One afternoon, sitting in the almost-deserted Jockey Club, Rafe was called to the telephone. He had told nobody where he was going. Someone must have followed me, he thought. “Hello?”

The woman on the other end of the line called herself “a friend.” He recognized Paula’s voice at once.

“This week is a good one for traveling.”

Little children playing at melodrama, he thought, but against his will felt the soft kiss of fear. What had she heard?

“My family?”

“Also. It should be a long trip.”

“Who is this?” he asked charitably.

“Don’t ask questions. Another thing, your telephones at home and at the office are tapped.”

“Did you get the microscope?” he asked, an end to charity.

Now she was weeping, hard and wrenchingly, trying to talk.

“I love you,” he said, hating himself.

“Liar.”

“No,” he lied.

The phone went dead. He stood there holding the receiver, feeling numb and grateful, wondering what he had let get away when he had so carefully kept her out of his needs. Then he replaced the receiver and hurried to see his uncle.

They did not sleep that night. They could not take the land with them, the buildings, the machinery, the long good years. But there were negotiable securities, jewelry, the most valuable of his mother’s paintings, like money in the bank. Considered as Meomartinos they would be poor; considered by most standards they would have financial comfort.

The boat Erneido procured was no fishing boat. It was a power launch, a 57-foot Chris-Craft with twin 320 General Motors diesels, a stateroom, a carpeted salon and a galley: a fast and comfortable boat built to pleasure rich men. He gave his mother one and one-half grains of Nembutal as they left the beach at Matanzas the following midnight. She slept soundly.

He and his mother stayed in Miami only ten days. Guillermo and Uncle Erneido, mapping a legal campaign they hoped might somehow retain the Meomartino properties for the family in absentia, set up a residence-headquarters in two rooms of the Holiday Inn. They looked upon Rafe’s decision to go North as a temporary aberration.

His mother enjoyed the train trip to Boston on the East Coast Champion. They went directly to the Ritz through the lemon-freeze air of New England spring. For several weeks after that they were tourists, chasing the worlds of Paul Revere and George Apley, his mother’s strength trickling like sawdust from a doll with a torn heel. When she began to run a low-grade fever, he found her a famed cancer man at the Massachusetts General Hospital and stayed near her until the fever disappeared. Then he resumed his prowling search—for what?—without her.

It was March, cool and cruel. The lilacs and the magnolias along Commonwealth Avenue were tight hard buds, brown and black, but in the Public Gardens across the street from the Ritz, beds of hothouse tulips made splashes of color against the unawakened sod.