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energy. his shoulders slumped heavily and his forehead rested against the carpet.
    Tori turned him, stifled a scream. There wasn't much left of his chest. How he was still breathing, let alone able to open a cabinet, was beyond her.
    Her mind refused to work. It was as if she were stuck in tar. What had happened? How could this have taken place in the few moments she had been at the other end of the house?
    Ariel Solares was dying, but he did not seem focused on that; he had more urgent business. Still in her arms, he flopped like a landed fish until his right hand could reach into the cabinet. He drew out a hardwood box. It trembled in the grip of the spasm that racked him.
    Then Ariel pressed the box into her hand. his lips moved, his eyes searching hers, and Tori bent down.
    "What is it, Ariel?" she whispered. "Oh, my God, my God."
    Because his mouth was suddenly filled with blood. Bubbles formed at the corners of his lips as he drowned in his own fluids.
     
    And there was nothing Tori could do but hold him, rocking him gently, looking down at him to let him know she was there, thinking of the last line of the Borges fragment he had quoted before.
    Shortly before his death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face.

BOOK ONE
    THE SOFT CELL
    Men of action are, after all, only
    the instruments of men of thought.
    -- AFTER HEINRICH HEINE

ONE
    VIRGINIA COUNTRYSIDE/LOS ANGELES
     
    "She was meant to be canned-and she was canned."
    ' 'What you should say is that you canned her.''
    "Should?"
    "Yes. This is, essentially, what is operative here."
    The two men-one younger, black-haired, hawk-nosed, with penetrating blue eyes, the other, older, lanky, stoop-shouldered, with an aureole of cotton-candy hair-paused along the blue-stone path laid out in concentric circles around an immaculately manicured formal English garden.
    The late afternoon sun slid in and out of the elhis and alders, catching in its burnished glow a spray of hyacinth here, a twist of ancient vine there. Just behind the men a large Tudor-style stone and half-timber manor house was snuggled in among rustling beech, sheared cypresses, and well-established magnolia.
    "I don't understand you," the younger man said. He was dressed in a white shirt open at the neck, the sleeves rolled up to expose his burly forearhis, and blue jeans, the bottohis of which were tucked neatly into blue Tony Lama lizard cowboy boots. He wore a belt studded with silver Navajo conchos.
    ' 'You don't?'' The older man could have added "That's odd,'' but didn't. He had the face of a born commander: powerful, shrewd, disarmingly gentle in its deceit. Now, however, the fissures of time had scored his sunken cheeks, thinned his hair, unearthed the tic of a railing nerve. Only the eyes retained the full cunning of his youth. They were the eyes of the boy down the block who dared you to climb the tallest tree, to ride the back bumper of the local bus, and, maddeningly, disdained you whether or not you acceded to his dares.
    ''When I was somewhat younger than you are now,'' the older man said, "I spent a great deal of time with our cousins in London.'' He gestured at the cherry and hawthorn trees, the sea of crihison and lavender azalea bobbing beneath them. "That's where I discovered my love of gardens."
    "But not gardening." Russell Slade, the younger man, could not keep the sardonic tone out of his voice. "The Brits love to tend their gardens.''
    ' 'And so they should.'' Bernard Godwin, the older man, nodded approvingly. his summer-weight Henry Poole hunting jacket was as immaculate as his garden. his sturdy John Lobb country shoes positively glittered in the sunlight. "When one has little space one can call one's own, it is only prudent to mind it as best one can." Godwin swung abruptly around to face Slade;
    their eyes locked. It was essential, Slade knew, not to look away, for Godwin would take that as a sign of weakness. "But this is America, Russell,