Enemy within

13

A metroliner was leaving for New England twenty-two minutes after Lucy arrived at Penn Station, and she took it, paying cash on board for her ticket. The train was crowded, filled with suits tapping laptops and exurban matrons with shopping bags reading paperback novels about shopping. Lucy found a window seat and rested her head against the cool, dusty glass as the train pulled out of the station. Another train was waiting stationary across the platform, and she experienced the common illusion: for an instant she could not tell which train was moving, and this made her think of the science class she had just flunked, and of where she was fleeing-to her best friend, Mary Ma, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Mary was as prodigious in math and physics as Lucy was in languages and had left for MIT in what would have been her junior year in high school. Mary had once used the analogy of the moving trains to explain the theory of relativity to her idiot friend, and thinking of this, Lucy felt tears start in her eyes. Which she suppressed. The train moved into the tunnel, gathering speed. Now she only saw her reflection, ghostly, transparent, and closed her eyes.

In her head, racing thoughts. Lucy knew enough about spiritual practice to understand that she should exercise some control over these because they were agents that helped to convert mere sadness into paralyzing depression and neurosis, but she found herself too tired to make the effort. It was the sort of emptying exhaustion and dryness that allows intelligent people the world over to sit passively in front of televisions watching moronic pap. So Lucy watched the movie in her mind. She would go to Cambridge and start a new life and live in a house with Mary Ma and never have to go to school again. She would make her own money, which would not be difficult for her. She knew people at Harvard, for whom she could be a lab rat; alternatively, she could walk into any international firm or agency and get a job as a simultaneous translator. No problems there. Mary would be delighted to see her. It was just what any hardworking math superstar needed, a neurotic idiotsavant, religious-nut roommate. Mary would, of course, have made her own friends, geeks who spoke in equations, not Cantonese, and how would Lucy fit in there, she who often stumbled on what was seven times eight? Of course, Mary loved her, but just because you loved someone, you didn't necessarily want to have them in your lap. David, same thing, he didn't want her in his lap either, not that he loved her, far from it. Tolerated maybe. She had such a good heart, though, Mary, and Lucy had really done so much for her in the past, wetback that she was. It really wasn't too much to ask, just a place to hang out while she got her life together. But what if she was cold, frightened, rejecting? Mary had that Chinese thing about family.

Lucy opened her eyes. Still darkness, and her ghostly face. The tunnel went on for a long time. She looked around the train, at her fellow passengers. Next to her sat a suburban matron with nicely done blond hair and careful makeup. She was wearing a tan raincoat and a tweed skirt and reading Cosmo. The rack above her was stuffed with shopping bags. She played with her pearls as she read about (Lucy peeked) famous people's descriptions of their best orgasms. Lucy wondered briefly if this woman had any children and what their lives were like, and wondered also if a monster was living inside her, as there was in Lucy's own mother. As there was in most people, she imagined.

She shifted in her seat. The car seemed warmer, more odorous: electricity, oil, damp wool, the perfume of the suburban matron, a heavy tropical scent, like frangipani or mimosa. The light, too, seemed dimmer, more orangy now. Lucy looked at her watch, her cheap watch. It seemed to have stopped. Or maybe time had. Her head throbbed. Her chest felt constricted. Hell must be like this, she thought, a train in an endless tunnel, its cars full of the damned working on laptops and reading magazines about orgasms of other people. She would never get off this train not in her head, not in Boston either. Mary would look at her as at a stranger, a feeble smile, embarrassed introductions to people who did not screw up, who had normal parents, who were normal geniuses, who were not stupid freaks. Stupid freaks. Stupid freak.

Stupidfreakstupidfreakstupidstupidfreakfreakfreakyfreak, the train said. I don't care, an interior voice said over the sound of the rails, I don't care, fuck them, I'll show them, they'll be sorry they treated me like that, I don't need them, I can do it by myself, fuck them all… and the rest of the usual horseshit of adolescent neuroticism, too tedious almost to mention. Here Lucy was fortunate, in that she had been exposed to at least the beginnings of spiritual training, and as the demonic voices built up to a consuming racket, she began, almost instinctively, to pray, and as instinctively chose the simplest prayer in the book, nothing fancy, asking for nothing but mercy, a one-liner. And not silently either, so that the woman next to her said, "Excuse me?"

Lucy stared at her, her lips still moving. "I'm praying," she said, and ignoring the shocked expression on the woman's face, resumed that exercise: head forward, swaying slightly back and forth, in the manner of some of her paternal ancestors, forcing everything out of her mind but the prayer. Her breathing deepened. The crazy voices shrank in volume. The train burst out of the tunnel and rushed along the top of Manhattan and over the high rail bridge to the Bronx. The sky was full of bruised purple clouds; the sun was descending over the Palisades and, as they crossed the bridge, it shot out great shafts of topaz light, gilding the filthy waters of the Hudson and Harlem.

Lucy was aware of a change at her side. The matron was gone, and in her place sat an elderly woman in a black nun's habit and a soft white cloak. Her face was dark and passionate, and little fires flickered in her deep-set eyes. Her mouth was full and sensual and pursed into an amused twist. When she spoke, her voice was deep and melodious. Her Spanish had a thick Castilian lisp.

"And what do you think you are doing, little girl?"

"Where have you been?" Lucy blurted.

"I am always in the same place, thank God. Where have you been is what needs discussion. That, and where you are going."

And they did discuss it as the train swung east toward the gathering darkness and the fancy towns of exurbia: New Rochelle, Mamaroneck, Greenwich. Lucy had enjoyed an intimate relationship with St. Teresa of Avila since the age of ten, when her mother had given her, for some strange reason of her own, The Interior Castle. At first Lucy had imagined that everyone had a private saint, as she had imagined (briefly) that everyone could speak any language they heard after minimal effort. When she had found that both of these assumptions were false, she had kept mum about the former gift, feeling that she had already attracted enough attention and trouble with the latter. Mike Dugan knew about it, but being the sort of priest he was, he kept quiet too. The apparitions happened on their own schedule, sometimes twice a month, sometimes not for many months. It had been over a year just now.

The discussion grew heated. Teresa, of course, had many saintly virtues, but forbearance toward recalcitrant and impetuous girls was not one of them, as she had amply shown during her life on earth. She did not believe such young girls ought to be traipsing around the countryside. Lucy was needed at home. Her duty lay there, and besides, she had received her precious talent from God, and God would in His own time tell her what use she should put it to.

"You did enough traipsing around," Lucy retorted.

"Yes, when directed to by heaven, and very often to my great disadvantage and suffering. Are you being directed? No, you are running away. From your mother's pain, from your failure, from your feelings about this wretched young man. Go back, I tell you, and do your duty!"

"I can't! It's too much."

"God often makes life difficult for His friends."

"Then it's no wonder that He has so few friends!"

The saint's lip creased slightly, and her heavy eyebrows rose. "I said that."

"I know," said Lucy, and then another voice said, "Miss? Miss, are you okay?"

A conductor was leaning over her. The suburban matron was gone, or no-there she was, in the aisle, behind the conductor, looking nervous. The conductor, a pie-faced man with watery blue eyes magnified by wire-rimmed spectacles, looked nervous, too. Lucy recalled that talking to people who weren't there on trains had before this been a prelude to a murderous fusillade. She said, "I'm fine."

"You were talking to… ah… yourself, miss."

"I was having a religious experience," she replied with dignity. "I am not a danger to myself or others."

Everyone in the nearby rows was staring, craning their necks around to gape, the magazines and laptops abandoned. Lucy blushed. Now that the aura of the experience had passed, she was back in the world of social embarrassment. The conductor turned to the matron and, after a brief consultation, moved the woman and her many packages to a seat in the NO PRAYING section. People were still staring, and some of the ones sitting too close to the lunatic got up and moved to another car. The train was slowing down, gliding into a station. Without further thought, Lucy jumped out of the seat and fled the train. She looked around and discovered that she was in Bridgeport.

She knew someone in Bridgeport. In fact, it was probably a sign. Not Boston, Bridgeport. No, definitely a sign, she thought, and trudged out of the station. She asked directions and walked some distance until she came to Main Street, a tatty zone of the old downtown: pawnshops, saloons, cheap clothing and furniture stores. And oriental restaurants and groceries. She found a blue sign that said PHO BAC, in white lettering, and she went into the door beneath it, past windows clouded with steam. Odors of anise and cilantro, and of the fermented fish sauce called nuoc mam, and boiling rice. She went through the dining room and past a door that bore a metallic sign: PRIVATE.

Behind it, a small room containing a ratty couch, a round table in the center, some chairs. Four oriental men dressed in black clothes sat at the table playing cards. They looked up, bemused, when she entered. They were in their twenties, their thirties, all with thin, hard faces, three of them pockmarked, one, the oldest, smoothly handsome. His name was Freddy Phat, and he was a gangster. They were all gangsters there. He stared at her, his fine brows knotting.

"Freddy, it's Lucy. I'm here to see Uncle Tran." She spoke Vietnamese, with a fancy Saigon accent.

A smile. "Little Lucy! He didn't say you were coming."

"He didn't know. Where is he?"'

"Out. Doing business. How are you?"

"I've been better." Suddenly she felt weak. She went to the couch and threw herself down on it. The cooking smells from the kitchen reminded her she had not eaten since early morning. She closed her eyes.

"Hey, you're sure you're okay?" asked Freddy nervously. Freddy Phat had no particular liking for white girls, but this particular one was the most important white girl in the whole world.

"I'm okay. I think I must be hungry."

He grinned. "You came to the right place then." He laughed, and the other thugs laughed, too, hiding their bad teeth with their hands.

She was spooning hot pho into her mouth when a thin, middle-aged Vietnamese man walked in from the street. He wore a short, black leather coat and a white broadcloth shirt buttoned to the collar and a white silk scarf. On his head was a plastic-covered rain hat with the brim turned up all around. An unprepossessing figure, oriental anonymous, like a waiter or a clerk, until you studied the eyes. Tran Do Vinh was his name. Tran had been a minor official in the South Vietnamese government's finance ministry who had tried to escape by sea in 1978 and had perished of disease and exhaustion midway on the journey to the Philippines. The present owner of his name had been on the same leaky craft, although he had been a major official of the National Liberation Front, the so-called Vietcong. This was known only by Freddy Phat, Marlene Ciampi, and the girl who now jumped up and ran to him and threw her arms around him. He held her tightly. They had not seen each other in two years, and both of them were somewhat surprised to discover that she was now as tall as he. She pressed her face into the leather of his jacket and inhaled his scent-old-fashioned lilac hair oil, cigarettes, nuoc mam. He held her away from him and looked into her face. "My dear girl," he said in French, "I am so happy to see you. But what is wrong?"

She was crying like a baby. "Everything, Uncle! My life is a quite complete ruin."

"I am desolated to learn it. Finish your soup and let me hear the terrible details." They sat, he ordered tea, he sipped, she slurped and told her story-the disaster at school, her mother's collapse, the money and what it had wrought. He listened, smiling, asking hardly a question, and thought, as he often did in her presence, of his dead daughter, who would have been near Lucy's age now. He was not a sentimental man, but this he allowed himself. He loved her. It always surprised him, like a radio message from a dead self.

When she had finished, he asked, "So you had not intended originally to come to see me?"

"No, I was going to Boston to be with Mary Ma. My new life." Lucy rolled her eyes to mock herself.

"Very interesting. You recall that the very first time we spoke you were also running away from school. I gave you some soup."

"Yes, soup and a Confucian lecture on studying hard."

"Which clearly had no effect whatever," he said tartly. "And now that you are here…?"

Her face fell. Her fingers twiddled a packet of sugar. "I don't know. I feel stupid and wrong. But I'm just paralyzed. When I think of school… the boredom… it makes me shrivel."

"Oh, boredom. Pah! Coping with boredom is an attainment. No one unwilling to be bored has ever achieved anything grand, and I am sorry to see you have not learned how. I attribute this to your narrow genius, and to the impatience with tedium that I believe is common among people with such gifts. However, this can be corrected by cultivating the proper attitude. And you must have tutoring, in order to catch up in your studies."

"Tutoring by whom?"

"By me, it goes without saying. You will recall that I taught you how to calculate with fractions when you were eight-"

"Which I've managed to forget."

"-and your current work will pose no greater problems. As you will recall, I am a licensed teacher, and also not unskilled in the techniques of extracting information from unwilling heads. I believe similar techniques can move information in the opposite direction." He gave her one of his shark looks, and though she knew he was kidding, it still gave her a chill. She returned a hard look of her own.

"Will I have to listen to cryptic Eastern sayings that will make me a changed and better person, as in those movies?"

Tran sniffed as he had learned to in Paris in the fifties. "I assure you that my teaching methods are not cryptic at all. The opposite, in fact. I will be quite French. In any case, we will fix your school problem or kill you entirely, one or the other. Then we will see about repairing your dear mother. There is a telephone behind the cashier's desk. Please call your home immediately and tell your father of these plans."

Lucy meekly went off and did so. Meek was a relief just now. She found it encouraging that both St. Teresa and a commie gangster agreed about what she should do.

Marlene awoke and did not know where she was. This ignorance upon arising had not been unusual in recent weeks, but formerly she had, after a few moments, recognized her location as some corner of her home. This was not the case now. Above her she saw not the familiar smooth, off-white dropped ceiling of the loft, but acoustic tile, pale green. A TV hanging from the ceiling. A window, large and clean-the light said morning. A bag on a pole with a tube leading into a human wrist. A hospital? The wrist was attached to a chromed bed rail by a Velcro restraint. Her wrist, it seemed; the other was similarly tied, as were her ankles. That kind of hospital. They had somehow Velcroed the inside of her mouth, too, a technology she had not known existed. With effort she tore her tongue loose and croaked. Nothing happened. A call button was taped to the bed rail, within reach of her right hand. She pushed the button.

In came a large, ocher-colored woman in a pink pants uniform and pink harlequin glasses attached to a chain. She smiled and said, "Good, you're up. How are you feeling?"

"Water."

The woman applied the tube of a plastic squirt bottle to Marlene's lips. She sucked at it gratefully.

"Thank you," she said in a near normal voice. "Um… can I get loose now?"

"I don't see why not." The pink woman undid the restraints. "You got to promise me you won't tear up the place like you did coming in."

Marlene rubbed her wrists. "Where am I?"

"Kinney-Briard. You're in detox. I'm Dottie."

"Hello, Dottie. I'm Marlene." She stuck out her hand, and Dottie shook it uncertainly. Marlene thought most of the clientele at Kinney-Briard did not shake hands with their keepers. Kinney-Briard was one of the city's many private and expensive drunk tanks. "How did I tear the place up coming in?"

"You fought like a devil when you figured out where you were and that we were taking off your clothes. They said you were boxing them… you knocked Pat Lucas down with a punch in the jaw, and she's nearly two hundred pounds. And you gave Dr. Einkorn a split lip. I wasn't on shift then, but I heard it took six people to get you sedated and restrained. Where'd you learn to hit like that?"

"My dad taught me. He was a ranked welterweight in the forties." Marlene then added inanely, "I was drunk."

"You could say that. You had a blood level of point four one. Point one-o is legally drunk. Point five is when people start going into terminal comas. You were lucky your husband brought you in when he did."

"Yeah, lucky me." Marlene groaned and shifted in the bed. She could feel the initial pangs of what she knew would be one of the great headaches of the decade. Dottie was changing the IV bag. "What're you dripping into me?"

"Saline glucose with different electrolytes. You were seriously dehydrated, too. And malnourished. How long have you been drunk?"

"Not long. Weeks, not years."

"I guess. Rate you were going, you wouldn't have lasted a year."

On this cheerful note, Dottie departed, but not before dispensing an analgesic and directing Marlene's attention to the helpful brochures on the nightstand. Apparently "Doctor" would be by this afternoon to tell her about the program.

"The doctor I slugged?"

"Afraid so, dear."

"Did I hit anyone else besides those two?"

"No one but your husband."

"Oh, marvelous." Marlene pulled a pillow over her face. To her surprise, she fell instantly asleep.

And awoke to find Karp sitting there watching her, his expression neutral, tinged with apprehension. He had a purpling bruise under one eye.

She whimpered and placed her hands over her face. "Tell me it didn't happen. Tell me it was all a bad dream and I'm in here for an inoperable brain tumor."

He ignored this. "How do you feel?"

"Like I've been beaten with chains." She peeked through her fingers. "Jesus, Butch! I'm so sorry. What can I say? I don't remember any of it."

"The visit to the school?"

A pause, a shriek. She pulled the pillow over her head. From beneath it, she wailed, "No, I thought that was the d.t.'s. I really… Oh, God, no! That poor kid! Where is she?"

"Consorting with known criminals. She took off right after the events in question and ended up in Bridgeport. She called me last night. Apparently the plan is for her to stay up there with him until she's caught up in school. I spoke to Sister Royal about it…"

"Oh, God! Did she mention the… events?"

"Only to convey wishes for your recovery. She's a good egg. She says tutoring is a fine idea and that Lucy's welcome back if she catches up on her work."

"Did she ask who's doing the tutoring?"

"Yes. I said it was a personal friend of yours. A graduate of the Sorbonne. Take the pillow off your face, Marlene."

She did so and looked him in the eye. She reached out to touch the bruise, but he shied at her fingers. "I did that."

"Yes. A right hook, just after you coldcocked the doctor. You were also vividly negative as to my Semitic ancestry and my sexual prowess. It was quite a performance. I wasn't aware you harbored those feelings."

"It was the liquor talking," she said shortly, not wanting to consider any of that. "Am I going to have to be guilty about this for the rest of my life?"

"No, but it would be good if you fixed it so it wouldn't happen again."

"What, getting blasted? Okay, I promise I won't embarrass you in public again. I'll exercise discretion." She could feel the irritation rising. She looked at her husband's face. She blocked out the pain and love she saw there and painted it over with a smug, judgmental mask. She wanted a drink. She was ashamed of it, but there it was, not to be denied. "When am I getting out of here?" she asked, looking away.

"You need to talk to your doctor about that. When I spoke with him before, he suggested the full detox, four weeks."

The thought of Karp talking to some twerp shrink about her: a bolt of pain and revulsion, converted to rage. "You were talking to what's-his-face, Einstern? You told him all about how bad I am?"

"Einkorn. No, I told him I was terribly worried about you, that you'd never acted like this before, that I didn't know what the fuck to do. He offered me a Xanax and gave me a brochure about Al-Anon."

"Are you going to go?"

"No. Look, Marlene, I don't know fuck-all about alcoholism. Maybe I'm in denial, maybe I'm one of those enablers you read about. And if you want to know, Einkorn was kind of leaning me in that direction, but looking at this last twenty years we spent together, I honestly don't see that. I can't recall another time in all those years when you were falling-down drunk like you've been half a dozen times in the last month." He looked at her, but her face was closed to him. "I understand you're hurting from what happened. You've been hurting before, but you snap back; you get on with life. But not now for some reason." He tried a smile on. "Hell, Marlene, it's like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where the Chinese guy says, 'That not my wife.'" Marlene didn't smile back. "I mean you got a problem, let's talk about it. We always talked about stuff, even when we were fighting."

"My problem is there's nothing to drink around here," said Marlene in that strange voice she was using nowadays, a flat and bored voice, not her own, something she'd heard maybe. It was eerie for him, almost flesh-crawlingly. He wanted to shake her, hit her. He'd never wanted to do that before, even back when she was committing technical felonies every other night. He suppressed the comeback line, he sensed that's what the new Marlene wanted, a little trading of one-liners, keep it light, brittle, and bitter.

Instead he said, "Speaking of the movies, you remember what the girl says to Butch Cassidy? I'll love you, I'll do anything for you, but I won't watch you die."

That got her attention. He sensed something trying to come out in her, some real thing. He ought to have been tender now, dropped his guard, opened up, broke down, but he was not good at this sort of thing, not good at dealing with the dark parts. So he said, "Whatever you want, Marlene. I'll help you any way I can. But I'm not going to just watch you kill yourself. Pull one of these again, and I'll take the kids and split, I'll walk away. That's my bottom line, just so you know."

"That sounds like an ultimatum."

"Take it however you want."

They couldn't look at each other then, both hearts breaking.

The clinic was on Fifty-third off Second. When Karp left, he walked south, just to walk. The sky was low and threatening, cold for April; the green fuzz on the trees seemed out of its time, sprayed on, not real. Karp was a good city walker; his long legs ate the blocks without feeling the pounding, his size kept lesser beings from blocking his path. He walked blindly, his mind unable to get a bite into what was happening to him. It was not real, it was like a bad made-for-TV movie. He walked for a long time.

In leaving, Karp had left a hole Marlene could not fill with the material in the brochures. Nor did Dr. Einkorn fill it with his bland line: you're sick, we can fix it for you, give us a chance, put yourself in our hands, stop denying. Marlene was surly and wished that she had hit him a couple more times. No, she decided, when he had gone, too, the poor bastard is just doing his job. I am just not the job he does. Not yet, anyway.

She got out of bed and found her clothes in a closet. The skirt and jacket and blouse she had worn to the interview of doom were unwearable, stained with vile substances, stretched and torn. It looked as if whoever had worn them had been in a fight and lost. The underwear was intact, though, one of the sets she had bought in Bloomie's that day when she had got rich and drunk, and so were the boots and the long, fleecelined leather coat. She got into the undies and boots and coat and found her cell phone in her bag. She used it to call the limo service. They knew where Kinney-Briard was.

Marlene put on her makeup, trying as she did so not to really look at her face. It was like making up someone else in high school. Dottie came in while she was doing this.

"You going somewhere?"

"Yes, I'm checking out."

"You shouldn't. You're not detoxed yet."

"I'll detox on my own."

"I doubt that, sugar, but it's your life. Try to eat something. You won't want to, but force yourself. Bananas are good. And try to dilute it a little."

"I'm not going to drink. I mean get drunk. Like I did."

"Yeah, you are," said Dottie confidently. "I been doing this awhile, and I've seen about four million runners, and every one of them thinks they're different. I should go call Doctor, but I guess you don't want to wait around for that."

"No," said Marlene as she finished her eyes. She stood erect and fluffed her hair. With the belt cinched and the coat buttoned to the collar she looked dressed. She saw Dottie in the mirror observing her.

"How do I look?" Marlene asked, only a little sarcastically. "Like a drunk on the run?"

"You got that right. If I was you, I would go on home before you start in drinking, put some clothes on you. You go into a bar that way, you liable to end up in a cheap motel with a line of guys out to the street."

"Thanks for the advice," said Marlene stiffly. She shook hands with the nurse and did not look long into her eyes, which held far too much compassion. The limo was waiting. The driver was Osman. Marlene gave him the Crosby Street address. She slumped in the corner, hiding in her beautiful coat, flinching under the waves of psychic pain that rolled up from hell into her mind. She pinched her naked thigh under the coat hard, but it did no good. How did she get here? she wondered. This is not me. I am a solid citizen. I am not a drunk. I am not a shopomaniac. I am a good mother and a good wife. Not convincing. The memories came back, in fearsome detail; she squirmed, she writhed, she cried out. Osman's dark eyes appeared in the rearview mirror.

"Madam? Is something wrong?"

"No." No, she thought, I am not, I am not going to sit in a church basement and tell my sad story to a bunch of strangers. I can control this. Her teeth hurt from the gritting she was doing. "Stop here, pull over," she ordered. The car rolled smoothly to a curb, Thirty-second and Third. She jumped out and came back with an icy bottle of Chablis. The limo was supplied with stemware, and she had a corkscrew. Just one, make it last. She did make it last, almost to her door.

"Wait," she told the driver, and entered her building. She left the wine in the car, which she thought was okay and proof that she wasn't such a lush. A lush would never leave the bottle. In the loft there were cooking smells, something frying. In the kitchen was a woman she had never seen before, a stocky Latina not much older than she. The woman stared at her, essayed a formal smile. Marlene gave it back and lurched to the bedroom. A woman I don't know is taking care of my family, she thought. The dog was waiting for her in the bedroom, on the bed, where he was forbidden to be. He jumped off with a loud thud and fawned, snuffling and drooling. A pool of saliva ten inches wide was on the center of the duvet. Everything is falling apart, she thought. She dropped her coat, yanked off her boots, and opened her wardrobe. A cascade of pricey gorgeousness fell out onto the floor, some of it still wrapped in store tissue, other items popping from shopping bags. She grabbed a pair of tan leather pants off the top of the pile and a red silk shirt from a Lauren bag and put them on. She heard the door open.

The boys were standing in the doorway looking at her, their expressions like those of refugee children staring through barbed wire. She sat on the bed and spread her arms.

"Come'ere handsomes!"

They sat on either side of her, and she kissed them both.

"Where were you?" asked Zak.

"I was in a hospital."

"Were you sick?"

"Sort of."

"Are you going to die?" Giancarlo here, always cutting to the chase.

"Eventually, but not until you both learn to clean up your room or get married, whichever comes first. Who's in the kitchen?"

"Aemilia," said Zak. "She's making us fried chicken and french fries."

"Good. All the important food groups. Is she nice?"

A pair of shrugs. "Okay," said Giancarlo. "She mainly leaves us alone. Mom…?"

"Yes?"

"Are we ever going to get back to regular again?"

"Regular like how?"

"Oh, you know… all of us together, and Lucy and all of us having dinner and fun and talking."

"I sure hope so," said Marlene. "But, look, I'm the problem here, not you or Dad. I'll be straight with you guys, okay? I made a mistake, and it got some people killed and hurt, and other stuff happened that kind of knocked me off my feet. I'm not good for you all to be around right now. Lucy is staying with Uncle Tran in the country for a while, and I'm going to take off for a little while, too."

"You're getting divorced, aren't you?" Giancarlo's eyes started with tears. His brother was impassive. The emotional life of the twins was not really his concern. Zik handled that end of things.

"I am not. I just need a time-out, just like you need a time-out once in a while."

"You could take it in your room."

"No, grown-ups can't take a time-out in their rooms. They have to go away for a while. But, look." Here she grasped a hand from each in her two hands. "I swear to you I will fix myself up and then we will all be regular together."

And she jollied them and got them smiling, which she could always do (skilled phony that she was), and got them into the kitchen for their meal, then threw some things into a suitcase and stuffed into a duffel bag clothes that never imagined that they would ever be so stuffed, then dashed down the hallway to her office and grabbed up a pile of mail and tossed it into her bag. She found the lead and clipped it to the dog's collar. Someone to talk to. A quick good-bye, a flurry of kisses, and she was out.

The driver goggled when the dog jumped in and curled up on the seat. He was about to say something when Marlene got in, slammed the door, and thrust two $100 bills at him.

"It's just a dog," she said.

Like a playing card snapping over, his thoughts changed from worrying whether the dog would rip the damned upholstery and get him into trouble with the limo service, to contemplating what he would buy with the money.

That accomplished, Marlene dabbed at her damp eyes with a tissue, then poured and drank off a glass of crackling dry Chablis and heard as if for the first time the voice that said, oh, hell, you've had two, you might as well finish the bottle. No, not quite yet. Osman wanted to know their destination.

"I don't know. Some hotel. The Plaza. Go up Broadway." He nodded and pulled away, out to Canal, then north on Broadway.

Just a couple of nights, get myself together. Taper off a little. These were her thoughts, and to keep her mind occupied with trivia, she started to open her mail.

There must be, she thought, a jungle telegraph that tells everyone when you get a hold of a chunk of money. She had never received mail like this before. Business envelopes from people skilled in managing money, or stealing it. Prospectuses from firms needing capitalization, in larger, thicker ones. Large, creamy envelopes, almost as rich as leather, with invitations to gather at cultural events and give money to worthy causes. This appealed to her. A worthy cause. Here was one. The New York Foundation for the Arts. What more worthy, and it was tonight. At the Regency. She might be worthless herself, but she could still do some good. Besides, it would be an opportunity to wear some of those clothes, and there would be champagne. Here she could test her resolve. A couple of glasses, three at most, write a check, show the flag, and away. Like a regular person.