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By Root 524 0

some other officers, the talk very merrie but bawdy as many of the companie were cannon-maistres lately come from the Dutch warres. Such talk lyked me well for I yearned to be familiar with these artes & pressed them to answer my questions viz. how to site a gonne for best advauntage in the field, how to best aim to strake your marke, the divers sortes & qualities of poudre, how to mix & preserve it, & how to know how farre distant be your marke. This laste put them at a stande for they contended amongst them, one sayde by truste of eye another sayde nay by tryal of fire, looking close where the ball fell at everie shotte adding or taking away of poudre & also changing this according to the heate of the gonne as the day spent, for a hot gonne will throw farther of the same charge.

So I asked why they did not use the methode of triangles & sines & at this they were amazed haveing not heard aught of this beforre. Soe I drew a little picture shewing how a gonners quadrant, a square & a yard-sticke could be soe used to take the distance from one point to another far offe. They had to see & trye this methode without delay & I arranged all & tried to a distant tree & wee paced it out after & they were greately pleazed thereby how it accorded with my figures. Then a bigge heartie man Thomas Keane clapped my shoulder saying lad I would make a true gonner of you, be you ever wearie of making gonnes you can come with mee as matrosse to the warre & shoote them at Spaniardes, for a matrosse you know is a gonneres holpe. Soe I thanked hym kindlie but sayde I had no thought of warre then, how little we know Lord of youre devizynges or youre werkes.

5

To my credit, I suppose, I did not immediately race back to the office after the two detectives left. I finished my normal routine at the gym and took a shower and had a steam before returning. In the car, I admit I was not as engaged as I usually am with Omar's conversation. Omar worries a little obsessively about our involvement in Iraq and in general about the relations between his adopted nation and the Islamic world. His experience in this city after 9/11 has not been pleasant. This particular morning, as the radio murmured the latest bad news, and Omar put in his comments, the only atrocity that engaged me was the grim fate of my late client, Bulstrode. Could he actually have found a document that led to an invaluable manuscript? And had someone killed him to find out where said document was? There followed the even less pleasant thought: torture meant a desire for information, and what information did Bulstrode have to give out but the name of the person to whom he had given his manuscript, which was me? I did not really know the man, but I did not consider for one second the possibility that when they put the pain on him he would be able to conceal the location of that fat envelope.

Again, as with the cops, the feeling of unreality, the slipping into the forms established by fiction. Shortly after I graduated from college, that being still the era of the draft, and not being the resistant type, I yielded to the inevitable and volunteered myself (virtually alone among my graduating class I believe) as a draftee. They made me into a medic rather than an infantryman, and I ended up in the Twelfth Evac Hospital in Cu Chi, in South Vietnam. Unlike my S.S. grandfather, I was an entirely undistinguished soldier, being what was then known as a rear-area-motherfucker, or white mouse, but I did see an ammo dump spectacularly explode after being hit by an enemy rocket, and I recall all the witnesses thereto, in order to validate the experience, repeatedly using the phrase “it was just like the movies.” Thus, although life is by and large unthrilling, when we do find ourselves in the sort of situation upon which thrillers dote we cannot really experience it, because our imaginations are occupied by the familiar tropes of popular fiction. And the result of this is a kind of dull bafflement, and the sense that whatever it is cannot really be happening. We actually think that phrase: