That feeling lasted until I had finished combing my hair. The light in my bathroom looked cold and dull. The plain old day bore down on me. Problem is, when you’ve stayed at the Ritz, you don’t want to go back to the Holiday Inn.

  I had an hour to spare. Courts never start early. I had set the time aside to review some issues. You can’t expect lawyers to spot everything. A man has to take responsibility. So I went to my study. There was a pipe on the desk. It was mostly blackened, but there were some unburned crumbs.

  I opened the first file. They had given me copies of everything, of course. All the discovery materials. All the pleadings and the depositions and the witnesses. I was familiar with the facts, naturally. And objectively, they didn’t look good. Any blow-dried TV analyst would sit there and say, Things don’t look good here for the accused. But there were possibilities. Somewhere. There had to be. How many things go exactly to plan?

  The unburned crumbs were fat and round. There was a lighter in the drawer. I knew that. A yellow plastic thing from a gas station. I couldn’t concentrate. Not properly. Not in the way I needed to. I needed that special elevated state I knew so well. And it was within easy reach.

  Irresponsible, to be high at my first drug trial.

  Irresponsible, to prepare while I was feeling less than my best.

  Right?

  I held the crumbs in with my pinkie fingernail and knocked some ash out around it. I thumbed the lighter. The smoke tasted dry and stale. I held it in, and waited, and waited, and then the buzz was there. Just microscopically. I felt the tiny thrills, in my chest first, near my lungs. I felt each cell in my body flutter and swell. I felt the light brighten and I felt my head clear.

  Unburned crumbs. Nothing should be wasted. That would be criminal.

  The blow-dried analysts would say the weakness in the prosecution’s case was the lab report on the substances seized. But weakness was a relative word. They would be expecting a conviction.

  They would say the weakness in the defense’s case was all of it.

  No point in reading more.

  It was a railroad, straight and true.

  Nothing to do for the balance of the morning hour.

  I put the pipe back on the desk. There were paper clips in a drawer. Behind me on a shelf was a china jar marked Stash. My brother had bought it for me. Irony, I suppose. In it was a baggie full of Long Island grass. Grown from seeds out of Amsterdam, in an abandoned potato field close enough to a bunch of Hamptons mansions to deter police helicopters. Rich guys don’t like noise, unless they’re making it.

  I took a paper clip from the drawer and unbent it and used it to clean the bowl. Just housekeeping at that point. Like loading the dishwasher. You have to keep on top of the small tasks. I made a tiny conical heap of ash and carbon on a tissue, and then I balled up the tissue and dropped it in the trash basket. I blew through the pipe, hard, like a Pygmy warrior in the jungle. Final powdered fragments came out, and floated, and settled.

  Clean.

  Ready to go.

  For later, of course. Because right then those old unburned crumbs were doing their job. I was an inch off the ground, feeling pretty good. For the moment. In an hour I would be sliding back to earth. Good timing. I would be clear of eye and straight of back, ready for whatever the day threw at me.

  But it was going to be a long day. No doubt about that. A long, hard, pressured, unaided, uncompensated day. And there was nothing I could do about it. Not even I was dumb enough to show up at a possession trial with a baggie in my pocket. Not that there was anywhere to smoke anymore. Not in a public facility. All part of the collapse of society. No goodwill, no convenience. No joy.

  I swiveled my chair and scooted toward the shelf with the jar. Just for a look. Like a promise to myself that the Ritz would be waiting for me after the day in the Holiday Inn. I took off the lid and pulled out the baggie and shook it uncrumpled. Dull green, shading brown, dry and slightly crisp. Ready for instantaneous combustion. A harsher taste that way, in my experience, but faster delivery. And time was going to count.

  I decided to load the pipe there and then. So it would be ready for later. No delay. In the door, spark the lighter, relief. Timing was everything. I crumbled the bud and packed the bowl and tamped it down. I put it on the desk and licked my fingers.

  Timing was everything. Granted, I shouldn’t be high in court. Understood. Although how would people tell? I wasn’t going to have much of a role. Not on the first day, anyway. They would all look at me from time to time, but that was all. But it was better to play it safe, agreed. But it was the gap I was worried about. The unburned crumbs were going to give it up long before I arrived downtown. Which was inefficient. Who wants twenty more minutes of misery than strictly necessary?

  I picked up the lighter. No one in the world knows more than I do about how a good bud burns. The flame licks over the top layer, and it browns and blackens, and you breathe right in and hold, hold, hold, and the bud goes out again, and you hold some more, and you breathe out, and the hit is there. And you’ve still got ninety percent left in the bowl, untouched, just lightly seasoned. Maybe ninety-five percent. Hardly like smoking at all. Just one pass with the lighter. Merely a gesture.

  And without that gesture, twenty more minutes of misery than strictly necessary.

  What’s a man supposed to do?

  I sparked the lighter. I made the pass. I held the smoke deep inside, harsh and hot and comforting.

  My wife came in.

  “Jesus,” she said. “Today of all days?”

  So it was her fault, really. I breathed out too soon. I didn’t get full value. I said, “No big deal.”

  “You’ re an addict.”

  “It’s not addictive.”

  “Emotionally,” she said. “Psychologically.”

  Which was a woman thing, I supposed. A man has a stone in his shoe, he takes it out, right? Who walks around all day with a stone in his shoe? I said, “Nothing’s going to happen for an hour or so.”

  She said, “You can’t afford to fall asleep. You can’t afford to look all spacey. You understand that, right? Please tell me you understand that.”

  “It was nothing,” I said.

  “There will be consequences,” she said. “We’re doing well right now. We can’t afford to lose it all.”

  “I agree, we’re doing well. We’ve always done well. So don’t worry.”

  “Today of all days,” she said again.

  “It was nothing,” I said again. I held out the pipe. “Take a look.”

  She took a look. Exactly as predicted. The top layer a little burned, the rest untouched but lightly seasoned. Ninety-five percent still there. A breath of fresh air. Hardly like smoking at all.

  She said, “No more, okay?”

  Which I absolutely would have adhered to, except she had made me waste the first precious moment. And I wanted to time it right. That was all. No more and no less. I wanted to be ready when the fat guy in the uniform called out, All rise! But not before. No point in being ready before. No point at all.

  My wife spent a hard minute looking at me, and then she left the room again. The car service was due in about twenty minutes. The ride downtown would take another twenty. Plus another twenty milling around before we all got down to business. Total of an hour. The aborted breath would have seen me through. I was sure of that. So one more would replace it. Maybe a slightly smaller version, to account for the brief passage of time. Or maybe a slightly larger version, to compensate for the brief upset. I had been knocked off my stride. Ritual is important, and interference can be disproportionately destructive.

  I sparked up again. The yellow lighter. A yellow flame, hot and pure and steady. Problem is, the second pass burns better. As if those lower seasoned layers are ready and waiting. They know their fate, and they’re instantly ready to cooperate. Smoke came up in a cloud, and I had to breathe in hard to capture all of it. And second time around the bud doesn’t extinguish quite so fast. It keeps on smoldering, so a second breath is necessary. Waste not, want not.

  Then a third breath.

  By which time I knew I was right. I was getting through the morning just fine. I had saved the day. No danger of getting sleepy. I wasn’t going to look spacey. I was bright, alert, buzzing, seeing things for what they were, open to everything, magical.

  I took a fourth breath, which involved the lighter again. The smoke was gray and thick and instantly satisfying. I could feel the roots of my hair growing. The follicles were thrashing with microscopic activity. I could hear my neighbors getting ready for work. Stark and absolute clarity everywhere. My spine felt like steel, warm and straight and unbending, with brain commands rushing up and down its mysterious tubular interior, fast, precise, logical, targeted.

  I was functioning.

  Functioning just fine.

  A fourth hit, and a fifth. There was a lot of weed in the bowl. I had packed it pretty tight. A homecoming treat, remember? That had been the intention. Not really a wake-and-bake. But it was there.

  So I smoked it.

  I felt good in the car. How could I not? I was ready to beat the world. And capable of it. The traffic seemed to get out of the way, and all the lights were green. Whatever it takes, baby. A guy should always max himself up to the peak of his capabilities. He shortchanges himself any other way. He owes himself and the world his best face, and how he gets it is his own business.

  They took me in through a private door, because the public lobby was a zoo. My heels tapped on the tile, fast and rhythmic and authoritative. I was standing straight and my shoulders were back. They made me wait in a room. I could hear the crowd through the door. A low, tense buzz. They were all waiting for my entrance. Hundreds of eyes, waiting to move my way.

  “Time,” someone said.

  I pushed open the door into the well of the court. I saw the lawyers, and the spectators, and the jury pool. I saw the defendant at his table. The fat guy in the uniform called out, “All rise!”

  WET WITH RAIN

  Great Victoria Street

  Births and deaths are in the public record. Census returns and rent rolls and old mortgages are searchable. As are citizenship applications from all the other English-speaking countries. There are all kinds of ancestry sites on the web. These were the factors in our favor.

  Against us was a historical truth. The street had been built in the 1960s. Fifty years ago, more or less. Within living memory. Most of the original residents had died off, but they had families, who must have visited, and who might remember. Children and grandchildren, recipients of lore and legend, and therefore possibly a problem.

  But overall we counted ourselves lucky. The first owners of the house in question were long dead and had left no children. The husband had surviving siblings, but they had all gone to either Australia or Canada. The wife had a living sister, still in the neighborhood, but she was over eighty years old, and considered unreliable.

  Since the original pair, the house had had five owners, most of them in the later years. We felt we had enough distance. So we went with the third variant of the second plan. Hairl Carter came with me. Hairl Carter II, technically. His father had the same name. From southeastern Missouri. His father’s mother had wanted to name her firstborn Harold, but she had no more than a third-grade education and couldn’t spell except phonetically. So Harold it was, phonetically. The old lady never knew it was weird. We all called her grandson Harry, which might not have pleased her.

  Harry did the paperwork, which was easy enough, because we made it all Xeroxes of Xeroxes, which hides a lot of sins. I opened an account at a Washington, DC, bank, in the name of the society, and I put half a million dollars into it, and we got credit cards and a checkbook. Then we rehearsed. We prepped it, like a political debate. The same conversation, over and over again, down all the possible highways and byways. We identified weak spots, though we had no choice but to barrel through. We figured audacity would stop them thinking straight.

  We flew first to London, then to Dublin in the south, and then we made the connection to Belfast on tickets that cost less than cups of coffee back home. We took a cab to the Europa Hotel, which is where we figured people like us would stay. We arranged a car with the concierge. Then we laid up and slept. We figured midmorning the next day should be zero hour.

  The car was a crisp Mercedes and the driver showed no real reluctance about the address—which was second from the end of a short line of ticky-tacky row houses, bland and cheaply built, with big areas of peeling white weatherboard, which must have saved money on bricks. The roof tiles were concrete and had gone mossy. In the distance the hills were like velvet, impossibly green, but all around us the built environment was hard. There was a fine cold drizzle in the air, and the street and the sidewalk were both shiny gray.

  The car waited at the curb and we opened a broken gate and walked up a short path through the front yard. Carter rang the bell and the door opened immediately. The Mercedes had not gone unnoticed. A woman looked out at us. She was solidly built, with a pale, meaty face. “Who are you?”

  I said, “We’re from America.”

  “America?”

  “We came all the way to see you.”

  “Why?”

  “Mrs. Healy, is it?” I asked, even though I knew it was. I knew all about her. I knew where she was born, how old she was, and how much her husband made. Which wasn’t much. They were a month behind on practically everything. Which I hoped was going to help.

  “Yes, I’m Mrs. Healy,” the woman said.

  “My name is John Pacino, and my colleague here is Harry Carter.”

  “Good morning to you both.”

  “You live in a very interesting house, Mrs. Healy.”

  She looked blank, and then craned her neck out the door and stared up at her front wall. “Do I?”

  “Interesting to us, anyway.”

  “Why?”

  “Can we tell you all about it?”

  She said, “Would you like a wee cup of tea?”

  “That would be lovely.”

  So we trooped inside, first Carter, then me, feeling a kind of preliminary satisfaction, as if our leadoff hitter had gotten on base. Nothing guaranteed, but so far so good. The air inside smelled of daily life and closed windows. A skilled analyst could have listed the ingredients from their last eight meals. All of which had been either boiled or fried, I guessed.

  It wasn’t the kind of household where guests get deposited in the parlor to wait. We followed the woman to the kitchen, which had drying laundry suspended on a rack. She filled a kettle and lit the stove. She said, “Tell me what’s interesting about my house.”

  Carter said, “There’s a writer we admire very much, name of Edmund Wall.”

  “Here?”

  “In America.”

  “A writer?”

  “A novelist. A very fine one.”

  “I never heard of him. But then, I don’t read much.”

  “Here,” Carter said, and he took the copies from his pocket and smoothed them on the counter. They were faked to look like Wikipedia pages. Which is trickier than people think. (Wikipedia prints different than it looks on the computer screen.)

  Mrs. Healy asked, “Is he famous?”

  “Not exactly,” I said. “Writers don’t really get famous. But he’s very well respected. Among people who like his sort of thing. There’s an appreciation society. That’s why we’re here. I’m the chairman and Mr. Carter is the general secretary.”

  Mrs. Healy stiffened a little, as if she thought we were trying to sell her something. “I’m sorry, but I don’t want to join. I don’t know him.”

  I said, “That’s not the proposition we have for you.”

  “Then what is?”

  “Before you, the Robinsons lived here, am I right?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “And before them, the Donnellys, and before them, the McLaughlins.”

  The woman nodded. “They all got cancer. One after the other. People started to say this was an unlucky house.”

  I looked concerned. “That didn’t bother you? When you bought it?”

  “My faith has no room for superstition.”

  Which was a circularity fit to make a person’s head explode. It struck me mute. Carter said, “And before the McLaughlins were the McCanns, and way back at the beginning were the McKennas.”

  “Before my time,” the woman said, uninterested, and I felt the runner on first steal second. Scoring position.

  I said, “Edmund Wall was born in this house.”

  “Who?”

  “Edmund Wall. The novelist. In America.”

  “No one named Wall ever lived here.”

  “His mother was a good friend of Mrs. McKenna. Right back at the beginning. She came to visit from America. She thought she had another month, but the baby came early.”

  “When?”

  “The 1960s.”

  “In this house?”

  “Upstairs in the bedroom. No time to get to the hospital.”

  “A baby?”

  “The future Edmund Wall.”

  “I never heard about it. Mrs. McKenna has a sister. She never talks about it.”

  Which felt like the runner getting checked back. I said, “You know Mrs. McKenna’s sister?”

  “We have a wee chat from time to time. Sometimes I see her in the hairdressers.”

  “It was fifty years ago. How’s her memory?”

  “I should think a person would remember that kind of thing.”

  Carter said, “Maybe it was hushed up. It’s possible Edmund’s mother wasn’t married.”

  Mrs. Healy went pale. Impropriety. Scandal. In her house. Worse than cancer. “Why are you telling me this?”