At the door he pauses. “Maybe I’ll be around again,” he promises. “Or maybe not. It depends on how much time you got to get in shape.”

I lie in my own vomit. A wavering supplication reels through the fog of my consciousness: Please, Val, don’t come around today, I don’t want you to see me like this. The thought is superceded by another, more intense and totally preposterous. Someday before I die, I tell myself, I don’t know how or when, but I’m going to kill Kalid Qazwini.

FOUR
A GIRL IN THE HEART OF MARYLAND

A year sped by, calendar leaves exfoliating. I continued to lead a relatively sheltered life at Yale, until the day I met Valerie. After which nothing was the same.

Like most days that alter our lives, this one gave no indication of radical changes to come. It all began a week earlier, and blandly enough, with a note to:

Phillips Chatterton, Esq.

13520 Dumbarton Oaks

Baltimore

Maryland

Dear Sir:

Dr. Guthrie Armbruster, my faculty advisor, suggested that I write you about my being a graduate student in the English Department at Yale. My research has determined that you are a direct descendant of Thomas Chatterton, the subject of my doctoral dissertation. It would be of great value to me if I might talk with you about him. Perhaps there are family letters, notes, addenda, memorabilia that you might grant me the privilege of examining. I intend to be in Baltimore next week, working for few days in the stacks at Johns Hopkins. May I phone you at the time, and come to see you at your convenience?

Sincerely,

Judd Breslau

The Chatterton house, a great Georgian brick pile with a gallery and a hipped roof crowned by a balustraded widow’s walk, dominated a gentle rise in the Green Spring Valley. Delicate gates of wrought iron opened on a quarter-mile of driveway lined with oaks.

Before you get carried away in a magnolia trance of antebellum splendor, let me inject a few apt modifiers. The gallery wanted painting. A few planks of the widow’s walk, essential to any sentinel who wasn’t an acrobat or a mountain goat, were missing. The iron gates were rusty and asquint on their hinges. The approach was rutted with great potholes hosting a cancerous proliferation of damp toadstools and beasties with opaque wings that droned in the stillness of the hot, shimmering afternoon. The oaks, ridden by something like scurvy and badly in need of a surgeon, formed a blighted tunnel smelling dankly of decay. The whole place looked as if the ghost of General Sherman had bivouacked there; it needed extensive repairs before it could be condemned.