Life Expectancy

nitroglycerin on the point of a sword, never complicate the task by trying to tap dance.
        Although I realized that he might read the truth of our feelings in our silence, I could find neither my voice nor anything to say.
        Not for the first time and certainly not for the last, Lorrie saved our skin: "Would it even begin to be an adequate expression of our gratitude if we named our first son Konrad?"
        I thought this offer would strike him as pure sycophancy and that he would be offended by her obvious attempt to manipulate him. I was wrong. She had struck the perfect note.
        In the backwash of the flashlight beams, Punchinello's eyes visibly misted with emotion. He bit his lower lip.
        "That's so sweet," he said. "So kind. I can't think of anything that would please my father, the great Konrad Beezo, more than to know that the grandson of Rudy Tock was named after him."
        Lorrie greeted this response with a radiant smile that Leonardo da Vinci would have given his left foot to paint. "There all that remains to make me and Jimmy happy is if you would agree to be our baby's godfather."
        When in the presence of a prince of madness, safety lies, if anywhere, in presenting yourself as a member of that same royal family.
        More lip biting preceded his emotional reply: "I understand the obligation. I'll be little Konrad's protector. Anyone who ever wrongs him will answer to me."
        "You can't know," Lorrie told him, "what comfort that gives to a mother."
        Not as though issuing an order, more as though he were a friend seeking help, he asked us to take the handcart through the rambling historical mansion to the front door. I pushed the cart, and Lorrie picked out the route with a flashlight.
        Punchinello followed us with a flashlight in one hand and the pistol in the other.
        I didn't want him behind my back. I had no choice. If I had hesitated, he might have accelerated through one of his hairpin mood turns.
        "You know what's ironic?" he asked.
        "Yeah-that I was worried about going to the dry cleaner."
        He had no interest in my irony: "What's ironic is that as bad as I am at clown craft I'm that good at walking a wire, and I'm at home on a trapeze."
        Lorrie said, "You inherited your mother's talent."
        "And secretly took some training," he admitted as we passed from the kitchen through a butler's pantry into a grand dining room. "If I could have put half the time into those instructions as I put into clowning, I'd have been a star."
        "You're still young," Lorrie said. "It's not too late."
        "No. Even if I sold my soul for the chance, I could not become one of them, never an aerialist. Virgilio Vivacemente is the living god of aerialists and knows them all. If I performed, he would hear of me. He would come to see me. He would recognize my mother's face in mine, and he would kill me."
        "Maybe he'd embrace you," Lorrie suggested.
        "Never. To him, my blood is tainted. He would kill me, dismember me, marinate my remains in gasoline, burn them, urinate on the ashes, put the wet ashes in a bucket, take them to a farm, and stir them into the muddy wallow in the corner of a pigpen."
        "Maybe you're overestimating his villainy," I suggested as we followed a narrow hall to a wider one.
        "He's done that very thing before," Punchinello assured me. "He is an arrogant beast. He claims that he is descended from Caligula, the mad emperor of ancient Rome."
        Having seen Punchinello in action, I couldn't argue against the proposition that he might come from such lineage.
        He sighed. "That's why I've decided to throw my life away in a frenzy of vengeance. Might as well die if I can't fly."
        A grand staircase swept up into gloom from the lavishly detailed foyer.
        An inlaid black granite and terra-cotta floor depicted toga-clad figures and mythological beings reminiscent of images on ancient Grecian urns.
        Our sweeping flashlight beams imparted an illusion of movement to the scenes and the processions underfoot, as if these populations lived in a two-dimensional world as real as our realm of three.
        A brief dizziness spiraled through me, related less to the patterned floor, I suspect, than to a further delayed reaction to the murders of the two men in the kitchen. In addition, I felt unsteady because I recalled my premonition