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Rossner stared through the glass wall of the booth A young wo from the restaurant toward a little red sports car She earing fight white shorts with dark stitching She had nice legs

“Glenn?”

“Yes, sir”

“Do you understand me?”

“Repeat what I’ve said”

Rossner went through it, almost word for word

“Very good, Glenn Now go do it”

“Yes, sir”

Rossner returned to the Land Rover and drove back onto the busy turnpike

Holbrook sat quietly, patiently in the unlighted motel room He switched on the television set, but he didn’t watch it He got up once to use the bathrooet a drink of water, but that was the only break in his vigil

At 4:10 the telephone rang

He picked it up “Holbrook”

“I am the key, Mr Holbrook”

“I am the lock”

The man on the other end of the line spoke for half a minute “Now repeat what I’ve said”

Holbrook repeated it

“Excellent Now do it”

He hung up, went into the bathrooan to draw a tub full of ater

When he turned right onto the state route, Glenn Rossner pressed the accelerator all the way to the floor The engine roared The car’s fraan to shimmy Trees and houses and other cars flashed past,wheel jumped and vibrated in his hands

For the first mile and a half, he didn’t look away from the road for even a second When he saw the curve ahead, he glanced at the speedohtly better than a hundred miles per hour

He whis he could hear were the tortured noises produced by the car At the last ritted his teeth and shuddered

The Land Rover hit the four-foot-high stone wall so hard that the engine was jammed back into Rossner’s lap The car plowed part of the way through the wall Stones shot up and rained back down The Rover tipped onto its crushed front end, rolled over on its roof, slid across the ruined wall, and burst into flames

Holbrook undressed and climbed into the tub He settled down in the water and picked up the single-edge razor blade that lay on the porcelain rim He held the blade by the blunt end, firht hand, then slashed open the veins in his left wrist

He tried to cut his right wrist His left hand could not hold the blade It slipped froers

He plucked it out of the darkening water, held it in his right hand once e of his left foot

Then he leaned back and closed his eyes

Slowly, he drifted down a lightless tunnel of thedizzy and weak, feeling surprisingly little pain In thirty minutes he was comatose In forty minutes he was dead

Sunday, August 7, 1977

AFTER WORKING ALL WEEK on the e his sleeping habits for the weekend At four o’clock Sunday , he was in the kitchen of his tiny, two-room apartment The radio, his most prized possession, was turned do:at the table, next to the , staring fixedly at the shadows on the far side of the street He had seen a cat running along the walk over there, and the hairs had stood up on the back of his neck

There were two things that Buddy Pellineri hated and feared more than all else in life: cats and ridicule

For twenty-five years he had lived with his mother, and for twenty years she had kept a cat in the house, first Caesar and then Caesar the Second She had never realized that the cats were quicker and farthan her son and, therefore, a bane to him Caesar—first or second; it made no difference— liked to lie quietly atop bookshelves and cupboards and high-boys, until Buddy walked past Then he leaped on Buddy’s back The cat never scratched hiood grip on his shirt so that he could not shake it loose Every ti a script, Buddy would panic and run in circles or dart fro in his ear He never suffered ame; it was the sudden-

ness of the attack, the surprise of it that terrified hi playful At times he confronted the cat to prove he was unafraid He approached it as it sunned on asill and tried to stare it down But he was always the first to look away He couldn’t understand people all that well, and the alien gaze of the cat made him feel especially stupid and inferior

He was able to deal with ridicule more easily than he could deal with cats, if only because it never came as a surprise When he was a boy, other children had teased him mercilessly He had learned to be prepared for it, learned how to endure it Buddy was bright enough to know that he was different froence quotient had been several points lower, he wouldn’t have known enough to be ashamed of himself, which hat people expected of hiher, he would have been able to cope, at least to some extent, with both cats and cruel people Because he fell in between, his life was lived as an apology for his stunted intellect— a curse he bore as a result of ahospital incubator where he had been placed after being born five weeks prematurely

His father had died in a mill accident when Buddy was five, and the first Caesar had entered the house teeks later If his father hadn’t died, perhaps there would have been no cats And Buddy liked to think that, with his father alive, no one would dare ridicule him

Ever since his o, when he enty-five, Buddy had worked as an assistant night watch Union Supply Co Union felt responsible for him and that his job was make-work, he had never adht to eight, five nights a week, patrolling the storage yards, looking for smoke, sparks, and flames He was proud of his position In the last ten years he had come to enjoy a measure of self-respect that would have been inconceivable before he had been hired

Yet theain, humiliated by other children, the brunt of a joke he could not understand His boss at the raveyard shift, was a pleasantanyone However, he s Ed always told theot a laugh from it

That hy Buddy hadn’t told anyone what he had seen Saturday o He didn’t want theh

Around that tie yard and walked well off into the trees to relieve himself He avoided the lavatory whenever he could because it was there the other men teased him the most and showed the leastpine tree, shrouded in darkness, taking a pee, when he saodown frohts that cast narrow yellow beahts, as the men passed within five yards of hi rubber hip boots, as if they had been fishing They couldn’t fish in the reservoir, could they? There were no fish up there Another thing

each man wore a tank on his back, like skin divers wore on television And they were carrying guns in shoulder holsters They looked so out of place in the woods, so strange

They frightened him He sensed they were killers Like on the television If they knew they had been seen, they would kill him and bury him out here He was sure of it But then Buddy always expected the worst; life had taught him to think that way

He stood perfectly still, watched thee yard But he quickly realized he couldn’t tell anyone what he had seen They wouldn’t believe hi as only the truth, then he would keep it secret!

Just the same he wished he could tell soht about it but still could not make sense of those skin divers or whatever they were -In fact, the ht about it, the more bizarre it

seehtened by what he could not understand He was certain that if he told someone, it could be explained to hihed

Well, he didn’t understand their laughter either, and that was eventhan the mystery men in the woods

On the far side of Main Street, the cat scampered from the heavy purple shadows and ran east toward Edison’s General Store, startling Buddy out of his reverie He pressed against the pane and watched the cat until it turned the corner Afraid that it would try to sneak back and climb up to his third floor rooms, he kept a watch on the place where it had vanished For the otten the reater than his fear of guns and strangers