The main trouble between us, Rodge, is it's rude to tell a kid he's a bastard. What does illegitimate mean anyway — you're supposed to report for sanitization at the recycling center? Or am I supposed to come up with some tragic father story that'll leave no eye dry on the block? Okay, I'm the writer in the family, but that's out of my league. Face it, kiddo, you're stuck with Santos, which has seen honorable service for me as well as my mother before me.

Maybe I'm the illegitimate one for not seducing the first easy mark to offer up his name in the noble cause of giving your school records a G rating. Dude, you know that's not my style. The truth won't hurt you, Rodge. Me, maybe. Not you. So listen up. It's the closest to an apology you'll get from me.

#

I was lucky because your grandmother kept me and stayed in Brooklyn. She did the day-care thing and collected federal disability without going on city welfare — she had her pride, you know! — until an alliance of block associations anted up the down payment on this brownstone, with its view of the park — ain't that special? — and put her in charge. She called it the Adam and Eve Center, because every child is a new beginning. She took it, she said, so she could earn a living without having to find day care for me. But it was the only work she had been trained for, and now that there are public funds, she's some kind of civil servant, which seems to make her happy. Look, kiddo, my children's stories published by the collective won't keep us in tofu, so it's my living now too. You don't like, I don't like, but it's paying for your ticket out.

The Eisenhower-Kennedy corps of advisors in Indochina was the big thing when I was learning the ways of the world. We were living, as now, above a parlor furnished strictly child-size and a kitchen full of Howdy Doody decals and jelly handprints. After four years of not having anyone over, I decided I wasn't going through four more at Brooklyn College. I thought for a while about joining the army. But after a rich kid transferred to a private school in Canada so he wouldn't have to register for the draft in his senior year, and the only girl who would talk to me dropped out, was hospitalized, and then just split, because she got depressed over her brother's loss of a hand in Nam, I decided life held better things for me.

I left Mom to her three-year-old world — which was all she was good for, I swear, but which I had long outgrown — and got a job of sorts — "with a bunch of beatniks," Mom yelled when I moved across the East River, "acting like the whore I taught you not to be" — as receptionist and director of volunteer envelope-stuffing for the Committee on Neutrality, which had just learned how to tap into the bonanza of middle-class war resistance and was hiring.

One of my jobs was showing up at every rally and managing a counter of books and pamphlets. Horace Jahn's One World, One State — a vanity-press screed against nationalism — was $2.95, which left plenty of copies for me to thumb through. No known review of the book (except one by Horace himself in the committee's monthly newsletter) had ever appeared, and no one but me had ever been caught reading it. As CON's first and only executive director, however, Horace had become quite an influential nonviolent spokesman when I quit its only other paying job and went to work for the civil-liberties attorney Minerva Furey, where I at least had a lively space, a chance to think for myself, and more bucks.

But I still volunteered a few evenings a week and was managing the literature table at the side entrance to the Communal Union Church the night Jolly Roger, the dastardly draft dodger, came to hear Horace Jahn speak.

"Pick up?" I asked with that half-frown, half-pout I use when I want you to think I'm mad at you.

"Pickup," he answered. "Truly. Have a look at my papers if you can dig it. No one buys a bit of it since I came to the States."

I couldn't tell whether he was laughing at his own inane joke or was just adorable. "No one is named Roger Pickup," I argued. "Madness! Anarchy! Freedom and an end to all war before society allows anyone abroad in the streets with a handle like that!"

"It's ordinary enough," Roger insisted, "in London. I don't know where my mother got it, but she did, and now it's mine."

That was another thing that attracted me to him; a male bastard rarely figures it out right off like a girl, but if he does, he doesn't admit it to the first chick he hits on. I was almost twenty, he was maybe a year younger, maybe two, and he played it pretty punk to me. Skinny; ribs showing through a loose T-shirt; just average height, but the cuffs of his chino trousers barely skimmed the tops of his chukka boots, showing off the brilliance of his red socks. It was the end of that wicked witch winter of '62, and if it wasn't the first time Jolly Roger had tried to score, I'm pretty sure it turned out to be the first time it happened.

I called him that because he had just hopped out of a car full of faces I connected with the smuggling of dope on the high seas. He explained them as his escape route from England. He had joined the Royal Navy, he said, after his mother had died, and deserted when he learned his destroyer had been leased to the United Nations — a guarantee, he was convinced, that he would be dodging mines in some Vietnam harbor for a Yank petty officer who would find no comfort until "every Limey bastard had been sacrificed to the cause of advertising your red menace to the rest of the world."

Horace was scheduled to speak that evening. Although his one-world solution to the war was getting to be a running joke among such young activists as Allen Ginsberg and Abbie Hoffman, the meeting was a major social event for the fledgling hippies called beatniks. Discos were just private jet-set clubs in those days; coffee houses were outlets for infantile ego-trips; and movies were still the work of hands left unscathed by the fifties.

"Why don't you look at this?" I asked Roger, handing him a copy of The Guide to Conscientious Objection and dropping a quarter into the cigar box. "For you, no charge."

"Sell it to the jim," he muttered, tossing his bangs out of his eyes, "what's saving his sheets for a bloody career in the exciting field of desertion. When the governor fancies your arse, my lovely, you'll want more than a book to lay a proper turd with."

"It's not cowardice or appeasement," I said, feeling him out one more time. "It can lend motivation to your personal resistance against authority. What the hell are you doing here anyway?"

He pointed to One World, One State. "Here, let's have a look at that one, ducks." I tended customers while he struggled through the intense preface written by Horace in his pacifist work camp on hearing that the Bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. Finally Roger threw the book back at me, whistled, slammed a fist into a palm, and answered me, still with bravado, but glad that I had asked:

"My mum sent me. She told me not to blame the old man. She said he had no choice but to get himself shot up trying to liberate the bloody France he loved so much." He paused as the CON rally captain signaled me that Horace was ready to begin. I nodded, and when I turned back to Roger, I saw there were beads of sweat on his face, though the night was brisk. "The dad split," he went on, with a snarl and a squint that barely hid the dew under his eyelids, "before I ever saw sunlight. Blimey if your pacifist mill swill meant as bloody much to one bloke as getting his arse as far from his whore and his bastard as he bloody well could! 'Looking for his own dad, he was,' the old lady says to me, 'and if you'd a-known the story of how he was come to London, you'd be less like to blame a poor drunken bastard than the one what made him.'"

He made his move, but the doors had already closed, and he had to settle for his tongue on my lips. "Whatever you're up to can't be worse than the flak poor Horace gets every week from my East Village contingent. I have to fold tables now, but I'll be here when it's over, kiddo."

As it turned out I didn't speak to him again until the next morning. I had to use my old staff keys to rifle the CON petty-cash box during the night to bail Roger out of the Tombs on a disorderly-conduct charge. It had all happened during Horace's speech, which was the usual paraphrase of the final chapter of his book. I can quote those passages suggesting the flavor of his oration:

"United in common purpose — in common grief and common aspiration — men band together to commit great good or great evil. But give men two causes — then one must be evil if the other is good. . . . One cause to fight for is no cause to fight. . . . When hostile thoughts from our unconscious, like vampires from the grave, rear their combative heads, we strike stakes through their hearts in the name of family unity, of security, of peace and prosperity. I say to you now that . . . our family is mankind, and the vampires are the nations infesting the earth. . . ."

The poets and artists, who preferred no armies at all to one big one, snickered loudly and called for the legalization of pot. But when Horace had reached that part about the family and unconscious vampires, it was Jolly Roger making most of the noise. "You're the vampire," he shouted. "Ghoul! Bloodsucking murderer!"

"That's right," shouted a noted derelict from Avenue A, "when was the last time we saw the Hor during the day?" Someone shouted back, "When was the last time we saw you during the day?" but the damage had been done. The Hor's a vamp, came the thunderous chant, and pot's a champ. Even I started wondering. I used to speak to him on the phone from the office, but actually see him . . . .

One thing led to another; as the moderator announced that we had to remember we were in a church, that the disruption had got out of hand, that our right to petition for redress of grievances could not be threatened in this time of terrible war, the police came and carried Roger away.

We walked uptown after I made bail, but he didn't break down until we reached Washington Square. "Jahn, that bloody ripper," he muttered through gasps as I rinsed his face with water from the fountain, "done the dad's mum in for no bloody cause and made me the thing I am today."

#

Horace's career had been checkered, but nothing I knew about justified a charge like that. As a reluctant legal officer during the Great War, he had experienced a kind of mystical conversion in the north of France, which he would later call "the crossroads of my life." But he returned to the Justice Department and worked his way up to United States Attorney for the Southeastern District of New York. He became a fixture among the war-weary intellectuals of the Roaring Twenties, often seen in Village speakeasies with such writers as Theodore Dreiser and H. L. Mencken.

At about the time of the Crash, Horace's precocious daughter — he had married an older woman, who died bearing her only child — won the all-city young authors' competition with a murder mystery. Only a fourth-grader, she had a small girl dispatching her older brother's best friend because he didn't bother to show up after having jokingly asked her to his prom. Horace became convinced she had parodied Dreiser's An American Tragedy behind his back, although school officials reminded him it's about a man who puts his pregnant sweetheart away, and insisted, besides, that parody was beyond a child her age.

Contending that the novel denies "sexual guilt and personal accountability for violence," Horace petitioned the court to ban An American Tragedy because it "obstructs interstate commerce by setting lurid obsession and lawless aggression in competition with the works of authors whose development within the Judeo-Christian literary tradition is their sole appeal for an audience."

The case floundered for several years in several courts, until the newly elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt put an end to it. "There is no evidence to indicate," the President said during a Fireside Chat, "that either the daughter or the father has ever read the book."

Horace refused to resign, but accepted a transfer back to the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, where he had started before the War. He spent the middle thirties writing memos ordering the admission of "all immigrants other than those seeking political asylum." He again came into the public eye toward the end of the decade, when reporters discovered that he had admitted one of Trotsky's intended assassins and sent a quantum physicist — who "would teach us to improve our weaponry and destroy our souls" — back to Germany, where his Jewish wife in Scarsdale lost touch with him.

The New York Sundial wrote: "Mr. Jahn had in either case abetted hostile motive and injured the passive party." But a Congressional committee held: "The retaliatory intent of both the Soviet Union and the Third Reich having been sustained by the witness, no evidence of partisanship in the administration of the law can reasonably find credible affirmation here." Then the world was stunned by the Stalin-Hitler Peace Pact, and Roosevelt found the authority to fire his uncivil servant.

Horace responded with a personal-letter campaign among his former literary associates. He explained his lawsuit against Dreiser as "more a matter of conscience than censorship." He added, "My moral obedience compelled my personal involvement, whereas my sense of law and civil liberty led me to cheer Ted on to victory." He concluded that "folly and violence are the inevitable consequences of assertions of national sovereignty" and found it "self-antagonistic to oppose the brutal excesses of one nation without opposing the brutal excesses of all nations."

Enough writers responded to fill a letterhead, which Horace then used to announce the founding of (and to solicit donations for) the Committee on Neutrality. When he continued writing letters and making speeches after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt had him sent to a Civilian Public Service camp, where Quakers, Mennonites, the Amish, pacifists, and timid souls ate, slept, and conserved the environment, insulated from the larger community that would have liked to lynch objectors to war.

Horace's internment hit all the papers; a few months before D Day there was an attempt on his life. All earlier attempts to liberate Paris had failed, and the would-be assassin was a British national sent by the French Resistance to raise funds and put the heat on U.S. military intelligence. After sneaking past the guards, he slapped Horace's face, challenged him to a comic-opera duel, and shot at him only after Horace called for an officer. This "foreign agent" got a suspended sentence in exchange for his enlistment in Montgomery's Eighth Army. Americans took him to their hearts as a hero, until Horace's daughter ate a bottle of phenobarbital, when The Sundial held the very act of assassination guilty.

The years passed; the conscientious objectors returned to their homes, blacklisted and forgotten. Out of mind, that is, until Vietnam, when a new generation of military recruits resurrected the memory of refusal to serve.

#

"Horace and your grandmother?" I asked, trying for sympathy's sake not to laugh. It was a chilly morning on a wind-swept Washington Square, and I'd been looking for something in Horace's too-public life that would make sense of what Roger was telling me. "My sad cockney cavalier! I thought you never even knew your dad."

"My mother gave me the story," Jolly Roger answered, composing himself. "The last thing she gave me. My father, you see, wasn't properly born. He was found by a Red Cross nurse in Aubers just after the Great War. I should say this parlez-vous mademoiselle finds the bloody body of a peasant girl shot in the back — but with a bit of movement and the spark of life still lingering about the new-made corpse — and she has the bleeding consideration to carve the unborn bastard out of its belly while he's still able to take in air."

I stopped him from talking and washed his face from the fountain again. "Roger, poor child," I whispered, "how can you possibly be sure it was Horace who did it to her?"

He told me to listen more and wipe his face less. "The bloke what did it," he went on, "was known well enough to the Americans. This nurse spoke English and happened to mention the little rabbit drawn from your American helmet. Twas an officer called Herod Jones, your doughboys tell her. That lawyer with the medics . . . just come back, he did, with a German rifle, you see . . . a blooming pacifist don't you know! . . . wasn't required to come within ten feet of one, if you follow our meaning. Or so they tell this balmy French bird, her wings full of a gut-covered infant what hadn't the strength of breath yet to bawl aloud.

"Only they've corpses enough of their own without having the care of an officer's, they say to her, laughing their way through the service trench back to their lovely States-style barracks. A few weeks after the armistice, my mum tells me. Christmastide, it was. Yanks were in and out of the trenches like rats, looking for dead and missing, making a bloody nuisance of themselves. So this damn decent nurse reckons the new-hatched bastard would find better life with the water bottlers of Vichy and splits for the old homeland with the motherless brat what one day has the ill luck to sire me.

"What was the Frenchwoman's name? Where might her family be found? Ask as I might, my mum stays mum. She loses her memory . . . the dad never told her . . . blimey if the old lady didn't have the gift for going on about not going on! All I know is the dad splits Vichy when he's old enough to understand how he came into this world. Twelve bloody years old and scouring the streets of London for Herod Jones — or Horace Jahn, more likely. My mum, she says he never got no farther than herself and the liberation of France, but my first memory on those same London streets was the whispering of older boys. 'Roger the lodger' — that's the dad's fancy name on the street, because he dicked about a bit, he did — 'Roger the lodger, that flip-wreck, he got himself pinched trying to shoot this rich American traitor locked up in the States.'"

I waited until I was sure he was ready for me to say something. His breathing was labored and his face needed another sponging. "But those entrenched doughboys," I whispered as I wiped the tears and sweat away, "must have made that name up to goof on Froggie."

"The name they made up betrayed the name they first thought of."

"Anyway, Horace Jahn," I kept at it, maybe getting a little shrill, which I'm not proud of, " — which isn't Herod Jones, after all — was a conscientious objector, not a subversive. If it was your father who shot at him in the CPS camp, he went after the wrong man."

"Even Limey sailor boys," Roger answered, somewhat more in control, "have heard of the marvelous Horace Jahn, that grand barrister of international law what's putting an end to our miserable squabbles. Is that his book in your bag? Have a look for yourself."

"I've read it already."

"Just the preface, Virginia, my love. How much more of my time would you waste?"

#

PREFACE

[From One World, One State, by Horace Jahn (New York: Neutrality Press, 1947), pp. iii-vii]

The horror of war never quite halts its haunting of the guiltless and law-abiding.

When the United States was mobilizing its support of England in 1916, I was beginning the practice of law in government service at Ellis Island. Daily I saw the war-torn and ravaged come pleading to these shores for a home; daily I reviewed each case; daily I came to decisions of life and death. My work had been important enough to democracy to have exempted my service from our armed forces, but the pressure of family and friends on a naïve young attorney obliged my enlistment as a noncombatant legal adjutant to the medical corps.

It was on the French-Belgian border, in Aubers, nine months before the armistice, that I first fixed my gaze upon the trenches. We had arrived at Armentières, once a fertile farm village. But the women had permitted the orchards to fall into poor cultivation, and children ran wild, following at our heels and grubbing for food. Our company fell in along a cobblestone street and continued its trek as the street became an unpaved road that finally vanished into a ditch. From that point forward we were marching a good eight feet below the surface, and so we would remain until cessation of hostilities. A mile or so on, our ditch crossroaded with another to form a large subterranean forum open only to the sky. Soldiers were improvising diversions, uncrating supplies, wheeling the wounded. We went on.

But for the sky above and the sail of an occasional windmill, we had seen nothing of the countryside since the last Armentières urchin. At one point I saw an arm draped gracefully over the sandbags high above us, but our trusty sergeant told us that another detail would be dispatched for remains in that area. At last the trench was intercepted by one at a right angle in either direction, and we could go no farther ahead.

I had been given the impossible assignment of rehabilitating the vampire brigade, as we called those diseased deserters from both sides who had gone over the top and managed to stay alive wandering through the burnt-out farmhouses between opposing frontline trenches. When the armistice was finally signed, and we could go out by day, we scoured cellars and wells for the nests in which they fed and slept.

Sometimes they would attack; sometimes, run. Other officers permitted their men to interpret self-defense liberally in determining whether to shoot. I made sure that mine understood that these ultimate victims of the ultimate War were human beings, for whom a lifetime of selfless compassion could do no more than a single bullet, but that the spark of humanity we shared with them compelled us to prefer the pity to the gun. We did what we could: restrained them; applied what limited psychiatry the young era had to offer; traced dubious records; and permitted the medics an occasional slip of the scalpel when this barbarity called war had left no other way.

Often I would leave my men, taking advantage of the armistice to search the decimated farmland for errands of mercy. One such tour during the Christmas festivities found me at a crossroads separating the four varieties of grape grown at what had once been an estate vineyard. I shall always consider it an irony that the Deity chose this site of countless harvest bacchanals to manifest Himself in what could only have been an authentic religious experience.

Not a crossroads in the province escaped the shadow of its own peculiar calvary. Sculpted of bronze or wood, bequeathed by some long-forgotten artisans' guild, the wide-eyed passion of Christ on a mighty cross would cheer lonely travelers in imaginative accuracy of detail. But the calvary of this particular vineyard had been singularly defaced: the rivets had been worked out of the hands and feet, freeing the bony icon to dangle askew from a wooden peg whittled through the left breast with a bayonet.

No gunfire had disturbed the eerie silence in which I walked. Hostilities had ceased a month before. But at the foot of this mutated calvary, in the crisp parade regalia of a German officer, lay a corpse shot only minutes earlier. The body was still warm, and the blood still gushed, like the waters of a natural spring, from a wound in the chest.

The bolt of his rifle was locked against the back of his neck, in the time-honored fashion of weary infantrymen, by arms hooked around the butt and the barrel. Such weapons held great value among the enlisted men, and I wondered, as I pried the rifle loose, at the soldier who would so casually abandon the spoils of his unlawful aggression. My scruples forbade my bearing arms, but I came to perceive it as less a weapon than a gift through which some imminent crisis of faith would anon be resolved.

In my state of transported anticipation, I seemed to cut my finger upon the trigger. The instincts of the battlefield are animal instincts; without thinking I put the putative wound to my mouth. Only when the blood crossed my lips did I understand that my finger was whole. I reeled at the thought. The blood must have come from the Presence at my feet! It was as if the Deity had chosen me for personal communion with Him, a communion in which the priest's wafer and wine paled to mere mockery of Truth.

Shouldering what could only have been a divine gift, I made my way to the distant spire of a Gothic church. I turned, but could see the corpse no longer. What remained of spiritual life in this forsaken parish beckoned from ahead. A burnt-out church, its front wall and crucifix collapsed and crumbled before it, overlooked fallen headstones, open graves, silent valleys, and the ubiquitous trench, now a vague line snaking its lazy way against the horizon.

The Madonna had been thrown from the apse and lay half-hidden in the weeds. Now a charred hunk of black wood, it had once been a statue executed in the Flemish style of the thirteenth century. Turning it over I discovered the raw surface of freshly splintered blond wood just above the Virgin's charcoal arms cradled at her abdomen. It had been a Mother-and-Child, but the Jesus had providentially been wrenched from the wood into which He had been carved. Spared the worst of the conflagration, He had been deposited into the path, obliging me to step over His undefiled infancy, a monument to life indestructible, as I continued my approach.

A few of the vampire brigade were using the fallen cross as a bench for a late-afternoon lunch. A rusted cauldron simmered over embers. A woman, whom they may have gotten with child, sat among them. Army gossip had the females as campfollowers of favored deserters, but she could as easily have been a defenseless widow of a vineyard. One thrust what could only have been the roasted remains of a human loin at me. Another dipped his hands into the cauldron and cupped a blood-red brew for me. I felt the weight of Excalibur on my shoulder, and I knew, as they arose to smite me, the merciful purpose for which my Lord hath yielded unto me His terrible gift of thunder.

It was at that moment that I resolved to devote my life to the cause of peace and world government.

Horace Jahn
Maryland Forest Preserve
August 6, 1945

#

I put the book down. "Oh Roger, darling," I sobbed, pulling him into me, "that's still not proof."

"Ghoul," he answered, drawing away. "Vampire. That's what he called my father's mother. It was the place, the time, and the make of rifle. Proof enough for me. Shot her in the back . . . left her child to rot in her belly . . . then writes this book calling her a bloody headhunter."

"Roger, poor child, it was war, and war makes subhuman monsters. Let's end war and not waste our energy over a lonely old man's past sins. Without Horace there would have been no peace movement at all."

"Subhuman monster," he yelled, "is sort of the words I've been wanting." He paused on the verge of losing control before explaining. "Didn't the bloody fool know it's at crossroads that the undead are buried? To what end did he think some poor wretch had driven a stake through the form marking the grave? Sure they have their ways, they do, of passing even through sun-baked earth when they feel the tread of a yob cursed in the hearts of his mates. Blood of Christ on Jahn's lips? My arse! It was a vampire what kissed him and starving holy people that he killed."

He seemed to be having some kind of seizure. I tried to distract him by offering a detour to Sixth Avenue for The Sundial. We walked in silence.

"There is a superstition," I finally said, "that people of illegitimate birth become the vampires. So I wouldn't go on talking like that."

In the newspaper we found Horace's release attributing Roger's outburst to a pot-induced campaign among the beatniks to discredit him. Jahn acknowledged the preface to his book and regretted that a crisis of conscience, which had spawned his life's work, should have been mocked for so light and transient a cause. He also noted that deserters — Jahn must have had a pipeline to the police, because they had just made Roger that night — lack the moral courage of conscientious objectors, who don't run and hide.

Jolly Roger and I had a couple of weeks before the deportation hearing, and the press soon got tired of listening to him. The fuzz then dropped the charges in exchange for his enlistment as a noncombatant medic with a battalion aid station. The press picked it up and made a big deal about how democracy can absorb anarchic protest into constructive dissent.

We wrote each other regularly until he was blown up by a landmine. Roger will never know how much I wanted, but feared, to tell him that a Colonel Damonklaus, retired, who had been stationed in Armentières during World War I, had a letter in The Sundial six weeks after Jahn's press release. It was the first day I really suspected why I hadn't had my period, and I was somehow reminded that Jahn had once tried to censor a novel about a man who puts his pregnant sweetheart away.

The colonel wrote that he had looked into Jahn's book after hearing about Jolly Roger's antics. "There had been a general directive," he recalled, "forbidding the killing of the flu-ridden lunatics of the battlefields, except in the case of extreme and specific personal jeopardy." In the opinion of the colonel, Jahn should have been court-martialed.

He was already in Minerva Furey's law office when she asked me to work overtime taking notes that evening. "There is no limitation on prosecution," Jahn was saying. "This vicious libel could lead to a trial that would ruin the organization."

"It's not coming," Minerva advised him, "to any courtroom situation or anything approaching it. Murder in time of war is more a matter of philosophy than law. When you're ready, tell me again what you remember."

He was struggling to get his head straight, as though he had just awakened, and rambled somewhat: "I don't know how she found me. She must have walked into a trench and kept going through a maze of shell-shocked soldiers until she got to Aubers. Why would she do something like that, Minerva? You're a woman. Why?"

Minerva showed her palms to the ceiling and waited for him to continue. "There were nuns," he went on, "there was an historic convent in her province. How was a young attorney without connections going to get his mademoiselle from Armentières into the States and give the child a decent chance? But she had a knife and threatened to kill herself and the fetus after telling my commanding officer. What rational alternative was available to me at that moment?"

Again Minerva said nothing. I took the letter-opener from her desk as he started in again. "I'm not a cruel man, Minerva. I'm a pacifist, for heaven's sake! I would notbear arms. How could I have pleaded self-defense with that record? But the vampire brigade was always around, and I used a German rifle I found to release a few of the more degenerate with her. Believe me, Minerva, that liberation from subhuman depravity was as acceptable a plea, unofficially, as self-defense. I simply cited the behavior I knew no court-martial would question as evidence of that depravity."

Jahn must have seen me coming, because he dropped his right hand palm-down to his lap and used his left to jerk himself up against the back of his chair. I missed, but the blade of the letter-opener passed through his right hand and penetrated the seat under it.

He yelled and rocketed backwards on casters, crashing into the wall behind him and dislodging a bookend from a crammed shelf over his head. A boxed two-volume set of Dreiser's An American Tragedy fell and knocked him unconscious — or else he faked it.

Minerva hushed it up, telling the cops, who wanted to have me committed for observation, that I was upset about a pregnancy and under a doctor's care. But she told me privately she'd personally have me committed if I ever violated her client's confidentiality.

I did, and she didn't. Nothing much happened, except CON went out of business and Horace Jahn permanently retired to his legal wife's family estate. But for bouts of arthritis, his hand pretty well healed. I moved back to your grandmother's to have you. To your general dismay I guess I've more or less taken over the center.

So, what I really wanted to tell you on your seventeenth birthday is your father was the most beautiful, courageous man I've ever known. He taught me a bastard, like war, can hope only to be judged by the rules we make for ourselves, for we shall always be the illegitimate offspring of our progenitors.

Your great grandfather is still alive and in seclusion. He taught me you haven't killed a vampire until you've put a stake through its heart.

Happy birthday, kiddo!

end