uss later."

"... feel...."

"I said ... out of here...."

The voices became a meaningless liquid torrent cascading into a black
pit.

* * * * *

Now Temple sat with a water-glass a third full of Canadian in his
hand, every once in a while reaching up gingerly to explore the
bruised swelling on his head, the blood-matted hair which covered it.
To be a cuckold was one thing, but to be the naive, political pawn
sort of cuckold who is not a cuckold at all, he told himself, is far
worse. To live with his woman, eat the meals she cooked for him, talk
to her, think she understood him, sympathize with him, to make love to
her with passion while she responds with play-acting for a hundred
thousand dollar salary was suddenly the most emasculating thing in the
world for Temple. He had not thought to ask how long it had been going
on. Better, perhaps, if he never knew. And somewhere lost in the maze
of his thoughts was the grimmest, bleakest reality of them all: Lucy
was dead. Lucy--dead. But where did Lucy leave off, where did Sophia
begin? Was Lucy dead that night they returned more than a little drunk
from the Chamber's party, that night they danced in the living room
until dawn obscured the stars and he carried Lucy upstairs. Lucy or
Sophia? And the day they motored to the lake, their secret lake,
hardly more than a dammed, widened stream and dreamed of the things
they could do when the Cold War ended? Lucy--or Sophia? Had he ever
noticed a difference in the way Lucy-Sophia cooked, in the way she
spoke, the way she let him make love to her? He thought himself into a
man-sized headache and found no answers. This way at least the loss of
his wife was not as traumatic as it might have been. He knew not when
she died or how and, in fact, Lucy-Sophia seemed so much like the real
thing that he did not know where he could stop loving and start
hating.

And the girl, the Russian girl, had saved his life. Why? He couldn't
answer that one either, unless if it were as Charles suggested: Sophia
had studied Lucy so carefully, had learned her likes and dislikes, her
wants and desires, had memorized and practised every quirk of her
character to such an extent that Sophia was Lucy in essence.

Which, Temple thought, would make it all the harder to seek out Sophia
and kill her.

That was the answer, the only answer. Temple felt a dull ache where
his heart should have been, a pressure, a pounding, an un