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the room, finding a path between the hungry warriors. He lifted the receiver.
    â€œHello.”
    â€œMr. Rehv,” said a voice. It was the man who preferred to be known as Harry.
    â€œI don’t want to talk to you.”
    â€œPlease listen to me, Mr. Rehv.” He spoke very calmly, very quietly. “I’m very sorry about what happened tonight. I accept full responsibility. At least we have the girl. She is going to be fine.”
    â€œI don’t give a shit about the girl.”
    â€œI do. She is my granddaughter,” Harry said. “She tells me you were extremely able, Mr. Rehv. I very much want to talk to you at greater length. Perhaps—”
    Rehv cut him off. “I’m hanging up now. Don’t ever call me again.”
    â€œWait, Mr. Rehv, please. A man like you can’t spend a lifetime sitting on the fence.”
    Rehv paused, not because Harry’s words changed his mind in any way, but because they recalled Quentin Katz talking about staying marginal. In this brief silence Rehv thought he heard a faint metallic sound.
    â€œMr. Rehv?”
    â€œQuiet,” he hissed into the phone. He listened very hard, and after a few seconds again heard a muffled scraping. It seemed to come from the hall outside the front door of the gallery. “Don’t go away,” he whispered through the wires to Harry.
    He laid the receiver softly on the counter and opened one of the drawers. Inside, his hand found the knife Quentin Katz used to cut the cakes he sometimes gave visitors with their coffee. He walked slowly into the gallery, his bare feet noiseless on the pine floor.
    The front door was opening. A large dark figure moved out of the blackness in the hall and into the room. Rehv stood behind the sculpture of Genghis Khan. The pencil beam of a small flashlight shot through the darkness. It ran in a short arc, then fastened on the falling Gordon. The dark figure dropped quickly into a crouch. In the slight diffusion of the beam’s light Rehv could make out an extended arm, a hand holding an object.
    Nothing happened. The beam swept around the room, prodding the other sculptures. Rehv knelt behind Genghis Khan and made himself small. The beam passed over the camp cot, stopped, returned. The dark figure rose and began moving very slowly toward the cot, arm still extended.
    The figure bent forward. Light shone on the empty cot. Quickly the figure turned; the beam glanced off the object in its hand—a gun with a long silencer attached to the barrel. Carefully, methodically, the beam began probing the shadows in the room. Eisenhower. Rommel. Genghis Khan. It rested on Genghis Khan.
    The figure came closer. Slowly the beam examined Genghis Khan from head to toe. Then it touched Rehv’s knee. He dove across the floor. There was a noise like dry spitting. Something crashed. Rehv rolled at the dark figure, hitting it at knee level. It did not fall; it did not even budge. The beam shone on him. The long barrel pointed down, gleaming.
    Rehv drove up from the floor and sank the knife into the middle of the dark mass. He heard a grunt, which softened to a sound like leaking air. The figure slumped away, pulling the knife from his hand. The flashlight was pointing its narrow finger at the ceiling. Rehv picked it up and shone it on the figure at his feet: a dark suit, a dark face, an earlobe missing. A sticky wetness flowed around his bare feet.
    Rehv stood there for some time. Suddenly he turned and ran to the window. In the street below he saw only parked cars, and wet black pavement, like a river of oil.
    He walked back across the room. The sticky wetness had spread. He went into the storage room and picked up the phone.
    â€œHarry?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œCome here.”
    Night was slowly going gray when Harry arrived. The black mass on the floor was turning into a dead and bloody man. Rommel’s sausage head lay nearby. Harry glanced quickly around the