Simon was tired. They had buried Maurice on Friday. Only then had Simon discovered the number of friends Maurice had made over the years. He had seemed very much a solitary man, living in his big empty house. No family. A life given to a cause. "Let me be a caution to you," Maurice would say to Simon these last couple of years. And when Katarina had divorced him ( You are married to that old man, not me! in Russian accented Hebrew) Maurice had gotten very serious about those warnings. Then the shock of discovering that Maurice had left Simon the house and a little inheritance, and here Simon was, playing dutiful son at the memorial service while Brahms' Sextet played discreetly over the sound system. Across a room crowded with mourners, Simon saw the girl appear in the doorway: Lucy Brown, inappropriately dressed in a t-shirt and jeans. In the foyer behind her was a black man. Simon excused himself and went to the door. "It wasn't an accident, was it?" she said. "No. Murdered. Like your cousin." "Jesus," the black man said. Lucy said, "Did he ever talk about a--" "Gun," Simon said. "Yes. The Jeb Stuart gun." "What?" He shrugged. "He mentioned it one time. He said this old friend Lucky had a gun, 'the Jeb Stuart gun.' We assumed you knew more." "Who the hell is Jeb Stuart?" her friend said. Lucy cut her eyes in his direction. "What did I say?" The friend gestured around the room, at the candles, the flowers, the hushed murmur of Maurice's mourners. "Lucy, this ain't really the time ..." "Yeah." She turned to go. Moved by some obscure impulse, Simon said, "You're being careful?" "Oh yeah," Lucy said. She looked back over her shoulder at the mourners. "I don't want to be the star of one of these."
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