He is sipping his second Scotch when his bacon cheeseburger is served, and he’s two bites into the sandwich when a fussy-looking professorial type sits at the bar with one stool between them.

This obvious walk-on character has unkempt white hair and white eyebrows that haven’t been trimmed since the turn of the millennium. He’s wearing a black onyx stud in one ear, wire-rimmed half-lens glasses, a bow tie, a plaid shirt, a classic tweed sport coat, brown wool pants, and white athletic socks with moccasin-style loafers. The man is so detailed and so not Texan that Gottfrey realizes the Unknown Playwright is using the professor as an avatar, stepping into the play to deliver a message that must not be ignored.

The professor orders the same Scotch that Gottfrey is drinking, which is another sign of his importance to the story. While the man waits for his drink, he opens a thick paperback and sits reading, as if unaware that another customer watches from one stool removed.

Gottfrey understands the Playwright’s narrative structure well enough to know that the book matters. In fact, it seems to glow in the faux professor’s hands. In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson. Judging by the cover, it’s a work of nonfiction set in Nazi Germany.

Gottfrey finishes half his burger before he says, “Good book?”

Pretending to be surprised that anyone shares the bar with him, the professor pulls his reading glasses farther down his nose and peers over them at Gottfrey. “It’s brilliant, actually. A chilling depiction of an entire society descending from normalcy into almost universal madness in just a year or so. I feel a disturbing parallel to our own times and that long-ago Nazi ascendancy.”

Gottfrey says, “The National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Hitler and that ragtag crew around him—they seemed to be such a bunch of clowns, though I guess they couldn’t have been just that.”

This observation inspires a sense of intellectual brotherhood in the professor. He swivels on his barstool to more directly face Gottfrey, puts aside the book, and grips his Scotch glass in an age-spotted fist. “They were precisely what you say—a cabal of clowns, foolish misfits and geeks and thugs, pretenders to philosophical depth, ignorant know-nothings who fancied themselves intellectuals.”

Gottfrey nods thoughtfully. “Yet they led an entire nation into a war and genocide that killed tens of millions.”

“Our own time, sir, is infested with their ilk.”

“But how,” Gottfrey wonders. “How could they so easily lead a rational nation into ruin?”

“Yes, how? Look at them. Goering had a soft baby face. Horst Wessel was a chinless wonder. Had he been an actor, Martin Bormann would’ve been typecast as a gangster. Himmler, a sexless nebbish. Hess really looked like a Neanderthal! But they understood the power of symbols—swastika, Nazi flag—the power of rituals and costumes. Those Nazi uniforms, the SS especially. Hitler in trench coats and battle jackets! A bunch of dishrags made glamorous with costumes. They were pretenders, actors, assigning to themselves leadership roles and giving stellar performances … for a while. Beware actors who can become anyone they wish to be; they are in fact no one at all, cold and empty, though they can be pied pipers to the masses.”

The professor drains his Scotch. The bartender delivers a fresh glass of whisky even as his customer finishes the first.

Thinking about Vince Penn and Rupert Baldwin and Janis Dern, and so many others, Gottfrey says, “But for a conspiracy of clowns to take power and crush all adversaries, they must have something more than an understanding of symbols, rituals, and costumes.”

“Passion!” the professor declares. “They had more passion than those who resisted them. A passion to rule, to tear down society and remake it more to their liking, a passion to silence all dissent and to make a world in which they wouldn’t have to hear an opinion at variance with their own. The passion for destruction always has more appeal to more people than does the passion to preserve and build. It’s an ugly truth of human nature. Passion, sir. The kind of raw passion that breeds ruthlessness.”

Gottfrey nods. “They so believed in the rightness of their cause that they could kill without compunction. If you can kill without remorse, then you can slaughter your way to absolute power.”

“Sad to say, but yes.”

“If you want to be a leader,” Gottfrey continues, “embrace the role. Don’t just go along for the ride. Symbols, costumes, glamour, and passion can make even clowns appear to be godlike. The least likely among us can triumph.”

“How true,” says the professor. “How dismal but how true.”

Although his companion has not finished the second Scotch, Egon Gottfrey says, “I was depressed when I sat down here, but you have so lifted my spirits that I want to buy you a drink, if I may.”

“Sir, I never decline the kindness of strangers. But how peculiar that such a dark subject should lift your spirits.”

“Not at all,” says Egon Gottfrey. “You have helped me with a personal dilemma, and I am in your debt.”

4

WEARING WHITE SNEAKERS, breezy-cut white chinos, and a bright pink-and-blue Hawaiian shirt with a flamingo pattern, eighty-one-year-old Bernie Riggowitz stood five feet seven, weighed at most 140 pounds, and didn’t look like anyone’s image of ideal backup in a crisis. A little over a week earlier, urgently in need of new wheels, Jane had forced Bernie at gunpoint to give her a ride in his Mercedes E350 from Middle of Nowhere, Texas, all the way to Nogales, Arizona. He had proved not only to have the right stuff, but also to be the right stuff—unflappable, quick-witted, and game. Somehow, the kidnapping had turned into an agreeable road trip at the end of which they were mishpokhe.

Now, in the Tiffin Allegro, Bernie sat in a dinette booth with Jane, across the table from Luther Tillman, listening to their story of Techno Arcadians and injectable brain-tropic self-assembling nanoparticle control mechanisms. He exhibited none of the amazement or fear that might be expected. He asked no questions. His face revealed nothing of his thoughts, and although he listened intently, there was a faraway look in his eyes.

Concerned that she couldn’t read his reaction, Jane said, “Bernie, what’s wrong? It sounds too cockamamie or something?”

“Dear, you should excuse the expression, but it sounds so not cockamamie that my kishkes turned to jelly.”

“Listen, if you feel this is more than you bargained for, if you want to back out—”

Putting a hand on her arm, Bernie said, “Darling, stop already. You should live so long that I’d ever back out on you.” To Luther, he said, “I am so sorry about your wife and daughter. The pain …” He grimaced in sympathy and could say no more.

Luther loomed across the table like a version of Thor, and there was a rumble as of distant thunder in his voice. “We’re not going to let the bastards take Travis from Jane.”

“Your lips to God’s ear.” Bernie squeezed Jane’s arm. “I don’t put much stock in the cabala, but I’m told in Sepher Yetzirah it says something about making a golem from clay and using it for vengeance. What these Arcadian momzers are doing is a reverse golem. They take precious human beings and mold them into obedient clay. It’s not possible to back away from this and still have any self-respect. So when do I get a gun?”

“You won’t need one,” Jane said.

“Maybe I will. I know from guns. Back in the day, the wig business was not all bagels and cream cheese.”

To Luther, Jane said, “Bernie and his wife owned a wig company. Elegant Weave. They sold wigs up and down the eastern seaboard.”

“Fourteen states and D.C.,” Bernie said. “It was mostly a city business, so there were the usual wiseguys wanted their cut. Better you should declare bankruptcy the day you open your doors. We didn’t give them bupkis. I had a gun; Miriam, too. We could make hard-boiled like Bogart and Bacall when we had to convince the khazers we were tough.” He turned his hands palms-up. “I’m embarrassed to admit, Sheriff, our guns weren’t legal. But we never did shoot anybody.”

Jane stared at Bernie in silence for a moment. “You think you know someone, then you find out he’s a tough guy.”

“That was a long time ago. I’m eighty-one now. I’m about as tough as a cheese kreplakh.”

Luther said, “God knows what we’re going into. You should have a gun, Mr. Riggowitz. You cool with that, Jane?”

“How long has it been since you fired one?” she asked Bernie.

“About three weeks. Wherever I am, I find a shooting range once a month and do some target practice.”

“You mean you have a gun?”

“An old man who likes to drive mostly at night and through some lonely wide-open spaces, he shouldn’t have a gun? It’s there in my suitcase. I just wanted to feel you out, did you think me having a gun was kosher.”

She said, “The night in Texas I jacked your car, you had a gun then?”

He smiled and nodded. “In a special holder under the driver’s seat, muzzle backward, grip forward, so I could just reach under and snap open the sleeve and have it in hand.”