There are places where a man goes to be silent among other men. Other places, a man goes to talk, or to hear other men talk, about war or women, the sea or the sky. I had been spending too much time in the first kind of place, in the years since I had lost my arm and the better part of my right lung in the air over New France. I was in danger of becoming an old soldier's ghost before I had the chance to become an old soldier. I did not much resist, then, when André, a friend of recent acquaintance, dragged me into the raucous confines of the Grouper's Nest.

It was hot and close inside the bar's single, windowless room. Nautical and aeronautical instruments of dubious quality hung from pegs on the paneled walls. All of the high tables were occupied, as was most of the space between them. The bar smelled of beer and strong drink, sweat and perfume, tobacco and lust and fear.

My friend dragged me to the back of the room, and slapped a stack of red paper ration cards on the scarred, dark wood of the bar. "The special bottle, François," he said. "And the story." The bartender, an owlish old man wearing, of all things, what appeared to be a tuning fork on a necklace of blue yarn, swept the cards away and deposited an enormous bottle and two glitteringly clean glasses in their place.

The bottle was a round-edged pyramid of thick glass, topped by a slender spout. Behind its faded and peeling label, floating just below the top of the caramel liquid, was a brass egg bigger than my fist.

My friend eased the cork free and poured for us both.

I sipped; it was as if the fires of Hell and the light of salvation had been mixed and poured into a glass.

My friend sighed. "Is this bourbon, or the tears of God?" He drained the rest of his glass and slammed it on the bar. The liquid in the bottle sloshed, the egg spun. I saw then that it was etched with a web of delicate, curving lines.

"What is it?" I said, staring at the arabesques of light and dark as they chased each other around the surface of the egg.

"That," said my friend, "is the story."

With a sound like the bell of a church, the old man struck the tuning fork against the bottle. The egg spun again and he began to speak.

***

During the war (he said) I was commissioned as the armory officer on a gunship. Her name was the Marie Junot. As you may imagine, I served with many men, both men of character and distinction, and men whose prime distinction was their lack of character.

Luc Lamothe was a man of the latter sort.

Before the war, he was a painter in Marseille. He had a marginal talent, and a little shop on the place Jean Jaurès where he tended to vacationers and newlyweds who wished portraits made of themselves in fanciful guises.

He took no special notice of the couple who engaged his services on Wednesday, May 18th, 18—. He would have taken no notice of them at all had the woman not been quite obviously consumptive. Though she sipped frequently from a small bottle of patent medicine, her cough was chronic and wet. They sat for scarcely more than a quarter of an hour before she visibly wilted. Lamothe promised to have the portrait ready when they returned the next day.

He received them at the appointed hour, and whisked away the covering that concealed the canvas. His reward, however, was not the coo of the satisfied customer, but shouts of anger and dismay. The man in particular berated him in terms both unpleasant and overly familiar, and made threats of violence, should the painting not be immediately destroyed. Lamothe was forced to comply, and the work of his genius went to feed his hearth fire rather than his wallet.

The trouble was that Lamothe had taken his inspiration from the frail state of the woman's health and, under sway of madness or the muse, painted her as a ghost, and the gentleman as a spirit-medium, summoning her for a kiss from beyond the grave. Was he foolish? Cruel? Only he could say.

It were bad enough, had that been the end of the story, for Lamothe was in debt to dangerous men, had no more credit, and now could not afford the cost of materials for his next clients. If his fortunes did not change soon, he would be found dead in the river, thrown into prison, or press-ganged into the navy.

As it happened, that was not the end. The woman returned that night, without her fiancé. She announced herself with a weak rapping at the door of the room that served Lamothe both as home and studio. "May I come in?" she said, to his stony silence. Finally he relented and allowed her to enter.

She took a slow survey of the room, as if seeing it for the first time. She ran her fingers across the frame of his easel and spines of his books. She coughed, leaving red spots on her handkerchief. At last, after a full circuit of Lamothe's meagre life, she sat on his bed.

"I must apologize for my fiancé," she said. "He is an angry man."

Lamothe ran a dirty hand through his dirty hair. "I see," he said.

"I loved your picture," she said. "Michel, he—does not see the future as clearly as I. For me, you painted hope. Hope, that death might be a parting, a journey, and not the extinction or the fires of Hell that I am variously assured are awaiting me. For him—well, you saw."

"I did." Lamothe walked a pace towards the bed, then turned and walked back. "May I ask what it is you want?"

"Of course," she said. "This must seem rather odd to you. What I want is for you to paint it again, only—only for me, this time."

"You will pay?"

"Of course."

"In advance," he said. Then, suddenly awkward, he added, "I have no money, you see, to buy the canvas or the paint."

"Of course," she said. She produced a checkbook, and wrote him a draft on her bank that sufficed to cover his expenses for a month.

"Odile," he read.

"Yes?"

"Nothing. A lovely name." He coughed, echoing her. "For a lovely woman."

She smiled.

The next day, she sat for him alone for the first time. The day after, she sat for him for the first time wearing only what nature had given her. The day after that, he discovered the febrile heat of her skin and the depths of her hunger to live in all the ways that she could, while she was still able.

He never finished the painting.

Whether through some accident—a trace of paint found in an intimate area—or some other way, Odile's fiancé became aware of the dalliance. He arrived very drunk at Lamothe's room late one evening. Rather than the beating Lamothe expected, however, Michel gave Lamothe a sum of money and the advice that if he were to show his face in Marseille again, he would not long remain united in body and soul.

Lamothe took the money and fled.

He did not go far; only to Toulon. The money did not go far, either. Lamothe convinced himself that he was mad with love for Odile, and drowned himself in drink and women and luxury in order to forget. Within a fortnight, he was penniless.

It was his bad luck to be penniless in a port when a war began. He did, as he had feared, find himself pressed into service in His Majesty's Royal Navy of the Air, and swiftly transported to the skies over New France.

His two-year term of undistinguished service was ended abruptly by a mishandled a gas cartridge, and he was shipped back to the Fatherland, less one arm and most of one lung.

This brush with death had only strengthened his regrets over, as he now characterized it, the fiendish extortion that had separated him from his one love. As soon as he was able, he returned to Marseille and sought her out.

He did not have to look long. After a day or so, he found her, buried in the Cimetière Saint-Pierre, beside her mother and father. The date on her gravestone was a week after his departure; he concluded that she had killed herself for love of him.

He blamed Michel.

Now, he would live for vengeance.

He saved his pension and made do with begging until he was able to hire an investigator. With the investigator's help, Lamothe discovered that Michel had married and was now the father of young twins, and also that he was a banker, and a man of completely regular habits.

Thus it was that, without difficulty, he was able to book a passage in steerage to New France, and, on the morning that he was to sail, step out of a doorway to intercept Michel on his morning walk, and shoot him neatly in the ear.

Ten years of hard drink and hard life later, Lamothe is scarcely recognizable as the same man. He has grown old before his time, though not old enough to become wise, as he still pines for a woman he barely knew, and blames all of his life's misfortune on the man he wronged and murdered.

***

I backed away from the bar, wide-eyed and shaking. "What—What is this? André, what madness is this?"

For it was my own story. Recast and twisted—I had never served with a man of his age, and my Odile was nothing like the wanton he described—but recognizable still to him whose tale it was. My friend was laughing. Laughing! But his eyes were cold. "Not a bad trick, eh?"

"Trick?"

"The liquor, the spinning egg, the—what did you call it, François?"

"Subsonic drone," said the bartender, in a voice entirely unlike the one that I had heard telling the tale.

"What do you mean?" I demanded. "What compelled you to say those things?"

My friend laughed again, even more coldly. "You told the story, Gerard. Or should I say, Luc? And a good one it was, too! You did leave out one thing, however."

"What?" I felt a bead of cold sweat trickle down my back. "What was it?" I reached into the pocket of my coat. I had sold my revolver months ago, but he did not know that. I made a gun shape of my fingers, as children do, and poked it out at him.

"As well as a wife and children, Michel had a brother."

My friend drew a pistol from his pocket. Its slick gray barrel wavered a forearm's length in front of my face.

"When did you suspect?" I asked, hoping to keep him talking as I looked for some avenue of escape.

"Does it matter?" he said, and I saw in his eyes the determination of a man prepared to kill. I bulled into him, grabbed his arm, and pointed the pistol towards the bottle.

At such close quarters, the explosion was deafening. The bottle shattered, sending liquor and thick shards of glass spraying in all directions—not to mention the bullet itself, which ricocheted off of the egg and struck the housing of one of the bar's few gas lamps.

In seconds, it became a conflagration.

Whether my friend escaped, or the bartender, I do not know. I did not look back. I returned to my rooms only to secure my passport, and within a week, I had crossed the border into the northern territories of the Republic of Mexico.

If my friend did escape, I cannot doubt that he pursues me still.

If he did not, then I suppose it is his ghost that brings my dreams of Odile, that pursues me day and night even into the most silent of silent places.

Either way, he will have me soon. The silence fills with whispers. Guns are easy to come by in San Antonio. It will not be long.