as if it was too disdainful to he bothered With Lorie, or even with Gene.
    Gene stayed right where he was, trying to keep himself from trembling. "Lorie,'' he 
whispered. "Please, Lorie. If you ever felt anything for me. Please."
    The lion made a half-hearted jump in Gene's direction, and Gene couldn't help jerking 
nervously back, but Lorie butted the lion with her head, affectionately and gently, and 
the beast turned away hi mid-jump. Then, without any further hesitation, it turned around 
and began to run off, at a measured and even pace, along the road.
    Gene watched It' go. In a few moments, it was out of sight in the darkness. He turned 
around, and Lorie had gone, too, but he didn't know where. He slowly and painfully walked 
along the length of the hedge around the house, and pushed open the front gate. He went 
up the neat path to the bright green front door, and knocked.
    He waited two or three minutes before the door was answered. Then it opened up, and a 
tall gray-haired man in an expensive suit stood there with a martini in his hand.
    "Well, hi," he said expansively. "What happened to you?"
    "Lions," Gene said, and collapsed.
    He went, out of a strange sense of compulsion, to Mathieu's funeral. It was a dry, 
bitterly cold day, and there weren't many people there. The leaves had curled up under 
foot, and they crunched as they walked toward the grave like soldiers walking through 
Post Toasties. The sky was clean and blue, and the few Wispy clouds were very high up.
    Both Mrs. Semple and Lorie were standing by the grave. They were tall, and together, 
and dressed uv black, with veils over then- beautiful faces. The gravestone was simple, 
and probably hadn't cost very much. It read: Mathieu Besta, From His Loving Friends.
    Gene had come late, parking his white New Yorker by the cemetery gate. Maggie came 
with him, wearing a smart, new black coat that he had bought her specially. They came up 
the sloping path toward the funeral party, and nobody looked their way. There was a 
feeling that, remotely and perhaps unfairly, they were unwelcome guests.
    The priest was just finishing the service. Mrs. Semple reached down, took a handful 
of cold dry mud, and threw it on the lid of the coffin. Lorie stood there, silent and 
unmoving, with her hands across her stomach as if she was already heavily pregnant.
    "She's very beautiful," whispered Maggie. '1 don't think I've ever seen her this 
dose."
    "Beauty," said Gene, "is very often skin-deep, arid no farther."
    Maggie frowned at him. "I can tell you're a politician. You talk in cliches."
    He smiled absently. "Someone else said that to me, a long time ago."
    Mrs. Semple and Lorie left the graveside without even looking his way. Whatever they 
had between them was now in the hands of attorneys, and Gene had already been told that 
Lorie would agree to a painless and inexpensive divorce. All she had asked for was 
sufficient money to support a child, if, as she suspected, she was pregnant.
    Gene and Maggie stood there a little while longer, and then walked back down the path 
to the car.
    "You know something," said Gene, as they drove back into the morning sunlight toward 
Washington.
    "What's that?"
    "It's always the people who can't defend themselves who get the blame."
    "People? Or animals?"
    "In this case, animal. Singular."
    "But he did kill Mr. Semple. Or Mathieu Besta, or whatever they wanted to call him."
    "Sure. But who let him out? He was nothing but a dumb beast. He probably would have 
preferred to stay in his cage for the rest of his life, coming out now and again to get 
prodded by some ringmaster, and retire with grace and dignity and false teeth."
    "I don't know how you can laugh about teeth after what you went through."
    Gene shrugged. "To tell you to truth, it doesn't seem too real these days."
    "1s that why you came today?"
    "Maybe. I felt some kind of responsibility, too. I sometimes think that if it hadn't 
been for me, that poor guy would still be alive."
    Maggie took off her black straw hat. "Sure. And you'd be dead."
    Gene slowed the New Yorker up for a red light. The morning sun cut across the car, 
and lit up Maggie's hair. Across the street, tattered and faded, was a poster for 
Romero's Traveling Circus, with a vivid picture of a lion leaping through a hoop. In the 
next car, a pale-green Buick, a man with a snap-brim hat was arguing with his wife, his 
cigarette waggling between his lips.
    "Maggie?" Gene said.
    "Yes?"
    "Would you think I was out of line if I asked you to stay around?"
    Maggie turned to him and smiled. "As long as you're not on the rebound," she laughed.







1