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softly.
    “Tell me about Floyd. He’s in the group, right?”
    I nodded in Floyd’s direction. Floyd caught the nod. He looked confused and self-conscious. Good.
    “Yeah. He sure is. He’s almost Inner Circle.”
    “Inner Circle, huh? What does that mean, one of the bosses?”
    “Yeah.”
    “But only almost? Not really one of the bosses?”
    “Yeah. Right. But he will be soon. That’s how it works. You move up.”
    I’d have to find out more about that later. “Glance at Floyd now,” I told Royal.
    “Huh? What for?”
    “Just for-Christ’s-sake do it.”
    Royal’s head jerked around toward the object of my questions. I looked too. Floyd squirmed, glared, and looked away. That’ll teach him.
    I punched Royal’s arm, Floyd-style, and wandered back to my beer. Zack wasn’t sitting at the bar anymore. Neither was the gorgeous woman.
    “Nice place,” I told the bartender.
    “Thanks.”
    “Are you Thor?”
    He didn’t laugh or even smile. “Steve. And you’re Jason.”
    He’d been paying attention.
    “Nice clientele.”
    This time he smiled, with half his mouth like a movie villain, and went to the other end of the bar to take care of an order.
    Even though Thor’s was their home away from home, Royal’s friends weren’t exactly cutting loose. One of the beer bellies was grumbling about “driving long-haul,” and the little skinny guy was throwing around words like “upgrade” and “hard drive.” I overheard a few nasty references to various groups of people. I heard some bragging about expertise with firearms. But I didn’t see any actual guns, and nobody stood up in the middle of the room and announced he was going to torch a synagogue or toss a bomb into the Supreme Court. Nobody said anything that any stray G-man could really use.
    They were probably always careful in public. I wondered if there was a back room where they cut loose, where they planned their vandalism and mayhem. That’s what I’d been told about a string of IRA bars around the country: the theoretical politics were obvious in the public rooms, but if anyone had any action in mind, lips were not loose with strangers around.
    I didn’t know what other groups with secrets congregated in saloons. I guessed the Islamic Jihad didn’t. Coffee bars, maybe.
    But for a bunch of Nazis, a beer garden seemed appropriate.
    Floyd was watching me again. I considered going over to join him and his friends but I didn’t want to look too eager. Casual interest, yeah. Gee-whiz, no. This was not a gee-whiz kind of club.
    I found Royal near the jukebox and told him I was taking off, but I’d meet him there again the next night.

– 4 –
    The day didn’t start out too well.
    I’d made plans with my realtor, Jim, to look at a couple of properties, one with a cottage, one a duplex. When I called to confirm a meeting time, the woman who answered the phone told me that Jim had suddenly moved to L.A.
    “What do you mean, suddenly?”
    “Yesterday. His ex-wife called, said she wanted him back. He went. Can I help you with something?”
    I felt bad for me and bad for Jim. It’s not easy to find a realtor who understands, not for me, anyway. And he’d told me a little about his marriage. She’d left him to find some space or some damned thing. He was young, good-looking— he was making a big mistake. And probably missing a really great sale too.
    I told the woman about the houses we’d been planning to look at and she said she’d take me to see them. Her name, she said, was Sally Roskov. Did I want to meet her at the one in San Anselmo?
    I did, and when I got to the duplex, I pulled into the driveway behind a blue Saturn with a tall, red-haired woman leaning against it.
    “Jake?”
    I nodded. Normally at this stage of things I’d have been looking the house over, but she was walking toward me and she was wearing tan hiking shorts and boots and a gauzy-looking, reddish-brown shirt that matched her hair— it was short, like Sharon