He lived in a filthy, sixty-year old tenement wedged in a back alley off Hester Street, a five-story fire trap where rats swarmed in the walls and roaches scurried across countertops. Rows of worn, faded clothing hung from clotheslines on every porch, flapping in the Lower East Side winds that reeked of factory smoke, diesel exhaust, backed-up sewers, and slaughterhouses. Dirty children of every size and variety ran like ruffians in the dark hallways, their faces and voices already roughened by the grim reality of their station in life. He didn't mind any of it - not the ruffians, the smells, the roaches, not even the rats. He didn't care. He didn't care about anything, anymore.

He usually kept to his two rooms, the radio on for constant noise, the torn shades pulled against the muted daylight from the alley. He could hear his Polish neighbors through the thin walls, fighting ferociously and reconciling passionately like clockwork. He boiled gallons of water and drank cup after cup of strong black tea for his main sustenance. He didn't eat much at all, sometimes crackers or stale bread, sometimes sandwiches wrapped in wax paper and delivered from Morrison's Cafeteria by a bright young boy who would eagerly accept fifteen cents.

He didn't read, because he didn't want to think.

He didn't talk to anyone, because he didn't want to know them or be known.

He owned three pairs of pants, two ill-fitting shirts, one green sweater, a pair of splitting black leather shoes someone had donated to the relief camp, two pairs of darned socks, six pairs of uniformly gray boxer underwear, a long raincoat, a worn Fedora, and a sword.

He was the oldest man in the world, living in the greatest city on earth two months after the conclusion of the worst war in history.

He was a shell.

The crumbling, hollow husk of what he'd been, the insides having been carved out and flung into darkness, all traces of humor or hope seared out of his soul. He felt like a sandblasted statue, slowly being covered by the winds and dust of the Sahara. Any movement, even just rising from his bed, required enormous amounts of energy and usually accomplished very little. Easier to just sit, sometimes by the window but more often by the wall, and listen to the voices and music that came through the radio.

They came to him like visitors from another planet - boisterous women like Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Maxine Sullivan, Peggy Lee. Benny Goodman, the King of Swing, blasting through the air with enough energy to make the tea cup rattle. Duke Ellington, his music both witty and melodic. The bebop sounds of Dizzy Gillespie. Count Basie's elegant piano playing. The music registered in his ears and intellect but failed entirely to move his cold, dead heart. Still, it was noise, and better than silence. The only time he shut off the radio was when Glenn Miller came on - Glenn Miller, who'd disbanded maybe the greatest big band there'd ever been to enlist in the war, and disappeared in a tiny plane over the English Channel the previous winter.

At night he fled his rooms for the dark streets of the city - the shimmering towers of lights, the canyons of concrete and steel, the blasting winds and rushing rivers. Anonymous in his coat and hat, keeping as much to the shadows as he could, he walked countless miles between sunset and sunrise. He wandered wherever his impulse took him, from the deepest bowels of the slums to the upscale financial districts to the wilderness of Central Park. He feared nothing and no one, because he didn't have any fear left in him. It had been burnt away like everything else. Pain was an old, cold friend, and Death would be welcome any time it decided to come for him.

He lingered outside Radio City Music Hall, watching finely dressed women and men glide in and out wearing crisp suits and new furs. He hid for hours in cinemas, trying to lose himself in the languid eyes of Joan Crawford, Ingrid Bergman, Greer Garson, and Joan Fontaine. He admired James Cagney and Gary Cooper, wishing he had their fierceness and courage. He slumped low in his chair, passively letting the images flicker before his eyes, trying to generate interest in worlds and plots and problems fundamentally different than his own.

He didn't own a television, but watched them sometimes in storefronts along Sixth Avenue. Sports were popular broadcasts, along with a few chat and variety shows. Methos almost warmed to Milton Berle's "You Asked For It," but didn't have enough energy to actually like anything and found the show's title too ironic for words. The new technology itself was interesting, he supposed. If it kept up, it might change the world. But he was tired of the world changing.

Sometimes he rode the underground railways, feeling the roar of the trains all the way to the center of his bones and closing his eyes as the cars hurtled forward in blackness and noise. He would travel from the East River to the mighty Hudson and back again, imagining how good it would feel to lose himself in their cold, comforting depths. He contemplated a drop from the awe- inspiring Empire State Building, a long screaming plunge into nothingness, but each time he rode the swift elevator to the top he backed away, a coward at heart.

The Empire State, Chrysler, Daily News, Chanin, Lincoln, and Lefcourt Buildings - each was a stupendous feat of architecture and engineering, soaring upwards in ways he could never have imagined even a hundred years earlier. The Romans would have liked New York, would have seized it in their greedy hands and tried to scramble rung by rung into the sky. They would have made the automobiles and railways their golden chariots, and thundered up and down the length of the island trampling away the old world each day in favor of a new one. They would have feasted by the glowing lights of Times Squares, the Brooklyn Bridge, Wall Street. They would have conquered the city with war whoops and cries. But they were dead, their empire long mutated and dissolved, and even the glory of modern Rome faded beside this new kingdom.

Methos rarely thought of Rome anymore. Of the fallen glories of Babylon, of Mesopotamia, of Ithaka or Thira or Crete. The past was nowhere he wanted to be, the future unthinkable, the present barely tolerable. He existed moment to moment, carried by invisible forces without his full consent, mostly aware of the hollowness inside and a persistent chill that never seemed to leave the tops of his fingers, toes, and nose.

As early November brought shorter days and frigid air barreling down the Hudson he thought about buying gloves, maybe a scarf, and went to Macy's. One step inside brought him to a panicked halt. He saw thousands of wives stampeding up and down elevators, shrieking at clerks, waving bargains at each other, having their faces painted or odor marked with cloying perfumes, everything caught up in a mad commercial chaos of sales -

He fled back outside, and had to lean against the building for a good five minutes before recovering his breath and composure. He vowed to never go there again. He didn't really need gloves or a scarf anyway, and the little money he had left would be better spent on rent and other things. At least cold was something he could feel, something that he could call his own.

It was the first Wednesday evening of the month when he stepped outside his building and felt the ominous presence of another Immortal. He'd touched upon others in his nocturnal journeys around the city, but had always run from confronting them. He tried to do the same now, but as he moved into the alley a figure came and blocked him.

"I mean no trouble," the man said in Yiddish. "I don't want to fight."

Methos hadn't heard sincerity in awhile and wasn't sure it was in this man's voice, but decided to trust him. The worst that could happen was that he'd lose his head. He began walking away. He heard the patter of hurried footsteps, and the man fell in beside him.

"I just came to introduce myself," the stranger said, switching to English. "You're the one they call the ghost. You have all your neighbors spooked."

Methos failed to see why that should be important, and kept silent.

"My name is David Grossman," the stranger offered, sounding far too energetic and enthusiastic for Methos' taste. "I'm the rabbi at Temple Emmanu-El, on Grand St. next to the St. Sebastian's church."

Methos continued walking towards the Bowery. The chill air nipped at his ears and he turned up the collars of his coat. Rabbi David Grossman's breath punctuated the air with clouds of white, an annoying intrusion on Methos' peripheral vision. He kept silent.

"I've lived in New York since the days of Peter Stuyvesant," Rabbi Grossman continued. "It was called New Amsterdam then, and my people had been expelled from Pernambuco by the Portuguese. Stuyvesant and his Burgomasters didn't want us to stay, but Jews were investors in the Dutch West India Company and Stuyvesant reluctantly agreed to let us settle."

The words were like annoying raindrops, pelting his head. He had no idea what Grossman was talking about, and didn't care. But he kept silent.

Methos reached the Bowery and turned left, heading south. The rabbi kept pace admirably. Methos caught a quick glance at him as they turned and saw a man his own height, portly and ruddy, with thin brown hair under his yarmulke. If he carried a sword, it was very well concealed. Methos wondered idly if an Immortal rabbi would carry a sword, but didn't care.

"You should have seen this place when it was the heartland of the Tammany Democrats. Fernando Wood - what a handsome, unscrupulous man! Kept all the dock toughs, brothel-keepers and saloon scoundrels in line. Ran his wards with an iron fist. Fixed elections left and right, you know. Modern politicians could learn a thing or two at his knee."

Methos turned onto Canal Street. Grossman said, "Ah, Five Points! That wasn't too far from here, you know. Once the worst slum in the world! Rough and dangerous, decayed and foul- smelling, no fit place for a man with scruples. The Tombs was the city prison - two prisons, really, one for men and one for women, plus the courtyard for hangings."

For some reason, Methos realized, not only had this friendly and unwelcome rabbi fixed on him like a lost puppy, but he'd taken on the role of Manhattan tour guide to boot. He supposed he should be annoyed, but all he felt was tired. Maybe the rabbi would grow discouraged and leave. Maybe he would fall into an open manhole. Sometimes the world surprised him.

Grossman continued prattling on the subject of crime, which evidently fascinated him, and when Methos crossed Broadway the rabbi was doggedly at his heels. "You should have seen the draft riots here back in the Civil War," the rabbi told him. "The city was vehemently anti-war, you know. No one supported it. They wanted peace with the South and the continuation of slavery. When the government tried to draft soldiers the place erupted in violence against the police, the soldiers, the Negroes, property, everything. It was a terrible, terrible month. A city with so many different ethnic groups, unable to get along with itself - we should all know better."

Methos almost asked the rabbi if he'd heard of World War II, which might be considered just a trifle more tragic than a month's worth of Manhattan riots, but kept silent at the last moment.

"Still," Grossman sighed, "I love the place. I haven't left in over three hundred years. The farms I knew have all been plowed under layers of concrete, the trees leveled in favor of lamp posts, but nowhere else has the energy, the pulsing beat of the world at work."

While walking through Greenwich Village, Grossman reminisced about yellow fever, Little Africa, and the livery stables that had been driven out of existence by the subway and automobiles. Methos said nothing. At Bowling Green they reversed directions and started up Broadway, and the rabbi launched into an account of how the avenue had started life as De Heere Straet, a broad dirt path lined with rural cottages and orchards. Methos said nothing. Broadway, Grossman said, had later become lined with the homes of merchants, lawyers and sea-captains. As it swept north up the island it eventually transformed into Ladies' Mile and then the Great White Way before beginning its current decline. Methos said nothing. When they reached the glaring neon lights of Times Square it was nearly midnight, Methos was freezing cold, the rabbi had been talking for over six hours, and the bells of the city had long since rung midnight.

Methos said something. He turned to the rabbi and gave him his best level gaze, inscrutable and expressionless.

The oldest man in the world said, "If you'll excuse me now, I'm going to go hire a prostitute."

The rabbi, whose mouth must have been tired, said nothing. Methos left him and went to find a woman who would agree to his strange terms. They weren't hard to find, not in this neighborhood, not during the post-war euphoria and economic boom that still gripped a nation sick of war and dead sons. If five thousand years had taught him any useful lessons they'd been in the art of purchasing love, but the rabbi's annoying one-sided conversation had left him unsettled and it took him several minutes to find a suitable woman. She was at least five foot seven, the height he wanted. Her hair was the wrong color, but that could be overlooked. Beneath the layers of gaudy makeup she was barely eighteen years old, and had probably run away from a farm somewhere, hoping to make it as an actress. Her failed aspirations didn't interest him. She knew what she was doing, and if she chose to live this rough life it was her decision. Probably no one loved her; probably no one would ever miss her, either.

For ten dollars she agreed to take him back to her room in a decaying old hotel. Her eyebrows quirked up at his requests, but she'd heard worse. She took the handkerchief he'd brought and tested it between her hands, pulling at the blue silk with a solemn expression that said she knew all about the games adults played.

When it was done he dressed in the darkness and left her on the mattress. The cold night air revived his dragging senses. He saw no sign of the rabbi, and hoped the little man had found someone else to educate about the city's glorious past. Methos walked east, no destination in mind, and passed the New York Public Library without one iota of interest. Hours later he reached the East River. He'd heard talk on the radio of the United Nations pursuing a plot of land along the banks, hoping to build a new center of world peace and negotiation, and inwardly scoffed at their unrealistic goal. The United Nations had not prevented the recent horror, and couldn't possibly hope to prevent future holocausts. Man destroyed himself, again and again, every century, and Methos was the one who had to keep witnessing the stupidity.

He looked at the river, lured again by the promise of total blackness and total silence at its bottom, but in the end turned back towards the Lower East Side and began to trudge home, the prostitute's smell still on his skin.

In his tiny rooms he scrubbed himself clean and crawled into a lonely, narrow bed. He woke well after noon, drank tea, listened to the Brooklyn Dodgers play the New York Giants, ate a sandwich delivered by the Morrison's boy, and went out after sunset.

The sense of another Immortal almost made him groan.

"Good evening!" David Grossman said, rising briskly from the door stoop. "I thought you'd like some company again."

"You thought wrong," Methos said, and walked away.

The rabbi caught up with him at the corner. "It's a good night for walking," he said conversationally. "Which way tonight? Fifth Avenue? I remember when they used to call those uppity families the Fifth Avenoodles. Up to Central Park? I went to the first ever outdoor music concert they had there - what a sight! All the fashionable young men in their - "

Methos stopped and said, point-blank, "You don't understand. I neither desire nor enjoy your company."

Grossman blinked. He said, "Well, then, I'll just have to change your mind."

Methos turned away. Grossman followed. They walked five blocks in complete silence before Methos asked, "Why me?"

"Because I've never seen anyone in the world who needs to talk as much as you do."

The words cut swiftly and deeply into Methos' chest, but instead of pain he noticed a lessening of some unidentified burden. "Nonsense," he muttered.

"You can deny it if you like, my friend, but it's the truth. What's your name, by the way?"

"I don't have one."

"Of course you do."

Methos dug his hands deeper in his pocket and kept quiet. Grossman scratched his chin. "All right, if you don't, then let me give you one. A gift, if you like. I think your new name is . . . Adam."

"It's James," he said, despite himself.

"No," Grossman disagreed, "it's Adam. So where are we going?"

"Nobody knows."

"He knows."

For a minute, Methos wondered which "he" the rabbi was talking about it. Then he made a face. "I'm not Jewish."

Grossman sounded unperturbed. "I'm sure He doesn't mind."

Methos lapsed back into silence. He couldn't remember speaking so much in months and the effort already exhausted him. He plodded down Pike Street towards the East River, then turned along South Street. Grossman sniffed a little at Gustav Lindenthal's Manhattan Bridge - its architecture did not impress him - but had a dozen colorful tales to tell about the Brooklyn Bridge. It had once been the longest suspension bridge in the world, the rabbi boasted proudly, the perfect marriage of form and function. Methos conceded silently that it might be pretty, but what were aesthetics in the face of war's devastation?

They stood at the water's edge, shivering in the breeze, staring at the bridge, until Methos decided to move on. During the course of that night they walked down South Street, past the old East Side piers, past the ferry terminals to Staten Island, Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, through Battery Park, up West St, back along Rector crossing Broadway to Wall Street, and then up South Street again. Grossman spent the journey regaling Methos with memories of the colorful, vile gangs of villains who had ruled the city at the turn of the last century. The gangs had creative names - the Car Barns, the Five Points, the Fourth Avenue tunnel, the Gophers, the Pansies, the Hudson Dusters. They were all dead, of course, victims of their own violence and ruthlessness.

Methos wasn't very much interested in New York criminals, because he'd already met the most evil men in the world. They wore armbands with swastikas on them and had finally been defeated in a land thousands of miles away. Grossman, he decided, really needed to get out of New York more often.

He hoped the rabbi would grow tired and leave, but Grossman seemed full of energy and it was Methos who gave out first. They returned to Hester Street two hours before dawn. Grossman asked to come upstairs for a warm cup of tea, but Methos said his neighbors wouldn't appreciate the noise.

"I'm not loud!" Grossman persisted.

"You could wake the dead," Methos retorted. "Goodbye."

The next night, Saturday, Grossman was not waiting for him. His absence caught Methos off guard, and made him slightly suspicious. He lingered for a few minutes on the stoop, for no good reason he could identify, and when the rabbi still didn't show he set off alone. He took himself all the way to Harlem that night, but the Cotton Club was gone and he couldn't bear the hostile looks thrown to him when he breached the color barriers of one of the other nightclubs. He wound up back at Times Square, the blue silk handkerchief in his pocket, and found the same prostitute who'd serviced him two nights earlier.

She took him back to her room again, and did as he requested. He stretched out on the bed, which was lumpy and too soft but smelled nicely of lavender. She tied the handkerchief over his eyes and, without speaking, undressed him with soft hands and came to him beneath the scratchy cotton sheet. She said nothing, as instructed. In the darkness and silence he gave himself to the animal needs of his body, pretending she was Ruth. If Ruth didn't work, he tried one of his sixty-seven wives - any of them, Helen or Arete or Melishika, all of them dust now. In that same darkness and silence he pretended he was loved, and that this was an act of passion, not commerce.

He didn't want to know her name, her history, her likes or dislikes, her ideas, her hopes, her dreams. He didn't want to know her and see her die, like all the others. He didn't want to see her dragged upright by the Germans and shot in the head -

He shut out the image. He crushed the whore in his arms, hearing her muffled squeak but no words, and groaned beneath the manipulation of her hands and mouth.

When it was done he undid the blindfold, dressed himself, and left her on the bed where she was to remain until he was gone.

The next night he found Grossman on his doorstep again. "I couldn't come last night," the rabbi apologized. "It was Shobbes. You should come to Sheul with me."

"I'm not Jewish, and I don't like synagogues."

"The Lord doesn't mind."

"I do," Methos said.

"Why don't you believe in Him?" Grossman asked curiously.

"Because I'm old enough to know better," Methos replied. He wondered why he was even bothering with this conversation. He didn't even like the rabbi, and certainly didn't want to encourage his company. He stopped beneath a street lamp on Delancy Street. "How long have you been a rabbi?"

Grossman counted on his fingertips. "Eight, nine - no, make that eleven, twelve - fourteen," he finally said.

"Fourteen years?"

"Fourteen weeks."

Methos demanded, "You've only been a rabbi for fourteen weeks?"

"Yes," Grossman smiled, pleased with himself. "But I've been Jewish for four hundred years."

Methos spun off in the direction of East River Park. "Shouldn't you be tending to the needs of your congregation?"

"I am."

"I'm not one of you."

"You're one of me in the Immortal sense," Grossman reminded him. "Besides, I don't think the first part is true. You may not be Jewish, but they thought you were, didn't they?" Methos picked up his pace. "I don't know what you mean."

"I mean you have a tattoo, don't you?"

Methos shrugged deeper into his coat. "Go away. Leave me alone."

"You were in a camp," Grossman persisted, unflinching. "You have the look. The haunted, gaunt, broken look - "

Methos grabbed him and fiercely shoved him up against the brick wall of the nearest building. "Shut up," he growled, inches away from Grossman's face. "Don't even say it. Where I've been, who I am, is none of your business. No one asked you to help me."

"The Lord did," Grossman said softly.

"God?" Methos spat out. "Don't talk to me about God. Don't talk to me about His love, His justice, His mercy! Because I saw it, and it's hell. I saw it, and died in it, and if that was His idea, then He's a son of a bitch."

Grossman didn't answer. Methos dropped his hands away and turned from the rabbi, trying to bring his ragged breathing under control. He tried to identify the strange hotness running beneath the surface of his skin and realized, with a start, that it was anger. Pure, white-hot anger. He'd forgotten what it felt like. His knees went weak, and he groped his way down to the curb and gutter.

Grossman came to sit beside him.

"I'm sorry," Grossman said.

Methos scrubbed at his eyes and then rolled up his sleeves. "No tattoos," he said. "You think about that."

Grossman stayed silent for several minutes. Then he shifted uneasily and asked, "Does walking help so much?"

Methos considered strangling him, but the anger had abated into a dread coldness that made his hand too shaky for murder. "Yes," he said hoarsely.

"Then let's walk."

They walked every night but Sabbath night for the next three weeks, as autumn deepened into winter and the city grew white with frost and ice. The first snow, in the first week of December, blew flakes through the broken windows in Methos' apartment and made him wake, shivering, long before noon. He decided it probably was a good thing that he couldn't catch pneumonia. That night he tried walking Grossman all the way to Columbia University on the Upper West Side, but they bowed in defeat to the nearly gale-force winds and took the subway back to Hester Street. For the first time, Methos invited the rabbi up to his rooms.

Grossman hopped from foot to foot in the tiny kitchen, and blew on his hands in dismay as he surveyed the place. "No heat?"

Methos bent down next to a kerosene heater. "This does the trick."

"And this is where you live."

"It's not where the Fifth Avenoodles would, but yes," Methos said. Then he stopped, shocked at himself. He'd tried to make a joke. He could see in Grossman's eyes that it hadn't been a very good joke, but it was the first stab of humor he'd felt in at least a year. He blushed and turned away from the rabbi, busying himself with his task.

"What is that smell?" Grossman asked.

"There's no smell," Methos replied automatically. "Why don't you make some tea?"

With the steaming mugs in hand they sat on Methos' floor - he had no furniture except for the bed - and wrapped themselves in his think blankets. The tenement house was quiet around them, but the wind rattling on the panes sounded like a snare drum. Methos said, "Answer me something. Do you carry a sword?"

"Do you?"

"I'm not a rabbi."

Grossman withdrew his Spanish rapier and laid it flat on the floor.

"A holy man who fights for the Prize," Methos observed.

"I only defend myself," Grossman said. "I believe the Holy One would not have given me Immortality and then demanded I not defend myself."

Methos had heard worse rationalizations. "Perhaps."

"You carry a sword, but you want to die."

"I don't want to die."

"You act like it. You look like you think about it."

"I think about other people's deaths," Methos said after a moment, casting his gaze down to the floor. "I think about why them. I think about why not me. And I think that death must be very comfortable."

"Meanwhile, life isn't. Not now, at any rate."

Methos gulped at his tea. The apartment seemed so much colder than before, despite the waves of warmth coming from the small heater. "No one promised it would be," he finally murmured.

"Still," Grossman persisted. "Surely you know that this will pass? That there will be a time when you'll feel hopeful again?"

"I'll be happy to feel anything again," Methos said, closing his eyes at the confession. He took in a deep breath. "Tell me the truth. Who sent you to me? Why did you come, and stay?"

"It was His idea. And. . . your neighbors."

"My neighbors?"

"The Szczeblewski's, next door. They came to services and said there was a recluse in their building who never came out and never had any visitors. That his apartment . . . smelled funny."

Methos gazed levelly at him. "Do you remember when I said I had no tattoo?"

"Yes."

"I did. The first thing I did when I got to this place was cut it out of my arm. The knife went deeper than I planned, but I got it all out."

With the admission, Methos motioned towards the drawer below the kitchen sink. Grossman blanched a little. The windowpanes shook fiercely, as if in warning, then subsided. The rabbi went over and withdrew a faded, bloody mud-dried handkerchief wrapped around a grisly and decaying package.

"May I get rid of this for you?" the rabbi asked.

Methos looked at the handkerchief. In it was his old life, his old flesh. Giving it up meant a tentative step out of the past horror, into the unknown and frightening future. It took a minute, but he finally nodded.

"Yes." Methos averted his eyes. "Please do."

Three nights later, the tenement burned down. They had walked all the way to Rockefeller Center and back when Methos saw the gusts of flame bursting from the fifth floor windows. It was nearly four a.m., and the neighborhood lay sleeping in the icy darkness. David went to pull the fire alarm, while Methos barged up and down the hallways shouting for people to save themselves. He made it all the way to the fourth floor before the walls of solid blasting fire forced him down again. He carried out two old women, plunged back inside to rescue three crying children, and then made a third run to help out a drunken old soldier and his screaming daughter. By the time the fire trucks arrived the building was fully engulfed, and Methos was leaning burned and choking against the corner mailbox.

"He's fine," David told the firemen and police officers who came to check.

David took him back to the synagogue and installed Methos in the spare bedroom of his own quarters. Methos woke sometime later with the memory of smoke in his lungs and groped in disorientation for the figure above him. "Darius?" he gasped.

"No, David," the rabbi answered, sitting down and clasping Methos' hands. "You've slept nearly the whole day away."

It took Methos a minute to remember why he was in this whitewashed room, or why his clothes smelled of soot and ash. "There was a fire," he said.

"Yes. You saved many lives."

"No I didn't."

"Forty people survived, thanks to you."

Methos struggled to sit upright against the headboard and then ran his hands through sweat-stiffened hair. "How many died?"

"You can't blame yourself for them - "

"How many?"

"Five."

Five more ghosts to haunt his dreams. Methos said, "They can join the club."

"You're not responsible for them."

"If you say."

"Of all the self-centered, self-righteous, pig-headed - " David said angrily, and left the room. Methos stared after him in bewilderment, then pulled on the robe left at the foot of the bed and padded down the hall to the tiny kitchen where the rabbi was beating eggs in a frying pan.

"What did I say?" Methos asked.

"You are not to blame for all the world's ills," David told him, pointing the spatula in his direction, his face colored by the first fury Methos had ever seen in him. "No matter what happened, no matter how many millions died and lay rotting in unmarked pits, I refuse to believe you're the one who caused it."

Methos groped desperately for the chair and sank into it. "What?" David asked in alarm. "What is it?"

Methos bowed his head, fighting back the sensation of dead flesh pressing in on him from all sides. For a moment he was back in the cold pit, buried by arms and legs and lolling heads, the protruding eyes and tongues of naked strangers brushing his own bare skin. The kitchen spun out beneath him as something pressed it against his mouth.

"Drink it!" a voice ordered sternly.

He gulped at the cooking sherry and blinked up in disorientation at David's worried face.

"What happened?" the rabbi asked.

Methos took the sherry bottle and downed four large gulps. "Nothing," he swore.

"Adam, tell me."

For weeks David had persisted in calling him Adam. Methos laughed at the absurdity of it all - sitting in a synagogue's kitchen on a cold December morning, clothes reeking of fire, sherry tingling its way down his throat, a rabbi calling him by the name of God's first creation while he fought off flashbacks to the one of the worst deaths of his life.

"I was killed in a gas chamber," he heard himself say. So what if David knew. Let them all know, and heap pity on him. He didn't care. "They made us take off our clothes and told us we were going in for delousing. Then the gas started, and people started... choking, and dying . . . and I did too."

David sat in the next chair. "I'm sorry."

"Sorry means nothing," Methos said bitterly. "Sorry doesn't bring them back."

"Neither does torturing yourself."

"I saw . . . " Methos started, then stopped. He couldn't give words to the atrocities, because saying them aloud made them even more real. He threw David a helpless look, and the rabbi rose and pulled his head against his breastbone. Wordlessly the younger Immortal cradled him, while Methos struggled to keep the horror from filling the emptiness in his chest and head. The battle was already lost, though. He'd been awakened from the shell of shock and numbness that had protected him for months.

"Come," David said softly, taking him by the arm and leading him unresistingly back to the bedroom and the soft comfort of sheets and blankets. Methos crawled in like a small child and let the rabbi cover him up.

"I'm not tired," Methos said, a token protest.

"You're more tired than anyone I've ever met," David said solemnly, and began humming an old lullaby that sent Methos slowly drifting back to sleep and comfort and warmth.

***

Methos settled into the daily routine of the synagogue with startling ease. He had nowhere else to stay, certainly; the tenement was nothing but a blackened husk coated with icicles and frozen ash. David's synagogue offered the balm of Holy Ground, the steadiness of routine, and small, unpressured opportunities to make himself useful and sociable again.

He needed a name. James Powell had been captured in Austria while scheming against the Nazis and sent to Bergen-Belsen as punishment. There he'd found thousands of Jews starving or wasting away from disease, their faces no more than parchment- thin skin stretched over bone. Their bodies had been skeletal frames barely able to stumble from the floor or mud into the poison gas chambers. He'd been thrust among them with the terrible knowledge that he could not die, and if the Germans found out they'd subject him to merciless examination and dissection. He'd tried to keep as low a profile as possible, and succeeded up until the day he'd been killed and thrown into a pit with a hundred bloated corpses -

He still needed a name. James Powell's hidden passport had gotten him into America, but the identity of James seemed dead to Methos. He couldn't remember who James really was - the prisoner, the spy, the body in a pit - no, it was better that James die from disuse. David was still fond of the name Adam, and from the phone book they picked the innocuous last name of Pierson. Adam Pierson. A friend of David's created a British birth certificate, drafted a passport, and forged airline receipts. That subterfuge took the last of the money that Methos had ready access to. Most of it had gone into an airplane ticket to America, a sword, and rent at the tenement. Everything else was in Swiss bank accounts under names and numbers he'd stored safely in England.

As Adam Pierson, he started regularly attending David's synagogue services on Monday mornings, Thursday mornings, Friday evenings, Saturday mornings, and Saturday afternoons. Every morning he watched David carefully wrap the Tefillin over his head and left arm before saying morning prayers. During Sheul Methos obediently put on a yarmulke and tallith, but did not read from the Torah or don Tefillin. He observed the kosher laws of David's kitchen, careful to keep the meat and milk apart, and followed the prayer, study, rest and feasting guidelines of Shobbes.

He met and mingled with David's congregation, maintaining an emotional distance but able to make casual conversation. David told no one that he'd been in a camp - those wounds were still too raw to show to the sun - and Methos felt odd, listening to the fears and laments of these Americans who'd lost their families and friends to the Germans. If the talk became too intense he'd excuse himself and go shovel snow from the sidewalk or kick the synagogue's antiquated furnace back into life. David was his silent supporter in all things, asking only that he stop blaming himself for everything and let himself heal.

Methos wasn't about to explain to the rabbi that in many ways, his guilt stemmed from the misdeeds of his own youth - his karma, he thought, had made sure all of his own crimes and sins had come back with a vengeance not only on himself but on those he loved. He hadn't told the younger Immortal yet about Ruth, or of his last glimpse of her as the Germans fired at point-blank range into the back of her skull. She'd brought bread wrapped in a blue handkerchief to his hiding place, and they'd made love in the cold cellar and then fallen asleep. The Germans had surprised them there with shouts and boots; they'd never stood a chance.

Ruth was dead, her family was dead, six million Jews were dead. He'd been dead, and clawed his way out of an open burial pit into the rain. Now he was in America, land of freedom, and the freedom David had brought him was the ability to feel again.

He kept walking in the evenings, exploring the city and all its many facets, but no longer felt driven to exhaust himself mile after mile. He gained weight on a steady diet of three meals a day, and Mrs. Rosenfeld from down the street brought him her husband's old clothes to accommodate his new size. Mrs. Rosenfeld was seventy years old, tall and slightly stooping, her hair pulled into a tight bun and her eyes sharp behind wire-rimmed glasses. At one time, David confided, she'd been the belle of the neighborhood, but time and sorrow had turned her into a semi-recluse who only came out for services and grocery shopping.

"You should visit her some day," David encouraged Methos. "She thinks you're a fine young man."

"I'm older than she thinks," Methos said gruffly.

He continued to frequent the prostitutes in Times Square, but as time passed he no longer brought the blue handkerchief. He wanted to see their faces, and even learned their names. The eighteen year old was named Frannie, and she came not from a farm but from the far off grape valleys of northern California. Her roommate Elsa was a French whore who'd migrated down from Quebec, and their friend with the unlikely name of Jazz came from the Louisiana bayou. They didn't have hearts of gold by any stretch of his imagination, but they were relatively clean and amiable, and he made enough money doing odd jobs around the neighborhood to keep seeing them.

He had a warm place to live and a bed to sleep in every night. When the nightmares came, tearing through his mind with images of blood, pain and slaughter, ripping him from sleep with cries locked in his throat, David was there to comfort and listen.

Thanksgiving came very quickly, and Methos and David accepted an invitation at the home of one of David's wealthy friends on the Upper West Side. The sight of the lavish dinner table sent Methos' memories spinning back to the painful starvation of Bergen- Belson, but he recovered after a moment and acted as if nothing had happened. For Hanukkah, Methos privately entertained the young rabbi with a first-hand account of how the Maccabees had triumphed over the Syrians in 165 B.C. and the ensuing rededication of the Second Temple. Christmas seized the city with more post-war euphoria and the fake Santas at every corner made Methos smile, even though he still couldn't find the energy to be merry.

By Passover he was juggling his Times Squares trio with an Irish widow down the street named Claire MacPherson. She was an ample, boozy woman with innumerable charms, a half-dozen rowdy youngsters, and a bedside manner that accommodated any wish Methos might make. David wasn't too keen on her, but Methos thought part of that might be jealousy.

"He needs to take a wife," Mrs. Rosenfeld agreed, one fine May afternoon when Methos brought her a sack of deliveries from the fruit market. Her small apartment was immaculate in its order and tidiness. She'd been under the weather lately and the apartment smelled of menthol, but the fresh breeze ruffling the lace curtains dispelled some of the odor.

"Who should we marry him to?" Methos asked conspiratorially. Half the congregation was trying in earnest to set David up with daughters, granddaughters, nieces and widows. An unmarried rabbi was a remarkable thing, and Methos suspected David would have to take a wife soon to avoid suspicion.

"My granddaughter Iwona."

"Invite her to dinner, and we'll get them together."

"Deal," she smiled, and pulled a shiny half-dollar from her pocketbook. "This is for all your trouble."

"I can't possibly - " he started, but she insisted. Methos felt ridiculous, taking money from an old woman a fraction his age, but before he could protest further the buzz of an approaching Immortal made him cross to the window. David was off preparing for Alan Auberg's bar mitzvah, so it wasn't him. Methos nudged aside the curtain and glanced down three stories to the sidewalk. A tall Italian man, swarthy and heavy-lidded, looked up at the building. Methos ducked back behind the curtain before he could be seen. "What is it?" Mrs. Rosenfeld asked.

"Nothing," Methos said. He took her by the arms. "Please, do me a favor. Go stay with a neighbor for a few minutes. There's a man down there who looks as if he's trouble, and I would hate to see you get caught in the middle of anything."

"But - " Mrs. Rosenfeld started to protest in vain. Methos didn't even hear her. He went down the back stairs until he could no longer sense the other Immortal. A minute later he could feel the man again, and backed away. Bit by bit he lured him to St. Sebastian's, which was always open during the day.

"My name is Antonio Paolini and I will not fight you on Holy Ground," the man said in the dark, cool interior of the church. He hefted the weight of his broadsword, although he didn't dare do anything with it. "Come and fight me like a man."

"I have no quarrel with you," Methos said. "I've seen too much killing, too much death."

"And I haven't seen nearly enough," Paolini sneered.

"Leave him alone, Antonio," a cold voice rang out, just as the sense of another Immortal hit them. Both Methos and Paolini turned to the pulpit.

"It's me you came for," David said, hefting his rapier. The portly, ruddy puppy-dog Methos knew so well seemed to have been replaced, at least momentarily, but a hardened warrior with a glint of danger in his eyes. "It's me you'll fight. Let's take this outside."

"You can't fight in the middle of the street!" Methos protested. "Not even in New York!"

Paolini offered David a cold smile. "Then pick the time and place."

The rabbi didn't shrink from the other Immortal's gaze. "The South Street underpass. Sunset."

Paolini sketched a tiny, mocking bow and departed the church. Methos sank into the first pew and realized, for the first time, that his legs were shaking. He looked accusingly at David. "How did you know? ESP?"

"Mrs. Rosenfeld called me and said something was wrong," David replied, sheathing his sword. He glanced around curiously at the pulpit, the hanging crucifix, the bloody statue of Christ and a glimmer came into his eye. "So this is what the inside of a church looks like. I often wondered."

Methos' eyes narrowed in disbelief.

"It's a joke!" David protested.

"You can't possible mean to meet that man."

"Who, Antonio? Of course I do." David sat down on the bench next to Methos. "Are you all right? You're very pale."

"You can't let him kill you!"

David scratched his chin. "I will do my best. What is to be, will be - "

"Shut up!" Methos snapped. He bent his head between his knees, trying to stave off the wave of lightheadedness that came with the threat of grief to come. The rabbi's hand came down on the back of his shoulders and began a small, comforting manipulation of his tense, aching muscles. "Don't tell me about Fate, or Destiny, or anything. I don't want to hear God's plan for you."

David arched an eyebrow. "How could I, a mere man, know of the Holy One's plan for anything? I do what I must."

Methos tried to stave off the unwanted image of the rabbi's head, arcing through the air. "Why does he want you?"

David shrugged. "I killed a friend of his about eight years ago. Self-defense, of course. Paolini's come to New York before, looking for me, but today's the first time he's found me."

"Let me fight for you."

"No."

"Your life is more important - "

The rabbi put a finger to Methos' lips. "Don't say that. Don't think that. I fight my own battles. And win or lose as The Eternal, in His wisdom, decides. To let you fight for me would go against all I believe in." David let the words sink in and then added, "Besides, you haven't practiced in all the time I've known you."

"And I suppose you've been practicing where?" Methos retorted. "In the kitchen?"

David smiled beatifically. "In the basement, actually. But that doesn't matter. You must trust me to do my best. And if I should die, I trust you to get on with your life."

Methos shook his head and tried to blink away the wetness in his vision. "It's not fair. I can't lose anyone else. I just - can't."

David pulled him into an embrace. Methos resisted but David kept holding him, and finally Methos let himself be comforted. No one understood him like David did - not the Irish widow, not his Times Square trio. He struggled against the fear of impending loss, wiping his eyes ineffectively, until calmness returned in some semblance and David let him pull away.

"Everything will be fine," David promised. "But pray for me anyways."

Methos sniffed and looked blearily at the crucifix hanging on the wall. "Which God?"

"Any one that will listen," David said.

The rabbi stood and started for the door. He turned back to ask, "Adam?"

"Yes?"

"If I don't return. . . " David looked grim for a moment, but then recovered his normal good cheer. "If I don't return, do me a favor."

"What?"

"Take Mrs. Rosenfeld out on a date. I have a feeling you two would be good together."

Then David left, leaving Methos alone in the holy church in the stained-glass sunlight of a warm spring day.

***

Methos nearly lost one of the bag of groceries on the way up the stairs, but rescued the paper sack at the very last moment and lurched towards the last door on the floor. Mrs. Rosenfeld opened at his knock and helped him carry his burden to the kitchen table. "My goodness!" she said. "What did you do, bring the entire store?"

"Just half," Methos smiled.

She pulled a new coin from her purse. "Thank you."

"That's really not necessary - " he started, then stopped. The radio commercial playing from the corner unit had segued into a new song. Glenn Miller. In the Mood. For a moment all he could do was listen, dumbfounded. At first he only heard the mechanical precision of notes and chords, the schematic addition of harmony at precise points in the tempo. Then the song spun around him like a rainbow, colors filling his chest with a warmth and grace he hadn't felt in a long, long time. He stood transfixed in the waves of notes from clarinets and trumpets and drums, a saxophone, a trombone - everything building to crescendos and falling back again, in perfect order and gorgeous melody.

"Adam?" Mrs. Rosenfeld asked. "Are you all right?" He looked at her and saw not a seventy-year old woman but the belle of the neighborhood, bright and rosy-cheeked, her eyes full of life. Her apartment was a palace, and he was a king.

"What's your first name?" he asked hoarsely.

Her right hand fluttered to her chest. "Zofia. Why?"

"Zofia," he said, grabbing her hands, "dance with me!"

"Are you insane?" she protested as he pulled her to the center of the living room and started swinging her to the beat. She laughed, a girlish sound, as Methos twirled her on the small blue rug and brought her back with a shuffle of his feet and jerk of his wrist. "You're crazy!"

"Crazy like a fox," Methos grinned, swinging her out again. She barely missed the coffee table and he had to reverse direction himself to keep from crashing into the glass cabinet. Glenn Miller might be dead but his music lived on through the marvels of modern technology. They would all live - Miller, Gillespie, Fitzegerald, the Andrews sisters - for centuries to come, Immortals in their own right. Who knew what the world would bring tomorrow. Today he had music, and a laughing woman in his arms, and sunshine in the trees. He had his life back - not the same one he'd left behind in Guam and Paris, but one that still felt promising and maybe even joyous.

The phone rescued Mrs. Rosenfeld. She dove for it, leaving Methos shuffling beside the coffee table and playing an invisible saxophone. "Yes?" she gasped breathlessly, and then said, "Yes, rabbi, he's here. I'll tell him." When she hung up she said, "Rabbi Grossman said to tell you to hurry home or you'll be late for dinner."

"Rabbi Grossman worries too much," Methos laughed. The song ended and switched to Guy Lombardo. The world's oldest living Immortal slid to Mrs. Rosenfeld's side and said, "Madam, would you do me the honor of accompanying me to the Carnegie Hall next week?"

"Carnegie Hall? *The* Carnegie Hall?"

"I think there's only one. Duke Ellington is hosting a concert there. Would you come? Or would you break my heart?"

The elderly woman gazed at him in astonishment. "No," she said, "I'm too old. Take my granddaughter Iwona."

"You're only as old as you think," Methos told her. "Or as alive as you think. I don't want to go with Iwona, I want to go with her grandmother."

She made a last ditch effort to dissuade him. "Do you know how old I am?"

"You're only as old as you feel," Methos returned, nearly giddy with relief. "Please, please, please come." He went to one knee. "I beg you."

Zofia shook her head, laughing. "Carnegie Hall. Duke Ellington. Fine! We shall go to Carnegie Hall and see this Duke Ellington person. But I don't have a thing to wear."

"We'll go shopping," Methos promised, and pulled her to the center of the room to start dancing all over again. "Let's go to Macy's."

THE END

Author's Notes: That's it! No more Methos and WWII! Now we're moving on to Methos and San Francisco and the summer of love in 1967 - oh, no, just kidding :-) (I think)(He goes where he wants to, I just follow!) Thanks to Janine, Angela, Cindy and Kelly, who keep me inspired and somewhat sane, and to all the great people I talked to in Denver!

Other stories at:
http://expert.cc.purdue.edu/~ladyslvr/mcdonald.htm
ftp.highlander.org:/pub/highlander/HLFIC-L
http://www.mindspring.com/~vfoster/HL/

Fanzines:
Highland Blades, LHGraphics@aol.com
Highland Fling #3, 70711.3601@compuserve.com
Richie Forever II and III, grinnyp@aros.net