The Last Precinct

"What if France wants to extradite him?" I challenge Righter. "What if New York allows it?"

"We could cite what ifs until the moon turns blue," he says.

I stare at him with open disdain.

"Don't take this personally, Kay." Righter gives me that pi-ous, sad look again. "Don't turn this into your personal war. We just want the bastard out of commission. Doesn't matter who accomplishes that."

I get up from my chair. "Well, it does matter. It sure as hell does," I tell him. "You're a coward, Buford." I turn my back on him and walk out of the room.

Minutes later, from behind the shut door in my wing of the house, I hear A

"Come in," I say in an unsteady voice.

She stands in the doorway looking at me. I feel like a child, powerless, hopeless, foolish. "I insulted Righter," I tell her. "Doesn't matter if what I said was true. I called him a coward."

"He thinks you are unstable right now," she replies. "He is concerned. He is also ein Ma

"A

"Why are we in here when we can be enjoying the fire?" she says.

She intends to talk to me. "Okay," I concede, "you win."

Chapter 5

I HAVE NEVER BEEN ANNA'S PATIENT. FOR THAT MAT-

ter, I have never had psychotherapy of any sort, which is not to say I have never needed it. Certainly I have. I don't know anybody who can't benefit from good counsel. It is simply that I am so private and don't trust people easily and for good reason. There is no such thing as absolute discretion. I am a doctor. I know other doctors. Doctors talk to each other and to their family and friends. They tell secrets that they swear upon Hippocrates they will never utter to another soul. A

"You will not get through this if you remain silent." She is brutally direct.

Grief rises in my throat and I try to swallow it.

"You are traumatized," A

I can't hide my emotions this time. Tears slide down my face and drop in my lap like blood.

"I have always told my patients when they do not face their problems, they are headed for a day of reckoning." A

I Wearily look down at my lap. My slacks are speckled with tears and I make the inane co

"Get away from what?" This has snagged A

"What I do. Everything reminds me of something from my work. I don't talk about it."

"I want you to talk about it now," she tells me.

"It's foolish."

She waits, the patient fisherman, knowing I am nudging the hook. Then I take it. I give A

"You feel lonely," A

I do not answer her but continue my analogies, describing when Benton and I traveled by train across France for several weeks, ending in Bordeaux, and the rooftops got redder toward the south. The first touch of spring shimmered an unreal green on trees, and veins of water and the bigger arteries aspired toward the sea, just as all blood vessels in the body begin and end at the heart. "I'm constantly struck by the symmetry in nature, the way creeks and tributaries from the air look like the circulatory system, and rocks remind me of old scattered bones," I say. "And the brain starts out smooth and becomes convoluted and crevassed with time, much as mountains develop distinction over thousands of years. We are subjected to the same laws of physics. Yet we aren't. The brain, for example, doesn't look like what it does. On gross examination, it's about as exciting as a mushroom."

A

"No." She prods me. "Do not think. Feel it."

I ponder.

"No. Feel it, Kay. Feel it." She touches her hand over her heart.

"I have to think. I've gotten where I am in life by thinking," I reply defensively, snapping to, coming out of uncommon space I have just been in. I am back in her living room now and understand everything that has happened to me.

"You have gotten where you are in life by knowing," she says. "And knowing is perceiving. Thinking is how we process what we perceive, and thinking often masks the truth. Why did you not wish to share your more poetic side with Benton?"

"Because I don't really acknowledge that side. It's a useless side. To compare the brain to a mushroom in court would get you nowhere, for example," I reply.

"Ah." A

I stop rocking and reposition my broken arm, resting the cast in my lap. I turn away from A