Mask Market

The calendar said spring, but instead of blossom-bringing showers, the city stayed mired in dry cold. I never considered trying the co-op on West End. Parks was the source of that address, so he’d already worked it over long before he asked Charlie Jones to find him a tracker. Anyway, the info CD he had given me didn’t say anything about the girl I had known as Beryl Preston being married, or even living with someone, much less having kids.

A three-bedroom in that neighborhood would fetch a fortune for the owner—if the co-op board in her building allowed owners to rent out their units. But the Battery Park apartment was a condo. It wouldn’t have a board. Or a doorman.

Getting around this town isn’t complicated. You need to go north-south, there’ll be a subway someplace close, get you there quick enough…on days when its crumbling innards aren’t showing their age. You want to go east-west, you’re better off walking. I could spot most crosstown buses a couple of avenues and still catch them before they got to the next river. Battery Park is a nice walk from where I live, but not in bitter weather. And not when I’m working.

All I had for the pits who guarded my Plymouth was a few sawdust-and-pork-products wieners I picked up from a street vendor, but the beasts went for them like they were filet mignon. Or an enemy’s throat.

Every time I came, I got another micromillimeter closer to patting one of the females, an orca-blotched beauty who had begun twitching her tail at my approach a few months ago. “Hi, sweetheart,” I said to her. She’s the only one I ever talk to. She cocked her head, gave me a look I couldn’t read, then went back inside her house.

The Plymouth fired right up. I let the big pistons glide through the engine block on their coat of synthetic oil for a couple of minutes, waiting for the temperature gauge to show me signs of life. Then I motored over to the West Side Highway and turned left.

The ride lasted just long enough for James Cotton’s cover of the immortal Slim Harpo’s “Rainin’ in My Heart.” Blues covers aren’t the bullshit “sampling” rappers do, stealing and calling it “respect.” When a bluesman covers another artist’s song, he’s not just paying dues, he’s paying tribute. From the moment I’d caught Son Seals live in a little club in Chicago years ago, I’d wished he would cover “Goin’ Down Slow,” following the trail of giants like Howling Wolf and Big Bob Hite. But before that ever happened, he went down himself. Diabetes, I heard.

I found the complex easy enough; it was only a few blocks west of the blast zone from where the Twin Towers had fallen. Supposedly, the air around what tourists call “Ground Zero” is still full of microparticles from the atomized glass of all those exploded windows. I don’t know what effect stuff like that has on your lungs, but it hadn’t changed the asking—and getting—prices for lofts in the neighborhood. In this city, you could build apartments on top of a nuclear reactor and they’d be full by the weekend.

The gate to the parking lot wasn’t manned. A speaker box sat on a metal pole at the entrance. I hit the button, told the distorted voice coming through the grille that I was William Baylor, EPA, there to do some ambient atmosphere sampling.

I couldn’t tell if they understood a word I said, but the gate opened. I backed the Plymouth into the far corner of an open lot and climbed out. I was just taking a six-dial meter with two carrying handles and “EPA” stenciled across its side out of the trunk when a short, broad-chested Latino in a dark blue private-cop uniform strolled up.

“You’re the guy from…?” he said.

“EPA,” I answered, holding up the meter like it was an ID card.

“That’s what they give you to ride around in?” he said, nodding in the Plymouth’s direction.

“Nah. That one’s mine. If you use your own, you can make out like a bandit. Even with gas the way it is here, at forty-point-five cents a mile, you come out way ahead.”

But the guard wasn’t interested in the finer points of government reimbursement. “Is that righteous, man?” he asked, pointing at my car.

“Nineteen sixty-nine Roadrunner,” I told him, proudly. “All steel and all real.”

“Damn, it’s fine,” the guard said, strolling around the Plymouth like he was examining a prize horse.

“It’s gonna be, when I get all done with her.”

“It’s not a hemi, is it?” he asked, hopefully.

“It was once,” I lied. “But by the time I got it, the whole thing was in pieces. I’m running a 528 wedge.”

“That’s a crate motor?”

“Yep. Pulls like a train, and ticks like a good watch when it’s done.”

“What are you going to do for rims?” he asked, looking at the dog-dish hubcaps on the Roadrunner’s sixteen-inch wheels like you’d look at a potato sack on Jayne Mansfield.

“I haven’t decided yet.”

“A ride this size, you could run dubs, bro.”

“Maybe…”

“It would be awesome sick, man. Awesome.”

I looked around the near-empty lot. “You want to try it out? I know you can’t leave your post, but just a couple of laps…”

He stole a quick glance at his watch. “Oh, hell, yes!”

I handed him the keys, got in on the passenger side, putting my bogus measuring device in the back. He sat there for a second, taking it all in. Then he fired it up. “Oh, man, you can feel it.”

He pulled the shift lever into D, delicately eased off.

“No burnouts,” I warned him, keeping my voice light so he’d know I wasn’t taking him for an idiot.

He maneuvered around the lot, barely off idle, steering carefully. He wasn’t timid, just feeling his way.

“When we turn at the end, give it a little down the straight. But watch out—this sucker’s got mad torque.”

He didn’t say anything, concentrating. Made the turn, carefully straightened the front wheels, and gave the throttle a quick stomp. The Roadrunner squatted and launched, pinning us back in our seats. The guard stepped off the gas. We both listened to the sound of the monster V-8 backing off through the twin pipes. The muscle-car signature, as American as the blues.

“Oh, you one lucky hombre, esé,” the guard said.

Unit 229 was a townhouse, the last one in a row of immaculate, white-fronted look-alikes. Pushing the doorbell triggered some ethereal quasi-Asian music. I tucked the meter under one arm and waited, not hopeful.

The man who opened the door was a compact blond, with delicately precise features. He was wearing a thin black mock-turtleneck pullover that had to be cashmere tucked into cream-colored slacks with elaborate pleats. His pale hands were as neat as a surgeon’s.

“Yes?”

“Uh, I was looking for Peta. Peta Bellingham?”

“I think you have the wrong address,” he said, politely.

“No, I don’t,” I said, letting a current of concern into my voice. “I’ve been here before. To see—”

“‘Peta.’ Yes, I understand. But that must have been a while ago.”

“Not so long ago,” I said, taking the risk.

“Ah,” he said. “You must mean whoever lived here before I did.”

“I…guess. I mean, I always thought this was her own place. But I could be…”

“Well, I don’t think so,” he said thoughtfully, one hand on his hip. “Not with the way the owner has things set up.”

“Damn.”

“You haven’t seen her…Peta…in quite a while, have you?”

“I’ve been away,” I told him, watching his eyes to see if it registered.

“You’re not some stalker, are you?”

I shook my head sorrowfully. “No, I’m not a stalker,” I said. “I’m a professional disappointment. Peta’s not my girlfriend; she’s my sister. Maybe if I’d ever answered her letters while I was…away, I’d know where she is now. She’s the only one in the family who stuck by me. I figured, let me…finish what I had to do by myself, not drag her into it, you know?”

He studied me for a long minute, making no secret of what he was doing.

“Do you think the owner might have a forwarding address for her? You know, where to send the security deposit and all? All I want to do is send her a letter, tell her I’m…”

“That wouldn’t be much help, I’m afraid.”

“Maybe not. But it would be worth a try. I’ve got no one else to—”

“No, I mean…Oh, come in for a minute, I’ll show you what I’m talking about.”

I followed him into a living room that looked like a Scandinavian showroom, only not as warm.

“Just sit down anywhere,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

I found a metal-and-leather thing that I guessed was a chair, right next to a wrought-iron sculpture—another guess—and a plain black cylinder that seemed to be growing out of the hardwood floor.

He came back into the room, a purple file folder in one hand, a black-and-white marble ashtray in the other.

“You smoke, don’t you?” he said.

“Yeah, I do,” I lied. “How did you know?”

“I’m good at things like that,” he said, just this side of smug. He placed the ashtray in the precise center of the black cylinder—at least now I knew what it was for. I took out a pack of Barclays, tapped a cigarette free, and fired it up with a wooden match.

He seated himself on a severe-looking bench the same color as his hair, and handed me the file folder.

“This is why I don’t believe the owner would be of any help to you,” he said. “I’ve never met him. Take a look at the lease. Did you ever see anything so bizarre?”

I opened the folder. It looked like a conventional lease, on a preprinted form. On the last page, just above the line for the tenant’s signature, was a paragraph in large bold type. It specified that the rent was to be paid via wire transfer to a numbered account in Nauru; the tenant was to authorize auto-debit from his own account no later than the third day of each month. Then, in big red letters:

THIS CLAUSE IS DEEMED TO BE AND SHALL BE THE ESSENCE OF THE AGREEMENT. IT IS UNDERSTOOD AND AGREED THAT ANY VIOLATION OF SAID CLAUSE CONSTITUTES A WAIVER OF ALL TENANT’S RIGHTS TO OCCUPY THE PROPERTY, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE RIGHT TO CONTEST IMMEDIATE EVICTION PROCEEDINGS.

“My attorney told me that’s all nonsense,” the blond man said, as if to calm my anxiety over the prospect of him being evicted. “Absolutely unenforceable. But, as you can see, it’s all so very mysterious, isn’t it?”

“Sure is,” I agreed. Thinking, Here’s something that wasn’t on your little dossier, Mr. Certified Financial Planner.

“I’m truly sorry,” the blond man said. “I wish I could have helped you.”

“You did,” I told him, grinding out the cigarette I’d allowed to burn down in the ashtray. “If you know a room’s empty, saves you the time of knocking on the door, right?”

“Well, my door…I mean, if you think of something that I might be able to help you with, please come back.”

“I just might,” I lied, again.

Patience. I knew I had to wait for Wolfe’s crew to get back to me with something—like a solid confirm on the address Wesley had for Charlie Jones, or whatever was in the police file on the divorce papers filed by Daniel Parks’s wife—before I made my next move. There wasn’t any point working the rest of the info on that CD. If Beryl still owned the condo in Battery Park—and it felt like she did—she’d had it all locked and loaded way before she got in the wind.

I was spending money like I was actually working for Parks, but he was never going to settle his bill. In my world, that’s just wrong. But I had a writhing viper by the back of its neck, and I couldn’t just drop it and walk away until I was sure it wasn’t me it wanted to bite.

I stayed low, waiting. Every time Loyal called, I told her I was trying to put a deal together, and it needed all my attention.

“Has it got anything to do with…what we talked about, baby?”

“It…it could, is the best I can say now, little girl.”

“Well, are you sure you can’t come by? Even for an hour or so? I’ll bet you’d work better if you got your batteries recharged every so often.”

“I’d work happier,” I said. “But not better. When you’re on top of a deal like this, you can’t take your eye off the ball, or it gets dropped.”

If she knew that was all deliberately vague snake oil, she didn’t let on.

“Nobody call,” Mama said, in response to a question I hadn’t asked.

I made an “It’s out of my hands” gesture.

Max looked down at his own hands, a pair of oversized slabs of bone and sinew, each with a horned ridge of callus along the chopping side, the first two knuckles as dark and bulging as ball bearings.

I shook my head No. With nobody to answer our questions, it didn’t matter if we came on sweet or sour.

The Mongol’s face settled into lines of calm. He reached inside his jacket and took out a deck of cards, still in the original box, and put them on the table between us, raising his eyebrows.

“Let’s do it,” I said.

Out came Max’s score pad. Probably Volume 90—we started our life-sentence gin game a million years ago. When we had gotten bored with the steady diet, I taught him to play casino. Now we alternate randomly.

But it didn’t matter what game we played; we always kept score in dollars. At one point, Max had been into me for six figures, built up over a decade. He was lousy at cards to start with—a hunch-playing, omen-trusting, logic-hating sucker to his core—and Mama’s incessant-insistent kibitzing made him even more incompetent. Then, one day, he caught a streak gamblers only fantasize about. Before we stopped—Max wouldn’t let me walk while he was on his prime roll—it was more than thirty-six hours later, and he was just about even.

Took me another few years to get it all back.

I opened the pack of cards as Mama, smelling an opportunity to screw things up for Max, drifted over from her register. Mama worships numbers. Adores them. She can work her way through the toughest sudoku puzzle faster than the Prof can pick a lock—“Not Japanese!” she had hissed at me the first time I noticed her doing one. “Chinese invent, Japanese copy. Like always”—and she keeps three sets of books in her head. But when she gambles, the fever burns up the abacus in her brain like it was dry-twig kindling.

I held up both hands, fingers splayed, asking if Max wanted to try gin. He shook his head, held up four fingers.

Okay, casino it was.

I shuffled and dealt. The flop was the queen of spades, ten of clubs, ace of clubs, and seven of diamonds. I was holding a king, a pair of nines…and the deuce of spades, a money card.

Max studied the table. Mama pounded on his arm with a jeweled fist, hard enough to raise a bruise on a two-by-four. Max ignored her, concentrating.

Max took the queen with one of his own. I’d given up trying to teach him to count cards and spades; when it came to gambling, Max was a Taoist.

I dropped my king.

Max threw the jack of spades.

That left me with two choices: throw my Good Two on top of the seven, building nines, or put one of the nines, a club, on the table, in case Max was holding a ten. But if Max had been holding the ten of diamonds, he would have snatched the club ten off the table with it in a heartbeat. The ten of diamonds is worth two points; they don’t call it the Big Ten for nothing.

Or would he? I knew Mama would have; maybe that’s what she was beating on him about….

I threw the nine of clubs.

Max slowly and deliberately turned to face Mama. She looked away as the Mongol dramatically produced the Big Ten. He showed it to me, scooped the nine of clubs and the ace of hearts plus the ten of clubs into his hand. Three points, four cards, one move.

I bowed, and put the Good Two on the seven.

Max threw down the four of diamonds, and bowed to me as I took in my build.

Mama looked disgusted.

One of the payphones rang.

“Police girl call,” Mama said, a minute later.

“You mean Pepper, Mama?”

“Police girl,” she repeated, adamantly.

I must have gone blank for a minute. Next thing I heard was, “Burke! You want number?” I nodded. “Police girl” is what Mama always called Wolfe, even years after the beautiful prosecutor had gone on TV to denounce a sweetheart deal the DA was giving to a bunch of frat boys who’d raped a coed.

Wolfe’s pale, gunfighter’s eyes had been chips of dry ice, the white wings in her dark hair flaring as if in anger. She knew this was going to cost her more than just being Bureau Chief of CityWide Special Victims: She’d never work as a prosecutor again, anywhere. But she never took a backward step.

After that, when every legit door closed in her face, Wolfe had gone outlaw, running the best info-trafficking cell in the city. But to Mama, there’s lines you can’t cross. To her, Wolfe would be “police girl” for life.

I grabbed a throwaway cell, dialed the number Mama had given me.

“That was quick.” Wolfe’s voice.

“Anytime you—”

“This isn’t about me,” she said, softly but with no warmth. “Not about you, either. I have half of what you asked for—the half I had to do myself.”

Meaning she had to ask a cop. Ask him personally. I wondered if it was the same sex-crimes detective who was so in love with her that he’d committed a half-dozen felonies to protect her when Wolfe had been false-arrested a while back. Sands, that was his name.

I don’t know what he got for going out on that limb for her. Me, I went a lot further out than he did. And when it was over, all she had for me was a goodbye.

“How do I get it?” I said.

“I don’t know where you are now,” she said, not expecting me to tell her. “You know the short piece of Park Lane, on the northeast edge of Forest Park? Not Park Lane South, or Park Lane North, the little connecting piece, just up from Queens Boulevard?”

“Yeah. I was—”

“Can you get there in an hour?”

My watch said ten-twenty. “Give me to eleven-thirty?”

“Okay. Look for a light-colored Chrysler 300.”

“Finally traded in that old wreck of yours—” I started to say. But she had already cut the connection.

Forest Park was in Wolfe’s home territory, just up the hill from the courthouse-and-jail complex on Queens Boulevard where she’d once had her office.

At that hour, I didn’t play with side streets, just grabbed the BQE to the LIE to the Van Wyck to the Interborough. When I exited at Union Turnpike, I was only a few blocks from the meet, twenty minutes to the good.

The big Chrysler was sitting at the curb next to the park, steam burbling from its tailpipes. I drove past, glanced over to my right, saw a bulky male shape behind the wheel. Wolfe might still have her old car somewhere, but she sure had a new friend.

I spun the Plymouth into a U-turn, crawled along back the way I’d come until I found a place to pull over. I got out, started walking toward the Chrysler. The passenger door opened, and Wolfe stepped out into the spray of light. She was wrapped in a grape-colored coat with a matching toque, moving toward me quickly, as if to keep me from getting too close to the Chrysler.

I let her make the call, stopped in my tracks. She closed the ground between us, as sure-footed in spike heels as a Sherpa on sandpaper.

“It’s too cold to stand around out here,” she said. “Let’s sit in your car.”

I did an “after you” gesture. She strolled over to the Plymouth, let herself in. By the time I got behind the wheel, she had lowered her window and fired up a cigarette.

“You’ve got something for me?” I said, matching her all-business posture.

“Not with me. Pepper has it. I told her to bring it over to that restaurant of yours by one.”

“One in the morning?”

“Yes.”

“That’s not a lot of time for me to—”

“You’ll have plenty of time,” she said, dragging on her cigarette. “This won’t take long.”

I didn’t say anything, not liking it already.

“That other thing you asked for? It’s not going to happen.”

“Why not?”

“It’s not what we do,” she said. Her voice was gentle, but hardcored. “Information, that’s what we deal in. You know that. I won’t put my people in risk situations.”

“All I wanted was—”

“You wanted my people to get you a photo…or some other kind of confirm on a certain person at a certain address.”

“Right. And what’s so—?”

“You think I don’t know what Charlie Jones does, Burke?”

“He’s just a—”

“What? A ‘businessman’? I don’t think so. And the only reason a man like you would be looking for him is if he put you into something and it went wrong.”

“A man like me?”

“A man like you,” she repeated, turning to face me. “You used to be…something else, once. When we first met. You had, I don’t know, a…code of some kind.”

“I still do.”

“Is that right?” she said, snapping her cigarette out the window. “Remember that first time, what you were doing? Why you were doing it? When’s the last time you worked a kid’s case?”

“I’m working one now,” I said, hurt in a place I didn’t know I had.

“No, you’re not,” she said, sadness thick in her voice. “That’s not the kind of stuff Charlie Jones deals in.”

“Do you want me to tell you about—?”

“No. I don’t want you to tell me anything. I came here to tell you something, and I want you to listen. Listen good, Burke. This is the last time you put my people in harm’s way, understand? You think I don’t know what you brought Mick into last time you went off the rails? From now on, it’s like this: You want information, you can buy it from us, like anyone else. But no side deals, or you’re cut off. Are we clear?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I got it. No matter how careful I wipe my feet, I’ll never be good enough to walk on your carpet.”

“You want to feel sorry for yourself, go for it, Burke. You can’t be a mercenary and expect to be treated like a patriot.”

I stared straight ahead as she got out. I felt the door close behind her.

I was back at Mama’s by a quarter of. At one, Pepper walked through the front door, Mick looming behind her right shoulder. She came over to my booth, studied my face for a second, then said, “You didn’t expect her to come herself, did you?”

“No.”

She sat down across from me. Max was having an animated conversation with Mick, using playing cards to make some kind of point.

Mama brought Pepper a plate of assorted dim sum, and a pot of tea. They spent a few minutes trying to out-polite each other. Then Pepper slid a dark-brown nine-by-twelve envelope over to me.

I thumbed open my sleeve knife.

“It’s not original,” Pepper said. Meaning, don’t worry about opening the envelope delicately.

Inside was a sheaf of photocopied court documents. Mrs. Daniel Parks—née Lois Treanor—charged her husband with separate counts of adultery and “cruel and inhuman treatment.” The meat of the complaint was the wife’s affidavit. “Upon information and belief,” Parks had been maintaining a “long-term illicit relationship” with a woman “whose specific identity is not, at this time, known.”

The key word was “maintaining”…and as I read through the affidavit I could see why the cops were sitting on this one. According to his wife, Parks had been systematically looting the assets of the private hedge fund he managed, “with estimated diversion of no less than seven million dollars.”

That didn’t sound like a lot—hedge funds charge a percentage of assets under management as their fee, so Parks wouldn’t have come close to emptying the vault with those numbers. But then came the kicker: The complaint charged that Parks had stolen the money to “artificially inflate the management results for his paramour.” Like a Ponzi scheme, where you pay dividends to old investors with new investors’ money, syphoning off the cream until the pyramid collapses. Only this one wasn’t set up to benefit the manager; according to the complaint, it was set up to “impress and fascinate” one of the investors.

“Ms. X” was a siren, all right.

I read it over a couple of times. Most of it was lawyerese: lots of heavy adjectives bracketing slender facts. Whoever drew it up was careful not to accuse “Ms. X” of being in on the scam with Parks. Stripped to its core, it came down to this: Some guys will use presents for seduction, trading a piece of jewelry for a piece of ass. But this guy’s idea of a present was way off the charts; he was pumping himself up as a financial-management genius by pumping cash into the mystery woman’s account.

I went over the chronology. Parks had been served with the papers on Valentine’s Day—the kind of touch lawyers who keep press agents on staff think is very, very special. By the time Parks had gotten desperate enough to ask Charlie Jones for a referral, over a month had passed.

There was no indication that Peta Bellingham had been subpoenaed as a witness. And neither she nor Parks had been charged with a crime. Not yet, anyway—the forensic accountants would have to pick through the paper first.

And it wasn’t the cops who’d been looking for Peta; it was Parks.

I read through the papers again, but it was like trying to buy a Big Mac in a health-food store. Whatever I needed, I wasn’t going to find it in there.

Why would Peta Bellingham get in the wind? Even if Parks had diverted funds to her, she could always claim she was just an investor who thought her money manager was doing a great job…especially if she paid taxes on the gains, and had her own CPA do the returns. Plus, even if all the skimmed money really went to her, she had walked away from damn near that same amount in assets she left behind.

Or had she? Anyone with the contacts and connections to set up banking in Nauru might have been getting ready to vanish for years. Co-ops can be sold through agents, money can leave one account and appear in another without any human hands touching the cash.

And who had the hunter-killer team been working for when they X-ed out Daniel Parks?

Wolfe’s package was full of info, but it was a mutant hydra, birthing five new questions for every answer it disgorged.

“Thanks, Pepper,” I said, looking up.

She was nowhere in sight. I must have gone somewhere in my head—that happens when I hyperfocus.

I looked at my watch. Damn. Almost three in the morning.

“Where’s Max?” I called over to Mama.

“He go back home. Friend go with him.”

Friend? “Mick? The big guy who was here with—?”

“Sure, sure.”

I knew Max trusted Mick—the big man had been on the scene when we canceled the ticket of the guy who had made up the case against Wolfe—and I knew Mick was a kung-fu guy, but I never imagined the two of them working out together, especially in Max’s temple.

“Did Pepper go with them?”

“Little girl, big smile?”

“Yes, Mama,” I said, patiently. “You know who Pepper is.”

“No. She stay with me, we have tea.”

“So where is she now?”

Mama pointed instead of speaking. She doesn’t like the way the word “bathroom” sounds in English.

When Pepper came back out, she glistened as if she’d just bounced out of a shower.

“What are you so happy about?” I asked her.

“Well, you may find this hard to believe, Burke, but Mick doesn’t make friends easily.”

“A charmer like him?”

“He’s very charming when he wants to be. He just doesn’t like…”

“People?” I filled in, helpfully.

“Oh, stop that! You know what I mean. Anyway, he and Max are, like, real pals now. I told them I’d just wait here until they were done working out, or whatever it is they do. You know, the karate?”

“Yeah.”

“And I had a great time talking with Mama! Did you know her husband was an architect?”

I answered her with a noncommittal facial gesture—I didn’t know Mama even had a husband.

Max floated in behind me, Mick at his side.

“Did you have fun?” Pepper asked, brightly.

Mick and Max exchanged looks. “Yes,” Mick said. Yeah, I could see where all the charm came from, all right.

“We have to go,” Pepper told me, holding out her hand, palm up.

“How much?” I said.

“She said there was no charge,” Pepper said, lifting my heart a little. “But I have to take everything back with me,” she finished, putting it back where it belonged.

By the time I got up the next morning, every channel had some version of the same story: Some young kid, a reservation Indian out in Minnesota, had walked into the local high school with a shotgun, a pistol, and a bulletproof vest. He killed a bunch of people at random—a security guard, a teacher, and a lot of students—before he took himself out.

The kid had been “troubled.” I guess that’s the new word for a born-to-lose with a father who committed suicide, a mother who was severely brain-damaged, raised by a grandmother who constantly called him a “human mistake” when she wasn’t beating him. The kid became a Nazi—in his own mind, anyway. He preached racial purity to anyone who would listen—no one ever did, but he was used to that—and posted endless shrieks to his personal blog, too. At school, he wore black clothes and eyeliner, as if to make sure nobody ever forgot he was an outcast.

Producers spun their Rolodexes, and the lucky winners got to be on television, “analyzing” what happened. None of them went near the truth. I knew that truth. The kid was a member of a bigger tribe than you could ever find on a reservation. My tribe. The Children of the Secret. We know.

The experts droned on about “communication” and “reaching out” and “peer rejection.” But this kid hadn’t flown under the radar. Everyone around him knew he was buried in despair. They probably figured they knew the outcome, too—the suicide rate on reservations is right up there with the alcoholism level.

That kid was just another of the invisible ones—bullied, beaten, and belittled every day of his marginalized life. If anyone had the slightest idea that he might be a danger to someone other than himself, they would have unleashed a snowstorm of “services.”

Suicide, well, kids do that kind of thing. Homicide—now, that’s serious.

Every high school in America has them, the invisible ones. They all silent-scream the same warning: If you won’t see us, you’ll never see us coming.

But nobody ever starts the analysis until after the autopsy.

One of the cell phones trilled. I looked at the label on its holster:

Ralph P. Compton. I’d only given that number to…

“Compton,” I answered, in a brisk, businessman’s voice.

“Mr. Compton? My name is Sophia…Sophia Ginsberg. You were at my house looking for—”

“Oh, I remember you,” I said, my tone of voice telling her she’d made a reverberating impression.

“Well, you’ll be glad I called, in any event. I did speak to the broker, and I got an address for Mr. Preston. I don’t know if it’s still a good one, of course. But it was certainly good at the time we bought the house.”

“That’s great,” I said. “Let me just grab a pen….”

“Oh, I can give it to you tomorrow,” she said, quickly. “I’m going to be in the city, and I thought you might like to buy me lunch.”

“It would be my pleasure.”

“Oh, good! I didn’t want to come off as too—”

“I would have called you anyway,” I told her. She took the lie like a deep-tissue massage. I gave her the address of a midtown bistro where I knew Michelle could get me treated right, even on short notice.

“I don’t see where she gets her attitude from, after what you did for—”

“Let it go, honey,” I told Michelle, gently. Knowing she wouldn’t. Ever.

“You don’t need to know the reason to feel the season,” the Prof said. “Wish the weather was better, but…”

“I could be a Bible man again,” Clarence volunteered. He had a door-to-door routine down pat, came across as a bright, sincere young man on a mission to spread the Word.

“Wrong neighborhood,” I vetoed.

The Prof walked out of the room without ceremony. Came back with a chilled can of Red Bull and a small bottle of blueberry juice. Michelle poured the two together over a tall glass of shaved ice, sipped it delicately. My sister had a new personal drink every week, but the Prof and Clarence never strayed from their Red Stripe. I went with pineapple juice and seltzer.

We all sat in silence for a few minutes.

“Charlie’s a night man,” I said, finally. “How about I just pick a day, around noon, okay? I walk up to his front door and ring the bell, ask for Mr. Siegel?”

“I don’t like it,” the little man said. “What if he’s not home? What if his wife—got to have one, if he’s been there that long, I’m thinking—says he’s a traveling salesman, been on the road for months? He don’t come to the door himself, in person, we’re not making him pay to see our hole card, see?”

“It would be the same thing if I went there,” Michelle said. “It’s all chance, all luck.”

“Couldn’t you reach out for him, Burke?” Clarence asked.

“Anyone ever asked to meet with that motherfucker, he’d take off like a hellhound was on his trail,” the Prof said. “That’s not the way Charlie works it. He knows where to find you; you don’t never know where to find him.”

“That’s the truth,” I agreed.

“Next time he has a job for you, we follow him to his home?”

“That play won’t pay, son,” the Prof told Clarence. “One, could be months—years—before Charlie calls Burke again. Two, odds are, he don’t go home when a meet is over. Strike three, no way to shadow a man like Charlie Jones. Takes more than skill to do something like that; you got to have powers.”

The Prof and I shared a look. Wesley had powers. He was as relentless as obsession itself, a remorseless land shark. Not a great white, or a mako—no, Wesley was a bull shark, the deadliest of them all. A bull shark can work the deep ocean or shallow fresh water. It can take prey even in knee-high depths. And it’s the only shark with a memory.

It hit me then, why Wesley was the consummate shadow. He was one of the Invisibles. And nobody had ever seen him coming.

“Could we ask the Dragon Lady?” Clarence said, hopefully.

“To do what?” Michelle said, a slight tinge of sharpness in her voice.

“Hack the Con Ed records,” I answered for him. “Or Brooklyn Union Gas. Charlie probably never makes a call from that house, but he has to have the utilities turned on.”

“So, if this ‘Benny Siegel’ guy is still there…”

“Yeah. It won’t pin him down, but it might tell us if we’re wasting our time.”

“Or we could ask the Mole,” Michelle said.

“Ask him what?” said Clarence, retaliating.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, in a “don’t be dumb” tone. “He’s only the most brilliant scientific genius in the whole world, that’s all. If anyone can figure out how to—”

“We can take a ride out and see him,” I offered. Quickly, before the fuse burned down to the TNT.

No point in telling the Mole we were coming. He’s got a phone, but he never answers it if he’s working, and he’s just about always working.

Michelle fumed at me all the way. She’d been building her mood from the moment I told her we didn’t have time to stop at her place to let her change outfits, and hadn’t let up since. I ignored her—easy enough, since she was putting so much effort into ignoring me.

I slid one of my custom CDs into the slot, and let the music drift over us, tugging at the buried blossoms. Chuck Willis, “Don’t Deceive Me.” Johnny Shines swearing “My Love Can’t Hide.” Sonny Boy’s “Cross My Heart.” Timothea’s “I’m Still Standing.” Champion Jack’s version of “Goin’ Down Slow,” the one he called “Failing Health Blues.” By the time the CD got to the lush black velvet of Charles Brown’s “Early in the Morning,” my baby sister was back to herself.

“That young boy”—she meant Clarence, who was a long way from that now but, being younger than her, had to be a teenager, at most—“just wanted an excuse to see that woman,” she said, smiling now.

“The Dragon Lady? She’s married.”

Michelle’s the only woman I ever knew who can make a snort sound feminine.

“Fine,” is all I had in response.

“Burke, you know Mole will come up with something.”

“It’s not that, girl. No one respects the Mole’s stuff more than me. I was just thinking of something Wolfe told me.”

“Her? What would you even—?”

“Enough, okay? Just listen,” I said, as I wheeled the Plymouth off the Bruckner onto Hunts Point Avenue, heading for the badlands. “I thought I had a deal with her crew. Do a little surveillance on the address we had, see if they could get me a photo. Or anything that would lock it down as Charlie’s address. Then Wolfe pulled them off. She said it was because they just do paper stuff, no agents in the field. But there was something else going on, and I think I know what it is. Charlie Jones might not be much on his own, but anyone who tightropes over an alligator pit for a living gets to know the alligators pretty good after a while.”

“That’s right. I wouldn’t want him…”

“I know it, honey. That’s why I didn’t go running to the Mole right away, see?”

“Yes,” she said, crossing her legs. “I’m sorry. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.”

“It’s fine,” I soothed her. “We’ll just…consult him, okay?”

Her smile was a floodlight.

We rolled through the badlands, while I thought about how it was probably the last piece of real estate in New York that hadn’t been gobbled up for new construction. Not yet, anyway. With the tidal wave of property-greed crashing over the city, some Trump-oid was going to find the money—other people’s money—to renovate the barren prairie sooner or later. As we made the turn to the Mole’s junkyard, I pointed out a prowl car, parked in the shadow of what had once been a building.

“ROAD officers,” I said to Michelle.

“What are those?”

“Retired on Active Duty,” I told her. “It’s a good spot for cops like that. Plenty of crime, but no citizens to report it. They need something for their activity sheets, they can always bust one of the prosties working the trucks out of the Meat Market.”

“Very nice,” she said, stiffly. Michelle had worked the streets for years, when she was still pre-op. She still had a working girl’s mind: hated the cops, feared the johns.

I’d known my little sister since we’d been kids. I was older; she was smarter. I was stronger; she was quicker. The only times we were apart was when I was Inside, or she was. She’d been distance-dancing with the Mole for years before they ever got together.

What finally pushed them over the bridge to each other was the same thing that got Michelle off the streets and onto the phones. Love. Not the love they had for each other—that had been there since the minute they met, arcing between them like electricity, searing the air. No, this was love for a kid. A little kid who’d been turned out before he ever got to kindergarten. I’d snatched him from a pimp in Times Square, back when that part of town was a festering pus pit.

I hadn’t thought things through, just did what I used to do all the time back then—hurt the pimp, took the kid. But this wasn’t a kid I could take back to his parents: That’s who the pimp had bought him from.

While I was still running through options in my head, Michelle had already adopted the boy, pulling him to her in the back seat of my car. She hadn’t let go since.

Terry was her boy—hers and the Mole’s. The kid had his father’s nuclear mind and his mother’s titanium delicacy. His real father’s, his real mother’s.

I nosed the Plymouth against the rusting barbed wire that wound through the chain-linked entrance to the Mole’s junkyard like flesh-tearing ivy. I knew the motion detectors would have already set LEDs flashing where the Mole could see them.

Maybe there was a hidden dog whistle, too. The pack assembled like it always did, moving with the slow and easy confidence of an inexorable force. I looked for Simba, feeling a needle poised above my heart. The ancient warrior was about a hundred years old; one day he wouldn’t answer the bell for the next round. Just as I felt my throat close, I spotted his triangular head cutting through the mob like a barracuda parting a school of guppies. The pack was silent except for a couple of yips from the young ones who hadn’t learned how to act yet.

“Simba!” I called out. “Simba-witz!”

The old beast looked at me, white-whiskered face as impassive as ever. His eyes were filmy with age, but one shredded ear shot up as he tracked my voice, ran it through his memory banks. He gave out a short half-bark of greeting just as the Mole lumbered up and began unlocking the back part of the sally port.

The Mole drove from the gate back to his bunker. I wasn’t worried about letting him behind the wheel of my Plymouth: The tiger-trap potholes would keep his speed down to a crawl, and he could see well enough in daylight, even with the trademark Coke-bottle lenses covering his faded-denim eyes.

Simba and I walked back together, the pack at a respectful distance.

“We’ve still got it, don’t we, boy?” I said.

Far as I was concerned, he nodded.

As usual, the Mole was miserly with his words. But he listened good. When I was done, he said, “Why does he matter?”

“Charlie?”

“Yes. Either he is no danger to you, or he does not know where to find you.”

“Because, if he was a danger, he would have already moved on me?”

“Yes.”

“Charlie middlemanned a meet between me and this guy who wanted me to find a woman. The guy left to get something from his car. A team boxed him in, and just gunned him down. They didn’t ask any questions, didn’t even search the body. They knew who they wanted, and what they had to do.”

“So?”

“So maybe Charlie’s found himself another line of work.”

“As a Judas,” Michelle said.

“Even if that is so, it wasn’t Burke he betrayed,” the Mole said, reasonably.

“There’s a hundred other possibilities,” I said, lamely. “I just want to talk to him.”

The Mole gave me a look.

“You have a photograph?”

“I’ve got nothing,” I told him. “And a physical description wouldn’t do any good—it’d fit a million guys. All we’ve got is that address I told you about. If it’s still good, he spent a long time building that nest. That’d give us something to bargain with.”

“So you want a photograph?”

“Exactly.”

“Couldn’t you hook up some kind of—?” Michelle started to say, but I cut her off with: “No, honey. Now that I think about it, Wolfe’s right. Surveillance isn’t the way to go. No way we could put a stranger into a neighborhood like that, it’s too—”

It was the Mole’s turn to interrupt. “I know,” he said.

We were all quiet for a couple of minutes. Fine with me. I liked sitting out there in the fresh sunlight, my hand resting on the back of Simba’s neck.

“You have one of those new phones?” the Mole asked Michelle. “One that takes pictures?”

“Mais oui,” she said, insulted that anyone would think she was a fraction of an inch off the cutting edge…of anything.

“Everybody has them now,” the Mole said, as if Michelle had just made his point.

“So it wouldn’t make Charlie nervous, seeing one,” I said, picking up the thread.

“No,” the Mole said in a voice of finality. Then he launched into a string of Yiddish. The only word I recognized was landsman.

The bistro was called Le Goome. Before I could say a word, a guy who looked like he should be bouncing in a waterfront dive—except for the lavender satin shirt with the first three buttons undone to display a hairless swatch of chest—walked over, said, “Mr. Compton, yes?” His voice was right out of a cellblock.

“That’s me,” I told him.

“Michelle is very special to us,” he said, making it sound like a warning. “We have a lovely, private table for you, away from the window, yes?”

“That’ll be great.”

“And the lady?”

“Her name is Sophia. She’s tall, with—”

“She’ll ask for you, yes?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll bring her to you, sir,” he said, about as servile as a bull elephant during mating season.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” she said, as I got up to greet her.

“Don’t give it a thought.”

The waiter was androgynous, of no apparent age, wearing a lavender satin shirt. Maybe it was a theme.

“I always feel guilty in a place like this,” she said. “I eat so little, and they charge so much.”

“Food’s just fuel,” I told her. “People come to places like this for the experience.”

“Oh, that’s just right!”

I made a toasting gesture with my glass of vitamin water, telling her I was glad she agreed, but I was done talking….

She got it as if I’d spelled it out in neon. “I know you must want this,” she said, sliding a folded piece of paper across to me.

I opened it. One glance and I knew it was a dud. Jeremy Preston’s last known address was care of a law firm in Manhattan. They might know where he was now, but they wouldn’t be telling if they did.

“I’m sorry,” she said, telling me she knew what she’d given me was useless.

“That’s okay,” I told her. “I might be able to work with this. My company’s no stranger to lawyers.”

“It was just an excuse,” she said, looking down at her French manicure.

“I’m glad,” I said, lying.

By early evening, the Ralph P. Compton number had been nuked, the phone itself sledgehammered and tossed into a vacant lot. A new name was in the slot at the office building. Michelle’s lavender-shirted pal would respond to any questions with the blank look he’d probably learned in reform school.

And if I’d guessed wrong on the range of security cameras at Sophia’s house, and Hauser ever got a call about his license number, he’d pass a polygraph that he’d left the car at the station that morning, and it was right there waiting for him when he returned.

But all of that was reflex—I knew Sophia wasn’t going to be looking for me. Just the opposite. She’d had her sad little adventure; Ralph would get the message when she never called again.

Of course, she couldn’t be 100 percent sure that Ralph wouldn’t come looking for her. Get angry, demand an explanation, insist on seeing her again. That would have frightened some women, but not Sophia. Action like that would have buzzed her neurons. She was a junkie who needed a risk-fix every so often. And Ralph Compton had disqualified himself.

“You know what I always wanted to do?” she’d said, walking around the hotel room like she was thinking of buying it.

“This?” I guessed aloud, giving her the chance to pretend this was her first time with a stranger, if she wanted it.

She didn’t. “Did you ever do it outside?”

“You mean, like, in a car? When I was—”

“No. No, that’s not outside. I mean, like…we came up in the elevator, but there’s stairs, too, aren’t there?”

“There have to be. In case there’s a—”

“We could go out there,” she said, leaning back against the wall. “It would be so…exciting. Why do you think I wore this skirt? I could just…” She slowly turned her back, tugged at the hem. By then, I wasn’t surprised to see she was naked beneath it.

Part of me wanted to tell her I never had sex indoors until I was a grown man. Alleys, cars, rooftops—that’s where kids like us got it on. One girl I had was so much shorter than me that I used to stand her one step higher on the stairs, come into her from behind.

I didn’t tell Sophia that. And I didn’t tell her about the sex I didn’t want. When I was small, when I couldn’t stop them from doing whatever they wanted with their property. Not their property, actually—I belonged to the State. But the State was always very generous about loaning out its possessions.

No, I just told her doing it outside the hotel room was too much for me. She’d almost walked out then, disgusted. But I guess she figured she’d already made the trip, so…

That night, I paid another installment on the malaria I’d bought with my stupidity so long ago. Fever dream. They come when they want to, but less and less over the years. Usually, they’re just jungle visions: running, pieces of earth blowing up in chunks, blood in the ears so thick you can’t hear the gunfire, fear rising like ground fog, clouding your eyes and imprisoning your mind. Sometimes the location shifts. I’m not always in a jungle. But that ground fog is always there, hungry.

I was my old self in the dream. I mean, I looked like I did before my face got rearranged. It was years ago—I knew that because I was in the downtown meat-packing district at night, and it was deserted. So it had to be before the place turned itself into Club-ville, like it is now.

I parked my car—my old car, a 1970 Plymouth four-door sedan so plain it made vanilla look exotic—off Gansevoort Street and started walking. It was as if I was watching from behind myself—I could see with my eyes, but I couldn’t see my face.

There was no music to the movie. It was like watching a man in an aquarium.

“You looking for a date, mister?”

I saw a girl’s face, peeking around the corner like she was playing hide-and-go-seek. Not one of the tranny hookers who had made the area their personal stroll; this was an XX-chromosome package. I remember thinking, How do I know that? But I never answered my own question.

She was under five feet, way short of a hundred pounds. Wearing a baggy pink sweatshirt over jeans and pink sneakers. Her hair was in pigtails. A teenager, trying to look even younger.

“Maybe,” I said, to bring her closer. “Would it be an expensive one?”

“That depends on what you want to do on your date,” she said, biting her lower lip and looking a question at me in the darkness.

“You have a place?” I asked her.

“It’s a nice night out,” she answered, as if she’d been expecting the question. “And back here”—she shot an unrounded hip in the direction of the alley she’d come from—“it’s real private.”

“I don’t…”

“Oh, you’ll love it, mister. You don’t have to get undressed or anything.” She stepped closer. “Just let me take it out. A man built like you, I’ll bet you’ve got a big cock.”

I had her then, left hand clamped on the back of her neck.

She didn’t panic. “All I have to do is scream,” she said, calmly. “My man’s back there, and he’s a real—”

“Scream,” I said, pulling my .357 Mag loose.

“Oh God!” she said, very, very softly. “You’re a cop, aren’t you? Please, please, please, please, please.”

“Just come with me,” I said, watching the mouth of the alley.

“Please, please, please.” She was crying with her voice, but her eyes were dry.

“Please what?”

“I can do it in your car. I’ll suck your cock until it explodes,” she whispered against me, groping with her hand.

I turned slightly, guarding my groin.

“No, no, no, mister. I just wanted to show you how good I can be. Come on, please. I always wanted to suck off a cop. You see how good I am, you’ll come back, right? Anytime you want, I’ll be right here.”

“Come on,” I said, clamping down a little tighter to get her moving.

“Please!” she hissed at me. “It doesn’t have to be like that. I’ll do anything, mister. I’ll take it in the ass, if you want. Anything.”

“You’re not being arrested,” I told her. “I’m just going to take you—”

“No!” the girl begged. “Please. I never did anything to you, did I? And I’ll do anything you want. Anything. Just don’t take me back.”

“Back where?”

“You know,” she said, accusingly. “Back home.”

I woke up coated in sweat. I felt a white-hot wire somewhere in my brain, writhing like a stepped-on snake.

Unless Beryl’s father was deep underground, any of the Internet “public records search” services would turn him up in an hour. Their best customers are stalkers, and they cater to their clientele with a wide variety of options. They’ll give you access to DMV records—there’s an extra charge for states where that’s against the law—tax rolls, employment history, student-loan databases. If you want, they’ll even send you some photos of the target’s house.

You don’t have to be a celebrity to make the list. There are humans who worship property rights. Their property. Some of them see therapists with their “abandonment issues.” Others visit a gun shop.

All stalkers have one thing in common: a profound, overwhelming, all-encompassing sense of entitlement. Leaving them is worse than an affront; it’s an act of deadly aggression, a threat to their core. Punishment is required.

Most people who flee don’t have the resources to really get gone. They have to work for a living. Open a bank account. Rent an apartment. Get a driver’s license.

Ex-cons talk about “getting off paper,” meaning no wants, no warrants, no detainers, no parole, no probation. But the one paper nobody ever gets off is a stalker’s “to do” list.

For some disturbos, the relationship they think was “broken off” never existed in the first place. A true erotomaniac can construct the illusion of reciprocated love out of a celebrity’s autograph, a form-letter answer to fan mail, a “shared moment” during a public appearance. Or from secret messages the victim sends in a magazine interview, a line he writes in a novel, a gesture with his hand during a TV show. Messages only the “special one” can decode.

There’s nothing so dangerous as an armed narcissist, but the gun’s no good without an address. That’s why the highest level of threat assessment is reserved for the ones protection experts call “travelers.” Some stalkers get their rocks off writing letters; travelers always deliver their messages in person.

The search services never ask customers what they intend to do with the information they buy. After all, people are entitled to their privacy.

“When I was in high school, girls got a name for what they’d do.

Or wouldn’t do,” Loyal said.

“It was a small town?”

“That’s right. But I don’t see why that would make any difference. When I was in school, if you ever went all the way with a boy, just once, every other boy in school would expect you to do the same with him.”

“How old were you when you figured that out?”

“I didn’t have to figure it out; it all got explained to me.”

“By your mother?”

“Nope. Not my father, either. They didn’t talk about things like that. It was my brother, my big brother. Speed told me—”

“Your brother’s name was Speed?”

“Yes, it was,” she said, hands on hips, as if daring me to make something of it.

I held up my hands in surrender.

“Speed told me how boys talk. See, I always thought it was just girls who did that. I remember him saying it: ‘There’s some things I can’t protect you from, sis. Talk like that, once it gets out of the bottle, you can never put it back in.’ I never forgot that.”

“He was a good protector, your brother?”

“Oh, he was just the best! Some of the boys I went to school with, they could get a little rough, be too free with their hands, especially when they’d had some liquor in them. But none of them wanted to get Speed mad. He wasn’t the biggest boy in the school, but he was just so…willing. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Sure. I came up with guys like that. You might be able to beat them, but they’d make you do it. Cost you something to try, too.”

“That’s him exactly!” she said, clapping her hands. “It’s like you knew him.”

“Maybe I will, someday.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Speed’s gone. A year after I left, he was killed in an accident over to the mill. About killed my mother, too. She didn’t ever seem to get over him dying. She kept saying it wasn’t right—the parent is supposed to go first.

“In the beginning, she was just plain mad. Mad at everyone and everything. Stopped going to church. Told the preacher if taking Speed was part of God’s plan she didn’t want any part of it. Or Him. Then, one night, she went to sleep and never woke up. Never let anyone say you can’t die of a broken heart, Lew. Because my momma did, sure as I’m standing here today.”

“Didn’t you want to go—”

“Home? Well, sure, I did. I mean, I did go, for Speed’s funeral, and to stay with my mother for a bit. But it was her, her and my father, who got me to leave. They said Speed would have wanted me to try. I knew, the minute they said those words, it was true. Speed was always willing, and I had to be, too. Because I loved him so much.”

“He’d be proud of you, Loyal.”

“For trying? Yes, I guess he would be. Even if I didn’t succeed, I tried and tried.”

“You make it sound past-tense, girl.”

“It kind of is,” she said, as if really considering the idea for the first time. “Remember what I was talking to you about? My apartment?”

“Sure.”

“Well, that’s kind of my exit line. I am going back home. And I guess I could, you know, just sell out and go. That other plan—the one I told you about?—that’s only a good one if there’s a reason for me to stay.”

“You mean, like, a part or something?”

“More like a ‘something,’” she said, looking up at me through the veil of her long lashes.

“Spring came in like treachery,” the precise-featured man next to me said. We were sitting on an outdoor bench on Central Park West. “It popped up like a mugger out of the dark, pounced, and stole away with the cold. Get it?”

“Nice,” I said. He was wearing a black quilted jacket, left open to display a turquoise turtleneck jersey over black narrow-cuffed slacks and black slip-ons just a half-glisten less shiny than patent leather. I knew four things about him: he went by “Styx,” he was a writer, and he was plugged into a bunch of data banks.

The other thing I knew about him didn’t matter to me, and that mattered a lot to him.

All he knew about me was that I get paid for what I do, and I pay for what I want.

“You ever hear of Surry, New Hampshire?” he said.

“No,” I told him. Talking with this guy, the less words the better.

“There’s no ‘e’ in it. You spell it like it was ‘Furry,’ only with an ‘S’ in front, all right?”

“Sure.”

“If there was an ‘e’ there, it would be like those hansom cabs in the park. You know, a ‘surrey with the fringe on top.’”

“Ah.”

“It’s not far from Keene…?”

“Is that anywhere near Hinsdale?”

“Hinsdale? What’s up there?”

“Used to be a racetrack. They closed it down a few years back.”

“You mean, like, for racehorses?”

“Yeah. Trotters, not Thoroughbreds.”

“Oh.” He half-yawned. A mugger must have stolen his interest. “Anyway, that’s where your man lives. Surry, New Hampshire.”

“Preston, that’s a common name. You sure you got the—?”

“If he’s the same Jeremy Preston who sold the house in Westchester you told me about, he’s the one you want,” the man said, a little huffy that I could be questioning his skills. He’s a very sensitive guy. I guess writers are like that.

We got up and started walking through the park. He lives on the East Side; we’d part company where the traverse gives you the Fifty-ninth Street option.

A jogger passed us. He was wearing a white bodysuit with orange fluorescent bands around the sleeves and thighs. On his back was embroidered: “Runner Carries No Cash.”

“My mistress says to say hello,” the writer said. I guess this was one of those days when he wasn’t allowed to say her name.

“Back at her.”

We walked some more, watching spring descend all over the park.

“I’m working on a novella now,” he said. “I’m calling it ‘Sub Plot.’ What do you think?”

“Very strong,” I assured him.

It took Clarence only a few minutes to computer-map me a route to Surry, New Hampshire. Close to a straight shot: 95 North to New Haven, 91 all the way across the border into Vermont, take Exit 3, and then follow the directions I had taped to the dashboard.

I’d be running in the seam—it was too late in the season for the ski crowd, and too early for the foliage freaks. Even at cop-avoidance speeds, probably no more than four hours.

I would have liked company on the drive, but Beryl’s father had known a man with a different face, and I didn’t want to spook him any more than I had to. Or let him think anybody but me knew his business.

Once, I would have taken Pansy with me. She loved to ride, and she was a better conversationalist than she looked.

I walled that one off. Quick, before it took hold. Bad dreams are one thing; somewhere down in that darkness, you know they’re dreams. But invasive memories are ice-pick stabs that bring their own darkness. Waking up won’t help you. The best you can do is hold them off until they get tired and fade. Until the next time.

I rolled out at four in the morning. Even at that hour, the city’s never empty, but there was nothing you could call “traffic,” and I cruised all the way to the bridge without stopping for anything but the occasional light.

The Roadrunner was contemptuous of the speed I held her to, the tach loafing at around two grand. I switched between the all-news stations, listening for anything about the investigation into the death of Daniel Parks, but all I heard was the usual putrid stream of packaged press releases, endless sports scores, some breathless celebrity-watch crap, and a lot of commercials.

I switched to talk radio. People were still foaming at the mouth about some woman in Florida who’d been brain-dead for over a dozen years. She was way past a coma—“persistent vegetative state” is what the doctors called it. A feeding tube in her stomach was all that was keeping her body from rotting—to some, a lifeline; to others, a harpoon in dead flesh. Her husband said she had told him if she was ever in that kind of situation she’d want to go. Her parents said that was all a lie.

Her husband had the final say, and that probably would have ended it, except that the anti-abortion crowd decided this was some kind of “right to life” issue, and they lit a fire under their lackeys. The governor of Florida—a passionate believer in capital punishment, because that’s what the Bible told him—stuck his God-fearing nose in, personally passing a law that stopped the husband from disconnecting the feeding tube. When the courts said he couldn’t do that, his brother, Big Christian, took over. Once that happened, the same Congress that hasn’t been able to come up with a national health plan in twenty years took about twenty minutes to pass a law that sent the whole thing back to the courts.

The TV stations had all been running footage of the woman. Her eyes were empty, lips drawn away from her teeth in a permanent rictus her parents said was a smile of grateful love.

One caller said the husband should be on trial for attempted murder. Another screamed he was a “confessed adulterer,” since he was openly living with another woman. Someone else calmly recited that he was going to get “millions” from the lawsuit over what had made his wife brain-dead in the first place.

Fair and balanced.

When she’s finally allowed to go, I figure they’ll fight over the remains. If the parents win, my money’s on cryogenics.

No matter which station I switched to, there was the same topic. One degenerate said the woman was still smarter than his ex-wife had been—probably had worked on that line for days, in between popping Viagra so he could get his money’s worth out of his porno DVDs. Then there was a panel of medical experts, who went on about “loss of upper-cortical function,” and a bunch of other stuff nobody was listening to or cared about.

The only honesty I heard was from a brimstone-voiced woman who warned, “When America finally becomes a Christian country, cases like Terri’s won’t be decided in any court. The Lord will rule.”

I shivered like it was winter inside the car.

Once I got onto Route 91, I had to break my vow to stay at the speed limit if I wanted to avoid calling attention to myself. I inserted the Plymouth into a clot of cars and let them pull me along with them. Our pack was running a little over eighty when a red Mustang shot past on the left. The driver gave me a hard look, like he’d just backed me down from a challenge. Probably practiced it in his rearview mirror whenever he was stuck in traffic.

When I left the highway, I was only about twenty miles from my target. The Plymouth blended right into a thin stream of mixed vehicles, everything from working-class trucks to luxo-SUVs, with a seasoning of anonymous Japanese sedans and the occasional kid’s jacked-up Camaro.

My ID said I was James Logan, who lived in a building in the Bronx that hadn’t gotten a mail delivery since a drunken squatter kicked over a kerosene heater a few winters back. License, registration, and proof of insurance all matched the plates. Jim Logan had taken early retirement from his job as a manufacturer’s representative, selling restaurant supplies. His hobby was restorations. The Plymouth was a work-in-progress, and now he was looking for an old farmhouse he could bring back to life, too. Friends had told him that southern New Hampshire had a lot of wonderful possibilities, but he preferred to look around on his own first, before dealing with brokers.

There was snow in the fields, but the roads were crisp and clean. A few flakes may be enough to paralyze cities like Charleston or Atlanta, but up here even a major blizzard wouldn’t slow things down for long. It’s always easier handling what you’re used to—that’s why people with my kind of childhood do so well in prison.

The town didn’t have a lot of street signs, and I wasn’t carrying a premarked GPS, so I just meandered around, getting a sense of the place as I searched for the address.

I passed it twice before I pulled over and checked what I had written down. The number matched, but my expectations didn’t. Instead of the semi-mansion and fancy grounds I’d expected—and I’d driven past enough of those to know the little town didn’t lack for upscale housing—it wasn’t a lot more than a cottage, set off to the side of an unpaved driveway.

I drove back, thinking maybe I’d been looking at a guest house, or some kind of artist’s studio, and the real thing was somewhere behind it. But the only other building I could see as I went up the driveway was a small garage, sided the same as the house, with a matching roof. The house itself was bigger than it had looked from the road, but no more than a couple of thousand square feet, I guessed. If you transplanted the whole thing to Westchester, probably cost you three-quarters of a mil. Up here, maybe a third of that? I didn’t know enough to even guess.

I parked the Plymouth at the end of the drive, jockeyed it around until it was facing out the way I’d come, and walked across a patch of ground to the front door. Before I could raise my hand to knock, it opened.

“Yes?” said a gray man. I blinked twice, and the gray man turned into Jeremy Preston. Or whatever was left of him.

“Mr. Preston,” I said, confidently, “my name is Logan. James Logan. I’m here about a matter my brother handled for you, quite a number of years ago. I’ve driven a long way, and I’d sure appreciate a few moments of your time.”

“If it’s about the business, that was closed when—”

“No, sir,” I said, politely. “It was a private matter.”

He stared into my face, nakedly searching. Came up empty.

“Look, Mr…. Logan, is it? I don’t know any—”

“My brother’s name was Burke, sir. And the matter he handled for you concerned your daughter. Do you think we could…?”

Inside, the cottage looked like a lot more money than it had from the road. The peaked ceiling must have gone up fifteen feet, with massive beams running across; a series of skylights cut into one side flooded the room with pale northern sun. The furniture looked like it was wall-to-wall antiques, but, for all I know about stuff like that, it could have been a collection of three-dollar bills. A serious-looking woodstove occupied one corner, the cast-iron ducting showing it was used to actually heat the house. The stone fireplace that took up most of one wall must have been put there for entertainment.

“Coffee?” he asked.

“No, thank you.”

“Tea? Hot chocolate?”

I could see he wasn’t going to engage unless I gave him time to put himself together. “Hot chocolate sounds great, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble,” I told him.

“Nothing to it,” Preston said, leaving me alone in the living room. I could hear the sounds of glass and metal in what I guessed had to be the kitchen.

Enough time passed for him to have called the cops, if that was what he was going to do. But I didn’t think so; he wouldn’t have let me in if he didn’t want to hear what I had to say first.

“How’s that?” he said, handing me a heavy white china mug.

“Smells perfect.”

“It’s store-bought,” he said apologetically, as if I had been expecting him to produce something more authentic.

“Just about have to be, right? I’ve never been up here before, but I can’t believe the cocoa bean would survive this climate.”

“Yes,” he said, seating himself in a rocking chair covered by a white horse-blanket with red diagonal stripes. “Now, can you explain the whole thing to me, please? I’m a bit confused as to what you’re doing here”—smiling to take the edge off his words.

“My brother and I had different fathers,” I told him. “His name was Burke.”

The expression on his face told me he was ahead of me, but I went on, a man explaining his mission.

“We weren’t close,” I said. “Different lives, different coasts. So, when I learned I had been appointed the executor of his will, I admit I was surprised. I flew in from Portland—Oregon, not Maine—and the lawyer who had handled the will gave me an envelope. Inside, there was a list of my brother’s cases—apparently, he was some sort of private detective—and, well, I suppose you’d call them a list of last requests. Things he wanted me to do.”

“He wanted you to finish his cases?”

“Nothing like that,” I said, smiling to show how absurd the idea was. “I’m not a private detective, I’m a small businessman. Very small—I own a motor court on the coast, me and my wife. What Burke wanted me to do was, well—I’m not sure how to say this—kind of, maybe, check on how his cases turned out. It seems most of them involved children. I guess he wanted to know they came out okay. In the long run, I mean.”

“Why do you call him that?”

“Call him…what?”

“‘Burke.’ It seems strange to call your brother by his last name.”

“Oh,” I said, chuckling. “I see what you’re saying. Well, that’s what I always called him—a private thing, just between us. He always called me ‘Logan.’”

“I always called him Mr. Burke.”

I shrugged, as if to say my brother’s ways were a mystery to me.

He rocked gently in his chair. “So your brother’s records indicate he did some job for me?” he said.

“That’s right. There isn’t a lot of information there, but, whatever he did, it concerned your daughter. Beryl, right?”

“I had a daughter named Beryl,” he said, planting his feet to stop the rocker from moving. “But you’re going back a very long time. She’s a grown woman now.”

“So everything turned out for the best?”

“That’s what your brother wanted to know?”

“I guess so. He left…bequests to several of the children on his caseload. Not very much,” I said, holding up my hand as if to disclaim any big-bucks potential, “but…Well, like I said, we weren’t close. I couldn’t begin to tell you what was in his mind. He left some property he owned to me, and his car—that’s it, sitting out there in your driveway—too. But all the rest of his estate, and, like I said, that wasn’t much, he wanted divided up among five people. From the instructions he left, I could tell they were all old cases of his.”

“And you started with my daughter?”

“Actually, I’m finishing with your daughter. The other bequests have all been disbursed.”

“Well, as I said, Beryl’s not a child anymore. So why not just go straight to her?”

“That is what I did, for the others,” I said. “It took me a while—I don’t have to be a private detective to know that some women change their names when they get married. And the only addresses I had were for the parents, anyway.”

“I haven’t lived at the address Mr. Burke had for me for many years.”

“I found that out when I tried to visit. Luckily, your number was listed.”

“So why didn’t you just call?” he said, a flash of color showing under his grayness.

“I don’t believe this is the kind of thing people would take seriously if they heard it on the phone. With all the con men and scam artists running around today—you’d be amazed at what you learn, managing a motel—how would you have reacted if a stranger called and said he had money he wanted to give to your daughter?”

He nodded, but didn’t say anything.

I took a sip of the hot chocolate. “I couldn’t find a Beryl Preston in any phone book—I used the Internet to search. So I thought I’d drive up, answer any questions you have, and you’d tell me how to get in touch with her.”

He cupped his mug closely, as if warming his hands.

A minute passed.

“You think I’m nothing now, don’t you?” he said.

A beam of sunlight bent itself through the skylight, standing between us like the third rail on train tracks.

“I don’t understand,” I said, buying time.

“This house, the land it sits on, the furniture you see here, it’s mine. Truly my own. I never knew what that felt like, back when I was…back when I first met you.”

“Me? I—”

“I wasn’t just a dog on a leash,” he said, bitterness etching his thin voice like vitriol on glass. “Not just an actor playing a role, either. I ran the company, even if I didn’t own it.”

“I don’t know what—”

“You know what my strength always was? My secret strength? I was a good listener. I paid attention. A person’s voice, it’s like an instrument. You can hear if it’s out of tune, whether it’s under stress. The FBI even has machines now, for listening to voices. It’s supposed to be better than a polygraph. I’ll bet it is.”

I sat back on the couch, waiting for whatever he was going to come at me with.

“Feel free,” he said, pointing at a shallow brass bowl on a coffee table made from a cross-sectioned piece of timber, varnished to a high gloss. “That’s an ashtray.”

“I don’t smoke,” I said.

“Gave that up when you had the plastic surgery, did you?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Your voice,” Preston said, two fingers on his chin in a smug, pedantic pose. “It’s completely distinctive. I’d know it anywhere. I couldn’t be sure at first; maybe not smoking changed it a bit. But there’s a special…timbre to it. As if every word you say is wrapped around a threat.”

“You’re the one doing all the talking,” I said, just barely loud enough to carry across the room.

“Perfect!” he said, happily vindicated. “That’s it. That’s it, exactly.”

“She always blamed me,” he said, an hour and a half later. “And she would never tell me what I’d done wrong.”

“When did that start?”

“I…don’t know, exactly. It seems it was ever since she was a little girl. It was so…bizarre. I mean, I loved her so. She had to know that. No matter what she did, I always forgave her. The way she talked to me sometimes! My wife said I should put her over my knee, for being so disrespectful, but I never did, not once.”

I didn’t like the way his face morphed when he said “my wife,” but my own face showed him nothing.

“She was in trouble all the time?” I guessed.

“All the time,” he agreed, misery and mystery swirling in his voice. “She was smart; my goodness, was she smart. Her teachers said she could be anything she wanted, but she never applied herself, not to anything.”

“She went to public school?”

“And private school. And a residential facility…for troubled teens. Nothing made a difference.”

“That time I brought her back…?”

“She just ran away again. Not from us, from that…program we sent her to. The last resort. When she ran from there, she just disappeared. Fifteen years old, you wouldn’t think she would have the wherewithal to survive on her own.”

“Why didn’t you—?”

“What? Hire a man like you again? What good would it do? Beryl made it clear that she was not going to stay with us. A lawyer told us we could have her locked up—have her declared a ‘person in need of supervision,’ I think he called it—but that would just mean a state facility instead of a private one.”

“You never saw her again?”

“Oh, certainly I did. I’ll never forget that day. It’s an easy date to remember: nine, nine, ninety. Her eighteenth birthday. She drove right up to the house—the one in Westchester. Actually, I don’t think she drove herself; I had the sense that someone gave her a ride, and was waiting for her outside.”

“Did she—?”

“I asked her how had she managed to be on her own for all that time. She laughed at me. It was a nasty laugh. I can still hear it: ‘You think I was the only one to run away that night, Daddy?’

“I didn’t know what she meant, and it must have shown in my face. She told me she ran away with one of her teachers. I hadn’t heard—nobody told me about any such thing. She thought that was hilarious. ‘She didn’t run away from school, Daddy,’ she said. ‘She ran away from her husband.’”

He sat there, his expression stunned, as if hearing Beryl’s words again.

“I couldn’t…believe it for a minute,” he finally said. “What my daughter was telling me.”

“That she was gay?”

“No! I would never have cared about such a thing. Beryl knew that. We used to have very frank discussions. I talked to her about all the things I was supposed to: sex, drugs, drinking…. It wasn’t that Beryl was gay, it was that she wasn’t, do you understand?”

“She was just using that teacher to support her while she was on the run?”

“Yes,” he said, his voice trembling at the memory. “Using her, that’s right. And Beryl was proud of it, like it was a new game she had learned, and she was already the best at it.”

“That’s all she came to tell you?”

“No. That just came out,” he said, looking down at his lap. “What she came all that way to tell me was that I was a spineless coward.”

“Because…?”

“I don’t know,” Jeremy Preston said, wretchedly. “When I asked her what she was talking about, she just laughed that nasty little laugh of hers again.”

“Why are you really looking for her?” he asked, later.

“I ran across some information—more like a rumor, actually; I can’t speak for its accuracy, considering the source—that she might be in danger. This was in the middle of another case, nothing to do with her. Or you. But I remembered her from that time when I brought her back. And I thought…I’m not sure what I thought. I guess I just wanted to be sure she was safe.”

“So why did you come here with that story of yours?”

“She’s changed her name,” I said, flatly. “There’s a lot of reasons people do that. But in my business it usually means they don’t want the family’s brand on them.”

“You mean, you thought I was the reason?”

“No way to know,” I said, shrugging my shoulders.

“I didn’t know she changed her name. What does she call herself now?”

“Peta Bellingham,” I told him, watching his face for a tell.

“What kind of name is that?” he said, almost angrily. “I mean, it doesn’t connect to…anything I know.”

“I can’t tell you. Not yet, anyway.”

“You thought I might know where she is…but that I wouldn’t want to tell you?”

“Right. I thought she might be…aware of the situation. That the rumor I’d heard had some truth to it. I thought she might be staying underground until things got straightened out. Maybe staying with you, I don’t know.”

“You wanted to help her?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I did. I still do.”

“Because…?”

“I don’t have a good answer for that one. Maybe I’m just chasing down things I did when I was young.”

“Things you did wrong?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I couldn’t know that until I talk to her.”

“Bringing her back to me!” he said suddenly. “That’s what you thought you might have done wrong.”

I didn’t deny it.

“I don’t know where she is,” Jeremy Preston said. He stood up, paced in front of the cold fireplace for a minute, then turned to face me. “I don’t know where she is,” he repeated. “But I’ll pay you to find her.”

“Why?”

“Because I want the answer to your question, too, Mr. Burke. A lot more than you ever could.”

Preston told me he met the woman who would become his wife when he’d been a student at Harvard—“That’s right,” he interrupted himself, sharply, as if I had challenged his words. When I didn’t respond, he visibly relaxed, then went on again. All ponderous and pedantic, like a celebrity twit being interviewed.

“Those were tumultuous times. Not just Vietnam. The civil-rights movement, feminism, music…When they talk about a ‘counterculture,’ that’s very accurate. I was a senior, my wife was a sophomore. At BU, just across the river. I met her at a teach-in. Later, she told me that she wanted to marry me from the minute I stood up and…well, made a little speech, I guess.

“We had an understanding. A contract, even. We weren’t going to be dropouts, we were going to be…participants. Change-agents. Not by living on some commune, or marching in protests. It’s all very well and good to talk about the inevitable rise of the proletariat, but we knew revolutions need financing to move forward, the same way a car needs gas.

“Her father brought me into his company, but I was never the son-in-law,” he went on, as hyper-vigilant to attacks on his credentials as an abused child is to a subtle shift in a parent’s voice tone. “I hadn’t studied business in college—I don’t think anybody studied business back then—but I had an aptitude for it, and it came to the surface quickly. Before I was thirty, I was virtually running the company. And when my father-in-law died—heart attack; he wasn’t a man who ever listened to doctors—the segue was as natural as if I’d been groomed for the position since birth.”

“But your wife was the actual owner? Is that what you meant earlier, when you said—?”

“That this was mine?” he said, sweeping his hand in a gesture meant to encompass the whole house. “Yes, that’s exactly right. When we divorced, the prenup—I remember us laughing when I signed it: just a piece of paper her bourgeois father insisted upon, it was never going to matter to us—kicked in. There was never an issue of child support. Beryl had been gone quite a while, and she was no longer a minor, anyway.”

“Beryl was an only child?”

“Yes,” he said. “I wanted more kids. Especially later, when Beryl started to…act out. I thought, if she had a little brother or a little sister, it would be…I don’t know, a good experience for her. For them both, I mean.”

“Did she ever have a pet?” I asked. Remembering that she hadn’t when her father had first come to me, wondering if they’d ever tried that.

“You mean, like a dog or a cat? No, my wife was highly allergic.”

“She couldn’t be around animals?”

“Well, she could tolerate them in small doses. Like when we visited a friend’s house and they had a dog, she would pat it and everything. But to have one in the house, well, that would have been impossible for her.”

I shifted position to show I was listening close, said, “You were still together when Beryl came back to visit you, that last time?”

“Together? We were still married, yes. But the life we planned for ourselves had already disappeared.”

“You never got to be bankrollers?”

“Oh, we certainly did that. You wouldn’t believe some of the people who were guests in our home. That was part of what we wanted from our…contributions, I suppose. For Beryl to be exposed to the finest thinkers of our generation. The best minds, the best causes. And she was. My wife and I funded some major initiatives. And plenty of them weren’t tax-exempt, either.”

“Did you attract government attention?”

“Oh, I’m sure we did. Everyone in our circle was under some form of surveillance—it came with the territory.”

And made you feel like a real player, too, I thought, but kept it off my face.

“By the time Beryl was, oh, I don’t know, maybe eight or nine years old, it seemed like the revolution was dying. You know, the Age of Reagan and all that. The country changed…and so did our…raison d’être, you might say. Oh, we still contributed—the Southern Poverty Law Center, for example—but we weren’t dealing directly with the principals anymore. Instead of sitting around our living room, being in on the strategy, we were going to galas and writing checks.

“If you study history, you come to understand that everything changes in cycles. A wave crests, breaks, and the water is calm again. I knew, eventually, we would return to a time of…involvement, I suppose you’d call it.”

Good fucking luck, I thought. But my expression told him I was paying attention to every word he spoke.

That’s technique. Professionalism. And it’s going out of style. If America is a nation of sheep, TV is the shepherd. Jurors think CSI is a documentary. They’ll vote to acquit even when three witnesses saw the defendant shoot the victim, because there were no fingerprints on the recovered pistol—the one with checkered wood grips. Defense attorneys sum up in child-molestation cases by shrieking, “Where’s the DNA?” at juries who just know every human contact leaves traces a lab can detect. After all, the TV told them so.

Cops get infected with the same virus. They overdose on Law and Order reruns and end up thinking they have to “win” every interview. It’s not about the information anymore; it’s about the repartee.

I don’t care what side of the law you work: You never want to confront your subject while he’s still talking. In fact, you don’t want to interrupt him at all. Threats are for amateurs; verbal dueling is for fools. A pro knows there’s no reason to get your man talking if you’re not going to listen.

Good interrogation is like panning for gold. You let everything the other guy says pass through the mesh of your attention, encouraging him to keep it coming, knowing that the little nuggets won’t be obvious until you’re done sifting.

There’s a rhythm to it. When the flow slows, you have to tap the right nerves to get it moving again.

“You don’t think that Beryl…I don’t know…felt let down when things changed around your home?” I probed. “When you stopped…participating so actively?”

“Beryl? She was hardly ‘political’ at that age. And, the truth is, she never seemed to care. Oh, she got along well enough with the people we had over, and she understood why her mother and father were so committed to social change. She knew racism was wrong. She knew Vietnam had been an ongoing war crime, perpetrated against innocent citizens. She knew about the grape boycotts. About apartheid. About…well, a whole range of progressive movements. And she seemed, if not enthusiastic, at least supportive. But it was never her passion.

“She had a wonderful collection of…mementos, I suppose you’d call them. Special little gifts that people who came to visit would bring to her.” He gestured toward a chest-high shelf hung on two wrought-iron brackets, standing against the wall to his left. The shelf was crowded with small objects, a random sprinkling of wood, metal, and stone. I wasn’t close enough to see more.

“She never took them with her,” he said, sadly. “Even that last time.”

“So when you and your wife stopped…?”

“It was fine with Beryl,” he said. “She had plenty of activities. Piano, dance, art lessons, horseback riding—I let her do anything she wanted to try. Except that karate. That was going just too far. I mean, we were all for young women growing up with self-confidence, but the only place she could have gone for classes was run by a man my wife said made her very nervous. People didn’t talk about it back then, but we all knew some…pedophiles deliberately put themselves in a position to have access to children.”

“Did you ever meet the guy?”

“Well, I did, actually. Beryl was just so insistent, and I could never really say no to her, so I drove over there myself one night. Frankly, I couldn’t see what my wife had gotten so worked up about—the instructor seemed like a perfectly innocuous individual.”

“Was he Asian?”

“That’s right,” Preston said, defensive again. “But that had nothing to do with my wife’s decision, I assure you. His English wasn’t all that…precise; I guess that would be an accurate assessment.”

“He didn’t try and sell you anything, then?”

“You mean for Beryl? No. In fact, he said he personally didn’t teach the children’s classes. But he did suggest I might want to study with him myself.”

“You?”

“Yes. Do you find that so strange?”

“Not at all. I was just wondering if you listened to him.”

“How do you mean?”

“The way you explained it to me when I first got here. How you’ve got a gift for—”

“I didn’t say it was a gift,” he cut me off, somewhere between aggressive and defensive again. “I said it was a technique, listening for qualities in a person’s voice. And that I discovered I had some aptitude for it.”

“Okay. So when you were talking to the sensei…?”

He closed his eyes, going back there. I could see him listening then.

“No,” he said, slowly, dragging out the syllable. “There wasn’t anything there I would…mistrust.”

“But your daughter never did go for lessons?”

“No. As I said, her mother was opposed. And she was entitled to her own instincts. I always respected that.”

“Are you still in touch with your wife? Your ex-wife, I mean?”

“She knows where I live. I know where she lives. That’s about the extent of it. We’re not enemies or anything, but there’s really nothing left between us. Nothing to talk about.”

“Where does she live?”

“In Virginia. Not too far from Washington, D.C.”

“Did she ever remarry?”

“Not to my knowledge,” he said, not faking his lack of interest. “But she could have, for all I know.”

“Did she ever resume her maiden name?”

“Oh yes. Summerdale is her name now. Beryl Summerdale.”

“Your daughter was named for—?”

“Yes,” he said, adding a dash of unhappiness to his depression cocktail. “But she always had my name, too. Beryl Preston.”

“Look,” I told him, “all I wanted to do was to see if she’s doing okay. Don’t ask me why. Maybe I’m just getting older, and I wanted to…look back, see if I ever really accomplished anything back then.”

“You don’t do that sort of work anymore?”

“I…do. But not very much of it. I don’t know if I could find her—”

“But you’ll try?”

“Yeah. But if I do, she’s an adult now. I’m not bringing her back.”

“I understand,” the gray man said. “I want the same thing you do, Mr. Burke. Just to know she’s all right. That’s worth something to me. It always has been.”

I spent another couple of hours there. Half a dozen cups of coffee for Preston, another couple of hot chocolates for me. I kept panning until I was sure there wasn’t another nugget in the riverbed.

He offered me money. I told him that if I did turn something up, it would be the same as last time: COD.

Darkness was dropping by the time I left. It didn’t feel like city night to me. There wasn’t a hint of menace in it. Softer, like a blanket of comfort.

I knew better than to trust it.

I knew how to run different programs in my head at the same time way before anyone heard of “multitasking.” Any kid who’s been tortured learns how to do it. You can call it splitting off. Or compartmentalizing. Dissociating, if that makes you happy. It all comes down to the same thing: not being there while it’s happening. You watch them doing…whatever they want…to you, but you don’t feel it.

Not physically, I mean.

Not every kid learns it the same way. Some learn it so good that pain loses all meaning. It just doesn’t register. Prison guards call guys like that “anesthetics.” When they go, they go. Clubs bounce off their heads; they wear mace like it was a coat of sweat; they pull stun-gun wires out of their bodies and strangle you with them.

You can’t hurt them. It takes death to stop their pain.

Other kids split off for good. When it’s happening to them, they’re not there. It’s not that they go somewhere else like the splitters do; they are someone else.

There’s names for them, too.

I found another way. When it was happening, I watched it. Watched them, watched me. And in a little corner of my mind, a place they could never go, I was watching another movie, on a different screen.

That’s where I found my religion, watching that other screen.

I prayed and prayed. No one answered, but I never lost faith. I had to believe my god was true. Because I knew, if there was no god for kids like me, if the real God was the one the people who beat me and raped me and hurt me for fun had pictures of in their houses, I was lost.

I was still trying to understand when Wesley found me.

We were both just kids, locked-up, powerless kids. But where I had fear, Wesley had hate. I cried; Wesley plotted.

One night, he showed me how to do it.

Years later, I finally had something to show him, too. I had a family. One I made for myself. They chose me; I chose them. I wanted him with us. But it was too late for Wesley. He never came close to the campfire. He watched from the shadows until the day he checked out.

I know Wesley loved me, in the only way he could. When he crossed over, he left me the only thing that ever had meaning for him in life: a weapon.

I drove on autopilot, rerunning the session with Preston in my mind, looking for a loose thread to pull.

Beryl’s mother wasn’t hiding; she had a listed phone number. If I could just 411 her, Daniel Parks could have, too. A man like him would have exhausted every possibility before he ever went near the places where you could find a Charlie Jones.

But the CD Parks had given me hadn’t had a single line of info about parents. He knew where Peta lived, where Peta kept her money, where Peta shopped. He had to have been close with her. Intimate, anyway—those nude photos of her didn’t look commercial.

Daniel Parks had known a lot about Peta Bellingham. But he hadn’t known Beryl Preston. Not even that she existed.

By the time I got the Plymouth docked and walked over to the flophouse, it was too late to do anything but check in with Mama.

“Gardens,” she answered the payphone, the way she always does.

“It’s me, Mama.”

“Baby sister say you call her, okay?”

“Thanks.”

“Sure.”

“It’s me, girl.”

“You took your time,” Michelle said, indignant without asking for my reasons.

“That’s me,” I said.

“Don’t you be sarcastic with me, mister. I knew you’d be anxious to get what I had, that’s all. And I didn’t want to leave anything on a tape.”

“Okay, honey. I’m sorry.”

“My boy says his father wants to see you.”

“Now?” That was plausible. A man who lives underground doesn’t use a sundial.

“No. Tomorrow. In the afternoon.”

“I’ll be there.”

“You’ll pick me up first,” she ordered.

“Two o’clock?”

“Very good,” she said, back to being sweet-voiced. I’m not smart with women, but I wasn’t stupid enough to tell her I had finally snapped to why she hadn’t just left a message.

The next morning, I dipped into my cache of dead-ended cell phones and dialed the number I had for Beryl’s mother. Three rings, a click, then…

Sounds of a baby, gurgling happily. Laid over it, a woman’s pleasant voice: “Hi. This is Elysse and her mommy. If you have a message for either of us, we’d love to hear it. Have a wonderful day.”

Nothing so unusual—a lot of people think it’s precious and special to have their kid record the outgoing message on the answering machine. But Beryl’s mother had to be in her early fifties. And her father said Beryl had been an only child….

A grandchild? Beryl’s child, being raised by the mother? That happens. Girl finds herself pregnant, but can’t find the father. Or doesn’t know who he is. Or does, and wishes she didn’t. So she comes home with the baby—“just until I get on my feet.” Sooner or later, she makes tracks, leaving the baby for her mother to raise. Goes back to the life that put her in that trick bag to begin with.

If you think that only happens in ghettos, get yourself tested for cataracts. Rich folks may live on never-touching parallel tracks, but the same train runs on both of them. For some unwanted kids, there are “state homes.” For others, boarding schools. Some humans dump their children on the grandparents. Some sell them.

If that baby was Beryl’s, could Daniel Parks have been the father? Is that why he was diverting cash to her?

I went back to the CD, using the search function Clarence had shown me. Not even a hint that Beryl might have a child, much less that Parks might be the father.

Was Beryl Summerdale the mother and the daughter? Had Peta Bellingham just gone back home, with her child, and taken her mother’s maiden name as her own? Hiding in plain sight, separating herself from whatever mess Daniel Parks had gotten himself into, waiting for it to blow over. Or for him to be blown away.

“You got pals in D.C., don’t you, honey?” I asked Michelle, on the trip up to Hunts Point.

“Good pals,” she assured me.

“Good enough to lend a car to a stranger?”

“Oh, please,” she said, waving away such pettiness. If Michelle called them good pals, they’d drive a man in a ski mask to the nearest bank…and wait outside, with the motor running.

“That’s some outfit,” I said, not lying. She was wearing a lilac business suit over a plum-colored silk blouse trimmed in black around the collar. Her ankle-strapped spike heels were the same color as the blouse. So were her nails. A jet-black pillbox hat with a half-veil completed the picture, and it was a box-office smash.

“Well, I’m glad someone noticed.”

“Girl, how can you get on the Mole’s case before he even gets a chance to drop the ball?”

“Why wait?” she said, grinning wickedly. “I know my man.”

Michelle had brought a for-once/for-real spring day with her. The Mole’s junkyard lanai was drenched with sun, transforming the random shards of metal and glass that surrounded the area into a glistening necklace.

“You look gorgeous, Mom,” Terry told her, adroitly cuing his father, who still couldn’t come up with the required compliment in time. Michelle generously settled for the blush that suffused the Mole’s pasty skin.

The kid opened a laptop computer with a gigantic screen and fired it up, canting the screen so that I could see, blocking the sunlight with his shoulder.

The screen flashed too quickly for me to follow. A row of what looked like different-colored balloons popped up. Terry played the cursor over a red one and double-clicked. A photo snapped open, as clear as a movie-screen image.

A man in a dark overcoat, caught mid-stride moving down a sidewalk, a bulky briefcase in his right hand. A businessman, returning from a hard day?

“What’s this?” I asked Terry.

“Hold up,” he said, fingering the touchpad.

Another picture. The same man, just turning in to the front walkway of a house.

Click. Close-up of the house.

I’d seen it before.

In Briarwood.

“Got it?” Terry asked.

“Yeah.”

“Okay…” He clicked again.

Close-up of a man carrying a briefcase. Three-quarter profile.

Charlie Jones.

“Are you sure he wasn’t just—?”

Before I could say “visiting,” Terry had clicked again. This time, the man was standing on the front step, talking to someone whose back was to the camera. Click, click, click; each one a tighter close-up.

Charlie Jones.

“I never thought those camera phones could get anything like that,” I said, impressed.

“They can’t,” Terry said, proudly. “But when Dad makes one…”

“You see?” Michelle said, preening.

“What’s on the rest?” I asked Terry, indicating the unopened balloons on the screen.

“More of the same,” he said. “He usually comes home from…well, from whatever he does, around two, three in the afternoon.”

“When does he leave?”

“We didn’t have infrared,” the Mole said, answering my question. “You said you only needed—”

“Ah, this is perfect, brother.”

The underground man blushed again.

In New York, a new restaurant opens every seven minutes. Then Darwin takes over, and most disappear within a few months. But they keep coming, like a stampede off a rooftop.

Loyal was all pumped up about trying this Italian joint she’d heard about. It was on Ninth, in the Forties. Way too far to walk, especially in the high heels I’ve never seen her without. It was raining, so getting a cab was a crapshoot, and I didn’t feel lucky.

“Is this your car?” she asked, looking around the interior of the Plymouth like a girl who expected to find a baby-grand piano hidden in a tarpaper shack.

“One of them,” I said. Then I gave her the whole restoration-hobby routine.

“It’s nice,” she pronounced. “Nice and big.”

New York parking lots charge more per hour than some hookers, and they both end up doing the same thing to you. Loyal had a red vinyl raincoat and a little matching umbrella. It didn’t really cover the both of us, but she insisted, molding herself against me as we walked the two blocks to the restaurant.

An olive-skinned woman in a black cocktail dress who’d spent way too much time on her hair tapped an open ledger book with a silver pen and looked at me expectantly. I was about to tell her we didn’t have a reservation—it was only a few minutes past seven, and I could see a dozen empty tables in one glance—when Loyal said, “Lewis,” as she squeezed my left arm with both hands.

A hatcheck girl took Loyal’s raincoat, handed me the ticket and a half-wink.

“Bitch,” Loyal said under her breath.

“She was just working me for a tip when we pick up the coat later.”

“There’s all kinds of tips,” she said, grimly.

A guy in black pants, white shirt, and a black vest showed us to a table for four.

“Will you be joined by—?”

“Just us,” I said. That’s the way guys doing time spell “justice,” but I didn’t share that gem with him.

The waiter looked like he’d been betrayed, but manfully went on to recite a list of specials. Endlessly.

When he was done, Loyal gestured at me to go ahead, she was making up her mind.

I ordered shells and sauce, although they called it something else. Loyal had one of the specials, and a glass of red…although they called it something else.

“To drink?” the waiter said to me.

“Water, please.”

“Perrier? Or—?”

“Just plain water.”

“You want tap water?” he said, as if asking me to confirm I was too miserly to be at large.

“Unless you’ve got something cheaper,” I said, smiling.

As soon as he was gone, Loyal leaned forward.

“You scared him, Lew.”

“Me?”

“You scared him,” she repeated. “And you scared me, too, a little bit.”

“I didn’t say—”

“You have an ugly smile,” she said, very seriously. “Is that why you never use it?”

“That’s a nice thing to say, with all the money I’ve invested in these teeth.”

“You know what I mean,” she said, hazel eyes steady on mine. “That was an ugly smile. And your voice was ugly, too.”

“I guess that goes with being an actress. You pick up all these subtle little things that someone like me would never—”

“Be like that,” she said, closing the subject.

My plate of shells was all-the-way tepid. The pasta was mushy, the sauce had no bite. Even the basil leaf was extra-limp. But maybe I was prejudiced.

“It’s not that good?” Loyal said.

“I didn’t come here for the food.”

“You think I like food too much?” she said, archly.

“I like to watch you eat,” I said, truthfully. Loyal didn’t put away much food, ever, but when she enjoyed something, she let you know.

“You know why I love going out to eat so much?”

“Because you hate to cook?”

“I hate to cook for myself,” she corrected. “What fun is that? But I’m really a damn fine cook. Not fancy stuff,” she said, hastily, “just regular food. Bacon and eggs, roast beef and potatoes, things like that. And I bake, too. Not cakes, pies. That’s really my specialty.”

“Do you scratch-bake?”

“I do,” she said, smiling widely. “Oh, I might cheat a little on the filling, but I never went near one of those crusts you can buy in a store.”

“Sounds good.”

“What kind of pie do you like, Lew? I’d love to bake one for you.”

“Chocolate.”

“Chocolate? What kind of a pie is that? Oh, you mean like chocolate-cream pie?”

“French-silk chocolate pie,” I said, on sure culinary ground for once.

“Okay,” she said, nodding gravely, as if confirming a suspicion.

“Do you ever wonder about people working in places like this?” she asked, over her espresso cup.

“Restaurants?”

“Not in front, where you can see them. In the back. Doing the dirty work.”

“You mean like illegals, working off the books?”

“Yes. I read in the paper this morning where they arrested a man in Queens for bringing in dozens of people from—I forget the exact country, but it was in South America, maybe?—and they had to work doing all kinds of terrible things for almost no money. They were all living in his basement, like pigs in a pen. It was disgusting. Like they were slaves.”

“They were,” I told her. “It’s called debt bondage. They take out a loan to be smuggled here, then they have to work it off. That’s all they do, work. Believe me, they pay ‘rent’ for that basement pen you’re talking about. By the time they send a little money home—which is what they came here for in the first place—there’s almost nothing left.”

“How come the people who do them that way don’t go to jail?”

“Sometimes they do, but not often. It’s big business, supplying bodies for labor. There are contractors who’ll find illegals for whatever you want done: picking crops, loading trucks, cleaning toilets. Guaranteed not to gripe about working conditions, complain about the pay, or join a union. They open their mouths, and they get shipped back across the border.”

“But…”

“Anytime there’s a big profit margin, you’ll get people who want to play, Loyal. Going to jail, that’s a business risk. And, in that business, not much of one.”

“But they don’t tell them, right?”

“I don’t understand.”

“The…workers. They don’t tell them what’s really going to happen once they get here, do they? I mean, they promise them all kinds of wonderful things, to get them to make the trip.”

“Yeah, they do. How’d you know?”

“Because that happened to a girlfriend of mine,” she said. “It almost happened to me, too.”

In the short time we were inside, the weather had changed again. It was warmer after dark than it had been all day, and the air smelled fresh after the rain.

“I could never do that,” she said, as we stepped onto the sidewalk.

“What?”

“Not tip a waiter. I can’t believe you did that.”

“You think it was wrong?”

“Well,” she said, taking my arm, “I don’t think I’d go that far.

But they all work for tips, don’t they?”

“Yeah. And I gave him one that’ll pay off a lot better than the few bucks I stiffed him out of.”

“What do you mean, sugar?”

“He thinks tips are a percentage play, understand?”

“No, I don’t!” she said, deliberately bumping me with her hip.

She was looking up at me from under those impossibly long lashes, biting her lower lip. “Don’t use…language with me, Lew,” she said, pleadingly. “I’m smart, but I don’t talk the same way you do.”

I drew in a shallow breath, thinking how right she was.

“Whoever schooled that waiter told him people always tip some set amount—in this town, most folks just double the tax and call it right. So he figures, if he embarrasses people into spending more money just to prove they’re not cheap—”

“Oh! Like he tried to do with you?”

“Yeah. If he does that, the check for the meal will be bigger. And so will his tip. But that’s not going to work all the time. And when it backfires, you get nothing. So if you do the math—”

“He comes out with less,” she said, nodding in understanding.

“Right. Some people come to restaurants to be bullied by the waiters, true enough. But not that restaurant.”

I paid the parking tab. Added a fin on top, since the car jockey had listened to my “Keep it ready, okay? Two hours.” My Plymouth was right next to his booth, aimed out at the street.

I held the door open. Loyal sat behind the wheel for a second, then wiggled her way over to the passenger side.

“Have you ever been in one of those restaurants?” she asked, as I aimed the car at the West Side Highway. “Where people like to be bullied by the waiters?”

“I have.”

“Did you like it?”

“I wasn’t the one who had the reservations. I was the guest.”

“So?” she said, not to be deterred.

“I never like it, little girl. I don’t like it, period. Not when someone tries it on me, not when they try it on other people, either.”

“I hate bullies, too,” she said. “I always did.”

Images flashed in my mind. Quicksilver fire, candlepoints of pain in inky blackness. I closed them off.

“The last time I was in a big old car like this, I was in school,” she said. “A boy I went out with, he was going to be a stock-car racer.”

“Was his name Junior?”

“Don’t be so smart,” she said, reaching over to punch me on the upper arm. “His name was Holden. All the girls knew his trick.”

“His trick?”

“I don’t know what you call it in New York, but where I come from, if a boy had a special way he’d use to get a girl…to do stuff, we’d call it his trick.”

“And Holden’s was his car?”

“Not the car itself, the way he drove it. He’d take a girl out on the back roads and drive like the devil was in his rearview mirror. My girlfriend Rhonda told me he got her so scared she wet her pants.”

“Maybe that was what—”

“Oh, just stop!” she said, punching me again. Harder. “I know what you mean, but that isn’t what she was saying. She meant…you know.”

“So you went out with him to show Rhonda he couldn’t make you do that?”

“Well, maybe not that, exactly. But you’re right, it was sort of that way.”

“So what happened?”

“It was pretty much like Rhonda told it. Holden was a maniac, all right. A few times, I was just sure we were going to wreck. But it wasn’t scary at all. I kind of liked it.”

“You think Holden was disappointed?” I said, turning onto the highway, heading north.

“Oh, I know he was,” she said, grinning.

As we passed the Ninety-sixth Street turnoff, Loyal asked, “Where are we going, Lew?”

“It turned out to be a beautiful night. I thought you might want to take a little ride.”

“I sure would. But where can you really ‘ride’ in this city?”

“Just be patient,” I said.

“Watch me,” she retorted, sticking out her tongue.

I paid the extortion to get onto the Henry Hudson, and finally got to let the Plymouth run a little on the Saw Mill River Parkway.

“Hmmm,” Loyal said, as we shot past a big BMW sedan. “This thing feels like it’s not even trying.”

“Wait,” I promised.

Another tollbooth allowed us to get to Yonkers. From there, it wasn’t far to a narrow road that ran as jagged as a mid-attack EKG. The Plymouth had been there before, when I’d had to leave the area in a hurry—the big car acted like it remembered.

“Whooo-ee!” Loyal whooped, as I whipped around an S-curve in low gear and floored it just as I got the nose aimed right. The Roadrunner’s xenon lights ripped blue-white holes in the blackness ahead. She flipped open her seat belt and slid over so she was jammed up against me, her left hand on my thigh to hold her in place.

I came off the back road into an underpass, hooked the entrance ramp, and charged onto the highway again, looking for an opening. It was there, and I had the Plymouth past the century mark in a finger-snap. We slipped off at the next exit, found the side road again, and went back to corner-carving. For a finale, I powered her through a full-sideways slide, making more noise than I needed to about it.

“Over there!” Loyal said, pointing to a side road as if we were being chased.

I nosed the Plymouth along cautiously. I knew she was a tiger on pavement—even wet pavement—with that Viper IRS under her, but I didn’t want to try my luck on dirt. I spun the wheel hard left as I braked, then backed into a small clearing barely big enough to let us in.

“Oh, that was fine!” Loyal said, a little breathless. “I can see why you’re putting money in this one, Lew”—patting the dashboard. “She’s got a nice big butt under that shabby old skirt, doesn’t she?”

“Surprised a lot of people with it, too,” I agreed.

Loyal took a pack of cigarettes out of her little red purse.

“I’m a secret smoker,” she said. “When I was in school, nice girls didn’t smoke. But when I came to New York, it seemed like the girls who knew what was going on, they all did. So I picked it up. Then, all of a sudden, it was, like, if you smoked, you were some kind of a degenerate. So I stopped. Only not really. And sometimes I just want one, you know?”

“I do,” I said, taking the pack from her. I tapped out a pair of smokes, lit them both, handed her one.

“It’s beautiful here,” she said, later. “Even though you can’t see the sky because of all those branches, you know the stars are out. It’s that kind of night.”

“It’s beautiful here, all right. But it would be even if it was the middle of a rainstorm.”

She moved against me. Just a tiny bit, more like a twitch than a snuggle.

“You know something else good girls didn’t do?”

“Drink?”

“Yes. That and have sex in cars. Well, not have sex, even. Just be seen in a boy’s car in certain spots outside of town. I did that once. Because I didn’t know any better, I let this boy talk me into taking a ride, and we ended up parked in one of those places. He never did anything more than kiss me, but by the time Monday came around, it was like I was the Whore of Babylon.”

“Your brother must not have cared for that.”

“Oh my goodness, he did not. Speed went up to the boy that had been telling the story and asked him to fight. Well, the boy wasn’t going to fight Speed, and Speed couldn’t just up and start beating him. But Speed was so smart. He said something to the boy that made him have to fight.”

“What was that?”

“Well…” She looked down at her lap. “He told the boy, ‘I know you didn’t do what you’ve been telling everybody you did. Because you can’t bust a girl’s cherry with your nose.’”

“I guess that would do it,” I said, admiringly.

“Uh-huh. I was only fourteen then. It was right after that when Speed had that talk with me.”

“He was a fine brother.”

“He still is,” she said. “And he’ll always be.”

“You think I’m silly, don’t you?” Loyal said. It was a little after midnight. I was lying on her bed, a pillow propped under my head. She was standing with her back to me, candlelight playing over her lush curves, holding a cigarette in her right hand.

“Because you only smoke in your house when you can open a window?”

“This is my whole stake,” she said. “I can’t do anything that might mess it up.”

“I understand.”

“No, you don’t,” she said, as she dropped her cigarette into a glass of water. She left the window open as she padded into the bathroom in her bare feet. I heard the toilet flush. Then the hiss of the lemon-scented aerosol can she kept on a little shelf next to the sink.

She brought the spray can back with her, gave the bedroom a liberal blast before she closed the window. She returned the can to its resting place and crawled back onto the bed. She stopped when she got as far as my knees, posing on all fours as if she couldn’t make up her mind.

“I want to tell you something, okay?”

“Sure.”

“Don’t you want to know what?”

“When you tell me, I’ll know.”

She didn’t move for a few seconds. Then she crawled the rest of the way toward me, gave me a soft kiss on the mouth, and curled herself into me, her cheek against my chest.

“Remember what I told you, about needing a place to stay for a couple of years?”

“Uh-huh.”

“That was a lie,” she said. “A little lie. But it’s part of a lot of other ones.”

I didn’t say anything. My hand on her back didn’t so much as flex.

She went quiet. I matched my breathing to hers, waiting.

“You know what I want?” she whispered.

“No.”

“I know you’re mad, Lew. I don’t blame you. But I still want to do it.”

“Do what?”

“Tell you the truth,” she said.

“I don’t own this place,” she said, as if confessing to a mortal sin. “I mean, I do, but I don’t own it all.”

It took her a solid minute to figure out that I wasn’t going to be asking questions: I was the audience at a one-woman show.

“What I mean is, there’s a mortgage on it. A big one. And it seems like every year the maintenance goes up, too. When I bought it, I used everything I had saved up just to make the down payment. And I had to get…someone…to lie for me about my income, too. The board here is very strict.”

I moved my knuckle along her spine, just enough to tell her I was listening.

“For a long time, that worked out okay. I didn’t have a job, not a real one, but I never missed a payment. It’s all one payment here, every month. Your mortgage and your maintenance—the taxes are in there, too.

“But I haven’t worked in…in a long time, Lew. If I sold this apartment tomorrow, I’d walk away with maybe two hundred, two hundred and fifty. And that’s only because prices have gone up so much. So I have to gamble. I know the bubble’s supposed to break, but that’s what everyone said a couple of years ago, and the elevator still keeps climbing. I have to keep riding it, and jump off just before the cable snaps. That’s what I meant about waiting another two or three years. But if I take out one of those home-equity loans to cover the maintenance, I’m never going to come out with the cash I need.”

Time for me to participate. “So the plan is, you find another place to live, rent this one out, make enough to cover the mortgage and maintenance, build some more equity, and hope the co-op market keeps climbing?”

“That’s right,” she said, sounding as if she was ashamed of herself for such a devious scheme. “I could only rent to someone who the board approved, but that wouldn’t be hard—other owners in the building have done it.”

“Why couldn’t you just do that, and use the money you get from renting this place to rent a smaller apartment? If you rented this one furnished, you could get a pile of money. If you’re willing to live outside the city, it wouldn’t cost all that much. Then, when you go back to work…”

“I’m not going back to work, Lew. Not ever again. The last job I was going to apply for changed all that.”

“What was the last job?” I asked, shifting my weight slightly.

“You were,” Loyal said, reaching down to cup me in her soft, warm little hand.

“It’s all in there,” she said, an hour later.

We were sitting at a café-style table that barely justified an ad that would someday read “eat-in kitchen.” Loyal in a pink silk kimono, me in a white terry-cloth bathrobe that she’d given me when I got out of bed—a brand-new one, still in the original wrapper. She thrust an accordion file folder at me, as if I had demanded it, then folded her arms over her chest.

“What am I going to be looking at?”

“Everything. My bank account, my checking account, my mutual fund, my tax returns, the papers for the co-op…”

“I don’t need to see any of this, Loyal.”

“Don’t you want to know if I’m telling the truth?”

“I always want to know if you’re telling the truth.”

“I haven’t been.”

“Like you said, the whole business about needing a place to stay, it wasn’t exactly the lie of the century.”

“You know what’s not in there, Lew?”

“What?”

“How I earned my money. What I do for a living.”

“That’s not my business.”

“No? Then how come you’re so careful about condoms? Most men hate them.”

“I don’t want children,” I said. A truth, with a lie at its heart—my vasectomy had taken that possibility off the table a long time ago.

She gave me a searcher’s look.

“So if I told you I had my tubes tied…?”

“I—”

“It wouldn’t change anything,” she said, cutting me off. “You don’t know who I’ve been with, for one. And, for two, I could be lying. Plenty of girls who sleep with married men deliberately get pregnant, don’t they? Maybe they want to force the man’s hand. Or maybe it’s just about collecting a fat child-support check every month. It could even be for blackmail.”

“I suppose,” I said, as if none of that had ever occurred to me.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said gravely. “I never had my tubes tied.” She waited for a reaction. When none came, she went on, “And I never would,” clasping her hands prayerfully. “I couldn’t even have an abortion.”

“You’re Catholic?”

“No, no, no. I’m a…Well, I don’t know what I am. Not that way, I mean. I was church-raised, but I haven’t gone since I was last home. To say goodbye to my daddy. But that…other thing, it’s got nothing to do with church. I wouldn’t fault a woman for protecting herself, no matter what she had to do. I couldn’t do it because…”

“Because…?”

“Never mind,” she said, moving her hands to her hips.

I nodded, accepting her judgment.

“That’s it?” she said sharply.

“What are you—?”

“You just let me get away with that? What’s wrong with you, Lew?”

“I don’t under—”

“When a woman says, ‘Never mind,’ you’re supposed to ask her again. At least once.”

“Why?”

“To show you’re interested, silly. Of course, if you’re not…”

I wasn’t that slow. “Sure I am, honey. I was just respecting your—”

She leaned forward, generous breasts threatening to spill out of the pink kimono. “That’s my secret dream,” she said, librarian-serious. “A baby of my own. When I was growing up, I never thought much about things like that. I never thought about a big church wedding, or having kids. I don’t know when it got into me. Since I’ve been up here, I know. Someday, I’d love to have a little girl. I’d be a good mother. A real good one. And I could teach her things, too.”

“It’s a good dream, Loyal.”

“It is,” she said, closing her eyes for second. “I used to babysit all the time when I was in school. But it wasn’t until I got out in the world that I understood what that takes. Not to have a baby—anyone could do that—to be a mother. I kept telling myself I wasn’t ready. And the years kept on rolling, like a river that won’t be dammed. You know?”

“Yeah.”

“Remember, when we were having dinner, I told you about something that almost happened to me?”

“Your girlfriend? The one who went somewhere on a promise, and it turned out to be a trick?”

“A trick,” she said, bitterly. “That’s it, exactly.”

“She wasn’t my girlfriend, not like you’d say ‘girlfriend’ where I come from. Just another girl I knew, from the business.”

It was like a game of chicken—the loser would be the first person to say “prostitute” out loud. It wasn’t going to be me.

“I didn’t come to New York to be in movies,” Loyal said. “Nobody in their right mind does. I wanted to be on the stage. Not Shakespeare or Mamet, more like musical comedy. I can sing and dance, too. Not good enough to be the lead, and I’m way too short to be a Rockette, but I thought I could get chorus work.”

“That didn’t work out?”

She made a harsh sound in her throat, like a strangled laugh. “No. I did all the usual stuff girls like me do: went to a thousand auditions, waited on a thousand tables. I got little, little tiny parts. In off-off Broadway. Plays that ran a weekend, and didn’t cover my cab fare home.

“The first ‘agent’ I got didn’t want to get me jobs; he wanted to get me. But I was expecting that, and all it cost me was time. I didn’t get discouraged; I didn’t think I was going to set the town on fire or anything. But I was hustling like a crazy woman just to put together the cash for head shots and audition tapes.

“That’s when I started working as a B-girl. I told myself it was just like an acting job, sitting with men, listening to them go on and on. I threw down so many watered drinks, I spent half my time in the bathroom, I swear.

“After a couple of years, I’d had my fill. I’d been up here long enough so I could go home and tell folks I’d given it my best shot. I even had a couple of clippings I could show people, but…”

I stayed in my silence, waiting.

“Could you go in the living room?” she said.

I got up without a word. Walked over to the armchair, guided by the light spilling from the kitchen.

Time passed.

I heard sounds I couldn’t identify, coming from the bedroom area but deeper, as if there was another room behind it.

Loyal stalked into the living room like a woman on business. “Here,” she said, handing me a leather folder. The cover was soft, as if filled with foam. She walked behind me, turned on the lamp. My lap filled with frosted light.

“Go ahead,” she said, still standing behind me.

It was a photo album. The first shot was black and white, an eight-by-ten glossy. Loyal, in a straight chair, facing the camera head-on. She was wearing a short black skirt and a white blouse, black pumps on her feet, blonde hair pulled back into a bun. Each of her ankles was lashed to a leg of the chair. Her hands were behind her back. A white cloth was tied around her mouth, parting her lips.

“Keep going,” she said from behind me. “I did.”

The photographs were in some kind of sequence, telling Loyal’s story. They went from ropes to duct tape, from cloth to ball gags, from fully dressed to partially, then not. The last one had Loyal on her knees, facing a wall, naked. You couldn’t see her face. Her wrists were handcuffed behind her back, her ankles were bound together, and a single chain linked the two.

When I was finished, I closed the book.

Loyal turned off the light behind me.

“Say something,” she said.

“You’re a good actress.”

“What does that mean, Lew? What are you trying to say?”

“Just that. In the earlier pictures, when they came in close on your face, you looked like a damsel in distress.”

“What does that mean?” she said again, her voice tightening down to braided wire.

“You looked terrified,” I said. “Like the villain had tied you up, and your only hope was that Dudley Do-Right was going to ride in and rescue you.”

“That wasn’t acting,” she said, putting her hands on my shoulders.

“They really do it,” she said, standing by the window in the living room, this time facing me. “Tie you up, I mean. The first time I…modeled, I thought it was all fake. Like it would be Velcro or something. But it wasn’t.”

“So you were afraid of…what, exactly?”

“I don’t know,” she said, blowing a stream of smoke out the opened window. “Being…helpless, I guess. Not in control. They loved that. I had the ‘look.’ So I had all the work I wanted.”

“Why did you stop, then?”

“Did you ever look into a fireplace when it’s working? Well, that’s what it was like. If you start a fire, you either feed it, or you watch it go out. Do you have any idea of what I’m telling you, Lew?”

I flashed on a not-so-young-anymore girl I’d met in Los Angeles years ago. I’d been out there looking for a photographer who took crime-in-progress pictures for money. He knew I was looking, and he’d gone to ground. I’d gotten the girl’s name from someone who told me that she might have an address for him. And that she’d be stupid enough to give it up, if I worked her right.

That girl hadn’t been stupid. Just sad. All done, and she knew it.

When you’re fresh stuff out here, they may not treat you like a little princess, but they don’t…torture you, you know? But every video you shoot takes a little of the bloom off you. One year, you’re getting a thousand bucks for naughty schoolgirl—and I was never the lead, okay?—the next, they expect you to take some rough stuff for less money, and do it more often. And if you do that? Another year and you’re down to double anals and gang bangs. After that, it gets really disgusting.

“A real good idea,” I said to Loyal.

She took my tone for truth, shifted her own to one less challenging. “It’s like with my apartment,” she said. “I knew I had to get off the elevator before it started going down.”

“They asked you to—”

“I wasn’t looking at myself. Just sleepwalking through it. But I was sliding. It started with girl-girl. Not sex—they never even asked me to do that—but there’d be another girl in the pictures. Like she was the one who tied me up. Maybe I wasn’t raised on the fast track, but I could feel the heat when I got close enough to the fire.”

“You’re not the first actress to do that kind of modeling, early in her career.”

“If that was all I’d done, I could see what I want to see when I look in the mirror.”

“I don’t see that when I look, either,” I said. “I don’t know anybody who does, all the time.” That wasn’t the truth. I’d done time with glistening psychopaths whose self-worship was the sum total of their existence. But that was Burke, not the man she knew.

“Yes,” she said absently. She gutted her cigarette. I waited while she did her full-disposal routine in the bathroom.

“All the time I was…modeling, I had been trying out for parts. But I was getting used up there, too. Like I was disappearing. And the less of me there was, the less I felt I could go home.”

“So you stayed….”

“Until now. Yes. But I didn’t just quit modeling, I quit trying to work, too.”

“How could you do that and—?”

“—still afford a place like this? You know the answer to that, Lew. I’m a toy. A pet. A rich man’s life-size doll. I’ve had four of them since I left off working. You were going to be the fifth. That day we met? I wasn’t shopping for cars.”

I don’t know why I told you all that,” she said, as the green numbers on her alarm clock blinked 4:09. “I know how it makes me look. You know, I used to be able to lead boys around by the nose. All I had to do was take a deep breath, wiggle a little, and talk baby talk. I never had to…do what I told you to pay the rent, or keep food on the table.

“I wasn’t addicted to drugs, I wasn’t…I didn’t have any excuse, not really. I was just ashamed to go home. Not because of anything I did, but because I wouldn’t have anything to show for it. Can you understand that, Lew?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I can. And when you go now, after you sell your apartment, you’ll have been a hardworking actress who saved her money.”

“I sure will. I’ll be able to fix up the house so it’s one of the nicest ones around. Have a swell car. Maybe even…”

“Meet a guy?”

“I…don’t know about that,” she said, letting me in on a conversation she must have had with herself a hundred times. “Here’s what I do know: I can’t go back home just to be getting a job in some store. I need to come back with enough money to live right, so people know I made something of myself while I was away, be proud of me for it. It wouldn’t take a fortune for me to be somebody back home. I just don’t want to be a fraud.”

I touched the vertebrae at the base of her neck. She made a little moaning sound that didn’t have a trace of fake in it.

“It looks like you’re staying the night, for once,” she said, reaching for me.

Loyal slept with her face buried so deep in the pillow I couldn’t see how she got a breath, but her rib cage moved rhythmically as I punched in a number on my cell. I stepped into the living room and waited for the call to be answered.

“Gardens.”

“It’s me, Mama. Can you find the Prof, ask him to meet me, anytime this afternoon?”

“Twelve hours?” Mama said, making sure.

“Perfect.”

“Max, too?”

“No, I won’t need—”

“Yes,” she said, hanging up.

“You don’t take coffee even in the morning?” Loyal asked me. We were back at her kitchen table. She was bustling around, wearing a pair of baggy gray shorts and matching jersey top. I was just sitting still, stealing glances at my watch. Almost ten in the morning.

“Well, you have to have something in your stomach to start the day,” she said, firmly. “At least let me make you some toast.”

“That would be great.”

“And have some juice, too. I’ve got…” She bent at the waist to look in the refrigerator.

“You keep juice on the bottom shelf?”

“Oh, you!” she said, turning over her shoulder to smile at me. “You know all a girl’s tricks, don’t you?”

“Not even close,” I said, as much truth as I’d ever told in three words.

“Well, you sure know what a girl likes.”

I chuckled. Said, “Even I know that trick.”

“Hmmpf!” she said, turning around, hands on hips, face glowing with mock annoyance.

“Come here for a minute, girl.”

She took that as a request to sit on my lap.

“What?” she said, innocently.

“Remember last night? You were telling me about how you almost got into real trouble. A girlfriend of yours went somewhere….”

“Oh! That’s right, I was. I forgot. You really want to know about that?”

“Yeah, I do.”

She squirmed around in my lap. Not playing, getting comfortable. “I never thought I was better than anyone else,” she said, her tone telling me it was very important to her that I believe her. “I met a lot of girls like me. Not just when I was…modeling. When I worked in bars, too. And went on casting calls, of course. I was kind of in the middle of them. Not one of those dreamy-eyed ones who believe they’re going to be ‘discovered’ someday, and not one of those who believe you have to put out for producers if you ever want to get a part, either.

“You know how they say there’s lines you shouldn’t ever cross? Well, I found out that those lines move. Right in front of your eyes. Even if they don’t move for you, they move for your judgments. Do you see what I’m saying, Lew?”

“What you might have once thought was…wrong, or whatever, you learned that there might be good reasons for it.”

“Yes! I may be very old-fashioned. I guess I’m even country in my heart. But, to me, there’s always going to be a difference between a woman who sells herself for money to buy a fur coat, and one who does it to keep a roof over her kids’ heads.”

“And before you came to this city, you would have thought the same of both, that’s what you’re saying?”

“That is what I’m saying. It’s easy to point the Bible at folks like you’re aiming a gun, but it’s just a book, isn’t it? Everybody who reads it comes away with whatever they bring to it. So it wasn’t going to be me casting that first stone.”

“Right,” I said, squeezing her waist slightly to underline my approval.

She took a deep breath. Let it out slowly. Then she stood up, went to the sink, and drew herself a glass of tap water.

“The job was what they called being an ‘entertainment hostess.’ Like a B-girl, but very, very high-class. It was a six-week contract, working for this club. They paid for everything: plane fare, your hotel room, meals, the works. And you came back with thirty thousand dollars. In cash, no taxes.”

“Where was this, Tokyo?”

She gave me a long, measured look. “Yes, that’s right. How did you know?”

“Just a guess.”

“Uh-huh. Then I bet you could guess the rest of the story, too.”

“I might. When your girlfriend got there, they took her passport away. And her visa. That was to make sure she fulfilled her contract, they told her. And they told her she’d misinterpreted what they meant by ‘entertainment,’ too.”

“I’m not sure about that last part,” Loyal said. “I mean, about them fooling her. Lace—that’s what she called herself—she was…I’m not going to call names, but I think she might have known what she was going to have to do. What she didn’t know was that she wouldn’t have any choices. It wasn’t one man. Or even one man a night. By the time they allowed her to leave, it wasn’t even one man at a time. When they let her go, they took most of the money away from her, too.”

“She told you this when she came back?”

“Yes. I told her she should report it. To the UN or something, I don’t know. I mean, Japan, that’s not someplace where they don’t have laws. It’s a very civilized country. And we do all kinds of business with them, don’t we?”

“All kinds,” I agreed.

“Lace said she was mad, but she wasn’t crazy. ‘They’ve got different rules for whores,’ is what she told me. It made me sick.”

“I don’t think you were lucky, girl.”

“What do you mean?” she said, frowning.

“It wasn’t luck that kept you from going over there. You were either too smart or too scared.”

“Scared.”

“When it comes to an offer like that, one’s as good as the other.”

She came back over to me, threw one leg over mine, and sat down on my lap again, this time facing me.

“I told you a lot of truth, these last few hours.”

“I know.”

“Yes. I think you do. I think you do know it was the truth.” She bounced slightly, as if she were making up her mind what to do next.

“What?” I said.

“How about you tell me some truth, Lew?”

“What truth would you like, girl?”

She leaned in so close I lost focus on everything but her eyes. “Tell me why you pretend you’re married,” she said, very softly.