Artemis Fowl, The Arctic Incident: The Graphic Novel by Eoin Colfer

Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident: The Graphic Novel

by Eoin Colfer

ARTEMIS FOWL HAS ALWAYS RESENTED GOING TO SCHOOL, PREFERRING INSTEAD TO PLOT HIS NEXT CRIME.

     So when the young criminal genius learns that his father is being held prisoner by the Russian Mafiya, he cuts class and braves the sub-zero temperatures of the Arctic Circle to rescue him.

     As if having a band of gangsters on his tail isn't enough for the criminal mastermind, Artemis's old enemies, the fairy People, believe that he is supplying illegal human power cells (that's AA batteries to us) to the goblin gangs.  But is he responsible – or is someone else arming the goblins?

     Maybe Artemis Fowl isn't trying to con the fairies.  Maybe this time he needs their help. . . 'Fast, Funny and very exciting' – Daily Mail

     Back in COLOUR, back in ACTION

     'A brilliantly drawn tale that blends outrageous fantasy with gripping action' – Big Issue

     'This crime adventure story is made all the more compelling by the brilliantly detailed illustrations' – Scotland on Sunday

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Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld. Illustrator Keith Thompson Trilogy Book 1

Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld. Illustrator Keith Thompson

Trilogy Book 1

     It is the cusp of World War I, and all the European powers are arming up. The Austro-Hungarians and Germans have their Clankers, steam-driven iron machines loaded with guns and ammunition. The British Darwinists employ fabricated animals as their weaponry. Their Leviathan is a whale airship, and the most masterful beast in the British fleet.

     Aleksandar Ferdinand, prince of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, is on the run. His own people have turned on him. His title is worthless. All he has is a battle-torn Stormwalker and a loyal crew of men.

     Deryn Sharp is a commoner, a girl disguised as a boy in the British Air Service. She's a brilliant airman. But her secret is in constant danger of being discovered.

     With the Great War brewing, Alek's and Deryn's paths cross in the most unexpected way...taking them both aboard the Leviathan on a fantastical, around-the-world adventure. One that will change both their lives forever.

http://www.penguin.com.au/lookinside/spotlight.cfm?SBN=9780670073030

And Another Thing by Eoin Colfer
Extract

Foreword

   If you own a copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy then one of the last things you would be likely to type into its v-board would be the very same title of that particular Sub­Etha volume as, presumably, since you have a copy, then you already know all about the most remarkable book ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor. However, presumption has been the runner-up in every major Causes of Intergalactic Conflict poll for the past few millennia, first place invariably going to Land-Grabbing Bastards with Big weapons and third usually being a toss-up between Coveting Another Sentient Being's Significant Other and Misinterpretation of Simple Hand Gestures. One man's 'Wow! This pasta is fantastico!' is another's 'Your momma plays it fast and loose with sailors.'

   Let us say, for example, that you are on an eight-hour layover in Port Brasta without enough credit for a Gargle Blaster on your implant, and if upon realizing that you know almost nothing about this supposedly wonderful book you hold in your hands, you decide out of sheer brain-fogging boredom to type the words 'the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy' into the search bar on The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, what results will this flippant tappery yield?

   Firstly, an animated icon appears in a flash of pixels and informs you that there are three results, which is confusing as there are obviously five listed below, numbered in the usual order.

   Guide Note: That is if your understanding of the usual numerical order is from small to large and not from derivative to inspired, as with Folfangan Slugs who judge a number's worth based on the artistic integrity of its shape. Folfangan supermarket receipts are beauteous ribbons, but their economy collapses at least once a week.

   Each of these five results is a lengthy article, accompa­nied by many hours of video and audio files and some dra­matic reconstructions featuring quite well-known actors.

   This is not the story of those articles.

   But if you scroll down past article five, ignoring the offers to remortgage your kidneys and lengthen your pormwran­gler, you will come to a line in tiny font that reads 'If you liked this, then you might also like to read . . .' Have your icon rub itself along this link and you will be led to a text only appen­dix with absolutely no audio and not so much as a frame of video shot by a student director who made the whole thing in his bedroom and paid his drama soc. mates with sand­wiches.

   This is the story of that appendix.

 Introduction

   So far as we know. . . The Imperial Galactic Government decided, over a bucket of jewelled crabs one day, that a hyper­space expressway was needed in the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral Arm of the Galaxy. This decision was rushed through channels ostensibly to pre-empt traffic con­gestion in the distant future, but actually to provide employ­ment for a few ministers' cousins who were forever mooching around Government Plaza. Unfortunately the Earth was in the path of this planned expressway, so the remorseless Vogons were dispatched in a constructor fleet to remove the offending planet with gentle use of thermonuclear weapons.

   Two survivors managed to hitch a ride on a Vogon ship: Arthur Dent, a young English employee of a regional radio station whose plans for the morning did not include having his home planet blasted to dust beneath his slippers. Had the human race held a referendum, it would have been quite likely that Arthur Dent would have been voted least suitable to carry the hopes of humankind into space. Arthur's university yearbook actually referred to him as 'most likely to end up living in a hole in the Scottish highlands with only the chip on his shoul­der for company'. Luckily Arthur's Betelgeusean friend, Ford Prefect, a roving researcher for that illustrious interstellar travel almanac The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, was more of an optimist. Ford saw silver linings where Arthur saw only clouds and so between them they made one prudent space traveller, unless their travels led them to the planet Junipella where the clouds actually did have silver linings. Arthur would have doubtless steered the ship straight into the nearest cloud of gloom and Ford would have almost certainly attempted to steal the silver, which would have resulted in the catastrophic combustion of the natural gas inside the lining. The explo­sion would have been pretty, but as a heroic ending it would lack a certain something, i.e. a hero in one piece.

   The only other Earthling left alive was Tricia McMillan, or Trillian to use her cool, spacey name, a fiercely ambitious astrophysicist cum fledgling reporter who had always believed that there was more to life than life on Earth. In spite of this conviction, Trillian had nevertheless been amazed when she was whisked off to the stars by Zaphod Beeblebrox, the maverick two-headed Galactic President.

   What can one say of President Beeblebrox that he has not already had printed on T-shirts and circulated through­out the Galaxy free with every uBid purchase? ZAPHOD SAYS YES TO ZAPHOD was probably the most famous T­shirt slogan, though not even his team of psychiatrists understood what it actually meant. Second favourite was probably: BEEBLEBROX. JUST BE GLAD HE'S OUT THERE.

   It is a universal maxim that if someone goes to the trou­ble of printing something on a T-shirt then it is almost def­initely not a hundred per cent untrue, which is to say that it is more than likely fairly definitely not altogether false. Con­sequentially, when Zaphod Beeblebrox arrived on a planet, people invariably said 'yes' to whatever questions he asked and when he left they were glad he was out there.

   These less than traditional heroes were improbably drawn to each other and embarked on a series of adventures, which mostly involved gadding around through space and time, sitting on quantum sofas, chatting with gaseous computers, and generally failing to find meaning or fulfilment in any corner of the Universe.

   Arthur Dent eventually returned to the hole in space where the Earth used to be and discovered that the hole had been filled by an Earth-sized planet that looked and behaved remarkably like Earth. In fact this planet was an Earth, just not Arthur's. Not this Arthur's, at any rate. Because his home planet was at the centre of a Plural zone, the Arthur we are concerned with had found himself shuffled along the dimensional axis to an Earth that had never been destroyed by Vogons. This rather made our Arthur's day, and his usu­ally pessimistic mood was further improved when he encountered Fenchurch, his soulmate. Luckily this idyllic period was not cut short by bumping into any alternate Uni­verse Arthurs who may have been wandering around, possi­bly in Los Angeles working for the BBC.

   Arthur and his true love travelled the stars together until Fenchurch vanished in mid-conversation during a hyper­space jump. Arthur searched the Universe for her, paying his way by exchanging bodily fluids for first-class tickets. Even­tually he was stranded on the planet Lamuella and made a life for himself there as sandwich maker for a primitive tribe who believed that sandwiches were pretty hot stuff.

   His tranquillity was disturbed by the arrival of a couriered box from Ford Prefect, which contained The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Mk II in the form of a smarmy pan­dimensional black bird. Trillian, who was now a successful newswoman, had a delivery of her own for Arthur in the shape of Random Dent, the daughter conceived with the donated price of seat 2D on the Alpha Centauri red-eye.

   Arthur reluctantly took on the role of parent, but was completely out of his depth with the truculent teenager. Random stole the Guide Mk II and set a course for Earth, where she believed she could finally feel at home. Arthur and Ford followed, to find Trillian already on the planet.

   Only then is the Mk II's objective revealed. The Vogons, irritated by the Earth's refusal to stay ka-boomed, had engi­neered the bird to lure the escapees back to the planet before they destroy it in every dimension, thus fulfilling their origi­nal order.

   Arthur and Ford rushed at semi-breakneck speed to London's Club Beta, pausing only to purchase foie gras and blue suede shoes. Thanks to the old dimensional axis/ Plural zone thing, they found Trillian and Tricia McMillan co-existing in the same space-time, both being screamed at by an emotional Random.

   Confused? Arthur was, but not for long. Once he noticed the green death rays pulsating through the lower atmos­phere, all of the day's other niggling problems seemed to lose their nigglyness - after all, confusion was not likely to slice him into a million seared pieces.

   The Vogon Prostetnic had done his job well. Not only had he lured Arthur, Ford and Trillian back to the planet Earth, but he'd also managed to trick a Grebulon captain into destroying the Earth for him, thus saving the crew several hundred Vog hours' paperwork with the munitions office.

   Arthur and his friends sit powerless in London's Club Beta and can only watch as the ultimate war on Earth is waged, unable to participate, unless involuntary spasming and liquefaction of bone matter counts as participation. On this occasion the weapons of destruction are death rays rather than Vogon torpedoes, but then, one planet-killing device is pretty much the same as another when you're on the receiving end . . .

http://www.penguin.com.au/lookinside/spotlight.cfm?SBN=9780718155148&Page=Extract

Love and Summer by William Trevor
Extract

   On a June evening some years after the middle of the last century Mrs Eileen Connulty passed through the town of Rathmoye: from Number 4 The Square to Magennis Street, into Hurley Lane, along Irish Street, across Cloughjordan Road to the Church of the Most Holy Redeemer. Her night was spent there.

   The life that had come to an end had been one of good works and resolution, with a degree of severity in domestic and family matters. The anticipation of personal contentment, which had long ago influenced Mrs Connulty's acceptance of the married state and the bearing of two children, had since failed her: she had been disappointed in her husband and in her daughter. As death approached, she had feared she would now be obliged to join her husband and prayed she would not have to. Her daughter she was glad to part from; her son – now in his fiftieth year, her pet since first he lay in her arms as an infant – Mrs Connulty had wept to leave behind.

   The blinds of private houses, drawn down as the coffin went by, were released soon after it had passed. Shops that had closed opened again. Men who had uncovered their heads replaced caps or hats, children who had ceased to play in Hurley Lane were no longer constrained. The undertakers descended the steps of the church. Tomorrow's Mass would bring a bishop; until the very last, Mrs Connulty would be given her due.

   People at that time said the family Mrs Connulty had married into owned half of Rathmoye, an impression created by their licensed premises in Magennis Street, their coal yards in St Matthew Street, and Number 4 The Square, a lodging house established by the Connultys in 1903. During the decades that had passed since then there had been the acquisition of other properties in the town; repaired and generally put right, they brought in modest rents that, accumulating, became a sizeable total. But even so it was an exaggeration when people said that the Connultys owned half of Rathmoye.

   Compact and ordinary, it was a town in a hollow that had grown up there for no reason that anyone knew or wondered about. Farmers brought in livestock on the fi rst Monday of every month, and borrowed money from one of Rathmoye's two banks. They had their teeth drawn by the dentist who practised in the Square, from time to time consulted a solicitor there, inspected the agricultural machinery at Des Devlin's on the Nenagh road, dealt with Heffernan the seed merchant, drank in one of the town's many public houses. Their wives shopped for groceries from the warehouse shelves of the Cash and Carry, or in McGovern's if they weren't economizing; for shoes in Tyler's; for clothes, curtain material and oilcloth in Corbally's drapery. There had once been employment at the mill, and at the mill's electricity plant before the Shannon Scheme came; there was employment now at the creamery and the condensed-milk factory, in builders' yards, in shops and public houses, at the bottled-water plant. There was a courthouse in the Square, an abandoned railway station at the end of Mill Street. There were two churches and a convent, a Christian Brothers' school and a technical school. Plans for a swimming-pool were awaiting the acquisition of funds.

   Nothing happened in Rathmoye, its people said, but most of them went on living there. It was the young who left – for Dublin or Cork or Limerick, for England, sometimes for America. A lot came back. That nothing happened was an exaggeration too.

   The funeral Mass was on the morning of the following day, and when it was over Mrs Connulty's mourners stood about outside the cemetery gates, declaring that she would never be forgotten in the town and beyond it. The women who had toiled beside her in the Church of the Most Holy Redeemer asserted that she had been an example to them all. They recalled how no task had been too menial for her to undertake, how the hours spent polishing a surfeit of brass or scraping away old candle-grease had never been begrudged. The altar fl owers had not once in sixty years gone in need of fresh water; the missionary leafl ets were replaced when necessary. Small repairs had been effected on cassocks and surplices and robes. Washing the chancel tiles had been a sacred duty.

   While such recollections were shared, and the life that had ended further lauded, a young man in a pale tweed suit that stood out a bit on a warm morning surreptitiously photographed the scene. He had earlier cycled the seven and a half miles from where he lived, and was then held up by the funeral traffic. He had come to photograph the town's burnt-out cinema, which he had heard about in a similar small town where recently he had photographed the perilous condition of a terrace of houses wrenched from their foundations in a landslip.

   Dark-haired and thin, in his early twenties, the young man was a stranger in Rathmoye. A suggestion of stylishness – in his general demeanour, in his jaunty green-and-bluestriped tie – was repudiated by the comfortable bagginess of his suit. His features had a misleading element of seriousness in their natural cast, contributing further to this impression of contradiction. His name was Florian Kilderry.

   'Whose funeral?' he enquired in the crowd, returning to it from where he had temporarily positioned himself behind a parked car in order to take his photographs. He nodded when he was told, then asked for directions to the ruined cinema. 'Thanks,' he said politely, his smile friendly. 'Thanks,' he said again, and pushed his bicycle through the throng of mourners.

   Neither Mrs Connulty's son nor her daughter knew that the funeral attendance had been recorded in such a manner, and when they made their way, separately, back to Number 4 The Square they remained ignorant of this unusual development. The crowd began to disperse then, many to gather again in Number 4, others to return to their interrupted morning. The last to go was an old Protestant called Orpen Wren, who believed the coffin that had been interred contained the mortal remains of an elderly kitchenmaid whose death had occurred thirty-four years ago in a household he had known well. The respectful murmur of voices around him dwindled to nothing; cars drove off. Alone where he stood, Orpen Wren remained for a few moments longer before he, too, went on his way.

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The Wrecker by Clive Cussler with Justin Scott
Chapter One

SEPTEMBER 21, 1907
CASCADE RANGE, OREGON

   The railroad dick watching the night shift troop into the jagged mouth of the tunnel wondered how much work the South­ern Pacific Company would get out of a one-eyed, hard-rock miner limping on a stiff leg. His bib overalls and flannel shirt were thread­bare, his boots worn thin as paper. The brim of his battered felt slouch hat drooped low as a circus clown's, and the poor jigger's steel hammer trailed from his glove as if it was too heavy to lift. Some­thing was fishy.

   The rail cop was a drinking man, his face so bloated by rotgut that his eyes appeared lost in his cheeks. But they were sharp eyes, miraculously alive with hope and laughter - considering that he had fallen so low he was working for the most despised police force in the country - and still alert. He stepped forward, on the verge of inves­tigating. But just then a powerful young fellow, a fresh-faced galoot straight off the farm, took the old miner's hammer and carried it for him. That act of kindness conspired with the limp and the eye patch to make the first man appear much older than he was, and harmless. Which he was not.

   Ahead were two holes in the side of the mountain, the main rail tunnel and, nearby, a smaller 'pioneer' tunnel 'holed through' first to explore the route, draw fresh air, and drain water. Both were rimmed with timberwork rock sheds to keep the mountainside from falling down on the men and dump cars trundling in and out.

   The day shift was staggering out, exhausted men heading for the work train that would take them back to the cookhouse in the camp. A locomotive puffed alongside, hauling cars heaped with crossties. There were freight wagons drawn by ten-mule teams, handcars scut­tling along light track, and clouds and clouds of dust. The site was remote, two days of rough, roundabout train travel from San Fran­cisco. But it was not isolated.

   Telegraph lines advancing on rickety poles connected Wall Street to the very mouth of the tunnel. They carried grim reports of the financial panic shaking New York three thousand miles away. East­ern bankers, the railroad's paymasters, were frightened. The old man knew that the wires crackled with conflicting demands. Speed up construction of the Cascades Cut-off, a vital express line between San Francisco and the north. Or shut it down.

   Just outside the tunnel mouth, the old man stopped to look up at the mountain with his good eye. The ramparts of the Cascade Range glowed red in the setting sun. He gazed at them as if he wanted to remember what the world looked like before the dark tunnel swal­lowed him deep into the stone. Jostled by the men behind, he rubbed his eye patch, as if uneasily recalling the moment of searing loss. His touch opened a pinhole for his second eye, which was even sharper than the first. The railway detective, who looked a cut above the ordi­nary slow-witted cinder dick, was still watching him mistrustfully.

   The miner was a man with immense reserves of cold nerve. He had the guts to stand his ground, the bloodless effrontery to throw off suspicion by acting unafraid. Ignoring the workmen shoving past him, he peered about as if suddenly spellbound by the rousing spectacle of a new railroad pushing through the mountains.

   He did, in fact, marvel at the endeavour. The entire enterprise, which synchronized the labour of thousands, rested on a simple struc­ture at his feet. Two steel rails were spiked four feet eight and a half inches apart to wooden crossties. The ties were firmly fixed in a bed of crushed-stone ballast. The combination formed a strong cradle that could support hundred-ton locomotives thundering along at a mile a minute. Repeated every mile - twenty-seven hundred ties, three hundred fifty-two lengths of rail, sixty kegs of spikes - it made a smooth, near-frictionless road, a steel highway that could run for­ever. The rails soared over the rugged land, clinging to narrow cuts etched into the sheer sides of near-vertical slopes, jumping ravines on bristling trestles, tunnelling in and out of cliffs.

   But this miracle of modern engineering and painstaking manage­ment was still dwarfed, even mocked, by the mountains. And no one knew better than he how fragile it all was.

   He glanced at the cop, who had turned his attention elsewhere. The night-shift crew vanished into the rough-hewn bore. Water gurgled at their feet as they tramped through endless archways of timber shoring. The limping man held back, accompanied by the big fellow carrying his hammer. They stopped at a side tunnel a hundred yards in and doused their acetylene lamps. Alone in the dark, they watched the others' lamps flicker away into the distance. Then they felt their own way through the side tunnel, through twenty feet of stone, into the parallel pioneer tunnel. It was narrow, cut rougher than the main bore, the ceiling dropping low here and there. They crouched and pressed ahead, deeper into the mountain, relighting their lamps once no one could see.

   The old man limped more quickly now, playing his light on the side wall. Suddenly, he stopped and passed his hand over a jagged seam in the stone. The young man watched him and wondered, not for the first time, what kept him fighting for the cause when most men as crippled as he would spend their time in a rocking chair. But a man could get hurt asking too many questions in the hobo jungles, so he kept his wonderings to himself.

   'Drill here.'

   The old man revealed only enough to inspire the confidence of the volunteers he recruited. The farm boy carrying the hammer thought he was helping a shingle weaver down from Puget Sound, where the union had called a general strike that completely tied up the cedar-shingle industry until the bloodsucking manufacturers beat them with scab labour. Just the answer a budding anarchist longed to hear.

   His previous recruit had believed he was from Idaho, on the run from the Coeur d'Alene mine wars. To the next he would have fought the good fight organizing for the    Wobblies in Chicago. How had he lost an eye? Same place he got the limp, slugging it out with strike-breakers in Colorado City, or body-guarding for 'Big Bill' Haywood of the Western Federation of Miners, or shot when the Governor called up the National Guard. Gilt-edged credentials to those who hungered to make a better world and had the guts to fight for it.

   The big fellow produced a three-foot steel chisel and held it in place while the man with the eye patch tapped it until the point was firmly seated in the granite. Then he handed the hammer back.

   'Here you go, Kevin. Quickly, now.'

   'Are you certain smashing this tunnel won't hurt the boys working the main bore?'

   'I'd stake my life on it. There are twenty feet of solid granite between us.'

   Kevin's was a common story in the West. Born to be a farmer before his family lost their land to the bank, he had toiled in the sil­ver mines, until he got fired for speaking up in favour of the union. Riding around the country on freight trains looking for work, he had been beaten by railway police. Rallying for higher wages, he'd been attacked by strike-breakers with axe handles. There were days his head hurt so bad he couldn't think straight. Worst were the nights he despaired of ever finding a steady job, or even a regular place to sleep, much less meeting a girl and raising a family. On one of those nights, he had been seduced by the anarchists' dream.

   Dynamite, 'the proletariat's artillery,' would make a better world.

   Kevin swung the heavy sledge with both hands. He pounded the chisel a foot in. He stopped to catch his breath and complained about the tool. 'I can't abide these steel hammers. They bounce too much. Give me old-fashioned cast iron.'

   'Use the bounce.' Surprisingly lithe, the cripple with the eye patch took the hammer and swung it easily, using his powerful wrists to whip the steel up on the bounce, flick it back in a one fluid motion, and bring it hard down on the chisel again. 'Make it work for you. Here, you finish . . . Good. Very good.'

   They chiselled a hole three feet into the stone.

   'Dynamite,' said the old man, who had let Kevin carry everything incriminating in case the railway police searched them. Kevin removed three dull-red sticks from under his shirt. Printed on each in black ink was the manufacturer's brand, VULCAN. The cripple stuffed them one after another into the hole.

   'Detonator.'

   'You absolutely certain it won't hurt any workingmen?'

   'Guaranteed.'

   'I guess I wouldn't mind blowing the bosses to hell, but those men in there, they're on our side.'

   'Even if they don't know it yet,' the old cripple said cynically. He attached the detonator, which would explode forcefully enough to make the dynamite itself blow.

   'Fuse.'

   Kevin carefully uncoiled the slow fuse he had hidden in his hat. A yard of the hemp yarn impregnated with pulverized gunpowder would burn in ninety seconds-a foot in half a minute. To gain five minutes to retreat to a safe place, the old man laid eleven feet of fuse. The extra foot was to take into account variations in consistency and dampness.

   'Would you like to fire the blast?' he asked casually.

   Kevin's eyes were burning like a little boy's on Christmas morn­ing. 'Could I?'

   'I'll check the coast is clear. Just remember, you've only got five minutes to get out. Don't dawdle. Light it and go - wait! What's that?' Pretending that he had heard someone coming, he whipped around and half drew a blade from his boot.

   Kevin fell for the ruse. He cupped his hand to his ear. But all he heard was the distant rumble of the drills in the main bore and the whine of the blowers pulling foul air out of the pioneer tunnel and drawing in fresh. 'What? What did you hear?'

   'Run down there! See who's coming.'

   Kevin ran, shadows leaping as his light bounced on the rough walls.

   The old man ripped the gunpowder fuse from the detonator and threw it into the darkness. He replaced it with an identical-looking string of hemp yarn soaked in melted trinitrotoluene, which was used to detonate multiple charges simultaneously because it burned so fast.

   He was quick and dexterous. By the time he heard Kevin return­ing from his fool's errand, the treachery was done. But when he looked up, he was stunned to see Kevin holding both hands in the air. Behind him was the railroad dick, the cop who had watched him enter the tunnel. Suspicion had transformed his whiskey-sodden face into a mask of cold vigilance. He was pointing a revolver in a rock-steady grip.

   'Elevate!' he commanded. 'Hands up!'

   Swift eyes took in the fuse and detonator and understood at once.

   He tucked his weapon close to his body, clearly a fighting man who knew how to use it.

   The old man moved very slowly. But instead of obeying the order to raise his hands, he reached down to his boot and drew his long knife.

   The cinder dick smiled. His voice had a musical lilt, and he spoke his words with the self-taught reader's love of the English language.

   'Beware, old man. Even though you have brought, in error, a knife to a gun fight, I will be obliged to shoot you dead if it does not fall from your hand in a heartbeat.'

   The old man flicked his wrist. His knife telescoped open, tripling its length into a rapier-thin sword. Already lunging with fluid grace, he buried the blade in the cop's throat. The cop reached one hand to his throat and tried to aim his gun. The old man thrust deeper, twist­ing his blade, severing the man's spinal cord as he drove the sword completely through his neck and out the back. The revolver clattered on the tunnel floor. And as the old man withdrew his sword, the cop unfolded onto the stone beside his fallen gun.

   Kevin made a gurgling noise in his own throat. His eyes were round with shock and fear, darting from the dead man to the sword that had appeared from nowhere and then back to the dead man. 'How-what?'

   He touched the spring release and the sword retracted into the blade, which he returned to his boot. 'Same principle as the theatrical prop,' he explained. 'Slightly modified. Got your matches?'

   Kevin plunged trembling hands into his pockets, fished blindly, and finally pulled out a padded bottle.

   'I'll check the tunnel mouth is clear,' the old man told him. 'Wait for my signal. Remember, five minutes. Make damned sure it's lit, burning proper, then run like hell! Five minutes.'

   Five minutes to retreat to a safe place. But not if fast-burning trinitrotoluene, which would leap ten feet in the blink of an eye, had been substituted for slow-burning, pulverized gunpowder.

   The old man stepped over the cop's body and hurried to the mouth of the pioneer tunnel. When he saw no one nearby, he tapped loudly with the chisel, two times. Three taps echoed back. The coast was clear.

   The old man took out an official Waltham railroad watch, which no hard-rock miner could afford. Every conductor, dispatcher, and locomotive engineer was required by law to carry the seventeen-jewel, lever-set pocket timepiece. It was guaranteed to be accurate within half a minute per week, whether jouncing along in a hot locomotive cab or freezing on the snow-swept platform of a train-order station atop the High Sierra. The white face with Arabic numerals was just visible in the dusk. He watched the interior dial hand sweep seconds instead of the minutes Kevin believed that the slow-burning pulver­ized gunpowder gave him to hightail it to safety.

   Five seconds for Kevin to uncork his suIfur matches, remove one, re-cork the padded bottle, kneel beside the fuse. Three seconds for ner­vous fingers to scrape a suIfur match on the steel sledge. One second while it flared full and bright. Touch the flame to the trinitrotoluene fuse.

   A puff of air, almost gentle, fanned the old man's face.

   Then a burst of wind rushed from the portal, propelled by the hollow thud of the dynamite exploding deep in the rock. An omi­nous rumble and another burst of wind signalled that the pioneer tunnel had caved in.

   The main bore was next.

   He hid among the timbers shoring the portal and waited. It was true that there was twenty feet of granite between the pioneer bore and the men digging the main tunnel. But at the point he had set the dynamite, the, mountain was far from solid, being riddled with seams of fractured stone.

   The ground shook, rolling like an earthquake.

   The old man allowed himself a grim smile. That tremor beneath his boots told him more than the frightened yells of the terrorized hard-rock miners and powder men who came pouring out of the main tunnel. More than the frenzied shouts of those converging on the smoke-belching tunnels to see what had happened.

   Hundreds of feet under the mountain, the tunnel's ceiling had col­lapsed. He had timed it to bury the dump train, crushing twenty cars, the locomotive, and its tender. It did not trouble him that men would be crushed, too. They were as unimportant as the railway cop he had just murdered. Nor did he feel sympathy for the injured men trapped in the darkness behind a wall of broken stone. The greater the death, destruc­tion, and confusion, the slower the cleanup, the longer the delay.

   He whipped off his eye patch, shoved it in his pocket. Then he removed his drooping slouch hat, folded the brims inside out, and shoved it back on his head in the shape of a miner's flat cap. Quickly untying the scarf under his trousers that immobilized his knee to make him limp, he strode out of the dark on two strong legs, slipped into the scramble of frightened men, and ran with them, stumbling as they did on the crossties, tripping on the rails, fighting to get away. Eventually, the fleeing men slowed, turned by scores of the curious running toward the disaster.

   The man notorious as the Wrecker kept going, dropping to the ditch beside the tracks, easily eluding rescue crews and railway police on a well-rehearsed escape route. He skirted a siding where a pri­vately owned special passenger train stretched behind a gleaming black locomotive. The behemoth hissed softly, keeping steam up for electricity and heat. Rows of curtained windows glowed golden in the night. Music drifted on the cold air, and he could see liveried servants setting a table for dinner. Trudging past it to the tunnel bore earlier, young Kevin had railed against the 'favoured few' who travelled in splendour while hard-rock miners were paid two dollars a day.

   The Wrecker smiled. It was the railroad president's personal train. All hell was about to break loose inside the luxurious cars when he learned that the mountain had fallen into his tunnel, and it was a safe bet Kevin's 'favoured few' would not feel quite so favoured tonight.

   A mile down the newly laid track, harsh electric light marked the sprawling construction yard of workmen's bunkhouses, materials stores, machine shops, dynamo, scores of sidings thick with mate­rials trains, and a roundhouse for turning and repairing their loco­motives. Below that staging area, deep in a hollow, could be seen the oil lamps of an end-of-the-tracks camp, a temporary city of tents and abandoned freight cars housing the makeshift dance halls, saloons, and brothels that followed the ever-moving construction yard. .

   It would be moving a lot more slowly now.

   To clear the rock-fall from the tunnel would take days. A week at least to shore the weakened rock and repair the damage before work could resume. He had sabotaged the railroad quite thoroughly this time, his best effort yet. And if they managed to identify what was left of Kevin, the only witness who could connect him to the crime, the young man would prove to be an angry hothead heard spouting radical talk in the hobo jungle before he accidentally blew himself to kingdom come.

http://www.penguin.com.au/lookinside/spotlight.cfm?SBN=9780718154684&Page=Extract

Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby Excerpt (Chapter 1)

Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby

Excerpt

Chapter 1

     They had flown from England to Minneapolis to look at a toilet. The simple truth of this only struck Annie when they were actually inside it: apart from the graffiti on the walls, some of which made some kind of reference to the toilet's importance in musical history, it was dank, dark, smelly and entirely unremarkable. Americans were very good at making the most of their heritage, but there wasn't much even they could do here.

'Have you got the camera, Annie?' said Duncan.

'Yes. But what do you want a picture of?'

'Just, you know . . . '

'No.'

'Well . . . the toilet.'

'What, the . . . What do you call those things?'

'The urinals. Yeah.'

'Do you want to be in it?'

'Shall I pretend to have a pee?'

'If you want.'

     So Duncan stood in front of the middle of the three urinals, his hands placed convincingly in front of him, and smiled back over his shoulder at Annie.

'Got it?'

'I'm not sure the flash worked.'

'One more. Be silly to come all the way here and not get a good one.'

    This time Duncan stood just inside one of the stalls, with the door open. The light was better there, for some reason. Annie took as good a picture of a man in a toilet as one could reasonably expect. When Duncan moved, she could see that this toilet, like just about every other one she'd ever seen in a rock club, was blocked.

'Come on,' said Annie. 'He didn't even want me in here.'

     This was true. The guy behind the bar had initially suspected that they were looking for a place where they could shoot up, or perhaps have sex. Eventually, and hurtfully, the barman had clearly decided that they were capable of doing neither thing.

Duncan took one last look and shook his head. 'If toilets could talk, eh?'

Annie was glad this one couldn't. Duncan would have wanted to chat to it all night.

     Most people are unaware of Tucker Crowe's music, let alone some of the darker moments of his career, so the story of what may or may not have happened to him in the restroom of the Pits Club is probably worth repeating here. Crowe was in Minneapolis for a show and had turned up at the Pits to see a local band called the Napoleon Solos that he'd heard good things about. (Some Crowe completists, Duncan being one, own a copy of the local band's one and only album, The Napoleon Solos Sing Their Songs and Play Their Guitars). In the middle of the set, Tucker went to the toilet. Nobody knows what happened in there, but when he came out, he went straight back to his hotel and phoned his manager to cancel the rest of the tour. The next morning he began what we must now think of as his retirement. That was in June 1986. Nothing more has been heard of him since - no new recordings, no gigs, no interviews. If you love Tucker Crowe as much as Duncan and a couple of thou­sand other people in the world do, that toilet has a lot to answer for. And since, as Duncan had so rightly observed, it can't speak, Crowe fans have to speak on its behalf. Some claim that Tucker saw God, or one of His representatives, in there; others claim he had a near-­death experience after an overdose. Another school of thought has it that he caught his girlfriend having sex with his bass-player in there, although Annie found this theory a little fanciful. Could the sight of a woman screwing a musician in a toilet really have resulted in twenty-two years of silence? Perhaps it could. Perhaps it was just that Annie had never experienced passion that intense. Anyway. Whatever. All you need to know is that something profound and life-changing took place in the smallest room of a small club.

     Annie and Duncan were in the middle of a Tucker Crowe pil­grimage. They had wandered around New York, looking at various clubs and bars that had some kind of Crowe connection, although most of these sites of historic interest were now designer clothes stores, or branches of McDonald's. They had been to his childhood home in Bozeman, Montana, where, thrillingly, an old lady came out of her house to tell them that Tucker used to clean her hus­band's old Buick when he was a kid. The Crowe family home was small and pleasant and now owned by the manager of a small print­ing business, who was surprised that they had travelled all the way from England to see the outside of his house, but who didn't ask them in. From Montana they flew to Memphis, where they visited the site of the old American Sound Studio (the studio itself having been knocked down in 1990), where Tucker, drunk and grieving, recorded Juliet, his legendary break-up album, and the one Annie liked the most. Still to come: Berkeley, California, where Juliet – in real life a former model and socialite called Julie Beatty - still lived to this day. They would stand outside her house, just as they had stood outside the printer's house, until Duncan could think of no reason to carry on looking, or until Julie called the police, a fate that had befallen a couple of other Crowe fans that Duncan knew from the message boards.

     Annie didn't regret the trip. She'd been to the US a couple of times, to San Francisco and New York, but she liked the way Tucker was taking them to places she'd otherwise never have visited. Boze­man, for example, turned out to be a beautiful little mountain town, surrounded by exotic-sounding ranges she'd never heard of: the Big Belt, the Tobacco Root, the Spanish Peaks. After staring at the small and unremarkable house, they walked into town and sipped iced tea in the sunshine outside an organic cafe, while in the distance an occasional Spanish Peak, or possibly the top of a Tobacco Root, threatened to puncture the cold blue sky. She'd had worse mornings than that on holidays that had promised much more. It was a sort of random, pin-sticking tour of America, as far as she was concerned. She got sick of hearing about Tucker, of course, and talking about him and listening to him and attempting to understand the reasons behind every creative and personal decision he'd ever taken. But she got sick of hearing about him at home, too, and she'd rather get sick of him in Montana or Tennessee than in Gooleness, the small sea­side town in England where she shared a house with Duncan.

     The one place that wasn't on the itinerary was Tyrone, Pennsyl­vania, where Tucker was believed to live, although, as with all orthodoxies, there were heretics: two or three of the Crowe com­munity subscribed to the theory - interesting but preposterous, according to Duncan - that he'd been living in New Zealand since the early nineties. Tyrone hadn't even been mentioned as a possible destination when they'd been planning the trip, and Annie thought she knew why. A couple of years ago, one of the fans went out to Tyrone, hung around, eventually located what he understood to be Tucker Crowe's farm; he came back with a photograph of an alarm­ingly grizzled-looking man aiming a shotgun at him. Annie had seen the picture, many times, and she found it distressing. The man's face was disfigured by rage and fear, as if everything he'd worked for and believed in was in the process of being destroyed by a Canon Sureshot. Duncan wasn't too concerned about the rape of Crowe's privacy: the fan, Neil Ritchie, had achieved a kind of Zapruder level of fame and respect among the faithful which Annie suspected Duncan rather envied. What had perturbed him was that Tucker Crowe had called Neil Ritchie a 'fucking asshole'. Duncan couldn't have borne that.

     After the visit to the restroom at the Pits, they took advice from the concierge and ate at a Thai restaurant in the Riverfront District a couple of blocks away. Minneapolis, it turned out, was on the Mis­sissippi - who knew, apart from Americans, and just about anyone else who'd paid attention in geography lessons? - so Annie ended up ticking off something else she'd never expected to see, although here at the less romantic end it looked disappointingly like the Thames. Duncan was animated and chatty, still unable quite to believe that he'd been inside a place that had occupied so much of his imaginative energy over the years.

'Do you think it's possible to teach a whole course on the toilet?'

'With you just sitting on it, you mean? You wouldn't get it past Health and Safety.'

'I didn't mean that.'

     Sometimes Annie wished that Duncan had a keener sense of humour - a keener sense that something might be meant humorously, anyway. She knew it was too late to hope for actual jokes.

'I meant, teach a whole course on the toilet in the Pits.'

'No.'

Duncan looked at her.

'Are you teasing me?'

     'No. I'm saying that a whole course about Tucker Crowe's twenty-year-old visit to the toilet wouldn't be very interesting.'

'I'd include other things.'

'Other toilet visits in history?'

'No. Other career-defining moments.'

'Elvis had a good toilet moment. Pretty career-defining, too.'

     'Dying's different. Too unwilled. John Smithers wrote an essay for the website about that. Creative death versus actual death. It was actually pretty interesting.'

Annie nodded enthusiastically, while at the same time hoping that Duncan wouldn't print it off and put it in front of her when they got home.

'I promise that after this holiday I won't be so Tuckercentric,' he said.

'That's OK. I don't mind.'

'I've wanted to do this for a long time.'

'I know:'

'I'll have got him out of my system.'

'I hope not.'

'Really?'

'What would there be left of you, if you did?'

     She hadn't meant it cruelly. She'd been with Duncan for nearly fifteen years, and Tucker Crowe had always been part of the package, like a disability. To begin with, the condition hadn't prevented him from living a normal life: yes, he'd written a book, as yet unpublished, about Tucker, lectured on him, contributed to a radio documentary for the BBC and organized conventions, but somehow these activities had always seemed to Annie like isolated episodes, sporadic attacks.

     And then the internet came along and changed everything. When, a little later than everyone else, Duncan discovered how it all worked, he set up a website called 'Can Anybody Hear Me?', the title of a track from an obscure EP recorded after the wounding failure of Crowe's first album. Until then, the nearest fellow fan had lived in Manchester, sixty or seventy miles away, and Tucker met up with him once or twice a year; now the nearest fans lived in Dun­can's laptop, and there were hundreds of them, from all around the world, and Duncan spoke to them all the time. There seemed to be a surprising amount to talk about. The web site had a 'Latest News' section, which never failed to amuse Annie, Tucker no longer being a man who did an awful lot. ('As far as we know;' Duncan always said.) There was always something that passed for news among the faithful, though - a Crowe night on an internet radio station, a new article, a new album from a former band-member, an interview with an engineer. The bulk of the content, though, consisted of essays analysing lyrics, or discussing influences, or conjecturing, apparently inexhaustibly, about the silence. It wasn't as if Duncan didn't have other interests. He had a specialist knowledge of 1970s American independent cinema and the novels of Nathaniel West and he was developing a nice new line in HBO television series – he thought he might be ready to teach The Wire in the not-too-distant future. But these were all flirtations, by comparison. Tucker Crowe was his life-partner. If Crowe were to die - to die in real life, as it were, rather than creatively - Duncan would lead the mourning. (He'd already written the obituary. Every now and again he'd worry out loud about whether he should show it to a reputable newspaper now; or wait until it was needed.)

     If Tucker was the husband, then Annie should somehow have become the mistress, but of course that wasn't right - the word was much too exotic and implied a level of sexual activity that would horrify them both nowadays. It would have daunted them even in the early days of their relationship. Sometimes Annie felt less like a girlfriend than a school chum who'd come to visit in the holidays and stayed for the next twenty years. They had both moved to the same English seaside town at around the same time, Duncan to finish his thesis and Annie to teach, and they had been intro­duced by mutual friends who could see that, if nothing else, they could talk about books and music, go to films, travel to London occasionally to see exhibitions and gigs. Gooleness wasn't a sophis­ticated town. There was no arts cinema, there was no gay commu­nity, there wasn't even a Waterstone's (the nearest one was up the road in Hull), and they fell upon each other with relief. They started drinking together in the evenings and sleeping over at weekends, until eventually the sleepovers turned into something indistin­guishable from cohabitation. And they had stayed like that for ever, stuck in a perpetual postgraduate world where gigs and books and films mattered more to them than they did to other people of their age.

     The decision not to have children had never been taken, and nor had there been any discussion resulting in a postponement of the decision. It wasn't that kind of a sleepover. Annie could imagine herself as a mother, but Duncan was nobody's idea of a father, and anyway, neither of them would have felt comfortable applying cement to the relationship in that way. That wasn't what they were for. And now, with an irritating predictability, she was going through what everyone had told her she would go through: she was aching for a child. Her aches were brought on by all the usual mournful­happy life events: Christmas, the pregnancy of a friend, the preg­nancy of a complete stranger she saw in the street. And she wanted a child for all the usual reasons, as far as she could tell. She wanted to feel unconditional love, rather than the faint conditional affection she could scrape together for Duncan every now and again; she wanted to be held by someone who would never question the embrace, the why or the who or the how long. There was another reason, too: she needed to know that she could have one, that there was life in her. Duncan had put her to sleep, and in her sleep she'd been desexed.

     She'd get over all this, presumably; or at least one day it would become a wistful regret, rather than a sharp hunger. But this holi­day hadn't been designed to comfort her. There was an argument that you might as well change nappies as hang out in men's lavato­ries taking pictures. The amount of time they had for themselves was beginning to feel sort of . . . decadent.

     At breakfast in their cheap and nasty hotel in downtown San Fran­cisco, Annie read the Chronicle and decided she didn't want to see the hedge obscuring the front lawn of Julie Beatty's house in Berkeley. There were plenty of other things to do in the Bay Area. She wanted to see Haight-Ashbury, she wanted to buy a book at City Lights, she wanted to visit Alcatraz, she wanted to walk across the Golden Gate Bridge. There was an exhibition of postwar West Coast art on at the Museum of Modern Art just down the street. She was happy that Tucker had lured them out to California, but she didn't want to spend a morning watching Julie's neighbours decide whether they constituted a security risk.

'You're joking: said Duncan.

She laughed.

'No: she said. 'I really can think of better things to do.'

     'When we've come all this way? Why have you gone like this all of a sudden? Aren't you interested? I mean, supposing she drives out of her garage while we're outside?'

     'Then I'd feel even more stupid: she said. 'She'd look at me and think, 'I wouldn't expect any different from him. He's one of the creepy guys. But what's a woman doing there?''

'You're having me on.'

     'I'm really not, Duncan. We're in San Francisco for twenty-four-hours and I don't know when I'll be back. Going to some woman's house . . . If you had a day in London, would you spend it outside somebody's house in, I don't know, Gospel Oak?'

     'But if you've actually come to see somebody's house in Gospel Oak . . . And it's not just some woman's house, you know that. Things happened there. I'm going to stand where he stood.'

     No, it wasn't just any house. Everybody, apart from just about everybody, knew that. Julie Beatty had been living there with her first husband, who taught at Berkeley, when she met Tucker at a party thrown by Francis Ford Coppola. She left her husband that night. Very shortly afterwards, however, she thought better of it all and went home to patch things up. That was the story, anyway. Annie had never really understood how Duncan and his fellow fans could be quite so certain about tiny private tumults that took place decades ago, but they were. 'You And Your Perfect Life', the seven-­minute song that ends the album, is supposed to be about the night Tucker stood outside the family home, 'throwing stones at the win­dow / 'Til he came to the door / So where were you, Mrs Steven Balfour?' The husband wasn't called Steven Balfour, needless to say, and the choice of fictitious name had inevitably provoked endless speculation on the message boards. Duncan's theory was that he had been named after the British Prime Minister, the man who was accused by Lloyd George of turning the House of Lords into 'Mr Balfour's poodle' - Juliet, by extension, has become her husband's poodle. This interpretation is now accepted as definitive by the Tucker community, and if you look up 'You And Your Perfect Life' on Wikipedia, apparently, you'll see Duncan's name in the foot­notes, with a link to his essay. Nobody on the website had ever dared wonder aloud whether the surname had been chosen simply because it rhymed with the word' door'.

     Annie loved 'You And Your Perfect Life'. She loved its relentless anger, and the way Tucker moved from autobiography to social commentary by turning the song into a rant about how smart women got obliterated by their men. She didn't usually like howling guitar solos, but she liked the way that the howling guitar solo in 'Perfect Life' seemed just as articulate and as angry as the lyrics. And she loved the irony of it all - the way that Tucker, the man wagging his finger at Steven Balfour, had obliterated her more completely than her husband had ever managed. She would be the woman who broke Tucker's heart for ever. She felt sorry for Julie, who'd had to deal with men like Duncan throwing stones at her windows, meta­phorically and probably literally, every now and again, ever since the song was released. But she envied her, too. Who wouldn't want to make a man that passionate, that unhappy, that inspired? If you couldn't write songs yourself, then surely what Julie had done was the next best thing?

     She still didn't want to see the house, though. After breakfast she took a cab to the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge and walked back towards the city, the salt wind somehow sharpening her joy in being alone.

     Duncan felt slightly odd, going to Juliet's place without Annie. She tended to arrange their transport to wherever they were going, and she was the one who knew the way back to wherever they had come from. He would rather have devoted his mental energy to Julie, the person, and Juliet, the album; he was intending to listen to it straight through twice, the first time in its released form, the second time with the songs placed in the order that Tucker Crowe originally wanted them, according to the sound engineer in charge of the ses­sions. But that wasn't going to work out now, because he was going to need all his concentration for the BART. As far as he could tell, he had to get on at Powell Street and take the red line up to North Ber­keley. It looked easy but of course it wasn't, because once he was down on the platform he couldn't find any way of telling what was a red-line train and what wasn't, and he couldn't ask anyone. Asking somebody would make it look as though he wasn't a native, and though this wouldn't matter in Rome or Paris or even in London, it mattered here, where so many things that were important to him had happened. And because he couldn't ask, he ended up on a yel­low-line train, only he couldn't tell it was yellow until he got to Rockridge, which meant that he had to go back to the 19th St Oak­land stop and change. What was wrong with her? He knew she wasn't as devoted to Tucker Crowe as he was, but he'd thought that in recent years she'd started to get it, properly. A couple of times he'd come home to find her playing 'You And Your Perfect Life', although he'd been unable to interest her in the infamous but supe­rior Bottom Line bootleg version, when Tucker had smashed his guitar to smithereens at the end of the solo. (The sound was a little muddy, admittedly, and an annoying drunk person kept shouting 'Rock' n' roll!' into the bootlegger's microphone during the last verse, but if it was anger and pain she was after, then this was the one.) He'd tried to pretend that her decision not to come was per­fectly understandable, but the truth was, he was hurt. Hurt and, temporarily at least, lost.

     Getting to North Berkeley station felt like an achievement in itself, and he allowed himself the luxury of asking for directions to Edith Street as a reward. It was fine, not knowing the way to a resi­dential road. Even natives couldn't be expected to know everything. Except of course the moment he opened his mouth, the woman he picked on wanted to tell him that she'd spent a year in Kensington, London after she'd graduated.

     He hadn't expected the streets to be quite so long and hilly, nor the houses quite so far apart, and by the time he found the right house, he was sweaty and thirsty, while at the same time bursting for a pee. There was no doubt he'd have been clearer-headed if he'd stopped somewhere near the BART station for a drink and a visit to the restroom. But he'd been thirsty and in need of a toilet before, and had always resisted the temptation to break into a stranger's house.

     When he got to 1131 Edith Street, there was a kid sitting on the pave­ment outside, his back against a fence that looked as though it might have been erected simply to stop him from getting any further. He was in his late teens, with long, greasy hair and a wispy goatee, and when he realized that Duncan had come to look at the house, he stood up and dusted himself off. .

'Yo,' he said.

     Duncan cleared his throat. He couldn't bring himself to return the greeting, but he offered a 'Hi' instead of a 'Hello', just to show that he had an informal register.

     'They're not home,' said the kid. 'I think they might have gone to the East Coast. The Hamptons or some shit like that.'

'Oh. Right. Oh well.'

'You know them?'

     'No, no. I just . . . You know, I'm a, well, a Crowologist. I was just in the neighbourhood, so I thought, you know . . .'

'You from England?'

Duncan nodded.

     'You came all the way from England to see where Tucker Crowe threw his stones?' The kid laughed, so Duncan laughed too.

     'No, no. God no. Ha! I had some business in the city, and I thought, you know . . . What are you doing here, anyway?'

'Juliet is my favourite album of all time.'

     Duncan nodded. The teacher in him wanted to point out the non-sequitur; the fan understood completely. How could he not? He didn't get the pavement-sitting, though. Duncan's plan had been to look, imagine the trajectory of the stones, maybe take a picture and then leave. The boy, however, seemed to regard the house as if it were a place of spiritual significance, capable of promoting a pro­found inner peace.

'I've been here, like, six or seven times?' the boy said. 'It always blows me away.'

     'I know what you mean,' said Duncan, although he didn't. Perhaps it was his age, or his Englishness, but he wasn't being blown away, and he hadn't expected to be, either. It was, after all, a pleasant detached house they were standing outside, not the Taj Mahal. In any case, the need to pee was preventing any real appreciation of the moment.

'You wouldn't happen to know . . . What's your name?'

'Elliott.'

'I'm Duncan.'

'Hi, Duncan.

     'Elliott, you wouldn't happen to know if there's a Starbucks near here? Or something? I need a restroom.'

'Ha!' said the kid.

Duncan stared at him. What kind of answer was that?

     'See, I do know one right near here. But I kind of promised myself I wouldn't use it again.'

'Right,' said Duncan. 'But . . . would it matter if I did?'

'Kind of. Because I'd still be breaking the promise.'

     'Oh. Well, as I don't really understand what kind of promise you can make with regard to a public lavatory, I'm not sure I can help you with your ethical dilemma.'

The boy laughed. 'I love the way you English talk. 'Ethical dilemma'. That's great.'

     Duncan didn't disabuse him, although he did wonder how many of his students back home would even have been able to repeat the phrase accurately, let alone use it themselves.

'But you don't think you can help me.'

'Oh. Well. Maybe. How about if I told you how to find it but I didn't come with you?'

'I wasn't really expecting you to come with me, to be honest.'

'No. Right. I should explain. The nearest toilet to here is in there.'

Elliott pointed down the driveway towards Juliet's house.

'Yes, well I suppose it would be,' said Duncan. 'But that doesn't really help me.'

'Except I know where they keep their spare key.'

'You're kidding me.'

     'No. I've been inside like three times? Once to use the shower. A couple times just to see what I could see. I never steal anything big. Just, you know, paperweights and shit. Souvenirs.'

     Duncan examined the boy's face for evidence of an elaborate joke, a satirical dig at Crowologists, and decided that Elliott hadn't made a joke since he'd turned seventeen.

'You let yourself into their house when they're out?'

The boy shrugged. 'Yeah. I feel bad about it, which is why I wasn't sure about telling you.'

     Duncan suddenly noticed that on the ground there was a chalk drawing of a pair of feet, and an arrowed line pointing towards the house. Tucker's feet, presumably, and Tucker's stones. He wished he hadn't seen the drawing. It gave him less to do.

'Well, I can't do that'

'No. Sure. I understand.'

'So there's nothing else?'

     Edith Street was long and leafy, and the next cross street was long and leafy too. It was the sort of American suburb where residents had to get into their cars to buy a pint of milk.

'Not for a mile or two.'

     Duncan puffed out his cheeks, a gesture, he realized even as he was making it, intended to prepare the way for the decision he'd already made. He could have gone behind a hedge; he could have left that second, walked back to the BART station and found a cafe, walked back again if he needed to. Which he didn't, really, because he'd seen all there was to see. That was the root of the problem. If more had been . . . laid on for people like him, he wouldn't have had to create his own excitement. It wouldn't have killed her to mark the significance of the place in some way, would it? With a discreet plaque or something? He hadn't been prepared for the mundanity of Juliet's house, just as he hadn't really been prepared for the malo­dorous functionality of the men's room in Minneapolis.

'A mile or two? I'm not sure I can wait that long.'

'Up to you.'

'Where's the key?'

'There's a loose brick in the porch there. Low down.'

'And you're sure the key's still there? When did you last look?'

     'Honestly? I went in just before you came. I didn't take a single thing. But I can never believe that I'm standing in Juliet's house, you know? Fucking Juliet, man!'

     Duncan knew that he and Elliott weren't the same. Elliott had surely never written about Crowe - or, if he had, the work would almost certainly have been unpublishable. Duncan also doubted whether Elliott had the emotional maturity to appreciate the 'breathtaking accomplishment of Juliet (which, as far as Duncan was concerned, was a darker, deeper, more fully realized collection of songs than the overrated Blood On The Tracks)' and nor would he have been able to cite its influences: Dylan and Leonard Cohen, of course, but also Dylan Thomas, Johnny Cash, Gram Parsons, Shel­ley, the Book of Job, Camus, Pinter, Beckett and early Dolly Parton. But people who didn't understand all this might look at them and decide, erroneously, that they were similar in some way. Both of them had the same need to stand in fucking Juliet's house, for example. Duncan followed Elliott down the short driveway to the house and watched as the boy groped for the key and opened the door.

***

     The house was dark, - all the blinds were down - and smelled of incense, or maybe some kind of exotic pot-pourri. Duncan couldn't have lived with it, but presumably Julie Beatty and her family weren't sick with nerves all the time when they were in residence, the way Duncan was feeling now. The smell sharpened his fear and made him wonder whether he might throw up.

     He'd made an enormous mistake, but there was no undoing it. He was inside, so even if he didn't use the toilet, he'd still commit­ted the crime. Idiot. And idiot boy, too, for persuading him that this was a good idea.

     'So there's a small toilet down here, and it's got some cool stuff on the walls. Cartoons and shit. But the bathroom upstairs, you see her make-up and towels and everything. It's spooky. I mean, not spooky to her, probably. But spooky if you only kind of half-believe she even existed.'

     Duncan understood the appeal of seeing Julie Beatty's make-up absolutely, and his understanding added to his sense of self-loathing.

     'Yes, well I haven't got time to mess around,' said Duncan, hop­ing that Elliott wouldn't point out the obvious holes in the asser­tion. 'Just point me towards the downstairs one.'

     They were in a large hallway with several doors leading off it. Elliott nodded at one of them, and Duncan marched towards it briskly, an Englishman with pressing West Coast business appointments who'd trowelled some time out of his hectic schedule to stand on a pave­ment, and then break into someone's house for the hell of it.

     He made the pee as splashy as possible, just to prove to Elliott that the need was genuine. He was disappointed by the promised artwork, however. There were a couple of cartoons, one of Julie and one of a middle-aged man who still looked something like the old photos Duncan had seen of her husband, but they looked like they'd been done by one of those artists who hang out at tourist traps, and in any case they were both post-Tucker, which meant that they could have been pictures of any American middle-class couple. He was washing his hands in the tiny sink when Elliott shouted through the door, 'Oh, and there's the drawing. That's still up in their dining room.'

'What drawing?'

'The drawing that Tucker did of her, back in the day'

Duncan opened the door and stared at him.

'What do you mean?'

'You know Tucker's an artist, right?'

     'No: And then, because this made him sound like an amateur, 'Well, yes. Of course. But I didn't know . . : He didn't know what he didn't know, but Elliott didn't notice.

'Yeah,' said Elliott. 'In here:

     The dining room was at the back of the house, with French windows leading out on to a terrace, presumably, or a lawn - there were curtains drawn over them. The drawing was hung over the fireplace, and it was big, maybe four feet by three, a head-and-shoulders por­trait of Julie in profile, half-squinting through her cigarette smoke at something in the middle distance. She looked, in fact, as if she were studying another work of art. It was a beautiful portrait, reverential and romantic, but not idealized - it was too sad, for a start. It some­how seemed to suggest the impending end of his relationship with the sitter, although of course Duncan might have been imagining that. He might have been imagining the meaning, he might have been imagining the power and charm. Indeed, he could have been imagining the drawing itself.

     Duncan moved in closer. There was a signature in the bottom left-hand corner, and that was thrilling enough to require separate examination and contemplation. In a quarter of a century of fandom, he'd never seen Tucker's handwriting. And while he was star­ing at the signature, he realized something else: that he hadn't been able to respond for the first time to a piece of work by Crowe since 1986. So he stopped looking at the signature and stepped back to look at the picture again.

     'You should really see it in the daylight,' said Elliott. He drew back the curtains on the French windows, and almost immediately they found themselves staring at a gardener mowing the lawn. He saw them and started shouting and gesticulating, and before Dun­can knew it, he was out the front door and halfway up the road, running and sweating, his legs shaking with nerves, his heart pounding so hard he thought he might not make it to the end of the street and possible safety.

     It wasn't until the doors on the BART closed behind him that he felt safe. He'd lost Elliott almost immediately - he'd run out of that house as fast as he could, but the boy was faster, and almost imme­diately out of sight. And he never wanted to see him again anyway It had been pretty much all his fault, there was no doubt about that; he'd provided both the temptation and the means to break in. Dun­can had been stupid, yes, but his powers of reasoning had been scrambled by his bladder, and . . . Elliott had corrupted him, was the truth of it. Scholars like him were always going to be vulnerable to the excesses of obsessives, because, yes, they shared a tiny strand of the same DNA. His heart-rate began to slow. He was calming him­self down with the familiar stories he always told himself when doubt crept in.

     When the train stopped at the next station, however, a Latino who looked a little like the gardener in the back garden got into Duncan's carriage, and his stomach shot towards his knees while his heart leaped halfway up his windpipe, and no amount of self-justification could put his internal organs back where they belonged.

     What really frightened him was how spectacularly his transgression had paid off. All these years he'd done nothing more than read and listen and think, and though he'd been stimulated by these activities, what had he uncovered, really? And yet by behaving like a teenage hooligan with a screw loose, he had made a major break­through. He was the only Crowologist in the world (Elliott was nobody's idea of a Crowologist) who knew about that picture, and he could never tell anyone about it, unless he wished to own up to being mentally unbalanced. Every other year spent on his chosen subject had been barren compared to the last couple of hours. But that couldn't be the way forward, surely? He didn't want to be the kind of man who plunged his arms into dustbins in the hope of finding a letter, or a piece of bacon rind that Crowe might have chewed. By the time he got back to the hotel, he had convinced himself he was finished with Tucker Crowe.

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