Act of God

to work and able to write a decent lead. Bissington, he sat me down one day, and he said to me, he said, ‘Mr. Katzen’—he was a real formal guy, John, all the younger men Mr. this, all the women, younger or older, Miss this or Mrs. that. Anyway, Bissington, he says, ‘Mr. Katzen, someday this will happen to you. Someday you will be in need of a column, a story, a bylined article, whatever’—he didn’t say ‘whatever,’ John, that’s just me, giving you the sense of it—and he looked at me and he said, ‘Mr. Katzen, I stand before you, bereft of ideas. Provide me one.’ Not ‘provide me with one.’ Oh no, Bissington was a stickler. But he was dry, John, pumped dry of ideas, and I was so taken back—taken ‘aback,’ Bissington would say—that I couldn’t think of one. Not one idea, and me an energetic young man at the start of a promising career. So Bissington said to me, he said, ‘Mr. Katzen, then I shall have to stoop, stoop, to reading the...’—and Bissington paused, John, and he made a face you wouldn’t want to see over a meal. Then he finished by saying, ‘... the class -i-fieds.’ I tell you, all things considered, it was not a pretty scene.”
    “I can imagine. Why—”
    “Imagine? Imagi -nation, that’s the problem, John. To get a new idea, you have to have imagination, an imagination, some imagination. Well, I got to tell you, I’m all out. Not that there haven’t been plenty of newsworthy events. Last Wednesday, we had those three honor students killed in the drunk driving thing on Route 2. That night the North Shore woman supposedly lost overboard from a sailboat turns up tied and weighted down next to some lobsterman’s traps. And then Friday, that airliner heading from here to D.C. hits the flock of geese down there, crashes, and kills half the people on board. Picture that, John, a flock of birds. I got a friend on the state police I can call on the students thing, another friend in the Coast Guard on the woman, and a contact over at Logan in the agency investigates air crashes. Great stories all, John, but they’ve been covered, every last one. And now I’m like Bissington. One toe in the grave, and pumped dry of ideas. So I’m stooping, stooping to reading the... class -i-fieds.”
    Katzen passed his hand over the pages he’d been holding when I came in, so much like Cross’s gesture with the case file that I felt for him. “I don’t get it, Mo. ”
    “Don’t get what?”
    “How do the classifieds help you?”
    “How? How? You just got to read them. Look.”
    Or listen, as Mo picked up the paper and traced with his now-dead-again cigar down a column. “Here, here’s one. ‘For sale or trade, four polar-bear rugs. Skins dingy, but all teeth, claws, and’—I love this, John—’eyes in good shape.’ Now, you see what I mean?”
    “There’s a story in that ad.”
    “There’s got to be a story. Who the hell has four polar-bear skins? How’d they get them? Where’ve they been? What are the chances of other ones being out there? It’s like that, all through the ads. Oh, you’re going to have ninety, ninety-five percent duds, but then that one comes up for you, and boom, you’ve got your idea.”
    “And you’re no longer bereft.”
    Mo aimed his cigar at me. “Somehow, that doesn’t sound too good coming from a man your age, John.”
    “Sorry, Mo. Listen, I was wondering—”
    “I mean, a man your age shouldn’t be bereft of anything except the foolishness of youth. That’s a quote, too—from somebody else, not Bissington—though it wouldn’t surprise me much, he was to have said it back when I knew him.”
    “He probably did. Mo—”
    “You knew Bissington?”
    “No, I—”
    “Of course you didn’t, you were born way too late. You shouldn’t do that, John.”
    “Do what, Mo?”
    “Try to confuse a tired old man like me. It makes us go off on tangents.”
    “Sorry, Mo. ”
    “That’s okay. Now, what brings you here?”
    “I’m working on a missing-person/murder case.”
    “I don’t get you. The missing person is dead, they’re not missing anymore, right?”
    “No, Mo—”
    “Unless, of course, somebody stole the body after the person dies, but then it’d be a ‘missing-body’ case, right?”
    “Right, Mo. I—”
    “You ever have one of those?”
    “One of...?”
    “A missing-body case.”
    “Not yet.”
    “The day will come, John. The day will come.”
    As all days do. “I was just wondering if you