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fury, the Actor spied at some distance the horse, the rider.
    “Look sharp,” he spoke. The men and he changed suddenly to meeker, commoner sorts and began to work with assiduous uselessness on the car’s engaged tires. Pulling up beside them, Berndt casually offered his assistance. The words did not strangle his throat. He was calm. He tapped his farmer’s brim as he glanced into the back seat. The Actor had spread a blanket over Miss DeWitt’s legs, and she looked all right, though pale and dazzled.
    Berndt did not know that the Actor, with an eye to concealing the stolen money, had taken wads of it from the canvas bag. During the ride he had thrust as many bills as he could into his shirt. He had shoved the bag itself under the blanket, next to Miss DeWitt, whom he instructed to not bother getting out of the car. He smiled a genial greeting to Berndt, who nodded at Miss DeWitt, and set to work.
    As did she. Quickly, surreptitiously, with a busy intelligence, Agnes pulled sheaves of bills between her fingers and thrust these bills into the ripped lining of her jacket—and was able to feel, in spite of the swooning pain in her hip, that she was very glad to have been a careless seamstress. As for Berndt, by eagerly hooking the good beast to the car’s bumper and making an ostentatious show of straining its powers, Berndt made every appearance of helping the gang. Yet by degrees, through prods and signs, he actually caused the horse to mire them ever deeper. Soon they were in a more helpless state than before. The Actor didn’t see it at first, but then, trained to supersensory human clues, he caught a glance between the farmer and the hostage that betrayed their connection. Just as he moved to grab the reins and question this, there appeared at last Slow Johnny and the deputy, riding in the dead teller’s car.
    The men of the law stopped close upon the robbers and gingerly stepped toward them, guns drawn.
    “You’re done for,” shouted Slow Johnny.
    “Halt, you jackass!”
    Crouching so that his body was shielded by the car door and his gun level with the head of Miss DeWitt, the Actor warned off the sheriff.
    “Back! Back!” Berndt signaled to Johnny.
    “I’ll shoot her, yes by damn I will,” called the Actor.
    At a great distance from herself, Agnes felt her mouth open and words emerge. She spoke to the Actor, who cried out, warningly, again. Slow Johnny, though, was hard of hearing as well as slow and he kept walking forward. Berndt saw the thumb of the Actor lift off the hammer of the gun. He struck him just as the gun went off, so that the last Agnes DeWitt saw of the Actor was his unflinching look at her. The last thought she had about him was amazement that he did not regard her words or her life as important or even useful at all, or have a moment’s hesitation about ending all of the thousands of hours of tedious intensity of musical practice, ending the rippling music that her hands could bring into being, ending the episodes of greed and wonder in the arms of Berndt, and the several acts she’d learned to do that men paid whores great sums to perform and that she enjoyed, and further back, ending her time of devotion in the convent where her sisters had already unsewn, pressed, and restitched her habit for another hopeful. None of which was of any consequence. Not even the mountains of prayers for the souls so like his or the vivid attempts beseeching Mary to intercede. Nothing mattered. None of that. And beyond that, to her childhood and the tar roofs of the homestead and the alien bread of her mother’s cruel visions and her father’s terrifying gestures of love and all the precious jumble of her littleness, her thoughts, her creamy baby skin, her howls and burbles, all of this was as nothing to his casual wish to kill her.
    This fact smote her as a marvel and a sorrow, and she knew it was because of what she saw, straight on, in the Actor that she so fervently loved Chopin. And God. Now,