Mortal Fear. Greg Iles

is remarkably literate.”

      “Fuck you, Doctor. Ever read Faulkner? Thomas Harris?”

      “I meant for a serial murderer, Mr. Cole. No need to get defensive.”

      A soft knock sounds at the door. I look over quickly, half expecting Miles. When the door opens, a slender woman with cinnamon skin enters soundlessly and places a silver tea service on Lenz’s desk. The sweating pink Tab can looks incongruous on the gleaming tray. Without meeting my eyes she offers me a glass of ice, but I take only the can, pop the top, and drink half the contents in a few long swallows. Her black eyes rise to mine with disapproval. I try for a moment to guess her race but find myself at a loss. Living in Mississippi doesn’t give you much practice for this. There it’s either black or white, with a smattering of Vietnamese, Chinese, Lebanese, and Hispanic.

      Lenz watches the dark woman pour his tea without comment. After she exits, he says, “Why don’t we leave sex and violence for a moment?”

      “Fine.”

      “Do you earn a lot of money?”

      “Making money’s not a crime yet, is it?”

      “Were your parents wealthy?”

      I lie back on the couch and focus on the stained ceiling tiles. “My mother grew up on a farm that didn’t have electricity until she was fourteen years old. She picked cotton with her own hands all the way through college. In case you don’t know, wealthy people don’t pick cotton.”

      “Is money important to you?”

      “Is that a serious question?”

      “Your friend Mr. Turner seems to think you place an inordinate value on it.”

      “He talked to you about me?”

      “A bit.”

      I lean up on one elbow. “Tell me one thing he told you.”

      “He told me you keep a cache of gold buried beneath your land.”

      “That lying son of a bitch.”

      “It’s not true?”

      “About the gold? Yeah, it’s true. My grandfather Grant put in a nuclear bomb shelter at the farm during the Fifties. Some company was traveling through Mississippi selling plans. Big concrete bastard sunk into the ground. I keep some gold there.”

      “Why?”

      I lie back down and think for several moments. “I was raised by people who grew up during the Depression. I think the memory of that time stayed so real to my parents that it somehow entered me. Not the physical deprivation, but the knowledge that it could actually happen. That the whole social and financial structure of this country could implode and leave nothing but hungry and confused people.”

      “You feel anxiety about something similar happening again?”

      “I work in financial markets, Doctor. Most of the guys I know in Chicago have no real conception of the Depression. They know the word, but the only mental reference point they have is 1987, and that was over in a couple of days. They leverage positions to the moon, trade derivatives they don’t understand, tear apart companies in a day that took decades to build, and don’t see any farther than next week’s paycheck. You’re asking me if I think it could happen again? You should be asking when.”

      “This hoarded gold is insurance against some sort of final collapse?”

      “Laugh if you want. Ask the Russians how important gold is right this minute.”

      “Well, given these apocalyptic feelings, you seem like the last man in the world who’d be playing a game as risky as futures trading.”

      “I don’t mind risk. Because I’m not playing a game.”

      “What do you mean?”

      “No one who trades commodities has any intention of taking delivery of anything they buy or sell. It’s all a paper illusion, a numbers game. Until that fatal margin call, anyway. One day I decided I’d take delivery on something, just to find out if any of it was real. I’d heard of an old guy in Baton Rouge who took delivery of a truckload of soybeans for the same reason. I chose gold. They delivered it, too. And right now it’s locked in the bottom of that bomb shelter next to some forty-year-old cans of Spam.”

      “Remarkable.”

      “What does that tell you about me? Paranoia’s in my genes? I’ve always known that. I consider it a Darwinian advantage.”

      “Is paranoia the reason a man of your youth and wealth chooses to live in such an isolated place?”

      I raise my hands as if echoing his question.

      “Let’s try another tack. Why did you wait so long to go into the career for which you seem so singularly suited?”

      “I don’t know.”

      Lenz’s voice swings back at me like a pendulum. “I’m sure you do.”

      “Does everybody with a green thumb run out and become a gardener?”

      He folds his notepad shut and leans back in his chair. “Let’s say a man is a gifted mathematician. He may not choose mathematics as his career, but he will likely choose a related field, such as architecture or engineering.”

      “I didn’t.”

      “Of course you did. Music is fundamentally a mathematical art.”

      “That’s what I’ve always heard. Usually from people who don’t know diddly about music.”

      “What do you mean?”

      “Sure, you can break music down into mathematics. Classical music, especially. But Doctor, I’ve sat on the porches of tar-paper shacks with guys playing stuff … you wouldn’t believe it. Old arthritic black guys playing out-of-tune guitars and just effortlessly bending the notes into tune, playing with their eyes shut and it didn’t matter anyway ’cause they couldn’t read a note. They play between the numbers, man. And that’s just blues. Think about jazz. Music is math, what a load of crap.”

      “You’re a romantic, Cole.”

      “Music is romantic.”

      “Not all music.”

      “Mine is. The music of my generation, and the one before. Somebody—Oscar Wilde, I think—said that when trying to describe the act of love, humans have two choices, the language of science or the language of the gutter, both of which are inadequate. But rock and roll split the difference. That’s why it endures. It says the unsayable. Rage, angst, alienation, a dozen emotions. But the core of it is sex, Doctor. Sex, love, and obsession.”

      “An interesting thesis.”

      “That’s no thesis. It’s just life.”

      “I’d like to get back to your family for a moment.”

      “Did we ever leave?”

      “Your father was a physician. How did that affect you, growing up?”

      “I never had any anxiety about what my dad did for a living. ‘What does your dad do? He’s a doctor.’ End of conversation.”

      “Negatives?”

      I think a moment. “He wasn’t home a lot of the time. And when he was, it could be weird. I remember times I cut my legs, needed stitches, stuff like that. I’d run in the house yelling, he’d be watching the Saints play or something. He’d take a look through all the blood, then send me off with my mom to clean it up while he waited for the end of the first half. Then we’d finally go down to his office and sew it up. That bugged me when I was young. But I guess it taught me something too. A lot of injuries that look bad aren’t, really. No need to panic, you know?

      “What else?”