Crocodile Wince, a liqueur made from figs and almonds, is something I haven't sampled since I was a student at Noyamasho University. Half a glass of it is sufficient to remind me why. Some habits you have to make a conscious effort to grow out of -- at least if you want to have any chance of reaching old age in a reasonable state of repair. Still, I feel under pressure to match Kitty drink for drink.
        By the time I've escaped from the Volcano Room, I'm too drunk to drive safely. I sit in my car contemplating the options. How about phoning Yendo Help Drivers? Good idea, but I don't think I have the cash. Pay by credit card? I'm worried about this month's credit card debt as it is.
        I wish, now, that I'd taken Kitty's envelope. But that way lies disaster. And, even if I'd decided to sell out the Udamana clan, I'd need more money than Kitty had in that envelope.
        Even if?
        "If?" I say, aloud. "Where did the if come from?"
        Then close my mouth, wondering if my car might be bugged.
        Okay. Walk home? No. It's a real hike from the city center and, besides, the rain has started up again. A taxi? No. I should try not to blow holes in my budget unless I really have to. A bus is not impossible. But I hate public transport, which all too often seems to involve sitting next to some crazy person whose stream of consciousness line is plugged straight into a sewer. And catching a bus all too often means waiting at a bus stop for a bus that never comes.
        I'm almost drunk enough to put the car in gear and drive off into the future, disregarding the possibility of having an accident or getting myself pulled over by the police and arrested. What stops me is the fact that I dressed up so impeccably for today's power lunch. If I'd dressed down then quite possibly I would have "done a Molo", to quote one of Tanto's pet phrases, and would have driven home drunk, and the hell with the consequences.
        In the end, I set my cellphone's alarm for 3 p.m. and nod off in the car.
        When the alarm duly awakens me, I find the rain has eased to a negligible drizzle and the roads are fairly clear.
        By the time I park the car in the garage in front of the Older House, it has stopped raining entirely. I walk through the grounds of Perturbations Lodge to the Moss Mansion. As I come through the gate, I hear the phone downstairs ringing. But the phone stops as I get to the verandah.
        "Damn," I say.
        That's when I notice the skull sitting on a saucer on the verandah's weathered wooden boards. The skull of a bird. I stoop and pick it up. It is an old skull, light and fragile, long ago picked clean of any evidence of organic life. I turn it over, thoughtfully.
        This is anomalous.
        A threat?
        One or two generations earlier, a skull showing up in this manner might have been taken as a definite threat. A token of a blood feud, a feud to the death. But in today's Nizon we have long since given up the traditions of the blood feud. Feuding is something that belongs in one of those garish comic books that Tanto loves to read.
        So perhaps this bird skull was left by one of Tanto's melodramatic friends. A kid's stunt. But, no, Tanto's friends wouldn't be so subtle. A bottle crashing through a window would be their idea of a gleeful stunt.
        I pick up the saucer, which is old, chipped and painted with a faded pattern of carnations. The kind of thing you could buy for next to nothing in a junk shop. Or, alternatively, the kind of thing you could invest in (if you had investment money) in one of Yendo's antique shops. (Change the sign from "junk shop" to "antique shop" and the price rockets upwards, driven by an abstruse logic that I've certainly never been able to understand.)
        Now, question: does the cryptic skull relate to yesterday's cryptic letter? Viewed alone, that missive, which concludes by telling me to "Go and visit your mother", rather looks like a message of menace. And, in combination with the bird skull, it definitely looks like a threat. But what kind of threat? It would be nice if someone could give me a phone call to explain what's going on.
        As I'm thinking this, a phone starts to ring inside. Not the downstairs phone but my office phone, upstairs. I try the front door. It is not locked. I enter the house, and, as I step into the living room, the upstairs phone goes dead.
        I listen to the house, trying to figure out who is home.
        "Iola?"
        No wifely answer. I can hear the hum of the refrigerator from the kitchen. And, from the master bedroom, Melshu's snoring. Over the last few months, Melshu has been spending more and more of the daylight hours asleep, but we still hear him snoring through the night.
        Then the phone upstairs starts ringing again, and I hurry up the stairs to get the call.
        "Udamana here," I say.
        "Yeah," says the caller, sounding excited, flustered, made breathless as if by fear or panic. "The deal's off! Got that? You can't do a deal with the Zeast woman."
        It's disorienting, being gabbled at in this manner without anything by the way of preamble or explanation.
        "Strom," I say, picking the voice. "Strom, is that you?"
        The person on the phone stops talking and all I hear is heavy breathing, fast and uneven. What Tanto, back in the days when he was a little kid, used to call "rhinoceros tree breathing", meaning the way you'd sound if a rhinoceros had just chased you up a tree, an event which, at the age of nine or thereabouts, used to be one of Tanto's ongoing fantasies.
        "Udamana," says a new voice on the phone, male, deeper.
        There are two different people on the line. What is this? Some kind of conference call?
        "Speaking," I say. "Who are you and what are you doing hanging out with Strom?"
        "Nobody called Strom here," says the new voice, deep as a big black beard, massively male. "Just a message here. We've bought the land. We've paid the cash. What are you fooling at, talking with the Zeast woman? You mess with our deal and we'll mess with your head. Head, face, scalp, skull. Disaster squad time. Is that clear?"
        This might be scary except for the fact that it's gabbling nonsense. I'm the only person authorized to do a deal over the Udamana lands, and the first necessary step would have to be the dissolution of the Udamana Zekotalora Trust. Which hasn't happened yet.
        Unless ...
        Unless Mitodarni has forged my seal and signature on the necessary paperwork.
        "Who are you?" I say. "What makes you think you've bought our land? Who did you give money to? We need to sit down for a meeting!"
        "You have been warned," says the stranger. "Back off while you still have a face."
        And he rings off.
        I open my day planner, which is lying on the desk next to the typewriter, which is still draped with yesterday's "Go and visit your mother" letter and the envelope in which it came, both now dry. I flip to the "Notes" section and make a record of the time and content of the call.
        The second man I can't identify at all, but it's hard to shake the suspicion that the first one, the gabbler, was our steward Strom, or, to give him the glory of his full name, Kentruck Stromothard Pelagresi.
        "Strom," I say, with a flare of genuine anger, "I'm going to eat you alive."
        And I call his cellphone number. Switched off or out of range. I phone the Yaplama, where the call is answered (eventually) by Cousin Po, who is keen to know how my meeting with Kitty went. Nothing finalized yet, I tell him. Then ask about Strom. Strom went gone home sick early in the morning, and has been gone all day.
        I phone Strom at home, at the ramshackle cottage out on Ichatrak, the place that Strom calls the Larded Rabbit. The phone is engaged. Well, this is not going to keep. I'm going to drive round right now, confront Strom, and shake the answer out of him. Verbally or physically. Whatever it takes.