. He had in fact determined many years back that to examine the affair too closely could be hazardous to his health.

But did McClure know something, or was that a only fishing expedition?

He paused on the landing a few steps down from his apartment door. He had left it ajar, yes, but he thought he heard running water. If a pipe had burst again...

"Shit," he murmured aloud, and mounted the last few stairs by twos.

Christine Youngblood, a tea towel tucked into the waistband of her skirt, turned away from his kitchen sink with a sudsy wine glass in her hand. "Hi," she said with a sheepish grin. "I hope you don't mind. All these dishes lying around, and you're so aggressively neat, I thought--"

"I thought you had gone."

She peeked on tiptoe past his shoulder. "Is Mr. McClure still here?"

"No." He closed the door quietly.

God, she was beautiful -- she had her shoes off, too. Pretty little country girl feet, even. It thrilled him to see her making herself at home in his space. Possibly that meant she would not be averse to his making himself at home inside her blouse.

"Since this is Smokers' Hell, do you mind?" she gestured toward her purse on the table.

"Of course not."

She dried her hands and disposed of the towel before pulling a leather cigarette case and matching lighter from her bag. He expected her to sit down at the tiny table, but she remained on her feet, leaning against the counter, so he settled his rump against it, too. "How much do you know about Roman McClure?" she asked.

"Very little. Only what was said tonight. Why?" It disappointed him that she hadn't dallied back out of amorous intent, but her intensity pleased and interested him.

"What was your take on him?"

He shrugged. "I wasn't impressed. He isn't much at picking his pissing contests."

"Mmm," she purred, and once again a hint of kitten appeared in her eyes. "Very macho assessment."

"Thank you." He wished she would make up her mind which message she wanted to send him. "Once again, why?"

"He's really roiling the waters back in DC, looking for anything he can get on Argos Shockley."

"That doesn't surprise me, but who's your source?"

She tapped ash into the ashtray. "My husband, for one. A Post writer I know. For that matter, I'm surprised Magda didn't clue you in -- McClure's hanging around her husband quite a bit, although given their business interests, that may be perfectly aboveboard."

"Look, obviously you know more about McClure than I do. What can you tell me?"

She shook her head slightly. "Not much. I don't like him, I guess that's obvious, too. He creeps me out, that's the bottom line. It's pure gut -- if he came out in favor of milk, I'd switch to prune juice. I don't--" She hesitated for a moment, staring into space. "I don't know anybody who actually likes or trusts him, but I also don't know of anybody who wants to cross him."

"Up until tonight, he was never more than a name on a list of contributors," Booth confessed.

"He's like that, a background-y kind of person -- until you have something he wants."

"And what does he want?"

"That's what I'm trying to tell you. You'd better get people on finding out."

The Monk studied Christine with more fondness than before. Did Hal Youngblood appreciate the treasure he had married? Did he realize what a rare combination of savvy and sensuality she possessed?

"Can I buy you a drink, Mrs. Youngblood?"

Startlement in her eyes and color in her cheeks. "I would enjoy that, Mr. Booth."

His was a bare-bones kitchen, suited only for preparing a morning cup of tea or a sandwich to eat while watching the television he had mounted on the wall. That was all he used it for. He took few meals at home. He had no bar as such, either, keeping a small assortment of bottles in a lower cabinet where another might have stored pots and pans.

He selected two, located the proper glasses, and mixed a pair of drinks.

No expectations, he warned himself as he turned back to her with two glasses of amber liquid.

"Lovely crystal," she said. "What's this?"

"A Rusty Comfort -- Southern Comfort instead of Drambuie. Puts hair on your chest."

"I hope not."

He gave her a dog-dumb grin. "So do I, actually. God knows it's never worked for me."

Her own smile was dangerous, a walking-on-the-edge smile. "Prove it."

"Prove what?"

She looked around carefully at her surroundings. The kitchen was in an alcove constructed in the center of the apartment, and it was not visible from any of the dozen windows. She reached over and tugged on the end of his tie. "Prove that it won't put hair on my chest."

Reality flipped and spun again, and it was several seconds before he remembered to breathe. He placed his glass on the counter. "Prove that you don't have a hairy chest already."

Her eyes locked on his, she loosened the top button of her blouse.

Bingo.

Today's Early Five

First five on the MP3 shuffle today:
1. Mony, Mony (Tommy James/Shondells)
2. Mambo Italiano (Rosemary Clooney)
3. Dulcimer Stomp/Other Side (Aerosmith)
4. Hot Diggety Dog Ziggety (Perry Como)
5. Little Deuce Coupe (Brian Setzer, Brian Wilson)

Typrose

typo/spell-check fail du jour: ".. in support of sam-sex marriage ..."

Doesn't matter who gets hitched, as long as ol' Sam is getting some?

Typrose

typo/spell-check fail du jour: " ... use the express/HOV lame ..."

Today's Early Shuffle

1. I Will Survive (Gloria Gaynor)
2. When You Say Nothing at All (Alison Kraus)
3. Ecco, ridente in cielo (Nicolai Gedda)
4. Ballad of Harry Lewis (Allen Sherman)
5 1985 (Wings)

Typrose

typo/spell-check fail du jour in honor of talk-like-a-pirate day, although it helps to know the Wiggles repertoire: "Go, Captain Feathers Word Ahoy"

Today's Early Shuffle

arrived late.
1. Mr. White Keys (Cherry Poppin Daddies)
2. Hurt (Johnny Cash)
3. Suspicious Minds (Elvis Presley)
4. 500 Miles (Proclaimers)
5. Ecumenical March (Mitchell Trio)

Typrose

typo/spell-check fail du jour: "Don we now our gag apparel ..."

Would this be Groucho Marx glasses-and-mustache, or is Santa a bit on the kinky side?

Today's Early Five

First 5 on my MP3 shuffle
1. Ticks (Brad Paisley)
2. Call of the Wild Goose (Frankie Laine)
3. Unpack Your Adjectives (CTW)
4. Snoozers (Bacon Brothers)
5. Girls Just Wanna Have Fun (Cyndi Lauper)

Typrose

typo/spell-check fail du jour: "... living with the ever-present treat of nuclear attack ..."

Yum

Today's Early Shuffle

First five on my MP3 player this morning
1. eBay (Weird Al Yankovic)
2. Nobody Understands Me (Meryl Streep)
3. American Tune (Paul Simon)
4. Birmingham (Randy Newman)
5. Play a Simple Melody (Bing Crosby, Gary Crosby)

Typrose

Typo/spell-check fail du jour: "She Stops to Conquer." I guess she gave Goldsmith pause?

Today's Early Shuffle

Top of today's MP3 shuffle
1. I Kissed a Girl (Katy Perry)
2. Good Reuben James (Mitchell Trio)
3. E-I (Nelly)
4. That's Amore (Dean Martin)
5. Meglio Stasera (Lena Horne)

Typrose

typo/spell-check fail du jour: "Thou shalt not cover thy neighbor's wife."

The voyeur's favorite commandment.

Today's Early Shuffle

1. Birdhouse in Your Soul (They Might Be Giants)
2. Houston (Dean Martin)
3. Tall Hope (OBC album, "Wildcat")
4. Old Guitars (Bacon Brothers)
5. Forget About Dre (Dr. Dre, Eminem)

Typrose

typo/spell-check fail du jour: " ... dollar bill peaked out from the grass ..."

And it's never been the same since.

Today's Early Shuffle

1. Stranger on the Shore (Mr. Acker Bilk)
2. Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da (No Doubt)
3. Hooked on a Feeling (Blue Swede)
4. Boogie! (John Hartford)
5. Waking Up in Vegas (Katy Perry)

Typrose

typo/spell-check fail du jour: "... synapses between the ganglia of the neutral network ..."

I'm presuming this isn't about Fox TV ...

Today's Early Shuffle

Top five on this morning's MP3 shuffle:
1. Houston (Dean Martin)
2. Sugartown (Nancy Sinatra)
3. Boil That Cabbage Down (Smothers Brothers)
4. The River (Garth Brooks)
5. Bethena, a Concert Waltz (Joshua Rifkin)

Typrose

typo/spell-check fail du jour: "... shook off the snow and hung her thighs in the cupboard ..."

That's one way to practice abstinence.

Today's Early Shuffle

Been out of commission a few days!
First 5 on my MP3 shuffle today:
1. This Guy's in Love With You (Herb Alpert)
2. Shipoopi (Iggy Wolfington, chorus, Music Man OBC)
3. Cry of the Wild Goose (Frankie Laine)
4. I Kissed a Girl (Katy Perry)
5. Smoke on the Water (Deep Purple)

Typrose

typo/spell-check fail du jour: "... in-house demon station of Corelleware .."

(I knew it was evil, but ...)

Today's Early Shuffle

First five MP3s:
1. Broccoli (Phenomenauts)
2. Sunday (Larry Blyden, Pat Suzuki)
3. Farmer and the Cowman (OBC "Oklahoma!")
4. Old Man Emu (the Wiggles and Steve Irwin)
5. California Girls (David Lee Roth)

Typrose

typo/spell-check fail du jour: "... sixth season of Criminal Mines ..."

a miner catastrophe?

Today's Early Shuffle

1. Love, Look Away (Arabella Hong)
2. Ballad of Irving (Frank Gallop)
3. Overture and Parade (OBC Meredith Wilson's "Here's Love")
4. I'm Gonna Make You Mine (Lou Christie)
5. That'll Be the Day (Linda Ronstadt)