The Clown's Graveyard
Chapter Four: Tragedy Strikes

I was a celebrity.

It was hard to say whether the Explorer's Club made me great or vice versa. The things I knew and the evidence I presented held my audience in awe. I brought in crystal skulls from a mail-order company in Sedona, a squirrel that beat volunteers at checkers with its "super-rodent intelligence", a thousand-year-old time capsule fabricated entirely from scratch. Instead of conspiracy theories and secondhand gossip, the locker bays buzzed with Atlantis, Easter Island, and the Roc, the giant Arabian bird that snatched up unwary travelers in its horrible claws and carried them away to mountaintop nests to die amidst the bones and jagged eggshells. Kids who couldn't get tickets envied those that did.

I hadn't realized just how much I'd been in Lou's shadow. I hadn't existed independently of him before, but now I'd won my own fame and it felt pretty good.

"I can't believe you're the same kid you used to be in lower school," Alexandra Claiborne said to me. "You were such a total dork. Now you're this totally, like, cool kid, you know?"

I agreed that it was remarkable. The pleasure I took in her praise was tempered by the fact that she was sitting in Lou's lap, kilt draped across her pale, shapely thighs. Girls admired me but it was Lou they showered their clumsy sexual favors on. I seemed to arouse only the sweet, geeky, loyal type. The lovely Stephanie von Helferin and I remained strictly friends, much to my chagrin. But no matter. Lou and I now moved in rarefied company, the prettiest girls, the coolest guys. As the impresarios behind the Explorer's Club it was our due.

Although I was having the time of my life, there was also something troubling me, something just a little disconcerting about the success of my lectures. I'd never credited Hoosiers with all that much common sense, but really—was the balance so easily tipped between the real and the fantastic? The same subjects that had been greeted with derision a few years ago now gained unimpeachable credibility by virtue of the flimsiest proof.

It made me consider my own credulity. I'd expect my classmates to fall for petty trickery; they didn't know any better. I did, or should have. I couldn't help but wonder about some of the evidence I'd accepted in the past. It struck me that the books in my library lacked footnotes and bibliographies, or cited only their neighbors on the same part of the shelf. The grainy photographs and hand-drawn diagrams were if anything even less compelling than my own creations.

It wasn't that I was so attached to the idea that Nessie might exist per se. Any of the phenomena I studied or the stories I believed could have been proven wrong and it wouldn't have broken my heart. What mattered more was the sense of possibility and hope they collectively represented.

When I was a little kid, my parents used to hide my birthday presents in a closet in my dad's study. I'd see them hustling the shopping bags in from the car. I never succumbed to the temptation to peek. It was enough just knowing they were there. When I got picked on at school, or had to spend the afternoon with the geriatric veteran who confused me with his dead son, or when I didn't have enough change for a candy bar, I'd think about the stuff in that closet and dream that it might already hold what I most wanted, bought and paid for. That's the way I saw the world. I'd always believed there was a closet full of loot for me somewhere out there, but maybe there wasn't. Maybe the bags held empty boxes.

I did have my mother's credibility to fall back on. She'd been so knowledgeable about the world and its wonders, so full of answers. But that was then, and now she was gone. I had to figure things out on my own.

I tried to clear my mind with alcohol and Euchre but the questions haunted me. How much that I'd accepted as true was fraudulent? How much of my reality might be false?

I found Dad at home one afternoon when rehearsal had been rained out. I saw him through the window in the kitchen door shrouded in steam, a patterned apron strap across the back of his neck. The smell of carrots and potatoes boiling in water, sherry, and consommé seeped out through the cracks in the weather-stripping. Dad was making The Soup.

We'd had The Soup a lot when I was little. It was the one thing Dad knew how to make, and he made it whenever Mom didn't feel like cooking. The sequence of smells had worn deeply in my mind like the songs on an old LP, first a starchy white smell, then onion tears, then the one that now filled the damp evening air. Next would come melancholy thyme and bay leaf, and finally fresh tomatoes. I fought back nostalgia. Dad mostly ate carry-out these days. I saw the little cardboard containers tucked in the trash when I got home from dinner at St. Elmo's.

He looked up from a pan of browning chuck when I opened the door. "Hello son," he said, clearing his throat. He looked tired.

"Hey," I said. "Smells good." There were two bowls on the counter, two folded paper towels under two soup spoons. I looked at him. He was staring into the pot, stirring it absently with a long wooden spoon. "I take it we're eating together tonight?" I asked him.

"Hmm? Oh, sure," he said. He started to open the cupboard, then stopped himself. I sat on one of the high chairs while he finished cooking.

We had drifted, Dad and I. We hardly had a relationship anymore, just a single-syllable word in passing and a distracted game of cribbage now and then. We knew very little of each other's lives, though I could imagine his pretty well. Dad had never really got over Mom's death. Instead he'd let it define him. He existed in a state of perpetual mourning which, though imbuing him with a certain nobility, also sealed him within her memory. Nothing else could get through. Not that he seemed to mind. He and his grief were happy together and his mood was generally upbeat.

Not tonight, though. I wondered what was on his mind and decided to seize the opportunity for a father-son moment.

"Dad?" I said.

"Yes, son?"

The phone rang. I went into the other room to answer it.

"Andy? Is this Andy?" the voice said.

"Yes—who's this?"

"My god, little Andy. I haven't seen you since your folks split up. Are you in college now?"

"Who is this?"

"It's Bob, Bob Clampett, in Rochester. Listen Andy, I can't talk right now. Just give your father a message for me. Tell him I'm coming to Indy this weekend after all and I'll give him a call when I get there. All right? Hey—you take care, now. Don't let those college girls give you any trouble." He was still laughing when the line went dead. I returned the phone to the cradle. I could hear the periodic scrape of my dad's spoon against the stoneware bowl. When he finished he rinsed the bowl and put it in the dishwasher and went out to the porch.

"Your parents didn't split up," said Lou. "Your mom drowned."

"I know," I said.

"So this Clampett guy's pretty confused."

"Yeah."

The rain was fogging up the windshield. Lou pushed open the no-draft to let in some air. "Kind of got to you, huh," he said.

I shrugged.

"Do you ever feel like going out to see her—I mean, you know, her grave? Do you ever do that?"

"There is no grave," I said. "She was cremated and her ashes were scattered. There wasn't even a funeral."

"What do you mean there wasn't a funeral?"

"I mean, I got home from camp and she was gone, and that was that."

Lou pulled over to the curb and put it in park. We were a few blocks south of Broad Ripple. He stared at a mailbox up ahead, tapping his finger on the steering wheel.

"My dad told me all about it," I said. "She went out swimming one evening right after they'd had this big meal, she didn't wait half an hour because she wanted to get across the lake and back before the sun set. Halfway back she got a cramp and went down before anyone could reach her. The turtles messed her up too bad for a regular funeral so they cremated her, but the mortician gave her ashes to the wrong family and they scattered them on the dunes up north by Lake Michigan. At that point there didn't seem to be much point having a funeral, so they didn't. But she died loving us and she lives on in our hearts. End of story."

The car was dim, lit only by a streetlight a few houses up, but it seemed to me that Lou had gone pale. He began to speak, then cleared his throat. "I'm sorry, buddy, it's just ... that's the worst thing I've ever heard." He put a cigarette to his lips and tried to light it, his hand trembling. "I'd like to get my hands on that Clampett guy," he said.

"A cramp can render helpless even the best of swimmers," I said. The rain falling on the hood seemed very loud, like marbles clattering on a mirror. "It was a freak occurrence but that doesn't make it any less a tragedy."

"Obviously," Lou hurried to say.

"Excuse me," I said and stepped out of the car. Rain fell in long drops on my head and ran down the back of my shirt. Lou called after me as I walked up College to Broad Ripple Avenue. The afternoon storm had taken the neon signs by surprise and they remained dark as I passed under them, dripping grimly on the worm-strewn sidewalk.

Hardwicke's News and Tobacco glowed yellow behind a window display of pipes and cigars. A row of bells jangled when I opened the door. I stood dripping on a red and black doormat. Across the store I saw Hardwicke himself at an oversized brass till. Reddish-gray hair fringed his shiny pink head, his fair eyebrows invisible behind the thick frame of his glasses. He was talking to a customer over a glass case full of cigarillos. I pretended to browse the extensive pornography selection while I waited for the other guy to leave. "I can only assure you that wasn't what I meant at all, not at all," the tobacconist said in a high voice. The customer pulled on his cap with both hands and stalked out wordlessly, glaring over his shoulder.

I waited a few minutes then walked over to the old man and asked for a three-pack of Garcia y Vegas. "I think you're a friend of my father's," I said as he rang up my purchase.

He peered at me through the tops, then the bottoms, of his bifocals, then snapped his fingers. "Andy Hunter! Why I haven't seen you in years. You're the very image of your father. He mentions you all the time."

"He does?"

"Sure, sure," the old guy said. "Say, how's he doing? I haven't seen him in a bit."

"Oh, you know," I said. I shivered from the cold. "Sad about my mother."

Hardwicke shook his head remorsefully. "Just a shame about that," he said. "She did love him once, I think, but she had a lot of other things going on." He caught himself and reddened. "Not like that, not in a cheap, she was under a lot of strain." A large wall clock wheezed in preparation for striking the hour. "She wasn't entirely healthy," he said in a rising voice.

"No, she wasn't," I said. "She wasn't right."

"Not right, not right at all," the old man said. "Just running off like that, and you just a little boy."

I left the cigars on the counter.

She sure had me fooled. All this time I thought I knew the story, but I had been living a myth all along. Now my eyes had been opened. It should have come as no surprise in a world of artifice such as this, where the truth is told only by coincidence and you believe anything at your peril. In the common pursuit of fame I'd even become fraudulent myself.

Still, my fame, however achieved, did have a considerable upside. Keeping faith in obscurity sure hadn't got me anywhere. I'd lived in the clouds, more interested in what might be there than what actually was, while the rest of the world passed me by. Perhaps it was best to stop tilting at windmills and shake hands with reality. And the reality was, it didn't matter whether something was true or not as long as it made for a good story.

No longer constrained by misguided scruples, I pushed my Explorer's Club appearances further than ever before. I devised ever more grandiose hoaxes and pushed the boundaries of gullibility with the heart-stopping "evidence" I contrived. I made them gasp, made them cry, abused them like a rented mule and left them wanting more.

Lou naturally felt threatened by my ever-magnifying persona and expressed his resentment by criticizing my act. "What's up with your material lately?" he asked me after a particularly vivid gig in February, a winter matinee featuring hot chocolate and schnapps around a blazing bonfire. The audience had shrieked with fear and delight at my tale of man-eating ice monsters in outer Siberia. After the show we'd joined Alexandra and Stephanie at Stephanie's playhouse, a carriage house on her family's estate.

"What about it?" I said. In the kitchen, Stephanie and Alexandra broke a glass and burst into hysterics.

"You're just making the shit up, aren't you," Lou said, leaning moodily against the pool table. "It's not based on anything at all."

I feigned shock. "I can't believe I'm hearing this," I said. "You mean to tell me you harbor doubts about the Icemen of Irkutsk?" My snappy outfit, purchased with proceeds from the club, had me in a particularly jocular mood.

"Cut the crap," he growled. "That's not what I mean." He rolled a cue ball back and forth across the wheat-colored felt. "There was something to it before. Maybe you used a few props, but the stuff you were talking about was real. That was the whole point."

This time my incredulity was genuine. "Come on, Lou," I said. "Those fairy tales? All right, maybe I interpreted a few of them a little too literally. But that guy doesn't live here anymore. Besides, what difference does it make as long as the fans get their money's worth?"

Lou rolled the cue ball into a corner pocket and sat on the edge of the table. "Look, if it's just a matter of making stuff up, anybody can do that. I can do that."

"Then maybe you'd better," I interrupted. "While we're on the subject, it seems to me your spot has been a little flat lately."

Lou shook his head. "Look, you're really putting it across," he said tiredly. "I'm not saying you're not. I'm probably the only one out there who can tell you're faking it. But that's—"

"Mr. Serious One and Two!" Alexandra scolded as she carried in a tray of highballs, Stephanie giggling close behind. "Hey, I've got an idea—let's go to Dirk's house. His parents are out of town and his brother's house-sitting. It should be a major good time!" That was Alexandra for you. She always knew just what to do.

Senior year was the best, just like they said. There was always something going on, cruising the malls, playing drinking games in basements, sitting on the trunks of each other's cars in the gym parking lot with our shirt collars turned up, standing around kegs with the guys drooling snuff juice into plastic cups holding forth about college life and kids from other schools. All the usual high school crap. It was no skin off my nose if Lou's was out of joint. I could hang out with anyone I wanted to. That's what being popular is all about.

The thing with cats is, you can never point anything out to them. They always look at your finger. The more you waggle and gesticulate, the more intently they fixate on your fingertip, tail lashing, and never at the bird dozing unawares just ahead, or the dropped chunk of tuna salad. That's where the expression "missing the point" comes from. Cats think the finger itself is what's significant but it's just an agent, a device to indicate something worthy of their attention, sometimes with increasing urgency but still no results until you give up in disgust with a poke on the cat's moist, idiotic nose. I suppose dogs have a clearer grip on the concept, given that some of them actually point at things themselves. I wouldn't know; I was never much for dogs. No, I was a cat person.

Lou called one evening out of the blue. I hadn't seen him outside of school and the Club in a while. His voice sounded strange. "There's something I think you should see."

"What is it?"

"I don't want to talk about it on the phone. Meet me at the tow path in half an hour."

So melodramatic. I pulled my windbreaker off the doorknob and grabbed an apple on the way out the door.

Lou was already there. An early thaw had cleared the canal of snow and ice and it ran high with overflow diverted from the White River. We nodded to each other. His face was grave. I urged him on, feeling awkward and annoyed.

"I met a dwarf," Lou said.

"Is this going to be one of your stories? Because I—"

"Hear me out," he said. "I was sitting on the bench in front of Luscious Licks having a cone, and a dwarf, three and a half feet tall, stubby fingers, the whole bit, came up to me and asked for a cigarette. I gave him one and he sat down beside me. After a minute or so he starts mumbling to himself. I couldn't make it out at first. Then I catch one word: graveyard. I look the guy over. He looks pretty down on his luck, even for a dwarf. He's got one of those battered brown suitcases with the old travel stickers and the belt holding it closed with socks hanging out. His hands are rough and his nails are bitten down. Blackjack hanging out of his pocket. Then it hits me: he's a carny. Then I hear the word again, graveyard, but this time I got the one in front of it, too. Clown's."

I jumped slightly, then recovered. "Was the word after that 'nuthouse'?"

Lou paused before continuing. The air was damp and chilly. "There's more to it than that."

"I'm all ears," I said, affecting weariness.

He didn't say anything but pulled something out of his pocket. It was getting dark so he illuminated the object with the flickering yellow flame of his lighter. At first I took it for a red rubber ball. Then I saw the notch cut into one side. It was a clown's nose.

The dwarf lived in a residential hotel near Fall Creek River, down a smelly hallway strewn with cigarette butts and lottery tickets. I sat next to Lou on a couch that a college student would have thrown out and watched the beat old dwarf pour a gin and Mr. Pibb and scratch himself through a soiled undershirt. "I was not always as you see me now," he said.

"Tell Andy what you told me," Lou said.

"Seventy-nine days. Seventy-nine days of rain and insects and illness, hacking through vines and anaconda and all the time feeling like someone or something was watching, watching."

"Vasilinsky here worked for P.T. Barnum himself," Lou said.

"Did he now."

"A beautiful man, Barnum was," said Vasilinsky. "Never met a more gentle soul. Always good to his freaks." The dwarf walked over to a cluttered rolltop desk and yanked a framed photograph of the famed showman from beneath a stack of papers. "Aye, Pete, there was no stopping you. You knew it was out there and you just had to bring back its secret for the people, the people who paid all those nickels to visit your grand museum."

Vasilinsky shook his head, drained his cocktail, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He leaned over the arm of the couch on tiptoe so his face was only inches from mine. "P.T. Barnum sent me on an expedition to find the Clown's Graveyard, Mr. Hunter." His breath was overwhelming. The corners of his eyes were crusted with garm. "I never reported back. Not during his lifetime. I got delayed on the return trip."

"Eh? Eh?" said Lou behind me, poking me in the kidneys. I got off the couch to get some distance from the two of them. "Wait a minute, hold on now," I said. "P.T. Barnum's been dead for a century and the museum burned down for good in the 1850s. You'd have to be a hundred and fifty years old." I snatched my jacket off the couch and started for the door. "This is a damned waste of time." An unearthly sound stopped me. It was the high, wheezing laugh of the dwarf.

"You're welcome to disbelieve, Mr. Hunter," he rasped. "Or you might ask yourself whether a place that could arrest my aging and grant me eternal life might not also have a respectably solid claim to being in fact the Clown's Graveyard itself."

A chill went down my spine. He had a point. I listened to what he had to say.

The dwarf's party had been ravaged by a lethal jungle flu. Vasilinsky was the only survivor, and he'd been delirious for so long when he got back to civilization that he could never hope to find it again. But he'd recently undergone hypnosis under a physician's care and it had jiggled loose the memory of his travels. His advanced age and poor health wouldn't allow him to make the trip himself. But he had a map. Half a map, actually; the half with the Clown's Graveyard on it was missing. It was an ancient map, the ink faded, scored deeply at the folds, showing only six or seven Interstates in the entire U.S. It didn't even say "Excluding Hawaii and Alaska." A dashed line stretched from Terre Haute across the plains, reaching the Continental Divide before ending abruptly at the tear.

"What do you say?" Lou asked me.

"To what? This is a joke," I said impatiently.

"Would you excuse us a moment?" Lou said to Vasilinsky. The dwarf shrugged, picked up a pack of cigarettes from the coffee table, and stepped out onto the fire escape. Lou closed the window behind him.

"Aren't we a little old for this?" I said. "Isn't it kind of Santa Claus meets the Easter Bunny?"

"You didn't used to talk that way," Lou said. A shout came from Vasilinsky outside. He was cursing and flailing at a pigeon. "Come on," Lou said, shoving my resistant shoulder. "It'll be great. Just you and me. We'll start with the map, go as far as that gets us. Then we start looking for clues. Maybe we find it in a week. Maybe a year. Maybe we never do. But Andy, come on—this is the best break we'll ever get, this map right here. You heard what your mom said about the place. How can we not go for broke?"

"My mother," I said. "Why should I believe anything she said?"

"Your mother never lied to you," Lou said. "Your father did. You don't know the whole story. You don't know any of the story." He paced over to the window, stared at the back of the dwarf's knees for a moment, paced back. "You've got to have a little faith," he said.

I looked at the map, the dotted line meandering lazily across Illinois and Iowa in perfect French curves, crossing pale blue rivers and red highways and gray county lines before plunging off the edge. I wondered where the other half was. Perhaps in the hands this very moment of someone desperate to get from the Clown's Graveyard to Terre Haute. I laughed in spite of myself, the first I hadn't forced in a while. And then I thought, what if it does exist after all? A person can't be wrong about everything. And if it did exist—then it would be worth any effort to gain it.

"What the hell," I said to Lou. "What have we got to lose?"

Lou let Vasilinsky in from the fire escape and we arranged to meet him again the next day. Before we left, he said he wanted to show us something. We waited on the couch while he rooted around in an overflowing closet. When he came out it was with a shoe. An old, cracked, black-and-white wingtip. Size twenty-five.

We decided that our expedition would depart the second week in April, spring break. Lou would borrow or steal his father's convertible Continental, an enormous red and white yacht that would be an ideal road trip car. He had a few savings bonds he could cash in as necessary—enough to take us a long way, he said, and we could always live on our wits once they ran out. We'd travel from town to town interviewing clowns, looking for signs, attending every circus, fair, and carnival we could find, living in motels and hanging out in bars to listen to the conversations around us. It sounded like a promising plan.

Now that the Clown's Graveyard was within reach at last, I was struck by how easily my faith in the old stories had lapsed into apostasy. I was lucky to have a friend like Lou. He'd stayed true to the cause and now he'd brought us to the point of realizing our destiny. He was on to something, all right: the map, the shoe, the nose ... the stories Vasilinsky told, which so closely resembled the ones my mother had told me, perhaps in truth after all.

It occurred to me that we were going to miss graduation. But a high school diploma was optional for an explorer. All the great ones were self-taught in the adventurous arts.

Lou and I threw ourselves into preparations for the coming Explorer's Club show. It would be the last one ever, though only we knew that, and we wanted to go out with a bang. We'd line up the best acts of the year, add another row or two of seats, distribute extra guest passes. At the end of the evening the three of us, Lou, Vasilinsky, and I, would take the stage, and in a new, brighter spotlight we would tell the audience about our quest. I would tell them of the lost paths traveled by spent harlequins down streets paved with banana peels, past seltzer waterfalls and towering rubber trees, into the unknown. I would tell them how Lou and I would accomplish what none before ever could: we would find the Clown's Graveyard and we'd come back to tell the tale.

Lou grilled me incessantly on everything I knew about the place, and as I talked, the memories and fragments began to arrange themselves into a surprisingly coherent picture. The trail seemed to be manifesting itself right before my eyes. I was running over possible routes one afternoon when I was struck by an idea. I had to talk to the others right away. Lou wasn't home so I drove straight to Vasilinsky's place. I rapped frantically on his door. A tall woman in an evening gown answered.

"Is Vasilinsky here?" I asked.

"No, he's not. What do you want with him?"

"When do you expect him?"

"He's supposed to have been back by now. Probably out getting drunk. We've got rehearsal in an hour. Damn him—after I busted my ass to get him this part. Now he's blowing it with some stupid side job for a high school kid. I told him, however much he's paying you, it's not worth it to waste your talent playing Clarabelle the Clown for some Cornsilk Academy punk."

Lou had known just how to set me up. The Clown's Graveyard Gag would have been huge. He'd seen the writing on the wall and knew the day was coming when I'd drop him like the dead weight that he was, so he sold me out for one final score. It would be the ultimate story, the way he tricked his best friend and partner into throwing away his life for a bogus quest, and one so laughably infantile as the Clown's Graveyard. In one fell swoop he'd reclaim top billing at the Explorer's Club, establish once and for all his superior wit, and pay me back for the resentment he'd been nurturing all along. How far would he have let the scam go, how many episodes humiliating only in retrospect, before he harvested the bounty for his audience? With me standing up there right next to him, of course.

I went home. I didn't tell Lou I'd been tipped off. I went along as if nothing was wrong. The night of the big show drew near, with our departure scheduled for the following Tuesday. Finally it was Saturday morning. Everything was ready. People were getting together early at the Explorer's Club, grilling chicken on the railbed, playing Euchre on top of beer chests, making a day of it. Lou went over to play host. I told him I had to take care of something first but I'd be right behind him.

I went down to Vasilinsky's apartment. I told him there had been a few changes to the script.

This is what I imagined happening. First, around dusk, Lou starts asking where I am. He's already picturing that red rubber nose on his trophy shelf and he can't wait to get the gag in motion. Was there ever such a colossal setup, or so savage a denouement, as the one prepared for me?

Lou paces backstage, licking his chops, hungry for the kill. The dwarf, that venal wretch, both bribed and counter-bribed, says not to worry. Surely Andy will get here sooner or later. In the meantime, the audience growing restless, Lou has no choice but to raise the curtain without me. He makes vague allowances for my absence, still hoping I'll turn up in time for the grand finale, stumbling after the Clown's Graveyard lie yet again like an ass after a carrot dangling from a stick. But as act follows act to unprecedented acclaim, Lou sees no sign of his putative partner in the darkness behind the stage.

Finally, at the end of the evening, Lou takes the stage. The announcement of the bogus Clown's Graveyard expedition won't be the same without me at his side, gaping credulously, but the show must go on. He introduces Vasilinsky and tells the audience to pay close attention to what he has to say.

Vasilinsky steps to the fore. He pulls a folded sheet of paper from his pocket. Lou frowns slightly. This wasn't the way they'd discussed it. Using notes might undermine the credibility of the dwarf's tale. But no—it's a note from Andy. Vasilinsky reads it.

Dear Friends,

I regret not being able to tell you this in person, or to say goodbye [the audience gasps]. You see, I've been called away on a matter of vital national importance. I can say no more about it, except to thank you for your support over the years. I'm leaving Lou in good hands, though. From now on, he will be supervised by Doctor Vasilinsky [that's me, says the dwarf], who had treated Lou for two years at the Lascher Institute for Aberrant Youth prior to his special case admission to Cornsilk Academy. [Lou goes white as a sheet. He'd kept the secret of his past so well for so long—in fact, I was the only person he'd ever told]. Dr. Vasilinsky will do his best to see that Lou's mental illness continues to be channeled into productive and entertaining forms. Please continue to humor him, in memory of me.

Yours truly,

Andy Hunter

Shock and amazement. Who'd known? But it was all clear enough now. The rest of the evening fades glowingly into oblivion beyond that point, the fantasy having served its purpose. I didn't get to see what really happened when Vasilinsky spilled the beans, of course. I was halfway across Iowa by the time the sun was down on my way to California.

Having missed the point entirely.

Chapter Five: Summit at Il Pirata