Death of the Black-Haired Girl by Robert Stone Page B

legal liability. All at once it seemed that while nobody was responsible for anything, everybody was responsible for everything. In any case, Jo had low seniority in the counseling service and a subterranean chamber to go with it. But she had a following as a sympathetic presence, a word-of-mouth credibility passed along by students who managed to find her.
    She had been at the desk with her uneasiness for a few minutes when the bell at the street door rang. Lone women—everyone—tended to proceed with caution around the college after dark. There were frequent buses and group safety routes. Jo went up the half flight of stairs to the street level and, looking through the solid glass doors at the building’s main entrance, saw him on the sidewalk outside. A tall, thin man in his fifties with a scarred face stood in the lighted doorway. He was wearing a black beret, which he was stuffing into his overcoat pocket as he reached for the doorbell again. All the other offices in her building had closed and the street was winter dark. When he saw her through the glass door his eyes came alight. She let him in and gave him a chair in the office.
    “I thought I saw you at the hospital the other day,” she told him.
    “Indeed you did. And I saw you, Josephine.”
    “Don’t call me Josephine, by the way. Makes me feel like I’m married to Napoleon.”
    “Jo, is it?”
    “Yes. Do we know each other?” How strange it would be, she thought, if this were the man she remembered.
    He gave her face a long study. From his coat pocket he took a printout of one of the pictures from
Smith’s Recognizable Patterns of Human Malformation
and a copy of the
Gazette
with Maud’s article and picture.
    “I thought there might be a chaplain’s office. Then I checked the Newman Center. They directed me.”
    “I’m a layperson now. I withdrew almost thirty years ago. I’m on the counseling staff.”
    “Did you counsel Maud Stack?”
    “That’s confidential.”
    The man shrugged.
    “She didn’t seek counseling,” Jo told him.
    “Is she pregnant?”
    Quite without meaning to, Jo gave him a look of disgust.
    “None of my business?”
    “I know you’d like to make it your business. Fortunately it’s not, and you know it.”
    The man before her bore an uncanny resemblance to the one known as the Mourner. He had been the most extreme of those who embraced the option for the poor, the most avid defender of violent methods. He required approval, and more than approval he required power, moral and tactical. His way of exercising power was to become the fiercest of the revolution’s priests. He took great risks with the government’s death squads.
    Like the Mourner, this man was long-faced, an inch or so over six feet, broad-shouldered but slender. He must have gone through repeated attacks of one kind of tropical fever or another that had left his skin discolored. His eyes were peculiar: swollen and mottled with flashes of unnatural light, outsize pupils, lids like flaking dirty lace. White men who lived in the lowlands under the montaña sometimes took on a look like that in the Mourner’s eyes. Once his eyes had fascinated, with the power to halt a breath or a word. She could hardly believe she had not seen him before. But it was not possible, she thought. Everyone said the Mourner was dead.
    This man’s hair was white, trimmed closely and unevenly, possibly over a towel and a bathroom sink, but the effect suited him. The story was he had been badly beaten by the security police of several nations. Somehow the Mourner had got himself a reputation as a faith healer in one of the neighboring republics, a country traditionally hostile to the one whose regime he had been fighting to overthrow. Its security apparatus left him alone and he had begun to dabble in semi-miraculous cures. Jo had met him once at a conference at the Andrés Bello Catholic University in Caracas. At that time he was already a man to be feared.
    After the movement