A Long Line of Dead Men

"No, he'd still be news. And he wasn't the only prominent member, either. Ray Gruliow is guaranteed front-page news. And Avery Davis is a member."

"The real estate developer?"

"Uh-huh. And two of the dead men were writers, and one of them had some plays produced." I looked at my notes. "Gerard Billings," I said.

"He was a playwright?"

"No, that was Tom Cloonan. Billings is a broadcaster, he does the weather report on Channel Nine."

"Oh, Gerry Billings, with the bow ties. Gosh, maybe you can get his autograph."

"I'm just saying he's in the public eye."

"A mote in the public eye," she said, "but I see what you mean." She fell silent, and I went back to sifting my notes. After a few minutes she said, "Why?"

"Huh?"

"It just struck me. All these deaths over all those years. It's not like a disgruntled postal employee showing up on the job with an AK-47. Whoever is doing this must have a reason."

"You'd think so."

"Is there money in it?"

"So far there's twenty-five hundred in it for me. If Hildebrand's check is good, and if I can remember to deposit it."

"I meant for the killer."

"I figured you did. Well, if he gets a good agent maybe he'll do all right when they make the miniseries. But if he gets away with it there won't be a miniseries, so where does that leave him?"

"High and dry. Don't you get something for being the last man alive?"

"You get to start the next chapter," I said. "You get the right to read the names of the dead."

"You're sure they don't all leave their money to each other?"

"Positive."

"They don't each kick in a thousand dollars to start things off, and the money got invested in a small upstate corporation that changed its name to Xerox? No, huh?"

"I'm afraid not."

"And the whole club isn't some kind of a tom-tom?"

"Huh?"

"Wrong word," she said. "A tom-tom's a drum. Dammit, what's the word I want?"

"Where are you going?"

"To look it up in the dictionary."

"How can you look it up," I wondered, "if you don't know what it is?"

She didn't answer, and I drank the rest of my coffee and went back to my notes. "Ha!" she said, a few minutes later, and I looked up. "Tontine," she said. "That's the word. It's an eponym."

"Is that a fact."

She gave me a look. "That means it was named for somebody. Lorenzo Tonti, to be specific. He was a Neapolitan banker who thought it up back in the seventeenth century."

"Thought what up?"

"The tontine, although I don't suppose he called it that. It was a sort of a cross between life insurance and a lottery. You signed up a batch of subscribers and they each put up a sum of money into a common fund."

"And it was winner take all?"

"Not necessarily. Sometimes it was set up so that the funds were distributed when the survivors were down to five or ten percent of the original number. Others, smaller ones, stayed locked up until there was only one person left alive. People would be enrolled by their parents in early childhood, and if the investments did well they could wind up looking at a fortune. But they couldn't collect it unless they outlived the other participants."

"You got all this from the dictionary?"

"I got the word from the dictionary," she said, "so I'd know what to look up in the encyclopedia. I knew the word, I just couldn't think of it. Fifteen or twenty years ago I spent a weekend at an inn in the Berkshires. There was this historical novel on the subject, I think it was even called The Tontine, and somebody had left a copy there and I picked it up. I was only a third of the way through it when it was time to leave, so I stuck it in my bag."

"I think God'll forgive you for that."

"He's already punished me. I read it all the way through, and do you know what it said on the bottom of the last page?"

" 'Then she awoke and found it had all been a horrible dream.' "

"Worse than that. It said, 'End of Volume One.' "

"And you were never able to find Volume Two."

"Never. Not that I made searching for it my life's work. But I would have liked to know how it all came out. There were times over the years when that's what kept me from jumping out the window. I'm not talking about the book, I'm talking about life. Wanting to know how it all comes out."

I said, "You really look beautiful tonight."

"Why, thank you," she said. "What brought that on?"

"I was just struck by it. Watching the play of emotions on your face. You're a beautiful woman, but sometimes it all shows- the strength, the softness, everything."

"You old bear," she said, and sat down on the couch next to me. "Keep saying sweet things like that and I've got a pretty good idea how tonight's going to turn out."

"So have I."

"Oh? Give me a kiss, then, and we'll see if you're right."

Afterward, as we were lying side by side, she said, "You know, when I was saying earlier that the club was a real guy thing, I wasn't just making war-between-the-sexes jokes. It's very much a male province, getting together to work out a relationship with mortality. You boys like to look at the big picture."

"And girls just want to have fun?"