Sir--

I write to you this fine October day to clear up the mysteries surrounding the departure from our country of David Blaumond, a young agent of the Third Arm. I hope you'll forgive my presumption in addressing you again without introduction. But the police chief in my town--a weak-willed man--has refused to pay me the slightest attention, and I was forced to go over his head. If he's warned you, or slandered me in any way, I ask you to ignore it. I hope, as well, that you'll forgive me if my style is rusty. I am a not a writer by trade. I am a doctor. What's more, I have always lived--except for one year of service at the Front, and one in intelligence (where I was taught English, a useless language)--in this same small town. I don't even read the newspapers. I gave it up as a young man. Being an avid reader of newspapers proves you to be undeserving of life. Understand: I write to you as a fellow countryman, nothing else. You will have to forgive my salutation, as well. I don't have a phone, which made it impossible for me to find out your actual name. I gave up on phones, also, as a younger man. I was high-strung and I found disagreeable the thought that any vulgar person could project their voice into my domestic quiet.

Blaumond is--as membership in his organization demands--a Jew. I don't know if this will enter your calculations in deciding what to do about the strange (and troubling) events I am about to describe to you. Jews are all over our country now, a lot more than there were even in my youth. I remember, during the war, how they all went to hide in the woods. There's still a big patch where the volunteer security forces had to smoke them out. Imagine--after sixty years. It's actually quite pleasant: a glade, with grass and things like that. Even butterflies. The earth there is soft, and things grow well in it. I sometimes take a nap there, after my constitutionals. It's right under, in fact, the fortress for which our little town is famous. Probably the only reason you will have heard of it. Yes, the place is right under the walls, which are covered in scratchings and writings, all kinds. I find that I've already wandered somewhat. I will try to adopt a more businesslike, professional style from now on. Long life to you, Mr. Commissioner!

I first encountered the Jew in the hold of a ferry. I was returning from a trip to the islands just outside our harbor--I like to walk in the woods there; sometimes I collect tadpoles and things like that. We stood next to each other. I noticed immediately that he was clutching a stiff bouquet in his left hand. Flowers like this--I'm sure, Commissioner, that you've seen them a few times yourself--they are of the kind that grow on our limestone slopes. You know: small, weak-looking, lopsided. I don't know their names. Don't assume that because I catch tadpoles I go around pointing at flowers and saying their names. People who do that are intolerable, in my opinion, real fools. But he must have put himself through some serious effort to get hold of them, climbing, uprooting. This bouquet roused my suspicions immediately. What business does some young Jew have hauling flowers back and forth between our islands?

And it was this uncertainty that made me sure of the need to watch the Jew. Given his later actions, Commissioner, I'm sure you agree that it was the correct decision. I watched him as the ferry docked--what a bang it made, after hearing it twice a week for forty years I'm still frightened of it--and followed him out onto the harborfront. He walked quickly, not looking around, and stopped in front of a trash barrel, in which two loud fishermen had lit a fire. I watched him throw the bouquet into the yellow flames. The fishermen screamed in approval. I was so astonished I almost forgot to follow him any farther. I had fallen behind, as I stood there surprised, and he had turned from the harborfront into a side street, Flute Street. I hurried, but as I turned the corner I saw him step into a pension with a glowing white lamp and an acacia tree in front and vanish. The door, shutting, echoed in the empty street: it was Friday, nine o'clock Friday night, and the bells in St. Euphemia's had just begun to ring. I returned home--I live a little way outside of town, at the edge of the forest--and fell asleep in my armchair.

For two days I didn't see Blaumond. I dealt with a number of trivial, consuming responsibilities: painting, dusting, loose boards. I drive away with my shotgun one of the property assessors the town government regularly sends to trouble and oppress me. And my cucumbers needed tending to. I did, in short, the things that have caused my fellow citizens to regard me as a truculent, crazy old man. As you know, this has proven invaluable to me in my efforts to defend the honor of our country. Nothing lacks a purpose so much as a wifeless old man, the argument runs; ergo we're safe, ergo we can (foolishness! For I take thorough notes, Commissioner!) speak freely in his presence. I also had to go over my files: on the woman who owns our grocery store, on the assessor. I'm even thinking of opening one on my town's chief of police. I haven't yet--I'm giving him the full benefit of the doubt--but every day he comes closer and closer to having his name inked on a large, brown envelope (I find this by far the most convenient system for filekeeping). I mean no implied disrespect to you in planning this, Commissioner. But it's important you understand what kind of a man he is, with his senseless and cruel refusals to hear my pleas. These and other small tasks kept me busy until Sunday, when I woke up and, after downing my usual three glasses of brandy, began to walk the white concrete path that spirals up the hill to St. Euphemia's. And as I crested the hill I saw, astonishingly, Blaumond, sitting and smoking on the broad church steps. My fellow citizens were parting in two streams around him: the sermon had just ended, apparently. I realized that some unknown power had granted me a perfect, unrepeatable chance, and so I hurried up to him. I asked him for a light in terrible English. (I assure you, Commissioner, I spoke quaveringly and allowed my hands to shake.) And from the craftily uncertain tone of his answer--"No worries, sir"--I realized that I had a formidable opponent to deal with, despite his repulsive accent. We walked together down the white path, smoking, and a clutch of pigeons scattered into the white air at his heavy steps.

I gave him a wide berth after this initial contact. I knew where I could find him again, and I didn't wish to appear eager or--God forbid--lonely. But travelers through my town tend to congregate along the water, drinking and smoking for hours on end, or reading. The Jew belonged to the reading species. And two days later, I spotted him in the café near the harborfront. Our town is small, Commissioner; new arrivals are visible at even great distances. So I sat at a table some distance away from him observing. After ensuring that he hadn't noticed me approach, I moved one table closer and made an incomprehensible greeting noise. The Jew pretended not to recognize me. "Was, was, lesest du?" I asked, adopting my most benevolent tone. Now he permitted himself a belated smile of recognition and held up the book, wordlessly. Then reconsidered. "English," he asked, "how's your English." I nodded, feigning the vacant delight of an old, stupid man. "Fairly nonexistent, I'd guess," the Jew said, "but I bet you know German." I flapped my head again. "Ich deine name nicht kenne. The book's too hard to explain, anyway." (He permitted himself a filthy, self-pleased smile at his German. His pronunciation sickened me.) "Ante!" I exclaimed. I tried to endow my moron's shout with healthy joy and healthy skepticism. And to judge from the smirk that crossed Blaumond's face, I succeeded in confirming his expectations. I sipped my tea looked off into the forest of masts on the harbor: unused pleasure boats, the work boats having been out since dawn. The most useless boats are always the ones gracing the inevitable postcards--which all the towns ringing our island resemble with a sad, dull exactness. Honey-colored buildings crowd each other up a hill, blue umbrellas bulge near the water's edge, the purposeless, delicate boats . . . I pushed my pack of cigarettes towards him. He drew one out and lit it with the silver lighter my wife gave me for our fifteenth anniversary, which he fumbled and dropped into a puddle of melted ice near his left foot. "Oh fuck," he hallooed. And then, unable to meet my eyes: "Entschuldigung, right? That's how you request forgiveness?" A gull screamed and we sat in the surrounding silence, smoke drifting up into the cloudless sky. You might call this the moment when our brief friendship--and I use that word only for lack of a better, Commissioner; I'm sure you've felt similar feelings of closeness to your quarries--began in earnest.

You're no doubt wondering, Commissioner, why I would take such an interest in the honor and security of our country. Especially now, when any display of national pride brings down punishments on your head, impudent stares and the like. The dried-up old crone who runs our small grocery shop--you should have seen the stare gave me the one time I dared admit my love for our country. If the matter currently under discussion were any less pressing, I assure you, I would write you a full report on her. And you may think, also, I'm some arrogant old man, with too little to occupy himself, who imagines he is doing a great service only to congratulate himself or hide his loneliness and misery. But, if this were true, why would I do my work in secret? If this were true, why wouldn't I simply have let things stand with the chief of police (that boor)? I do not write letters to the editor, I do not involve myself in politics, I do not even raise my voice when I hear the Jewish stupidities that our young people are being raised on and trained to repeat. And I could give them a few lessons in experience, if I wanted. I could tell them a few things they wouldn't forget, that would make their ideas seem a bit threadbare! I'm sure that you need no instruction as to the nature of my activities during the war, of their extreme and unusual quality. I know that there are files on me, and I assume that they contain the usual lying, distorted accusations (all unproven; I am, as you can guess, a free man). But I will not disavow the basic tenor of those activities. They were strictly necessary. And given the circumstances under which they occurred, they constituted acts of mercy.

Understand: our island, according to the Annals of Brother Hieronymus (one of the few books, Commissioner, that I have taken unalloyed pleasure in reading), has always had its share of the people Israel. He explains a number of possible causes for this. One: money. Jews are by some quirk of nature attracted to money (you might say, in a philosophical sense, they are a consequence of money). And we have always enjoyed financial prosperity. From our lavender trade, from our fortress-like sea, from the harbor taxes that our burgomasters have been able to charge for the whole of Europe's existence. Two: strong Christian faith. This exerts a different but equally powerful attraction on them: they are sworn (as little children, did you know, they actually take an oath) to oppose and destroy it by the spread of disease, financial conspiracy against Christian merchants, infiltration of the governments through false conversions, well-poisoning. Third, they require, for their Sabbaths and Paschal feasts, the blood of children. And we have always been a fecund country. Fourth, our government--from the days of the barons on down, Commissioner--has welcomed them as they fled the persecutions they faced in other European countries. I believe they derive a powerful satisfaction from betraying and harming those who have aided them in their greatest need.
What is the surest sign of this need to betray? The defeat of the National Revolution, and the installation of a Bolshevist government. You do not need the venerable Hieronymus, Commissioner, to know that Bolshevism is the Third of the Eight Arms (as Kiš-Khereshchuk points out in his essential volume The Octopus). The Third Arm directed by the malevolent intelligence of Ahasveros, the Wandering Jew, whom Mammon (the god of the Jews; he possesses many other names) has put in charge of political intervention, just as Gershom Scholem, Walter Whitman Rostow, Lorenzo Da Ponte, and Henry James (all still alive, Commssioner; never doubt that) serve as the secret masters of the First, Fourth, Sixth, and Seventh Arms. (The Second, Fifth, and Eighth remain obscure to contemporary investigators.)
You object that Bolshevism has been dead in this country for nearly twenty years. Understand: it is not dead--just as the true masters of the Jewish race can never die--but quiescent, patient, and filled with incredible hatred. This is why I still man the ramparts, Commissioner: to stem the efforts of the Third Arm to seize control of our teardrop-like island again, and to rout out their black influence from the whole Adriatic, the miasmous and leaching influence of the Jew. Blaumond's throwing his bouquet into the fire, the night of his arrival--a gesture I had pondered over for days--its meaning became clear to me as we sat there, Blaumond faking his innocence and chewing the ice he'd slurped out of his coffee glass. It was a signal, aimed at some hidden agent of the Third Arm, and it meant that some veiled, vast, machination was soon to begin. What, I couldn't say. But that Blaumond might (without realizing it) reveal the nature of this secret battle I was confident. The Third Arm doesn't use its best agents as messenger boys. He could be cracked, and without him even knowing. I was sure of it.

I decided that the safest means of doing this was to confront him directly, disarmingly. And the surest way to avoid raising suspicions--a fact that I learned during my time as an interrogator, during the National Government--is to ask blunt questions about trivial facts. Just as the surest way to deceive anyone is to tell them the truth. I learned that during my hours spent in the glare of the lights, on the other side of the table--hours which, as the files on me indicate, were more than a few in number. The Jew and I found ourselves, after that second exchange, in an unspoken agreement to meet at around four o'clock every day, fine weather or rain, at the same café. And so it was that, on our seventh afternoon together, shortly after the bells of St. Euphemia's sounded the hour, I put out my cigarette, thumped my palms on the table, and opened my mouth. "Die blumen," I said, doing my best to impart an idiot's tremolo to my voice. Blaumond feigned incomprehension. "Die blumen," I repeated, "flowers, yes, in the, ah, the schiff! I saw. And then you threw them." (I rather delighted myself with this display of faltering speech, the longest phrase I ever spoke, then or later, to Blaumond.) "Warum," I said. He did something in response that caused me to restrain a bellow of laughter: he removed his wallet and worried out of it a picture of a girl. A Jewess, of course. The gleam of smug hatred in her eyes visible even in this faded and laughable photograph. Kinked, wet-looking hair, a keel-like nose. Repellent, Comissioner, though her skin was clear and admirable. But I nodded, with an expression of understanding weariness. Blaumond stammered "I wanted to. God. You know . . ." He lit another cigarette. "Win back her affections?", he continued, smoke trembling out of his mouth. "That's meaningless to you, probably." This display only strengthened my resolve to determine what his actual purpose was in my town.

I've lived here, as I remarked above, all my life. My property lies a little outside of the town limits. I have a house, where I used to treat patients until my retirement; a large garden plot, where I grow several varieties of cucumbers; and a small cottage, just one room. This cottage is where my wife's old possessions--those, I mean, that I didn't burn or give to charity--are stored. Her tapestries, her stuffed owl, the heavy bedstead we shared until her death, after which I began sleeping on my old army cot. Things improved for me immediately on doing that, and when I resumed the exercises my old drill sergeant had used to punish us . . . a world of difference. I've slept on that cot for nearly twenty years, as long as I shared my bed with my wife. In any case, this cottage I sometimes rent out to the vagrant foreign youth who often pass through my town. And it was here I intended Blaumond to stay, so that I could keep him under close observation. I hadn't counted on his apparent lack of suspicion about my offer, made with a jabbed index finger and a series of clumsy German phrases: "Zimmer? Wohnen da? Yes?" Blaumond accepted heartily. I saw at once that he was demonstrating how ingenuous he was, attempting to put me off my guard. This did not work. I scanned the corners of my garden for any disturbances: overturned stones, anything . . . all maintained its peaceful regularity.

I was married for an unfashionably long time, Commissioner, and that cottage is extremely central to my memories. I met my wife the first summer after the war. Her parents were dead. I'd known them my whole life. Her father the bookbinder had repaired a number of my uncle's anatomy textbooks. He died on the ramparts after the government fell, fighting against the Jews for our country's honor. I don't mean, Commissioner, that Jews armed to the teeth scaled the crudely-built stone walls and plunged their knives into Mr. Paskaljovic. They were far too clever for that. My wife's mother had died of tuberculosis the previous winter in a camp in the East. We had a number of letters from her about the good conditions there, so her death came as a shock. After she was taken, it was all my father--who headed our town's volunteer security force and autonomous council--could do to prevent Mr. Paskaljovic's and my future wife's subsequent arrest as social undesirables. But those tendencies, political tendencies I mean, really were restricted to Mrs. Paskaljovic. Her name? It escapes me. He was called Ante. My wife's name is unimportant. We were married in July in St. Euphemia's church. They hadn't even repaired the shell-holes in the roof, and so we had a canopy of blue nothing for the duration of the ceremony. The priest droned into his beard. After the ceremony concluded and the meager festivities--harsh, unripe wine and a shaky fiddler--had died away, we sat in the plank swing hung from the oak on the common. My wife burst into tears and refused ever to enter the church again. She cried until the stars appeared. I was only an indifferent churchgoer, so it made little impression to me.

When I first heard the story of Don Juan, I was seventy-three years old. My spirit sank. The adventurer condemned to hell for his exploits with women, the stone father dragging him into the underworld...it seemed to me a complete metaphor for human existence, for the world's heavy hand, the gradual death of desire. You'll call this the faint-heartedness of an old man. My wife had been dead for two decades. She was taken from me by the state security apparatus (not the organization set up during the National Revolution, but the low Bolshevist one that followed dishonorably on its heels) to a labor prison, where she died when the barrack she slept in was torched by a gang of thieves. I did not learn this until eleven months after her death. I continued to receive letters from her (forged and forwarded by our internal security service) for the duration of my ignorance. The woman who informed me of my wife's death had been with her in the camp. They worked as carpenters and load-draggers. She told me that my wife, before her death, had lost her left big toe and the first three fingers of her right hand to frostbite. And she said that her hair remained the hair of a young woman: dark and lustrous. My wife, it's true, had kept her shining, heavy hair until the last moment I saw her. She was on her way to meet with the officers of the local autonomous council, and our neighbor, the farmer--who would go on, Commissioner, to father our current chief of police--gave her a lift into town in the back of his truck. She wore a blue kerchief that waved like a flame and she smiled at me without moving. Only the kerchief was moving.

You'll ask yourself: how could I allow some Jew, one of the filthy, bloody-handed people responsible for her death, into this cottage, her cottage, where my last memories of her live? All sacrifice is necessary in the defense of country, Commissioner. And besides, though I am not a literary person, I am nonetheless an appreciator of irony. Blaumond stared around the small, neat room, his eyes brilliant, avaricious . . . I could almost hear the throbbing of his malignant heart. Again the sudden fear seized me that he had somehow arranged this as an ambush, that Bolshevist agents were about to descend on and destroy my homestead, but he shook my hand and se this bag down, and so his brief residence with me began.

Seven days Blaumond stayed with me. The first passed without anything happening, other than his wandering around in the woods near me until sunset. I stood waiting for him at the wood edge when dark was falling: I'd begun to fear that he'd gotten lost, which meant I'd never be able to extract any valuable information from him. But he appeared, sure enough, ahead of the darkness, crashing out of the brush like his co-religionists had done when we fired the woods where they were hiding. (Jews never seem to feel at home in the natural world.) His brows lifted when he saw me--as though he were surprised. I brought him a plate of ham and cucumbers and left him in the cottage. He kept the light on for a long time. I couldn't see into the room from my bedroom window, so I have no idea what he was doing, Commissioner. But it lasted until the bells in St. Euphemia's had tolled for three o'clock in the morning.

The second day proved to be very fruitful. Blaumond was not in the cottage when I got out of bed, so I took the opportunity to do a thorough search of his room. I'd wrestled his enormous berry-red backpack out from under his bed. The smell of sweat and tobacco leaked from it. But I had plunged my arm to feel for his document case, which I was sure would be at the bag's bottom, when the bag toppled off of the bed and pinned my arm underneath me. Pain shot up from my shoulder and I think, Commissioner, that I must have lost consciousness. I came to on the floor, staring into the rubble of his things leaking from the bag's mouth: clothes, a few books, four letters tucked back into their torn green envelopes, his toothbrush, a small box wrapped in indigo-striped paper, and his passport. I carefully replaced everything, except the passport, which I locked up in my dynamite-trapped safe (one of my proudest moments as a tinkerer, Comissioner) and waited until his return. I watched for his return, Commissioner, ten hours that day. At first nothing. But I knew he would be back: his bag was here, after all. So I waited, crouched at my kitchen window. When the ache in my legs became too strong, I stood and paced back and forth. But I was distracted from forming any coherent plan by worries.

About his return, I mean. He was at large, in the countryside. He could be on a train for the capital, for one of our industrial sites, bomb in a brown paper bag, or to St. Blaise Reservoir with a vial of sodium hexafluoride in hand. (These are the tactics of the Jews, as explained in The Octopus.) My watching grew more frantic; I found myself racing back and forth across the carpet in my living room, hands on my forehead, mouth opening and closing. My armpits were drenched with sweat. I would force myself to sit but was on my feet again soon, gnawing on a thumb to stifle the tears of frustration. But at dusk Blaumond wandered into my garden and started fingering one of my cucumber vines. I leaned out and called to him "Hallo David! Hallo!" spattering dove-white droplets of spittle on the green lawn. Blaumond left off prodding the cucumbers and sighed and waved. At night he turned his light out early, but I kept watch. And, as I expected he would, he crept out of his room. The moon was new, so I couldn't see exactly what he was doing, but I heard the scrape of a trowel blade against turned earth: he was burying something. My instincts shouted that it was the deceptively-wrapped box. A bomb? It seemed too small. A transponder of some kind, though, a radio beacon, indicating my backyard as a landing place for night drops, parachutists . . . my imagination shot off in these various directions, and I fell asleep contemplating the possibilities.

By morning it had become clear to me that, whatever he'd buried, and whatever the risks, I had to act. I did not pledge my life to the service of my country for nothing, Commissioner. I did not wage a decades-long battle against the Jews and their dialectical materialism so that I might quail at the thought of physical injury. And don't insult me, Commissioner, by assuming I don't know phrases like dialectical materialism. I can speak the jargon of thinkers, as well. Remember what sort of people ruled our country, those long years, thinkers all, and even among the pseudo-rebellious, the sickening attitudes of intellectuals. It's to our country's credit, in my opinion, that young people today are deeply superstitious, although they try to hide it with professions of materialism. Science has become through overfamiliarity a platitude for them, the way religion once was, and as a result all kinds of powerful, subterranean currents of though have begun to gain strength. Take my wife's stuffed owl, for instance. My wife's owl stands guard on a shelf over the bedstead, with a stare of schoolmasterly rage. This makes people deeply uncomfortable. Many of my young renters have moved it, draped a towel over it. I once found it hidden among my cucumbers. But I always restore it to its proud place. As a test, I suppose. I myself am not at all superstitious.

Which why I had such unshakable confidence in my plan. I had to be away from home all that day. This troubled my conscience, but I was so sure of success that I did not linger over my doubts. Today I needed to pay my usual weekly trip to visit my wife's grave, which is several miles outside of town. She told me once that she didn't want to be buried in the shadow of St. Euphemia's. So I buried her favorite dress and her wedding ring (her body had been destroyed, untterly, in the barracks fire) in a field near the roots of an old oak and carved her initials and the dates bookending her life on the trunk. I do not have a car and I move slowly. Getting there and back takes time. And I had to stop along the way to upbraid people: a man who let his goat out onto the road; a fat woman and her fat daughter, who were having a yelling match in their garden. I always try to help uphold civil order. It was dark by the time I returned and Blaumond was lying in bed and smoking when I invited him in for dinner, the first step in my campaign.

Ham and cucumbers, as usual. I caught him arranging his features into polite appreciation. (I was surprised, Commissioner, that he proved able even to eat the ham, given his racial makeup. One of the few points on which Brother Hieronymus and Kis-Khereshchuk agree is the Jews have a racial intolerance for certain foods, and that they have erected a number of false religious prohibitions of these foods to prevent exposure of their inner physical deformities.) He ate with fake relish. But he polished off the bottle of brandy I placed near him in less than an hour. We ate in our usual silence until I asked him about the Jew-faced girl he had shown me, about the picture, and he waved my questions off and asked for more liquor. This made my lips twitch with suspicion. So I asked him what he had been doing outside the night before.

Commissioner, I swear to you, I saw the sweat leap out of his wide pores. "Just, oh, just rooting around, you know, exploring the terra incognita!" A cracked false chirp in his voice. I had won. So I didn't press. He looked ashamed. "Is nice, sehr schoen," I murmured, and let the matter drop, and lifted the empty bottle inquiringly. He nodded, tears of guilt beading in his dark (positively Levantine, Commissioner) eyelashes. His face was flushed with alcohol. I could tell by the swaying movements of his head that he was struggling to keep a growing drunken dizziness under control. "Mehr?" I asked, taking a bottle from the sideboard. I filled his glass before he could reply.

My basement is dark. But the shotgun always gleams locatably in its rack. I keep it oiled, clean and loaded, all very soldierly. As I charged up the stairs, my heart contracted with release and happiness, I could barely breathe from it. In the warm kitchen light, the barrel shone like the back of a swallow. And Blaumond, when he saw the gun as I strode in, responded with hilarious speed: he scrabbled out of his chair, crying with ten rapid breaths "Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck." He had his hand spread out in front of him, Commissioner. I almost laughed, though I felt a twinge of pity. "Outside," I screamed, "back turned." And so we marched together into the friendly summer dark.

"Dig it up," I commanded when we reached the approximate spot I'd seen him burying his package. "I don't remember," he began, but I chambered a shell with a harmonic chunking sound and he dropped to his knees. "With my hands?" he pleaded. I said nothing, so he began to scrape. It didn't take long. Nightbirds trilled and the ocean whooshed and sighed. The satisfaction of obedience to my principles filled me. Soon, David turned to face me, his hands clasped around something. I pointed the gun at his quivering, shadowed face, so that he could look up into the barrel, and he--chest hitching and heaving--revealed the object he had planted. I couldn't see what it was. So I jerked the gun in the direction of the house. He understood me and marched back, one fist now closed around his treasure--our treasure.

He had unearthed a jeweller's box, pelted in brushed pseudovelvet, eggplant-colored. He clicked it open--after another instructing jerk of my shotgun-barrell--and inside, clamped between the white inner lips of the box, was a cheap ring. A blood-red stone, muddy gold . . . This was far worse than I had imagined: I had no idea what this could be, and any effort to find out would require putting down the gun. I hope you see why the situation was impossible, Commissioner. And how Blaumond showed, even in his moment of complete apparent surrender, typically Jewish guile: he had me at a disadvantage. I almost shot him for that alone, then and there, in my immaculate kitchen. But I restrained myself. It's hard for me to decide if Jews merit severe punishment or an extreme form of forgiveness. I imagine that you have had a similarly confused and confusing response to them in the course of your busy days.

He fell, as I was marching him down into the dim basement, from the liquor and the fear. (I almost shot him again, but this time out of surprise.) "I have your passport," I called as he struggled to his feet. "Are you going to kill me," he asked, his voice cleared of emotion. "Stand up, Jew," I said calmly, "and look under the window. A red switch." This turns on my incinerator, with which I dispose of intractable trash. It's large enough to cremate a full-grown human, the salesman told me. It looks like a truncated Roman column; at the bottom there's a tall metal grate through which the orange flames flicker, like a pupil, a tongue. The machine kicked on with a muted roar and its fire cast a low light around the room. Blaumond's back was still turned and his ring-holding fist still clenched. "Just shoot me already. Are you some kind of closeted faggot or a war criminal? Or something?" "Throw it," I barked. "What," he honked. "In the fire." "This?" He opened his fist. "And you can have your papers back." "You'll kill me," he said. He was weeping openly now. I could tell from the spasming of his shoulders. "The furnace," I replied. "It's just an engagement ring, bro," he sobbed.

But he approached the flame and I followed. He tossed in the ring and a ripple of intense relief passed over his face, as though a cord had snapped, a cord holding him erect. The fire reddened his hair. He'd stopped crying and was staring into the light like an animal. We stayed until the ring had disintegrated, the stone splintering with a glassy cry, the gold warping, running. I made him turn the incinerator off, and we left the local heat it had poured out behind us. He walked very steadily up the protesting stairs. It took him less than a minute to fill the small hole he had clawed out of the soft earth of my garden. "I know you work for the Third Arm," I informed him. And that he was a Jew, and what Jews are, and what they have done to my once-free and adorned country, reducing it first to an asphalted ruin, and then to a crowded maelstrom of German tourists bellowing with laughter, and that I knew very well how deeply the Third Arm has infiltrated Europe, and that you, Commissioner (and other higher authorities), would receive full reports of his exposure and punishment. I lasped from English into our native tongue and back, so I don't know how much he understood. But my tone was emphatic and clear, and I kept the gun leveled at his pale neck, so he must have taken the greater point. I finished before I thought I would. And pursued by my honorable silence, he trudged back to the cottage.

But now I've come to the most difficult part to narrate: my own spiritual disorder and dereliction. I followed him up the lit doorway and stood on the threshold watching. He stared up at me from the crumpled bed, face empty and slack. He looked--and I've noticed this about other Jews--much younger, much weaker than he was. I could smell the brandy on him at a distance of six feet. He stood, shaking, and crossed the room towards me but diverted himself at the last minute and kneeled over my wastebasket--my wife's, I should say--and heaved and retched, bringing up nothing but thin brandy-scented bile. "Are you going to kill me," he rasped. And for the third time, I nearly did. But instead I switched off the cottage light, a naked weak bulb, and turned to leave. Through the open door I could see my pomegranate bush shaking in a breeze, and all the stars out over the cliffs: lyre, archer, swan, and eagle. I thought of shooting him, as I raced back indoors, of going back and shooting him, burning the body or burying it under my cucumbers, so that one of his race might actually enrich the land rather than destroy it. But I didn't. I unlocked his passport, as promised, and left it next to his bed.

Sleep did not come that night. I sat up with the gun in a chair at the kitchen window, staring out into the dark. I was sure that Blaumond would come for me in the night, even though I could not decipher the meaning of the ring, or why he had seemed so relieved to destroy it. Neither the Annals nor The Octopus offered any help. Their discussions of Jewish sorcery are sadly limited, and the other books in my modest library of related works don't discuss it at all. I've had time, of course, to develop some of my own thoughts, in the decades I've been alone in this house: what kept occurring to me was the terrible idea that the ring was an amulet designed to entrap the essence, the spiritual and ethnic essence of my wife, to draw it from the surroundings that she loved and tended, so that he could interfere with me, defeat me in my private and invisible war. I know that the Third Arm has long been observing me. I see signs of their passing everywhere, in the subtle leaf-and-branch signals (a knot of vines, two sticks in a small cross) they use to communicate, in the hostile glances of my neighbors. But try as I might I could yield up to no better meaning for Blaumond's ring than my tenuous thoughts of magic. And soon the anxiety I felt dissolved in the warmth, the filial warmth, radiating from the thought of my citizen's duty fulfilled. I drank a small glass of brandy to congratulate myself and polished the gun's stock and barrel with a napkin. At dawn Blaumond walked down my garden path, glanced at my window (I waved the barrel at him, somber and calm), and hobbled rapidly past my five-barred singing garden gate along the stony road back to town. His bulbous bag made him look like some dumb, upright beast of burden. I sat in the garden until almost noon, drinking tea and listening to the breeze over the rocks, over the treetops, to the cries of gulls. Then I began to make the notes that would finish, Commissioner, as this report--incomplete though it is.

And that anxiety returned, and grew stronger, and has given me no peace since. I hope you'll forgive me for weakening at such a crucial moment. You'll doubtless think that it's because I don't have children. But I assure you that's wrong. My wife is dead, yes, but my son and his family are thriving. He works in a meat distribution plant in the capital and his wife teaches kindergarten. They have two boys, both enormous. And that's why I must write you this report, Commissioner: to assure that my weakness does not stem from sentimentality for my own children, and to attempt to clear up an affair even I don't understand. Why didn't I do my duty and destroy Blaumond? Why did I give him his passport back and instruct him to leave? To banish him, to free him. In deference to my wife, whose presence lingers in the cottage. Perhaps killing him would have endowed him with too permanent an existence. Whatever its cause, my sudden weakness has forced me to question myself. Am I worthy of the strenuous service I have chosen? I know you won't answer me. Or put more exactly: I know that your only response will be silence, as it has been with all the other dispatches I've sent. I can't decide if you intend this as encouragement. I think you must. You too, I know, operate under society's hostile and uncomprehending eyes, under a regime that can never know your truest and most private desires. Your silence is necessary, I understand that. But I still wish to atone, and I hope that you will act (for you know what must be done) to complete my insufficient atonement, despite the repeated insistences that you won't, discouragement offered me by my simpleton chief of police, whom I delivered in the tiny, smoke-smelling bedroom of his father's farmstead, where you could hear the pigs in the sty beneath the window grunting and shrieking as they ate their filth.

I don't know where to look, now, for salvation. Perhaps, though . . . I'm not sure how best to express this, so I will let an old fable speak for me. Have you ever heard of the Nun's Fortress? Our little town lies, as you probably guessed from all my talk of islands and harbors, next to the ocean, and it climbs a steep hill up to the Nun's Fortress. During the reign of our country's first and most famous king, a local baron fell in love with a novice in our town's convent. In those days, our country's daughters were not only beautiful but virtuous. Baron Tvrtko pleaded with her. He sent her long letters. These were written by his wicked advisor, the baron himself being illiterate. He begged for a lock of her hair, for a glance. He rode his white stallion in its chiseled and filigreed battleplate all night beneath her window, clanking and moaning like two broken Browning guns, the kind the British used. But the novice stood her ground. She was married to Christ. Or so the tale runs. I've always been confused by this piece of theology.

So the baron swore to burn the convent to the ground. He stole out of his castle in the dead of a spring night with a troop of retainers and cut down a stand of larches. He and his men corded and bound the trees and dragged them on sledges to the convent. They piled them around its base and set them on fire. The baron sat on his white horse--now stained by the huge firelight--in his hunting garb of fox skin and uncured leather, holding an axe and a maul. The convent sat in the forest on one hill and the fortress on another. "By the grace of God the novice and all the sisters were carried through the air and deposited safely in the fortress as their convent burned." At least this is how it's recorded in the Annals. The forests surrounding my town contain, according to the local tourism bureau, "pine, fir, poplar, beech, and red oak." But the clearing where the convent stood remains bare: grayish dirt and stones, nothing else. And some people, Commissioner, cite this as proof of the story's truth.