By the light of the moon

Dylan had been at the deck
railing with Jilly no more than two minutes when this man arrived.
He brought cocktails on a small black-lacquered serving tray
featuring a lily-pad design formed by inlaid mother-of-pearl. A
pair of perfect dry martinis – stirred, not shaken.
    Slender but well conditioned, moving with the grace of a maitre de ballet and with the quiet self-assurance of one
who most likely had earned a black belt in tae kwon do, Ling might
have been thirty-five years old, but in his ebony-black eyes could
be glimpsed the wisdom of the ancients well distilled. As Jilly
took her martini from the lily-pad tray, and again as Dylan
accepted his, Ling bowed his head slightly and with a kind smile
spoke one word of Chinese to each of them, the same word twice,
which Jilly somehow knew was both a welcome and a wish for their
good fortune. Then Ling departed almost as discreetly as a ghost
dematerializing; had this been winter and had the deck been dusted
with snow, he might have left no footprints either coming or
going.
    This, too, was uncannily as it should be.
    While Jilly and Dylan enjoyed the perfect martinis and the view,
Shepherd remained in the living room behind them. He'd found a
corner to his liking, where he might stand for an hour or two,
sensory input limited to the contemplation of wall meeting
wall.
    The French have a saying – Plus ça change, plus
c'est la même chose – which means 'The more things
change, the more they remain the same.' Shepherd, as he stood now
in the corner, embodied the comedy and the tragedy of that truth.
He represented both the frustration and the graceful acceptance
that it suggested, but defined as well the melancholy beauty in
those words.
    Considering that Parish's nationally syndicated radio program
was heard on over five hundred stations six nights a week, Monday
through Saturday, he would ordinarily have been at work as twilight
cast its purple veils across the lake. In a state-of-the-art studio
in the basement of the house, he could take calls from some of his
ten million listeners and from his interview subjects, and with the
assistance of Ling and an engineer, he could conduct his show. The
actual production facility remained in San Francisco, where
call-ins were screened and patched through to him, and where the
combined audio feeds were filtered and enhanced for
all-but-instantaneous rebroadcast.
    This Saturday night, however, as on the first night following
injection with Proctor's stuff , Parish would forego the
usual live broadcast and run instead a best-of program from his
archives.
    Shortly before they were expected to join their host for dinner,
Jilly said to Dylan, 'I'm going to call my mom. I'll be right
back.'
    Leaving her empty martini glass on the deck railing, she folded
to a shadowy corner of the gardens at the back of the Peninsula
hotel in Beverly Hills. Her arrival went unnoticed.
    She could have folded anywhere to make the call, but she liked
the Peninsula. This hotel was the five-star quality she had hoped
one day to be able to afford if her career as a comedian had taken
off.
    At a pay phone inside, she fed change to the slot and keyed in
the familiar number.
    Her mother answered on the third ring. Recognizing Jilly's
voice, she blurted: 'Are you all right, baby girl, are you hurt,
what's happened to you, sugar – Sweet Jesus keep you safe
– where are you?'
    'Relax, Mom. I'm fine. I wanted to let you know that I'm not
going to be able to see you for a week or two, but I'll figure out
a way for us to get together soon.'
    'Jilly girl, since the church, people been here from the TV,
from the newspapers, all of them as rude as any welfare bureaucrat
on a dry-cracker diet. Fact is, they're out in the street right
now, with all their noise and satellite trucks, littering with
their filthy cigarettes and their granola-bar wrappers. Rude, rude,
rude.'
    'Don't talk to any of them, Mom. As far as you know, I'm
dead.'
    'Don't you say such a terrible thing!'
    'Just don't tell anyone you've heard from me. I'll explain all
this later. Listen, Mom, some big, tough-looking dudes are going to
come around soon. They'll say they're with the FBI or somesuch, but
they'll be lying. You just play dumb. Be nice as pie with them,
pretend to be worried sick about me, but don't give them a
clue.'
    'Well, I'm just a one-eyed, two-cane, poor-as-dirt, ignorant,
big-assed simpleton, after all. Who could expect me to know
anything about anything?'
    'Love you to