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dusty floor and I smoked two cigarettes. I had just finished the second one when she was brought back. There is a sisterhood of grief, of anguish, in which all women go apart from you and you cannot reach them. There is an habitual posture which makes you think of war drawings, of widows and refugees, of exile. She sat on the bench, shoulders hunched high, head lowered, handkerchief held to her eyes with both hands, body trembling. Despite the gay clothes she had worn, perhaps in an effort to cheer Alister, she could have been in rags, a peasant cloth over her head, knotted under her chin, bare brown feet dusty from roads that had been too long.
    “Come along,” the elderly guard said to me.
     
    Bird cage was a good word. There were no windows in the room. Fluorescence was white glare. Three of the walls of his cage were heavy woven wire, the fourth a bare wall painted an unpleasant glossy green. Two guards played cards at a small table against a wall twenty feet from the cage. I was permitted to approach to a point six feet from the cage. The elderly guard stood beside me. Alister stood inside the cage, gray fingers hooked into the wire, head lowered. He looked thirty years old.
    “Al!” I said sharply. He gave the impression that you had to awaken him. His head lifted slowly. He looked at me. They were Vicky’s blue eyes. I had not remembered that. They were dulled. Recognition came slowly, lighting the eyes to a point of intensity and immediacy and then fading back to dullness.
    “I want to help,” I said. “I need some leads.” I realized I was speaking the way one speaks to the sick, the deaf or the wounded. The elderly guard said, “She talked at him the whole time. He didn’t answer. They get this way. Punchy like. The brainy ones do.”
    One of the guards at the table said, “And this kid has a real big brain on him.”
    “Shut up, George,” the elderly one said gently.
    “He’s sick,” I said. “He’s mentally ill. You can’t go ahead and—”
    “The court says he’s sane, mister. He’s just gone back inside himself. He’s inside there, thinking.”
    “With that big brain,” the guard at the table said.
    “For God’s sake, George.”
    “Al!” I said again. He didn’t lift his head.
    “A week from tomorrow he’ll be over his troubles,” the guard said.
    “You better take me back,” I said.
    As we left I looked back. He still stood there, like the prey of a shrike impaled on a barb.
     
    She had stopped crying. Her face was pale and empty. We were taken to the gate and they let us out. We got into the car and I drove into the middle of the shabby city and turned south. When we were on the open road she said, “Immature.”
    “What?”
    “I was, Hugh. Turning it into some kind of a movie plot. In comes the hero. The vital clue is found. The innocent boy is released. He walks out into the sunlight, and the birds are singing. But it isn’t that way. It’s all too late. They’ve killed him already.”
    “He could come back. It would take time.”
    “But you see,” she said patiently, “neither you nor I have any real hope of doing anything. We try to cheer each other up. There are only so many hours and minutes and seconds left. Then they’ll kill him and now maybe that’s best. Maybe that’s the only thing left to do with him now.”
    “Vicky!”
    “And when they do, Hugh, it’s the end of him, and it’s the end of anything we could have had. I won’t wish on you what I will become.”
    “Is that self-pity?”
    “I don’t know. I don’t care.”
    We stopped at a place but she couldn’t eat. I took her back to the motel. She didn’t want me to stay with her. Her eyes looked almost as empty as his.
    I went back to the Inn. There had to be some starting place. I looked at my watch. I saw the sweep second hand moving around and around. Each revolution took that much off his life. And off mine and off Vicky’s.
      

Chapter Five
     
    MONDAY THE SEVENTEENTH was