The three hours it took to drive from the restaurant to Grand Marais, a small fishing village on Lake Superior, were spent unpleasantly trying to digest a platter of sauerbraten, spätzle and red cabbage. The food was good, but not good driving food, much less secret mission food: his eyelids drooped and itched for sleep, the soaring heart became a fat hen at roost. Many of the problems the world has had with Germany in the past century, he felt, could be traced to this leaden, fascistic diet. It sucked out the aerial spirit and made one fart and feel unkind. He possessed enough self-knowledge, though, to avoid devising a new diet on a full stomach, having done so a hundred times, a number far in excess of what it takes to teach wisdom to a Pavlovian dog. There was a brief rape fantasy, not so quickly brought under control, in which he discovered an attractive girl scout lost in the forest. He led the hundred and thirteen pound waif to a woodland stream where she (the usual hygiene) bathed. Then he pounced like a cat, swerving back over to his own side of the yellow line to miss a blue pickup. Certainly his first rape fantasy in memory had to be attributed to the leakage of sauerbraten into his veins. He corrected the fantasy by only putting it in a third of the way, and prolonging it into an afternoon of heartfelt bliss where it was he, Warlock, who exercised all of the good sense. The poor thing was crazy for him. She couldn’t be stopped.

He checked into a modest motel on a hill outside of town, rejecting the fancier digs near the Coast Guard station as being too obvious. The food had settled to the point that he could get back on his mental toes. Hudley jumped into the middle of the large bed still gnawing furiously at a greasy veal knuckle he had secured for the dog at the restaurant. He pondered battling the dog for the knuckle but didn’t feel up to the strain. A dog needs a vacation from strife. While sorting through his gear he remembered Diana saying that tonight was the summer solstice and it now occurred to him that that meant the longest day and shortest night of the year. He knew there were additional meanings but Anthropology 101 was a long time ago. Diana had so many nutty interests: on his forty-second birthday the December before, she had told him that he was lucky in terms of Chinese mythology because he was entering his seventh seven. He had made light of her statement in front of Clete and La Verne. She had huffed off for a walk in a blizzard, loving winter as she did—skating, skiing, tobogganing, walking—while he only pretended he did.