"We got together last month," he said. "At Keens Chophouse on West Thirty-sixth Street. That's where we've been holding our dinners ever since Cunningham's closed in the early seventies. They give us the same room every year. It's on the second floor, and it looks like a private library. The walls are lined with bookshelves and portraits of somebody's ancestors. There's a fireplace, and they lay a fire for us, not that that's what you necessarily want in May. It's nice for atmosphere, though.

"We've been going there for twenty years. Keens almost went under, you know, just when we were beginning to settle in there. That would have been tragic, the place is a New York institution. But they survived. They're still there, and, well, so are we." He paused, considered. "Some of us," he said.

His glass of Courvoisier was on the table in front of him. He still hadn't taken a sip. From time to time he would reach for the small snifter, letting his hand cup the bowl, taking the stem between his thumb and forefingers, moving the glass a few inches this way or that.

He said, "At last month's dinner, it was announced that two of our members had died in the preceding twelve months. Frank DiGiulio had suffered a fatal heart attack in September, and then in February Alan Watson was stabbed to death on his way home from work. So we've had two deaths in the past year. Does that seem significant to you?"

"Well…"

"Of course not. We're of an age when death happens. What significance could one possibly attach to two deaths within a twelve-month period?" He took the glass by its stem, gave it a quarter-turn clockwise. "Consider this, then. In the past seven years, nine of us have died."

"That seems a little high."

"And that's in the past seven years. Earlier, we'd already lost eight men. Matt, there are only fourteen of us left."

Homer Champney had told them he'd probably be the first to go. "And that's as it should be, boys. That's the natural order of things. But I hope I'll be with you for a little while, at least. To get to know you, and to see you all off to a good start."

As it turned out, the old man lasted well into his ninety-fourth year. He never missed the annual dinner, remaining physically fit and mentally alert to the very end.

Nor was he the first of their number to die. The group's first two anniversaries were unmarked by death, but in 1964 they spoke the name and marked the passing of Philip Kalish, killed with his wife and infant daughter three months earlier in a car crash on the Long Island Expressway.

Two years later James Severance was killed in Vietnam. He'd missed the previous year's dinner, his reserve unit having been recalled to active duty, and members had joked that an Asian war was a pretty lame excuse for breaking such a solemn commitment. The following May, when they read his name along with Phil Kalish's, you could almost hear last year's jokes echoing hollowly against the paneled walls.

In March of '69, less than two months before the annual dinner, Homer Champney died in his sleep. "If there comes a day when you don't see me by nine in the morning," he'd instructed the staff at his residential hotel, "ring my suite, and if I don't pick up then come check on me." The desk clerk made the call and had a bellman take over the desk while he went up to Champney's rooms himself. When he found what he'd feared, he called the old man's nephew.

That nephew in turn made the calls his uncle had instructed him to make. On the list were the twenty-eight surviving members of the club of thirty-one. Champney was leaving nothing to chance. He wanted to make sure everyone knew he was gone.

The funeral was at Campbell's, and it was the first club funeral Lewis Hildebrand had attended. The overall turnout was small. Champney had outlived his contemporaries, and his nephew— a great-nephew, actually, some fifty years Champney's junior— was his only surviving relative in the New York area. Besides Hildebrand, the contingent of mourners included half a dozen other members of the thirty-one.

Afterward, he joined several of them for a drink. Bill Ludgate, a printing salesman, said, "Well, this is the first of these I've been to, and it's going to be the last. In a couple of weeks we'll be all together at Cunningham's, and Homer'll have his name read with the others, and I guess we'll talk about him. And that's enough. I don't think we should go to members' funerals. I don't think it's our place."

"I felt I wanted to be here today," someone said.

"We all did or we wouldn't be here. But I talked to Frank DiGiulio the other day and he said he wasn't coming, that he didn't think it was appropriate. And now I've decided I agree with him. You know, back when this thing first got rolling, there were a few members I used to see socially. A lunch now and then, or drinks after work, or even getting together with the wives for dinner and a movie. But I stopped doing that, and when I spoke to Frank I realized it was the first conversation I'd had with any of the group since dinner last May."

"Don't you like us anymore, Bill?"

"I like you all just fine," he said, "but I find myself inclined to keep things separate. Hell, I haven't even been to Cunningham's since the last get-together. I don't know how many times someone'll suggest it for lunch or dinner, and I always make sure we wind up someplace else instead. 'Oh, I'd rather not,' I told a fellow just last week. 'I had a bad meal last time I was there. The place isn't what it used to be.' "

"Jesus, Billy," somebody said, "have a heart, huh? You're gonna put them out of business."

"Well, I'd hate to see that happen," he said, "but do you see what I mean? Once a year's enough for me. I like having thirty guys that I only see once a year, in a place I only go to once a year."

"That's twenty-seven guys now, twenty-eight including yourself."

"So it is," he said gravely. "So it is. But you see my point, don't you? I'm not telling the rest of you what to do, and I love you one and all, but I'm not coming to your funerals."

"That's okay, Billy," Bob Ripley said. "We'll come to yours."

"Thirty men in 1961, ranging in age from twenty-two to thirty-two with a median age of twenty-six. Thirty-two years later, how many would you expect to find alive?"

"I don't know."

"Neither did I," Hildebrand said. "After the dinner last month I went home with a headache and tossed and turned all night. I woke up knowing something was very wrong. You've got a group of men in their late fifties and early sixties, you're going to have some losses. Death is going to start making in-roads.

"But it seemed to me we were way over the probabilities. My mind kept coming up with different explanations, and I decided the first thing to do was find out if my sense of things was accurate. So I called up a fellow I know who's always trying to sell me more life insurance and told him I had an actuarial problem for him. I ran the numbers for him and asked him what percentage of deaths you'd expect over that span of time in a group like that. He said he'd make a couple of calls and get back to me. Take a guess, Matt. How many deaths would you expect in a group of thirty?"

"I don't know. Eight or ten?"

"Four or five. There ought to be twenty-five of us left and instead we're down to fourteen. What does that say to you?"

"I'm not sure," I said, "but it certainly gets my attention. The first thing I'd do is ask your friend another question."

"That's just what I did. Tell me your question."

"I'd ask him to gauge the significance of a sample with three or four times the expected number of deaths."

He nodded. "That was my question, and he had to call somebody to find out. The answer that came back to me was that sixteen deaths out of thirty was remarkable, but it wasn't significant. Do you know what he meant by that?"

"No."

"According to him, the sample's too small for any result to be significant. We could have one hundred percent surviving or one hundred percent dying and it wouldn't really signify anything. Now if we had the same percentage in a substantially larger group, then it would mean something from an actuarial standpoint. See, actuaries like large numbers. The bigger the group, the more they can read into the statistics. If we had a hundred forty survivors in a group of three hundred, that would have some significance. Fourteen hundred out of three thousand, that would be even more significant. A hundred forty thousand out of three hundred thousand, that would begin to suggest that the sample was composed of people who lived in Chernobyl, or whose mothers took DES during pregnancy. It would really set the sirens wailing."

"I see."

"I've had some experience in direct-mail advertising. We tested everything. You have to. If we had a list of half a million names, and we did a test mailing to a thousand of those names, we knew we'd get the same response ratio within a point or two from the entire list. But we knew better than to send out a test mailing to thirty names, because the results wouldn't mean anything."

"Where does that leave you?"

"It leaves me impressed with the percentages, and never mind the size of the sample. I can't get past the fact that statistically we should have suffered four or five deaths and instead we took a hit three or four times as heavy. What do you make of it, Matt?"

I gave it some thought. "I don't know anything about statistics," I said.

"No, but you're an ex-cop and a detective. You must have instincts."

"I suppose I do."

"What do they tell you?"

"To look for special circumstances. You mentioned one man who died in Vietnam. Were there any other combat deaths?"

"No, just Jim Severance."

"How about AIDS?"

He shook his head. "We had two gay members, although I don't believe anybody knew they were gay when the chapter was founded. I wonder if that would have made a difference. In 1961? Yes, I'm sure it would have, and when we stood up and recounted the most interesting fact about ourselves at that first meeting, that particular fact went unmentioned. But later on both of the fellows saw fit to tell the group about their sexuality. I don't know when those revelations burst upon us, but we were still meeting at Cunningham's then, I remember that much, so it was quite a while ago. In any event, neither of them died of AIDS. Lowell Hunter very well may, in the course of time. He's told us that he's HIV-positive, but as of our meeting last month he was still completely asymptomatic. And Carl Uhl died in 1981, before anybody even heard the word 'AIDS.' I gather the disease existed then, but I certainly hadn't heard a thing about it. In any case, Carl was murdered."

"Oh?"

"They found him in his apartment in Chelsea. He lived just around the corner from Cunningham's, but of course Cunningham's was long gone by the time Carl was killed. I gather it was a sex killing, some sort of sadomasochistic game gone out of control. He was tied up and wearing handcuffs and a leather hood, and he'd been eviscerated and subjected to sexual mutilation. It's a hell of a world we live in, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"After I spoke to my insurance man, I spent a few nights sitting up late and trying to concoct explanations. The first, of course, is sheer chance. There might be long odds against such a high number of deaths, but any gambler will tell you that long shots come in all the time. In the long run you'll go broke betting on them, but what is it they say? In the long run we're all dead, which, when you stop and think of it, is one of the club's underlying principles." He picked up his glass, but he still didn't drink the damn thing. "Where was I?"

"Sheer chance."

"Yes. No way to rule it out, but I set it aside and looked for other explanations. One that occurred to me was that the group was composed of men with a strong predisposition toward early death. It seemed at least arguable that natural selection might have operated to steer such persons into our club. A person genetically destined for an early grave might be aware of his fate on some unconscious level, and might thus be more likely than the next fellow to accept an invitation to join a group preoccupied with death. I don't know whether or not I believe in fate, it probably depends when you ask me, but I certainly believe in genetic predisposition. So that's one possibility."

"Tell me some of the others."

"Well, another one that came to me is a little more mind-over-matter. It strikes me as possible that the club itself could have the effect of increasing its members' chances of dying young."

"How?"

"By focusing our attention on our own mortality to an unnatural degree. I'd hate to argue that a man can prolong his life by systematically denying his own mortality, but it's still possible that we can hasten the day by sitting around waiting for it, and getting together once a year to find out who caught the bus. I'm sure there's a part of me that longs for death, just as there's another part that wants to live forever. Maybe our meetings strengthen the death wish at the expense of the life urge. The mind-body connection is sufficiently established these days that even the doctors are grudgingly aware of it. People are vulnerable to illness because of their mental state, they become accident-prone, they make dangerous decisions. It could be a factor."

"I suppose it could." I wanted more coffee, and I'd barely raised my head to look around for the waiter when he hurried over to fill my cup. I said, "Homer Champney sounds like a fellow with a pretty strong life urge."

"He was a remarkable man. He had more energy and zest for living well into his nineties than most men ever have. And don't forget he was of a generation that didn't live as long as we do today, or stay as active. A man our age was supposed to be ready for a rocking chair, assuming he still had a heartbeat."

"What about the others in his chapter?"

"They died," he said ruefully, "and that's all I've ever known about them. I don't remember any of their names. I only heard them the one time, when Homer read the list and burned the paper it was written on. He made a real point of never mentioning any of their names again. As far as he was concerned, the chapter was closed, period. I don't know how long they lived or how they died." He laughed shortly. "For all I know, they never even existed."

"What do you mean?"

"It's a thought I haven't entertained in years, but it came to me late one night and I've never entirely forgotten it. Suppose there never was a chapter before ours. Suppose Homer picked those thirty names out of the phone book. Suppose he made up the whole kit and caboodle, including the man who'd fought in the Mexican War, along with the legends about Mozart and Isaac Newton and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Suppose he was just a nut with a gift of gab who thought it would be interesting to eat beef once a year with a group of young fellows while he waited for the man with the scythe."

"You don't really believe that."

"No, of course not. But what's interesting is that there's no real way to disprove it. If Homer had any written records of the previous chapter, I'm sure he destroyed them after our first meeting. If any of his chapter brothers left anything on paper, I suppose what their heirs didn't throw out is moldering in some attic somewhere. But how would anyone know where to look?"

"Anyway," I said, "it doesn't really matter, does it?"

"No," he said. "Because if there's a destiny operating, genetic or otherwise, I don't suppose there's anything to be done about it. And if our membership in the club is killing us by poisoning our psyches in some insidious fashion, well, it's probably too late to look for the antidote. And if Homer was a sly old duffer and ours is the first club of thirty-one in human history, well, so what? I'll still turn up at Keens the first Thursday in May, and if I turn out to be the last man alive, I'll make it my business to pick out thirty honorable men and keep the old flame burning." He snorted. "I could say that it gets harder every year to find thirty honorable men, but I don't know that it's true. I have a feeling it was never easy."

I said, "You think the members are being murdered."

"Yes."

"Because the actual deaths have been so greatly in excess of probability."

"That's part of it. That's what got me looking for an explanation."

"And?"

"I sat down and made a list of our deceased members and the various ways they died. Some of them very obviously had not been murdered, their deaths could only have been the result of natural causes. Phil Kalish, for example, killed in a head-on on the LIE. The other driver was drunk, he'd managed to get on the wrong side of the divider and was speeding eastbound in the westbound lane. If he'd lived he might have been prosecuted for vehicular homicide, but it doesn't sound like something some devious mass murderer could have arranged."

"No."

"And some Viet Cong or North Vietnamese soldier killed Jim Severance. Death in combat isn't something you usually think of as a natural cause, but I wouldn't call it murder, either." His fingers just touched the bowl of the snifter, then withdrew. "There were some natural deaths that couldn't have been anything else. Roger Bookspan developed testicular cancer that had metastasized by the time they caught it. They tried a bone-marrow transplant but he didn't survive the procedure." His face darkened at the memory. "He was only thirty-seven, the poor son of a bitch. Married, two kids under five, a first novel written and accepted for publication, and all of a sudden he was gone."

"That must have been a while ago."

"Close to twenty years. One of our early deaths. More recently, there were a couple of heart attacks. I mentioned Frank DiGiulio, and then two years ago Victor Falch dropped dead on the golf course. He was sixty years old, forty pounds overweight, and diabetic, so I don't suppose you'd call that suspicious circumstances."

"No."

"On the other hand, several of our members have been murdered, and there have been other deaths that could conceivably have been murder, although the authorities didn't classify them as such. I mentioned Alan Watson, stabbed in a mugging."

"And the fellow in Chelsea who was killed by a sexual partner," I said, and scanned my memory for the name. "Carl Uhl?"

"That's right. And then of course there was Boyd Shipton."

"Boyd Shipton the painter?"

"Yes."

"He was a member of your club?"

He nodded. "At our initial meeting he said that the most interesting fact he could tell us about himself was that he'd painted a wall of his apartment to look like exposed brick. He was a trainee on Wall Street at the time, and he made it sound as though painting was just a pastime for him. Later, after he'd quit his job and made his first gallery connection, he admitted he'd been afraid to let on just how important it was to him."

"He became very successful."

"Extremely successful, with an oceanfront house in East Hampton and a state-of-the-art loft in Tribeca. You know, I've often wondered what became of that faux-brick wall Boyd painted. He slapped a couple of coats of flat white wall paint on it before he moved, so that the landlord wouldn't have a fit. Well, whoever's living there now has an original Boyd Shipton trompe-l'oeil mural under God knows how many layers of Dutch Boy latex. I suppose it could be restored, if anyone knew where to look for it."

"I remember when he was killed," I said. "Five years ago, wasn't it?"

"Six in October. He and his wife had come into the city for a friend's opening and went out to dinner afterward. When they returned to their loft downtown they evidently walked in on a burglary in progress."

"The wife was raped, as I recall."

"Raped and strangled, and Boyd was beaten to death. And the case was never solved."

"So you've had three murders."

"Four. In 1989 Tom Cloonan was shot to death at the wheel of his cab. He was a writer, he published quite a few short stories over the years and had a play or two produced Off-Off-Broadway, but he couldn't make a living at it. He'd make up the difference working for a moving company or renovating apartments for an unlicensed contractor. And sometimes he drove a cab, and that's what he was doing when he died."

"And they never cleared that case, either?"

"I believe the cops made an arrest. I don't think the case ever went to trial."

It wouldn't be hard to find out. I said, "Thirty men, and four of them have been the victims of homicides. I think that's more remarkable than the fact that sixteen of you have died."

"I was thinking that myself, Matt. You know, when I was a kid growing up, I don't think my parents were acquainted with a single person who'd been murdered. And I didn't grow up in some storybook town in South Dakota, either. I grew up in Queens, first in Richmond Hill and then we moved to Woodhaven." He frowned. "I'm wrong, because we did know someone who was murdered, although I couldn't tell you his name. He owned a liquor store on Jamaica Avenue and he was shot and killed during a holdup. I remember how upset my parents were."

"There were probably others," I suggested. "You're less aware of that sort of thing when you're a kid, and parents tend to shield you from it. Oh, there's no question that the homicide rate's higher than when we were kids, but people have been killing each other since Cain and Abel. You know, in the middle of the last century there was a sprawling tenement complex in Five Points called the Old Brewery, and when they finally tore it down the workmen hauled sack after sack of human bones out of the basement. According to informed estimates, that one building averaged a murder a night for years."

"In one building?"

"Well, it was a pretty good-sized building," I said. "And it couldn't have been a very nice neighborhood."