The Best American Mystery Stories 2011

A Crime of Opportunity by Ernest J. Finney

FROM Sewanee Review

NO MATTER HOW FAST or how far she ran, she was never going to outrun herself. That was the sorry truth, Delilah thought. She was still here. She slowed on the last stretch through Golden Gate Park and found Mrs. Stowe-no, she had to remember, Renée-waiting where she said she'd be, by the windmill. They crossed the highway to the sidewalk along the seawall that paralleled the dunes. It was already dark at six, a November dark, a West Coast dark, nothing like New York in November, where you always seemed to be in the shadow of the buildings. And not as cold here, as if the wispy fog were insulation against the wind.

Where were they now? Even after five months in San Francisco she still got lost, running, day or night. She wasn't sure what direction they were going now-north, south?-though she could hear the waves slap against the sandy beach. She didn't want to seem anxious; Renée would say, "Okay, Delilah, what is it?" with that hint of impatience in her voice. Once she'd told Renée, "Prepare for the worst and it will never happen," and Renée had come back with, "Preparation inhibits spontaneity. Forget those maxims, Delilah. You're no longer in the Girl Scouts."

She hadn't taken her cell phone or her pager. Renée never commented, though, if she got a call from her office; Renée knew her job involved instant decisions at all hours. The plan tonight was that they would walk for a while and end up in a small neighborhood restaurant Renée knew about. She could phone in to the office from there, Delilah thought, to get the new euro high against the dollar.

Renée was in her storytelling mode, this time about her paleontologist husband's first discovery in Patagonia. "We lived in one of those white canvas pyramid tents: I remember how the dozen or so guy lines would sing in the night wind. The place where Sonny had chosen to dig was a treasure trove of Pliocene-era fossils. The armadillo, by the way, has hardly changed at all in forty-five million years: it has stayed the same since the Eocene period, a living fossil. We had twenty of the local Indians to work the site. Wonderfully conscientious men and women."

Striding along in her British outfit, long tartan skirt, turtleneck sweater, and camel-hair blazer, heavy brogans, her gray hair topped by a beret, Renée was becoming more English with each sentence. Her husband had been born in London. Clothes seemed made for her: she was tall, narrow, long-waisted like the models you saw in magazines. Extremely trim, though she ate like a horse. She was swinging her cane-her English shooting stick, she called it-which turned into a kind of stool when you stuck the metal spike at the end into the ground and opened the handle.

"Let's stop for a minute so I can stretch." She interrupted Renée's story to steer them to a cement bench under a streetlight. She was warm in her sweats and twisted her fanny pack around so it didn't stick into her side before she started her stretches. Renée paced in the square of light; she couldn't sit still either. What was amazing was that Renée looked no more than forty, say, maybe fifty. But she had to be nearly eighty. One of her stories took place in 1939. Her face was almost unlined, though there was no sign of surgery. She had young breasts; she'd seen them when Renée was trying on a dress at Nordstrom's. There were no liver spots on the back of her hands.

There had been occasional passersby, a woman walking a dog, but now two men stopped. "Lovely evening," one said. Renée stopped pacing but didn't pause in her tale about discovering that she'd been sitting upon four vertebrae of a species never before found in South America. "Why don't you two ladies hand over your purses and start taking off your clothes." The one who spoke was wearing a leather jacket like an undercover cop in a TV series. Then he yelled, "You heard me-strip."

That got Renée's attention. "I beg your pardon. Are you speaking to us?"

In response, the other one, like a conjuring trick, slowly drew a machete from the sleeve of his raincoat. Renée laughed out loud like she had seen something funny.

It all happened so fast there was no time to be scared. "Run," Delilah yelled, grabbing for Renée's hand. But Renée had stepped aside and had raised her shooting stick one-handed, as if she was going to twirl it like a baton: a blade of grass was dangling from the point of the stick. Cell phone, Delilah thought; pretend you've got it, and she reached into her pocket and yelled "I'm calling 911" the same instant she saw the blade of the machete catch the light as it came down toward Renée's head. It was too fast for her to see exactly what happened, but one man screamed, the other fled, and the machete fell with a clang to the sidewalk. She caught Renée's hand this time, and they ran too.

After a block and a half they couldn't hear the screams anymore. Renée slowed a little, still walking so fast Delilah had to jog to keep up. "Renée, shouldn't we get the police?"

"No, no; I don't think so. I just administered a life lesson to that young man. The police would only confuse the issue. Remember now, it's not the groin or the kneecap you kick. The whole business with karate and jujitsu and the rest is overrated. Too physical. You have to go for the eyes in a situation like that. Car keys are very good. Your thumb will do too."

By the end of the block Renée had resumed her Patagonia story in Argentina. But the image of the point of the walking stick spearing the man's eyeball made Delilah feel dizzy, made her own eyes water. It was the second time she'd heard Renée say life lesson. The first had been on the day they'd met.

She could admit it now; she was a mess then. Bewildered, was that it? By the move to San Francisco from New York. It was before noon; the restaurant was already packed; they'd lost her reservation. It shouldn't have thrown her, but it did. Just going to lunch could throw her into confusion. She didn't like eating alone anyhow, wasn't used to it yet, especially in a place like this, locally famous. She was ready to flee, and then the maître d' asked if she'd mind sharing a table. She followed the waitress across the the dining room to a table by the window next to the street, and the woman seated there stood up and introduced herself, Renée Stowe. From the beginning the woman made her feel comfortable, relaxed, talkative. They decided to split a bottle of wine. After they ordered dessert, Delilah heard herself let go, recite line by line her secret, private résumé she didn't dare go over very often, even to herself. Falling in love that first time in college, graduating, marrying, getting her law degree. Thinking her life would be like her parents' life, two happy people who loved each other. Was it playing house? Was she fantasizing? Did having sex with the lights on mean you'd love someone forever? People fell in love: how was it they fell out of love?

And the law: she'd been wrong about that too. The third member of her immediate family to become a lawyer. How could she have thought that being a defense lawyer for the city of Pittsburgh could mean that any of the defendants would be innocent? That she could get them off by her very brilliance after they'd committed and already confessed to some terrible crime? Let them back into society to continue those desperate acts? As part of a team or on her own, she'd lost some twenty-one cases, four capital, in the fourteen months before she quit. Felons at the city jail called her the funeral director. Defendants insisted on another attorney the minute they saw her walk through the door. As her father had always said, there was no correspondence between the law and justice.

And divorce didn't end a marriage, she found out. You still heard from your mother-in-law, his favorite niece, the former spouse himself, who wanted to have dinner. To try again. What happened to us? he asked. There were no words to answer that. It was all so sad, like five years of her life had been erased. She fled to New York City. Left litigation, got a job as legal counsel for the Zoological Society; her father had known someone. That was where she'd met her second husband, who was on the board. He was in finance.

Charming? Intelligent? Witty? Mysterious? Wayne was unaware he was all those things. He'd lived abroad most of his life, much of it in Asia, where his Quaker father, an MD, had developed a number of rural clinics. Hand-to-mouth existence. Not much school, no real formal education. He spoke five languages and two Chinese dialects. Often stopped at the medical school to sit in on a lecture. Took her to a conference in Montreal to look over innovations in emergency-room technology. She introduced him to marathons.

At the time she'd thought rather highly of herself. Her divorce had improved her image, hadn't diminished her but made her more experienced, a woman of the world. She didn't see it as a failure. And she hadn't seen Wayne as a challenge. He pursued her.

At this point she embarrassed herself and Renée too. She hadn't realized she was weeping, but big tears were falling into her water glass with a splash that wet her knuckles. The idea that she would never see Wayne again finished her, melted all her resolve. She must have sobbed out loud next because Renée placed her hand on her wrist and said calmly, "There is no life lesson to prepare us for loss and grief. Get a grip, dear." Handing her a handkerchief, Renée took over the conversation, chatting away, then excused herself after a comfortable interval to go to an appointment. When Delilah motioned to the waitress for the check, she was told Mrs. Stowe had already taken care of it. A couple of days later-they had exchanged cards at some point-she received a note from Renée: "Delightful time. I lunch at that restaurant at eleven each Wednesday; hope we meet there again."

Work was chaotic: the dollar was plummeting; all currencies were careening. Her company, an intermediary between international banks, handled money transfers. Trying to keep ahead of the exchange rates-yen and yuan, pound and peso-was the best part of her job, like trying to count the angels dancing on top of a dozen pins. You had to be fast and right when so much money was involved.

Wayne had recommended her for the position at his firm; he was the comptroller. She had wanted a change, some excitement. And she turned out to be good. Better than good; within a year she had her own office and secretary. She and Wayne were serious by then, living together. It wasn't like her first marriage, following the prescriptions for happiness: communicate, compromise, share experiences, always be a generous lover. Flowers and candlelight. Wayne ignored those rules, or better, he wasn't aware of them. He believed in fidelity, but that was all. Insisted they live in his little apartment in Queens. He couldn't drive, had never owned a car, used public transportation, sometimes made terrible mistakes, mispronouncing common Engl ish words. She loved him all the more for it.

Her mother had told her when she was a girl that she was going to be beautiful someday. She'd always thought it just was something mothers said to ordinary-looking daughters. But one day when she was twenty-seven, applying lipstick, she noticed something different. It looked like her nose and chin had somehow decided to join her mouth and eyes and become a whole that was almost striking. Was she seeing things? That's when she met Wayne. He was the one who put it into words. He was tracing the outline of her lips with his forefinger as they sat at a table in the New York Public Library. "You are beautiful," he said. And she believed him.

He'd taken her to a hundred Chinese restaurants so she could learn the regional foods. They had dinner so often at a Hunan place near their Queens apartment that the owners called them by their first names. She'd proofread the daughter's eighth-grade essays there. One night, when the long table in the center of the room was filled with a large family, Wayne leaned over and said something in Chinese to an old lady at the table, and they traded stories back and forth throughout dinner. Wayne knew the small city the woman was from, and he laughed and laughed at one yarn, which he translated for Delilah. "In a country full of national heroes, from emperors to Mao, we have erected only one statue in my city. Many years ago a tributary of the Yellow River overflowed and left a deep pond in the neighborhood. Two sisters were playing nearby and one fell into the pond and was going under for the third time. A duck that had been living on the pond for years swam over to her, and the girl was able to hold on to the duck and make it to shore. In appreciation the grateful city raised the money for a bronze statue of the duck to be placed by the pond."

"Is it a parable? Is there more?" she'd asked him. "I don't get it."

He'd smiled at her then. "Think about it," he'd said.

She'd get glimpses of Wayne sometimes in San Francisco, think she saw him crossing Union Square or waiting for a bus as she walked by. She'd stop and go back. It was never he. She never saw him while she ran, though. He never appeared as she sprinted up some famous San Francisco hill, gasping for air. She was running twice a day now.

In addition to lunch on Wednesday, Delilah and Renée were eating dinner twice a week at an Argentine restaurant Renée had discovered. Unbelievable grilled steaks. No chemicals, no feedlots; the steers were free-range. According to Renée, the owner had a foothill ranch in the wilds of the San Joaquin Valley. Delilah smiled as Renée ladled more chimichurri onto their steaks. She was working on being cheerful. She often felt that Renée had to restrain herself from reaching across the table and shaking the spit out of her, yelling, "Quit dwelling on your open wounds."

She'd almost stopped being morose. She liked hearing herself laugh again. They'd even double-dated: Renée's nephew and a gentleman from an escort service for Renée. The ersatz nephew was paid too, Delilah was almost sure. It had been hilarious. "Men are such good actors," she'd told Renée when they were being driven home in the limo. "Don't go there, dear," Renée had said, more sharply than usual. By that time she'd told Renée the rest of the story. Wayne's disappearance. Scandal. Over $700 million missing. The enormous reward offered. Gone without a trace, both the money and her second husband-the one she thought she couldn't live without.

She'd gone home to Philadelphia for comfort, once it was clear what had happened. "It's not the end of the world," her mother and father told her. But it was. You could only fall in love like this once, she understood then. It was too hard on you; you'd never survive another loss. The firm had treated her like she had been suddenly widowed, as if Wayne had died tragically. They never so much as suggested she might know where Wayne had gone. She would have told them if she'd had any idea at all, just to see him again. It was too hard to stay in Queens without Wayne. When she asked to be transferred to the West Coast, it was arranged immediately; the firm paid her moving expenses. They trusted her: she'd been told that several times by various executives.

Sometimes she thought back to the times she and Wayne had gone to Quaker services-meeting for worship, they called it. It had seemed so incongruous, the silence, listening for some transcendent voice in a meeting house in Brooklyn. Was this how it had been in China when he was a boy, these hours of silence, waiting to hear from God? It was so un-Episcopalian: that had been more like playing dress-up every Sunday. She found a Friends meeting listed in the San Francisco phone book and went to it a couple of times on the sly so she wouldn't have to explain to Renée. In the silence she thought about Wayne. Tried to imagine what Wayne would have been thinking about in those Quaker meetings on Schermer-horn Street.

Renée promised to show her the state of California. She drove like a truck driver in her Mercedes, straight down the middle of the freeways as fast as she could get away with. Delilah had expected they'd see a lot of museums, but they never went close to one except once, when they got lost and ended up in L.A. by the La Brea Tar Pits next to the Los Angles County Museum. No operas, no concerts. And the international wonders-the giant sequoias and the coast at Big Sur-were never on the agenda. They did drive to Yosemite Valley one Saturday, parked near an old apple orchard by a campground. Delilah started to get out to look for the waterfalls. "Don't," Renée said, looking at her watch, "you'll ruin it," and they headed back to S.F. after five minutes.

It was the freeways Renée loved: the physical act of driving up and down the state on black macadam was her idea of exploring. They'd shoot up 5 heading who knew where. Delilah stopped asking, because all Renée said was, "You'll see." Renée could keep on driving for seven or eight hours. They'd reach some destination-Yreka, say-and spend the night. If there was a good restaurant in the town, Renée would find it. They'd barhop or walk somewhere. Renée could strike up a conversation with anyone. They got invited to a potato farmer's home for tea. Joined an Audubon Society tour of a sewage treatment plant at which forty-three different species of birds had been counted. They rented bikes in Clover-dale and rode them all afternoon. They rode up 101 and switched to 1 to see Fort Ross and Gualala.

She had been feeling so much better lately-focused. Being around Renée was like taking a tonic that made you's tronger. Renée was not only smart; she kept current: she didn't own a TV or computer, but newspapers and magazines were stacked all over her place in Sea Cliff. She was never patronizing when they talked politics, never used her longevity as a lever. Thanks to Renée, Delilah was clear finally on the difference between communism and socialism: one collapsed; the other was thriving in Scandinavia and Canada. Renée said that while most wealthy people were Republicans because they benefited most from the party's policies, there was no rational explanation why anyone making less than fifty K would ever vote for that party, but she was no limousine liberal: when pressed, she denounced all parties, and when pressed further, said she was an anarchist. "Laws are like broken stoplights; you have to drive through them," she said.

They were in the dining car of the Coast Starlight from San Luis Obispo to L.A. when Renée said that. And when Renée continued by saying, "The Pacific Rim. The West Coast, dear, is where the future lies," Delilah sat back for the lecture that was sure to follow.

"The East Coast is still dominated by Western Europe. We may be the sole superpower now, but it's not only because we are being led by a twit that we get all this disrespect from Europeans about the Mideast. We'll always be a stepchild there. The Russians are in the same boat. It'll take another two hundred fifty years before we can stop revering European culture and think for ourselves. The West Coast, however, shares nothing with the Far East but capitalist greed. Look at Japan today. Look at China. We will never understand Asia, but that's a strength. We'll use each other forever. And that assures the future. If it's true that New York City is the capital of the world, California is the first nation-state of that same world. The place is its own mythmaking machine, and the whole world wants to be part of that myth, wants to come here. Who wants to live in New York? Just people from Indiana and Minnesota."

"Since I get to benefit from your wisdom, I get to pay for dinner," Delilah said. Renée was a check-grabber. The food was so-so; they ordered another bottle of wine. Renée was talking about a paper by her late husband, the paleontologist Sonny. Would she ever be able to say Wayne's name so easily? She understood she had loved Wayne too much. That's why she couldn't let go. When Renée talked about Sonny, it was never in detail. He never came alive.

She'd been telling Renée work stories, and when she brought home a CD with evaluations of Singapore's current financial position relative to South Asia, Renée wanted to see what it looked like. When it came up on the screen it had to be incomprehensible to a layman, but Renée still watched the screen as if she understood what she was seeing. "This reminds me, I'd like to visit your office sometime, Delilah," Renée said. "I'd like to loan you a painting, a Ray Strong landscape I bought a few years ago, but I want to see how it will fit there."

"It wouldn't be possible, Renée. No visitors. It's the most security-conscious place in the city. It takes an employee ten minutes to go through all the controls." She hated to see that look on Renée's face, but there was nothing for it.

Then, the next day at her desk, it came to her: she could take Renée to the firm's Christmas party. Pass her off as her grandmother. Renée would be insulted: she liked to say they were like sisters and seemed not to be kidding; she was so vain she wouldn't allow herself to be photographed. But she'd like the fact that they were breaking the rules. The photo was a problem, though. She'd never get Renée near the place without a company ID tag with photo.

She was patient, and a couple of days later she snapped a photo from across the street as Renée stepped out of her hair salon. It caught her in a half-s mile, her storytelling face. Delilah hoped she'd look half so good herself at Renée's age.

Renée was full of surprises. She phoned on Friday night to say, "I have an outing planned, dear. Wear warm clothing. I'll pick you up at four A.M." Delilah had schooled herself not to show surprise, but it was hard not to when they drove down to the wharf and boarded a party boat and went out trawling for salmon under the Golden Gate Bridge toward the Farallon Islands. Typical Renée outing. Picnic lunch. Bubbly, good Napa champagne. Everyone calling each other by their first names. Renée won the boat pool for biggest fish with her thirty-four-pound salmon.

They made a day of it, met for dinner that night at the Argentine restaurant. Went to a couple of neighborhood bars with names like Tiny's and neon outlines of martini glasses. Delilah drank too much. But she knew she could relax around Renée, be herself. At two A.M. they ended up in a Chinese restaurant on Clement Street. They ordered General Tso's chicken. Hunks of deep-fried chicken with sweet-and-sour sauce. She had to concentrate with her chopsticks if she wanted to get any food close to her mouth.

She started talking about Wayne. Not maudlin or full of sorry-I-didn't-do-this-or-that. When Renée, who she hadn't thought was listening, asked, "Delilah, where is Wayne?" the question didn't catch her by surprise. She wanted to explain to her friend that she didn't know. But she heard herself say, "Somewhere in Asia, maybe." He'd been all over China and Mongolia as a boy; his father took him by horseback to clinics way up in the mountains. Had actually ridden a camel on the Silk Road. Had a story about the old Orient Express that left Moscow and ended up at the Sea of Japan. He'd bring out maps sometimes to show her where he'd been, saying the names of places in Chinese and then in English. "Here"-they were lying on the rug on their stomachs in front of the fire-"is the most interesting place in the world. A Shangri-la. It doesn't have a name. But it's not far from the city with the statue of the lifesaving duck." They had met the old woman again at the Hunan restaurant the night he said that.

"But why take all that money just to live in some primitive place like Outer Mongolia?" Renée wanted to know.

She had to think about that. She must chew the food in her mouth first. She didn't know. She shrugged her shoulders.

"Surely he gave some hint where he planned to go. He spoke Portuguese. Brazil? Mozambique?"

She had thought about it, of course, going over every word he'd ever said. He had no family that she knew of. His parents were dead. She slowly moved her head back and forth.

The more she considered it, she thought later in her flat, brushing her teeth, the more she realized Wayne had loved her. She was sure of that part. I'll never let you go, he told her once. He hadn't used her; he could have taken even more money if he had asked her to help. Was he waiting for things to cool down and then he'd send for her? She'd go in a minute. That was wishful thinking on her part. A pretty picture, Renée would say. They were only together eleven months: how well can you know someone in that time? The General's chicken had been one of Wayne's favorite dishes.

Delilah was at work in her office when two uniformed armed guards came through the door, followed by her supervisor and the senior vice president. "Ms. Winslow, we'd like you to come with us." She tried not to look surprised. When she stood up too quickly, one of the guards rested his hand on his pistol.

For the next five hours she sat in a comfortable chair and answered hundreds of questions put to her by the head of security. They gave her coffee and bathroom breaks and lunch. She signed a waiver that both her office and apartment could be searched and her finances audited. She cooperated completely until they asked if she'd submit to a lie-detector test and a body search. Then she exploded. "Hey, wait a minute; explain to me what I'm supposed to have done." Someone standing behind her said, "Ms. Winslow, you're in a heap of trouble." A screen came down the wall like a shade and the lights went out. A police photo of Renée came on the screen, with numbers on the bottom. "This is an Interpol mug shot, after she did Lloyds of London out of forty-lhree million pounds. Insufficient evidence. She's been thieving for over forty years."

"You don't think…?"

"We don't know what to think. You were passing her off as a relative to breach security. You tell us."

"I was just trying get her into our Christmas party. That's all." Be careful, she told herself. This is serious. Serious. Serious. "Let me remind you, in case you have forgotten," she said as loud as she could, "I'm a lawyer. If you don't intend to charge me, I'm going home." Still no one spoke. She stood up. The light went on. Her eyes adjusted to the light, but Renée's photo stayed on the screen like a ghost passing through the room.

"Do you want to continue working here?" the senior vice president asked.

"After this, why would I want to? Unlike yourself, I'm capable of other things."

"We are going to require your help, Ms. Winslow."

"I'll be in my office at seven A.M. as usual. We can discuss it then."

Once she got to her flat she found herself going over everything that had transpired since she'd met Renée. Had she been duped again? Or had she duped herself both times? Believed what she wanted to believe? She had to think this out. If Renée was wanted by Interpol, why hadn't they picked her up? And her job, why had she felt devastated at her first thought: please, don't fire me. It might have its moments, but it was an awful place to work: a bunch of moneychangers. Bottom feeders.

She was up at her usual time, five A.M. Went for her run. The dark streets were full of people doing the same thing, getting some exercise before sitting down indoors all day. It might have been her imagination, but a woman across the street had seemed to turn the same corners she did. Imagination. Once she got to work, it was as if nothing had ever happened. She spent the morning in her office. No one appeared. Had lunch at her desk. The firm didn't forget things like this. Something would happen. But nothing did, not by five o'clock anyway. She went home. No messages from Renée, which was not so unusual. Tomorrow was Wednesday; they'd meet for lunch. She'd wait.

Nothing happened at the office Wednesday morning either. She thought of what Wayne had said to her once: "People pretty much do what other people expect them to do." That couldn't be true. Was that true?

Nothing from security: she should stop worrying about it. Concentrate on what she was going to say to Renée. What was there to say but goodbye? How could Renée have made up all those elaborate stories? But wasn't that what Wayne had done too? Maybe it was all fantasy about his life in China. Had any of that been true? For some reason she felt confident, as though she was going to make the right decisions now. She had changed-thanks to Renée, she had to admit to herself. It was almost physical, as if she'd developed a third eye and could see better.

Renée wasn't at the restaurant. She sat at their table half an hour before ordering. Ate her lunch and decided against dessert. Draining the last of the water from her glass, she saw through its thick base a distorted image of Renée approaching the table. She was so surprised she kept the glass to her mouth, watching, until Renée was seated at her place. She dreaded this part, she realized. "I didn't expect to see you," she said. "I thought you were going to miss this time."

The waitress came to take Renée's order. She was taking her time over the menu. Watching her, Delilah didn't feel angry so much as puzzled. "Here," Renée said, handing her a jewelry box. "This is for you." Inside was an old-fashioned silver brooch with a stone she couldn't identify. Renée had never given her anything before.

"It's beautiful," she said. "Thank you."

"It's a gift. Humorous, I hope. It's from one of the first specimens I was taught to identify in the field. Mineralized dinosaur droppings. I found it going through some things in an old trunk. I like the medieval name for these, fumets. The specks of blue are fossilized plants, probably-"

She interrupted. "Were you ever in South America, Renée?"

The woman didn't change expression, stirred her coffee, one, two, three times around. "In fact, I was. It was my father who was the paleontologist, and I spent one summer with him in Patagonia. It was my first life lesson. That was while my mother was traveling by ocean liner back and forth to Europe, fleecing unwary wealthy travelers. Marrying some of them. She was a bigamist many times over. I inherited my propensity for larceny from her. I loved my mother more than I could say." Renée was getting that dreamy look; she could go on for hours.

"Why should I believe anything you say? I've heard too many inventions. You were going to use me, Renée." She'd said it too loud. People were looking their way.

"Let me remind you, my motives may not have been pure, but where would you be without me, Delilah?"

"I wouldn't be a suspect in a scheme to rob my firm."

"They won't do anything. Stand up for yourself."

"What I don't understand is why, at your age, are you still doing this? You must have more money than you will ever need."

"At my age? You're missing the point, dear. There's no better buzz than making a law or breaking the law. Ask any politician. Or lawyer, for that matter. Judge. Priest. Thief. I'm not trying to justify stealing in a moral sense. But at my level it's an art form. The movement of a decimal point. The timing of a bank transfer. Insider information. Corporations do it every day."

"You must spend all your life looking over your shoulder. What a burden."

"I've never found it so. You're not grasping the fact that some people don't mind that. Thrive on it, in fact. Come on, Delilah. It's not as if you've never known another person of my sort."

She didn't catch the last bit, went on with what she wanted to say: "So being a thief is more rewarding than living a normal life?"

"Oh my, have I failed completely, dear? Did I waste all that time on you?"

Then it registered. The other person was Wayne. There was something wrong with this. Renée was acting the same as always, but this was a conversation within a conversation. She needed to listen more carefully. She looked for an opening. "They are going to lock you up, Renée."

"Don't believe everything they tell you, dear. That's law enforcement's great secret: rarely do they ever catch anyone unless they get an accomplice to turn snitch. Or trick someone into confessing. Those old charges they have against me: worthless. You don't think I know what they know? I have never spent a night away from my own bed."

The waitress brought Renée her lunch. This was not going the way Delilah had anticipated. Renée was too clever for her. "What would you have done if I'd cooperated?"

Renée looked unsurprised. "Did they talk you into wearing a wire, dear?"

For some reason the idea of a tape recorder was so preposterous, so funny, that Delilah started laughing out loud. Renée stopped eating and examined her face as if looking in a mirror, then dropped her left eyelid in a slow wink. Delilah understood who was wired then.

"It would have been a small fiddle, Delilah. Maybe ten, no more than twelve million. Petty cash for them. Nickel and dime. Some foreknowledge from you, and I take it from there. Your end is, say, eight or nine percent. Euros, of course. Nothing like what your husband got away with."

"Husband?"

"You've never divorced him, have you? You still use his last name. Now that man should have his picture in the dictionary at the word thie f. He could give me lessons. He disappears, no trace, not a photo or a fingerprint left behind. The perfect crime. Except he left you behind, his true love. It's a real mystery."

The customers in the restaurant had thinned out; it was almost two. "How will Wayne contact you, Delilah? A man who works for the firm for nine years before he makes his move, phenomenal planning, timing, waiting for the perfect moment. Just between us. It's been sixteen months. He must be getting lonely, wouldn't you say?"

She finally understood. It takes a thief to catch a thief. The firm had come up with all this to get their money back? What was Renée really, a retired high school teacher, an amateur actress? Or maybe she'd always worked in law enforcement. Whatever she was, Renée was lobbing a ball over the plate for her to hit.

She spoke slowly, so every word would be recorded. "Renée, you surprise me. To even consider I could betray the people I work for…" She tried to sound sincere. She couldn't read Renée's expression. "And as for Wayne, if he were ever to contact me, I'd turn him in in a second. Refuse the reward, of course, but I'd have to turn him in. It's a basic life lesson: you always try to do the right thing." She stood up to leave, and Renée reached across the table and squeezed her shoulder. She was going to miss Renée.

The vice president came into her office at four P.M. with the director, who did all the talking. "We have a complete severance package we want you to look over. A year's salary, medical, generous lump sum. But if you accept, we want you out of here by five."

She just glanced at the four pages. She had expected something like this after her lunch with Renée. A mentor to the end. Maybe. She tore the pages down the middle; Renée would not approve of such melodrama. "I don't need anything from you." She picked up her purse and walked out. She was free; they'd given up on her as a way to find Wayne. Probably. Maybe.

On the way back to her flat she thought again about the duck tale. What she had never been able to compute was the image of a duck saving a child. She was too literal-minded or something. "A big dog, yes, but a fowl?" she had asked Wayne. "It's the woman's story," he'd said. "You have to trust her version. I do." Maybe it was a very large duck. Swan-sized.

What was she going to do now? She looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. Renée's brooch was on her lapel; she must have pinned it on at some point during lunch. A dinosaur dropping. It seemed fitting, somehow. She'd wear it on herjourney. A long one, cautious, circuitous. Looking for a statue of a duck.