The Dogfather

wine we’d drunk, and it wouldn’t exactly be a noble deed to send the leftovers to Guarini with a self-righteous little letter (“I cannot accept your gifts, but I’ve already eaten and drunk half, so here’s the rest!”) Still, I could rid myself of what remained. My two big dogs, of course, offered a convenient means to dispose of the meat. In fact, I put them in my bedroom before dumping the leftover steak into a plastic bag and taking it out to the trash. The unopened bottles of wine went to the cellar, where they’d sit until I donated them as auction items at the annual Camp N Pack weekend of the Alaskan Malamute Rescue of New England (Visit us on the web! www.amrone.org ). I rinsed out the empty bottles and disposed of them outdoors in the recycling bin under the back steps. As penance, I then e-mailed four people who’d applied to adopt dogs from Alaskan Malamute Rescue and were impossible candidates. It’s fun to reply to promising prospects. I picked the four least promising applicants, people with scads of cats, rabbits, and toddlers, no experience with big dogs, no kennels, and no fenced yards.
    Then I cut Tracker’s nails, got scratched, vacuumed, took a shower using antibacterial soap, and finally took Rowdy on leash to the smooth surface of my driveway to engage in my personal form of prayer: the merging of canine and human souls that occurs in the pursuit of flawless heeling. Heeling is alpha and omega; it’s where dog training begins and ends. Good heeling does not require concentration; it is concentration. You and your dog are so lost in each other that your spiritual oneness becomes a miraculous unity of motion: You move as one.
    The prayerful nature of dog obedience training is not always immediately apparent to those of conventional religious persuasions. Upon spotting a dog such as Rowdy, for example, and a person such as myself, the luckless individual who dwells in dogless ignorance and sees but through a glass, darkly, is all too likely to blurt out, “For God’s sake, that woman must be crazy! She’s spitting at her dog!” Cheddar cheese, in case you wondered.
    To the credit of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, let me hasten to add that its agents, Victor Deitz and John Mazolla, may have sensed the spiritual nature of Rowdy’s and my endeavor. Or so I like to imagine. This was, after all, Sunday morning. What I know is that the blurt-free, indeed speechless, men stood in my driveway with eyes so wide and mouths so open that I was tempted to ask whether they wanted some cheddar, too.
    Our worship service having been interrupted, Rowdy and I turned our attention to the two men, who seemed to be in their mid-thirties and were short-haired, clean cut, and thus identifiable as probable non-Cantabrigians. Mormons? The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has a big facility on Brattle Street and sends lots of young Mormons here from Utah to try to convert the rest of us. I sometimes wonder what horrible crimes these innocent-looking missionaries have committed back home to get stuck serving out their long sentences in Harvard Square. Baptist fundamentalists would have an easier time making converts in Beirut than the Mormons probably do in this multicultural hotbed of caffeine-addicted feminist intellectuals. Not that religion is dead here. On the contrary, Cambridge is filled with people who’ve been Born Again: They’ve accepted John Harvard as their personal savior.
    Or maybe the two men weren’t Mormons after all. They just stood there. The Mormons were always friendly and polite.
    “Are you lost?” I asked, meaning geographically, not spiritually, in other words, “Hey, this is 02138, the notorious Dip Zip, and no one as conventional as the two of you could possibly have come here on purpose.”
    That’s when Victor Deitz, as he proved to be, asked whether 1 was Holly Winter. Having said that I was, I naturally expected him to tell me that his dog refused to come when called or was afflicted with submissive urination, so just as naturally I was surprised when he said, “Victor Deitz,” and pointing to his companion, “John Mazolla. FBI.”
    Deitz was a short, hard-muscled, Nordic-looking man with pale hazel-blue eyes and white-blond hair clipped to a uniform quarter of an inch all over his skull. Mazolla was a few inches taller than Deitz. His coloring was only slightly darker than Deitz’s. His eyes were blue, his hair light brown and neatly trimmed