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“Have a macaroon,” said Ferdousine.

“A dizzy spell,” said Kate.

“Or a slice of Melba toast.”

They were in Ferdousine’s sitting room. Each afternoon he took high tea here, framed by a stage-set that masqueraded as a scholar’s den. “A buttered scone,” he said, his voice still stuck in prewar Westminster, all drawled vowels and spat consonants, and a sniff before each phrase, as if savouring its scent. “A cucumber sandwich,” he said. “Or perhaps a potted shrimp.”

It was not an act that age had improved. Across the years his dryness had turned dusty, his nicety gone to fuss. He kept on fiddling with the details—a high-winged starch collar here, a pair of gold-rimmed pince-nez there—but the pose of Persian
sage as English gentleman seemed more and more untenable. The phrase that Kate used to herself,
he didn’t ring true
. But she had no heart to tell him that. Besides, it was too late. At his age, what other part would he have time to master?

At least the props were solid—the high, strait windows, the parquet floor, the antique silk rug from Shushtar, the Spy cricket prints and the scenes from Farsi myth, all slaughter and sex. Heavy oak bookcases were lined with reference books, from
The Book of Thoth
to
Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage;
custom-built pine cabinets spilled over with files. An A-Z of miracles and their mediums: Conchita Gonzalez of Garabandal, and Joseph of Copertino, Marija of Medjugorje, Padre Pio, the weeping statue of Syracuse. Stuff that bored Kate stiff, yet she felt comfort here, it was always easy to drowse.

All she’d ever asked was not to see. And in this room she felt blindfold, secure. So she stuffed herself with pork pies and luncheon meats, while Ferdousine sucked at a
sohan
, a large flat disc of caramel with squashed pistachios that his cousin sent him from Isfahan. It made a noise like a bird’s bones breaking as he nibbled, quick pecking bites just so.

“And this young man, John Joseph I believe the name is,” said Ferdousine, sniffing. “What might be your intentions there?”

“To make a man out of him,” Kate replied.

“Heh heh.” He still carried his head cocked sideways, but the curious bird’s eyes were not yellow now, they were a dishwater grey. “To make a man,” he said, and sniffed again. “Heh heh.”

The project that he was presently engaged on involved a Magdalena Santos of Alajuela, Costa Rica, just twelve years old, who’d been surprised by the Devil in her bath, and had then flown backwards with so much force that she smashed clean through the bath-house wall, hurtled across the back
yard and out into the road, narrowly missing a passing truck and finally coming to rest against the steps of the local
cantina
, bruised and shaken but otherwise undamaged, still holding tight to her bar of soap.

On Ferdousine’s working table was a small mountain of press cuttings, scraps of letters, numbered stickers for cross-reference, and foolscap sheets of yellow notepaper handwritten in purple ink like a brasserie menu. A hooded light fell on his hands blotched with liver spots, his fingers clawed by arthritis. “A most remarkable simulacrum,” he said. “An eidolon without parallel.”

“Pass the jam tarts,” said Kate.

“One thinks of Charmaine Dupont of Maine, perhaps of Isabella Moffo.” But she was no longer listening, no amount of jam tarts could bribe her. All this slicing and dicing, these boneyard speculations, it wasn’t decent.
It is an evil generation that asks for a sign
. Who had she told that to?

She must have been eating too fast, her head had started to throb. Maybe closing her eyes would ease her. Then again, maybe not. The sneaking schoolboy had been bad enough, his box of knives worse. But Abel Bonder? That was past toleration.

Whispering Death
, that was how he’d been billed. On stage his movements had been so restrained, so understated, that the knives seemed to glide self-propelled, and when they hit the board, you hardly heard a sound. Just a hiss, a muffled sigh, like a fish slipping into boiling water.

The season she’d known him, it was the year after Tarpon Springs. Charley Root had retired by then, no promoter would hire him any more, and they were living above a bakeshop in Palmetto. Kate’s mother was dying in the back room.

Kate had not known her well, they’d never talked much. While she was still working, she had seemed no more than one
of Charley Root’s appendages, a figure in some other room, crossing herself at mirrors, drenching her own feathers at the sight of knives. But now that she was bedridden, she seemed to hog the whole apartment. The murmur of her prayers, the sicksweet reek of candles and blown flowers from the altar she kept in her room—you couldn’t catch your breath for sanctity.

Charley Root himself could not stand to stop indoors. He ran a book out of his garage, greyhounds and jai alai mostly, and soused on Rebel Yell. When other knife-throwers came through town, they used to stay in Kate’s room, she’d have to sleep on a Laz-E-Boy downstairs.

Knife-throwing was a figure of speech.
Impalement
was the technical term, the word preferred by the pros, though Kate liked
blading
better, it sounded more sporting somehow. She had recently turned twelve, all freckles and teeth-braces, with a flat English drone that she’d picked up from Charley Root, an infection she couldn’t kick. But Abel Bonder seemed not to mind. He used to stand in the doorway, filing his fingernails, and watching her watch TV. A lean and whittled man—
blade-thin
, Charley Root used to say for a laugh—in a black suit and black patent shoes.

He had the loveliest hands. Not a whole lot of wingspan, but long and slender with tapered, girl’s fingers, and the moons of his nails a faint ghostly blue. A symptom of heart disease, Kate had heard, but how could that be true? If he’d had a heart, Charley Root would not have reverenced him. Would never have made him a present of his own knives. Not his Harvey McBurnettes.

Elvis was on the Steve Allen Show, the Jimmy Dorsey Show. But with Abel Bonder watching her, and Charley Root glugging Rebel Yell, and her mother’s dying smell in the back room, Kate couldn’t cream undisturbed. So she took refuge in the bakeshop downstairs.

Pasquale Brito’s Sweet Tooth
. A sallow-face man with a smoker’s cough, a smile like cracked glass, you’d never have guessed he had so much yeast in him. Or icing sugar, either. But he was the finest master-baker in the Panhandle. Plaited loaves and sourdough hearts, wedding breads all cinnamon and wild honey. And his pies. Sweet suffering mother of us all, those pies! Strawberry and rhubarb, frangipani, four-and-twenty blackbirds, mud and moon. Every sugared thing under the sun.
Beignets
and brioches,
cannoli, pain perdu
, bullfrogs, marzipan logs,
pinocatte alla perugina
and
cornetti con panna montate
and
biscotti di novara
. And
ma’amouls
. Of course, his orange-blossom
ma’amouls
.

They were his speciality; had won prizes from Kissimmee to St. Pete. Little tartlets no bigger than your thumb, stuffed with almonds, walnuts, pistachios and dates, and slathered over with a white cream made of rose-water and pulverized Bois de Panama, Pasquale Brito called it
naatiffe
. He’d got the recipe from his Syrian girlfriend, a nurse built like a Mack truck, used to come see him every afternoon late when surgery got out, and they’d retire to his kitchen. Leaving Kate in charge of the bakeshop. Up to her tits in meringues.

On this certain afternoon, with thick soupy rain outdoors and the bakery windows all steam, she had sat reading
Heartbeat
or
Teen Flame
, she couldn’t swear which, and when she glanced up, Abel Bonder was standing in the doorway, eating Shoofly Pie.

He looked like a black sun. Or some kind of reckoning. Stood watching in his black suit and tie, his black shoes shined to wing-tip mirrors, and all he did, he breathed in. Sucked up the smells of damp bread like a poultice still warm from the oven, the rain’s steam seeping, and the day’s last batch of fresh pies oozing sap on the pine counter, its wood stained dark with their juices. Hung there straight and still with his pinched
gravedigger’s face turned half-sideways, raised at a slight angle, he made Kate think of some white-stick blind man groping for light, and she laughed. Because she was embarrassed, was all. Flushed and sweated as she was, crab-coloured, she thought, a freckled crab, and her mouth crucified by braces. Still, she laughed. And Abel Bonder handled her. He put his blade hand on her breast, and he threw her on her back. Drove her down legs-kicking in the
ma’amouls
, slithering and sliding through the Bois de Panama. Pile-drove her so hard that she flew right off the counter, scrambling and flailing, she skinned her elbows, her knees, she didn’t care, she was out the door and running free, and that was all of Whispering Death.

But not all of his baggage. On the next afternoon Kate was walking home from school with Maria and Bobbie Jane, they were her best friends, and they were passing McMurdo’s Hardware when she spotted a ratty ginger toupee, sitting lost on the windowsill.

All day, ever since early Mass, she had been feeling dizzy, untethered, as if nothing was in its right place. So when she saw this hairpiece, she didn’t walk on the way she should, she stopped and picked it up. A most malignant object, normally she wouldn’t have touched it with Charley Root, but some sick spirit was on her, this day she could not stay her hand.

What she remembered best about McMurdo’s window, there was a pair of stainless steel fire tongs, and at the instant her hand touched the toupee, these tongs blazed with light. At first flash she thought it was a Susie Q, but she was wrong, this was no knife glinting, it was only the girl from Tarpon Springs, the one in the plastic raincoat. The exact same girl, no doubt of that. Except that she wasn’t wearing her raincoat this time. It was summer in Palmetto, the sun was bright and fierce. So the girl was dressed in pedal-pushers and shorts, a halter-top.

Lounging in McMurdo’s doorway for shade, she was licking on an ice-cream cone, it looked like Rocky Road, with her white shoulders and midriff bare, and her long bare legs so gorgeous, no words could begin to describe. Then she turned her head, saw the wig like a dead ginger kitten in Kate’s hand, and the toupee burst into flame.

At least she thought it did. She could have sworn. But when she came back to herself, Maria and Bobbie Jane said nothing about any rug, denied all knowledge. Which was strange, to say the least. Because Kate had felt her hand burn, her whole palm seared where she’d cupped the plate. The pain had been so fierce and true, she kept the wound bandaged till Labor Day.

No fun in that heat. But Abel Bonder had worse. Drunk in his hotel room in Tampa, he got his hand snagged in an electric toaster, cooked it to a crisp, and the hand shrivelled up, there was no blade extant that it could hold or throw in his life again.

1958. July.

Almost forty years gone by, and still she could not face a
ma’amoul
; she guessed she never would. And now the asshole was back. Fouling the Zoo, messing with Pearl, intruding on Billie and Bo. Even inside this room, she couldn’t push him back.

“Have some fruitcake,” said Ferdousine.

“Glacé cherries. They give you cancer.”

“I was not aware of that.”

“I saw it on
Geraldo
,” said Kate. “They kill you dead.”

No place left, it seemed, that she could rest secure. When she looked down to brush the stray crumbs from her lap, she heard a muffled rippling below, something rubbery and squished, a creaking like some leaky tug rocking at anchor before a storm. It was her girdle, and it was no use, it held nothing at bay. The birds were racketing and screeching in the
Zoo downstairs, the snakes were hissing for their tea, the apocalypse preachers in the street were still ranting about the beast with seven heads and on each head the name of blasphemy, and somebody was crashing and blundering on the stairs, something was kicking at the door. “Could I tempt you to broach a rock bun?” said Ferdousine. His old man’s hairless skull looked indecently exposed. “What would you say to a treacle tart?”

Terribilis est locus iste
 …

Some one or thing was falling.

H
e had been jumping frogs for pennies with Juice Shovlin, and his frog had kept winning. The frog was called Alan Rudkin after the fighter, and like the fighter he was undersized, not quite balanced right. One of his front legs was malformed, causing him to stagger and sometimes keel over on landing. Juice Shovlin kept calling foul, claiming he was drunk or doped, but such was not the truth of it, he was simply a born champion, he had a champion’s battling heart.

On this afternoon Rudkin had won five straight rounds in a breeze, never raised a sweat. Four pennies sat beside John Joe’s mark, but Juice Shovlin wouldn’t come across with the fifth, he was a bad loser. “You have that frog jazzed to the eyeballs,” he said. Even in those years he was big for his age and red, with wet red lips, that’s why they called him Juice. “Fecking chancer, fecking cheat,” he said. “I should have your guts for fecking garters.”

They were playing in the road outside the national school and it came on to snow, so they ran home. When they reached the Shovlins’ gate, Juice spat on John Joe’s shoes, a fat gob like a white worm. “Wait here till I fetch you your penny. Your fecking blood money,” he said, and ran away indoors.

The snow came harder then, and it brought on the dusk. Rudkin was taking little hops by the roadside, just to keep in
practice. Then Juice Shovlin was running back, carrying a copper pan held out before him at arm’s length. His knuckles were clenched tight round the handle, red and raw, and the copper pan was full of boiling milk. Without breaking stride, he scooped up Rudkin and threw him in. The milk seethed and bubbled. “Here’s what I owe you,” Juice Shovlin said, and his red knuckles flicked, the pan turned over, Rudkin flew out sprawling on a thin white sheet. It glimmered in the dusk, this hissing sheet, and flew into John Joe’s face. Then he was stretched on the ground, a coin was in his mouth.