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Regina Fastnekker’s smile was all the more brilliant for being so rare. Her laughter had a pure soprano quality. Lithe, long-limbed, her full skirt lending a peculiar dignity to her passage, she went across the porch, descended the steps, and disappeared up the walk.

6

Two days later, in the Northwestern University library, Kim looked up from the book she was reading to find Janet Layton smiling down on her.

“Can we talk?” she whispered.

Kim, startled to see the sister where she had had such a dramatic encounter with the brother, got up immediately. Outside, Janet lit up a cigarette.

“There is something I should have told you the other day and didn’t. In fact I lied to you. I have known all along that Mike was still alive.”

“You did!”

“He telephoned me in my dorm room within a month of his disappearance. The first thing he said was that he did not want my parents to know of the call.”

“And you agreed?”

“I didn’t tell them. I don’t think I would have in any case. You would have to know how terribly they took Mike’s disappearance, particularly at the beginning. If I had told them, they would have wanted proof. There was none I could give. And of course I had no idea then that it would turn into a permanent disappearance. I don’t know that he himself thought so at the time.”

“What did he want?”

“He wanted some computer disks from his room.”

She had complied, putting the disks in a plastic bag and the bag in a trash container on a downtown Chicago corner. She walked away, as she had been instructed, but with the idea of hiding and watching the container. She took up her station inside a bookstore and watched the container. Clerks asked if they could be of help and she shook her head, her eyes never leaving the container. After an hour, the manager came and she moved to a drugstore, certain her eyes had never left the container. After four hours of vigil, she was out of patience. She decided to take the disks from the container and wait for another phone call from her brother. The plastic bag containing the disks was gone.

“I felt like a bag lady, rummaging around in that trash, people turning to look at me. But it was definitely gone. Someone must have taken it within minutes of my putting it there, while I was walking away.”

“And your brother called again?”

“Months later. I asked him if he got the disks. He said yes. That was all. His manner made me glad I’d done what I had.”

Before leaving the disks in the container, Janet had made copies of them. She opened her purse and took out a package.

“Would you give these to Sister Mary Teresa?”

“You should give them to the police.”

“I will leave that up to her. If that’s what she thinks should be done with them, all right.”

“Did you read the disks?”

“I tried to once. I don’t know what program they’re written on, but I typed them out at the DOS prompt. They looked like notes on reading to me. The fact that Mike wanted them means only that they were important to him. Frankly, I’d rather not admit that I’ve heard from Mike over the years. My parents would never understand my silence.”

Kim had difficulty understanding it herself, Emtee Dempsey, on the other hand, found it unsurprising.

“But of course it would have been unsurprising if she told them too. Singular choices do not always have moral necessity. There were doubtless good reasons for either course of action and she chose the one she did.”

“What will you do with them?”

“What the young lady suggested. Study their contents. Can you print them out for me?”

Before she did anything with the disks, Kim took the same precaution Janet had and made copies of them. There were three disks, of the five-and-a-half-inch size, but only two were full, the third had only twelve thousand bytes saved on it. Running a directory on them, Kim jotted down the file names.

BG&E.one

BG&E.two

TSZ.one

TSZ.two

TSZ.tre

That was the contents of the first disk. The second was similarly uninformative.

PENSEES.UNO

PENSEES.DOS

PENSEES.TRE

The third disk had one file, AAV.

The files had not been written on Notabene, the program Kim preferred, nor on either Word or WordPerfect. Kim printed them from ASCI and began reading eagerly as they emerged from the printer but quickly, as Janet had, found her interest flag. Michael Layton seemed to have devised a very personal kind of shorthand. “Para fn eth no es vrd, pero an attempt para vanqr los grads.”

Let Emtee Dempsey decipher that if she could. The fact that Michael Layton wrote in a way difficult, if not impossible, to follow suggested that the disks contained information of interest. The old nun spread the sheets before her, smoothing them out, a look of anticipation on her pudgy face. Kim left her to her task.

The old nun was preoccupied at table and after night prayers returned to her study. At one in the morning, Kim came downstairs to find Emtee Dempsey brooding over the printout. She looked up at Kim and blinked.

“Any luck?”

“You are right to think that decoding always depends on finding one little key. Whether it is a matter of luck, I do not know.”

“Have you found the key?”

“No.”

“I couldn’t make head nor tails of it.”

“Oh, the first two disks present no problem. They are paraphrases of Nietzsche.”

“You mean you can understand those pages?”

“Only to the degree that Nietzsche himself is intelligible. The young man paraphrased passages from the mad philosopher and interspersed his own comments, most of them jejune.”

“How did you know it was Nietzsche?”

“Beyond Good and Evil. Thus Spake Zarathustra.”

“And the second is Pascal?”

“Unfortunately no. The thoughts are young Layton’s, thoughts of unrelieved tedium and banality. Do you know the Pensieri of Leopardi? Giacomo Leopardi?”

“I don’t even know who he is.”

“Was. His work of that name is a collection of pessimistic and misanthropic jottings, puerile, adolescent. If a poet of genius, however troubled, was capable of writing such silliness, we should not perhaps be too harsh with young Layton.”

“What is on the third disk?”

She shook her head. “Those few pages are written in a bad imitation of Finnegan’s Wake, a kind of macaronic relying on a variety of languages imperfectly understood. I had hoped that the first disks would provide me with the clue needed to understand the third, but so far this is...”

An explosion shook the house, bringing Emtee Dempsey to her feet. But Kim was down the hall ahead of her and dashed upstairs. As she came into the upstairs hall, she saw that a portion of the left wall as well as her door had been blown away. The startled face of Joyce appeared through plaster cloud.

“Strike two,” she said.

7

Sister Mary Teresa wanted to take a good look around Kim’s room before calling the police, although why the neighborhood had failed to be shaken awake by the explosion was explained by the incessant street racket that did not really cease until three or sometimes four in the morning. The explosion of Kim’s computer would have been only one noise among many to those outside, however it had filled the house. The wall that had been blown into the hall was the one against which Kim’s computer had stood.

“Why would it do a thing like that?” the old nun asked.

“I’ve never heard of it before.”

“Was it on?”

“I never turn it off.” Kim explained the theory behind this.