The Cold Moon

comes barreling through, well, the results are going to be unpleasant.”
    “That makes sense.”
    Duncan turned away from the display. Vincent was hoping they’d leave now, go downtown and get Joanne. But Duncan walked across the room to a large case of thick glass. It was behind a velvet rope. A big guard stood next to it.
    Duncan stared at the object inside, a gold-and-silver box about two feet square, eight inches deep. The front was filled with a dozen dials that were stamped with spheres and pictures of what looked like the planets and stars and comets, along with numbers and weird letters and symbols, like in astrology. The box itself was carved with images too and was covered with jewels.
    “What is it?” Vincent asked.
    “The Delphic Mechanism,” Duncan explained. “It’s from Greece, more than fifteen hundred years old. It’s on tour around the world.”
    “What does it do?”
    “Many things. See those dials there? They calculate the movement of the sun and moon and planets.” He glanced at Vincent. “It actually shows the earth and planets moving around the sun, which was revolutionary, and heretical, for the time—a thousand years before Copernicus’s model of the solar system. Amazing.”
    Vincent remembered something about Copernicus from high school science—though what he remembered most was a girl in the class, Rita Johansson. The recollection he enjoyed most was of the pudgy brunette, late one autumn afternoon, lying on her tummy in a field near the school, a burlap bag over her head, and saying in a polite voice, “Please, no, please don’t.”
    “And look at that dial,” Duncan said, interrupting Vincent’s very pleasant memory.
    “The silver one?”
    “It’s platinum. Pure platinum.”
    “That’s more valuable than gold, right?”
    Duncan didn’t answer. “It shows the lunar calendar. But a very special one. The Gregorian calendar—the one we use—has three hundred and sixty-five days and irregular months. The lunar calendar’s more consistent than the Gregorian—the months are always the same length. But they don’t correspond to the sun, which means that the lunar month that starts on, say, April fifth of this year will fall on a different day next year. But the Delphic Mechanism shows a lunisolar calendar, which combines the two. Ihate the Gregorian and the pure lunar.” There was passion in his voice. “They’re sloppy.”
    He hates them? Vincent was thinking.
    “But the lunisolar—it’s elegant, harmonious. Beautiful.”
    Duncan nodded at the face of the Delphic Mechanism. “A lot of people don’t believe it’s authentic because scientists can’t duplicate its calculations without computers. They can’t believe that somebody built such a sophisticated calculator that long ago. But I’m convinced it’s real.”
    “Is it worth a lot?”
    “It’s priceless.” After a moment he added, “There’ve been dozens of rumors about it—that it contained answers to the secrets of life and the universe.”
    “You think that?”
    Duncan continued to stare at the light glistening off the metal. “In a way. Does it do anything supernatural? Of course not. But it does something important: It unifies time. It helps us understand that it’s an endless river. The Mechanism doesn’t treat a second any differently than it does a millennium. And somehow it was able to measure all of those intervals with nearly one hundred percent accuracy.” He pointed at the box. “The ancients thought of time as a separate force, sort of a god itself, with powers of its own. The Mechanism is an emblem of that view, you could say. I think we’d all be better off looking at time that way: how a single second can be as powerful as a bullet or knife or bomb. It can affect events a thousand years in the future. Can change them completely.”
    The great scheme of things . . .
    “That’s something.”
    Though Vincent’s tone must have revealed that he didn’t share Duncan’s enthusiasm.
    But this was apparently all right. The killer looked at his pocket watch. He gave a rare laugh. “You’ve had enough of my crazy rambling. Let’s go visit our flower girl.”

    Patrolman Ron Pulaski’s life was this: his wife and children, his parents and twin brother, his three-bedroom detached house in Queens and the small pleasures of cookouts with buddies and their wives (he made his own barbecue sauce and salad dressings), jogging, scraping together babysittermoney and sneaking