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clothes; except that a master cut the hair, and the clothes were cashmere, vicuña, silk. A buried memory unearthed itself: this man and his wife were known as the handsomest couple in all of Chubb. Ah, he had Chandra now! The son of some maharajah, rolling in riches, married to the daughter of another Indian potentate. They lived on ten acres just inside the Holloman County line, together with an army of servants and several children who were tutored at home. Apparently the swanky Dormer Day School was not swanky enough. Or might give the kids too many American ideas? They enjoyed diplomatic immunity, quite how, Carmine didn’t know. That meant kid gloves, and pray he wasn’t the one!
    “My poor Jimmy,” said Dr. Chandra, voice sympathetic but not oozing the tenderness Cecil’s did when speaking of Jimmy.
    “Give me Jimmy’s story, please, Doctor,” Carmine said, gaze riveted on another monkey, its legs crossed nonchalantly, seated in a complicated Plexiglass chair inside an enormous box with its door open. The beast was minus its tennis ball hat, revealing a pink mass of dental cement in which was embedded a bright green female connector. A bright green male plug had been inserted into it, and a thick, twisted cable of wires in many colors ran to a panel on the box wall. Presumably the panel connected the monkey to a lot of electronic equipment in nineteen-inch racks around the box.
    “Cecil called me yesterday to tell me he’d found Jimmy dead when he went in to see the monkeys after lunch,” the researcher said in the most pear-shaped English accent Carmine had ever heard. Nothing in common with Miss Dupre’s or Don Hunter’s accents, different though they were from each other. Amazing that such a tiny country had so many accents. “I went downstairs to see for myself, and I swear to you, Lieutenant [another left enant], that I deemed Jimmy dead. No pulse, no respiration, no heart sounds, no reflexes, both pupils dilated. Cecil asked me if I wished Dr. Schiller to perform an autopsy, but I declined. Jimmy hasn’t had his electrodes implanted for long enough to have been of any experimental value to me. But I told Cecil to leave him be, that I’d check again at five, and if he hadn’t changed, I’d pop him in the refrigerator myself. Which is what I did.”
    “What about this guy?” Carmine asked, pointing at the monkey, which bore the same expression as Abe when dying for a cigarette.
    “Eustace? Oh, he’s of immense value! Aren’t you, Eustace?”
    The monkey transferred its gaze from Carmine to Dr. Chandra, then grinned ghoulishly. You are one arrogant bastard, Eustace, thought Carmine.
    Chandra’s technician was a young man named Hank, who took Carmine to the O.R.
    Sonia Liebman greeted him in the anteroom, describing herself as the O.R. technician. The anteroom was given over to shelves of stores to do with surgery; it also contained two autoclaves and a formidable-looking safe.
    “For my restricted drugs,” Mrs. Liebman said, indicating the safe. “Opiates, Pentothal, potassium cyanide, a bunch of nasties.” She handed Carmine a pair of canvas bootees.
    “Who knows the combination?” he asked, putting them on.
    “I do, and it is not written down anywhere,” she said firmly. “If they have to carry me out feet first, they’ll have to bring in a safe-cracker. Share a secret, and it’s no secret.”
    The O.R. itself looked like any other operating room.
    “I don’t operate under fully sterile conditions,” she said, leaning her rump on the operating table, which was an expanse of clean linen savers and had a curious apparatus mounted at one end, all aluminum sticks, frames, knobs geared down to Vernier scale. She herself was clad in a clean boilersuit — ironed — and canvas bootees. An attractive woman of about forty, he decided, slim and businesslike. Her dark hair was drawn back in a no-nonsense bun, her eyes were dark and intelligent, and her lovely hands were marred by nails