Past midnight, the sky has not reached for dawn.

Dampness claims the streets of Stuttgart. A leaden cloud quilt lowers on rows of street lamps, white melons in the falling mist, and Tour Bus 43 is five hours behind schedule and lost. It trundles by buildings anonymous in shadow. Through flecks of rain its twin headlights catch colorless stone, the slickened tires of parked autos. Mrs. Linden, frantic insomniac third window from the rear, watches it all slipping by.

The entire tour has swung radically from disaster to tedium and back again with no sane ground between. Mrs. Linden had hoped Europe would provide her with a sense of history. Instead it has only made her cling more fiercely to the ruins of her own past. About her in the half-empty bus the other passengers sleep. Mrs. Linden tries in vain to pretend she has joined them. She imagines she is at home in Baltimore, dreaming, her missing husband Jonathan curled by her side. She conjures from memory, room by room, detail by detail, the house they once owned. As this illusion is nearly complete, down to the cat's paw distortion in the lower right pane of their bedroom window, its complexity overwhelms her and she is left staring at the droplets gathered on the window glass of the bus.

Each time she allows herself to drift toward sleep, Mrs. Linden becomes conscious of the darkness moving outside, the interior of the bus mostly dark, and she begins to feel the night. It closes in upon her, bearing a raft of images. It is a weight heavier than her own stifling her with cloth, a great braid of hairy rope wound about half the earth. It is the junkman from her childhood, old bugaboo with a clacking wagon who lived beyond the foundry and the slag heaps. For seconds at a time, as the bus lumbers onward, she fears she may become hysterical.

They round a corner, rocking on the uneven pavement, and the larger droplets are thrown loose from the window. Mrs. Linden allows her gaze to be captured and deceived by this flash of motion. She sees arcing silver pebble which burst to nothingness on the street before they can rebound. With this vision she realizes the darkness has retreated. They have left the residential labyrinth they have been traversing for the past half hour. Street lamps are spaced more closely together. Mrs. Linden spies awnings, shop windows, and silently -- no, half-aloud, whispering to herself -- she prays that soon they will reach their destination.

"Let me have a quiet room," she prays, "away from the street, and a clean bed, and no bugs, not again, please no bugs!"

The world tilts back, then forward, as they top a rise and begin the descent. Mrs. Linden grips the armrest to restore her shifting equilibrium, fumbles at her purse to make sure it has not fallen to the floor. All at once they have stopped.

The bus is parked at an angle to the curb, nosed into a spot too small to accommodate its length. Its rear end protrudes onto the street. As the engine dies, people begin to stir and there is a low rushing of sleepy voices. "Where are we?" "What time is it?" The double doors hiss softly. The driver is leaving the bus. Mrs. Linden, peering through the rain-splattered glass, watches him jog across the street, his shaggy hair uncapped, large head bobbing in the wetness. She sees the man enter a doorway and her confusion evolves to consternation, indignation. Over the door in glowing red-orange a tilted martini glass is filled by lighted dots every few seconds, empties all at once to blackness, begins to fill again.

She stares at the sign. Her helplessness in the face of the situation leaves her exhausted. Her features take on an expression lost in their own fleshiness. Perhaps hatred. Only it seems too differentiated, too vulnerable. The lighted dots flow. The glass empties, the glass fills, and the surface of Mrs. Linden's awareness is momentarily held captive by this simple repetition. She is tired indeed, yet her thoughts continue to turn.

The door of the bus has been left open. She can feel the cooler air of the street and smell the rain, a dirty city rain. The driver has only gone for directions, she reasons, soon he will be back and we will be on our way. Still a sense of abandonment clings. She envisions the night passing, the diffident rain continuing to fall, the darkness slipping away...an automobile rounding a corner in the first strands of dawn, a blue '56 Plymouth sedan, she recognizes its passengers through the windshield...herself, Jonathan and their infant son...too soon the crooked barrier of the bus looms upon them, tires begin to loose traction on the slick...

She jerks awake, head snapping up, a line of pain like a twisted nerve spilling along her jaw. Tears fill her eyes as she massages the ache away. The rain falls. Modulated by wind it rattles against the metal roof of the bus. Several minutes have passed since the driver's departure and the other passengers have returned to sleep. Mrs. Linden can hear their breathing in the dark. Somehow their unconsciousness seems to add to her own plight. Not the plight of this trip, but an older, more inclusive feeling. A sense of sickening acceleration...as if the panorama of her life were sweeping by her more and more rapidly.

Her gaze wanders up the street, then down. She is unable to see into the shop windows, the foreign signs she cannot read. The bar which the driver has entered seems to be the only thing open. A movement near the end of the block draws her attention. At first she suspects her eyes have deceived her again. Then she spots a figure, hunched in the shelter of a shop awning.

The man stands in a space of relative shadow, equidistant between two street lights. Long coat, dark trousers, visored rain cap -- he blends so well into his surroundings that if not for his movement, she might never have seen him at all.

Before her fright at this first figure out of the night can take hold, she notices the second. Both figures are gesturing, apparently talking. The second stands partially hidden in the enclave of a recessed doorway; from her vantage she can make nothing of it, no more than a rippling shadow. The fact that there are two figures seems less sinister to her than one. Whatever their business, she thinks, it must have to do with one another, not with her or the bus...still, why are they standing out there in the rain and dark? Why don't they go home, or to a tavern or restaurant if they want to talk?

The first figure begins to back toward the street. It is a man, she can be positive of that now. He moves farther into the circle of illumination cast by the street lamp. Beneath his trousers cuffs Mrs. Linden sees the glint of highly polished leather and she thinks of the military. He nears the curb, raising his hands before him. His whole body has taken on a shrunken and hesitant quality. The shadow figure also moves and Mrs. Linden sees another glint of light...light reflected from metal.

She is looking directly at the gun barrel as it explodes. The flash plumes against her eyes, blinding as a photo bulb. The concussion is muffled, a dull fillip of sound. A second flash catches her blinking; rainbow images erupt across her range of vision. And again the sound, sharp yet thudding, like a strap upon a mattress.

Hands before her face, Mrs. Linden rocks back. Quickly she leans forward, straining to see beyond the spots still dancing across her retina. The man with the cap has collapsed into the gutter. The cap has fallen loose and rolled several feet from his prone body. Another man is running up the street...tall and long-legged...the second figure! He wears a top hat, full evening dress which rides loosely on his thin frame. A broad cloak twists behind him in the wind of his movement. And in one hand he carries the gun, snub and fat-barreled. A silencer, Mrs. Linden thinks, though her only knowledge of guns is from the movies.

The man nears the bus, begins to turn his head, the lamplight is about to fall fully on his features...and Mrs. Linden leans back from the window, afraid he will catch her watching. She does not look again until the sound of running steps has faded.

Once more the street is deserted. Only now does she realize that the entire incident has taken place in a matter of seconds. She pushes against the armrest, half rising from her seat, staring about the bus. She slips back heavily. The other passengers are still asleep. No one except her has seen a thing! But what can she do? The man could be dead, she thinks, or lying there bleeding to death at this moment.

She begins to breath loudly. A low whimper winds its way up from her chest and is choked off in her windpipe. Her thoughts are out of control. Not for the first time she wishes she had never come to Europe. She thinks of Jonathan, if only he were by her side. He'd know what to do. Or their son. Or any man she could trust. Suddenly a thousand incipient images crowd in upon her with frightening intensity. It is as if the storehouse of the past, her past, have come tumbling down about her to ensnare her thoughts in a net of tangled memories. Sunlight. Porcelain. Marmalade. Shopping sprees. Diaries filled with a script spare as crib notes. Forgotten dinner parties. Sometimes just the two of them. Jonathan's hands with the square-cut nails moving in the candlelight. His bizarre bedtime requests. Her legs in the stirrups. Her breasts and the weight she never lost. Jonathan's throat. The graying stubble in the spot his razor could not find. Her son returning from school. Hostile and unrecognizable. An artist with strange words and ideas. Jonathan's pale blue eyes squinting at her through spotted glasses. That look she could never trust.

She has to do something!

Mrs. Linden shakes her head to clear it. Hair, spilling from pins, trails against her neck. Her hands are clenched upon themselves, knuckles white, nails digging into palms. Her mind grapples to regain touch with the present. She thinks of the driver. The bar. There must be a telephone. They can call the police, an ambulance. If she stays where she is another moment she may begin to scream. Or another nightmare, a score of nightmares, could materialize out of the darkness and transpire before her waiting eyes.

With one hand she grasps her purse, a large bag of vinyl and metal; with the other, the collar of her cloth coat. She begins to edge out of the seat. She stands, above average height for a woman, large-boned, yet not large enough to carry her weight with any semblance of grace. The flowers sag upon her dress. She moves awkwardly up the aisle, step by step, turning sideways to avoid outstretched arms, a man's booted foot. She brushes an elbow and is rewarded by a sleepy grunt.

"What?" a voice asks.

Mrs. Linden doesn't answer but keeps moving. It is only on the last step before the street that she pauses.

The night is chillier than she suspected. The rain has lessened. Without slipping her arms into the sleeves, Mrs. Linden gathers her coat about her, over her head, holding it together with both hands from the inside. With one thumb she hooks the strap of her purse, which rests against her belly. She steps down, walking carefully to avoid the puddles. Cold drops touch her legs. the street is silent but for a thin line of music, which seeps form the bar.

She can smell the city, its industry, its ashes and garbage. In the puddles, neon signs distort. She looks to the sky once -- only clouds, no stars -- thinks again of the junkman from her childhood, and her steps hasten. All too soon the opposite curb and the tavern loom upon her. Her face distorts and she begins to tremble.

Until this moment she has maintained the hope that none of it is really happening, that it is all another unwanted dream. As she reaches hesitantly to open the brass-studded door, as she feels the dampness invading her shoes...

# # #

M. Gabriel Panache, artist-mercenary-imagist, straightens his clothes, listens to his steps slow upon the cobbled pavement. He is a fair young man with finely-chiseled features, a blond mustache in no need of trimming. Even now that he is only strolling his movements are brusque and well-measured. When he is angry or aroused his pale blue eyes, clear as glass, can flame like the eyes of a jackal. A remnant of that light shows within them now.

His path has carried him to the river. The palette gun lies safely hidden within the folds of his cloak. Here it has stopped raining, there is no fog, yet on this moonless night the water is invisible, only a band of blackness before the lights of the farther shore. On the quay at the near edge of this blackness stands an old dray wagon. Upon its flat bed sits a hunched figure which could be no more than an old gunny sack. M. Panache's lips are compressed, his breathing nearly even.

# # #

Mrs. Linden stands on the threshold, allowing her coat to slide down about her shoulders. The room is dim and smoky, loosely filled with an assortment of men, none of them young. The music, post-war American jazz, is from a jukebox the likes of which she has never seen. There is a screen mounted on its surface and on the screen a naked woman is dancing. The colors are unreal, her bare flesh shines with an impossibly roseate hue. Mrs. Linden looks away hurriedly. The environment is completely alien to her: she is not the kind of woman who goes drinking. She searches along the line of men at the bar, hoping she will not have to enter further.

She sighs. The driver has spotted her.

He approaches, a swarthy man with large pores. His jacket is open. A gray shirt, missing a top button, reveals his ribbed undershirt and the matted hairs of his chest. In one hand he holds a stein of beer, nearly empty and foamless.

"Mrs. Lindy," he reproaches, "you should have stayed in the bus. We'll be leaving soon."

He has insisted on this mispronunciation of her name throughout the tour and she has given up correcting him. He seems a man slow to understand, both boorish and clownish. His English is broken, but by what accent Mrs. Linden has been unable to guess.

She points toward the street. "A man...a man's been shot."

Once she has spoken she realizes her voice has been drowned by the music. The driver, sensing her terror, seeing the lividness on her features, steps closer. She can smell his body, a cheap aftershave gone sour with sweat.

"A man...," she repeats carefully, "in the street...has been shot."

The driver's eyes narrow with concern. Only for a second. Then he smiles. "Mrs. Lindy," he says, putting one hand upon her shoulder, "are you sure it isn't your nerves again?"

She pushes his arm away. She glares at him. As the driver steps back she feels anger, a release, as if the night has lifted. "I tell you a man's been shot!" Her voice is loud enough now. "I saw it with my own eyes. We have to call the police!"

Another man has approached and is peering at her over the driver's shoulder. He is balding and his lips are sunken, giving the impression of a sneer. "What's up, mate?" he asks in perfect English.

"She says someone's been shot," the driver shrugs. He lifts his stein, throwing his head back as he swallows the rest of the beer. "Out in the street."

"Shot, eh?" The bald man eyes Mrs. Linden up and down speculatively. "Well, let's have a look. Come on, lady, show us."

She is about to insist that they call the police, but the man is already yelling back into the room. "Hey, boys, there's been a shooting! Come on. Let's have a look."

A number of men turn their heads at the bald man's call and begin moving away from the bar. Mrs. Linden is helpless before this turn of events. Her brief rush of anger has evaporated. Before she can protest, the driver has taken her by the arm and is leading her back into the street.

As the tavern door claps shut, the music dwindles again to a thin strain. The rain is misting. Mrs. Linden glances over her shoulder. At least seven -- no, eight or nine -- men have filed out behind them. They stand in shirt sleeves, some with drinks still in their hands. Before she looks away she has the distinct impression that several of them are grinning, as if in expectation of an adventure.

"Well?" the driver asks.

The bald man is scanning the block with a keen eye.

From this angle the street appears different to her, its perspective strangely foreshortened. For a moment she cannot find the correct shop. Then she sees the lump of the body, lying in the gutter. She shivers and summons her courage. "There," she points, her voice cracking on the single word.

They begin to advance down the street.

Mrs. Linden doesn't want to move, but the driver still has her arm. Her feet begin to drag and she finds herself leaning on him for support. The men behind are another pressure, forcing her forward. A bulb in one of the street lamps flickers with a broken rhythm. Once more her thoughts begin to leapfrog. The night...the rain...a foreign city...an anonymous crowd of men. A fantasy from her adolescence, a fantasy of rape, erupts into her consciousness.

There is a popping noise to her right.

Mrs. Linden looks. Another of the men has come abreast of her. He is cracking his knuckles. He wears a sleeveless sweat shirt and his beefy arms are goosepimpling in the cold. "Don't worry, lady," he tells her. "No one is going to fuck with us!"

She turns her head away at once. Why, a part of her mind screams, if this is Germany, is everyone speaking English? She shuts it off and refuses to listen. They are almost to the body. She wants to be somewhere else, anywhere else.

The driver lets go of her arm and moves forward alone. Mrs. Linden steadies herself as he bends over the motionless form and begins to poke. He lifts...and a piece of sodden cardboard, darkened at the edges, comes up in his hand. Mrs. Linden takes another step. Her eyes bulge. She sees damp ashes, a bottle speckled by the rain, a flattened tin can. Where there should be a body there is nothing more than a pile of refuse. The driver looks up.

"It does look a bit like a body," the bald man observes. "At least from a distance."

"But I saw it," she says. Her voice begins to whine. "He fell right here. The other man ran up the street." She looks about wildly. "There," she points, "there's his cap!"

The cap is there all right. The bald man picks it up and passes it to the driver, who appraises it briefly, swipes it against his pant leg, and tries it on. It fits him perfectly. Glancing over Mrs. Linden’s shoulder, he offers the crowd an apologetic smile.

"Let's go back to the bus," he suggests to his passenger.

Mrs. Linden is totally confused. Yet the driver's manner prompts her anger once more. Not a release this time, but a frenzied anger, knotting back onto itself.

"I saw it!" she suddenly screams. She can find no other words. "I tell you I saw it!"

She clenches and shakes her fists. Her purse swings and the coat begins to slip from her shoulders. Turning too quickly to catch it, she becomes entangled in its folds. As she falls to one side she sees the spinning sky, the faces of the men staring. Her palms slide upon the mud and grit of the pavement.

"We don't like ladies who play tricks on us," someone says.

# # #

In a second floor room of a modest but adequate hotel off the Geisterstrasse, M. Gabriel Panache moves to and fro as he packs a single traveling case of hand-tooled Moroccan leather. The room is overheated: a fine film of sweat gathers on his chiseled features. He has changed to a continental suit of green cord, boots and vest of dark suede, taupe dress shirt, maroon knit tie. The outfit is flamboyant only because it is so expensive, so well chosen and matched. His sandy hair, longish, parted in the middle, enhances the already misleading asceticism of his face.

M. Panache is a precise young man, but no ascetic. His indulgences are well known in certain circles, though they are hardly held against him. He is a respected professional within his field because his commissions are often distinguished by the kind of personal flair not easy to come by in an age of mechanization. He takes one final inventory of his bag: socks, handkerchiefs, traveler's checks, shaving cream, tooth polish, fog grenades, hoarfrost ampules, timeslippers, hairy rope, the Mallacan stiletto, palette gun, tape recorder, bugs, bacteria, psychedelic pastilles, drop jars, cat's paws, marmalade, stirrups, dead rodents. On the little finger of his left hand there is a gold signet ring, a runic "L" framed by griffin's claws, which conceals a 1/18th millimeter wire of silico-copper capable of penetrating the brain stem, overriding the senses, and transmitting stimuli directly to the cerebrum. Anything else he needs he will be able to get in Zurich.

He snaps the case shut, catches up his cloak and turns to the door. He must hurry or he will miss his flight. Jonathan does not pay him to be late. And there is also the matter of Marie and the junkman and the fever bombs.