Talk Talk

One

“YEAH, HI. Is this Dana?”

They were announcing a special over the loudspeakers-“Attention, Smart-Mart shoppers, we're having a blue-light special in the housewares department, our superdeluxe model three-speed blender for only thirty-nine ninety-five while supplies last”-and the clamor distracted him. Plus, Madison was hanging on his left arm like a side of beef, totally sugared-out, her hair in her face, a smudge of chocolate on her chin, chanting “I want, I want, I want,” and where was Natalia? “Hold on,” he said into the phone, “I can't hear you.”

He gave the place a quick scan, the phone in one hand, Madison occupying the other, the usual chaos prevailing-kids running wild, fat people shoving carts piled high with crap up and down the aisles as if it were some sort of competition or exercise regimen, heads, backs, shoulders, bellies, buttocks, a stink of artificial butter flavoring and hot dogs grilled to jerky-and then he found a small oasis of calm in the lee of the menswear department and put the phone to his ear again. “Yeah? Hello?”

“Dana?”

“Yeah. Who's this?”

There was the briefest tic of hesitation, and then the voice on the other end of the line began to flow like verbal diarrhea: “It's Rick, I just wanted to hook up on that thing we were talking about the other day-”

He didn't recognize the voice. He didn't know any Rick. Madison pinched her tone to a sugar-fed falsetto: “I want Henrietta Horsie. Please. Please, Dana, please?”

“Rick who?”

“James, Rick James. You know, from the bar the other night? The one on, what was the name of that street?”

That was when everything went still, the loudspeakers muted, Madison moving her mouth and nothing coming out, the bare-legged kids charging silently up and down the aisles and even the babies with their purple-rage faces stalled right there in mid-shriek. He felt sick. Felt as if someone had taken a shank and opened him up. And he was trembling, actually trembling, when he clicked the off button and slid the phone down inside the Hanes display case.

His first thought was to find Natalia and get her out of there, to get in the car and make scarce, but he fought it down. It was nothing-or no, it was something, definitely something, something bad-but there was no need to panic. So they had the phone number-that was inevitable. He'd get another phone, no big deal, but then what if they could somehow trace it or get to the house? But no, he told himself, that was crazy. He was safe. He was fine. Everything was fine.

Madison, five years old tomorrow and with the shrunken hungry bewitching face of an elf out of some fairy tale, let go of his hand suddenly and allowed herself to come down hard on the hard shining floor. He looked down at her in that moment as if he'd never seen her before, her eyes contracting with calculated hurt or sullenness, ready for bed-past ready for bed-and then he jerked his head up and scanned the place for Natalia.

William Wilson was thirty-four years old, a pizza genius and a clothes horse, and to his own mind at least, a ladies' man, though his last lady-the lady before Natalia-had given him a daughter of his own whom he loved till it hurt and then turned into a queen bitch and landed him in jail. He'd always hated the name his mother had imposed on him-William Jr. after his father, who was his own kind of trouble-and when he was in elementary school he felt a little grand about it and insisted that everybody call him William and not Bill or Billy, and then in junior high he saw how uncool that was and got a warm-up jacket with Will stitched across the breast in white piping, but that didn't seem to make it either. Will, William, Bill, Billy: it was all so ordinary, so pedestrian-or plebeian, one of his favorite words from history class, because if anybody was the opposite of plebeian, it was him, and Christ, how many William Wilsons were there in a country the size of the U. S.? Not to mention England. There must have been thousands of them there too. Hundreds of thousands. And what of all the Guillaumes and Wilhelms and Guillermos scattered round the world? By high school he'd adopted his mother's maiden name-Peck-and nobody dared call him anything else, because he was quick with his tongue and his hands and feet too, black belt at sixteen, and there was only one kid at school who even thought about fucking with him and that kid, Hanvy Richards, wound up with the bridge of his nose broken in three places. Peck Wilson, that was who he was, and he went to the community college and got his associate's degree and rose up the ladder from delivery boy to counterman to manager at Fiorentino's in his hometown of Peterskill, in northern Westchester, and he traveled too, to Maui and Stowe and Miami. He tried out women the way he tried out drinks and recipes, always eager, always exploring. By the time he was twenty-five he was flush.

Sure, then he met Gina, and it was all shit after that. Or no: to give her credit, because she had an awesome body and a pierced tongue that tasted of the clove cigarettes she smoked and could make him stand up straight just thinking about it, she took him on more of a shit-slide, a whole roller-coastering hold-your-breath-and-look-out plunge into a vast vat of shit and on shit-greased wheels too. But he didn't want to think about that now. He wanted to think about Natalia, the girl from Jaroslavl who never got enough of anything-the shopper extraordinaire, restaurant killer and bedroom champion-with the breathy bitten-off Russian accent that made him itch and itch again and her little daughter by the guy who brought her over and got her her papers, an older guy she never even liked let alone loved.

They were in the car now, the Z4 he'd bought her (black, convertible, with the 3.0-liter engine and six-speed manual transmission), and the trunk was full of Smart-Mart loot and Madison was squirming in her lap. “Why is it we must go so soon?” she said, giving him a look over her daughter's head. When he didn't answer right away because he was fumbling with the packaging of one of the CDs he'd picked up while she was shopping (the new Hives, a greatest hits compilation of Rage Against the Machine, a couple of reggae discs he'd been looking for), she lifted her voice out of the darkness and said, “Dana? Are you listening to me?”

He loved the way she said his name, or the name she knew him by, anyway-down on the first syllable, hang on to the “n” and then rise and hit the “ah” like a bell ringing-and he dropped the plastic CD case into his lap and reached for her hand. “I don't know, baby,” he said, “I just thought you might want to go someplace nice, like that seafood place maybe, you know? Aren't you getting hungry?”

Her voice floated back to him, coy, pleased with itself: “Maggio's? On Tiburon?”

“Yeah,” he said, and he had to release her hand to shift down. “I mean, if you're still up for it.” He gave her a glance. “And Madison. She could sleep in the car-I mean, she's really knocked out.”

She was silent a moment. The engine sang its sweet song as he accelerated into the turn. “I don't know,” she said, “too much tourists, no? Already, already the tourists! What about-?” And she named the priciest place in Sausalito.

“I hate that place. Phonier than shit. All the waiters have a stick up their ass.” He was remembering the last time, the look on the face of the little fag with the bleached hair when he mispronounced the name of the wine-it was a Meursault and he'd had it before, plenty of times, but he wasn't French, that was all.

“I like it.”

“Not me. I swear I'll never go there again. I say Maggio's. I'm driving, right?”

The car thrummed beneath him, everything-every bolt and buckle and whatever else they had under the hood-in perfect alignment. This was the real thing, German engineering, and it made him feel unbeatable. He fumbled a moment with one of the reggae CDs-an old Burning Spear his cellmate used to play all the time-and then passed it to her. “How about a hand here, huh?” he said, and Natalia's sweet smoky arrhythmic voice floated out again-“Sure,” she said, “sure, no problem, honey, and Maggio's is fine, really”-and the lights flashed in the windows and the fog came up off the bay and Madison, her hair shining in the draw of the approaching headlights, found her niche in her mother's arms. And there it was: the first light insuck of a child's snore, replete.

He was abstracted all through dinner, but Natalia hardly noticed. She was chattering away about some new appliance she needed for the house-a new microwave oven, that was it, because the old one, the one that came with the place, was outdated and it took her nearly five minutes to boil water for a cup of tea and she just didn't trust the Smart-Mart line since they were a such a “cheapie” place, didn't he think? — and he let her go on, her shopper's rhapsody a kind of music to him. If she was happy buying things, then he was happy paying for them. It was a feeling he liked, providing for her-especially in contrast to Marshall, the dud she'd been with before him and who wasn't the father of Madison and was so stingy and petty she couldn't even begin to talk about it, but of course she always did. She'd been out to the car twice to check up on the kid and sneak a smoke and she managed to tuck herself back into her seat just as the entrees arrived. He didn't say anything, just watched her as she unfolded the white linen napkin with a fillip of her wrist, her shoulders bare, eyes darting round the room-in her element, absolutely in her element. The steam rose from their plates. The waiter materialized over her shoulder-“Grated parmesan? Ground black pepper?”-and faded away. She spread the napkin across her lap, took a sip of wine. “You are the quiet one tonight, Da-na, yes?” she said, giving him a sidelong look as if better to examine him from the angle. “Something is wrong? You usually like this place, is it not so?”

He did like the place. It wasn't in the league of the Sausalito restaurant maybe, but the menu was pretty eclectic and they knew him here-everybody knew him-and if there was a line of tourists or whoever, they always seated him the minute he walked in the door. Which was the way it should be. His money was good, he tipped large, he always dressed in a nice Armani jacket when he came in for dinner and his girlfriend was a knockout-they should have paid “him” just to sit at the bar. He was having the seared ahi, to his mind the best thing on the menu, and it came teepeed atop a swirl of garlic mashed potatoes and translucent onion rings with a garnish of grilled baby vegetables; she was having the seafood medley. The ahi looked good, top-flight, but he didn't pick up his fork. Instead he reached for the wine, their second bottle, a Piesporter he'd always wanted to try, and it was good, light and crisp on the palate, very cold and faintly sweet the way a Riesling should be. “Yeah,” he said, “the place is great.”

She was neatly slicing a medallion of lobster in two. Her earrings caught the light as she bent her head forward, and he saw her framed there as if on the screen in a movie theater, the selective eye of the camera enriching the scene till the grain of the wood paneling shone behind her and the crystal glittered and her eye lifted to meet his. He'd bought them for her, the earrings, fourteen-karat white gold chandeliers with a constellation of diamonds, to make things up with her after their first fight-she wore them to bed that night and she didn't wear anything else. “You look not so great-like a man who is, I don't know, not so great right now. Are you not hungry? You are feeling discomfited?”

He had to smile. Inside he was still seething at that fuckhead on the other end of the phone-Rick James, yeah, sure, the superfreak himself-but he had to hand it to her: she could make him smile anytime. “Discomfited.” Where in Christ's name had she come up with that one? “It's nothing, baby,” he murmured, reaching across the table for her hand, a hand almost as big as his own, the long predatory fingers, the pampered nails in two shades of lacquer, as if a cobalt moon were setting over a maraschino planet in ten fleeting phases. She took his hand in a fierce clasp and brought his knuckles to her lips.

“There,” she said, everything about her sparkling, the earrings, the sheer fabric of her dress, her eyes, her lips, “you see? I make it better.”

But it wasn't better. He felt sulky, sullen, felt like lashing out at somebody. He freed his hand, picked up his fork and scattered the seared slabs of pink flesh round the plate. “You got your phone?” he said suddenly.

She was sipping wine, the pedestal of the glass hovering like a hummingbird over the bud of her mouth. She liked wine. Liked it even more than he did. She liked vodka too. “Why? Did you lose yours?”

He shook his head, held out his hand. “I left it on the dresser.”

“But no-you have it when we are at The Bridge, for cocktails. Before the Smart-Mart. Remember? You are calling for canceling Madison's piano lesson-remember?”

“Maybe I left it in the car.”

A theatrical sigh, the bemused frown giving way to a lingering look of chastisement, of maternal tsk-tsking-yes, and wasn't it motherhood that ruined them all, that elevated them to the status of the all-knowing and all-powerful, and reduced everybody else, even grandfathers, dictators and mercenary killers, to the level of feckless children? Even as she dug into her purse for the cell a quick flare of anger burst in his brain, streamers everywhere. Did he snatch it from her? Maybe. Maybe he did. “I've got to make a call,” he said, barely able to suppress the rage in his voice. “Be right back.”

He was on his way to the men's, shouldering his way past a group of lawyer types at the bar-thirty to sixty, pinned-back ears, faces that glowed like jack-o'-lanterns with their own self-importance, Glenfiddich in their tumblers and bitches on their arms, Berkeley bitches, Stanford bitches, maybe even Vassar bitches-when he shot a glance to the doorway and saw the cutout figure of a little girl with a tragic face poised right there on the carpet in the shadow of the hostess' stand. Madison was barefoot, her sundress askew, Henrietta Horsie dangling by the rope of its tail from the clench of one tiny fist. There was the smell of the sea knifing in through the open door, a smell of cold storage and rot, and it reminded him of where he was, of what it cost to live where you could get that smell anytime you wanted it, day and night. She was crying. Or no, whining. He could hear the faint singsong whimper, and it was like some stringed instrument-cello, violin-playing the same dismal figure over and over. Two couples suddenly entered the picture, looming up behind her looking puzzled and annoyed, as if they'd just stepped in something, and the hostess-Carmela, eighteen years old and as tall and lean and honey-breasted as a fashion model's little sister-was bent at the waist, clearly disconcerted but trying her best to coo something reassuring.

“Fuck it,” he was thinking, “let Natalia deal with it,” and he swung abruptly to his left, nearly colliding with a fish-faced woman in pearls and a black cocktail dress and half a mile of exposed bosom who was making her way back from the ladies'. “Oh,” she gasped as if he'd run her down on a football field and slammed the wind out of her, “oh, beg pardon,” and that was all it took-the movement, the distraction-because he heard Madison cry out behind him and then he turned and she was running to him, already sobbing.

The whole place stopped dead, every head raised to see what the commotion was, even the waiters looking over their shoulders as they levitated their trays and paused in mid-step. One of the lawyers might have said something: there was a laugh, a group laugh, at the bar behind him, but he blocked it out, Madison coming straight for him, her sobs brutal and explosive, the bare dirty feet slapping through a minefield of boots and loafers and heels till she was there clinging to his leg like a-what were those fish that fasten on to the sharks? “Dr. Halter, is everything all right?” one of the bartenders said, but he ignored him. And he must have lifted her too forcefully because she exploded all over again and he just tucked her, kicking, under one arm and brought her to Natalia like something he'd caught and trussed up in the jungle and they were laughing at him, he could feel it, everybody in the place, just laughing.

There was one white-haired old shit in the men's, meticulously drying his fat red hands as if he was afraid his skin was going to come off, and Peck gave him a look of such pure hate and burgeoning uncontainable violence that he backed out the door like a crab. The door eased shut on marble, fresh-cut flowers, a smell of new-minted money chopped up and vaporized. And what was that? — opera-playing through the speakers. For a long moment he just stared at himself in the mirror, his eyes vacant, and nothing registered, as if he didn't recognize himself or the place either. Then he realized the phone was still in his hand, Natalia's phone, the one that was stuck to the side of her head sixteen hours a day when she was running up the bill talking to her sister in Russia and her brother in Toronto and her best friend Kaylee whose kid was at the same pre-school as Madison. The phone. He studied it there in the palm of his hand as if he'd never seen it before, as if he hadn't signed on for a thousand free minutes and used it as an extension of himself whenever he had to check up on the ballgame or place a bet or score a little something to make the afternoons go easier with nothing to do but sit in the sun on the back deck and stare at Natalia's sweet brown midriff and tapering legs because how much sex can you have before you go blind and deaf and your tool falls off?

He heard somebody at the door-another white-hair-and he said, “Give me a minute here, will you? Is that too much to ask-a fucking minute's privacy?” And then he opened his hand and began to slam the cell against the marble tile of the wall in front of him, and he slammed it till there wasn't much left to hold, and after that he dropped it to the marble floor and worked it with his heel.

Later, after they'd got home and Natalia put Madison to bed and settled down in front of the tube (“Everything satisfactory? You want that doggie-bagged, Dr. Halter?”

“Nah, no point in it-give it to the homeless, will you?”), he took a bottle of beer into the spare bedroom he used as an office and booted up the computer. He went to the T-M site, typed in his password and brought up his account-OVERDUE AND PAYABLE/SERVICE INTERRUPTION WARNING-to see what he could find there. He'd gotten lazy or incautious or whatever you wanted to call it and now he'd put everything at risk and that was just stupid, stupid, stupid. For a year and more he'd been careful to pay up all his Dana Halter accounts just so something like this wouldn't happen, but he'd had a little cash-flow problem-the condo, the new car, Natalia on the phone and at the mall and the salon and Jack's and Emilio's and all the rest-and things had slipped. Now they were onto him. “Jesus,” the thought of it made him so furious, so rubbed raw and plain pissed off it was all he could do to stop himself from jerking the monitor off the desk and flinging it through the fucking window because the thing wasn't giving him what he wanted. He stared at the screen, at his account, calls out and calls in-incoming, incoming-but nothing more recent than the close of the last billing period. He wanted that number. The number of that fuckhead Dana Halter-or the cop or detective or whoever he was, “Rick Fucking James”-and he wasn't going to wait for the bill and he wasn't going down to the T-M office to pay off the account either. No, he was going to get a new phone in some other creep's name and no one would be the wiser except maybe Natalia (“Will you not give me back my cell, Dana?” she'd said the minute they got in the car; “No,” he said, “I need it because I'm expecting a call, okay? Can you just back off? Can you?”).

Before he did that, though, he had a little task to perform, the smallest pain in the ass maybe, but not risky, not at all. What he had to do, first thing in the morning, even before he opened a new account and got his five hundred free minutes and no-charge weekends, was go down to Smart-Mart and amble into the menswear department. He'd been hasty, impulsive. He hadn't been thinking. But he could picture it already, some career drudge stocking shelves or pushing a broom and “Hey, bro, can you help me out here-I had my cell balanced right here on top of this display because my arms were loaded down with all this high-quality Hanes underwear and I think it went down there, yeah, there, behind the partition. Hey, thanks, man, thanks beaucoup.” Yeah, and then he'd toss it away again, but not before he hit “Calls Received” and got that clown's number. Because who was to blame here, who was the wise guy, who was fucking with whom?

Two

“WHAT DID HE SOUND LIKE?”

Bridger shrugged. She watched his lips. “I don't know-like anybody else, I guess.”

It was early evening, she was feeling frayed and beaten and so exhausted her internal meter was barely registering, but her papers were finished and back in the hands of her students and her grades were in. They were at a restaurant, Bridger's treat, the silent careening of the waitresses and the tidal heave of people swelling and receding at the bar a kind of visual massage for her, and as she poured out her second glass of beer she felt herself coming back to life. She'd always liked this place-it featured old sofas and low tables, loud rock music (very loud: she could feel the vibrations in the beer bottle, in the cushions, the table, almost picture the air fracturing around her) and a mostly young clientele from the local college. It was dark, there were dashed-off-looking abstracts on the walls, and it was cheap and good. She'd ordered risotto, about the only thing she could get down without chewing; Bridger was having pizza, the all-sustaining nutriment and foundation of his diet.

“You're hearing,” she said, leaning into the table, “and you can't do better than that? What was his voice like?”

He leaned in too, but he wore an odd expression-he hadn't heard her. Because of the music. “What?” he said, predictably.

She gave him a smile. “Just like the night we met.”

“What?”

So she signed it for him and he signed back: “What do you mean?”

“You're deaf too.”

He had an outsized head, castellated with the turrets and battlements of his gelled hair, and sometimes, when she saw him in a certain light, his features seemed compacted in contrast, like a child's. That was how it was now. He had the look of a child, puzzled, unaware, but slowly allowing her gesture to make the words in his mind and bring the meaning back through the circuitry to his eyes. “Oh, yeah,” he said aloud. “Yeah.”

“But what did he sound like?”

A shrug. “Cool”.

“Cool? The jerk who stole my identity is cool?”

Another shrug. He lifted his beer to his lips to give him time with the response, then he set it down carefully and said something she didn't catch.

“What?”

His clumsy Sign, loose and sloppy, but endearing because it was his: “Suspicious.”

“He sounded suspicious? Cool and suspicious?”

People were watching them-the girl at the next table over, trying not to stare but nudging the boy with her, college students both, with tiny matching Mickey Mouse tattoos on the underside of their left wrists. People always stared at her, overtly or furtively, when she talked in Sign, and when she was younger-especially in the crucible of adolescence-it used to affect her. Or no: it mortified her. She was different, and she didn't want to be. Not then. Not when the slightest variation in dress or hairstyle reverberated through the whole classroom. Now it was nothing to her. She was deaf and they weren't. They would never know what that meant.

Bridger gave one last shrug, more elaborate this time: “Yes.”

She finger-spelled his name and it was both an intimate and formal gesture, intimate because it was personal, because it named him instead of pointing the right hand and index finger at him to say “you” and formal because it had the effect of a parent or teacher announcing displeasure by reverting to the full and proper name. Charles instead of Charlie. William instead of Billy. “Bridger,” she signed, “you're not communicating.”

She watched his mouth open in a laugh, enjoyed the glint of the crepuscular bar lights off the gold in his molars.

“And if you're not communicating, how are we ever going to track down the had guy?”

They both laughed, and her laugh might have been wild and out of control-most deaf people's laughs were described as bizarre, whinnying, crazed-but she had no way of knowing, and she couldn't have cared less. The place was warm. The place was loud. A guy at the bar turned round to stare at her. “But seriously,” she said aloud. “The area code was 415?”

“What?”

“Four-one-five?”

He nodded. The music might have been supersonic, the plates rattling on the shelves, people running for cover and whole mountains tumbling into the sea, but a nod always did the trick.

“Bay Area,” she said.

“That's right,” he said, and he leaned in so close she could feel his breath on her lips, “and it's a 235 prefix.”

Another number. She took it from him and repeated it: “Two-three-five?”

“Same as Andy's, my friend Andy? From college?”

“Marin?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Marin.”

On Friday morning she met with her last class of the semester and felt nothing but relief. They were juniors, so there was none of the tug she'd felt with the seniors on Thursday, the ones who were going out into the world to make a life without her-these kids she'd see next year, and they'd be taller, stronger, wiser, and she'd give them words, words on the page and in the mind and in the residual silent beat of the iamb that was as natural as breathing, “What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why I have forgotten.” As she packed up her things, sorting through books, papers, videotapes, she couldn't suppress a sudden rush of elation, the kind a runner must feel at the tape, her first year behind her, the long break ahead and the sting of what had happened over the past weekend gradually beginning to fade.

The other teachers were going out to lunch at a place down by the ocean to celebrate the end of the term with steamer clams, fish and chips and a judicious and strictly medicinal intake of alcohol, but she was going to the dentist. Or rather the endodontist. “Root canal.” Simple dactyl. There wasn't much metaphoric mystery there: the root of the tooth branched down into her jaw like the root of a tree, where the living nerve relayed pain to the thalamus; the canal was to be excavated through the tender offices of Dr. Stroud's instruments, and though she'd be spared the noise that so intimidated the hearing, the stink of incineration would ride up her nostrils all the same even as the bony structure of her cranium vibrated with the seismic grinding of the drill. And the pain-there was no aural component for that. She would feel it as much as anyone, maybe more. She could see it like an aura, taste it. Pain. Of course, Bridger had a different take on it altogether-and he could afford to, since he wasn't the one undergoing the ordeal. The night before, just to reassure her, he'd told her that the last time he'd been to the dentist he'd named names and given up all his secrets in the first three minutes and still the fiend kept drilling. She'd signed back to him, right hand open, palm in, fingers pointing up, then the fingertips to the mouth and the hand moving out and down, ending with the palm up: “Thank you.” And then aloud: “For sharing that.”

She'd avoided Koch since their confrontation on Tuesday, but as she was hurrying down the hall, running late, two cardboard boxes of books and papers clutched to her chest, her briefcase slapping at her right thigh and skewing awkwardly away from her, he emerged from the main office. They made eye contact-he saw her; she saw him; there was no avoiding it-and his mouth began to move. The only thing was, she didn't know whether he was chewing gum or delivering a soliloquy out of “Richard III,” whether he was offering up the apology he owed her or even a threat or insult, because she dropped her eyes and went right on by him as if he were a figure out of a dream.

Because she was late, Dr. Stroud dispensed with the usual ten minutes of banter, gossip and news of the world, and settled her into the chair as expeditiously as possible. Still, he was running at the mouth all the while, filling her in on his wife's fender bender (Dana loved the term, loved the rhyme and the function and the way it snapped on the lips to reveal the grimace of the teeth) at the farmers' market the previous week-she was there for the cut flowers, she was mad for cut flowers, and for beets and broccolini and did he ever tell her about the time she ran out of gas in the middle of the Fourth of July parade? and some overanxious boutique baby-vegetable purveyor backed into her in his seven-thousand-pound Suburban. Or at least that was the drift of it, broccolini a bit problematic, and that put her back a phrase or two. Before he inserted the rubber dam and the crank device that jammed her jaws open, she was able to respond by averring that broccolini was her single favorite vegetable, sautéed in olive oil with chopped garlic, shallots and a splash of Dijon mustard, and that she hoped the damage to the car wasn't too severe, but by that time he was already onto some other subject, something dental-or endodontal-she gathered, something serious in any case, because his eyebrows suddenly collided and his pupils narrowed. A moment later he and the nurse both snapped on their surgical masks and she felt the sting of the needle as it slid into her gums and after that all communication ceased.

Two hours in the chair. The drilling, the gouging, the fitting of the post and the grinding down of the temporary cap: two hours anyone else would have written off. But not Dana. She was, as Bridger was quick to point out-pejoratively-an A-type personality, as if that were something to be ashamed of, as if civilization hadn't been built on the backs of the A-types, as if armies hadn't been led by them, advances made in the laboratory, in the concert hall, the universities and hospitals and everywhere else. Slow down, people told her-“Bridger” told her-relax and live in the moment, but they were B-types, they were slackers. Like Bridger. And were there only two types then? No, she thought, there must be a third type, type C, for Criminal. That man in the photo staring out at her from the fax in the police station, that was what he was: no need to make and build or lie back and smell the roses when you could just simply steal it all.

So she was an A-type. And she had two hours. She understood that it would be somewhat difficult to focus under the circumstances, what with the dentist's fingers in her mouth and the nurse's face hovering in her field of vision like the moon to his sun-no hearing person could have done it-but she was good at shutting out the world, a champion, in fact, and she'd brought the thin sheaf of “Wild Child” along with her. It had been over a week since she'd had a chance even to think about it in any fruitful way, and that nagged at her. She couldn't hope to write under the circumstances-there was no realistic way and she had no expectations-but what Bridger didn't understand was how vital it was to review and revise, to re-enter that world she'd created and find her way to a destination she couldn't even guess at.

The drill bit, the dam held. Dr. Stroud probed. The nurse loomed. And Dana lifted the manuscript in one hand and banished them both, drifting, drifting now into another place altogether, a place where she wasn't Dana Halter of the San Roque School for the Deaf, but a child of eleven, a boy child, nameless, naked, dwelling in his senses. There was a scar at his throat, a raised ragged island of flesh he fingered because it was there, a scar that preceded all the others and took him back to the moment when he found himself waking for the first time to the swaying of the trees and the rhythmic clangor of the birds and insects, attuned to the fierceness of the wind in the branches and the pitch of every note the branches sang. He lived in France, in the untamed forest of La Bassine, but he didn't know it. Lived eighteen hundred years after the death of Christ, but he didn't know that either. All he knew was to dig in the earth for grubs and tubers, to gorge on berries, grasshoppers, frogs and snails, to crouch over his haunches in a nest of leaves and listen to that symphony of the air and the melody the brooks played and the insects of the day and the insects of the night, the earth spinning for him alone and no human voice, no words, to intrude on it…

But Dr. Stroud was there, leaning away from her now, the surgical mask removed, and he was smiling at her-preening himself on a job well done. The nurse was smiling too. “That wasn't so bad, was it?” he said, careful with his lips and teeth and tongue so that she could understand.

“No,” she said, her own lips cumbersome and without sensation, “not bad at all.”

“Good,” he said, “good. Well, you're a model patient, let me tell you.” His eyebrows tented. Both his hands were clenched above his shoulders and rocking back and forth in celebration of their mutual triumph. “If you have any pain, Advil should do it. And nothing too strenuous”-yes, that was it: strenuous-“for the rest of the day. Take some time off. Put your feet up. Relax.”

She nodded, her mouth frozen in a Xylocaine-induced grimace. And then he went on to tell her an elaborate story about one of his other patients, whom he wouldn't name out of professional discretion, but she was something of a hypochondriac-his mouth gaped over the word-and that was the last thing she caught because he forgot himself and began talking so fast even a hearing person would have had trouble understanding him. A term came to her-“motormouth”-and she had to smile, whether he misinterpreted it or not. She was on her feet now, at the door, and he was still talking away, but for all she got of it he might as well have been chewing gum.

Three

MADISON WAS AWAY at the piano teacher's, Natalia was sunbathing on the deck and he was poised over the black granite top of the kitchen counter, mixing their second round of Sea Breezes. He stood there in a cocoon of silence (the CD needed to be punched up but he didn't feel like punching it), appreciating one of those moments when the whole world opens itself up to you, when everything you take for granted in the daily hassle to scratch and grab and assert a little dominance is suddenly right there in front of you and the planet poises on its axis, just balanced, just now. And he wasn't drunk, not yet-that wasn't it. He was just attuned to the little things: the taste of the salt air through the flung-open window, the feel of the delicate layer of ice on the neck of the Grey Goose bottle straight from the freezer, the perfume of the split lime, the sweetness of the cranberry juice and the acid pull of the fresh-squeezed grapefruit in the stone pitcher. He looked out over the salt marsh to the bay beyond, the light like something out of a painting-a thousand gradations of light, from the palest driest Arctic stripes at the wrought-iron rail of the deck to the rich tropical gold poured all over Natalia and the chaise longue to the distant white purity of the sails of the boats tacking against the breeze.

For dinner, he was going to make sea scallops braised with scallions and garlic, with a sauce he'd learned years ago while fooling around at the restaurant (a white wine reduction flavored with shallots and a splash of sherry, dollop of butter, fold in the cream at a galloping boil and reduce the whole thing again till it was a fifth of what you started with). He was thinking rice with it, flavored with bouillon, sherry and sesame oil, and maybe a salad and some sautéed broccolini on the side. Keep it simple. He could have done something more elaborate, because everything was fine and he had all the time in the world, and yet sometimes you just wanted to get back to basics and let the flavors speak for themselves. He could have made dinner rolls from scratch if he'd had the inclination, could have done up something for dessert too, but you couldn't beat fresh-picked raspberries in heavy cream with a sprinkle of sugar and a splash of brandy to burnish the taste. This was how life should be, no hassles and strains and worries, time on your hands, time to stroll through the farmers' market and the wine shop and have a cappuccino and croissant with your lady on a sunstruck morning, time to chop and dice and sear and lay out a nice meal for Natalia's friend Kaylee and what was her husband's name? Jonas, yeah, Jonas. Not a bad guy, really, for a loser. They had a chain of exercise studios-Pilates and the rest of that crap-and he supposed they did pretty well, and that was all right. At least the guy appreciated fine cuisine, a good bottle of wine-at least he wouldn't be wasting his time in the kitchen on a couple of zeroes. The light shifted. The world began to crank round again. His eyes went to Natalia, the sun on her legs, the sheen, the geometry of perfection, and then he came back to the business at hand: cutting two neat pale green wedges of lime to garnish their drinks.

By the time the doorbell rang, everything was ready to go-Madison back from the piano teacher, fed and in her pajamas, the videos selected, the pans laid out and the scallops prepped-and Natalia got up out of the chaise longue in her two-piece and chiffon robe and drifted through the open French doors like something floating on the breeze. She always moved like that-everything in its own sweet time, “Don't rush me, just look at me”-and he heard the greetings at the door and came out of the kitchen with two fresh cocktails in hand. The kid-the daughter, Lucinda-made a bolt for Madison's room and Kaylee, a bony blonde with pinched little shaded glasses and a frizz of hair twisted up in a bun, pulled him to her for an embrace. “Hey,” she was saying, “we just saw the most awesome thing out on the road on the way here, this white bird? — Jonas says it was an egret-just like perched there on the yellow line like it was in the middle of a river or something-”

Peck handed her a Sea Breeze, even as he gave the husband's right hand a squeeze and fitted the cold glass into the socket of his left. “Hey,” he said, and the husband-stubble-headed, goateed, going to fat around the ring in his earlobe-returned the greeting.

“Wasn't that an egret, Jonas?” Kaylee was saying.

“It is a white bird,” Natalia said, bending to levitate her hand two feet from the tiles as her breasts, on display, shifted in the bikini top, “about this high off the ground, yes? We are seeing them all the time,” she avowed, straightening up. “With the binoculars. Common, yes. Very common here.”

“Really?” Kaylee lifted her eyebrows, raised the cocktail to her lips. “It's like really beautiful, though,” she murmured over the rim of the glass. “Like magical, you know?”

The husband wasn't having it. He just held on to his grin and said, “Maybe we ought to get one and stuff it for the Corte Madera place.”

“Oh, Jonas,” the wife said, making a face. She looked to Peck for approval. They both did, the whole party arrested in the entryway, gulping vodka and making small talk about birds.

“Sure,” he said, “why not? And we can stuff the tourists while we're at it too.”

The conversation at dinner ran to a whole host of mainly numb-brained subjects, from Nautilus machines to stair-steppers, the stock market, the Giants, A's, farm-raised salmon and the new Kade movie to the “like super-expensive” European vacation Jonas was treating his wife to, a whole month and the kid at Grandma's, week in Paris, week in Venice, then the rest of the time on some jerkoff's sixty-thousand-foot-long boat off the Islas Baleares. They'd actually said that, actually given him the Spanish with the rolling r and the whole deal, as if they were a tag team of waiters in a Mexican restaurant, first him-“Islas Baleares”-and then her, like an echo. They'd praised the meal-and the wine, and they'd brought two bottles of Talley Chardonnay that wasn't half bad-but as the sun went to bed and the stereo got louder and they began to put a real appreciable dent in the bottle of Armagnac that had cost him sixty bucks at the discount place, Peck began to realize he could live without these people. He really could. Kaylee he'd approved of because she kept Natalia occupied and off his back, but the husband was full of shit to his ears-they both were-and he felt himself getting restless, getting edgy, and that wasn't good because it destroyed the mood of the day and made him think of other things, things that had a negative energy, things that brought him down. Like Dana Halter. Like “Bridger,” that asshole.

He'd called the number that morning and got a message-“Hello, you've reached Bridger's cell; leave a number”-and he felt as if he'd pulled the handle on a dollar machine and got two cherries instead of three. Bridger. What kind of name was that? And why was he playing the game instead of Dr. Dana Halter? If he was some kind of cop he wouldn't have been stupid enough to display his number… which meant he wasn't a cop. But then who was he?

“So, Dana,” the husband was saying, fat-faced, red-faced, leaning into the coffee table as if it were the municipal pool and he was about to plunge in, “anything new with you?”

He felt the smallest burr of irritation. He gave the guy a look to warn him off but he was too dense to catch it.

“I mean, with your practice-that office space in Larkspur? How'd that ever work out?”

It wasn't just a burr-it was a thorn, a spike. Who “was” this clown? And what had he told him? Shit, he couldn't even remember himself. He reached for the snifter and took a moment to study the way the brandy swirled and caught at the glass-it was the color of diet cola when the ice melts down in it, and how had he never noticed that before? — and then he realized that nobody was talking. The husband was staring at him, waiting in his gerbil-faced way for a response, wondering vaguely if he was being dissed, and if he was, what to do about it-and both girls had stopped jabbering away about so-and-so's boob job and were watching him too. “I don't know,” he said finally, trying to control the bubble that was swelling inside him like one of the bubbles that punch through the sauce after you fold the cream in, “with all the malpractice insurance, I don't know how anybody could say it's worth it. Really. Sometimes I think I'd be better off just staying out of it-”

Kaylee's mouth flapped open as if it were spring-operated: “But you're so young-”

The husband: “And your training. What about your training?”

They'd moved into the main room from the dining table-“No, no, don't bother,” Natalia had said when Kaylee tried to help her clear up, “leave it for the maid”-and he'd taken a certain satisfaction in going round the room and flicking on the lamps to create a feeling of intimacy and warmth, as if lamps were hearths and the twenty-five-watt bulbs miniature fires blazing against the night and the fog creeping in across the hills behind them. He studied the husband just the briefest fraction of a second-was the fat fuck mocking him? Was that it? But no: he could detect nothing but a kind of stubborn booze-inflected obtuseness in the man's dwindling stupid little eyes. He didn't answer.

“But all that work, medical school and all,” Kaylee said. She arched her back and did something meant to be furtive that tautened the thin black straps of her bra. “It seems such a shame.”

“Oh, no,” Natalia cut in, making a moue over the “o” sound and holding it a beat too long. “Dana's job is for looking after me and Madison,” and she reached out to caress his biceps. “Is that not so, baby?” She smiled her biggest smile. “A full-time job, no?”

The husband's snifter was empty and he was reaching out his claws to refill it. “Where did you say you went to medical school? Hopkins, wasn't it?”

“Yeah,” Peck said. “But I was thinking it might be cool, really cool, to do something with Doctors Without Borders. You know, go to Sudan or someplace. Help people. Refugees and that sort of thing. Cholera. Plague.”

“Médecins sans Frontières,” the husband said, as if he were licking fudge from between his teeth.

From the back room came the sound of the kids' video, some Disney thing with the seahorses and talking starfish and all the rest, music swelling, the sound of artificial waves. He was agitated, and he didn't know why. The day had been perfect, the sort of day he could have lived through forever, the day-the days-he'd promised himself when he was inside, when everything was gray and the sun never seemed to shine and there was always some self-important officious asshole there to make you toe the line, lights out, everybody up, and the bonehead cons with their pathetic attempts to join the human race, “427, factory, I swear; Nobody changes this channel, motherfucker;” and “How would you like your Jell-O cooked, sir?” But no, he did know why. Everything he had was balanced on the head of a pin, like the collapsible two-story brick house with the three-car garage and the bird in the cage and the yapping dog all folded up in a carpet in one of Madison's videos, swept away in a windstorm that raked the lot where it had stood just a heartbeat before. It was people like this, like “Jonas,” like “Kaylee,” that were the problem. What was he thinking? That he could just waltz in and set himself up and think these people were his friends or something? No. That wasn't the way it was. That wasn't the way it would ever be.

So what did he do? He pushed himself back from the coffee table and raised one foot in his shining new ultra-cool Vans with the checkerboard pattern and set it down right beside Jonas' drink. “Yeah,” he said, leaning back into the cushions and giving both arms a good sinew-cracking stretch, “that's right. That's who I'm talking about.”

When he first met Gina, things were different. He was twenty-five years old, with two years of community college behind him and stints at restaurants in Maui and Stowe, no record of any kind except for traffic infractions (tickets he tossed in the trash, because really, they were just a scam anyway, a means for local municipalities to raise cash so they could buy more cruisers and more radar guns so they could rob more people in the name of law and order), and he'd just been promoted to manager at Fiorentino's, the youngest manager they'd ever had. Or at least that was what Jocko, the basset-faced old bartender who'd been there since the Civil War, told him. Then Gina showed up. He'd been sitting at the bar, his day off-noon-with Jocko and Frank Calabrese, the owner, and a mini-parade of girls slipped in and out applying for the cocktail waitress job advertised that morning in the local paper. They had the faintly tarnished look of cocktail waitresses, every one of them, and some had experience, some didn't. He wasn't looking for experience. He was focusing on one attribute only-how hot they were, on a descending scale of one to ten. None of the others even came close to Gina-facially, maybe, but her body was right out of “Playboy;” or better yet, “Penthouse.” Jocko and Frank, who could be brutal, didn't give him any argument.

Gina-Louise Marchetti.

She'd gone to Lakeland High School, just outside Peterskill, she was twenty years old, between boyfriends, and living-temporarily, she insisted-back at her parents' place on a twisting black road in the rural tree-hung precincts of Putnam Valley, where absolutely nothing was happening, not then or now or ever. Within a week he was sleeping with her and within the month she'd moved into his apartment. Most nights after work they'd cruise the local bars and then sleep in till noon and on their days off they took the train into Manhattan and hit the clubs. They did drugs together, but not in an excessive way, and only speed and once in a while E, and they began to enjoy some decent wines and experiment with recipes out of a cookbook when they had a night at home. For Christmas she bought him a cherrywood wine rack-“For the cellar you're going to have”-and he gave her a case of red the liquor salesman got him wholesale; they cooked a paella for Christmas dinner, just to be different, and spent most of the night admiring the way the twelve symmetrical bottles of Valpolicella looked in the new wine rack.

That was nice. Very domestic, very tranquil. He was in love, really in love, for the first time in his life and he was making good money-and so was she-and there wasn't a bump in the road. They moved into a bigger apartment, with a view of the Hudson from the nuclear power plant all the way up the river to where it snaked into the crotch of the mountains. He got himself a new car, a silver five-speed Mustang with some real pop to it. Nights-alone, in bed, just the two of them-were special. “You're an awesome lover,” that was what she told him, “awesome,” and he believed her then-believed her now, for that matter. But everything in this life turns to shit, as his father used to say (until he died in his Barcalounger of an aneurysm in the brain, the cocktail glass still clutched in his hand), and Frank, the owner, proved it by getting divorced.

Divorced meant time on your hands, time to pick and cavil and criticize, and Peck didn't take criticism well. He never had-in fact, the surest way, all his life, to make him react, was to call him out on something, whether it was his chores at home when he was a kid, or the dick of a math teacher he'd had in the ninth grade trying to humiliate him at the blackboard or the succession of half-wit bosses he'd had from junior year on and every one of them thinking they were God's gift to the world. He knew differently. No matter what, he was always right, even if he was wrong, and he could prove it with one jab of his right hand. Maybe other people-the losers of the world-could turn the other cheek, bow their heads, suck it up, but he couldn't. He had too much pride for that. Too much-what would you call it? — self-respect, self-love. Or confidence, confidence was a better word. At any rate, Frank started living at the bar, inhaling Glenfiddich all night long and getting nastier and crankier and crazier by the day. And then-it was inevitable-there came a night when Peck couldn't take it anymore (some shit about he wasn't ordering the right grade of parmesan and he didn't know real parmesan-“Parmigiano-Reggiano”-from his ass and he was fucking up and costing his boss money) and the youngest manager in Fiorentino's history went down in flames. There was some name-calling, some breakage, and he wouldn't be counting on a reference from Frank Calabrese anytime soon.

Gina was a rock, though. She threw down her apron, emptied the tip jar and stalked out to the car, and within the week she'd found a storefront on Water Street and hit her father up for a loan and Pizza Napoli was born. The place was an instant hit-you would have thought they were giving the pizzas away-and the secret was Skip Siciliano, the pizza chef with the handlebar mustache and the towering white toque he'd managed to coax away from Fiorentino's because Frank was an asshole and Skip couldn't have agreed more. That and the location. People wanted to look out on the broad rolling back of the Hudson and sit at nice tables with sawdust on the floor and strings of salami and garlic hanging from the racks overhead and eat pizza hot from the oven and they wanted antipasto and calzone and homemade pasta too and they wanted takeout and a nice selection of medium-priced Italian wines. By the end of the first year, he and Gina got ambitious and opened the second place-Lugano, a name they picked after closing their eyes and dropping a coin on the map of Italy. The idea behind Lugano was to make it an upscale place, full menu, osso buco, seafood, cotechino, specials every night, caponata in a cut-glass jar on every table and crostini the minute you sat down.

Then Gina got pregnant and told her father, and her father-a loudmouth and bullhead in a league of his own who'd never warmed to Peck because he wasn't Italian and even if he had been it wouldn't have mattered because nobody was good enough for his girl, not the right fielder for the New York Yankees or Giuliani's favorite nephew-insisted that they get married within the month. From Peck's point of view, the whole thing stank. He didn't want a kid, didn't want to be tied down at so young an age, and he resented Gina for letting it happen in the first place. But he went along, not coincidentally because her father was the controlling partner of both Pizza Napoli and Lugano, and he loved her, he did. At least then he did. They were married at the Assumption church, big reception at the country club in Croton, no expense spared, Peck's mother there in the front pew, drunk as usual, a buddy from high school he hadn't seen in six years-Josh Friedman-standing in as best man, and it was a fait accompli.

The thing is, it all might have worked out, a slow upward climb into maturity and the fullness of a relationship, the kid, a dog, a house in the country, if it wasn't for Gina. As soon as she got pregnant, she stopped sleeping with him. Just like that. She was always sick, always complaining about imaginary pains, and she got sloppy and let herself go. She never washed her hair. Never picked anything up. And sex. Did he mention sex? Sex was about as frequent-and satisfying-as the comet that comes every four hundred years and then you go out on the lawn and gape up at some poor pale pathetic streak of scum in the sky you can barely locate. Big thrill. Big, big thrill.

Could anybody have blamed him, even the pope and his College of Cardinals, if he began staying late at the restaurant? Even now, even after the jail time and the hate and resentment and going underground and all the rest, he had no regrets. Sometimes he'd just close his eyes and see the glow of the bar at two a. m., the front door locked and two or three of those candles guttering in their yellow globes till it seemed as if the whole place had been sprayed with a fine patina of antique gold, and Caroline or Melanie or one of the other cocktail waitresses sitting there beside him having a slow smoke and a Remy, his hand on her thigh or her breast as if he were fitting her for a custom-made outfit. So casual. So slow and sure. The beauty of it: he'd fucked her the night before and he'd fuck her again tonight. Once he got around to it.

“So jazz-you dig jazz at all?” Jonas was saying, and Peck had been away for a moment there, and at first, for the smallest sliver of a second, couldn't quite place him. “The new Diana Krall-did you know she married Elvis Costello? — it's pretty awesome.” The man was fumbling in his jacket, the big hand moving like an animal caught in a bag, and then he flashed the CD and handed it across the table. “You might want to put this on. It's pretty awesome. Believe me.”

Somehow, Peck's mood had soured. The pans were dirty, the meal stewing down in their guts, the Armagnac evaporated-was the guy using a straw, or what? Plus there was this asshole Bridger, threatening everything, and the first chink in the wall: the credit card he'd laid out on the counter at the Wine Nook was invalid, or so the pencil-neck behind the counter informed him. Natalia-half-playful, half-serious-had accused him of brooding and he'd defended himself, lamely, as in “I'm not brooding-I'm just thinking, that's all.” Now he took the CD from Jonas in its compact plastic case and stared at it absently.

“I think you're going to like it,” Jonas said, leaning in over the table. He was drunk, sloppy, fat-faced. Peck suppressed an urge to punch him. “Isn't that right, honey?” Jonas said, turning to his wife.

“Oh, yeah,” Kaylee crooned, “yeah, I think you'll really like it.” She shrugged, a long shiver that ran up one side of her torso to her shoulders and back down again; she was drunk too, and why couldn't anybody sit down and eat a nice dinner without getting shit-faced? She gave him a wide wet-lipped smile. “Knowing you. Your soulful side, I mean-”

Natalia was nestled into the sofa like a cat, her legs drawn up, shoes off, the snifter cradled in the v of her crotch. She let her eyes rest on Jonas. “It is what, standards-is that how you say? Standards? Such a funny term.”

No one answered her. After a moment, the CD still balanced in his hand, Peck said that he'd once been to the Five Spot with a girl he was dating ten years ago or more and that the band that night-female vocalist, flute, piano, percussion, bass-was like somebody taking their clothes off in the dark because they're ashamed of the way they look, and then he laid the disc back down on the coffee table and rose to his feet. “Listen,” he said, “I just remembered something-if you'll all excuse me a minute. I've got to-got to go out. Just for a minute.”

Natalia said, “But, Da-na, it is near to one in the a. m. Where? Where do you go?”

She was laying into him in front of the guests and that rubbed him the wrong way. He wanted to say something hurtful and violent, but he held back. He was all bottled up. He was wrong, he knew it, and so he said something in melioration, something he shouldn't have said: “I need to make a phone call.”

And now a whole shitstorm of protest and sympathy rose up, Natalia complaining in a little voice that he'd smashed her cell phone and wondering why he couldn't use the landline and both Jonas and Kaylee whipping out their cells as if the cells were six-shooters and this was the OK Corral. What could he say? Nothing. He just waved them off and backed across the room as if he were afraid they'd chase him down, tug at his sleeves, force their phones into his hand, and he snapped a mental picture of their faces-drunken faces, puzzled faces, a little indignant even-as he slipped out the door.

Outside, the fog had grown thick, obscuring everything. It was cold suddenly, the damp reach of it getting down inside his shirt, and he wished he'd thought to bring a jacket, but no matter. He slid into Natalia's car-“Natalia's car:” the registration was in his name and he was the one making payments on it-turned over the engine and worked the button on the temperature gauge till it read 80 degrees. There weren't many pay phones around anymore-they were a vestige of a bygone era, Frank's era, Jocko's, his own dead father's, and they'd be gone entirely in a decade, he would have put money on it-but there were a couple in the lobby of the Holiday Inn, and that was where he headed.

He stopped at the bar for a cognac and five bucks' worth of change. He had no idea what it cost to call San Roque, and he probably shouldn't have been doing it, anyway-there were easier ways to get what he wanted-but he couldn't resist, not tonight, not the way he was feeling, so sour and disconnected and twisted up inside. The lobby was over-lit, blazing like some meeting hall, but it was deserted at this hour. He listened to the coins fall and the operator's voice and then the ringing on the other end of the line.

“Hello?”

“Bridger?”

“Yeah?”

“I just wanted to confirm that your listing in our guide is correct-can you give me a spelling on your complete name?”

“Listen, if you're selling something, I don't want it-this is my private cell and you better, please, just remove it from your records.”

“Oh, I'm not selling anything, not that you want, anyway.” He gave it a heartbeat, just to let everything settle. “It's me, Dana. You know, the Rick James fan.”

There was a silence, festering, the scab picked, the bandage torn from the wound. It made his heart swell to listen to it, to listen to the shithead dangle on the other end of the line, caught out at his own game. “Yeah, uh, hi.”

“Hi yourself, asshole. You think you can dick with me?”

“You're the asshole. You're the criminal. You think you can steal my girlfriend's identity and get away with it? Huh? We're going to track you down, brother, and that is a promise.”

“Girl”friend? The quickest calculation. So he was a she and the fish was on the line. Keep it going, he told himself, keep it going. “I guess we'll see about that, won't we.”

“So you got my cell, big deal. I know where you live. I know where you're calling from right now.”

“Really?”

“Really. You might be calling from anywhere in the 415, but you live in Marin, don't you?”

That froze him a minute-till he realized that was the old cell number, the dead cell number, and what did it matter? A whole lot of people lived in Marin County. Yeah. Sure. But how many Dana Halters? He saw Natalia's face then, her lips, the dark eternally disappointed pits of her eyes, heard her in his head questioning why, why, why do we have to move and what do you mean your name is not Dana? “What do you mean?”

The voice came back at him, a loser's voice, but hard now, hard with the righteous authority of the new kid called out on the playground: “Don't you?”

“Right,” he heard himself say, and he looked up to follow a woman in heels and a tight blue dress picking her slow careful way from the bar to the elevators, “and you live in San Roque.” And then, though he wanted to tear the thing out of the wall, all of it, the black box with the shiny silver panel, the wires and cords that pinned his voice to this place and this time, he very gently put the receiver back in its cradle and walked out the door and into the fog.

Four

WORK HAD JUST BEGUN on the next project Radko had lined up-a time-travel thing in which a group of twenty-first-century scientists, including one ingenue with inflated breasts, a sexy gap between her front teeth and a coruscating pimple dead center in the middle of her nose that had to be painted out in every frame, discover a portal to Pompeii the day before Vesuvius erupts and have to go around frantically trying to communicate the imminence of the danger in a language no one understands-when Bridger felt someone hovering over his shoulder and looked up to see Radko himself standing there on the scuffed concrete with a pained expression. It was just past ten in the morning. Bridger had spent the night at Dana's and so he'd had a relatively nutritious breakfast (Cheerios with a spoonful of brewer's yeast and half a diced nectarine, plus toast and coffee) and he'd left her hunched over her computer, tapping away at the dimensions of the wild boy's fate. He was feeling relaxed and benevolent, the new project-which no doubt would become as dull and deadening and soul-destroying as the last-engaging him simply because it was new, the computer-generated temples and sunblasted domiciles of Pompeii in diametrical contrast to the burnt sienna gloom of Drex III. He'd been bent over Sibyl Nachmann's face, his mind on autopilot as he painstakingly removed the blemish, a procedure Deet-Deet had already christened a “zitectomy,” when he became aware of Radko.

“She is out there,” Radko said, his voice deep and bell-like.

Bridger looked to the screen, not certain exactly what he meant-was she off the scale as far as looks were concerned or was she grazing the limits of histrionic expression? “Yeah,” he said, nodding, because it was always a good idea to agree with the boss, “yeah, she is.”

Radko waved both his hands vigorously, like an umpire declaring a man safe at third. “No, no,” he said, ““Dana,” she is out there.”

It took him a moment to understand-Dana was in the front office, beyond the uniform line of cubicles and the pouchy droop-shouldered figure of Radko, who was pointing now, his face heavy and oppressed. Bridger pushed back his chair and got to his feet. If Dana was here, then she was in trouble. Something had gone wrong. The first thing he thought of was the man in the picture, the voice on the phone, the thief. “Where?” he demanded, just to say something.

He found her in the outer office, slumped forward in one of the cheap plastic chairs against the far wall. She was wearing the T-shirt and jeans she'd had on when he left the apartment and she hadn't combed her hair or bothered with makeup and there was something clutched in her right hand, papers, letters. Was it her manuscript? Was that it? He crossed the room to her, but she didn't lift her head, just sat slumped there, her shins splayed away from the juncture of her knees, one heel tapping rhythmically against the leg of the chair. “Dana,” he said, lifting her chin so that her eyes rose to his, “what is it? What's the matter?”

There was a noise behind him-Radko at the security door motioning to Courtney, the receptionist, a nineteen-year-old blonde who two weeks earlier had dyed her hair shoe-polish black and banished all color from her wardrobe in sympathy with whatever style statement Deet-Deet was trying to make. She gave Bridger a tragic look and excused herself-“I'm just going to the ladies',” she murmured-and then the door pulled shut and they were alone.

Dana didn't get up from the chair. She didn't speak. After a moment she took hold of his wrist and handed him an envelope addressed to herself from the San Roque School for the Deaf. As soon as he saw it, he knew what it meant, but he extracted the letter and unfolded it all the same, her eyes locked on his every motion. The letter was from Dr. Koch and it said that after consulting with the board he had the regretful duty of informing her that her position had been terminated for the fall session and that this was in no part due to any dissatisfaction that either he or the board might have had with her performance but strictly a result of budgetary constraints. He concluded by saying he would be happy to provide her with references and that he wished her success in whatever new endeavor she might embark upon.

“You know it's bullshit,” she said, her voice echoing in the empty room. “They're firing me. Koch is firing me. And you know why?”

“Maybe not. He says they're eliminating the position-that's what he says…”

Her eyes narrowed, her jaw clenched. “Bullshit. I e-mailed Nancy Potter in Social Studies and she said they're already advertising for a vacancy in high school English. Can you believe it? Can you believe the gall of Koch? And these lies,” she shouted, snatching the letter out of his hand. “Just lies.”

Beyond the windows, two rectangular slits cut horizontally in the wall to let the employees of the inner sanctum know there was another world out there despite all evidence to the contrary, a woman with six dogs of various sizes on a congeries of leashes was pausing beneath the massive blistered fig that dominated the block. A kid in a too-big helmet went by on a motor scooter, closely tailed by another, the asthmatic wheeze of the engines burning into the silence of the room. He felt miserable suddenly, thinking only of himself, selfish thoughts, the what-about-me? of every contretemps and human tragedy. This would mean that Dana was going to have to relocate, no choice in the matter, and where would that leave him?

She was on her feet now, angry, impatient, thrusting out her arms and jerking her shoulders back in agitation. “It's because I was in jail. He blamed me. He all but accused me of dereliction of duty.”

He tried to put his arms around her, to hold her, comfort her, but she pushed him away. “Here,” she said, thrusting a second letter at him as if it were a knife, “here, here's the capper.”

The letter was from the Department of Motor Vehicles. A month earlier she'd sent in her license renewal, just as he'd done himself two years ago. As long as there were no outstanding convictions or special considerations, the DMV had instituted a policy of renewal by mail without the necessity of being re-photographed. Dana had taken that option-who wouldn't? The price of a thirty-nine-cent stamp saved you a trip to the DMV office and an interminable wait in one line or another. All right. Fine. So what was the problem? “It's your license?” he asked.

Her eyes were hard, burning. “Go ahead, open it.” He heard the door crack open behind him and turned to see Courtney's pale orb of a face hanging there for an instant before the door pulled shut again. He bent to fish the new license out of the envelope, hard plastic, laminated, “California Driver License” emblazoned across the top of it. They had her name right, had her address too, but the sex was wrong and the height and the weight and the signature at the bottom. But that wasn't the worst of it. The two photos, the larger on the left and the smaller on the right, were of a man they'd both seen before, and he was staring right at them.

There was no question of going back to work. Dana was in a state. Every day, it seemed, the mail brought some fresh piece of bad news, bill collectors dunning her for past-due accounts she'd never opened, a recall notice for a defect in a BMW Z-4 she'd never seen, notification of credit denied when she hadn't sought credit in the first place. And now she'd lost her job, now she'd be driving on an expired license. “What next?” she demanded, her voice strangled and unbalanced, riding up the walls like the cry of some animal caught in a snare, and she took hold of his arms in a grip so fierce she might have been trying to stop the bleeding, only he wasn't bleeding. Not yet. “Back to jail again? Tell me. What do I have to do?”

He wanted to hold her but she wouldn't let him because he was the villain all of a sudden, the stand-in for the bad guy, the nearest warmblooded thing she could fight against. A man. Hairy legs and a dangle of flesh. A man like the one who'd done this to her. He said, “I don't know, I really don't,” and she still held to her grip, her nails biting into the flesh, both of them fighting for balance. All at once he felt the irritation rising in him-she was crazy, that was what she was. Fucking crazy. “Goddamnit, let go of me,” he shouted, and he shoved her away from him. “Shit, Dana. Shit, it wasn't me, I'm not the one to blame.”

At that moment the door pushed open behind them and there was Radko, with his heavy face and his cheap shoes and his cheap watch. “I dun't like this,” he said carefully, slowly. “Not in my office.”

Dana glared at him. Here was another man to lash out at. “I want to kill him,” she said.

Radko studied the gray abraded paint of the floor. “Who? Bridger?”

Bridger understood that he was at a crossroads here, that there was a choice he would have to make, and soon, very soon, between Digital Dynasty and this wound-up woman with the tangled hair and raging eyes. A mad notion of stalking out the door flitted in and out of his head, but he caught himself. Conflict was inimical to him, a condition he'd always-or nearly always-managed to avoid. “I'm sorry,” he said, ducking his head in deference. “It's just that thing-you know, with Dana and what she's been through? It just won't go away.”

Radko lifted both hands to smooth back the long talons of his hair, then he lifted one haunch and settled himself on the edge of the receptionist's desk and began fumbling for the cigarettes he kept in the inside pocket of his jacket. “This thiff, yes?” he said, his voice softening. “This is it? This is the problem?”

Bridger acknowledged that it was.

“So sit,” Radko said, gesturing to the plastic chairs along the wall, “and you tell me.” And then, to Dana, as he touched the flame of his Bic to the cigarette, “You mind?”

“Yes,” she said, “I do,” but he ignored her.

Over the course of the next half hour, while Courtney went out for coffee and Plum twice stuck her head through the door to assess the situation and deliver updates to the crew and the cigarette smoke rose and the sun inflamed the undersized windows, Dana, who barely knew Radko, unburdened herself, and when she was at a loss, Bridger was there to offer amplification. Drawing at his cigarette, smoothing back his hair, sighing and muttering under his breath, Radko listened as though this were the plot of a movie he expected to bid on. “You know,” he said finally, “in my country this thing goes on all the time. This stealing of the documents, of the people too. Kidnap for ransom. You know about this?”

Bridger nodded vaguely. He wasn't even sure what country Radko came from.

“Let me see that,” Radko said, slipping the ersatz license from Dana's hand. He studied the picture a moment, then offered his opinion that the DMV had screwed up and the computer had sent the license to the address of record rather than the new address the thief had given them. “If you get that address,” he said, glancing up as Courtney came through the street door with their coffees, “then you get this man.”

Dana had become increasingly animated as they worked through the litany of details-how they'd contacted the credit reporting agencies and put a security hold on all her information, how they'd sent out copies of the police report and affidavit to the creditors of the spurious accounts, how they'd gone to the police and the victims' assistance people-and now she wondered aloud just how they might go about doing that. “This guy could have a hundred aliases,” she said, removing the plastic cap from the paper cup and pausing to blow at the rising steam. She took a sip. Made a face. “And how do we get the address? They won't even run a fingerprint trace. Not important enough, they said. It's a victimless crime. Sure. And look at me: I'm out of a job.”

“Milos,” he said.

Courtney had settled back in at her desk, making a pretense of focusing on her computer, and Plum, for the third time, pushed open the security door and let it fall to again. Bridger said, “Who?”

“Milos. My cousin. Milos he is finding anybody.”

The next afternoon-a Friday and Radko gone to L. A. for another “meeding”-Bridger left work early to pick up Dana at her apartment. He had to get out of the truck and ring her bell-or rather, flash it-because she wasn't quite ready, and he stood there on the doormat for five minutes at least till she appeared at the door, but the appearance was brief. Her face hung there a moment, wearing a look of concentrated harassment, the door swung open, and she was gone, clicking down the hallway in her heels, looking for some vital thing without which she couldn't leave the apartment even if it were on fire. He wanted to remind her-urgently-that they had an appointment with Radko's cousin at four-thirty and that his office was in Santa Paula, a forty-five-minute drive, but he wasn't able to do that unless he was facing her and he wasn't facing her. No, he was following her, from one room to another, her hair flashing, her arms bare and animated as she dug through a dresser drawer, pawed over the things on the night table, tossed one purse aside and snatched up the next. “I'm running a little late,” she flung over her shoulder, and slammed the bathroom door.

Bridger wasn't happy-he resented feeling compelled to speed and risk another ticket-but he was resigned. He put his foot to the floor, the tires chirped and the pickup protested, wheezing and spitting as he gunned it up the ramp and onto the freeway, and he glanced over at Dana to see how she was taking it, but she was oblivious. He remembered how she'd told him that when she'd first got her new car-a VW Jetta-it ran so smoothly she couldn't tell whether the engine was actually going or not and had continually ground the starter without knowing it. Only after she realized that people were staring at her in the parking lot-grimacing, clenching their teeth-did she begin to adjust. It was all about the vibration, and eventually she trained herself to pick up the faintest intimation of those precise valves working in their perfect cylinders and all was well. The pickup was another story. Yet once he got it up to cruising speed and kept it there he was able to make up the time with some creative dodging around the cell-phone zombies and white-haired catatonics whose sole function in life it was to block the fast lane, and they pulled into Santa Paula no more than twenty minutes late for the appointment.

The town was a surprise. Instead of the usual California farrago of styles and build-to-suit outrages to the public sensibility, it seemed all of a piece, like something out of an old black-and-white movie. In fact, it all looked hauntingly familiar, the broad main drag lined with one-and two-story frame buildings that must have dated from the forties or earlier, the hardware store, the mom-and-pop shoes and clothes shops, Mexican restaurants, coffee shop, liquor store and cantina, and he couldn't help wondering how many period pieces had been filmed here. Teen movies, no doubt. Greasers in too-perfect '55 Fords and Chevys, cruising, heading for the hop. Dreary dramas about old people when they were young. World War II weepers where the crippled hero returns to receive a mixed message and the streets run ankle-deep with schmaltz. Of course, all this could be re-created today without ever having to leave Digital Dynasty, but still, it did Bridger good to see the real deal, the actual frame-and-stucco buildings of the actual town. They were rolling down the street, going so slowly they were practically parked, when he pointed to the scrawled sheet of directions in Dana's lap and asked, “What was that number again?”

She didn't respond, didn't glance down at his finger or up at his face. She seemed as entranced as he, her head lolling against the frame of the open window, legs crossed and one foot dangling as if it was barely attached, and that made him smile-here she was, relaxed for the first time in weeks, a little road trip, the prospect of Milos and an end to her troubles working on her like a massage. He had to point again before her eyes went to his lips. “One-three-three-seven,” she said, squinting through the windshield to track the numbers on the storefronts.

There was no shortage of parking-the town seemed almost deserted-and they emerged to eighty degrees and sun and a light breeze with a distant taste of the sea riding in on it. The trees bowed and waved. A pure deep chlorophyll-rich square of green crept back from the curb across the street and wrapped itself around some monument to war veterans or a mayor gone down to the exigencies of time. It was all very-what? Very calming. Ordinary. Real.

Milos' office was above a Korean grocery that stocked nothing but Mexican specialties and beer, and Milos himself answered their knock. He was younger than Radko, thinner, with sucked-in cheekbones and tight discolored lips, but he wore his hair the same way as his cousin, gel-slicked and glistening like the nose of something emerging from the sea, with an orchestrated dangle of individual strands in front. It took Bridger a minute, and then he understood: Elvis Presley in “Viva Las Vegas.”

“So, yes,” Milos said, in the same dense indefinable accent as Radko, waving them into the office, “you are looking for a thiff, I know, I know.”

He offered them seats-two straight-backed wooden chairs-and dropped into a swivel chair behind a desk that might once have been a library table, gouged and pitted and with nothing at all on the barren plane of its surface except for a single old-fashioned rotary phone. The rest of the decor ran to patterned wallpaper, a bookcase filled with what seemed to be birdwatchers' guides and a long unbroken line of phone books, two hundred or more, that climbed up the near wall like some sort of fortification. Dana perched briefly at the edge of her chair, but almost immediately she rose and began pacing, making liberal use of her hands as she spewed out the story, Bridger elucidating and interpreting whenever Milos' gaze seemed to grow distant. It took five minutes, no more, and then she ran out of words and sat heavily beside him. They both looked to Milos, whose face revealed nothing.

“All this I know,” he said, and held out his hands, palms up. “My cousin,” he added, in a long whistling sigh.

A protracted moment swelled and receded. It was oddly silent, as if the rest of the building were deserted, the grocery notwithstanding, and hot, too hot, the pair of windows behind Milos' desk painted shut and the fan in the corner switched off-or no longer functioning. Bridger exchanged a look with Dana-she was drained, her shoulders slumped, the drama over-and he wondered what they were even doing here. Milos, as Radko had confided, mainly worked divorces, peering through suburban windows, watching motels from across the street, and his office didn't exactly inspire confidence. He was definitely low-tech. And this thief, this man in the photo, this voice on the phone, was as high-tech as you could get.

Milos finally broke the silence. “A man such as this,” he intoned, pulling open the drawer of the desk and removing a smudged file folder, “he is not so smart as you think.” He took a moment, for dramatic emphasis, and slid the folder across the table to Dana.

Inside was the fax of a police report from the Stateline, Nevada, Police Department and there, leering at them, was the now-familiar face. The man's name was recorded as Frank Calabrese, born Peterskill, NY, 10/2/70, no address given-“Transient,” the report said, “Sex M, Race W, Age 33, Ht 6–0, Wt 180, Hair BRO, Eyes BRO, SS#? D/L 820 626 5757, State NY”-and he'd been arrested for forgery at a Good Guys store, where he'd attempted to acquire credit in another person's name-Justin Delhomme-and purchase a plasma TV worth $5,000. He was carrying a second driver's license, a California license, that showed him to be a.k.a. Dana Halter, of #31 Pacific View Court, San Roque.

Bridger could feel the excitement mounting in him-here he was, the son of a bitch, “nailed”-and he glanced up at Milos in gratitude and elation, and how could he ever have doubted him? “So his real name's what, Frank Calabrese?”

Milos tented his fingers and looked wistfully at Dana, whose head was bowed as she scanned the report, oblivious. “You are jumping,” he said, never taking his eyes from Dana. “Because this is not his name, why would it be?” He shrugged. “Just another alias.”

Sensing something in the air, Dana looked up.

“But he is not so smart, you know why?” Milos went on, pointing a finger at Dana. He let out a long breath. “Because he is in love with you.”

Dana looked to Bridger as if she hadn't read him right, then turned back to Milos. “Love?” she echoed.

“With “you”,” he repeated.

“You mean, he's in too deep-he's got too much invested in this scam or whatever it is to give it up, right?” Bridger offered.

“Who you are,” Milos said, everything freighted on his lips, “he is. You can catch him now.”

Almost involuntarily, Bridger murmured, “But how?”

The sun glazed the windows, a smear of something suspended there in a tracery of false illumination. Bridger smelled his own sweat, primordial fluid, a funk of it, and he could smell Dana too, prickling and acidic. He wanted a beer. He wanted the beach, the ocean, peace and union and love, and what he had instead was this overcooked room and Radko's cousin who was so cryptic he could have been writing fortune cookies in a factory in Chinatown. “How?” he repeated.

Milos pushed the hair out of his eyes, only to have it spring back again in a spray of glistening black vectors, and then he reached into the drawer a second time and shoved a piece of paper across the table to them. On it was written a postbox number in Mill Valley. “This,” he said, drawing it out, “is where bill goes. For cell phone. The address on this account is yours and landline number too, but bill goes here.” He was smiling now. “Very friendly man in Collections. I think you know him: Mr. Simmonds?” Another shrug. “It is a small thing.”

The clumsy lips, the imbalance of the accent: Dana wasn't reading him, so Bridger translated for her as best he could. She watched him carefully, then shifted in the chair. “But what do we do about it?” she asked, her face drawn down to nothing.

Milos' voice rode a current, higher now, as if a breeze had caught it. “You go,” he said. “You are Dana Halter too, no? You have proof?”

She nodded.

“Then that is “your” box.”

Sunday morning, early, they left San Roque in Dana's Jetta, headed north. Bridger had meant to tell Radko in person-he'd made his choice, for love, for support, for Dana-but in the end, he opted for the easy way out: e-mail. “Sorry. Gone one week. Emergency. Bridger. P. S. See you next Monday?”

The sun was behind them as they pulled out of town on the Coast Highway, the ocean gathering light and throwing it at the pavement, the car a leaping shadow just ahead of them. Dana sat in the passenger's seat beside him, her face soft and composed, her hair still wet from the shower and pinned up in a way that showed off the line of her jaw, the sharp angle of her cheekbone, her ear, whorled and perfect as a shell. She'd held him a long while that morning and then pulled back and signed “I love you,” the index finger pointing first to her heart, then both hands crossed in an embrace and finally the finger coming back to him, and he couldn't resist her. They'd made love the night before, slow and languorous, the bed a raft at sea in the dark and silence of the room, and they fell to it again, on the rug in the hall after she'd come dripping from the shower and given him the sign: “I… love… you.”

What was he feeling? Burnished. Shining. Polished like a gem. The radio was cranked and she was bent over her laptop, alternately tapping at the keys and glancing up to stare out over the stacked-up waves with pursed lips and unseeing eyes, isolated from the moment and this place and the world. The music crept into him and he tapped out the rhythm on the dash. An old song, familiar as blood. “Who, who, who, who, / Tell me who are you…”

Five

SHE LOOKED UP from the screen and saw the sea spread out before her, the stalled distant waves like interlocking tiles, the spilled milk of the clouds, sun like wax-“metaphor, everything a metaphor”-even as the dim dripping forest of La Bassine dissolved in a blaze of light on water. Bridger was beside her, present and visible, one hand on the wheel, the other beating time on the dash. His chin bobbed, his shoulders dipped and rose. One and two, one and two. And now he was singing, singing in perfect silence, his lips pursed as if he were blowing out a whole birthday cake's worth of candles. She glanced at the LED display on the radio: 99.9, classic rock. He was singing some immemorial song he knew and she didn't, singing to himself, everything about him alive and focused and beautiful, running with the sound. She didn't stop to think what it meant to go there, to that place where the hearing were transported in the way she was when she was writing or reading or locked away in the dark chest of the cinema while the shapes joined and convulsed on the screen and she saw with a clarity so intense she had to turn away from it; no, she just let herself feel it through him, through the weave of his shoulders and the rhythmic slap of his hand, and then she was beating time too.

The landscape sprang away from them. The dash gave and released, their two hands pounding. And then a car appeared in the inside lane and rolled silently past them and he shifted his eyes to her, his smile opening up, and he sang for her, sang to her, more insistent now, more vigorous and emphatic, his lips, his lips: “Who, who, who, who?”

She hadn't thought past the moment, past packing her bags and the two new credit cards she'd got to replace the canceled ones, because it had all seemed so natural, so logical: the thief was in Mill Valley and he had a postbox at Mail Boxes Etc. and they were going to go there and find him, watch him, stalk him. And then what? Call in the police. In her fantasy she saw him striding into the shop to check his mail while they sat outside in the car-they knew his face, but he didn't know theirs-and punched 911 into the cell phone. Or they'd get the mail themselves, find an address, an account number, trace him to his house and nail him there (yes, “nail” him, as you would nail a board to the floor). And in the fantasy she saw a SWAT team swooping down on him, men in flak jackets and protective headgear, candy-apple-red lights flashing on the cars, the helicopter slamming at the air, and she'd confront him then, spit in his face as he was led away in the same inflexible restraints they'd bound her up in, and she'd confront him again in court, the perfect witness in perfect control, the interpreter motionless at her side.

But that was the fantasy. The reality-and it made her stomach clench to think of it-might be less certain, might be dangerous. How stupid was he? How much in love with her base identifiers could he be when he knew he'd been found out? He might be a thousand miles away by now, more than a match for any amateur detective, and with a new name and a new persona. He could be anywhere. He could be anybody. But still, the thought of what he'd done to her without pause or conscience or even a trace of human feeling made her seize with the rage she'd felt all her life, the rage of shame and inadequacy and condescension. Revenge, that was what she wanted. To make him hurt the way she did. Only that.

They'd just passed King City when she looked up next. Bridger was no longer slapping the dash, no longer singing. He had one hand draped over the wheel, fingers dangling, and he was slumped down in the seat, looking tired. Or wiped, as in “wiped-out, eliminated, destroyed.” She touched his arm and he turned his head. “Are you tired?” she asked. “You want to maybe stop for lunch?”

He nodded and that was good enough because she couldn't very well expect him simultaneously to keep his eyes on the road and his lips in her field of vision. But then he turned full-face and said, “What do you feel like-Mexican?”

“Sure,” she said.

He was grinning even as he swung off the freeway and onto the main street-the only street-of a town that consisted of a grocery, a gas station, a cantina and two cramped and competing “taquerias” called La Tolteca and El Sitio respectively. “Good choice,” he said, turning to her as he killed the engine.

They chose El Sitio and couldn't have said why, no appreciable difference between the two places, both dark inside because electricity cost money, both run by the wives, grandparents and children of the men in the fields. There were four tables shoved up against the wall, a chest-high counter, the kitchen. The smells were dark and lingering, but good, a dense aroma of ancient chiles, refried beans in a pot crusted with residue, peppers and onions and the fry pan that was always hot. One of the tables was occupied by two super-sized white women with unevenly dyed hair-travelers like themselves-who were staring moodily down at the foil-wrapped remains of their burritos and clutching bottles of Dos Equis as if they were fire extinguishers. An old man, lizard-like in a white smock and trousers, sat at the table behind them, tentatively poking a pink plastic fork at a plate of scrambled eggs and beans. There was a handwritten menu on the wall.

Bridger consulted the menu a moment, then turned to the woman at the counter. He said something Dana didn't catch-was he speaking in Spanish, was that it? — and then looked to her. “You know what you want?”

“I don't know,” she said, using her hands unconsciously. She looked to the menu and back again. “I can order for myself.”

The woman behind the counter, as reduced and small-boned as a child, though her hair was going gray, watched them impassively. She was there to take their orders and their money and to give them a plastic chit with a number on it and to call out the number when the orders came up, and her eyes betrayed little interest beyond that. The menu was in Spanish: “taco de chuleta; taco de rajas; taco de cazuela; tamal de verduras.” It wasn't a problem. Dana had lived in San Roque for more than a year now and she knew the basics of Mexican cuisine as well as she knew Italian or French or Chinese, and to make it easier for her, since she wasn't prepared to wrestle with the pronunciation-English was challenge enough-there was a number attached to each item. She chose the fifth item on the list, “tostada de polio,” turned to the woman and said, as clearly as she could, “Number Five, please.”

For a long moment the woman merely examined her out of eyes so dark there was no delineation between iris and pupil, and then she looked to Bridger and said something in her own language, which Bridger, at first, didn't seem to understand. She had to repeat herself, and then Bridger nodded, the pale bristles of his hair gone translucent in the long shaft of sun leaching in through the door. “She says she'll have the Number Five,” he said, and then repeated himself in his high school Spanish.

They took the table behind the two women-What percentage of Americans were obese? Thirty percent? Was that the figure she'd read? — and Bridger got them their drinks. He was having “horchata,” she a Diet Coke, out of the can. The women behind them were hunkered over the table, their faces animated, inches apart, exchanging confidences-gossip-and Dana almost wished she could hear what they were saying about their husbands, boyfriends, their ailments and beauty treatments and the children who invariably disappointed them. Instead, she asked Bridger what the woman at the counter had said. “And why didn't she understand me? Wasn't I clear?”

He dropped his eyes. “No, it wasn't that. Or it was. She's-well, her English isn't too good-”

“Yes? But what did she say?”

He looked embarrassed-or reluctant-and she felt her face go hot.

“It was something insulting, wasn't it?”

“I don't know,” he said, and then he said something she couldn't make out.

“It was in Spanish?”

Instead of repeating it again, uselessly, he pulled a pen from his pocket and wrote the word out for her on the back of a paper napkin: “Sordomuda.”

Now she did flush. “Deaf-mute?”

He nodded.

What she wanted to ask was, “How did she know?” but instead she glanced across the room to where the woman sat perched on a stool behind the cash register, her head down, flipping through the pages of a Mexican tabloid; she wore gold earrings, the faintest points of light; a silver cross dangled from her throat on a silver chain. She was perfectly ordinary, like a thousand other women in a thousand other taco stands, Mexican restaurants and “pupuserias,” a woman who knew the feel of the mortar and pestle and the consistency of the “harina” paste shaped to fit the hand and pounded flat between the palms. But who was she? Did she have a deaf son? A deaf sister? Was she deaf herself? Or was she just superior? Contemptuous? Hateful?

Everything was in stasis, but for the right arm of the cook-a man so small and slight he might have been the cashier's brother-which jerked rhythmically as he slid the pan back and forth across the gas burner. After a moment, she turned back to Bridger and signed, “How did she know?” but all he could do was shrug and hold out his hands. When their order came up, he went to the counter and brought back a paper plate and set it before her. The dish it contained didn't look like a tostada. For one thing, there was no shell; for another, no lettuce. Instead, what she got seemed to be some kind of organ meat in gravy and a wash of melted cheese.

“What's wrong?” Bridger asked, his mouth crammed with beans and rice. “Not hungry?”

Very slowly, with the tip of one reluctant finger, she pushed the plate away, and it wasn't worth the explanation. She let her hands talk for her: “No,” she signed, “not anymore.”

“You want to drive?” he asked her. They were standing in the street outside the restaurant, the car glazed with the sun. It was hotter than she'd expected, hotter inland than she was used to on the coast. The heat drugged her and she didn't see the woman watching her from behind the window of the “taqueria” or the pair of lizards chasing one after the other through the dust or the drift of yellowed claw-like oak leaves at her feet. She didn't want to drive. She wanted to stare into the screen and shut out all the rest and she let her hands tell him so. A moment later, the town was behind them and only the vibration of the steel-belted radials, riding on air, told her they were moving.

Six

There were two bona fide bedrooms in the condo, one for Madison and one for Natalia and him, as well as an extra half-bedroom, what the real estate lady wanted to call a sewing room. Or a nursery. “Or”-with a look to him, coy and calculating-“a home office, an office away from the office. For when you get tired of all those patients.” It wasn't much, not a whole lot bigger than the cell he'd shared with Sandman at Greenhaven Prison, but it had a view of the bay and the big stippled pyramid of Mount Tam, and Natalia had found him an oak desk, a pair of matching file cabinets and a Tiffany desk lamp on one of her far-flung antiquing forays. So it was an office. He hooked up his computer and his printer and did business here, reserving the computers at the public library for highly sensitive transactions, the things he didn't want to risk having traced. Madison wasn't allowed in this room, for obvious reasons, and he frowned on Natalia coming in to appropriate a pen or a pair of scissors, though once, when he'd forgotten to lock the door, she'd slipped in naked and put her hands over his eyes. She didn't have to whisper, “Guess who?”

He was in the office now, at his computer, Natalia treating herself to a morning at the spa and Madison off at day camp, and he was doing a little research. It was the kind of thing he was good at, better than good-he'd made a nice quiet living at it for the past three years now, and if there was the occasional glitch, like that time in Stateline when he'd been up all night at the blackjack tables and he was wired and burned-out and maybe a little drunker than he thought, he had it covered. Post bail and walk and let them come after somebody else, Dana Halter or Frank Calabrese or whoever. It was nothing to him, not anymore, and if he hadn't fallen for Natalia he could have lived in Marin for the duration, a doctor in a tailored suit and the calfskin duster he'd picked up last winter, “money for nothing and the chicks for free,” wasn't that how it went?

The first time, though, when he was Peck Wilson and in love with his four-year-old daughter-Sukie, Silky Sukie, he used to call her-the law was a clamp, a harness, a choke hold that cut off all the air to his lungs and the blood to his heart. Gina moved out on him and took his daughter with her, right back to the big Bullhead's house, and why? Because he was a son of a bitch, a rat, a scumbag, because he was cheating on her and no fit father and she never wanted to see him again, never. And if he ever dared to lay a hand on her again, if he ever even thought about it- What she didn't mention, what the lawyer didn't mention, was the way she'd come to treat him, as if he'd been hired for stud purposes only, to broaden the gene pool so the Marchetti dynasty could wind up with a granddaughter and heiress prettier than a queen and smarter by half than anything they could ever have hoped to produce. That, and to go on fattening the bank account by pushing himself day and night till his brain began to bleed out his ears. Without her, and with the unflagging bullheaded enmity of her father, Lugano went down the tubes within six months-the state came and closed the place up for non-payment of sales tax, which he had to hold out just to cover the suppliers-and the pizza place was reeling. But the divorce order, which he hadn't agreed with but was too tired to fight, specified the amount he had to pay for alimony and child support and laid out the hours-minutes, seconds-he could spend with his daughter. Okay, fine. He moved to a smaller apartment, ran the wheels off the car. There was Caroline, there was Melanie, and what was her name, that girl from the bookstore in the mall? On Sundays, he took Sukie to feed the ducks at Depew Park or to the zoo at Bear Mountain or they hopped the train into the city to catch the opening of the newest kids' flick or to see the Christmas display at FAO Schwarz.

Even now, sitting at his desk, watching the information come to him like a gift from the gods, he could remember the way it felt when he found out Gina was seeing somebody. He'd let himself slip-if he was working out more than every second or third day, that was a lot-and he was drinking too much, spending more than he wanted to on women who did nothing for him, letting work eat him up. He was at a club one night after locking up, a local place that featured a live band on weekends, standing at the bar waiting for Caroline to come back from the ladies', thinking nothing, when somebody threw an arm round his shoulder-Dudley, one of the busboys from Lugano, the one who was always in the cooler, smoking out. “Hey,” Peck said.

“Hey. 'Sup?”

Dudley must have been around nineteen, twenty, hair corded in blond dreads, pincer eyes, big stoned grin, tattoos to the waist, which was as far down as he'd ever been exposed on the premises of the restaurant, but Peck could speculate about the rest. This was the kind of guy-“dude”-who probably had the head of a dragon staring out of his crotch.

In answer, Peck told him “Not much,” and then went on to regale him with a laundry list of woes, not the least of which was his bitch of a wife, and then Caroline came back and they all three had a shot of Jäger and the band pounded away at a Nirvana tune and they just listened, nodding their heads to the beat. When the band took a break, Caroline went outside to have a smoke and Dudley leaned in, his elbows tented on the bar, and opined, “It sucks about the restaurant.”

It did. Peck agreed. There was movement at the door, ingress and egress; somebody stuck some money in the jukebox and the noise came roaring back.

“Yeah,” Dudley said, raising his voice to be heard above it, “and it sucks about Gina too.”

A little fist began to beat inside Peck's right temple. “What do you mean?”

Dudley's face receded, flying away down the length of the bar like a toy balloon with human features painted on it, and then it floated back again. “You mean you don't know?”

The next day, he didn't go in to work. He felt the faintest sting of conscience-they'd be shorthanded, short on produce too, and the dishwasher would just sit around and listen to right-wing talk on the radio and Skip would be so drunk he'd burn the crust off the pies and squeeze the calzone till it looked like road kill on a plate-but the tatters of his work ethic were nothing in the face of the rage he felt. What was he working for, anyway? “Who” was he working for? At first he refused to believe what Dudley was telling him. That she was seeing anybody was enough to light all his fuses, but that she was going out with-sleeping with, “fucking”-Stuart Yan was beyond comprehension. That he was Asian, or half-Asian, had nothing to do with it, nothing at all (and yet he couldn't help wondering just exactly how the Bullhead must have felt about that). The problem, the immediate problem that settled inside him with the weight of a stone, was how he was going to face people, anybody-Dudley, his friends, former customers, people at the bar-when his wife was fucking some slope and he was paying for it, paying for her to just lie around like a slut and get laid all day.

By ten in the morning he was parked at a turnout just off the road to her parents' house. The season was spring, late spring, and already the vegetation was twisted up like a knot, weeds crowding the front bumper, the branches of the trees in full leaf, but still he was afraid she'd notice the car-metal-flake silver wasn't exactly an earth tone. Cars went by, three and four at a time, as if they were attached on a cable, then nothing, then three and four more. There were birds crowding the canopy of the tree that hung out over the car-tiny black-and-yellow things he'd never noticed before, popping in and out of the leaves like puppets-and he worried briefly that they'd spot the top of the car with the drooling white beads of their excrement, but eventually they faded out of his line of vision and he forgot all about them. He didn't really know what he was doing there parked under a tree on a back road to nowhere, didn't have a plan, and yet every time he heard the hiss of tires on the road his heart started slamming at his ribs. He watched pickups rattle by, cars of all makes and descriptions, a kid on a green Yamaha. There was the smell of the sun on the pavement. After a while he buzzed the window down all the way, let the radio whisper to him, the soft thump of a song he'd heard so many times he might have written it himself. An hour cranked by, two hours, three.

Finally, and he might have dozed for a while, he couldn't be sure, he came up fully alert, just as if someone had slapped him or doused him with a bucket of ice water: there she was. Her car. The metallic blue Honda her father had bought for her, and she was behind the wheel with her ugly black-framed glasses on, two little white fists like claws jerking back and forth though the road ran straight as a plumb line in front of her, and there was the kid's seat in back-Sukie, strapped in and clutching a neon-orange teddy bear, her face a blur-and another face there too, on the passenger's side in front. The car was coming toward him-he'd chosen this straightaway for its sight lines-and the whole thing was over in the space of ten seconds, come and gone, and yet still he recognized that face, round as a beachball, the sleepy eyes, the clamped dwindling afterthought of the mouth, and before he could think he'd turned the key in the ignition and slammed the car into gear.

If she hadn't seen him there at the side of the road, she saw him now. He watched her eyes go to the rearview and then her head bobbed toward Yan's and Yan looked over his shoulder and that was all it took to put him over the line, that unconscious gesture of complicity, of intimacy-“putting their heads together”-and he came up on the bumper of the Honda so fast he had to hit the brakes to keep from tearing right through them. And he might have-might have run them off the road, because he was acting on impulse only, inimical to everything that walked or drew breath on the planet-if it wasn't for Sukie. His daughter. His daughter was there, strapped in with her bear, and he was the one out of line here, he was the one endangering her. He dropped back half a car length-safety, safety first, because Gina was as uncoordinated and ungifted a driver as he'd ever seen-but he stayed there, raw and hurt and put-upon, stayed there, right on their tail, till a gas station rolled up on the right and Gina hit the blinker and pulled in.

As if that could help her.

He was out of the car in a heartbeat, screaming something, he didn't know what-curses, just curses, maybe accusations too-and he had his hand on the driver's side door of the Honda even as Stuart Yan was puffing himself out the other side and some bald suit at pump number 3 shouted, “Hey, what's going on here?” If he recalled anything with clarity from those diced and scrambled moments excised from his life, it was the look on Gina's face behind the rolled-up window and the locked door-pale, distant, afraid, terrified of what was about to unfold-and the look of his daughter. Her face was like a big open wound, hurt and puzzled and caught dead-center in a tornado of emotions. That look-Sukie's look-almost stopped him. Almost. But he was running on fumes at this point, the high-octane stuff, fully combustible, and he lit into Stuart Yan with a kick to the windpipe and then he took hold of the suit-some real estate drone with an inflated opinion of himself-and flung him across the hood of the car. What did it take? The trash can, the first thing that came to hand, metal anyway. He raised it above his head, shit flying everywhere, cups and paper wipes and soda cans, and brought it down against that window, again and again and again.

He lifted his eyes from the computer screen and looked out over the bay to where a string of pelicans blew like leaves across the belly of the water. In the foreground was a gently curving row of palms, just like in Florida or Hawaii, better even; sun glinted off the hoods of the Jags, Mercedeses and BMWs in the reserved parking; sailboats crept by like moving statues. If Gina could only see him now. He was sitting on a condo worth three-quarters of a million dollars, he had a new BMW, money in the bank, a girlfriend any man would kill for, and he was leaning over his antique desk under the light of his antique lamp, doing research, manipulating things, the kind of work that always had a calming influence on him, but then he wasn't calm. And he wasn't happy. Not today. In fact, the more he thought about it, the angrier he got, filled right up to the neck with the bitter concentrate of the very same rage that had come over him the day he'd put Stuart Yan in the hospital. And why? Because he'd been careless, because he'd let himself get sucked in, because Natalia was the one thing he couldn't let go of. And Dana Halter wasn't the problem, he saw that now. Bridger was. Bridger Martin.

Once he had the cell number, the rest had been easy. He went online to a reverse phone directory to get the carrier, then called customer service, claiming to be Sergeant Calabrese of the Fraud Division of the SFPD. The woman on the other end of the line, whether she was in India or Indiana, never asked for verification, though he had a legitimate police code he could have used, and she matched the cell to the account number and brought up the name and address on the account. For twenty-five dollars an online information broker gave him the header information on the credit reports-full name, address, social security number, d.o.b.-and he faxed all three credit reporting agencies on the stationery of one of his ersatz businesses, Marin Realty, asserting that Bridger Thomas Martin, of #37, 196 Manzanita, San Roque, was applying for rental property and ordering up a copy of the credit reports. A little research, that was all. Just watching his back.

He'd been busy since he'd got that phone call at the Smart-Mart, very busy, but it wasn't as if he hadn't known it was coming. The same Realtor who'd sold him the condo would be handling the resale, and though he'd probably get screwed out of a couple thousand here or there, it didn't really matter-he'd already set up an account in New York to handle the transfer of the funds once it sold. And it would sell fast, prime property right on the water, people lining up to get in. The hard part was Natalia. She didn't know a thing about it, not yet. The real estate woman wouldn't be showing the place till they were gone, and he was ready to just walk and leave everything behind, the desk and the lamp and the bedroom suite and all the rest of it, but Natalia was going to put up a fight, he knew it. And that was what made him angry. The thought of it. The thought of losing her. And for what? For Bridger Martin?

A week, that was all he needed. The reports would be in his hands by then and the new credit cards too, though Bridger Thomas Martin, whoever he was, wasn't exactly a tycoon and the credit limits were lower than he would have liked ideally, but that wasn't a worry-he had plenty of cards, cards were nothing. No, he had something else in mind for this clown, something else altogether. A week. A week to wrap things up, and then they'd be gone, and he saw it already, the new car-he was going to look at a Mercedes this afternoon, on the way back from his workout-with plenty of room in back for Madison and her toys and pillows and blankets, he and Natalia sitting up front in style, stopping wherever they liked, first class all the way, a nice little vacation and educational too, good for the kid. See the country. The sights. Pike's Peak. The Great Lakes. Gettysburg. And Vegas, definitely Vegas. Natalia could hardly object to that.

When he'd got what he wanted he shut down the computer, went out to the kitchen and made himself a sandwich. For a long while he stood at the counter, his jaws working mechanically, gazing at the Mexican tile, the pottery and baskets and whatnot Natalia had picked up to give the place a little charm, the new microwave, the Navajo rugs. The light played through the windows and rode up the walls. It was exclusive light, the light of the sun reflected up off Shelter Bay, rippling and fluid, and there were times when he could just sit for hours with a cocktail and watch it move and transform like an image on a screen. He was going to miss it. Miss the fog too, the way it wrapped itself around everything in the visible world, like snow in suspension, making and remaking itself all over again. All the anger he'd felt earlier was gone now-if he felt anything, he felt drained.

But he wasn't going to let it get to him. He had things to do. He rinsed the plate, stuck it in the dishwasher, then dug his gym bag out of the closet. Working out always cleared his head, the endorphins flowing, the reps on the weight machine his own kind of zen, almost unconscious, counting off, counting off again, his breathing deep and steady. When it went well, when he got into the rhythm of it, he almost felt as if he were rooted to the bench-or no, as if he were the bench itself, no more aware than a slab of steel. And after he worked out, he was going to look at that car, and then he had to stop at the market. Tonight it was veal cordon bleu, and he had to pick up the boneless chops, the prosciutto and the Emmentaler he liked to use (pound the veal, bread it, lay on two wafer-thin slices of the ham and two of the cheese, wrap it up, pin it with a toothpick and bake at 350), and he was thinking maybe he'd do gnocchi with a white sauce and a quick sauté of baby zucchini on the side. Or maybe fava beans in tomato and basil. And he'd pick up two bottles of that Orvieto Natalia liked, and if he was in the mood, and if he had the time, he might whip up a couple of almond tortes. That would please her. And some spumoni for the kid.

He went out the door, bag in hand, and didn't look back.

For what he wound up paying for the attorney he could have spent a month in the best hotel in Manhattan, no expense spared, room service, show tickets and bar tab included, but the man got him a shrink to testify before the judge that what Peck had done to Stuart Yan (and the ancillary damage to his wife's car and to the not-so-innocent bystander) was an aberration, the result of temporary insanity, and that it would be ridiculous to say he was a threat to society when in fact he was no threat at all. The attorney talked of mitigating circumstances-the defendant was only trying to protect his family from this interloper, this stranger, Yan, whom he saw, rightly or wrongly, as threatening his wife and child, and he'd over-reacted in the heat of the moment. He accepted his culpability. He was contrite. Willing to make full restitution. Further, he had a clean record and he was a successful small business owner whose incarceration would deprive the community of his services and put at least seven people out of work. But the assistant DA came right back at him, claiming that this was a case of attempted murder or at the very least assault with a deadly weapon likely to produce great bodily harm-the defendant was a black belt in karate, after all, and knew perfectly well what he was doing in attacking Mr. Yan, who, incidentally, had temporarily lost the use of his voice due to damage to his larynx and could very well suffer permanent incapacitation.

Peck had to sit there and take it, but he was seething. Under other circumstances-outside in the street, a bar, anyplace-he would have taken the man apart because he'd never felt such hatred for anybody in his life, not even Yan or Gina. Who “was” this guy? What had he ever done to “him?” As it turned out, though, it was just posturing on the assistant DA's part: neither side wanted to take the case to trial. The outcome-and it could have been foreordained given what it was costing-was a plea bargain.

The judge, a skeletal little dark-skinned man in his forties-his name started with a “V” and went on for six unpronounceable syllables-gave him a five-minute lecture, rife with sarcasm, as Peck stood there trying to hold his gaze. Yan was in the back of the courtroom, wearing a neck brace, and Gina and her parents were there beside him, looking like Puritans ranged round the ducking stool. About the only thing Peck could be thankful for was that Sukie was at a friend's house, because as unforgiving and vituperative as Gina might have been, even she realized there was no point in having her witness her father's public humiliation, not after what had happened to the window of the car and the rain of those splinters of safety glass and the way her father had fired up the Mustang and scorched the pavement till the tires smoked and all the birds blew out of the trees. The judge gave him three years probation and imposed a restraining order enjoining him from coming within five hundred feet of his wife. The order further prohibited him from having any contact whatever with her, not by telephone, e-mail, the postal service or through a third party, except as arranged by the court according to family law and visitation rights for his daughter. At the end of it, the judge leaned forward, and in his high clipped Indian accent, asked him if he understood.

“Yes,” Peck said, though it was wrong, all wrong, and he was sick with the aftertaste of it. “I understand.”

“Good,” the judge said, “because I sincerely hope you do. If you obey the directives of this court and keep out of trouble-any trouble whatsoever-this felony charge will be reduced to a misdemeanor upon completion of probation and payment in full of restitution to the victims.” He paused. The courtroom was silent but for the faint distant moan of the air conditioner. “But if I see you here before me again, no matter what the charge, you'd better have your toothbrush with you because I will remand you directly to jail. Do I make myself clear?”

Peck remembered feeling like something scraped off the bottom of somebody's shoe, even though the attorney seemed pretty pleased with himself and to everyone's mind the incident was closed. His mother was there, with one of her sack-like friends, both of them probably drunk already though it wasn't yet noon, and two of his own drinking buddies, Walter Franz and Chip Selzer, from the ex-bar at the ex-restaurant, had turned up to show support. Lunch, people wanted lunch and a celebratory drink or two, his mother grinning, Walter and Chip crowding in on him, but he wasn't having it. “Hey, congratulations, man,” Walter crowed, throwing an arm round his shoulder. “It's over, huh? Finally over.”

They were out in the hallway, a crush of people coming and going. Fat people. Stupid people. The dregs. And then he saw Gina and her parents pushing through the swinging door at the end of the corridor, Yan trailing behind them like a retainer, and he couldn't help himself-he shoved Walter away, a shrug of the shoulder that knocked him up against the wall, and when Chip moved in, his palm spread wide for the high-five, he just turned his back and stalked out the door.

For the next few weeks he put his head down and tried to forget about it. Focus on the business, that was what he told himself, shake it off, straighten things out. Though he'd never let it show, the legal convolutions-the endless meetings with the shrink and the lawyer, the postponements, the general level of harassment and pure unadulterated crap-had really got to him, and Pizza Napoli wasn't what it was or what it should have been. Sales were flat, people cooking out and going to the beach, and they just didn't think pizza as much in the summer as when school was on and the kids were sitting there at the kitchen table every night screaming to be fed. For the first time ever, and against his better judgment because in his eyes it reduced the place to the level of Pizza Hut or Domino's, he gave in to Skip and offered a two-for-one coupon in the local paper.

It didn't do him much good-if there was a blip in the receipts it was too small to notice. But the ad itself (it wasn't even an ad, just a cheesy coupon in the Thursday morning insert), aside from costing him money, seemed to suck the last shred of class out of the place. He hated it. Hated the way it looked on the page, the lame line drawing of a stereotypical grinning potbellied mustachioed greaseball of an Italian chef holding up a vertical pizza in defiance of gravity beneath the legend “Pizza Napoli, Buy One Regular Size Pizza with One Topping, Get the Next One Free.” Christ, he might as well have been selling hula hoops.

And then there was Gina. He wasn't allowed to contact her, but he still had the right to see his daughter every Sunday, all day Sunday, whether Gina liked it or not, and his lawyer contacted her lawyer and worked out an arrangement whereby Gina's mother would bring Sukie to some neutral place and he would pick her up. They agreed on McDonald's-she loved McDonald's, more for the playground than the food, the vanilla shake thick as sludge and the shrunken little patty of whatever it was they slipped between the grease-soaked bun, no ketchup, no mustard, no onions, neither of which seemed to interest her beyond the first sip and the first bite-and Gina's mother was consistently late. He sat there in the Mustang, checking his watch every ten seconds, kids all over the place, but not his kid, and when Gina's mother did show she never apologized or even said word one, handing Sukie over as if she were giving her up to a child molester. Did he hate that woman, with her surgically restructured face and her liposuction and frozen hair and the way she locked up her features and threw away the key as if just to look at him was an ordeal? Yes, sure he did. And he hated Gina for what she'd done to him. And the Bullhead-just hearing his voice on the phone, the hectoring nag of a voice going on and on about the menu at Pizza Napoli, the books, the bottom line: “You're not offering the public what they want. You know why? Because you get stuck on one thing. Listen to me: you're screwing up. Big-time. Wake up, will you?” Not to mention Stuart Yan, who was suing him for damages in civil court. It had to come to a head. A saint would have broken under the pressure, and he never claimed to be a saint.

It was a Sunday and he was sitting in the car outside McDonald's, reading the sports page, watching the leaves change, checking his watch-nine o'clock, nine-thirty, ten-and Gina's mother never showed. His first impulse was to drive out there and do some damage, confront the bitch, tear the house down if that was what it took, but he suppressed it: that was a ticket to jail. He checked his watch again. A guy came out the door, a nobody, a nonentity in flip-flops and shorts, and he had his two kids by the hand and they were one happy family, their Egg McMuffins tucked away and the park or a football game in their immediate future or maybe a cruise up the river to see how the leaves looked against the water. He wanted to call, but that was against the rules too. At eleven, sick with rage, he gave it up and drove to the restaurant to discover a message on the machine: “Just to let you know,” Gina's mother's pinched voice came at him as if she were hollering down a tunnel, “Sukie won't be coming today because of the ballet at Carnegie Hall. The whole family's going.”

He listened to the message twice through, standing there over the phone in his office at the back of the building, struggling for control. There were stains on the wall. The place smelled of marinara sauce, a dark ancient funk of it, and of the grease extruded from the pepperoni and the cheese burned to the walls of the oven. They thought they'd beaten him down, marginalized him, taken him out of the equation-before long, he'd be erased altogether. That was what they thought, but they were wrong. He could have called his lawyer and started up that whole dance again, could have complained, and yet he didn't see what good that would do-they had their own lawyer. Up to this point, he'd played by the rules. Now the rules were off.

In the morning, as soon as the offices were open, he put in calls to the phone company, the gas, electric and water, identifying himself as John Marchetti and ordering a stop service on all utilities at the house. He filed a change of address at the post office, then called American Express and Visa-the two cards he'd seen the Bullhead flash-and claimed he'd lost his wallet and wanted replacement cards overnighted by FedEx. When the new cards arrived at the post-office box he'd set up, he began to order things for delivery to 1236 Laurel: a new washer and dryer; an antique slate pool table that weighed over a thousand pounds; a pair of purebred Dalmatians; a deluxe fourteen-jet hot tub that could accommodate six people comfortably. That was just the beginning. He canceled Gina's cell, canceled her credit cards, went down to the bank and closed out their joint savings account. And Yan. He went after Yan too, but in a more immediate way. A week later, after he'd closed the restaurant for the night and made the rounds of the bars, he found Yan's Nissan parked out front of his apartment and poured six plastic jugs of muriatic acid over the finish, then slashed the tires and took out the windshield for good measure. The night was cold, his breath steaming, the tire iron flashing under the street lamp like a sword of vengeance, and maybe somebody saw him there or maybe it was the post-office box, maybe that was it. He never knew really. In fact, he was still asleep when they came for him, and he never did remember his toothbrush.

By the time he got round to cooking, it was past seven and Madison was distracted and whiny. She sat at the kitchen table, pounding her legs back and forth under the chair as if she were on a swing set at the playground, watching him poach the gnocchi while the cordon bleu began to send up signals from the oven and the white sauce thickened in the pan and the zucchini simmered in olive oil, red wine, garlic and chopped basil, the flame up high just before he cut it down nearly to nothing. There was an untouched glass of milk in front of her and the croque monsieur he'd made her from a heel of French bread and the leftover slices of prosciutto and Emmentaler browned in the pan. He could see the semicircular indentation her upper teeth had made in the sandwich when she'd lifted it to her mouth and then decided she wasn't going to eat it after all because she was cranky and tired and sugared-out in honor of Dunkin' Donuts Day at camp and because he wanted her to eat and her mother wanted her to eat and she didn't want to do what anybody wanted her to do, not in her present mood.

For his part, he was through coaxing her. She could kick away all she wanted and she could pout and mug and whine that the milk was too warm and the sandwich too cold or plead for him to read her a story or at least let her get up from the table and watch TV, but he was in a zone-he was enjoying himself, the meal coming to fruition, two sips left of the vodka martini on the counter and the Orvieto on ice. Natalia had set the table on the deck-it was an uncharacteristically mild evening, the fog held at bay, at least temporarily-and she was out there now, martini in one hand, magazine in the other. After the spa, she'd spent the afternoon shopping with Kaylee, and she'd come home in a delirium of shopping bags, the slick shining colors catching the light, her hair swept back, her smile quick and unambiguous and her mood elevated. Definitely elevated. She insisted on trying things on for him-“Did he like this one? Did he? Was he sure? It wasn't too, too… was it?”-and Madison was summoned to try on the three outfits she'd got for her (hence the mood and the lateness of the meal).

He hadn't told her a thing yet, just that he had a surprise for her. While she'd been out shopping, he'd been shopping too, and he'd traded the Z4 in on a Mercedes S500 sedan with charcoal leather seats, burl walnut trim, an in-dash GPS navigator system and Sirius satellite radio, in a sweet color they called Bordeaux Red. There was a price differential, of course-a considerable one, and he knew he was being taken, the salesman pulling some sort of phony accent on him and kissing his ass from the front door to the desk and back again-but that hardly mattered. The Beemer was his down (the pink slip signed over to him by none other than Dana Halter) and there were no payments for the first six months, by which time it really wasn't relevant. Now, as he dodged from one pan to the other, checking the cordon bleu, dipping the gnocchi out of the pot and slipping them onto a greased sheet for a three-minute browning in the oven, he was burning up with the need to show it to her, to show it off and see the look on her face. That was how he'd planned it out, the new car first, the thrill of it, maybe a ride round the block or over the bridge, and then he'd give her the news: Business. An opportunity on the East Coast. But it would be a vacation, a vacation too-see the sights. Didn't she want to live in New York? Hadn't she always said that? New York?

In the heat of the moment-pans sizzling, aromas rising-he didn't hear her come in the door. There was Madison, pouting at the table, there was the deck and the empty chaise, and here she was, Natalia, slipping her arms round his waist. “So what is this surprise?” she cooed, her lips at his ear. “Tell me. I can hardly stand to know.”

Flipping off the gas under the burners, he gave the zucchini pan a precautionary shake and then swiveled round in her embrace. Both his hands climbed to her shoulders and he took her to him for a lingering kiss while Madison looked on in mock disgust. “You'll see,” he murmured, and in that moment he was sure of her, sure of the feel and the taste and the smell of her, his partner, his lover, the dark venereal presence in his bed. “As soon as we eat.”

“Ohhh,” she said, drawing it out, “so long?” And then, to her daughter: “It is a surprise, Madison. For Mommy. Do you like a surprise?”

After dinner-Madison managed to get down two forkfuls of gnocchi and half a slice of the veal, though she just stared right through the vegetables-he took them down the front steps to the gravel walkway along the bay. They were holding hands, Natalia on his right, Madison on his left. Madison bunched her fingers in the way Sukie used to, not quite ready to interlock them with his because she was still in a mood and that would have been too conciliatory under the circumstances-the surprise wasn't for her, after all, or not primarily. “What is it, Dana?” she kept saying in a high taunting schoolyard voice. “Huh? Aren't you going to tell?”

“Yes, Da-na,” Natalia chimed in. “I am in suspense. It is out here, outside? Something outside?”

He didn't answer right away. He was thinking of Sukie, the last time he'd seen her. It was the week he'd been released. They were at McDonald's, same place, same time, but she wasn't the girl he knew. It wasn't just the physical changes-a year older, a year taller, two teeth missing in front, her hair pinned up with a tortoiseshell barrette so that she seemed like an adult in miniature-but the way she looked at him. Her eyes, fawn-colored, round as quarters, eyes that had given themselves up to him without stint, were wary now, slit against the glare of the sun, against him. He could see the poison Gina had poured into them and see too that there was no antidote-there was nothing he could do to win her back, no amount of fudge on the sundae, not the desperation of his hug or the prattle of the old stories and routines. She was lost to him. He didn't even remember her birthday anymore. “No,” he said finally, bending low against the tug of Natalia's hand to bring his face level with her daughter's, “it's inside.”

All three of them had halted. Madison's nose twitched. “Then why are we out here?”

“Because this is an alternate way to our garage, isn't it? An acceptable way? A nice way, out here, breathing nice clean air after dinner?” He straightened up even as she let go of his hand and flew across the grass; just as she reached the garage door-unfinished wood gone gray with the sun and sea for the natural look-he clicked the remote and the door swung up as if by magic.

“It is a car?” Natalia said, catching the glint of chrome as they strode across the grass hand in hand.

When they were there, when he'd let Madison in to scramble over the seats and Natalia, her mouth slack, had pulled back the driver's side door to peer inside at the dash, he said, “Top of the line. Or nearly.” He paused, watching her run a hand over the upholstery. “I could have gone for the S600, but it's such a gas hog-four hundred ninety-three horses. I mean, think of the environment.”

Natalia was giving him a puzzled look. “But where,” she said, “is my car?”

“Mommy, Mommy!” Madison shouted, bouncing so high on the rear seat her head brushed the roof.

“I traded it on this,” he said, trying to keep his voice even. “For you. For Madison. You can't have her on your lap all the time, I mean, she's growing up-look at the size of her.”

“But I love my Z-car.” Natalia's lips were clenched. Her eyes hardened.

“I know, baby,” he said, “I know. When we get to New York I'll get you another one, I promise.”

Her head came up now, up out of the dark den of the interior, with its rich new smell and the shining screen of the GPS system. “New York? What are you talking about?”

Later, after they'd put Madison to bed, they had a talk. It was the kind of talk he hated, the kind where you were up against the wall, no place to hide, and everything was going to come out sooner or later. He felt vulnerable. Irritated. Felt as if he was standing before the judge all over again, the lawyer, his probation officer.

Natalia had made coffee and they sat across from each other in the living room, holding on to their mugs as if they were weighted against a hurricane wind. She was watching him closely, her eyebrows lifted, both hands clenched round the mug in her lap. “So, you are going now to tell me what this is all about? That I should have to leave my home and tear up-is that how you say it? — tear up my daughter when she is just to start in school?”

“You love me, right?” he countered, leaning forward to set his mug on the coffee table. “You've told me that a thousand times. Did you mean it?”

She didn't respond. Outside, a pair of blue lights drifted across the bay.

“Did you?”

In a reduced voice, she said that she did. One hand went to the throat of her silk blouse; she fingered the necklace there, pearls he'd given her. Or paid for, anyway.

“All right, good. You're just going to have to trust me, that's all”-he held up a hand to forestall her. “Haven't I given you everything you could possibly want? Well,” he said, without waiting for an answer to the obvious, “I'm going to continue to do that. No, I'm going to give you more. Much more. Private school for Madison, the best money can buy, and you know the best schools are on the East Coast. You know that, don't you?”

Her face was ironed sober, no trace of theatrics or antipathy. She was trying hard to comprehend. “But why?”

“It's complicated,” he said, and he glanced up at a movement beyond the window, a flash of white, the beat of wings, something settling there on the rail-an egret. Was that an egret?

“Yes?” she said, leaning into the table herself now, her eyes probing his.

“Okay,” he said. “You just have to-listen, my name isn't really Dana.”

“Not Dana? What do you mean? This is a joke?”

“No,” he said, slowly shaking his head, “no joke. I–I “adopted” the name. Because I was in trouble. It was-”

She cut him off. “Then you are not a doctor?”

He shook his head. There was the shadow of the bird there, faintly luminous, and he couldn't help wondering if it was a sign, and if it was, whether it was a good sign or bad.

“And all this”-her gesture was sudden, a wild unhinged sweep of her hand-“is a lie? This condo, this coffee table and the dining set? A lie? All a lie?”

“I don't know. Not a lie. Everything's real-the new car, the earrings, the way I feel about you and Madison.” He glanced away and saw that the bird was gone, chased by her gesture, by the violence of her voice. “It's just a name.”

There was a long moment of silence during which he became aware of the distant murmur of the neighbor's TV, a sound that could have been the wash of the surf or the music of the whales. But it wasn't. It was only the sound of a TV. Then she said, “So, if you are not Da-na, then who are you?”

He never hesitated. He looked right at her. “Bridger,” he said. “Bridger Martin.”