It was useless trying to pretend innocence, Jaffe knew. His months of study had carved 
knowledge into his face. He couldn't pass for a naif any longer. Nor-now that it came to 
it-did he want to.
  "No scam," he said to Homer, making his contempt for the man's puerile suspicions 
plain. "I'm not taking anything you'd want. Or could use."
  "I'll be the judge of that, asshole," Homer said, throwing the letters he was examining 
down among the rest of the litter. "I want to know what you've been up to down here. 
'Sides jerking off."
  Jaffe closed the door. He'd never realized it before, but the reverberations of the 
furnace carried through the walls into the room. Everything here trembled minutely. The 
sacks, the envelopes, the words on the pages tucked inside. And the chair on which Homer 
was sitting. And the knife, the short-bladed knife, lying on the floor beside the chair 
on which Homer was sitting. The whole place was moving, ever so slightly, like there was 
a rumble in the ground. Like the world was about to be flipped.
  Maybe it was. Why not? No use pretending the status was still quo. He was a man on his 
way to some throne or other. He didn't know which and he didn't know where, but he needed 
to silence any pretender quickly. Nobody was going to find him. Nobody was going to blame 
him, or judge him, or put him on Death Row. He was his own law now.
  "I should explain..." he said to Homer, finding a tone that was almost flippant, 
"...what the scam really is."
  "Yeah," Homer said, his lip curling. "Why don't you do that?"
  "Well it's real simple..."
  He started to walk towards Homer, and the chair, and the knife beside the chair. The 
speed of his approach made Homer nervous, but he kept his seat.
  "...I've found a secret," Jaffe went on.
  "Huh?"
  "You want to know what it is?"
  Now Homer stood up, his gaze trembling the way everything else was. Everything except 
Jaffe. All the tremors had gone out of his hands, his guts and his head. He was steady in 
an unsteady world.
  "I don't know what the fuck you're doing," Homer said. But I don't like it."
  "I don't blame you," Jaffe said. He didn't have his eyes on the knife. He didn't need 
to. He could sense it. "But it's your job to know, isn't it?" Jaffe went on, "what's been 
going on down here."
  Homer took several steps away from the chair. The loutish gait he liked to affect had 
gone. He was stumbling, as though the floor was tilting.
  "I've been sitting at the center of the world," Jaffe said. "This little room...this is 
where it's all happening."
  "Is that right?"
  "Damn right."
  Homer made a nervous little grin. He threw a glance towards the door.
  "You want to go?" Jaffe said.
  "Yeah." He looked at his watch, not seeing it. "Got to run. Only came down here-"
  "You're afraid of me," Jaffe said. "And you should be. I'm not the man I was."
  "Is that right?"
  "You said that already."
  Again, Homer looked towards the door. It was five paces away; four if he ran. He'd 
covered half the distance when Jaffe picked up the knife. He had the door handle clasped 
when he heard the man approaching behind him.
  He glanced round, and the knife came straight at his eye. It wasn't an accidental stab. 
It was synchronicity. His eye glinted, the knife glinted. Glints collided, and the next 
moment he was screaming as he fell back against the door, Randolph following him to claim 
the letter-opener from the man's head.
  The roar of the furnace got louder. With his back to the sacks Jaffe could feel the 
envelopes nestling against each other, the words being shaken on the pages, till they 
became a glorious poetry. Blood, it said; like a sea; his thoughts like clots in that 
sea, dark, congealed, hotter than hot.
  He reached for the handle of the knife, and clenched it. Never before in his life had 
he shed blood; not even squashed a bug, at least intentionally. But now his fist on the 
hot wet handle seemed wonderful. A prophecy; a proof.
  Grinning, he pulled the knife out of Homer's socket, and before his victim could slide 
down the door stuck it into Homer's throat to the hilt. This time he didn't let it lie. 
He pulled it out as soon as he'd stopped Homer's screams, and he stabbed the middle of 
the man's chest. There was bone there, and he had to drive hard, but he was suddenly very 
strong. Homer gagged, and blood came out of his mouth, and from the wound in his throat. 
Jaffe pulled the knife out. He didn't stab again. Instead he wiped the blade on his 
handkerchief and turned from the body to think about his next move. If he tried to lug 
the sacks of mail to the furnace he risked being discovered, and sublime as he felt, high 
on the boor-slob's demise, he was still aware that there was danger in being found out. 
It would be better to bring the furnace here. After all, fire was a moveable feast. All 
it required was a light, and Homer had those. He turned back to the slumped corpse and 
searched in the pockets for a box of matches. Finding one, he pulled it out, and went 
over to the satchels.
  Sadness surprised him as he prepared to put a flame to the dead letters. He'd spent so 
many weeks here, lost in a kind of delirium, drunk with mysteries. This was good-bye to 
all that. After this-Homer dead, the letters burnt-he was a fugitive, a man without a 
history, beckoned by an Art he knew nothing about, but which he wished more than anything 
to practice.
  He began to screw up a few of the pages, to provide some initial fodder for the flame. 
Once begun, he didn't doubt that the fire would sustain itself: there was nothing in the 
room- paper, fabric, flesh-that wasn't combustible. With three heaps of paper made, he 
struck a match. The flame was bright, and looking at it he realized how much he hated 
brightness. The dark was so much more interesting; full of secrets, full of threats. He 
put the flame to the piles of paper and watched while the fires gained strength. Then he 
repeated to the door.
  Homer was slumped against it, of course, bleeding from three places, and his bulk 
wasn't that easy to move, but Jaffe put his back into the task, his shadow thrown up 
against the wall by the burgeoning bonfire behind him. Even in the half minute it took 
him to move the corpse aside the heat grew exponentially, so that by the time he glanced 
back at the room it was ablaze from side to side, the heat stirring up its own wind, 
which in turn fanned the flames.
  It was only when he was clearing out his room of any sign of himself-eradicating every 
trace of Randolph Ernest Jaffe-that he regretted doing what he'd done. Not the 
burning-that had been altogether wise-but leaving Homer's body in the room to be consumed 
along with the dead letters. He should have taken a more elaborate revenge, he realized. 
He should have hacked the body into pieces, packaged it up, tongue, eyes, testicles, 
guts, skin, skull, divided piece from piece-and sent the pieces out into the system with 
scrawled addresses that made no real sense, so that chance (or synchronicity) was allowed 
to elect the doorstep on which Homer's flesh would land. The mailman mailed. He promised 
himself not to miss such ironic possibilities in the future.