“Why do you swear so much?” Eigen asked Karras.

“Fuck, do I?”

“A lot. It doesn’t bother me, but I was wondering.”

“Maybe it’s because one night long ago I had to fucking watch a goddamn preteen fuck her own pussy bloody with a cruci-fucking-fix while she screamed at me that my fucking sweet, dead mother was sucking cocks in hell.” Karras pulled a flask from his frock pocket and took a swig. “Goddamn exorcisms.”

His saying all of this to Eigen was bad enough, but he had said it loud enough for everyone in the restaurant to hear. To understate it justly, every set of eyes in the restaurant was settled on him.

“What’s everybody fucking looking at? What are you fucking looking at? Haven’t you ever seen a goddamn priest before?”

The patrons went back to their meals. The waitress came and stood over Karras, hands on hips.

“What in the h-e-l-l is wrong with you?”

“I did not have the f-u-c-k-i-n-g energy to spell out every g-o-d-d-a-m-n word. Won’t happen again,” Karras said.

“It better the fuck not,” she said.

2

Karras was adamant that the best way into the Naval Observatory was the legal way, a public tour. If we were caught on the grounds, we would likely be arrested by the Secret Service, and since I didn’t have an ancient key like Sill, being caught was a near certainty. He parked the Malibu not far from where my car had been parked before it was towed. Finding the BMW was going to be impossible, as I had no license, no registration, no idea of the plate number and could not remember the model, year, or color. Given that, it could have been parked three spaces away and I would not have known.

Gaining entry was easy enough. We bought tickets and walked in. “Easy peasy,” Karras said. We walked through a room of clocks, read plaques about time, visited the library, and then looked at the telescope. We stayed with the tour group, which consisted of a couple from Ames, Iowa, and their six children from six to fifteen; a young gay German couple who seemed to be in the middle of breaking up; a man from Albany, New York, who wore a jacket with patches from every national park in the country and every tourist site in the District of Columbia; and a pair of librarians from Falls Church, Virginia, who visited the observatory weekly because they had a crush on the docent, a sixty-three-year-old retired navy commander with sideburns and impeccable posture. As the tour was near complete, Karras peeled us off and we slipped back into the circular library. Eigen and I followed him past the rope that forbade tourists to climb the stairs to the mezzanine. Once up there with the beautiful, old books, he had us lie on the floor so that we were concealed by the half wall.

“What now?” I asked.

“I suggest a nap,” Karras said. “No-fucking-body comes up here and they’ll be locking up soon. We’ll get up, go to the telescope room, find the fucking thingie out there in space and you can do what you have to goddamn do. So, nighty-night.”