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hold-up. Maybe it’s going to be a full moon tonight.”
    “Like I said, I wouldn’t know,” said Macbeth.
    “Sure it is. I had a guy in the cab, two fares before you. Wanted me to take him to the Christian Science Church – why he’d want to go there this time of night beats me – anyway, he’s the quiet type and doesn’t say much. Then, all of a sudden, he starts screaming at me that there’s a kid in front of the cab. So I leave half my tread on the blacktop and nearly get rearended by a bus. Now I’m telling you, there was no kid. But I can see he really believed he saw one. Funny thing is he’s all shook up for a moment then goes all calm again, like he understood why he was mistaken. Full moon. Must be.”
    The traffic started moving again and Macbeth and the driver fell back into silence.
    By the time the taxi pulled up outside the green-canopied bar, the sun had sunk lower in the sky and dressed downtown Boston in red gilt edging and velvet shadow. It was the type of light that awoke something in Macbeth: something deep buried and long forgotten. He felt a kind of melancholy as he looked down along Beacon Street to where the evening light softened the Georgian geometry of King’s Chapel.
    “You sure I don’t know you from somewhere?” asked the cabbie as he took the fare and tip from Macbeth.
    “I’m sure.”
    *
    Macbeth couldn’t remember exactly where and when he had first met Pete Corbin, but it must have been when they had been at Harvard med school together. As he recalled it, they hadn’t been friends then: Corbin had been part of a different set and they hadn’t encountered each other that often. But years afterwards, after a joint internship at Beth-Israel Deaconess and when both Corbin and Macbeth had settled into their shared specialty of psychiatry and had worked together at McLean, they had become friends. Or maybe just acquaintances. Macbeth was never very sure where the defining line between the two lay. Pete Corbin was one of those people you gave a call when you were in town and shared a few drinks or a meal with. You talked medicine, you talked hospital politics and you talked mutual acquaintances and shook hands heartily at the end of the night but you did not really, at the heart of it all, know each other. It was the similitude of friendship: just one of the threads spun through society’s web and you clung on to it.
    So, when Macbeth knew he was going to be back in Boston, he’d given Corbin a call and they had arranged to meet for a meal.
    The Gathering Stone was supposed to be Scottish-themed, but with its facing of Portland brownstone and ornate blue-green ironwork curlicuing around the huge windows, its name emblazoned in gold Celtic-style lettering, and its sidewalk A-frame blackboards with names and prices of beers and whis-keys chalked on them, The Gathering Stone did not do much to distinguish itself from the default Boston mock-Irish. Inside, it was all exposed brick, knotty pine and posters of Edinburgh Castle and sword-waving red-headed men in plaid, instead of the usual bicycles outside rural Irish pubs. It was the kind of place that was an undisguised feigning of something else: an honest simulation that wasn’t intended to be anything other, or for you to expect anything more, than a simulation. Theme-park ethnicity.
    When they had first gotten to know each other, Pete Corbin had commented that Macbeth’s surname clearly hinted at some Scottish ancestry. Based on this tenuous logic, it had become the accepted thing that they meet at The Gathering Stone.
    Macbeth found Corbin nursing a single malt in a booth beneath a framed print of a vaguely desolate-looking mountain and loch scene. A tall, lanky type with a web of thinning blond hair stretched over a high-domed head, Corbin was wearing a tweed jacket, pale chinos and a blue button-down open at the collar. He had mastered, with deliberate and studied intent, that casual look of the academic. It was a look