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  "We'd better make it the park," Melda said. "I'm hungry. And momma always said a girl should eat first, even when she was providing the eats." Chesney made a different kind of groan, and she said, "Don't worry, sweetie. Food gives me energy."

  She lived on the far side of the long river-following park. Carrying the picnic basket, it would take her a while to walk to their favorite spot – actually, it was Chesney's pick – near the amphitheater and the basketball courts. That meant he had some time. He used it to summon his assistant.

  The fiend appeared the moment the young man spoke its name, bringing with it a slight whiff of sulfur. As usual, it arrived hovering in the air, its saucer-sized eyes in a weasel's face at the same level as Chesney's, which meant that Xaphan's patent-leather shoes, wrapped in old-fashioned spats, were about three feet above the carpet. Between the fanged head and the foppish footwear was a pin-striped, wide-lapeled, double-breasted suit, of a kind that had been fashionable among the denizens of Chicago speakeasies, back when twenty-three-skidoo was on every hepster's lips.

  "Hiya, boss," said the demon around a thick Havana Churchill that protruded from between two huge curved canines that would have been a sabertooth's pride. The fiend removed the cigar only long enough to blow a complicated figure of smoke into the apartment's air and to lift the glass in its other hand to its thin, black weasel lips. Xaphan drank off a finger of tawny overproof rum, issued a breathy sigh of satiation, and put the cigar back where it had been, breathily pumping the glowing end to a brighter glow. When the Churchill was drawing to its satisfaction, Chesney's assistant said, "Whatta ya say, whatta ya know?"

  "I'm going out to the park for a picnic with Melda," the young man said, "then we'll probably come back here." He ignored the demon's suggestive eyebrow motions and low-voiced "Hubba hubba!" – he'd found that responding to Xaphan's prurience only encouraged more of the same. "But tonight," Chesney went on, "I want to go out and do some crimefighting."

  "Okay," said his assistant, in a tone that implied it was waiting to hear the details.

  But Chesney didn't have any details. "So I need to know what's going down" – he'd heard police officers, or at least actors pretending to be cops, talk that way on TV – "in the mean streets. What can we hit tonight?"

  Xaphan's eyes looked left, then right. It pulled the cigar from its lips and examined the glowing coal for a moment, then said, "I gotta tell ya, not much."

  "What do you mean?"

  Xaphan put the cigar back, shot the linked French cuffs of its silk shirt and gave a kind of hitch of its padded shoulders that always reminded Chesney of Jimmy Cagney in the old black-and-white, crime-does-not-pay films. "I mean," the demon said, "not much. These days, crime…" – it gestured with the hand that held the glass of rum, spilling a few drops – "there ain't so much of it around, see?"

  "Come on," said Chesney, "it's a big city. I've seen the figures." As an actuary, the young man was intimately familiar with crime statistics.

  "Things change," Xaphan said, tilting the glass and draining the last of the rum.

  "What things?"

  "Well, mainly," said his assistant, "you."

  "I haven't changed," said Chesney. "I don't change." Anyone who knew him could have attested to the truth of the remark – although not too many people, apart from his mother and now Melda McCann, could have been said to have really known Chesney Arnstruther. "Does not play well with others," had been a frequent notation on his grade-school report cards, words that could have served as both the young man's life motto and the epitaph carved into his tombstone. The only other phrase that could have given those six words competition as a succinct summation of Chesney's life was the one he had just voiced to his demonic helper: "I don't change."

  "Yeah," said the fiend, "but you've changed the game. At least around this here burgh."

  "You mean crime – major crime – has gone down since I started being The Actionary?"

  "You got it. The serious outfits, they gone and pulled right back. No dope, no heists, no chop shop action. Nobody would look at a bank job even if they had the keys to the front door and the combination of the vault."

  "Hmm," said Chesney. "So what does that leave?"

  Xaphan shrugged again and puffed smoke around the cigar clamped in its jaw. "Little everyday jobs, muggings, burglaries, guys cheatin on their taxes, playin' poker, hangin around in cathouses, kids boostin stuff outta the stores, guys spittin on sidewalks." It drew deeply on the Churchill and blew another complicated smoke-shape. "You wanna tackle some of that?"

  "We've been doing that kind of thing the past couple of weeks. That's not what I became a crimefighter for."

  "Hey," said the demon, "whatta ya gonna do?"

  Chesney had no quick answer. He couldn't see a pool of light to work within. "Wait a minute," he said after a moment, "I play poker."

  "Not for the stakes I'm talkin about," said the demon. "Real moolah. Besides, you never played in the back room of no high-class house of ill repute. A house that takes a percentage of every pot – that's what makes it illegal."

  "Huh," said Chesney, still thinking. "Is there a game like that going on tonight?"

  "It so happens, there is."

  "Are the players hoodlums?"

  Xaphan looked like a weasel weighing things up. "These ain't your ordinary street goniffs," it said, "but ain't one of them as hasn't done a shady deal or taken a kickback."

  "Racketeers!"

  "It wouldn't be stretchin' the point too far."

  "What time does the game start?"

  "Nine, ten," said Xaphan. "They eat, have a few drinks, maybe talk some bizness, go upstairs with the girls. Then they settle in for an all-nighter."

  "Where is this place? What's it called?"

  "It ain't got a name. Too exclusive. Mostly they call it 'Marie's place.' Or just 'the place,' seein' as how Marie's been dead maybe forty years."

  It was sounding good to Chesney. He could see it in his mind's eye: chandeliers and swag lamps, champagne in free-standing ice buckets, velvet-covered plush furniture, cigar smoke, women in frilly corsets. He realized he was back in a pool of light. "Come at midnight," he told his assistant. "We'll let them get right into it. Then… wham!"

  "Wham it is, boss." Xaphan looked into its glass and seemed surprised to find it empty. "Ya need me for anything right this minute?"

  "No, I've got to get to the park and meet Melda." Chesney checked his watch, found he had to hurry.

  "You wanna take the short cut?"

  Technically, according to the contract Billy Lee Hardacre had negotiated with Satan on behalf of the young man, the demon's powers were only to be invoked in Chesney's role as the crimefighting Actionary. But Chesney and his assistant had come to a private arrangement: Xaphan performed some extra duties in exchange for being able to use their way station in the outer circle of Hell, which was well stocked with overproof rum and fine Cuban cigars – the demon had developed a taste for the latter during his Capone years, and for the former when he was attached to the scourge of the Spanish Main.

  "Let's," said Chesney. Instantly he was no longer in his apartment, but in a warm, comfortable and spacious room whose thick stone walls, oak-beamed ceiling and plush carpeting kept out the howl of the ice-charged winds that blew foul, stinking air in a ceaseless gale through Hell's outermost region. Xaphan used the stopover to recharge his tumbler of rum and immediately drain it. Then the room was gone and Chesney was in the park, near the bench where he was to meet his girlfriend.

  "Girlfriend," he whispered to himself. Saying it was almost as good as being called 'sweetie.'

  "She's comin," said the demon. "I'm just gonna fade you in."

  To avoid startling the citizenry, they had arrived invisible, as Xaphan would remain. The demon looked around, saw a teenager on the very edge of the riverbank. The kid was trying to impress his girl by holding out a fragment of bread and encouraging a floating Canada goose to take it from his hand. The fiend made a slight mo
tion of its own stubby fingers, and now the goose lunged upward, caught both the bread and the youth's fingertips in its beak and turned its neck into an ess-shape as it yanked down hard. The teenager, pulled toward the water, tried to keep his footing, knees bent, free arm windmilling. His girl grabbed the flailing limb, but she was too late to pull him back. Instead, he grabbed her wrist and they both toppled into the shallows, where the goose beat its wings at them and honked in outrage.

  Every eye in the park turned toward the disturbance. "Okay," said the demon, "fadin' you in now."

  Chesney became visible as he sat down on the bench. Nobody noticed. "See you at midnight," he said, but his assistant was already just a whiff of sulfur dissipating in the late spring air. He relaxed against the horizontal wooden slats of the bench's backrest. He looked in the direction that Melda would be coming from, and there she was: just passing the basketball court, where the usual gang of young toughs were passing the ball back and forth and offering salacious invitations to the women, usually in pairs, who walked or jogged by.

  One of the teenagers said something to Melda – or tried to; he got no farther than "Hey, chica–" before one of the others clamped a hand over the speaker's mouth and spoke rapidly and quietly into his ear. The silenced youth's eyes widened, his friend released him, and they all turned their attention to dribbling and passing the basketball.

  Chesney had watched the business. He put it into the context of what Xaphan had told him about crime rates falling. The same gang of thugs had surrounded Melda McCann as she'd walked home from work three weeks before, their intent the theft of her purse. Instead, from out of the darkness, the Actionary had appeared amid a clap of thunder and a flash as bright as lightning to bang heads together and send the muggers fleeing.

  It would have been a perfect moment, if Melda hadn't taken him for yet another threat and pepper-sprayed his eyes and nose. But, fortunately, they had gotten past that, and past the much worse things that had ensued when they'd all gone to Hell, and now Melda McCann was one of only three people – Chesney's mother and the Reverend Billy Lee were the others – who knew that he was the crimefighting Actionary.

  She arrived carrying a large plastic cooler hung from a strap over her shoulder. Chesney knew that she was slight of stature but surprisingly strong. He stood and took the cooler from her, set it on the bench, then craned his neck down to kiss her upturned lips.

  "Hi, sweetie," she said.

  "Hi, yourself."

  "You still upset about the rev?"

  "Not now," he said. He drew her down to the bench and they kissed again, a long one that resulted in Chesney having to rearrange the front of his slacks.

  Melda noticed and rolled her eyes. "Eat first," she said. She pulled the cooler closer, opened its lid and began taking out small plastic containers. Then she scooted sideways on the bench to make room between them for the food.

  Chesney looked around the park, wanting to see somebody noticing him and his girl and how cool they were with each other. But the only people looking their way were the gangstas at the basketball court. One of them, the leader, seeing he had caught Chesney's gaze, showed him an expression of exaggerated surprise, as if the actuary had just pulled off some impressive stunt.

  "Hey, 'mano!" the young tough called. He wore a gold, sleeveless shirt and red bandana tied in a torc around his forehead. A chain-link tattoo circled his throat. "You got some huevos, hookin' up with that chica." Chesney ignored the remark, but the thug continued: "You know whose girl that is?"

  "Ignore him," said Melda, continuing to unpack the cooler.

  But Chesney wasn't going to let the day be spoiled. "Yeah," he called back. "Mine."

  The gangsta showed him mock fear, his hands shaking in front of his chest. The others in the gang made hoo and whoa sounds and laughed.

  Melda handed Chesney a sandwich. "Eat," she said. She selected one for herself and took a healthy bite. Chesney followed her lead. They turned away from the basketball court to face each other and, for Chesney, that meant that the rest of the world ceased to exist.

  They ate in silence for a while. Besides sandwiches, Melda had brought cut-up raw vegetables and a dressing that she made herself out of sour cream, garlic and herbs. She dipped a cherry tomato into the little plastic tub and popped it into his mouth. He loved that, even though he had hated it when his mother used to do it at the family dinner table when he was a kid. Of course, Melda was a better cook than Letitia, whose science of the kitchen extended no farther than the need to cook everything until it was either limp and soggy or bone-dry.

  "Listen, sweetie," she said, after he had finished his second sandwich and half the veggies. "I've been thinking."

  "About what?"

  "About you and me and this thing you do." She was watching him closely and when she saw the look on his face, she said, "What's the matter?"

  He didn't know. But it was as if a cloud had passed between them and the sun. The light no longer seemed so bright. "You're not…" he began, but couldn't find words to continue. He gathered himself and tried again. "You're not going to push me… like my mother and the reverend–"

  "What? No!" She shook her head as if a particularly silly idea had somehow made its way into her mind and had to be thrown off. "No, no, never. Look, sweetie, if you don't want to be a prophet, that's okay with me."

  "Oh, good," he said, and reached for another cherry tomato.

  "I mean," she continued, "where's the profit in being a prophet?"

  He stopped with the dripping red orb at his lips. "Huh?"

  "All I'm saying, is you're a celebrity now. You're the Actionary, for gawdsake. You should cash in."

  He put the tomato down. "I'm not doing this for money," he said.

  "Who said money?"

  "You did. You said, 'cash in.' Cash is money."

  She looked as if the connection had never occurred to her. "Okay," she said, "I didn't mean like get paid for crimefighting. Like, how would that even work? They'd make you a special agent for the FBI?"

  "The FBI already has special agents, thousands of them."

  "Okay, then, a super special agent. But that's not what we're talking about anyway."

  "What are we talking about, anyway?" he said. The air still seemed cooler than it ought to be in the sunshine. The disturbance in the front of his slacks was now just a memory.

  "Being a celebrity. Endorsements. Giving speeches. A book deal." Her eyes widened, "Oh, god," she said and only breathed the next two syllables: "Oprah."

  "Oprah?"

  "You could so be on Oprah. She'd love you."

  "But I don't want to be on Oprah."

  "But you'd need her," Melda said, as if explaining to a nine year-old, "for the book."

  "I don't want to write a book. Or give speeches." When he thought about it, the prospect terrified him. "Or tell people what kind of soda they should drink."

  She gave a delicate snort. "I think you'd get a better class of endorsement than Coke or Pepsi. Those big companies with the names that don't tell you what they do, the kind that used to hire Tiger Woods until it turned out he was more into sluts than putts."

  "But I don't want to do that," Chesney said. "I just want to fight crime."

  "But what are we going to live on?"

  "Well," he began, and then the pronoun she had used caught up with him. "We?" he said.

  "Well, yeah," she said. "I mean, I kinda thought, the way you like me . . ."

  "Oh, said Chesney. He realized that while he was enjoying the unfamiliar territory known as "having a girlfriend," the girlfriend in question was already picking out an address in the land of permanent relationship. Perhaps even the neighborhood called marriage. He wondered how he would feel about that, once he got over the surprise. But now he focused his mind on the question they were actually discussing. "I have a job," he said. "I make pretty good money. And you've got your thing with the nails."

  She sighed. It wasn't anywhere near as eloquent a condemnatio
n of his intellect and character as one of Letitia Arnstruther's sighs, but it blew from the same direction. "You can't keep working there," she said.

  "Why not? I mean, the C Group has wound up, now that W.T. has decided not to run for governor." That decision by Chesney's employer, Warren Theophilus Paxton, had been prompted by the sudden nervous breakdown of his daughter, Poppy, who did not remember her own trip to Hell. Unlike Melda, Poppy had gone there unwillingly, kidnapped by her father's campaign adviser, Nat Blowdell, who'd made his own deal with the Devil, though on more traditional lines than Chesney's.

  C Group had been a special crime statistics unit within Paxton Life and Casualty, to which Chesney had been seconded. It crunched numbers to back up Paxton's candidacy, which was supposed to be based on an anti-crime platform. The campaign would have been fueled by a "missing blonde" media frenzy orchestrated by Blowdell. Young, blonde women who went missing were a guaranteed draw for the media. Every year, on the anniversary of her disappearance, the media ran retro-stories on the young journalism student, Cathy Bannister, who had been snatched from her third-floor apartment nine years ago, and never seen again.