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make of it?” he asked after Reardon had finished.
    â€œI really don’t know,” Reardon said.
    Piccolini crushed the stub of his cigar into the ashtray on his desk. “Mr. Van Allen has asked to speak with the head of the investigation. He wants a firsthand report. I made an appointment for you to see him at three-thirty this afternoon.”
    â€œSchedule him for tomorrow morning,” Reardon said. “I’m seeing Bryant this afternoon.”
    â€œNo,” Piccolini said. “Schedule Bryant for tomorrow morning.”
    â€œLook, Mario, if Noble heard something it’s just possible that Bryant saw something.”
    â€œIt can wait.”
    â€œYou’ve been a detective a long time,” Reardon said. “You know better than that.”
    Piccolini opened a desk drawer, pulled out some papers and threw them on his desk. He started shuffling through them. “Bryant will have to wait,” he said.
    Reardon shrugged. “All right. When is Van Allen coming over?”
    â€œHe’s not coming over here. You’re going over there.”
    â€œWhere?”
    â€œHis place on Fifth Avenue. Right across from the zoo.” Piccolini took a small piece of paper and started to write down Van Allen’s address.
    â€œI know where it is,” Reardon said brusquely, and turned to leave the office. For the first time in all the years he’d worked for Piccolini, he did not close the door behind him.

5
    On his way over to the Van Allen penthouse later in the afternoon Reardon was waiting on the curb at the corner of 68th Street and Park Avenue when the orange “Don’t Walk” sign across the wide avenue changed to “Walk.” He stepped off the curb, and at that instant — and for only a brief moment — he did not know where he was. He looked around in dismay, as if he had been suddenly placed in an unfamiliar universe. The city had taken on an immense and terrifying aspect, its sounds rushing at him like famished beasts. The moment passed so quickly that he did not even have time to tremble or call out, but the terror — as it passed — was overwhelmingly real.
    As he walked across Park Avenue, shaken by the experience, the feeling of having blacked out, if only momentarily, made him think of the Arturo case. He remembered Arturo as a slim, awkward young man who wore an enormous pair of black-framed glasses and seemed extremely interested in police work. For months he had haunted the station house. Week after week Arturo would go directly to the desk sergeant and be waved through the outer vestibule and up the stairs to where the precinct records were kept. He was thought to be a graduate student researching some phase of urban police work. But Benedict Arturo, all those weeks he sat poring over the precinct files, was instead investigating himself — quietly, methodically assembling the evidence that would alter his life forever, evidence from which Reardon had later learned Arturo’s story.
    As a child Arturo had sometimes experienced blackouts. At first these periods were short, no more than a few minutes. But by the time he entered college he was experiencing amnesiac lapses which sometimes lasted as long as seven hours. He could not recall anything that happened to him during these lapses, although friends subsequently assured him that they had seen him eating quietly in the cafeteria or strolling the halls of the library.
    Although confused and frightened by these lapses, Arturo chose to ignore them. Then late one evening he awoke from one of them to find his face badly scratched. He discovered unexplained rips in his clothing, mud on his shoes. After that strange articles began appearing in his room, each time following a period of amnesia. Once it was a red handbag slung over his bedpost. On another occasion he found a single brown high-heel shoe standing upright just inside his door.
    Reardon had always thought that it