The Ancient Company

Alvah Gershon, M.D., specialist in dermatology, had been legally divorced for exactly one day when, from an unknown informant, he received news which implied the possibility of murdering a man he had never met. He had never laid eyes upon the man he might be obliged to kill. So far as he knew, the man had never seen him, nor had reason to.

And there were some other peculiar elements with which Dr. Gershon opened his career as a cautious assassin. Would he have been called to follow this path where it led him, were it not for the coincidence about his divorce, which left him unanchored in spirit? And connected with this rhetorical question, he might not have been so obedient -- obedient! -- had he felt that he had chosen a useful medical specialty, such as surgery or endocrinology or internal medicine, instead of raising a prosperous practice based on pimples and vanity, itches and self-hatred, troubles mainly of the idle. He felt useless. He felt superfluous -- a blemish on the skin of the times.

Dr. Gershon's former wife, Ruth, lived with their son in the small, neat, slate-gray house in a moderately elegant Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco where they had installed themselves four months after the boy, Ronnie, had been conceived. Their divorce was composed of a series of amicable arrangements between responsible parents; they had simply cooled on each other, in the fashion of old school chums. Ruth now practiced child psychology part time; Gershon visited the boy at his convenience; and the child support for Ronnie and the payments on the mortgage of the slate-gray house did not break his back. The expense, what with taxes and all, was a strain on a young practice, but not a backbreaker. Ruth had broken nothing else, either; she had left him intact.

"I want you to have liberal visitation," she said.

"Thank you, Ruth," he said.

"We must consider not only the child," she said. "We must also consider you."

"Thank you, Ruth," he said. "I have always been able to count on you."

"We have always been able to count on each other, Alvah," she said.

Everything, up to this moment in his life, seemed to have been liberally counted on and trustworthy. And now this moment in his life.

Often these past months, in his newly decorated redwood floor-through on a deslumming slope of Potrero Hill, weary after a day of dispensing antihistamines and cortisone ointment -- he also dealt in calamine lotion, like a school nurse -- Alvah Gershon sat through the evening in his bachelor flat with its splendid view of the San Francisco Bay, smoked his pipe, made an effort to enjoy the empurpled glow of water, as he was supposed to, and wondered just why Ruth and he had separated. Boredom. But he was no less bored now, and the boredom made him tired, and the fatigue made it hard for him to play young doctor on the town, rounding up the girls at Enrico's, like so many of his acquaintances. Well, at age 38 he could still go back to school and train for something serious. Distraction. And that would make a mess of his finances; he was not ahead of his expenses, he was just keeping up. Boredom. And he would poke the fire, poke his pipe, and wonder where a man who has listened to his mother, listened to his wife, listened to his seniors and the chiefs of clinic, listened to everyone, could now go in life. There was silence, but when he listened, there was no new voice telling. He had been separated for a year; he was now divorced in the eyes of the State of California. He dwelled in his reduced circumstances on a good slope of Potrero Hill -- a neat, alert, depressed young man with sallow skin and large dark eyes and strong tufts of dark hair, looking a little like a Hungarian officer of cavalry. He had no place to put his speed and alertness.

Then, one Wednesday afternoon, on the day when he had no office hours, the anonymous special-delivery letter came. It was surely the oddest communication that Alvah Gershon had ever received. It did not exactly promise murder, but it meant that he must think about it. He had to think seriously about a question which he had never before considered. Although very long and detailed, the letter can be summed up fairly simply:

The letter informed Dr. Gershon that a certain Dr. Muller-Frantz, temporary instructor in physics at the University of California at Berkeley, had been active in the German missile program during the War. His record as an active and public anti-Semite during the early years of the Nazi regime had made it impractical for him to be hired by Von Braun for American missile work, as so many other German scientists had been. Some journalist or jealous colleague would have turned up the reports. He had managed to find this quiet berth in an American university, where, however, he was not happy. For one thing, his pay and rewards in prestige were less than he deserved. For another, he was surrounded by Jewish mathematicians, physicists and students, who breed as if the bush had only been pruned by Hitler. His isolation, however, had stimulated him to work, and he had come upon some important developments in the utilization of missile technology. He had made contact recently with the Nasser government and, within a few weeks, would be taking to Cairo his talents as a disseminator of poison gas, disease germs and nerve destroyers -- silent and secret weapons which could cause an effective horror without even the inconvenience of war ...

Reading this letter, Dr. Gershon felt alternate waves of rage and disgust sweep through his body. Why him? he asked. Why choose Alvah Gershon to hear all this? He was not even a Zionist. And how did it happen that Nazis were allowed to teach in this country? (He knew that they worked on research programs -- any leg ahead in the space race.) And was it a hoax? And what the devil was he supposed to do about it? And then, as a doctor, he imagined the skin eruptions, eye hemorrhages, suppurations and ulcers, explosions of organs, fits and paralysis which one might find in an epidemic of the diseases commonly understood under the heading "Plague."

There were various courses of action for Alvah Gershon. As a first step, he could investigate to see if this were not the peculiar joke of one of his patients. San Francisco, like every city, is full of bored nuts whose psychoses give off all sorts of smoke. In the cool gray city, madness sometimes turned from the bottle or the Golden Gate Bridge. It erupted the skin, it lacerated the spirit, it made trouble. And then, if the sender of the letter was not a crank. Dr. Gershon could go to the State Department office, or the FBI, or the Israeli consul, or the B'nai B'rith ... In fact, he had no idea where to go. This problem had not been discussed in Medical Ethics 2.

Tucking the letter into his jacket pocket, he went off to pick up his son after school. Wednesdays he took him to the park. Driving with his son to Golden Gate Park to row on the lake or visit the children's zoo, to show him the deciduous leaves and explain why others are evergreen, he worried about the time when he might have a girlfriend instead of just an occasional nurse; and then would he want his son to meet the girl, and would his wife become more difficult? He believed that she too was finding the freedom of an amicable divorce no more exciting than their amicable marriage. American worries in 1966.

But this day he had other worries. Oddly enough, as if tuned in by some mysterious offshore station, his son Ronnie, aged ten, who had begun to know everything about wars, asked him a question which made a connection with the letter in his pocket:

"Daddy, were you in World War One or Two?"

Gershon laughed and explained. But he remembered, also, how history is telescoped for the young. In 1939, the earlier War had seemed part of some medieval jousting, and its veterans old men. He had been a child then, reading child's versions of trench fighting and Verdun. And now, in 1966, the span of time since the end of his -- Gershon's -- War was as great. He spent the afternoon at the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park, telling Ronnie about the War. He had been a 17-year-old paratrooper near the end of it. He had jumped nearly 50 times, first from towers and then from planes. Airplanes with propellers. He had carried a Browning automatic rifle. The War had been fought because a tyrant had wanted to conquer the world and kill, kill, kill. When he began to describe the reasons for the War, Ronnie interrupted. "Did you ever shoot anybody? What did it feel like, floating down? Like a deciduous leaf? How much chocolate did you carry in your belt?"

"Oh, you've heard before, have you?"

"Well, I'm not dumb, Daddy."

The boy did not understand what he was saying about the reasons for the War, but his cheeks grew flushed and his eyes bright as he realized that his father, the doctor, the skin specialist, his mother's former husband, had done something exciting, many years ago. Gershon kept trying to explain the War and the boy kept trying to make him tell an adventure story.

In a way, Gershon felt, the boy was right. He was right about his own needs. They drank tea together, and ate cookies with funny sour seeds in them, and were served by a round, brown, smiling little Japanese girl, in folklore costume, who put her fingertips together when she listened to Doctor Gershon ask for more cookies. The boy, wearing his ritual maroon corduroys for visitation with his father, a sleepy dreamy kid with a pink little mouth, was an old child, knowing everything, perched, legs swinging, on the summit of childhood. Soon -- his father realized, examining the darkening upper lip -- soon he would be a young adolescent, suffering confusion, insomnia, ambition, desire, the tortures of becoming a man, expecting all the blessings of power. During this last time of easy childish freedom, he could worship his father. Later, he would judge.

Telling his story, and feeling the warmth of father and son pass between them, Gershon recognized what had been lacking in his affable life with his child, his patients, his friends. Yes, even with his wife. He felt the lack by the presence. He needed to court the practical anxiety of making up his own mind. He needed chances and chanciness, the natural lot of a man. He was a dark, elegant and bent young man, like a Hungarian officer, with more awareness than is needed for effective action. But now he understood what he was missing -- risk and commitment -- knew it now for sure by remembering the year when he had hand it. That power was worth the accepting, and its dangers. Telling the War thrilled him, too.

He took the boy home a little late. "You look very well," said Ruth. "Would you like a cup of coffee? You know, Alvah, I was worried about you. But today you look better than you have in months -- color in your cheeks."

Color in my head, thought Alvah Gershon.

He headed back through the evening traffic toward Potrero Hill, the sun roof of his black Peugeot thrown open. The sky showed streaks of color, like the tint of a brave woman's hair. What a romantic notion! He smiled at his abandonment of caution in his daydream. A kid in a rod behind him honked. He raised his fist through the sun roof.

He would find out about Dr. Muller-Frantz. He felt certain that it was not a hoax. He would do what he could. And then, if necessary, if there were nothing else personal and sensible to be done in order to stop his going to Cairo, Alvah Gershon. M.D., practice limited to dermatology, would settle personally with Dr. Muller-Frantz, skin to skin.

• ••

Dr. Gershon was a peculiarly secret person, though like many men, submitted to the strong, silent hero of the Western movie in his childhood, he often felt that he talked too much. With a few friends he had mused about philosophy (the meaning of life), his doubts about his profession, his strangely attenuated dealings with his wife, his careful passion for his son; to one friend he had even confessed his odd frozen isolation in the state to which he had aspired: free, exploring his freedom, prospering reasonably, a professional man, paying his taxes. He confided in no one, however, for several days after receiving the letter about Muller-Frantz. Instead, he made a little list of authorities to consult first: the police, the B'nai B'rith. It wasn't much of a list. Well, perhaps the letter was a hoax. Later he could try the Israeli consul. But surely it must be a hoax.

But then, two days later, he awoke at dawn with an angry clenching and the decision: Do something now. If it was not a hoax, now was the time to do something. Ailanthus, the tree of heaven outside his bedroom, lay its thick, oily leaves against the glass. As the sun came up, he took his coffee at the window facing the Bay -- once more that magic sense of early morning which had been his good luck in childhood, the fresh of flowers and the gleam of slanting sunlight on blue San Francisco. Then he drove to the police station. When he said he had information about a murder, they grudgingly allotted him a room and a sergeant. Sergeant Fred Shannon, smile at the ready, like a man being shown a love letter, was a handsome cop with a thatch of curly white hair and a slight limp. He used his limp with the pleasure of a man who had earned it in the line of duty, not bowling. He had been told about many murders in his lifetime, but this one confused him. "Who? A doctor Muller-Frantz? Who'd he kill? What do you mean 'a whole population'? Talk English to me, Mister Gershing."

"Doctor."

"Doctor Gershing."

"Doctor Gershon."

"Well, talk so's I can understand." He made a shrewd cop smile. He had a healthy pink scalp, boiling with waves of curly white hair. "And tell me what you say you're a doctor of, too, will you?"

From the next room came regular and rhythmical sounds which at first made Dr. Gershon think of lovemaking, but then, sorting them out in the hullabaloo of the police station, he recognized that someone was being beaten by someone to whom administering beatings was a habit. "Ah didn't do nothin", Ah didn't do nothin'," said a voice through the walls.

The handsome white-haired sergeant noticed Dr. Gershon falter before these sounds. "Criminal investigation department," he said. He excused himself and went next door; a moment later the rhythmical sounds of lovemaking ceased. When he came back, he said, "The courts make it hard on we law-enforcement officers. Sometimes we got the circumstantial evidence, but they just crap on us. So we like to get the lawbreaker to own up for his own good. That way, they confess, they get consideration from the D.A. Also the dockets are awful crowded -- I tell you, Doc, it ain't easy to protect law and order."

Dr. Gershon was still frowning and distracted.

The policeman, by profession a judge of human nature, brought him back to their subject. He had taken his night course in getting along with civilians, but the world is still round and cranks are still a pain in the place where a veteran desk sergeant feels chafing and irritation. He said, "I can't see what crime you're trying to say this here German refugee doctor committed. Seems like you're hounding him. The police, y' know, we respect the rights of citizens, even if they ain't citizens. That's our sworn duty as officers of the law. Now this here citizen -- all right, he might be a German Nazi citizen, but he's a law-abiding American today -- we can't interfere with his due processes. He's only a D.P. from Red tyranny, after all -- you understand what I mean, Doc?"

The sergeant was brisk, but civil. Dr. Gershon got up to go. Politely the sergeant accompanied him to the door.

" 'Course," said the cop apologetically, "if there's illegal entry, you could go to Immigration. Or you catch him littering the California highways, ha-ha. But I'm serious." He crinkled up his eyes to show that the way of the world was not too much for him, even though he now had to take a desk job, what with that limp and all. But he could still have a little fun with the citizens. He added: "Or on his income tax, you could really get him there, the Treasury Department. They really pay for informants there, Doc, if you could use the cash -- you know?"

Dr. Gershon backed out. Down the hall they had started to beat the prisoner again. Apparently the sounds were traveling along pipes into this room by a quirk of acoustics -- a tinny complaining voice -- because as soon as he opened the door, the sounds of official investigation faded away. "Ah didn't do nothin' -- -- " In the hall, the bustle of a downtown police station. Wives and mothers, lawyers with briefcases, unreality. What was he doing here? But then, what was he doing when he sanded blemishes in his office?

He had a coffee next door to a bailbond joint. He sat in the indecisive damp chill of a San Francisco morning, outdoors at the Doggie Diner, huffing on his cup at a stool and thinking, Yes, it's probably a hoax. Who would write to me and why?

At home he received a letter typed on the same machine as the first. It simply gave the dates of Dr. Muller-Frantz' trip. He was leaving in a week, by Lufthansa Airlines, for Copenhagen, Frankfurt and Cairo, with a change of planes in Copenhagen and a stopover of a few days in Frankfurt before the terminal stretch of his one-way trip to Egypt. Times of arrival and departure were noted as efficiently as if the message came from a travel agent. First-class flight. Traveling alone.

Alvah Gershon began to think more systematically and cunningly. He called Lufthansa, said he was Doctor Muller-Frantz, and confirmed the reservations. It was exactly as written. He had six days in which to act.

That afternoon he went to the local office of the B'nai B'rith. It was a much smaller place than the police station, and there was only a volunteer worker -- a blue-haired lady doing her nails -- instead of a desk sergeant, and no Negro prisoner being pounded, and a sweet, plump, garrulous man of 50, looking as if he were the model of all summer camp directors, to welcome him to B'nai (continued on page 210) Ancient Company (continued from page 102) B'rith, which is a fraternal organization interested in sociability and charity. He must have just taken his topcoat out of storage. It hung behind his desk, and in the sunlight, that eternal beam of San Francisco noontimes, it gave off a roughedged damp smell of moth balls. The director's name was Morris Koven; he apologized for having his coat hanging there, blocking off the view, but he wanted to air it out a little. He removed it, stroking the nap and then guiltily darting his fingertips to his nose and away. He was a man who liked the smell of moth balls. Well, some people, for example Alvah Gershon, liked the smell of gasoline, hangars, garages. Liking a smell is no crime. And Morris What's-his-name was making him welcome. "We get a lot of dentists. We got the professionals, of course, the insurance boys, business, like that. But I have to admit it's a little slow on doctors for some reason, I never can figure why. They don't think they need us. But I always say: Ask not what the Jewish community can do for you; ask only a lot what you can do for the Jewish community. And I say further: We don't just need money, we need you, a nice young doctor, the younger generation. I heard you're divorced, Doc. Oh, those things get around. We don't see you here, but I know, I know." He winked elaborately, a wink that stirred the air. The volunteer worker had stopped typing. She was pretending to think, searching with a nail for an idea in her blue hair. She was listening. "I sent you our literature, you remember? I put you on the mailing list. For one thing, you can meet the people at our meetings, and who knows if some nice parent doesn't have some nice daughter?"

The volunteer worker was about to raise her hand and volunteer an answer to the question.

"I came to you with another problem, Rabbi."

"Well, I didn't finish my studies. I was more -- outgoing is the type. Some nice little girl, not a baby anymore, but maybe cute -- -- "

When Gershon finally told him the story, the man did not believe. He believed, but he did not believe. "Why that's terrible," he said, "terrible, just terrible. What a world we live in. But you see, Doctor, I have to do more with the club activities, socials, education, things like that -- you should maybe write to the Anti-Defamation League, Doctor. But, of course, anything I can do you for, I'll be more than glad -- -- "

A strange harsh voice -- Gershon's -- broke in, and he heard this voice as if it belonged to someone else, the passionate adolescent that he had been, wanting to be a doctor and cure the sick: "But he's a killer! There's no time! Nothing to do with defamation! A murderer!"

"Well, Doctor, OK. I just don't think it's necessary to raise your voice in here. I know you're nervous, being divorced and all. I see that problem all the time in my line of work -- I'm like a psychologist, you know? Incidentally, don't call me Morris or anything, call me Moishe. I got training in social welfare. I was only trying to be helpful, OK? First I was thinking you would maybe like to join the community, meet some nice people, we have the theater club and the gourmet society meets on first Tuesdays of the month for men only, and the ice-skating group -- we get a special arrangement at the rink -- and then you tell me there's this anti-semeet and I only tried to tell you the proper place where to go -- -- "

Gershon was on his way, mobilized, grinding out the words, "Well, you go there," and wondering if the police and this man, Morris What's-his-name, had gone mad. No, theirs was the normal madness -- that illness which daily erodes the spirit as sugar erodes the teeth, till suddenly the pain cuts in but the nerve is dead. They decay and die and only feel pain when it is too late to learn from it.

There was something else which he did not stop to measure. As he rushed, enraged, there was something else going on. It was the more warming to his soul because he did not think of it: He was happy. The others were just following their habits, their American habits of 1966, smelling their fingertips as they had done as children, but Alvah Gershon, M.D., was finding something real to do. He was finding his own way.

During the good times of his life, when he had won through an exam, or on his weekend passes, the idea of a girl used to float into Gershon's body like a warming suffusion, the high pleasure of work, a hot and cold bath, good health. Girls, a girl. Now the itch to pride and power set dancing once more the dream of love. He stopped for a moment and let it play. Just because Morris and the cop stood in the road, he could push by them. He would try every chance, every ditch and field. He could be unique -- why not? He could make his own way through the woods. As life filled him once more -- its defiance, its mystery -- he suddenly caught a glimpse of her face in his memory, vividly shining, scrubbed, smiling, and yet unknown by him. She had been hurrying down a hall with one hand at the blonde roll of hair. Nurse's uniform, some kind of pin (silver), a book under her arm. He had not until this moment known that this mild snapshot had been taken by his memory. Funny Brownie. Now he must solve the mystery of that friendly, easy face; solving meant to conquer it, then share with it the victory.

He couldn't help thinking at this time, in this boyish way, of pride and conquering and total sharing, all these hunter's ways of imagining love. With his father, with his wife, even with his son, love was a partial and qualified matter. This exhilaration was his way of setting himself apart from wavy-haired cops and moth-eaten Morris. He fought discouragement by being undiscouraged. Coffee, lack of sleep and the pressure of his secret entered into it, too. Before now, Gershon had been too preoccupied to let the girl come into his mind except when she was present, actually there, pleasing his eyes above a gauze mask, just doing some task while her body rustled crisply, faintly scenting the air. But now he thought of her; he came to a focus. She was a German nurse at Mount Zion Hospital, where he did his charity consultation work two afternoons a week. Her name was Heidi, and their eyes had met, and she would know him by name. She was in the States on an exchange program with Bonn.

The swarthy, lean, slightly bent Hungarian cavalry officer stood grinning on Divisadero Street beneath a sign that read: A vote for the great society is a vote for ... He was reaching for a dime in his pocket, sorting it out of the handful of change in the old way. The gesture recalled old urgencies: Get the girl now! He got her number from the hospital and telephoned.

Good luck. She was off duty. She was willing to see him. He would take her for lunch at Enrico's in North Beach, hoping the sane pleasuring of the idle, forever-April scene of Telegraph Hill would help her to understand him, and therefore help him to understand himself. There was a special reason, of course, for thinking of German Heidi.

While waiting to meet her, he jotted down in a little notebook a summary of what he knew already. Muller-Frantz' telephone number. He lived at an address on Geary Boulevard in San Francisco; he must have commuted across the Bay Bridge two or three times a week to Berkeley. He added the date of his departure. The airline. His exact time. Then he drove past the address on Geary and slowed down. Muller-Frantz had a little cottage in a garden off this swath of highway cut wide through the city, stretching almost to the Pacific Ocean.

Then it was time to collect Heidi Broich.

They paused before Enrico's, that Paris picturebook café, outdoor tables and reflecting heaters for warmth; Gershon whirled his Peugeot about and headed toward another place, The Barbary, where they could have a back table, noon darkness and candles. Entering the darkness, he felt a moist, melancholy coolness and a responding heat in himself, like remembered love, the first love of college, when being away from home and finding a strange girl with a bicycle and a cardigan opened up all reality to him. Heidi smiled and cuddled her chin into her collar. She liked a masterful man. Then he told her his story; he wanted to tell someone who would listen and to whom the tale would make sense.

"Why me?" she asked.

"Not just because you're German," he said, and then tried to think why. No, just because she was German.

"I was born as a baby in the War," she said.

"You don't remember," he prompted her.

"Yess. Yess I do not remember."

He frowned, pressed his mouth together and studied the amber of his beer as if it were crystal. "But let me explain anyway," he said.

She listened obediently, even eagerly. She too was shocked, but unlike the curly-haired cop and the B'nai B'rith bureaucrat, she took a personal interest in Alvah. This was no place to talk about such matters, she said. It was shocking and dreadful. "Oh dear, there are no more Jews in Germany," she said, bemoaning the lack as if Jews were a natural resource mysteriously removed from the soil, like the nitrogen under a crop of tobacco.

They went to her apartment near Mount Zion. He continued talking while she offered him a drink. He did not seem to hear her and went on talking.

She slipped into something more comfortable while he stood, eyes averted, at the doorway and explained why a rage could be aroused in him by the prospect of an assault on the remnant of Jews who had been gathered in Israel. Ordinarily Gershon's dark face at this afternoon hour was further darkened by beard, but the hectic flush gave him a color, red and black and pale, cheeks, tufted hair, eyes and lips, that made him look like a student in Hamburg, Heidi informed him. And of course his nose was so much more interesting, bony and distinguished. "You say like that? distinguished?"

She did not know Dr. Muller-Frantz, but she would try to understand Gershon. He felt like a paratrooper on a desperate mission. No, like a soldier on leave before his mission began. "Do you have a bicycle?" he asked.

"Why you ask such funny questions?"

Her hands were like little paws all over him. He dipped himself dripping into her.

• • •

The few days sped by. There was no time to be Hamlet; cop, bureaucrat and nurse had helped him very little. Gershon decided not to ask the proper order of his going. He tried to finish the sentence he had started to read on a billboard someplace, he didn't recall where, about how a vote for the Great Society was a vote for something. But he was too busy. In a way, the policeman, the man from the social club and the German girl had given him what he needed. They had brought him alive, in frustration, in exasperation and in lust -- alive. The yellow-gray skies of San Francisco were his Paris; he lived in risk of everything. The one who could help him most was waiting, but not waiting very long, not much longer, only a little time more. And what if he should decide to leave early?

Why not take the simplest way through to him?

Gershon tried the telephone and got no answer. He sat heavily, shaking, as if dialing a dead number had used all his strength. While he sat in this rage, the fire of waiting ablaze in his head, another special-delivery letter arrived. It enclosed a newspaper clipping about a complaint in the United Nations. Egyptian and Israeli authorities had arranged a prisoner exchange. The prisoners handed back alive to Israel were not being returned to their families. The government of Israel was asking a United Nations examination of them. They had been castrated; their tongues had been torn out; they had been put in enormous truck tires and rolled about for hours, days. Doctors had observed this process and regulated it to keep them alive. Not one was presently sane. It was thought that none of them would ever again be anything like a human being.

The note attached to the clipping stated simply that the doctors who looked after these men in prison had received excellent training in Leipzig and Munich. And it added: "Of course, this is practical medicine on a very small scale."

Dr. Gershon sat by the telephone and dialed the number again and again, until on perhaps the 40th effort, several hours later, there was an answer. There was a mild professorial: "Jah?"

He had planned out his attack; he would explain very little, and the little he said would test the information he had. There would be an economy of means. By reticence and by a calculated imprecision, he would arouse no suspicion. "Hello?" he asked the blank face at the other end. "Doctor Muller-Frantz? I am Mr. Gershon, concerned with ... ah ... the United Arab Republic."

"Oh yes. So pleased."

"Perhaps I could pay you a visit to discuss ...?"

"Yes. Of course. So pleased."

They made an arrangement to meet at the man's cottage late that same afternoon. Muller-Frantz took the bait eagerly. He must have felt isolated, uprooted, alone in his new enterprise -- living in one place, native of another, traveling to an even stranger compression chamber. Gershon had an astringent sense of tracking him down. His last patient of the day -- a woman with infected cuticles from an allergy to nail polish -- noticed that he did more than prescribe isothipendyl, an antihistamine, hot soaks and a non-allergenic polish. He also smiled at her.

Now into his Peugeot -- sun roof back -- and down Geary Boulevard, past used-car lot, shopping center, and through the little settlement of White Russians (restaurant, apteka) which had been sliced in half by the highway. A vote for? A vote for? Never mind.

He parked, lit a cigarette, looked about, ground out the cigarette, and went forward. He rang a little bell -- brass tinkler hanging from a rope.

Muller-Frantz bowed him into the cottage, which was placed deep within its sheltering garden. Behind, Gershon heard the pumping labor of traffic on the highway, muffled by vines and flowers, the perpetual springtime of San Francisco gardens. Ahead of him stood a short, plump man dressed in good tweeds, with high shoes polished like mirrors. As he bowed, Gershon could see the tea service on a table. He must have carried that silver with him in his baggage -- knotted and knobbed pitcher, spoons with crushed flowers, butter knives and an embossed sieve. Clearly he was not a man who fled without considering the future. He had a taste for the good things. Like Gershon, a bachelor; unlike him, Muller-Frantz had learned to be happy in indulgence of his pleasures. Moving about the room, a mingled smell of old tweed, tea and cookies, and fresh eau de cologne arose from Muller-Frantz. He had the thinnest hair Gershon had ever seen on a man pretending to a full head -- a few strands wound round and round, like the map of space, each separate strand with its star-glisten of cologne.

"I have taken a cup while waiting," he said. "I hope you don't mind."

"Was I late?"

"No. But I was waiting."

Gershon sat down heavily. It was odd to be so expected. He looked into the cup as Muller-Frantz handed it to him. Nothing but tea. The man had confessed his impatience like a lover.

"Ah," said Muller-Frantz, settling back into an armchair. His belly jutted forward under his vest; he was slouched into the chair and could arise only with difficulty; a pink, chubby, defenseless baby lay beneath the armor of dress. But his eyes gleamed with an adult calculation behind his heavy glasses. Within the steel frame there were concentric circles of glass, and a bulging false eyeball of glass at the center. "Cream? Sugar? Lemon? It's all there. You will forgive if I allow you to serve yourself. I am alone, you see, and so I have been all my life." His eyelids fell in a moment of modest grief for his lifelong solitude. He recovered. The aquarium eyes were staring again through their thick glass. Shielded eyes, naked nostrils. Abruptly he asked: "And you are here about the Cairo Project?"

"Yes," said Gershon.

"Yes."

Muller-Frantz poured hot milk into his own tea. Gershon shook his head. "Perhaps lemon?" the man asked. "It is good for the skin, my mother used to say. She still remembered scurvy -- a disease, no, a gondition." A bright boyish smile at his visitor. He sniffed through his uptilted nostrils. Gershon wondered if he looked to him like an Arab. It made no difference. He was obviously so pleased with himself, with everything that was happening to him, that he wanted simply to brew his tea, to rest his saucer on the little jutting tummy, to smooth away any agitation in his nose with one decisive finger, to smile and murmur and wait for developments. He was either a calm man or a man calmed with much effort. And his mind fully composed about everything.

He gazed at Gershon and made inquiry in one repeated word which seemed to dismiss all small preparations for talk: "Yes?"

Gershon put down the cup. He jumped at the clatter it made on the table. "Tell me," he said, "without the technicalities, exactly what it is that you can contribute. What is it that you propose to do -- you personally?"

"Ah," said Mueller-Frantz. "Gontribution to the Goming War. Well said, that. Egg-ceedingly well put. My gontribution to the war, my personal iota -- you say iota? Yes. Let me think of that a moment." He sat, breathing heavily, his plump hands folded on his belly, the bright, unseeing eyes closed, as if dreaming forth his words. Thinking. And then he spoke. He put forth very dryly, as if for a bureaucratic record, his qualifications as a developer of special weapons. They would be of specific efficiency on a small, densely populated, civilian area; and, he noted wryly, they were not psychological in character. He said that word as if it were an evasive trick. "Unless, sir, you consider elimination of the hostile population a merely psychological goal. I prefer to think of it in Malthusian terms -- death as a means of making fertile once more. Pruning, extirpation, as a means to allow a superior crop. Of course, that is a bolitical decision. Personally, I am expert in the means -- a technician." His eyes fluttered shut. "Nevertheless, I cannot help having a general background -- general ideas." When he finished, he took a deep breath; he sighed; he smiled to himself and said, "I have not been asked to work for the Americans because of the scandal. I was not a so-called non-bolitical scientist in Germany. I was involved in bolitics. I was Chief of a Section -- you say Section? I carried out my principles in trying to purify Germany. They are afraid of me." He smiled, and the tiny round aquarium eyes disappeared into the center of the bulging glasses. "Their fear degrades them, not me. I go where I am better needed."

Gershon, gazing at this man as if trying to memorize a map, saw on his skin the possibility of all the diseases he had studied -- eczemas, thyroid thickening and cracking, proliferating moles, precancerous lesions, suppurations, leprosy. He sank for a moment into a sick black despair, a despair like fear clutching at his belly and folding down his vision. He should be curing this man. He was a doctor, not a murderer. His rage faded; he saw that the man was getting over a cold. The flanges of his nose were chapped. Pale shadow of lanolin salve about his nostrils.

Muller-Frantz seemed to read his mood. It was as if he were a mechanic winding up the emotion he needed. "I have changed my plans." He put the key in Gershon's back and he wound it a little tighter. "I leave in three hours."

Gershon said simply, "It was you who wrote to me. Why me?"

"Wrote?" said Muller-Frantz.

"Why me?"

The man pouted like a child, like a girlish, spoiled boy-child, caught out in his game. "You're a good one," he said, "a perfect one." He would finish the game anyway. He reached in a drawer of the coffee table. Behind him, Gershon could see the packed suitcases, precisely tagged, all bearing the destination Cairo -- Caire -- El Kahirah stenciled in block letters. It was the terminal after the very far wanderings of this old man. Muller-Frantz finished his search, which was only a pretense of search, which was a way of enjoying his moment, and put a Luger on the table. "Yours to choose," he said.

Gershon pulled back in his chair as the barrel lay pointed at him on a doily in a furnished cottage on Geary Boulevard near the Pacific Ocean. Muller-Frantz smiled and turned the barrel to three o'clock. "Doctor Gershon," he said, "I believe I have developed a weapon that will eliminate the so-called State of Israel from the known world in something under seven minutes. This does not give much time for retaliation, does it? We scientists, all German, a few Austrian, have our own suburb of El Kahirah, have you heard about that? Our club, our women if we still want them, our pools and servants. Our work, too. When our work is done ..." The nostrils winked. "When our work is really done, a long battle will have been won at last. But not completely. You see, sir, there is no complete victory. I have come to accept that fact. And so I need the little victories, too. I need you, Doctor Gershon. A personal victory. At random -- nearly at random -- I create -- or perhaps I merely find -- a coward. The distinction is not essential."

Gershon picked up the Luger, moving his hand to take it from its three-o'clock position. His hand was hot and dry, but he knew that the living creature always has oil on its skin; the fingerprints would be clear enough, if that mattered. It did not matter.

The man looked at his own belly. He offered two targets, the glistening top of his head with its droplets of cologne, the tiny protruding little bag of belly. "I wanted to take one with me," he said, "as I fly away. One You." That was how he pronounced it: One You. "But since I planned it this way, sir, how do you know I would be of any use as a technician in Egypt? Perhaps I am just tricking you to kill me? Perhaps I am merely dying of cancer and wish to collect the insurance -- a suicide clause in my policy?"

Gershon stared. As he watched the man, there was an odd feeling of nostalgia in his breast, a sick sinking longing -- not for his wife and the dim days of family happiness (breakfast once: when?) but for the excitement of his first days of Anatomy, on a metallic autumn day when it seemed that he might really be a doctor, and then earlier, in another golden autumn, for his father, one of those dim, driven, preoccupied fathers. Once, on a Sunday afternoon walk in Indian summer, his father had shown him the striations of a leaf, how life was taken in, how the leaf breathed. Photosynthesis and the crackled, age-old veins; and then his father had seemed to be talking to him, to his little boy whom he wanted someday to be a doctor. That joyous memory went back to his 11th year; he remembered it now without joy, with a heavy and mournful nostalgia.

The man's voice bubbled on. "That makes calculation, You? Perhaps I am just causing nastiness? Excellent! Then you let me go to the little suburb of El Kahirah. You give me your permission. You let me go. After all, am I not a human soul? Hath not a National Socialist eyes? When you prick me, do I not bleed? Ha-ha! Forgive me, I translate your poet Shylock into English back. Ha. I should not play tricks in such matters."

What would his father and his son want him to do? What had himself, age 11, planned in life, and what had he done at 17, leaping from the sleekbellied T-42? There was something secret on the German's mind, too. Gershon struggled for his intention, his own, beyond his hopes for his boy, soon to grow away from him, and beyond his father's ambition, mercifully dead before Alvah finished his training in dermatology and allergy. Gershon, still alive, wondered if he could manage to claim such burdens for his bent and cautious shoulders. And still, and still.

"Do you have the right to take a human life, You? Perhaps I merely tease. Suppose I am that remarkable person who has a sense of humor, heavy northern humor, it is true, but I cause you to sin. Or not. By your will to send me to my project in Cairo -- kinks in the Abdul III rocket -- those fools! Arab names! But I am studying a little Arabic. I have had to learn many languages in my time. It is an aptitude like mathematics. 'El Kahirah' means 'The Victorious.' Ah. And so decide, You. Chew. Juden. Jew."

Gershon pulled the trigger. There was a click. It was not loaded; it had not been loaded. Muller-Frantz made a soft chuckle. He sighed. "But now you have made up your mind, yes, You? That proves." He threw a knife on the table. "Now, You."

Since he had planned everything so carefully, he had probably also sent a letter to the police. The man ruled over his little world of scheme and hatred. He was demanding that he be murdered. It occurred to Gershon that he might even load the Luger and shoot himself, using gloves to keep Gershon's fingerprints on the weapon, shooting himself in the belly so that he would have time while bleeding to death to get rid of the gloves and place the Luger across from him, as if it were murder. It occurred to him that the police might be on the way already. It occurred to him that the man was mad.

"Will you do nothing, You?" Muller-Frantz demanded.

Gershon picked up the knife.

"Will you do?" Muller-Frantz asked. "Otherwise I go to Egypt and I kill millions, if I can. And I assure you I can."

Gershon was alone with his decision for a long moment as his fingers grew familiar with the intimate sleek of the handle of the knife. He accustomed himself to the idea. He tried to learn from this man.

"I think you had better hurry," said Muller-Frantz, "else I shall fight you and perhaps win. Or someone will interrupt us. You have always neglected the eleventh commandment."

He paused while Gershon tried to understand this.

"Destroy the enemy. For that reason you do not survive. You think you survive in America, in Israel -- you think you survive. But you have been murdered so long you are an amputated people, ghosts, merely reprieved victims. A few of you kept alive as patients cured by radiology. To live a little longer. But you die when needed." He smiled and yawned, patting his mouth with his hand. He was like an old professor who read off a lesson from lecture notes made ages ago, learned from another professor in good order, passed on effortlessly in fly-buzzing classrooms from professor to professor in Nuremberg, Prague, Kiev and Vienna, in all the spired cities where civilization has been turned on the wheel, shaped, broken and shaped again. He coughed and swallowed the wetness in his throat. A stray glob would not worry a foreclosed man. He said: "As usual, it will be too late while you think, You."

He stopped to beam upon his antagonist. He was a happy man.

"You are my puppet. When I do not move, you do not move."

He pursed his lips to show that he knew everything. He was unsurprised. He was demonstrating for some imaginary audience. How nicely he could predict the Jew's behavior!

His confidence that he controlled and predicted everything changed the game for Doctor Muller-Frantz. And if he were not really playing to win? The answer to this, like most perfect knowledge, would forever evade Alvah Gershon, M.D., for at that moment he fell forward, convulsively sprung by his legs. His legs shot him into the scientist as if they followed a system of abstract logic, of music, of mathematics, of the laws of gravity and flight -- no physicality to it at all. The shape of fact disappeared; there was only pattern. And then the puffing, resisting, enveloping welcome of fatness about a knife.

Dr. Gershon was not thinking about history, but he understood the mistake of Muller-Frantz. He had chosen a man made desperate by the rule of comfort. Dr. Gershon was one obedient man among millions of them, but a man dismayed by his obedience. Or had Muller-Frantz somehow planned his own error?

They were leaning together, shoulder to shoulder, in an odd swaying collaboration. Then, with the snap of a wrist, Dr. Gershon pulled away. For some reason he thought of mushrooms in a forest. The creature started its fall. "You!" -- and died.

Gershon stared at the crumple at his feet. It was as natural as a shriveled, striated leaf. A slow seep of blood. Capillary action took the thick color into tweed.

He let the knife fall alongside the body. Judgment hastening. Was he more than a man who took another man's life? Was he an ordinary murderer?

Later he would need to explain to his son. For the moment there was only act. No longer dwelling within a future he could predict, he waited in a cottage off Geary Boulevard to meet the fate of those who make their own laws, of the hunter, of the man who joins, very late in history, that ancient company.