"Don't freak on me, just listen. There is money put aside for Dora that has no connection to me. The government can't touch it, besides, they never got an indictment against me let alone a conviction, you saw to that. The information's in the flat. Black leather folders.

File cabinet. Mixed right in with sales slips for all sorts of paintings and statues. And you have to save all that somewhere for Dora. My life's work, my inheritance. It's in your hands for her. You can do it, can't you? Look, there's no hurry, you've done away with me in a rather clever way,"

"I know. And you're asking me now to function as a guardian angel, to see that Dora receives this inheritance untainted...."

"Yes, my friend, that's precisely what I'm begging you to do. And you can do it! And don't forget about my Wynken! If she won't take those books, you keep those books!"

He touched my chest with his hand. I felt it, the little knock upon the door of the heart.

He continued. "When my name drops put of the papers, assuming it ever makes it from the FBI files to the wire service, you get the money to Dora. Money can still create Dora's church. Dora is magnetic, Dora can do it all by herself, if she has the money! You follow me? She can do it the way Francis did it or Paul or Jesus. If it wasn't for her theology, she would have become the charismatic celebrity long ago.

She has all the assets. She thinks too much. Her theology is what sets her apart."

He took a breath. He was talking very rapidly, and I was beginning to shiver. I could hear his fear like a low emanation from him.

Fear of what?

"Here," he said. "Let me quote something to you. She told me this last night. We've been reading a book by Bryan Appleyard, a columnist for the papers in England, you've heard of him? He wrote some tome called Understanding the Present. I have the copy she gave me. And in it he said things that Dora believed ... such as that we are 'spiritually impoverished.' "

"Agreed."

"But it was something else, something about our dilemma, that you can invent theologies, but for them to work they have to come from some deeper place inside a person... I know what she called it... Appleyard's words ... 'a totality of human experience.' " He stopped.

He was distracted.

I was desperate to reassure him that I understood this. "Yes, she's looking for this, courting it, she's opening herself for it."

I suddenly realized that I was holding on to him as tightly as he was holding on to me.

He was staring off.

I was filled with a sadness so awful that I couldn't speak. I'd killed this man! Why had I done it? I mean, I knew he'd been interesting and evil, but Christ, how could I have