lights, he made a photocopy of the note, returned the note to his shirt pocket, and faxed 
the copy to Sal at the Register.
    The phone rang a minute later. Sal said, ‘You put it through the fax wrong-side up, 
dickhead. All I’ve got is a blank sheet of paper with your number at the top.’
    ‘I’m sure I did it right.’
    ‘Even your inflatable woman must be frustrated with you. Send it again.’
    After switching on a lamp, Tommy returned to the fax machine once more. He was 
careful to load the page properly. The mysterious ideograms had to be face-down.
    He watched as the rollers pulled the single sheet of paper through the machine. The 
small message window displayed Sal’s fax number at the newspaper and the word sending. 
The page of ideograms slid out of the machine, and after a pause, the word in the message 
window changed to received. Then the fax disconnected.
    The phone rang. Sal said, ‘Do I have to drive over there and show you how to do it 
right?’
    ‘You mean you got a blank page again?’
    ‘Just your sender-ID bar at the top.’
    ‘I absolutely loaded it right this time.’
    ‘Then something’s wrong with your fax,’ Sal said.
    ‘Must be,’ Tommy said, although that answer didn’t satisfy him.
    ‘You want to bring the note by here?’
    ‘How long will you be there?’
    ‘Couple of hours.’
    ‘I might stop by,’ Tommy said.
    ‘You’ve got me curious now.’
    ‘If not tonight, I’ll see you tomorrow.’
    Sal said, ‘It might be some little girl.’
    ‘Huh?’
    ‘Some other figure skater jealous about the one in your article. Remember that 
Olympic skater, Tonya Harding? Be careful of your knee caps, Tommy boy. Some little girl 
out there may have a baseball bat with your name on it.’
    ‘Thank God we don’t work in the same building any more. I feel so much cleaner.’
    ‘Kiss Rhonda Rubbergirl for me.’
    ‘You’re a diseased degenerate.’
    ‘Well, with Rhonda, you’ll never have to worry about catching anything nasty.’
    ‘See you later.’ Tommy put down the telephone and switched off the lamp. Once more, 
the only light was a pale pearlesence that spilled in from the second-floor hallway.
    He went to the nearest window and studied the front lawn and the street. The 
yellowish glow of the streetlamps didn’t reveal anyone lurking in the night.
    A deep ocean of storm clouds had flooded the sky, entirely submerging the moon. The 
heavens were black and forbidding.
    Tommy went downstairs to the living room, where he discovered the doll slumped on its 
side on the end table beside the sofa. He had left it propped with its back against the 
stained-glass lamp, in a sitting position.
    Frowning, Tommy stared at it suspiciously. The doll had seemed to be full of sand, 
well weighted; it should have stayed where he had put it.
    Feeling foolish, he toured the downstairs, trying the doors. They were all still 
securely locked, and there were no signs of visitors. No one had entered the house.
    He returned to the living room. The doll might not have been balanced properly 
against the lamp, in which case the sand could have shifted slowly to one side until the 
damn thing toppled over.
    Hesitant, not sure why he was hesitant, Tommy Phan picked up the doll. He brought it 
to his face, examining it more closely than he had done earlier.
    The black sutures that indicated the eyes and the mouth were sewn with heavy thread 
as coarse as surgical cord. Tommy gently rubbed the ball of his thumb across a pair of 
crossed stitches that marked one of the doll’s eyes... then across the row of five that 
formed its grimly set lips.
    As he traced that line of black stitches, Tommy was startled by a macabre image that 
popped into his mind’s eye: the threads abruptly snapping, a real mouth opening in the 
white cotton cloth, tiny but razor-sharp teeth exposed, a quick but savage snap, and his 
thumb bitten off, blood streaming from the stump.
    A shudder coursed through him, and he nearly drop-ped the doll.
    ‘Dear God.’
    He felt stupid and childish. The stitches had not snapped, and of course no hungry 
mouth would ever open in the damn thing.
    It’s just a doll, for God’s sake.
    He wondered what his detective, Chip Nguyen, would do in this situation. Chip was 
tough, smart, and relent-less. He was a master of Tae Kwon Do, able to drink hard all 
night without losing his edge or suffering a hangover, a chess master who had once 
defeated Bobby Fisher when they encountered each other in a hurricane-hammered resort 
hotel in Barbados, a lover of such prowess that a beautiful blond socialite had killed 
another woman over him in a fit of jealousy, a collector of vintage Corvettes who was 
able to rebuild them from the ground up, and a brooding philosopher who knew that 
humanity was doomed but who gamely fought the good fight anyway. Already, Chip would have 
obtained a translation of the note, tracked down the source of the cotton cloth and the 
black thread, punched out a thug just for the exercise, and (being an equal-opportunity 
lover) bedded either an aggressive redhead with a gloriously pneumatic body or a slender 
Vietnamese girl with a shy demeanour that masked a profoundly lascivious mind.
    What a drag it was to be limited by reality. Tommy sighed and wished that he could 
step magically through the pages of his own books, into the fictional shoes of Chip 
Nguyen, and know the glory of being totally self-confident and utterly in control of life.
    The evening was waning, and it was too late to drive to the newspaper offices to see 
Sal Delano. Tommy just wanted to get a little work done and go to bed.
    The rag doll was strange, but it wasn’t half as menacing as he tried to pretend that 
it was. His fertile imagination had been running away with him again.
    He was a master of self-dramatization which, accord-ing to his older brother Ton, was 
the most American thing about him. Americans, Ton had once said, all think the world 
revolves around them, think each individual person more important than whole society or 
whole family. But how can each person be most important thing? Can’t everyone be the most 
important thing, all equal but all the most important at same time. Makes no sense. Tommy 
had protested that he didn’t feel more important than anyone else, that Ton was missing 
the point about American individualism, which was all about the right to pursue dreams, 
not about dominating others, but Ton had said, Then if you don’t think you better than 
us, come work in bakery with your father and brothers, stay with family, make family 
dream come true.
    Ton had inherited certain sharp debating skills - and a useful stubbornness - from 
their mother.
    Now Tommy turned the doll over in his hand, and the more that he handled it, the less 
ominous it seemed. Ultimately, no doubt, the story behind it would turn out to be 
prosaic. It was probably just a prank perpetrated by children in the neighbourhood.
    The pin with the black enamel head, which had fastened the note to the doll’s hand,