Talk Talk

One

AS SOON AS he laid eyes on the house, he knew he had to have it. Even when he'd been living with Gina and making out pretty well, king of his own domain, envious of no one, he'd be going one place or another-running errands, dodging between the two restaurants-and glance out the car window and see a house like this and feel something move in him. Awe. A kind of awe. To think about the people who lived there, doctors, lawyers, old money, the real class acts with blue-chip investments handed down through the generations and the Jag and the SLK280 sitting side by side in the garage. They came into Lugano sometimes, people in their forties, fifties, even sixties, and they knew their wines and never needed help with the menu or the pronunciation of anything, whether it was Italian, French or German. Then they went home to a house like this, the slate roof, the mullioned windows, shrubs a hundred years old clipped and tamed as if they were an extension of the walls, flower beds, ivy, wisteria-and always a hill studded with trees. To look down from.

And here it was, right before him. The real deal. This was no development house thrown together with two-by-fours and plasterboard, no condo, no rambling Peterskill Victorian that had been divided up two generations ago into dark stinking run-down rat warrens inhabited by welfare mothers and crackheads, this was where the rich people lived, where they'd always lived. And rich people built their houses out of stone. That was the first thing he saw, the stone-a sun-striped bank of silvered gray stone glimpsed through the trees as they followed Sandman and the real estate lady up the gravel drive-and then the poured water of the windows, the slate roof that shone as if it were eternally wet, the ancient copper downspouts with their tarnish of green.

Natalia said, “It is a nice set, yes?”

The sunlight pooled in the drive where Sandman and the real estate lady-Janice Levy, short, bush-haired, expansive-were just getting out of the car. “Setting, you mean,” he said. “And look at that-look at that view.” He was pointing now, as the lawn unscrolled to a line of trees that dipped away to give up the river and the mountains beyond.

“I hate it.” Madison was leaning forward, her face intent, eyes roaming over everything. “Mommy, I hate it. It looks like a witch's house. And there's nobody to play with.”

For once, Natalia ignored her, and then they were climbing out of the car, Sandman grinning and Janice Levy watching them with the keen eyes of a behaviorist, watching for nuance, the slipup, anything that would give him away. “Wait'll you see inside,” Sandman was saying. “This place is you, man, I told you.”

Sandman was right. It “was” him, sure it was, no doubt about it. Even if the inside was as vacant as a barn or redecorated in motel revival with cottage cheese ceilings and lime-green paint he would have taken it on sight, the deal already done and awaiting only his approval. And Janice Levy's approval of them, on behalf of the Walter Meisters, who were already in West Palm Beach because Mrs. Meister, at seventy-two, could no longer take the winters and didn't care how muggy and buggy Florida got, it couldn't be any worse than a New York summer, even with the breeze off the river. Muggy was muggy. At least that was what Janice Levy told them, pinching her voice just this side of caricature to impersonate the old lady as she showed them through the place, pointing out the amenities and spewing away non-stop.

Sandman-he looked good, looked respectable, his tattoos covered up under a long-sleeved button-down shirt in a pale banker's blue that brought out the color of his eyes and his facial hair reduced to a single strip of dirty blond soul beard depending from his lower lip-grinned and tugged at his sleeves and dropped his baritone down to its most soothing pitch as they shuffled through the rooms and Janice Levy waved and jabbered and professionally ingratiated herself. “And the bar,” he said. “Look at the bar.”

They were in the main room, with its fireplace and views out to the river, oak floors, golden with age, the bar-sink and mini-fridge beneath it-tucked in against one white-plastered wall. “Yeah,” he heard himself say, “nice.” He was wearing his expressionless expression beneath the new mirror shades he'd picked up in a mall someplace in Utah, give nothing away, though the price had already been set and there was no reason or room for bargaining, sign the papers or walk. But this was how he did business: never let them know what you're thinking.

Natalia ran a hand over the burnished surface of the bartop and turned to Janice Levy to ask about storage space. “Are there not closets?”

Balancing one elbow in a cupped palm and tilting her head in what was meant to be an ingenuous way, Janice Levy assured her that the closets were more than adequate, though, of course, in an old house-a classic house-you did have to be creative. And didn't she know just the antique dealer to find her some real period pieces, wardrobes, chiffoniers, breakfronts, but really, a house like this- That sold Natalia right there-that and the kitchen, which, as Sandman had promised, had been upgraded to the highest haute bourgeois standard (the Meisters were real foodies, Janice Levy confided, with over five hundred cookbooks alone). The kitchen pleased him too-granite countertops, a prep island, hooks for the saucepans, the big Viking range every bit the equal of the one they'd left behind-and he made the mistake of saying so.

“Oh, are you a foodie, then, Mr. Martin?”

He gave her a stare, then removed the shades to fix his eyes on her, to show her he was sympathetic, handsome, dashing, a ladies' man, nobody to fear. “I wouldn't go that far,” he said. “I like to cook. And I like a good restaurant too.”

Natalia was fully warmed up at this point-he could see the let's-go-shopping look settling into her pretty dark whiskey-colored eyes, a whole new house to fill, a real house, a country estate surrounded by antique dealers and Manhattan just over an hour away. “He is the best. A cook to dream for. And wine. His own sommelier.”

Janice Levy was watching him. So was Sandman. The time had come to sign the papers, two-year lease with an option to buy, break open the Perrier-Jouët and get the real estate lady out the door so she could drive overfed couples around in her white Land Cruiser and sell, sell, sell. She knew all about him. Knew the amount he kept in his bank accounts, knew how much equity he had in the condo in Mill Valley, knew he was clean, debt-free, and that he was twenty-nine years old and had a degree from the USC film school and money to burn. “So,” she said, laying her briefcase on the bar and snapping the latches with a practiced flip of both thumbs, “what is it you said you did? For a living, I mean?”

“Investments.”

“Oh,” she said, “of course. Yes, I knew that.” She was marshaling the papers for his signature, the handing over of the check, the first six months paid in advance, Sandman to get his deposit back, when she mused: “You're in the film business?” In the background he could hear Madison's piping skirl of a voice, “Mommy, Mommy, there's a swing set!”

“No,” he said, moving up to stand beside her and run his gaze over the first page of the agreement, “that's an amateur's game. It's like gambling, know what I mean?”

Her eyes-they were green, sharp, attractive, definitely interested-shifted to him. He could smell her perfume. Like all real estate women she had terrific legs, which she showed off in a skirt that fell just below the knee. “No, not really. But I do have a client looking for a house now who works in TV, in Manhattan, and he-”

“Investments,” he repeated. “Keep it real.”

“Yes,” she said, nodding vigorously. “Oh, yes. Definitely.”

The trip cross-country wasn't exactly what he'd envisioned-they'd stretched it out to two weeks and a day, and they did manage to see the Great Salt Lake, an Amish village and the world's biggest longhorn steer, all for Madison's benefit, but there was no Tahoe and no Vegas. Once he'd got back on I-80 he just kept going, his mind working round the sharp edges of what had happened back there outside of Sacramento, and after he crossed the state line he began to rethink things. For one, there was no real reason to dawdle-a little R & R, sure, please the kid and Natalia too-but the sooner he got settled in New York and started making some real money again, the better. And the car. He'd been in panic mode there for a while, the adrenaline scouring his veins and seriously impairing his judgment. He had ID. He had papers for the car. It was his, no question about it, and once he was out of California he didn't have to worry about the cops either-if that was even a worry to begin with-and plus he had money in the thing. He'd paid ten thousand down, cash, on Natalia's Z4 and had better than a year's payments in it too, and so no, he wasn't going to unload the Mercedes. Dealer plates were nothing-he'd just toss them, make up a phony pink slip and register the thing in New York. And when Bob Almond of Bob Almond Mercedes/BMW wanted to know where his payments were, well, he could go on down to San Roque and try to shake them out of Bridger Martin, the asshole.

And so he'd kept going, Natalia dozing, Madison awake now in back and playing her videos over and over, the maddening rupture of the kiddie soundtrack better than the claws-bared assault of Natalia's nagging, and that wasn't over yet-she was just giving her vocal cords a rest. Scenery-or lack of it-fled by the windows. He kept his foot on the gas and his eyes on the rearview. It must have been four or so before Madison started whining and Natalia lifted her head to give him a stare that burned right through him, Winnemucca bleak, Elko bleaker, and in a withering voice wondered if he intended to drive all day and all night without stopping even to perform their natural functions or consume-that was the word she used-anything of nourishment. “Are you planning to stop,” she said, and he wouldn't look at her, his eyes on the road, “or are you still running?”

“I'm not running.”

“Then what are you doing?”

“Driving.”

“Driving, yes. I see that.” She looked out the window on high desert scrub, the world bleached of color, the sun as persistent as a nightmare. “But this is not Tahoe.”

“No,” he said, “no, it's not. Change of plan.”

“This is not Vegas.” He stole a glance at her and her face was set, angry, all the soft opalescent beauty drained out of it. “What is this? This is nothing.”

An exit blew by, trucks drawn up in a steel ridge, a hundred cars and milling stupid people like stick figures in an artist's rendering of the ultimate truck stop, gas, food, lodging, condoms, pigs in a blanket, tequila. A sign for Indian jewelry, ONLY 20 MILES. And then scrub, more scrub, and the long dwindling slash of the road.

“You stop,” she said, and she turned her wrathful face to him. “At the next place you stop and I don't care what it is, you stop.”

“A pool,” Madison chimed in. “I want a place with a pool. Can I go swimming, Mommy, can I?”

He heard himself say, “Sure, no problem. Next place. Next place with a pool.”

For a moment, all three of them fixed their gaze on the road ahead, the gleaming chain-link of cars and trucks vanishing into the horizon, cartoon characters whinnying and chortling in the background, the tires faintly humming. “Something is wrong,” Natalia said then.

“Nothing's wrong.”

“Then why not Tahoe. You promised Tahoe.”

“I told you, I changed my mind.”

“Those people-”

“Fuck those people.”

She drilled him with her eyes. She didn't want him cursing around Madison, and he knew that-that was one of the rules. No cursing around Madison. “Those people-” she repeated.

“Fuck those people.”

And so it went, ad nauseam, for two weeks and one day.

Their first night in the house, after four in the local motel and five full days of shopping, hassling with the utilities, arranging furniture and unpacking the big cardboard boxes sent on ahead from California, he decided to inaugurate the kitchen. A little Thai/Chinese fusion was what he was thinking: three-flavor stir-fry (scallops, monkfish, tiger shrimp), pork spring rolls to start and a nice medium-spicy squid salad that would have enough push to it to satisfy Natalia and yet not overwhelm Madison's tender young palate. Though Madison was learning-he had to give her credit for that. Ever since her mother had moved in with him he'd been weaning her off the bland stuff, slipping her a slice of daikon or Vidalia onion when he was cooking, an extra portion of wasabi and pickled ginger with her sashimi-and then a bowl of green-tea ice cream to cool and compare. Or having her do the taste test with a tiny sliver of the tan chipotle mecos he liked to use in his chicken enchiladas or the dark red coil of a smoked serrano, and always an ice afterward. She was getting to be a little champ, actually, insisting on a dollop of jalapeño jelly instead of cinnamon on her butter-drenched toast in the morning.

The supermarket wasn't what it was in California, of course, but he'd found an Asian market in Fishkill (a little bit of a haul from Garrison, but he tried to restrict his shopping to the north so as to stay away from Peterskill, for obvious reasons) and got pretty much everything he needed, from the cellophane noodles to the sweet chili sauce, spring roll wrappers, fresh cilantro and gingerroot. It had rained earlier, the clouds gathering atop Storm King and fanning out to sink low over West Point, and that was something he'd missed, the suddenness and violence of the thunderstorms; now, standing at the kitchen counter, he caught the indefinable scent of his boyhood drifting across the lawn and through the screens, the smell of the woods, sumac, mold, rot, the superabundant water sitting in its pools in the hidden places, everything in ferment. He was happy suddenly, feeling as if a load had been lifted from him, a load that had worn him down this past month and more, happy to be cleaning squid with one of his sharp new J. A. Henckels ice-hardened knives and having a glass of Champagne at the window, the sky close and gray and the grass spread out beneath him such a dense green it was almost black. Happy about the Champagne too, the price on the Perrier-Jouët so good he'd gone ahead and bought a case, the French wines cheaper here by far than on the west coast, thinking he'd be drinking a lot more French from now on, not to mention Italian and even Spanish. He was feeling all this, alternately plying the knife and setting it down to lift the Champagne flute to his lips, when Natalia slipped up noiselessly behind him and wrapped her arms round his waist.

“Hey,” she murmured. “How is it going? Looks good. Squid, yes?” There was a saucepan on the stove, the heat up high-he was making a fish stock from the scraps of the monkfish, a little white wine, butter, garlic and green onions to flavor the squid-and his hands were full. Normally, he didn't like to be bothered when he was cooking-cooking required your full concentration or things were apt to go wrong-but he was feeling so good he just leaned back into her to enjoy the feel of her long-fingered hands on his abdomen, up under his rib cage and where he was especially sensitive, on his chest and nipples. “Feels nice,” he said, turning his head for a kiss. “You want a glass of Champagne?”

“Fine,” she said, moving away from him now, “yes, I would like that, but I am looking for the hammer I have just bought-have you seen this hammer?”

She'd found a set of musty-looking turn-of-the-century prints in one of the local antique shops, featuring two children, a boy and a girl, in various poses-swallowed up in a maelstrom of brooding vegetation, strolling hand in hand like lost waifs, kicking their bare feet in a snarling stream, gazing up into the heavens as if for guidance-and she'd spent the last hour trying to decide where to hang them. “No,” he said, “I haven't seen it, but would you mind-the Champagne's in the ice bucket there and my hands…” He held up both palms, wet and slimed with the exudate of the squid, in evidence. “And that saucepan on the stove there-would you turn the heat down? To low. All the way to low.”

She was wearing a pair of capris to show off the perfect swell of her calves and her beautiful ankles and feet, open-toed sandals and a white blouse hiked up and knotted under her breasts-and she'd put her hair up too, no nonsense here, a whole house to whip into order. He cross-hatched the flattened slabs of squid to tenderize them and watched her glide across the floor to the stove and then pour herself a glass of the wine. And what was he feeling-love? Lust? The quiet seep of fulfillment and domestic bliss?

“Toast?” he proposed, putting down the knife to wipe his hands on a towel and then taking up his own glass.

The sun had fingered its way through the clouds, suddenly illuminating a patch of woods beyond the window-up came the light as if wired to a rheostat-and then just as quickly it faded. A snapshot. With a very long exposure. She was watching him intently. Poised on one foot, the glass at her lips. “Toast to what?” she asked, her face changing. “To, to”-and here it came, the flush along the cheekbones, the sheets of moisture to armor her eyes-“to a man who will not even make the introduction to his mother? In his own hometown? Of his fiancée? Is that the toast you want? Is that it?”

He said her name, softly, in melioration.

“Because I cannot stand this shit, and that is what it is, “shit.” You hear me?”

“Please,” he said, “not now.”

“Yes, now,” she said, spreading her legs for balance and then throwing back her head to drain the flute in a single gulp as if she were back in Jaroslavl with a glass of no-name vodka. “I don't believe you. I don't believe anything you say. This money. Where do you get this money? Is it drugs, is that it?”

He just stared. He didn't want to get into this.

“Will I-am I to go to prison, then? Like Sandman? And you-you have been in prison too, I know it.”

“It's a long story,” he said.

“Yes. But you tell it to me. You tell me everything.” She poured a second glass for herself, and he could see her hand tremble at the neck of the bottle. “Because I swear, if you don't… You are ashamed of me? Why? Because of my accent? Ashamed of me so that I can meet only Sandman and not your own mother?”

“It's not that,” he said, and still he hadn't moved, the squid lying there on the counter neatly prepped, his flute empty, the pan simmering on the stove. “Okay, you're right,” he said, and he moved to cut the heat under the pan and pour himself another glass, “I guess it is time, because you're just acting crazy now-drugs? Me? Have you ever seen me do any kind of drug, even pot-even a single toke?”

“Cocaine.”

“That's nothing. A little toot now and again, just for fun. What, once a week-once every “two” weeks?” He spread his arms wide in expostulation. “You like it too.”

She gave him a tight smile. “Yes. Sometimes.”

“I'm no bad guy-you think I'm a bad guy? What happened to me is no different than what happened to you. I just hooked up with the wrong person, is all. My wife. My ex-wife. That was the beginning of it, just like you-just like you with what's his name, Madison's father?”

She took a seat at the table they'd just bought the day before-oak, 1890s, six matching chairs, two with hairline cracks that had been glued and varnished over-and they finished the bottle and opened another one and he told her as much as he could, because he wanted to be honest with her; he loved her, and really did believe that people in a relationship needed to be straight with each other. What he didn't tell her was that his real name was Peck-Bridger was good, Bridger was fine for now, though he'd run the creep's credit into the ground because he couldn't resist putting it to him and before long he'd have to be somebody else-or that it wasn't the investment business he was planning on running out of the big paneled aboveground basement or that he couldn't bring her to see his mother not only because his mother was irrelevant to him but because she might call him Peck or even William and he just needed to take things step by step right now.

At some point, he'd got up and started chopping cilantro, green beans, garlic and chiles, and he deveined the shrimp and put on a pot for the rice. She didn't have much to say. She sat there running the tip of her index finger round the rim of the glass, wearing her brooding look. He was feeling a little light-headed from the wine. The pleasure of the hour, of being alone with his thoughts while things sizzled in the pan, was lost to him and the taste of the Champagne had gone sour in the back of his throat, but at least, he thought, he'd laid the issue to rest. He'd opened up. Been as forthcoming and honest as he could be, under the circumstances. And she seemed satisfied, or at least placated.

For a long while neither of them said anything. There were the faint sounds of life in the country-birdsong, crickets, the wet rush of a lone car's tires on the road out front. And what else? The rhythmic squeak and release of Madison's swings, a sound as regular as breathing. Everything seemed to cohere round that rhythm, slow and sure and peaceful, even as he moved back to the stove, busy there suddenly. When the wok was good and hot he dumped in the garlic, ginger, green onions and chiles and the instant release of the flavor scented the air in a sudden burst that made his salivary glands clench. Behind him, at the table, Natalia cleared her throat, poured herself another glass of wine. Then, in her smallest voice, she said, “I still do not see why I cannot meet your mother.”

Two days later, he was in a place across the river, in Newburgh, buying a high-end color copier with a credit card in somebody else's name, after which he intended to check out an authentic old-country German butcher shop Sandman had turned him on to-he thought he might make Wiener schnitzel, with pickled red cabbage, spätzle and butter beans, just for a change, though on second thought it was probably too heavy in this heat and he might just go with potato salad and bratwurst on the grill-when he decided on a whim to stop in at a bar down by the waterfront. He had a couple of hours to kill and that was nice. It was calming. As was the feel of the sun on his back as he loaded the copier into the trunk of the car, the underarms of his shirt already damp with sweat, the heat and humidity sustaining him in a way the refrigerated air of the Bay Area never could have. He felt like a tourist on his own home turf. A dilettante. A man of leisure taking the air before ensconcing himself on a barstool and having a cold beer or two in a conical glass beaded with moisture while the TV overhead nattered on about nothing and he spread a copy of the newspaper across the bar and mused over the little comings and goings of the Yankees and Mets.

Natalia was shopping. He'd dropped her off at a mall the size of Connecticut and she said she'd call him around two for lunch. They'd found a day camp for Madison, though she hadn't wanted to go, of course, and she'd clung to her mother's legs and shrieked till the snot ran down her nose and generally caused a monumental pain in the ass for everyone concerned, but at least they didn't have to worry about her till five-or was it five-thirty? He thought about Sukie then, couldn't help himself-it hurt to be so close and not see her, but he didn't dare risk it, not yet, anyway. Her face was there, rising luminous in his mind, and then just as quickly it was gone. He checked his watch-quarter past twelve-and stepped into the bar.

Or it wasn't a bar, actually, in the strictest sense of the word-it was a bar/restaurant, looking to go upscale, part of the interconnected complex the city fathers had built along the riverfront to attract tourists and the locals who had a little money in their pockets and thought they were getting something special because the waiters wore starched white aprons over dress shirts and ties and the Hudson was right outside the window. And he wasn't complaining-he loved to drift into places like this, the Varathane still fresh on the pine wainscoting, the owners young and uninitiated and looking to score big. It was like a busman's holiday for him, studying the menu, the wine list, seeing what they were getting for what they were putting out, but it was strictly for comparison. He'd never own a restaurant again. Too much shit. Too much heartache.

It took a minute for his eyes to adjust, and then he nodded at the hostess (eighteen, natural blonde, with a butterfly tattooed on the wing of her left shoulder, and he hated that, hated tattoos on women, especially when they wore them in intimate places-it just suggested traffic to him, that was all), removed his shades, swept a hand over the crown of his head to settle his hair and pulled up a stool at the bar. The place was fairly well crowded and that surprised him. The bar was full of business types in lightweight summer suits, plus a couple of secretaries and three or four of the local lowlifes-you could pick them out at a glance, despite their bright-colored shirts and the watch-me-behave-myself looks on their faces-and maybe two-thirds of the tables were filled, mostly with women, mostly drinking iced tea and picking at the crab salad served on half an avocado. What was the word he was looking for? Déclassé. It wasn't Sausalito, that was for sure.

He'd just ordered his beer and half a dozen cherrystones, just spread out the paper on the bar and glanced up at the TV screen to see somebody somewhere hitting a home run on yesterday's highlight reel, when he felt a hand on his shoulder and swung round on the stool as if he'd been burned, jumpy-crazed, freaked-despite himself. For a moment he didn't know whose eyes he was staring into, some stranger's, some jerk who wanted to just have a glance at the sports page or politely ask if he might not mind shifting down a stool so he could- “Peck, man-don't you recognize me?”

It was Dudley, Dudley with his hair cut short and his earring banished, dressed in a white apron over a long-sleeved shirt and tie. He didn't know what to say. Tried to stare right through him, hello, goodbye, “You talkin' to me?” But it wasn't working, wasn't going to work. He was William Peck Wilson, and though he hadn't been anywhere near Peterskill in three years, he'd already been sniffed out. “Newburgh.” Jesus Christ. It was twenty-five miles away and on the other side of the river. Who would have thought anybody would know him here?

Dudley was standing there grinning as if they'd just gone in together on a winning Lotto ticket. His eyes were like grappling hooks. His lips were drying out. “Yeah,” Peck said, ducking his head, “yeah. Good to see you.”

“Oh, man, I can't believe it. So you're back, huh?” And then, before Peck could answer, he was calling down to the bartender, “Hey, Rick-Rick, give this man anything he wants. What do you want? A little nip of that single-malt scotch-what did you used to drink?”

The name stuck in his throat like a wad of phlegm. “Laphroaig.”

“Yeah, right: Laphroaig.” He stole a glance over his shoulder. “I'm not supposed to drink while I'm working, but hey, this is special, a special occasion.” He shifted on his feet, took a step back to widen his view, then reached out a balled-up fist to rap Peck on the shoulder. “Shit!” he barked. “Shit, Peck, it's great to see you. Balls up, man. Balls up!”

He couldn't help himself-something just snapped at that point-but suddenly he seemed to have Dudley by the arm and he was gripping that arm in his right hand as if he wanted to crush it and he was pulling Dudley to him so that he could drop his voice to that Greenhaven register: “Don't call me that,” he said. “Don't call me by name. Not ever.”

The light banked in Dudley's eyes, then came back in a soft glimmer of recognition. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I can dig it.”

Then they had the Laphroaig. Then they made some very quiet, very general conversation until Dudley had to excuse himself to go back to work. There was that moment of farewell and goodbye and see you next time, but Dudley just wasn't ready to let it go yet. “So,” he said, already leaning toward the kitchen, “am I going to see you around, or what? Are you back?”

Peck watched two women get up from their table by the window and fuss around over their purses and shopping bags and whatever else they'd dragged into lunch with them, their backsides tight in their skirts as they bent down and came up again. Beyond them, out on the river, a lone high gull coasted on the streaming currents of the air. He stood, tucked the paper under his arm. “No,” he said, “just passing through.”

Two

THEY WERE SOMEWHERE in Utah, staring out at the salt flats that were so blanched and bleak and unrelieved he might have created them himself for the backdrop to some post-apocalyptic thriller, but he was too tired, sweat-slicked, dehydrated and vaguely feverish even to guess at the storyline or get beyond the long-distance shimmer of the (hackneyed) opening shot. Dana was driving. She'd been gazing into her laptop all day as if it were the crystal ball in “The Wizard of Oz,” and then they'd stopped to gas up and use the restroom and she'd taken over the wheel. For the last couple hundred miles he'd been steeling himself to call Radko, just to see how things stood, though he knew in his heart that by now somebody else would be occupying his cubicle and plying his mouse. It was hot, the car's air conditioner barely functioning, the sun glancing off the hood, the dashboard, the buttons of the radio. His underarms were clammy and abraded and his T-shirt was stuck to his back and he kept playing with the vents to maximize the minimal airflow, without much success. He took a moment to glance at Dana, her jaw set and hands rigid on the wheel, then pulled out his phone, punched in the number and raised his eyes to the white vacancy of the horizon.

The phone picked up on the second ring. “Rad,” Radko announced, delivering his standard telephonic greeting, as if pronouncing the two syllables of “hello” were a waste of time.

“Rad?” Bridger repeated stupidly. He'd been listening to talk radio out of boredom, some reactionary demagogue of the airwaves spewing about communists and liberals and Mexicans in a high inflammatory voice, and though he'd turned down the volume, the noise was still there. The term “eco-Nazis” rose up out of the chatter and fell away.

“Who is this? Bridger? Bridger, is that you?”

“Yeah, uh-hi.”

“Where are you?”

“That was what I wanted to talk about, what I wanted to tell you-”

“You tell me nothing. You are at airport, you are in your house, you are standing in lobby of this building where I am running a business and paying the rent, and it does not matter, does not”-he paused to snatch at the word-“register. And you know why?”

“I'm in Utah.”

“Utah.” There was an infinite sadness in the way he pronounced it, as if Utah were a prison or a leper colony.

“That's what I wanted to tell you, I'm sorry, but Dana, I mean, Milos-”

“No, do not bring my cousin's name into this.”

“We have to go to New York, because this thief-”

“Thiff, thiff, always this “thiff”-give it up why don't you? Already, enough.”

“He's got “me” now-somehow he managed to get hold of my identity, taking out credit cards in my name and I don't know what else, and if anybody comes there looking for me, creditors or collection agencies or whatever, I want you to know it's not my fault. I'm not guilty. Don't blame me.”

“Blame? Who is blaming? I want to tell you something, that there is a woman, very young woman, sitting in your workstation right now, a quick worker, bedder, I think, than you-if you are even here, is what I mean.” Bridger tried to cut in, but Radko had raised his voice now, hooking the words on the caps of his teeth and spitting them into the receiver. “But you are not here, are you?”

“I understand. I know where you're coming from. I just want to say that this is all way beyond my control, and, well, I guess when I get back I'll give you a call. Just in case-”

“In case what?”

“You need me. Again.”

“When “do” you come back?”

The voice on the radio flared and died. Dana hadn't moved, even to blink her eyes, everything stationary except the shapes of the distant cars and trucks ever so gradually enlarging on the far side of the divider. “I don't know. As soon as I can.”

“You don't know?” Radko paused for effect. “Then I don't know too,” he said, and cut the connection.

That was Utah. Then there was Wyoming, and after Wyoming, Nebraska and Iowa and the worn green underbelly of Illinois and on and on, the road a whip and the car clinging to it like a drop of sweat or blood or both. They alternated behind the wheel, one of them unconscious in back as the other fought the tedium, and he tried to take most of the burden on himself because it was especially hard on her with conversation a virtual impossibility and no radio to distract or absorb or infuriate her. She wasn't a bad driver-the deaf, as she'd pointed out to him a hundred times, were more visually alert and spatially oriented than the hearing, hence better drivers, hands down-but he couldn't help worrying she'd drift into a trance and do something regrettable, if not fatal. Exhaustion crept up on him, though. And the heat. It seemed as if they were following a heat wave all across the fat wide hips of the country, hardly a cloud in the sky and not a drop of rain.

They stopped one night at a motel in a college town in western Pennsylvania, both of them so keen to escape the torture chamber of the car they no longer cared whether Frank Calabrese got to New York ahead of them or if he'd defrauded another half-dozen people in the interval or set himself up as President and CFO of Halter/Martin Investments. For his part, Bridger was ready to let it go, give it up, repair the damage and move on, but Dana was intractable. “You're like Captain Ahab,” he said, clumsily finger-spelling it for her as they stood in line at a Subway crammed with students slouching under the weight of their backpacks.

“I am not”, she signed.

“You have to know when to cut your losses”-he tried to make a joke of it-“otherwise you wind up with a peg leg, or worse: you go down with the whale. You don't want to go down with the whale, do you?”

She didn't laugh. Didn't even crack a smile. For a moment he wondered if she'd understood him, and he was about to repeat himself, though nothing falls flatter than a joke reiterated, when her eyes went hard. Her shoulders were cocked toward him, her hair fanned out as if a sudden breeze had caught it, and when she spoke her words were stamped with the impress of her teeth: “It's not funny. You're not funny.”

They'd come to the glassed-in counter now, Dana next in line, and the shrunken harried-looking woman in plastic cap and gloves, whose job it was to layer meat, cheese and vegetable matter on the customer's roll of choice, was saying “Next” in vain. “You're not funny.” Jesus, did she have to be so negative all the time? Couldn't she lighten up? Even for five minutes?

Of course, he wasn't in the sunniest of moods himself (they were both wiped, both in need of food, a shower, a couple hours comatose on a king-size bed in front of a pulsating TV screen) and something in him, the first flicker of a cruel impulse he never knew he possessed, made him wait till the woman had raised her voice-“Next!” she cried in exasperation, “Next!”-and finally reached across the counter to poke Dana with her plastic-clad index finger. No one likes to be ignored, that was what he was thinking-that was what he was communicating here, a little lesson, tit for tat-even as Dana gave him a savage look, then turned to the woman and ordered, pointing out the items she wanted because pointing was the norm in this establishment, the whole process of shuffling down the line and creating the sandwich a cooperative pantomime between customer and worker punctuated by the odd verbal cue: “Six-inch or twelve? Balsamic-cheddar whole-grain or regular Italian? To drink?”

He waited till they were back in the motel, shoes off, sunk into the bed under the tutelary eye of the TV and working on the sandwiches, before bringing up the subject again. “I don't know,” he said, looking her in the face. “I just wonder what the plan is, that's all.”

She was at a disadvantage, because it took both hands to compress a twelve-inch submarine sandwich and keep it from disintegrating into its constituent parts, but she was game. She paused to swallow, then leaned over to take a sip of the extra-large diet soft drink clenched between her legs. He saw that her face was relaxed now, the tension and fatigue beginning to loosen their grip. She came up smiling. “The plan,” she said carefully, “is to stay at my mother's and let her spoil us for a few days.” She opened wide, took a foursquare bite of the sandwich, chewed, swallowed, both hands engaged. “Then,” she said, gazing from him to the TV screen and back, “we get in the car, go up the FDR Drive to the Deegan Expressway to I-87 to the Sprain Brook and take that to the Taconic. If memory serves, it's 9A after that and then Route 9 right on into Peterskill.” She bent forward for another bite, a baffle of bread, Swiss cheese and smoked turkey blunting her diction. “It's a scenic route,” she said, chewing, “beautiful trees, dogwood, wildflowers. You're really going to love it.”

It was past noon when they woke, the room frigid and dark, as remote from the world as a space capsule silently drifting across the universe, and they might have slept even later if Bridger hadn't become aware of a muted sound, a rhythmic thumping insinuating itself in the space between the low groan and high wheeze of the air conditioner. At first, he didn't know where he was, everything dim and robbed of color, a sensation of wheels sustaining him, of motion, but then he was fully awake and the noise-someone was knocking at the door, that was it-rousing him to action. He slipped into the pair of shorts he'd flung on the carpet the night before, the feel of them cold against his skin-cold, and faintly damp with yesterday's sweat. The knocking seemed to intensify. He glanced at Dana. Her face was wrapped in sweet oblivion-nothing could wake her, and the thought made him feel tender and protective. What would have happened if he wasn't there? The place could have been on fire and she'd never know. He fumbled his way to the door and pulled it open.

A woman was poised there before him, her fist arrested in the act of knocking-a woman with indignant eyes and her black hair pulled back in a knot, and why did she look so familiar? For a moment, he was mystified, but then he took in her sandals and the tangerine-colored sari, and began to understand. “What?” he said, squinting against the assault of sunlight. “What is it?”

“Checkout time is eleven a. m.,” the woman said.

“Oh, yeah,” he muttered, “yeah, sorry.” The heat, gathered up off the pavement and filtered through every creek, pond and mosquito-infested puddle in the neighborhood, rose up to stab at him till he winced: “humidity.” He'd never really known what it meant except in the abstract. He was sweating already.

“For your information, it is now twelve twenty-five in the afternoon.” Sorry.

The look she gave him was drained of sympathy. “Don't make me charge you an extra day, do you understand what I'm saying?” Her eyes flicked to the bed and the bundled form of Dana, then flew at his face. “Don't make me do that.”

Then they were in the car again, back on I-80, back in Purgatory, back on the road that never ends, and it wasn't until they hit a truck stop outside Bloomsburg that they had a chance to comb their hair, brush their teeth, put something in their stomachs. It was a joyless meal, a mechanical refueling of the body little different from filling up the gas tank. He drove the final leg, trying to extract some entertainment value from the radio, one alternative channel after the other fading out till he gave up and tuned in the ubiquitous oldies. The sun was right there with them all the way, relentless, pounding down on the roof of the car through the long afternoon, the cranked-up DJs in their air-conditioned studios making jokes about the heat-“Triple digit!” one guy kept shouting between songs-and they must have heard “Summer in the City” three or four times rolling through New Jersey. Or he must have heard it.

Dana didn't seem to mind the heat-or the silence either. She sat beside him, enfolded in her own world, tapping away at her laptop-this was her chance to work on her book, she told him, didn't he see that? “Enforced solitude. Or not solitude,” she'd added with an apologetic smile, “that's not what I mean.” He knew what she meant-and he wasn't offended. Not particularly. She was trying to make the best of things, as if anything good could come of all this. He wished her well. Hoped she finished her book, sold it to the biggest publisher in New York and made a million dollars, if that would make her happy. Because there was no doubt that Frank Calabrese and the whole insane enterprise of running him down wasn't making anybody happy, not her, not him, not Radko. Or the thief either.

The thief. He'd almost forgotten about him, almost forgotten what they were doing here and why. The trees were dense along the road, traffic building, his eyes enforcing the distance between cars, and all he could think about was the power this single individual had over them, how he was the one who'd put them here, in this car, in the glare of New Jersey on a hot July afternoon. He saw him then, saw the guy's face superimposed over the shifting reflection of the windshield, saw the way he walked, rolling his hips and shoulders like some pimp in a movie, like Harvey Keitel in “Taxi Driver,” and felt something clench inside him, a hard irreducible bolus of hatred that made him reverse himself all over again. He'd been tired the night before, that was all. Tired of the road, tired of the hassle, tired of Radko-tired even of Dana and the way she shut him out. But yes, they were going to find this guy. And yes, they were going to see him put behind bars. And no, it didn't have all that much to do with Dana, not anymore.

The sun was behind them when they rolled across the George Washington Bridge and into Manhattan, a place he'd seen only in movies, and here it was, the whole city bristling like a medieval fortress with a thousand battlements, each of them saturated with the pink ooze of the declining day. Dana directed him through the narrow canyons cluttered with nosing cabs and double-parked trucks, the evening lifted up and sustained on a tidal wave of cooking, a million fans blowing mu shu and tandoori and kielbasa and double cheeseburger and John Dory and polpettone up off the stove and out into the street. There was a smell of dogshit underneath it, of vomit, rotting garbage, flowers in bloom, diesel. He cranked down the window to absorb it. “Turn here,” Dana said, using her hands for emphasis. “At the next light, turn left.” The parking garage (they were somewhere on the Upper East Side, and he knew that because she told him) cost as much overnight as an entire month's parking had cost him in college, but Dana was paying and it didn't seem to faze her all that much, and then it was twilight and the lights of the city came to life as if in welcome.

There was a negotiation with the doorman, a logbook in the lobby that had to be signed, and then they were stepping out of the elevator on the nineteenth floor, and Dana's mother was there to greet them. She was shorter than her daughter by two or three inches, her hair the color of those copper scrubbers you buy at the supermarket, insistently slim, twice divorced, with a face that had to reshape itself every time she smiled or grimaced, as if it hadn't yet discovered its final form (a reaction to her new dentures, as he was to learn within two minutes of stepping through the door of the apartment). As for the apartment, it was bigger than he'd expected, one door leading to another and then another like something out of Kafka. Or Fincher. It had that claustrophobic cluttered three-shades-too-dim hazy atmosphere Fincher liked for his interiors and Bridger wasn't especially happy with it. If it had been something he was playing with on his computer, that would be another thing, but as it was he was almost afraid to sit on the couch in the living room for fear of sticking to it. So what did he think? Like mother, like daughter-Dana wasn't exactly the most organized person he'd ever met.

“Nice to meet you, Mrs. Halter,” he said, standing awkwardly in the middle of the front room. The shades were drawn. There was a smell of cat litter-or, more properly, cat urine.

“Call me Vera,” Mrs. Halter said, pushing him down in an easy chair strewn with knitting projects in various stages of completion and fussing over a bottle of wine-she couldn't seem to get the cork out-and a can of mixed nuts that featured Mr. Peanut against a midnight-blue background, but she wasn't Mrs. Halter anymore, anyway. “Dana's father left me for an “older” woman, if you can believe it,” she told him, “but that was ten years ago.”

“Mom,” Dana said. “Don't start. We just got here.” She'd draped herself across the couch in the corner, her bare legs pale against the dark pool of cracked green leather.

“Somebody at work. He's a lawyer, I don't know if Dana told you that… Anyway, I took my second husband's name-Veit-not because I have anything against Rob-that's Dana's father-but because I got used to it. It's punchier too: Vera Veit. VV” She set the wine bottle down on the coffee table to mold a figure in the air with the white slips of her hands. “Kind of sexy, don't you think?”

“Mom,” Dana said, and it carried no inflection, a complaint that had hung in the air since she was a long-legged preternaturally beautiful teenager who could never hit the right key, never influence a discussion or argument or participate in the roundabout of family ritual without involving her hands and her face and her body. He noted that, noted the way she became a teenager all over again the minute they walked in the door and her mother embraced her and held her and swayed back and forth in perfect harmony with her internal rhythms. It was all right. Everything was all right. For the first time since they left Tahoe, he could relax.

For the next half hour the conversation bounced round the room like a beach ball they were all intent on keeping in motion-a few questions about Bridger, his profession, his income, his prospects, leading to Vera's expressing her outrage over “this identity theft thing” and implying that Dana must somehow have called it down on herself through her own carelessness, to which Dana responded in the angriest, most emphatic Sign he'd ever seen-and then the ball dropped and the three of them sat there staring at one another like strangers until Dana's mother stood up abruptly and said, “So you must be hungry. You didn't eat on the road, did you? Dinner, I mean?”

Until she mentioned it, he hadn't realized how hungry he was. They hadn't stopped, even for a Coke, since breakfast (technically lunch, and he had a queasy recollection of grilled cheese, fries and a side salad with a dollop of very old ranch dressing), pushing on through just to get it over with, as if the drive were a prizefight and they were punch-drunk and reeling and praying for the bell at the end of the fifteenth round to release them. He heard himself say, “Sure. Yeah. But don't go to any trouble-”

“Oh, it's no trouble,” she assured him, reaching for the telephone on the table beside her. “I'll just call Aldo's and have them send something up. You do eat meat, right?” she asked, looking to Bridger, and then, without waiting for an answer, she turned to Dana. “Is the osso buco okay with you? You always liked osso buco.”

Dana didn't respond-she wasn't even looking.

“And soup. Anybody want soup? They do a nice pavese-you want soup, Bridger? Salad? Anything to start-crostini? Calamari, maybe?”

After dinner, which they ate off of heavy china plates balanced on their knees while sipping what Dana's mother kept calling “a really nice Bardolino,” Dana made a show of taking the things out to the kitchen to wash up. Bridger had risen from his chair in a half-hearted attempt to intercede, signing “Let me do it,” but Dana ignored him even as her mother sang out, “No, no, you sit down, I want to talk to you.” She had a coquettish look on her face as she added, “So we can get acquainted. All right? You don't mind that, do you? Getting acquainted?” And then she rose and refilled his glass, murmuring, “And have some wine. It's good for you. Good for the heart.”

The first thing she did was inform him of the grim statistics-he knew, didn't he, that ninety percent of the deaf married their own kind and that of the ten percent who married into the hearing world, ninety percent of “them” wound up divorced?

“Yes,” he said, leaning back in the easy chair and taking a moment to wet his lips with the wine, “that was one of the first things Dana told me after we met. After we started dating, I mean.”

“Not a happy number.”

“No.” The Bardolino had gone to his legs-he'd already drunk too much-and he felt paralyzed from the waist down. Not that he was uncomfortable, not anymore. Or not especially. The place was growing on him-so was Dana's mother. The food had been good, great even, still hot when she artistically slipped one item after another from the sealed Styrofoam boxes onto the plates, and the wine was whispering its secrets to him in a way that made the tensions of the road fade away to nothing.

Dana's mother was leaning forward, both elbows braced on her knees. “So you're not the type that's easily daunted-and you love her. You love my daughter. Or am I wrong?”

He could feel the wine rising now all the way up through his torso to his face, which was hot, and his forehead, which was on fire. “Yes,” he said, “or no, I mean-you're not wrong,” and he tipped back the glass and drained it.

“Because,” she went on as if she hadn't heard him, “as beautiful and independent and smart as she is-and she “is” brilliant, I hope you realize that-there are problems, little frustrations that add up, you know what I mean?” Her eyes were shaped like Dana's, closer to round than oval, and they were the same deep rich color suspended somewhere between brown and gold; when he held her gaze, when he looked into them, he saw Dana just as surely as if he were re-creating her on his computer screen. From somewhere below them, distantly, there was the sound of a siren. “She can be stubborn,” she said.

From the kitchen, down the hall and two rooms away, there was the thump and clatter of things being shifted around, a sudden crash, a curse. “What?” he said, distracted. And drunk. Drunk for sure.

“She can be stubborn. But you already know that.”

He shrugged. This was neither the time nor place for a critique.

Vera-could he call her Vera? — seemed deflated suddenly. Her own wineglass was empty and she rose to refill it and gestured toward him, but he laid his palm over the rim of the glass and shook his head. Her face composed itself. She sat heavily. For a long moment she said nothing and he was beginning to think the interview was over when she waved her glass and said, “Cochlear implants. For example. Take cochlear implants.”

He'd never heard the term before he took his Sign language course. It was the first night, and one of the students wanted to know why the deaf didn't just go out and get implants and dispense with Sign altogether. The teacher-she was married to a physicist who was prelingually deaf and used a combination of speech, lip-reading and Sign to communicate-pointed out that not everyone was a candidate for implants, for one thing, depending on the extent and pathology behind their hearing loss, and that among those who were, the results were often mixed. She went on to explain the procedure-the patient would have a receiver and electrodes surgically embedded in the mastoid bone and cochlea in order to pick up sounds from a tiny microphone located behind the ear. In the best-case scenario, these sounds would be transmitted to the auditory nerve and the patient would have some measure of hearing restored, perhaps enough to allow him to function almost normally in the hearing world, especially if he'd lost his hearing later in life. For the rest, it might be enough to improve lip-reading and enable them to talk on the telephone, hear alarms and car horns, that sort of thing. It wasn't a magic bullet.

“You know about cochlear implants?”

He nodded.

“Well, Dana… and this really frustrated me and her father too, and maybe frustrated is too mild a word because I was ready to scream”-she paused to give him a brittle smile-“but of course Dana wouldn't have heard me no matter if I screamed all day and all night for the rest of my life. But the point is she refused to be evaluated. Wouldn't even go to the otologist, not even to find out if she was physically capable of improvement-wouldn't hear of it.” Another smile. “Listen to me. Just the way we talk, the expressions we use-”

“I hear you,” he said, and for a moment she looked startled. Then her features rearranged themselves again and she slapped the arm of the chair and they were both laughing, the siren playing distantly beneath them, keening as if to split the night in two.

Three

ALL THE RIVER TOWNS looked the same, block after block of rambling top-heavy old houses in various states of disrepair, derelict factories sunk into their weed lots, the unemployed and unemployable slouching along the cracked sidewalks while the sumac took hold and the ceremonial parking meters glinted under the sun. Peterskill was no different. Unless maybe it was worse. She'd been here before, when she was a girl-her parents had rented a bungalow on Kitchawank Lake one summer and every Saturday they'd take the family out to a restaurant in the heart of downtown Peterskill, her father irrepressible, shouting “Cucina Italiana, the real deal,” mugging and rubbing his abdomen in broad strokes till she and her brothers would break up laughing-but that was twenty years ago and nothing looked even vaguely familiar to her now. The lake she remembered. She'd had a canoe to fool around in that summer-it had come with the house-and she remembered taking it into the little coves on the far shore whenever she could pry it away from her brothers, and she would just drift sometimes, reading, nibbling at a sandwich, feeling the breeze on her face and taking in the intoxicating scent of the lake, the scent of decay and renewal and the strangely sweet odor that lingered when the speedboats had gone.

“I want to go out to the lake when this is over,” she said. “Or, I mean, when we're done here.”

They were sitting in the car beneath one of the big shade trees planted in some long-gone era of boosterism and hope, and Bridger had a map of the town spread across his lap. He looked up at her out of his too-broad face and ran a hand through his hair. “What lake? What are you talking about? You mean the river?”

She watched for the words, but already the impulse was dying away. After a moment, after he'd turned back to the map, she said, “Never mind. It's not important.”

On the way up from the city she'd quizzed him about her mother and how they'd seemed to get along so famously. “What did you talk about?” she asked him.

He was squinting against the glare of the road, his eyes jumping to the mirrors and back-traffic was heavy and it made him tentative. “You,” he said. “What else?”

“Yes?” She laid a hand in his lap and he glanced at her before coming back to the road. It was muggy, overcast, threatening rain. “Tell me. What did she say?”

She couldn't read him in profile, but she saw his lips move.

“I didn't hear you,” she said. “What?”

He swung his face to her, gave a little smile. “She said you were stubborn.”

“Me? Don't believe everything you hear, my friend, especially considering the source. Especially from your girlfriend's mother-”

“Girlfriend? I thought you were my fiancée?”

“Your fiancée's mother.” She glanced out the window on vegetation so dense they could have been in the Amazon-less than ten miles from the city and there was nothing visible but a fathomless vault of green. “So I'm stubborn, huh?” she said, turning back to him. “What brought that up?”

A shrug. “I don't know. That first night, when you did the dishes and went to bed right after we ate-?”

His head was tilted forward, eyebrows cocked. Was he asking a question or making a statement? “I'm not following you,” she said.

He glanced tensely at the rearview, then brought his face round so she could see the words: “When-you-were-in-bed.”

“Yes?”

“Cochlear implants. She said you wouldn't even go in to get examined.”

It took her a moment, the sweet smell of chlorophyll flowing at her through the vents, the sky closing in, darkening like a spread umbrella. She said, “She would think that. She was always pushing, pushing. But you don't understand-she didn't understand. It was my decision and nobody else's.”

“What about now? Would you do it now?”

She let out a laugh, the kind of laugh that was meant to be bitter, mocking, but it might have sounded like a scream for all she knew. “No way,” she said, and she relished the brevity and finality of the phrase, so much intransigence packed into two little syllables.

“Why not? Other people-”

She signed it: “You sound like my mother”.

He gave her a look and took both hands from the wheel. “Other people do it,” he signed. “Why don't you? Then”-the car began to drift and he made a quick grab for the wheel-“then we could talk,” he said aloud, his eyes darting to the rearview mirror.

“We are talking.”

“You know what I mean.”

“No,” she said. “No, I don't. You mean I have to talk on your terms, in your language, is that what it is?”

“It's just that it could be better, that's all I'm saying.”

“Listen,” she said, “even if I wanted to let somebody open up my head, and I don't-would you want somebody to open up yours? Even if I did, even if I could hear something, anything, the best things in the world-music, my own lover's voice, your voice-I wouldn't do it. This is me. If I could hear, even for an hour, a minute, I'd be somebody different. You understand what I'm saying?”

He nodded, but his eyes had that vague look, as if she were speaking in some foreign language, and then he snatched them away and focused on the car ahead of him. Maybe he hadn't heard her properly, maybe that was it. Whenever she got passionate, whenever she got wound up, she tended to garble her words. She repeated herself, the whole speech, because her mother was wrong-she wasn't stubborn, just determined. And decisive. Even as a child she'd known which world she wanted to live in-the world she'd created for herself, the one she'd built block by block around her till it was impenetrable-and there was no one, not her mother or father or the nimblest and most persuasive audiologist in the world, who could tell her different.

Now, sitting in the car beneath the tree in the midday swelter while Bridger frowned over the map, she came back to the present and thought of what they were doing, what they were about to do, and felt her heartbeat quicken. There were two Calabreses listed in the Peter-skill directory, an F.A. at 222 Maple Avenue and an F.R. at 599 Ringgold Street. “Which one do we do first?” Bridger asked, turning to her, his finger stabbing at the map. “This one”-she saw the diagonal slash of the road heading southeast, out of town-“is F.A., and this”-his finger slid across the map, indicating a street due south of where they were-“is F.R. Looks like F.A. is closest, but it doesn't really matter because the town isn't all that big… What do you think-you choose.”

“I don't know, it's a toss-up,” she said, and the image of the flipped coin rose and settled in her mind. “F. A., I guess.”

Bridger looked over his shoulder, put the car in drive and swung out onto the nearly deserted main street of Peterskill, and she asked herself why she was so keyed up, so nervous, why her hands had begun to tremble and she was having trouble catching her breath. They didn't even know if the guy's name “was” Frank Calabrese-it could have been just another one of his aliases-and whether or not he was headed for Peterskill, no one could say. That was just their best guess. There was the evidence of the police report Milos had given them “(Frank Calabrese, born Peterskill, NY, 10/2/70),” and the cryptic letter from somebody called Sandman postmarked just up the line in Garrison, and what had “he” said? See you soon. That could have meant anything-he could have been flying to California or they were going to meet someplace in between or go to some crooks' convention together in Arkansas or Tierra del Fuego.

She flipped open the file folder, just to see the words there on the page, as if staring at them long enough would reveal their hidden meaning: “Hey, that thing we talked about is on, no problema. See you soon.” Was that enough? No problema? See you soon? Did they really expect to find this guy waiting patiently behind the screen door on Maple Avenue or Ringgold Street? It was crazy. Everything that had happened in the last month was crazy. And where were the cops-wasn't this their job?

Bridger's lips were moving. He was leaning into the windshield, counting off numbers: “Two-sixteen, two-twenty-there it is! Look, that place with the faded siding. Right there, see?”

He'd pulled in at the curb across the street and her heart seized all over again. She was staring at the most ordinary-looking house in the world, a pale gray Cape Cod that had no doubt replaced one of the tumbledown Victorians in the fifties or sixties in some kind of misguided attempt at urban renewal. There were weathered streaks under the drainpipes, a lawn that seemed to recede beneath an even plane of dandelion puffs, a tumble of kids' bicycles flung down on the blacktop drive beside a very ordinary car scaled with rust. Bridger took hold of her hand, and he was saying something, repeating it: “Do you want me to handle this? Because you can stay here if you want-it's probably nothing anyway, right?”

“I'm going.” She reached for the door handle, but he hadn't let go of her hand.

“But we need a plan here,” he said. His features were pinched, his eyes staring wide. He was trying to be cool, she could see that, but he was as agitated as she was. “If it “is” him in there, and chances are it's not, I know-we have to just back away, I mean, “run,” and I'll call the police on my cell. Okay? Don't say a word, don't talk to him, nothing. Just identify him and call the police.”

“Yes,” she said, “yes, I know. He's dangerous. I know that.”

Bridger was saying something else, using his hands now to underscore the words. “'Assault with a deadly weapon,' remember? That's in the police report. We do not mess with him like back there in that parking lot in where was it, Sacramento? That was insane. We're not going to do anything like that, you understand? Just identify him and call for help. Period.”

The sky had closed up, and as she slid out of the car and crossed the street with Bridger, feeling light-headed, the first few spatters of rain began to darken the pavement. At the last moment, when they'd already started up the walk, she wanted to hang back, reconnoiter the place-or the joint, case the joint: isn't that what they said in the old movies? — but then they were on the porch and Bridger was knocking at the screen door and there was a dog there, a shih tzu, all done up in ribbons, and it was showing the dark cavern of its mouth, barking. A moment later a woman appeared behind the screen, not a pretty woman, not young and dark-eyed and stylish, but the sort of woman who'd live in a house like this and find the time to tie ribbons in her little dog's hair.

Bridger did the talking. Was this Frank Calabrese's house, by any chance? No? Did she know-oh, the “F” stood for Frances, Frances Annie? Uh-huh, uh-huh. He was nodding. Frank, the woman thought-and she didn't know him, they weren't related-lived over on Union or Ringgold, one of those streets on the other side of the park.

It was raining heavily by the time they got to Ringgold Street, dark panels of water scrolling across the windshield, the pavement glistening, the gutters already running full. The house Bridger pulled up in front of wasn't appreciably different from the one they'd just left, except there were no bicycles out front and the car parked in the drive was a newer, more expensive model (but not a Mercedes and not wine red). And what had she expected, to see the thing sitting there sparkling in the rain with its California dealer's logo framed neatly in the license-plate holder? She felt deflated. Felt depressed. This time she stayed in the car while Bridger hustled up the walk, his shirt soaked through and a newspaper fanned out over his head. She saw him at the door, saw a figure there behind the screen-a shadow, nothing more-and she was frightened all over again. It was him, she was sure it was… but no, they were talking, some sort of negotiation going on, and now she could see the faint pale oval of the man's face suspended against the matte darkness of the interior, a naked forearm floating beneath it, gesturing, and in the next moment the door was shutting and Bridger was dodging his way back down the walk. She reached over to fling the car door open for him.

The rain came with him, the scent of it, his hair flattened across the top and hanging in loose wet strands around his ears. “Well?” she said. “Not him, right?”

“He's at the restaurant. That”-he turned the engine over, put the car in gear-“was his cousin, I think he said.”

“Restaurant? What restaurant?”

“Fiorentino's. On South Street-we passed it earlier, don't you remember? I guess he must work there or something… the guy that answered the door was maybe, I don't know, forty, forty-five, totally overweight-he had this huge belly. In a wife-beater, no less. Could you see him from here? No? Anyway, he just looked at his watch and said, 'You'll catch him over at the restaurant at this hour.' I asked him what restaurant and he said Fiorentino's before he thought to ask me what I wanted with Frank-and that was when he started to give me the suspicious look.”

“What? What did you tell him?”

“That I was a friend. From the coast. From California.”

She could feel her heart going again. “But what if he calls and warns him?”

“Shit,” Bridger said, and they were out on the street now, water planing away from the tires, “if he does, he does. We don't even know if it's him-and it's probably not, because you're telling me he already has a house and a job? I mean, how likely is that?”

Fiorentino's was on the far side of a broad street a few blocks down, and as Bridger hung a U-turn and pulled up at the curb in front, she had the feeling she'd been here before, déjà vu. Could this be the place, the one her parents had taken her to? The thought made her feel queasy. If this “was” it, then the whole thing got stranger and stranger. She imagined the thief, the guy with the sideburns and the cocky walk, shrunk down to the dimensions of a child, watching her from the kitchen, watching her eat and sign and roughhouse with her brothers, pizza on a shining silver platter, and memory like the taste of it.

She climbed out of the car, fumbling with her umbrella, and looked up at the façade. The restaurant occupied a pair of storefronts somebody had tried to unify with lateral strips of varnished wood that set off the windows like a big picture frame and the sign over the main entrance had been hand-painted in a flowing script. Each of the tables, dimly visible through the screen of rain, featured artificial flowers and a Chianti bottle with a red candle worked into the neck, but it was all so generic. Once she stepped inside, though-a long L-shaped bar to the left, an alcove and then the dining room to the right-she knew. And as if her visual memory weren't enough, there was an olfactory signature here too-some peculiarity of the pizza oven, the imported pomodoro and homemade sausage, the spices, the spilled beer, the mold in the back of the refrigerator in the farthest corner of the kitchen-who could say? But this was it. This was definitely it. She took hold of Bridger's hand and squeezed it. She wanted to say “No more, stop right here,” but her throat thickened and her fingers felt as if they'd been carved of wood.

What she saw was a typical neighborhood bar, half a dozen men in short-sleeved shirts, the white-haired bartender with his flaming ears and red-rimmed eyes, the cocktail waitress in a little skirt and net stockings, bored, her elbows propped on her tray. The TV was going-baseball-and nobody was eating. Too early yet. Too hot. Too rainy.

She stood beside Bridger, her hand locked in his, as he leaned in at the end of the bar and waited for the bartender to acknowledge him. There was a suspended moment, people giving them furtive glances, the quick assessment, her blood racing with fear and hate even as she felt crushed by a kind of trivial nostalgia for the place, for the way she was then, as a girl, when her parents were still married and her brothers were contained by these very walls, and then the bartender made his slow way down the skid-resistant mat and she saw his lips shape the obvious question: “What'll it be?”

She couldn't bear to look at him-she was watching Bridger, as if that could protect her, expecting the thief to step out of the shadow of the alcove and put an end to it all. “Is Frank here?” he asked. And then the movement caught her eye and she was watching the bartender's head swing back as he called down the bar and the cocktail waitress, buried under the glitter of her nails and the sediment of her makeup, awakened briefly to drift to the swinging door of the kitchen, lean into it and convey the message, the name passed from mouth to mouth: “Frank,” she imagined her saying, or maybe shouting over the noise of the dishwasher, the radio, the tintinnabulation of pots and pans, “Frank, somebody wants you.”

Frank Calabrese turned out to be a disappointment. He wasn't who he was supposed to be, not even close. The door to the kitchen swung open and she caught her breath, expecting the Frank Calabrese she knew to emerge wiping his hands on an apron, hiding out here in his father's or uncle's or cousin's third-string Mafia restaurant till the heat was off him and he could ruin somebody else's life, a mama's boy, a failure, wasted and weak, and this time she would be the one to stare him down, but the face she saw in the doorway was the face of a stranger. This man was short, broad-shouldered and big around the middle, and he was too old-forty, forty at least. He looked to the waitress, then to the bartender, and followed the line of sight from the bartender's pointed finger to herself and Bridger.

He was deceptively light on his feet for such a big man, this Frank Calabrese, and he glided down the length of the room as if he were wearing ballet slippers, his features composed, his eyes searching hers. “Hi,” she said, and held out her hand. “I'm Dana, and this”-indicating Bridger-“is my fiancé, Bridger. You're Frank Calabrese, right?”

“That's right,” he said, and he'd caught something in her speech that made him narrow his eyes and cock his head ever so slightly as if to get a clearer picture. “What can I do for you?”

Bridger started in then-Bridger, her spokesperson. He dropped her hand and unconsciously ran his fingers through his hair, trying to smooth it back in place. “We're looking for this guy-”

She cut him off: “Criminal. He's a criminal.”

“-this guy who I guess must have used your name as an alias, because-”

She couldn't make out the rest, but she knew the story anyway, not just the gist of it, but the whole of it in all its sorry detail, and she watched Frank Calabrese's face till the rudiments of awareness began to awaken there-Yes, somebody had used his credit cards without his knowledge, and yes, it had been a bitch to straighten it all out; he was still getting bills in the mail and this was three years ago already-and then she unzipped her black shoulder bag and extracted the file folder. Frank Calabrese stopped saying whatever he was saying. Bridger gestured to the bar, meaning for her to lay the folder there and display the evidence. Everyone was watching now, the customers, the bartender, the waitress. She took her time, almost giddy with the intensity of the moment, and then she leaned forward to spread open the folder on the counter, making sure that the police report, with its leering photograph and parade of aliases, was right there on top.

The moment was electric. Frank Calabrese laid a hand on the rail of the bar to steady himself and she could see the current flowing right through him, his face hardening, eyes leaping at the page, and before she formulated the question she knew the answer: “Do you know this man?”

“Son of a bitch,” he said. “Son of a fucking bitch.” He looked up at her, and it was as if he didn't see her at all. “You bet your ass I know him,” and his fist came down on the bartop with a force she could feel through the soles of her shoes. She didn't catch what he said next, the key they'd been looking for all along, the base identifier, the name Bridger repeated twice and then reproduced for her with his rapidly stitching fingers so that it hung like a banner on the air: “Peck Wilson. William Peck Wilson.”

Four

He knew he should never have come back, knew it was a disaster in the making, knew that the forces ranged against him-Gina, her fuck-head father, Stuart Yan, the cops, the lawyers-were still in place, merciless and unyielding, and that they'd strip him down to nothing if they had the chance, but it was his choice, wrong or not, and he would have to live with it. Could Dudley be trusted? No, he couldn't, though he'd try his best to be cool about it and that would last all of maybe forty-eight hours or until he ran into somebody from the old days and had his first drink and smoked his first number and started laying out his disconnected version of life under the sun. “Hey, man, this is for your ears only, and don't tell anybody because it's supposed to be like a secret or whatever, but guess who I ran into the other day?”

But he had come back. And he liked the feeling and he liked the house and all that went with it, the shopping and settling in, the smell of the grass as he traced one row after the other on the riding mower that came with the place, the contented squeak and release of Madison's swings pulling hard against their chains, the propulsive thrust of Natalia's figure as she lined the couch up under the picture window or slid the astrakhan rug into place in front of it. And there was Sandman too. Geoff. Geoffrey R. He'd missed him, missed having a buddy, a confidant, somebody he could hang loose with without having to worry about slipping up, because there were times when he looked in the mirror or slapped a credit card down on a waitress' tray and didn't know who he was. William, Will, Billy, Peck, Frank, Dana, Bridger-and the new one, a winner worth something like fifty million Sandman had sniffed out, M. M. Mako, as in Michael Melvin. The name was so ridiculous it had to be real.

All right. Fine. He'd made his choice and he wasn't concerned, not particularly. Even if he got pulled over, the cops had no way of knowing who he was. All they knew was what the license told them: he was Bridger Martin, with a pristine driving record and no outstanding warrants, solid, fiscally responsible, and he was just passing through on his way to Nantucket, a little vacation, and thank you, Officer, yes, I'll be sure to watch my speed. Still, as he carried his mug of coffee and the newspaper down to the office he'd set up in the basement, he couldn't help feeling the smallest tug of uneasiness when he thought of Dudley and Dudley's big mouth and whose ears might be cocked in anticipation. What he wanted-and it came home to him more than ever as he settled in behind his desk, folded back the financial section and looked out on the woods and the river and the pair of squirrels chasing each other across the lawn in quick darting loops-was to live quietly, anonymously, to live in this house with this car and this woman and not have to put up with any shit from anybody ever again. Go north. Go south. Stay invisible. Establish a base in the city, maybe get a little apartment in the Village or TriBeCa, an efficiency, anything, just to have a place to spend the night, because if they were going to go out, if they were going to party, have a nice meal, that was the place to do it. Not that Westchester didn't have plenty of fine dining-and Putnam and Dutchess too-but the real life was down the line, in New York, and nobody would recognize him there. Running into Dudley was a fluke, that was all, and it could happen again or maybe never, not for years. He lifted the paper to the light, took a sip of coffee. Yeah, and what if it was Gina? What if it was Gina he ran into?

It was then-just then, just as he was holding that thought-that there was a rap at the door behind him, the door that gave out onto the lawn. This was a French door, eight panes and a grid of painted mullions. A flimsy thing, old and unsteady on its hinges, a door anybody could see through, anybody could enter. He started-he couldn't help himself-and when he swung round in the chair, a little lariat of coffee sloshed out of the mug to spatter the front of his shirt.

“Hey, man, I didn't mean to startle you”-it was Sandman, the door cracked open, his hand on the knob, his face hanging there in the void, and he was grinning, his eyes winnowed down to two sardonic points of light-“and I wouldn't want to be the one to criticize, but maybe you've had enough caffeine for one morning. I mean, you practically launched out of that chair.”

He felt a tick of irritation. He'd been caught unawares, his guard down, caught fretting and worrying and wringing his hands like some paranoiac, some loser. He managed a tight smile as he reached for a wad of Kleenex to dab at the stains on his shirt. “Yeah,” he said, “you're right-too much caffeine, who needs it?”

Sandman crossed the room, his big shoulders bunched under a theatrically ducking head, as if he were afraid he'd scrape the ceiling-and it “was” low, only six and a half feet from the floor to the exposed pipes overhead, but this was all exaggerated, all for show-and then settled one haunch down on the corner of the desk. “Right, but I wouldn't mind a cup of mud myself, if you could spare one. Or Natalia. If the pot's full, I mean. If you've got coffee, some of that Viaggio mocha maybe, maybe with real cream and brown sugar? Two lumps. Or honey. I could do honey.” He lifted one eyebrow, stroked the strip of fur beneath his lip. “Because you know me, I wouldn't want to be the one to impose-”

He was doing his Sandman thing, always just this side of sincere. Everything a joke and every line delivered with a smile, as if he couldn't just walk upstairs and pour himself fifty cups of coffee if that was what he wanted, or move in permanently or borrow the car and take it to Maine or ask for a pint of blood and get it without stint or question. He was testing. Just testing to see if you were still with the program. And sometimes, like in Greenhaven, the program could be brutal. That smile, that Sandman smile, could freeze you at a hundred paces.

“Shit,” Peck said, ignoring him. “I ruined my shirt.”

“So buy another one.”

“If you didn't come creeping around like some fucking meter reader or something-”

“Me? I'm not creeping. Shit, I just rolled over here with the top down because it is one fucking day out there, and then I slammed the door and “stamped” down that driveway like Paul Bunyan… look”-he raised one leg-“I'm wearing my boots, see that? I've been stomping and stamping all morning, man.”

Peck was still in the chair, still dabbing at his shirt. He reached for a new wad of Kleenex. “I ran into Dudley,” he said.

Sandman gave him a puzzled look.

“This guy I used to know, this kid-he used to work at the restaurant. I saw him over in Newburgh-he's waiting tables at a place over there.”

Sandman let out a sigh. “Is that what it is? Is that what's bothering you?”

There was the whine of a motorbike going by on the road out front, the blat-blat-wheeze of a two-stroke engine shifting gears, some geek on his way to carve figure eights in the dirt down by the railroad tracks. They both looked up to follow the sound. “I don't know,” Peck said. “I just don't want any hassles, that's all. Don't want any talk, you know?”

“You didn't give him your business card, did you? Your home phone? E-mail? Your bank account number?” Sandman pinched his shoulders and flashed both palms for emphasis. “No worries, come on, man-he doesn't even know your name.” A long beat. He patted distractedly at his pockets, as if he were looking for a smoke, but since he didn't smoke anymore he let his hands drop to his lap. “So what did you tell him?”

“What do you think I told him?”

“All right, all right. Fuck it.” Sandman got up from the corner of the desk and made a show of shaking out his legs, as if he'd been cramped in the middle seat of a jetliner for the last six hours. “What I wanted to know is, number one, where's my coffee? And number two, do you want to take a ride on the most beautiful day in the history of mankind with the top down and the breeze in your hair?”

“Where to-the library?” He was pushing himself up now, stretching. He took a final dab at the shirt and dropped the Kleenex and newspaper into the trash.

And here was the grin, opening wide. “Yeah, that was what I was thinking. Maybe cruise across the bridge over to Highland Falls or someplace like that, Monroe, Middletown, whatever-they got a library there, right?” Now there was another bike out on the road-or two more bikes, a whole mini-motocross thing going on, the summer morning sawed lengthwise and then sawed through again. Sandman shifted his weight, tented his fingers in front of his nose. “No big deal, nothing strenuous-use the hookups there for a couple hours, make some money, that sort of thing, you know. And then maybe lunch and a couple brews or a nice bottle of wine, I mean, if Natalia doesn't need you to haul furniture around or anything-how about that place up along 9W there where you sit outside way high up and look down on the whole valley?”

“Like gods?” He was smiling himself now too. The tension, whatever it was, had slid away from him like a wet coat in the foyer of a very good restaurant.

“That's right,” Sandman said. “Like gods.”

Sandman's latest scheme was built on a solid foundation of research (“Research I was doing while you were dicking around in California,” he said, but with a grin, always with a grin), and it made sense both logically and financially. Instead of picking up IDs in an almost random way-off the Internet, out of the innards of the Dumpster, paying some kid three dollars a pop to skim credit card numbers at the gas station or the Chinese restaurant-Sandman was looking to target the rich and the super-rich and make the kind of connection that could pay the bills for a whole lifetime to come. “Why not?” he insisted. “If it works small, it works big, right?” Peck had to agree. He was ready to graduate. More than ready.

Because women found him interesting (and he found them interesting in turn; he'd been married something like four or five times), Sandman was able to extract certain small favors from the ones he felt especially close to. At the moment, he was simultaneously seeing two women Peck had never met, and never would meet, both of whom worked in the financial sector. One of them was some low-level functionary at Goldman Sachs-a secretary maybe-and the other, who was divorced and had two kids who were monumental pains in the ass, was an analyst at Merrill Lynch. What did they do for him? They provided stationery. And a legitimate address.

At the library, Sandman eased himself into a chair, booted up one of the computers and showed him how to access the files of individuals the Securities and Exchange Commission kept on its website as a public record. Then they migrated to separate ends of the row of computers and went to work. Once they were in possession of this information, they would use the stationery to request credit histories on selected individuals, and this would give them access to the brokerage account numbers. Then it was easy. Or it should be. Go to the Internet, transfer funds from existing accounts to the ones they'd set up elsewhere, let things rest a couple days and transfer them again, taking it deeper. Then close it all down, in and out, and nobody the wiser. And nobody hurt, except a couple of fat cats so fat they couldn't keep track of their own sweat trail. And they were crooks, anyway. Everybody knew that.

It was past two when Sandman came up behind him and laid a hand on his shoulder. He didn't know where the time had gone. Rather than print things out-and he was still a little paranoiac here-he was copying the files by hand into a notebook he'd brought along for that purpose, and he must have had a good hundred names already, but it was like fishing in a deep hole where they just won't stop biting. Or better yet, picking up nuggets off the floor of a gold mine. When have you got enough? When do you stop? He could have sat there all day and all night too.

“Hey, buddy, time for lunch, what do you say?”

Peck just stared at him, his eyes throbbing and the first faint intimation of a headache blowing like a sere wind through the recesses of his skull.

“Some fun, huh?”

“Yeah,” he said, but he couldn't elaborate, not yet, still in thrall to the munificent and all-encompassing kingdom of information. He glanced to his right, where another library patron, a titanic black woman with a pretty face and a sweeping curtain of dreads, was maneuvering her mouse so delicately she might have been peeling a grape with one hand. She looked up then and smiled at him, a smile surfeited with sweetness and simple pleasure, and he smiled back.

“But it's okay, we got enough,” Sandman was saying, his voice dropping to a whisper. “Tomorrow we type some letters and then we move, get in and out quick before anybody knows what hit them, because you know they're going to pull the plug on this, they got to. I mean, I can't believe we're the only ones-”

“Yeah,” Peck said, his voice sounding unnatural in his ears as he turned back to him and logged off the computer. He was so charged up he could barely breathe. “I know what you mean.”

Then it was back down what had to be one of the most scenic highways in the world, the road sliced right out of the side of the mountain like a long abdominal suture holding the two pieces together, and the view had never seemed so exotic to him, sailboats on the river like clean white napkins on a big blue tablecloth, the light portioning out the sky in pillars of fire. Sandman had the radio cranked, the car-a new yellow T-Bird he'd nicknamed “the Canary”-was taking the turns as if it were riding on air and the two of them were as high as lords and they hadn't touched a drop of anything yet. It was glorious. It was golden. It was good to be back.

They pulled up the long gravel drive just after six, the sun shuddering through the trees, the air heavy, saturated, offering up a feast of odors he'd forgotten all about, from the faint perfume of the flowers along the path (and what were they, daffodils?) to the one-part-in-a-billion offering of a skunk's glands and the fresh wet unchlorinated scent of rainwater in the barrel under the drainpipe to the wafting glory of top-quality angus beef hitting the grill on somebody's hibachi two or three houses over. He felt new-made. Felt unconquerable. It didn't hurt that he and Sandman had shared two bottles of the best wine on a pretty poor list in a pretty poor restaurant with the best view in the universe, because the second bottle, a Sauvignon Blanc chilled to perfection so that it went down cold enough to refresh you but not so cold that you couldn't pick up on its body and the subtle buttery oakiness of the cask it had resided in, lifted his quietly buoyant mood and made it soar. Was he drunk? No, not at all. His senses were awakened, that was all. The world was putting out its vibes, and he was receptive to them.

He hadn't given a thought to Natalia all afternoon, except to consider, somewhere in the back of his mind, that they'd have to go out to dinner because he really hadn't had time to plan anything. She had the car, so she would have been out shopping and she would have picked up the kid and probably taken her for a sandwich someplace. He was thinking alfresco, if the mosquitoes weren't too bad-there was a place in Cold Spring, right on the water. Maybe they would try that.

The first thing he noticed was that the sprinkler was going on the side lawn-Madison had been dancing through the revolving sheets of water in her shorts and T-shirt and he must have told her ten times already to be sure to shut the water down when she was done because it pooled there and made a mess of the lawn-and then he saw that Natalia, in her haste to haul her loot into the house, had left all four doors of the car wide open. Or no, it was only three. She was improving. Definitely improving. When Sandman pulled up beside the Mercedes and cut the engine, the first thing Peck did was get out and slam all three doors before ducking round the corner of the house to shut off the water and retrieve the sprinkler. In the process of which, he got his Vans wet.

Sandman was standing there in the driveway grinning at him, his aviator shades throwing light up into the trees. “Good to be home, huh?” he said. “The comforts of the hearth and all that.”

“You mocking me?” Peck said, feinting as if to toss him the bright yellow disc of the sprinkler. “Because you set the record there, my friend. How many wives was it? I mean, I only knew Becky…”

“Yeah,” and he was already turning to the house, “but I'm a bachelor now. But hey, you got any of that French Champagne left? Because I think we ought to be celebrating here, don't you?”

They were in the kitchen, and Peck was removing the foil from the neck of the bottle when out of the corner of his eye he spotted something anomalous on the kitchen counter, something that might have been a dollop of raw meat or-“What the fuck is that?”

Sandman was slouching against the refrigerator. He clipped his shades with two fingers and dropped them in his shirt pocket. “That? I don't know, it looks like shit to me, some kind of animal shit. Raccoons? You're not keeping raccoons here, are you?”

At that moment, the mystery revealed itself. A cat he'd never seen before-spotted like a leopard, with outsized paws and unhurried eyes-slid into the room, followed by a second one just like it. The two of them came right up to him, lifted their heads and began to yowl disharmoniously for food.

That set him off-he couldn't help himself, cat shit on the counter where he prepared the meals, where he kept his knives and his cutting board and his infuser and his grapeseed oil and extra-virgin cold-pressed Ravenna olive oil in the cut-glass decanter-and before he knew what he was doing, right there in front of Sandman, he lost it. His first kick-a reflex really-caught the near cat and sent it spinning into the cabinet across the room; the second kick caught only air. “Natalia!” he shouted, and the cats were gone now, vanished like smoke. “God-damnit, “Natalia!””

Sandman seemed to find the whole thing pretty amusing, holding the Champagne flute to his lips as Natalia, utterly unconcerned, drifted into the room in her own good time and stood there watching him, hands on hips. “You are shouting,” she observed. “I do not like this shouting.”

He was trying to keep it in, trying to keep his cool, trying to remember what he'd learned inside, what he'd learned from Sandman, but he couldn't. “What is this?” he hissed, outraged, gone already, and he pointed to the lump of soft wet excrement on the counter. “What the fuck do you call this? Huh?”

Small, slim, dark-eyed, her feet bare and her breasts heavy in a stretch top-she'd always claimed they were natural, but now it suddenly occurred to him how gullible he'd been to believe her-she shrugged and crossed the room to tear a wad of paper towels from the dispenser. “It is called shit,” she said, bending to engulf the redolent little patty and drop it into the wastebasket beneath the sink. Then she extracted the disinfectant, sprayed the countertop and wiped it dry with another towel.

“The cats,” he said. “I didn't, you didn't-”

“They are my Bengals,” she said, sweeping his glass from the counter and emptying it in a gulp, Russian-style. “I have found them in an ad today, this morning, the male and the female. Don't worry,” she added, grinning at Sandman, “you will love them. I know you will love them. But that is not the issue-”

“Issue? What issue? What are you talking about?”

“I am hungry. Madison is hungry.” Another look for Sandman. “And you have been partying without me.”

There were gulfs here, whole gulfs of unreason and bitterness opening up between them, and he was sour now, no question about it, but he threw in a peace offering: “I thought we'd go out.”

She was at the refrigerator, her back to him, pouring herself a second glass. “I do not wish to go out. I wish to stay home. With my daughter.” She turned to him now, her eyes burning, and he could see this went deeper than he'd thought-his mother, if she mentioned his mother again, he didn't know what he would do.

“We just got back,” he said. “I didn't pick anything up. I thought we'd go out.”

She ignored him, but she was playing to Sandman, trying to make him look bad.

“If you're so hot to eat at home, why don't you get off your lazy ass and do something for a change, huh?” He wasn't shouting, not yet-that wasn't his style-but he could feel himself slipping. The look of her infuriated him, the hard little nugget of her face, the way she gazed off into the distance and lifted the glass to her lips as if he didn't exist. His voice rose. He couldn't help himself. “Instead of shopping all the time. Instead of bringing home these fucking cats to shit on the counters, and where else are they shitting, I wonder? Tell me that.”

Another shrug, more elaborate than the last. “I will make the omelet, soup, anything. Tunafish. I will make tunafish.” She moved to the cabinet, her jaw set, and began to shift pots and pans around.

That was when Sandman set his glass down on the counter. “You know, I just remembered I got to go. Really. I just remembered this was the night I was going to pick threads out of my carpet.” The grin. The mockery. And then he clamped on his shades and was gone.

Everything was still for a moment, then Peck heard the car starting up in the driveway and somewhere beneath it, from Madison's room, the sound of the TV. He went to the refrigerator, took the bottle by the neck and poured himself a glass of Champagne. He was going to celebrate and he didn't give a good goddamn whether she liked it or not. She was at the stove now, turning up the heat under an empty pan. “Who you fooling?” he said.

When she turned round, her face was composed and when she spoke, finally, her voice was so soft he could barely hear it: “Nobody,” she said. “I am fooling nobody. Because I am not your wife and I have never seen your mother.”

Two days later, at eleven-thirty in the morning, he drove into Peterskill, though it was against his better judgment. Natalia was sitting beside him, leaning forward to study herself in the mirror on the back of the sun visor, sucking in her cheeks and rounding her lips in concentration as she reapplied mascara and eyeliner. She was wearing a shiny cobalt blue dress that clung to her figure, matching heels, stockings (though it must have been ninety degrees out already) and she'd deliberated for half an hour over taking along her silver nylon jacket, just, as she put it, to make a good impression, but finally decided against it. They'd dropped Madison at camp on the way and then driven the few miles into town along the old scenic road with its views of the mountains, the river and the humped gray domes of the nuclear power plant. Natalia had wanted to bring her daughter along-“She must meet her new grandmama because she will love her”-but he told her he didn't want to make his mother too nervous this first time with the kid around and she gave in because he was giving in to her and she was making an effort to be reasonable. And sexy. Very sexy. She'd climbed all over him the night before and he'd woken to her taking hold of his cock beneath the sheets and trailing her lips down his chest and abdomen in a flurry of hot sucking kisses. What he hadn't told her was that when he'd called his mother to tell her he was in town (but just briefly, briefly, just passing through) he'd asked her to see if she could set something up with Sukie. On the quiet.

His mother, for all her obvious flaws, had been good about that, staying a part of her granddaughter's life, and so Gina and her parents wouldn't be all that suspicious and as it turned out Gina's screaming hag of a mother was down with bursitis and Gina was working and the Bullhead was too busy making money to bother with babysitting and if Alice wanted to come and pick up Sukie for the day that was fine with them. So it was settled. Sukie would be there. And how did he feel about that? Strange, yes, but hopeful. It had been something like three years now and she would have had a chance to grow up and see things with a bit more perspective instead of just adhering to the party line Gina would have fed her. He was her father, after all, and he wasn't some jerk like Stuart Yan or whoever Gina was seeing now because how could she stay with Yan, how could she have even seen anything in him in the first place? But there'd be some other tool, some moron her father found on a jobsite someplace, somebody she'd met at work… But they weren't Sukie's father, whoever they were. He was. And no matter what it cost him he was going to try to hook that up again.

“No,” Natalia was saying, “you are not listening to me. I am not going to go there, to the house of your mother, unless I have Russian vodka to give to her-export, good Stolichnaya, no pepper flavor, no vanilla, no nothing-and flowers. Roses I will give her. White roses, three dozens, with the long stem. And you stop. You stop-there. There is a store.”

“You don't understand,” he said, his eyes locked behind his sunglasses, “but this town is a slum, nothing like that here. No florists, no liquor store that sells anything more than the cheap shit in the pint bottle. This is forty-ouncer territory, malt liquor, Miller High Life in the tall can.”

They were in downtown Peterskill, sitting at a light. He'd already taken a little detour past Pizza Napoli-boarded up, scrawled over with graffiti, the big red-and-white sign he'd spent twenty-five hundred dollars on still in place, still proclaiming the optimism he'd felt back then-but he didn't say a word and Natalia, busy with her face, didn't even notice.

“Then you go right back out of this town to anyplace, I don't know, the mall, the supermarket, and a good quality of liquor store. I am telling you. I will not get out of this car.”

It was all right. It was fine. In a way, it was a relief to flick on the blinker, hang a left and cruise up Route 6 a couple miles to the upscale mall because he was tentative about the whole thing, about exposing himself not only to whoever might be looking for him to glide up in front of his boyhood home and see his mother but about Sukie too. About that first instant, that beat of recognition. Would she come to him? Would she even know who he was?

At the mall, he parked at the far end of the lot and stayed in the car while Natalia trooped off in search of fatted calves and burnt offerings, but not before a colloquy that was like a KGB inquisition. (“And why will you not come?” she wanted to know. “I don't want to run into anybody, that's all.”

“Your ex-wife, is that who? Or some policeman? Is that it?”

“Just anybody,” he said. “I don't want to see anybody, okay? What's your problem? You see the store? There's the fucking store.”) It took her a good hour or more, the pavement radiating heat till the whole vast oceanic lot shimmered and blurred in mirage and he ran the car for the air-conditioning till it began to overheat. He had no choice but to crank the windows down-and there was that smell again, the smell of his boyhood, of all his years here when he didn't know the rest of the world existed. People stalked by, wrapped up in the private resentments and narrowing back rooms of their own personalities, mothers and children, Jewish, Italian, dark hair, dark eyes, retirees, punks in their street racers and the girls they performed for, everything a performance.

It came to him then that he was being crazy, purely crazy. Nobody knew him here. Nobody would recognize him. He could stroll right in there and buy all the flowers they had, cases of vodka-drink it in the lot out of the open bottle. Sure. Beg for it. Beg for them to come and lock him back up for violating his parole and running out on his child support and the Harley and whatever else they could dig up. At least he'd got rid of the cardboard plates with the dealer logo and the chrome license-plate holder with Bob Almond's name on it and the Larkspur address because that was flying naked. If anybody wanted to know he had the temporary registration taped right there in the lower right-hand corner of the windshield as per California regulation and the plates were on the way-though he did have to get on the stick and see about registering the thing in New York. Driving without plates was just asking to get pulled over. Right, tomorrow. He'd do it tomorrow. And then it occurred to him-it hit him, hammered him with a kind of flaring panic that got his stomach fluttering all over again-that he had to get out of the car and go into that store, or one of those stores, because in his fog he hadn't thought to pick up anything, no toy, no doll, no candy, nothing, for his own natural sweet little daughter, for Sukie.

The house hadn't changed at all, at least as far as he could see-maybe some of the trees were taller, the weeds thicker along the edges of the lawn. He was standing there at the door of the car, caught in a shaft of sun that was like a spotlight, a box of Godiva chocolates in one hand, the flowers in the other, and the stuffed toy he'd bought for Sukie wedged under one arm, giving the place a quick scan as Natalia, running the brush through her hair one final time, made him wait. His father had always spent an inordinate amount of time and money on the place, putting on the addition with its brick fireplace, pouring a new concrete walk, repainting the exterior every three or four years and the trim every two, as if that could forestall the declining property values, and though he'd been twelve years dead now, the effort still showed. Decay had settled in, that was inevitable. And his mother certainly wasn't about to worry over it-as long as the roof didn't fall in on her she'd be happy to sit there in front of the TV with her bloated friends and a vodka and Collins mix and watch the water stains creep down around the fireplace where his father had screwed up the flashing despite the best of intentions.

“All right,” Natalia was saying, and there she was, her shoulders squared and breasts outthrust, looking commanding and beautiful and throwing back her head so that her hair rose up in a fan of light and settled in perfect array on the perfect white skin of her bare shoulders. And the bones there. The exquisite bones. The scapulae, the muscles, the ligaments that flashed and moved under her skin. He had a moment of revelation that took him out of himself and he saw her as a sculptor might, some genius of line and form with a block of marble and a hammer ready to hand. “Well?” She was giving him a crucial look, a look that asked, “Am I beautiful? Am I ready? Do you want me?”

“Yeah,” he said, “yeah, yeah, you look great,” and she held out her arm for him and they turned to glide up the walk, the most natural thing in the world, everything in its place, and then he saw the arc described by the screen door as his mother leaned into it-his mother, with the nose he looked at in the mirror every morning and her hair gone silver and cut in a liquid fall at her jawbone so she looked like some stranger out of a silent movie-and the other figure there at her side, so small and delicate, with the unappeasable eyes and the blanched unforgiving face of the hanging judge.

Five

TO EXPECT TRUTH, justice, the closure official victims were forever demanding on the little screen as the captioning played out dispassionately beneath their grim tight faces, to expect anything other than chaos and frustration, was delusory and she was foremost among the deluded. Life frustrates. Eternally frustrates. How could it be any different? That was what Dana was thinking as she stood in the rain on a stranger's lawn and watched Bridger poised at the top of the front steps, knocking at yet another door. When Frank Calabrese's fist had come down on the bartop with the pure uncontainable force of vengeance in all its shining potentiality, she was sure they'd come to the final turning at the final corner. He knew the thief. He named the thief. He knew where he lived. And ten minutes later they were at Peck Wilson's house-the house he'd grown up in, where his mother lived still-and she and Bridger had got out of the car in the rain, every individual blade of grass standing up stark and violently green, the twigs of the trees curled into claws and her heart about to explode, and then the knock at the door and the sky darkening and darkening till it was like night in the afternoon… and now, after all that? Nothing. Nobody home. No silent footsteps, no noiseless drop of the latch or presumptive squeal of the hinges, no face appearing behind the dark screen that was like the scrim of a confessional or the veil of maya. None of that. Nobody home.

She watched Bridger shift his weight from foot to foot. His face was drained of color, his upper lip and the flesh at the base of his nostrils drawn tight. He knocked again, waited, his head cocked and eyes lowered as if to concentrate his hearing. They exchanged looks, another moment elapsed, and then he signed, “I'm going to go around back,” and she felt strange all of a sudden, vulnerable, felt like a criminal herself, and darted a quick glance up and down the street. In the rain, and with nothing moving anywhere except the water in the gutters, she almost missed the figure on the porch next door. A faint rhythmic movement caught her eye and she looked up to see a woman there, a big-armed old woman in wire-frame glasses, tilting back and forth in a cane rocker and staring right at her. For an instant she was frozen-to shout out would be too obvious-and then, urgently, she was clapping her hands together to warn him. He swung round, his face blank. “There's somebody watching,” she signed.

Bridger looked in the wrong direction. He'd come down the steps now and was arrested there in the rain, his hair limp, the shirt she'd given him for his birthday-the retro look, broad vertical bands of gray and black with an outsized collar-hanging off him like a shower curtain. “Where?”

Her face was wet, water dripping from her nose. She felt ridiculous. The rain intensified, sweeping down the street in successive waves. “Over there,” on the porch, she signed, and then retreated for the car.

The interior of the car smelled as if it had been dredged up out of the ocean. There was mud on her shoes-a pair of Mary Janes in teal blue she'd picked up on sale two days ago-and her clothes clung wet to her skin. She felt a chill go through her and she slid into the driver's side and started the car to run the heater as Bridger, reduced by the rain and the layer of condensation frosting the windows, waved cheerily to the old woman and cut straight across the lawn, stepped over the line of low shrubs that divided the properties and stood just under the projecting roof of the porch to snap his jaws and wave his hands while the old woman snapped her jaws in return.

It took forever. Bridger was out there chattering away as if the skies were clear to the roof of the troposphere and the sun beaming down in all its glory, and the old lady, rocking in the shadow of her porch, chattered back. And what could they possibly find to talk about, the hearing? All this chattering. Peck Wilson: was he there or not? That was all that needed to be conveyed. She was frustrated, angry, shivering in her wet clothes as the heater, out of use since January, added its own furtive metallic reek to the mix. For a long while she stared out the window, first at Bridger, then at the house-an old place, two stories, with a mismatched addition and a stepped roof-where the man who'd invaded her life had played and worked and grown into the fullness of his thieving manhood.

She began chanting to herself, a little Poe, which always seemed to calm her-“And neither the angels in Heaven above, / Nor the demons down under the sea, / Can ever dissever my soul from the soul / Of the beautiful Annabel Lee”-and then she felt the car rock and Bridger was sliding into the seat beside her. “Well?” she said.

“Her name's”-he finger-spelled it-“Alice.”

She was confused. “Whose? The old lady's?”

He swept both palms up over his face and into his hairline, then threw his head back and shook out the water like a diver emerging from a pool. “No,” he said, turning to face her. “Wilson's mother. Peck Wilson's mother. Her name's Alice.”

“Yes, but where is she?”

“The old lady-she was really nice, by the way-said she was away for the weekend, up at Saratoga or something. At the racetrack with her friend-not her son, her friend.”

“You didn't-”

“No,” he said. “I didn't tell her anything. I just wondered aloud, as a friendly neighbor, if she could tell me where Mrs. Wilson was because she was a friend of my mother's and my mother told me to look her up if I ever got to New York.” He shrugged, toweling his hair with a sweatshirt he snatched out of the tumble of dirty clothes on the backseat. “The usual bullshit. She was old, that's all.”

“And she believed you?”

Another shrug. “Does it really matter at this point?”

She gave him a long look, then dropped her eyes to put the car in gear. She was angry, frustrated, the whole thing boiling up in her-yes, it mattered, of course it mattered-and she accelerated too quickly, the back end shearing away from her on the slick roadway, everything out of kilter suddenly, and though she did manage to avoid the two parked cars on her right, the truck, the bright orange and white moving-truck with the U-Haul logo plastered along its gleaming steel midsection, was another story altogether.

Afterward, her most vivid recollection of the accident wasn't the way her car looked with its trunk radically compressed and jammed up under the belly of the truck as if some negligent giant had been at play with it, but standing there in the rain half a block from Peck Wilson's house-from the thief's house-while a joyless policewoman from the City of Peterskill Police Department tried to put her through the drunk test and Bridger waved his hands and flailed his lips at the bare-chested bodybuilder in shorts and flip-flops who'd rented the truck and left its front end projecting halfway across the street. “I'm not drunk,” she kept saying, “I'm deaf. Deaf. Don't you understand?” And the policewoman kept saying, “Spread your legs, hold out your arms, close your eyes, touch your nose.”

People had emerged from their houses up and down the block and gathered under umbrellas to savor the spectacle, barefooted little girls in shorts and summer dresses knotted behind the neck, their bulging mothers and smirking brothers, an old man in a straw hat. Dana wasn't hurt, nor was Bridger. Thankfully. But she'd been driving and she was the focus of attention, all those shallow shifting eyes judging her, the drunk-or no, worse than a drunk, a freak, a babbler, someone to instinctively shy away from. She knew what they were thinking, knew what they'd say over their hot dogs and coleslaw at dinner that night, a passing reference, the recollection of a little anomaly in an otherwise uniform day: “But she looked just like anybody else, pretty even-until she opened her mouth.”

The policewoman-she was of mid-height, Dana's age, with a rangy, asymmetric build, thick glasses in severe frames, eyes that could have been pretty with a little makeup-finally seemed to come round. Bridger had shifted his attention away from the man with the U-Haul and had stepped in to enlarge her understanding of what Dana was trying to communicate, while her partner, an older guy with fading eyes and hair the color of a lab rat's, hunched over his pad and began writing up the accident report. Dana watched them go back and forth, Bridger nearly as expressive as one of the deaf himself. “The truck isn't where it's supposed to be,” Bridger was saying. “They should never have parked it there in the first place.” The policewoman-Dana saw now that she had a nametag clipped above her breast pocket: “P. Runyon”-didn't seem particularly interested. To her it must have seemed an open-and-shut case, so routine it would have been a snooze but for the spice of the California plates and Dana herself-slick roads, excessive speed, the truck parked and locked and on the other side of the road nonetheless.

She turned abruptly to Dana and said something. What was it? Insurance? Yes, she had insurance-she fumbled through the glove box, her hands trembling, and finally produced the papers-and no, she didn't need to go to the hospital, she was perfectly all right, thank you. P. Runyon didn't seem satisfied. She stalked around in the rain, the water beading on the polished uppers of her standard-issue shoes, alternately glaring at Dana and turning her back on her to sweep the onlookers as if to assure them that things were in hand here, despite appearances, and that they'd all better look out and take a step back or they'd wind up with their cars stuffed under a truck too.

Then it was the tow truck, the crowd dissipating and the patrol car slithering off down the street, a spate of small talk in the solid high cab of the truck and finally the garage with its ancient chemical smells and the once-white shepherd-mix curled up on the floor. The repair estimate? No way to tell yet, but it looked as if the rear axle stub was broken-“Do you see that,” the service manager asked, pointing to where her car crouched against a low wall covered with ivy, “the way the wheels are canted like that?”-and of course there was going to be some fairly extensive body work, both back fenders, trunk, bumper, replace the rear window. By the time it was over, by the time they took a cab to the train station and caught the next southbound train and she was pressed safely up against the window and looking out on the pocked gray hide of the river, it felt as if a week had passed in the course of a single day-and it would be a whole lot longer than that, two and a half weeks, to be exact, before she would get her car back. “And that's night and day,” the service manager told Bridger over the phone at her mother's while Bridger cupped the receiver and translated, “night and day. A real rush job. Because I know how anxious the little lady must be to get back to California.”

In the interval, she tried to relax. Here was an opportunity to spend some time with her mother, work on her book, think things out-and if she was going to teach again she'd better clean up her CV and start making some inquiries, too late at this juncture for a hearing position, and certainly not at the college level, but there were deaf schools in Riverside and Berkeley she might try. If she did want to stay on the coast. She wasn't so sure anymore, wasn't sure about anything. Two months ago she was in love, blissfully involved in her research and her book, secure in her job at the San Roque School and beginning to feel the pull of the environment-mojitos on an outdoor patio in January, a bugless summer, the incalculable gift of the vernal light as it glanced off the stucco walls and red tile roofs of the buildings on campus and rode out to sharpen over the waves. Now she didn't know. Now she was living with her mother, without a car or a job. It scared her how quickly everything had turned against her.

She was being paid through the end of the summer and she'd been issued new credit cards, so she was all right there, at least for a while. Her credit was still a mess, though-she couldn't begin to imagine the depth and breadth of the heap of threatening letters and demand-payment notices piling up in one of those heavy plastic mail carriers in the back room of the San Roque post office, each one of which would have to be addressed at some point. The onus was on her, whether that was her signature on the credit card slip or not-and what did they care? They wanted their money. Period. The victims' assistance woman had gone into dark mode when she talked about the greed of the banks and credit card companies-“Easy Credit, Instant Credit, No Refusamos Crédito”-and how pretty soon everybody would have to have some sort of implant, like the ones they inserted up under the napes of cats and dogs, to prove their identity. Bridger had said, “Just like “1984,”” and the woman gave them a blank look.

But the mail. The mail was a problem. They'd left San Roque in such a hurry she hadn't really planned beyond the moment and so she'd put a four-week vacation hold on her mail delivery. She supposed she should have it forwarded, but that would be a kind of defeat, a giving-in to her mother and the easy way out-and she really didn't want to deal with the mess of her finances. The mail was nothing but bad news, and right now-on a muggy Tuesday afternoon a week after the accident, as she sat at the desk in the spare room of her mother's overstuffed claustrophobe's nightmare of an apartment and fiddled with the knobs on the air conditioner, hoping for just a degree or two of refrigeration-she wanted to focus on other things. Like her book. The laptop was propped open before her, giving back the words she'd dredged up out of herself, the imposture they represented, the incremental silent means of recasting her own uncertain self in Victor's image, in Itard's, but they were old words that slipped and elided and clashed like mortal enemies till she couldn't look at them. ““Wild Child,”” she said aloud, just to feel the buzz of the words on her lips. ““Wild Child,” by Dana Halter,” she said, as if it were an incantation. She repeated herself over and over again, but it was no use. Because in her mind, a husky deep contrarian voice kept saying, “Peck Wilson, Peck Wilson, Peck Wilson.”

She felt the door open behind her, her old trick, and turned to see her mother and Bridger standing there in the doorway, looking apologetic. “Can we come in?” her mother signed clumsily.

“Yeah, sure,” she said, grandly waving them in. She felt a quick sharp stab of embarrassment. Had they stood there listening? Had they knocked? Had they heard her rehearsing the name of her book? And her own name? Had she said “Peck Wilson” aloud?

“Almost done?” Bridger signed. His face was soft, open, and she could have read his expression as loving and supportive, but he wasn't fooling her. This was a guilty look, edged with alarm, a look complicit with her mother's-they “had” heard. An irrational anger started up in her: her own lover, her own mother.

“Yes,” she said. “Or no, not really. I'm just getting nowhere, that's all. Spinning my wheels, right?” And what was that, a racing term? Or was it when you were stuck in the snow or the mud? “Why, what's the plan?”

Her mother had taken to Bridger in a way Dana would have found gratifying under other circumstances, making it her sworn duty to show him every tourist site in the city, from the Statue of Liberty to MoMA to the American Indian Museum, Ground Zero and Grant's Tomb. She'd even taken him on the Circle Line tour around the Battery and up the East River, through the lively corrugations of Spuyten Duyvil and back down the Hudson on the West Side while Dana was-ostensibly-working. Her mother's smile strained till it blew up in her face. “I don't know,” she said, “we were just thinking we might go to a matinee, something light-a musical, maybe. Bridger's never been to a show and it would be a shame if he-”

“We don't have to go,” he said, slumping his shoulders and fixing his smile, and of course what he meant was that they did have to go or he would never get over it. “Can you handle it?”

“What do you mean 'can I handle it'? It's not a revival of “Children of a Lesser God,” is it?”

They both laughed. But these were strained laughs-she could tell by the way their eyes flashed at each other like those kissing fish in an aquarium. “We were thinking maybe “The Lion King,”” he said. “Or “Rent,” if we can get into it.”

““Equus,”” she said. “What about “Equus?”” She was being cruel, but she couldn't help herself. She was remembering the first time she'd ever seen the National Theater of the Deaf, when she was a freshman at Gallaudet, the year Deaf Power came into its own and swept the university. For the first time in Gallaudet's history, all the way back to its founding in 1864, a deaf president was installed after the entire student body took to the streets to protest the naming of yet another hearing chief executive. They marched in the streets for a week, chanting “Down with Paternalism!” and “We Are Not Children!”

“No More Daddies,” they shouted, “No More Mommies!” The wind stung her eyes. The cops came on their silent shuddering horses. She'd never felt more caught up and passionate in her life. And when the curtain opened on the play on that final night, the night of their triumph, the house was full to the rafters and she had to find a seat on the floor, everyone holding their breath in anticipation. It took her a moment to understand: this was no parade of mimes, no revival of “Death of a Salesman” or “The Glass Menagerie” in dumb show, but a new play, commissioned and written in their own language, the language of their new president. She exchanged a look with the girl sitting next to her, her roommate, Sarah, whose eyes flew back to the stage while her hands lay motionless in her lap, and she began to breathe again.

And now they wanted her to sit through “The Lion King?”

“No,” she said, “I think I'll just stay here and kill myself instead.”

“Come on,” Bridger said, and when he put a hand on her shoulder and ran it up the back of her neck, she pulled away from him. “It'll be fun.”

“You go,” she said.

Her mother's face hovered over her. “Lunch?” she offered. “Why don't we all just go to lunch then? What do you say?”

“No, really,” she said. “You go.”

On the day they picked up the car, the day she planned to sign over the insurance check to the man in the garage, retrieve her keys and then, no matter what Bridger or her mother or anyone else might have to say about it, go directly to Peck Wilson's house in the hope of spotting the Mercedes there in the driveway, the sun seemed to rise right up out of the front room of her mother's apartment, already riding high and scorching the earth by the time she and Bridger arrived, on foot and sweating, at Grand Central. Bridger had talked her into walking-for the exercise, of course, but there was no reason to be wasting money on cab fare when neither of them had a job and their credit was mutually shot. She bought three plastic bottles of water in the one-liter size while Bridger saw to the bagels in the brown paper bag and picked up the “Times” and the “Daily News” and then they settled into the Metro North car like reverse commuters. The other passengers looked bored and enervated, nobody talking, and that pleased her in an odd way, their silence layered over hers. She was imagining the other sounds-the rattling of the undercarriage, the hiss of the automatic doors-when Bridger tapped her on the arm and asked for one of the bottles of water.

She watched him unscrew the plastic cap and hold the bottle to his lips until he had to come up for air. The sweat stood out on his upper lip and his hair had thickened with it. “It's hot,” he mouthed. “Wow, it's hot.” He handed her half a bagel, neatly sliced in two. Outside, beyond the moving windows, the river looked as if it had just been refilled with pure clean tap water instead of the usual gray-green bilge. “You know those pictures of-?” he said, but she didn't catch the end of it. A place name, long word.

“What?”

“Afghanistan,” he said, spelling it out. “From the war, like, when was it-couple of years ago? Did you notice that every mujahedin carried three things into battle with him-a Kalashnikov rifle, a rocket launcher and a liter bottle of Evian, just like this?”

“Yeah,” she said, “yeah, it was funny. Just goes to show you what you value when you have nothing.”

“Right, you have nothing, no water, no trees, nothing but rocks. That's why you bomb the World Trade Center. That's why you carry weapons-so you can take what you want.”

“Like Peck Wilson.”

He gave her a look. The train lurched over a bad section of track, jolting the bagel he'd been gesturing with. She watched it float up against the backdrop of the Hudson, tightly clamped in the grip of his floating fingers. “I guess,” he said. “Yeah.”

“Do you think he has a gun?”

He shrugged. “He's an ex-con, isn't that what Frank Calabrese said?”

“So yes?”

“Which is all the more reason to stay away from him. I mean, look what it's got you, what it's got us-ruined credit, running all over the country, no money, no job, and now your car.”

“But we are going to drive by, right? Or maybe park around the block and just walk by in case he recognizes my car”-he was saying something but she wasn't watching-“just walk, that's all. And if we see him, or the car-the car would be the key-we call the police.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said, “yeah. They've been real friendly and understanding, haven't they?”

She felt that burr of irritation again, couldn't help herself. She made an effort to control her voice, breathe in, breathe out. “I'm not giving up,” she said, and she had no idea what she sounded like. “Not now. Not when we're this close.”

It took him a minute. He turned his head to gaze out on the river and the distant fractured cliffs of the Palisades, then swung back to her, his eyes compact and hard. “That's all we're going to do,” he said. “Just walk.”

It was quarter past eleven when they arrived at the Peterskill station and it must have been a hundred already, or close to it. Bridger wanted to walk to the garage-“It's only like a mile,” he said, and she said, “No, it's more like two, two and a half.” The station was right on the water, but there was no breeze and the sun ricocheted up into their faces. Cars pulled in and out of the lot, moving with slow deliberation, their windshields glazed with light. A knot of people crept past them with their shoulders slumped, borne down under the weight of the heat and trailing suitcases and elastic children. To make it worse, something was rotten, something dead along the shore, and the reek of it was calibrated to a persistent smell of frying from the cafe adjoining the depot. For a long moment they both just stood there glaring at each other until finally she said, “We're taking a cab and I'm not going to argue about it.” And she couldn't help adding a little sting to it. “It's my money, anyway.”

At the garage, everybody was moving in slow motion, from the mechanics to the service manager who went over the bill with them to the secretary who typed it up and had Dana sign here and here and here. She and Bridger made a show of looking over the car, which had just come back from the body shop that very morning, and she wondered about a ripple effect in the paint you could only see in a certain light and from a certain angle, but the service manager assured her that there was nothing wrong and even produced a pristine high-quality cotton-fiber rag and buffed it for her. “You see?” he said. “What'd I tell you?” And while she watched his lips and face and understood what he was saying, she couldn't see any appreciable difference-the ripples were still there. But it was hot. Mortally hot. And she didn't say anything.

Bridger kept telling her to make sure everything felt right with the rear end and she put it in reverse and jerked back a few feet, nearly running over the once-white dog that lay comatose in the shade of the retaining wall, and then she was out on the street, feeling liberated. She had her car back. She was mobile. She could go anywhere she wanted, up the coast to Maine or back across the country to San Roque, or even down to Gallaudet, to show Bridger the campus where she'd spent something like nine years of her life. Or to that street where the moving van was, or had been-Peck Wilson's street.

Bridger poked her. “How does it feel?”

“Fine.” It was a car-how should she know how it felt? It negotiated the bumps and potholes, responded to the pressure of her hands on the wheel, took her where she wanted to go.

“It's not pulling, is it?”

She didn't answer. There was hardly any traffic, a dead town on a dead day-a Saturday-and she was looking for a stretch of road where she could open it up a bit, feel the breeze tear through the windows and take hold of her hair, but there were just city streets and hills and stoplights. “You feel like lunch?” she asked, turning to him. “Before we-before we take our little walk? Our little stroll? Hmm? Lunch? Does that sound good?”

They found a diner in the middle of town, a real authentic one-“echt,” wasn't that the word? — fashioned from an old railway car, and sat there in the stultifying heat with their clothes sticking to the leather-backed seats while they ordered sandwiches they barely touched and downed glass after glass of pre-sweetened iced tea. Both doors were open and an old upright fan was going in the corner. There were flies everywhere, legions of them gang-piling on the window ledges and drifting haplessly in and out the doors. She'd ordered tuna on rye, not the best choice for a tropical day in a place where the refrigeration might be suspect, which was why Bridger had said, “I'm sticking with the bacon on a hard roll,” but it wasn't bad-it was good, even. And when the waitress, big in the hips, cheery and efficient, brought her face into view and asked, “What's the matter, honey, is everything all right or is it just the heat?” she smiled and said, “lust the heat.”

In fact, she was feeling good. Feeling lucky. This was the day, she knew it, and in the cramped cubicle of the ladies' that was no bigger than a shower stall, she reapplied her lipstick in the scratched-over mirror and gave herself a big relaxed smile, a beautiful smile, the smile her mother always said would be the making of her-“With that smile,” she'd say, “with that face, you'll go anywhere,” as if a smile could make up for her fried cochlea or disarm the stranger who looked at her as if she'd been just let out of the zoo. But here it was, her beautiful smile, consummate and full-lipped, staring back at her from the mirror, the very smile she was going to lay on Peck Wilson when they were leading him away in chains.

They didn't want to risk driving by the house, so she took a parallel street and found a spot to park under a big over-spreading maple in a long row of them. Bridger climbed out of the car and stretched as if they'd been driving for hours instead of minutes. He was wearing a T-shirt from one of the Kade films, red on black, featuring the hero's outsized head in some sort of leather helmet, and though The Kade was meant to look menacing she found the representation faintly ridiculous. He looked constipated. Looked weak and old and at the mercy of his agents. “Nice T-shirt,” she said. “Did I tell you how much I love it?”

He grinned from over the roof of the car. “Yeah,” he said. “You did. But The Kade is my man, you know that. If it weren't for him Radko'd probably be out of business by now.”

“I hear you,” she said, and they both laughed. She was wearing a T-shirt herself, also black, emblazoned with the name of a band she liked. Or would like to like. And a pair of shorts, loose-fit but not nearly as baggy as Bridger's. Despite the heat she had on her running shoes-or better yet, walking shoes. Her first impulse that morning was to go with something open-toed, sandals, flip-flops, but she'd caught herself: you never knew what the day would bring or just how involved this little stroll was going to turn out to be. The thought of it, coming back to her now as she tucked her purse under the seat and locked the car door, made her stomach clench. “You have your cell?” she asked.

Bridger whipped it from his pocket and held it aloft.

“Okay,” she said, “then I guess we're ready.”

The houses here weren't as dominating as the peeling Victorians closer to the center of town, but they seemed to be from the same general period-they were just scaled down, as if the people with more modest incomes had wound up here while the brewers and factory owners and bankers expressed themselves more grandly. And conveniently. Or maybe she was all wrong. She didn't know much about architecture, and she would have been the first to admit it. But certainly generations upon generations had lived here, unlike in California, and she could see that reflected in the grim stature of most of the houses, gray and nondescript but still standing after all these years.

They turned right at the corner and there, at the far end of the block, was Peck Wilson's street-what was it called again? Division? Division Street? That was fitting, wasn't it? Or how about Jailhouse Road? Thieves' Alley? Hadn't she seen a street on the map called Gallows Hill Road? That's where he should have lived, the son of a bitch, Gallows Hill Road. She was going to mention that to Bridger, lighten his mood, but she saw that his eyes were fixed on the corner ahead and he'd unconsciously quickened his stride. She skipped a couple of steps to catch up to him, then took hold of his hand and squeezed it hard and moved in to match him stride for stride.

A car went up the street and turned at the corner, leaving a taint of exhaust heavy on the air. Two kids on bicycles chased each other up the opposite sidewalk. The leaves of the trees curled in on themselves. And then they were on the street itself, Peck Wilson's street-an abrupt right at the corner and there was the house where the U-Haul had been parked, and there, across the street and half a dozen houses down, partially obscured by the shrubs and trees and the line of cars parked along the curb, was the house they'd come to visit. She felt Bridger tense at her side, both of them straining to see as they strolled hand in hand up the walk, each step bringing them closer. Bridger stripped off his sunglasses-Peck Wilson's sunglasses-as if to see better. They were directly across from the house now, trying to act casual, but there was nothing to see as far as she could tell.

“What do you think?” Bridger said.

They were still walking, moving past the house and heading for the end of the block, the sun lying in stripes across the sidewalk ahead of them, somebody's sprinkler going, a dog showing its teeth from behind a rusted iron fence. “I don't know,” she said, feeling all the air go out of her, “it looks closed up to me.”

He had his shoulders thrown back, his head cocked in a way she recognized: he was agitated, keyed up, almost twitching with all that testosterone charging through him. She remembered a lecture she'd attended in college-an animal behaviorist, a woman who'd worked with the chimps of Gombe and the bonobos in the Congo, showed a film of the males working themselves up in threat display, and all the students, all of her deaf compatriots, had burst into laughter. They didn't need to go to Africa to study body language-they saw it every minute of every day.

“Yeah, but all these houses look closed up,” he said, bringing his face so near she could smell the residue of the bacon on his breath, “because everybody's just hunkered down in front of the TV with the air conditioner going full blast. We need to”-but she missed the rest of it because they were crossing the street at the corner now, nice and square, nice and rectilinear, up on the far sidewalk and swing left, the cars idling at the light with their windows rolled up and their own air conditioners delivering the goods. The heat rose up off the pavement and hit her in the face as if she were walking through a wall and letting it crumble round her.

And then everything suddenly speeded up, fast forward to the end, the sun, the trees, the sidewalks and cars all dissolving in a blur that crystallized in the rear bumper of a wine-red Mercedes shooting past them, the right turn blinker on and a little girl's limp doll pressed to the window in back.