“And Kim’s bread knife,” I said to her, “while it might not be very sharp, nor have a stabbing point, can be used, with suffi?cient force, to take your nose, or your head, right off.”

They nodded, but they had no notion of the sheets—the rivers, the lakes—of blood, or how much muscle it took to saw through fl?esh and then bone.

They were waiting for me to continue. I forced myself back into their southern lady shoes.

Suze’s ice pick was traditionally a tool of men, or sexually predatory women in the movies. A bread knife was a tool of the home and hearth, something they handled every day, or that their mothers, at least, had. Not hard to guess which these women found more frightening.

“Next you have to ask yourself how expert the attacker is likely to be with the weapon. We’ve already seen how diffi?cult many of them can be to wield. Bear in mind that very few people are experts with things like razors or bread knives or ice picks. Remember that a weapon has no power of its own. It depends entirely on its user.” And the magic the victim invests in it.

“What’s the point of all this thinking?” Pauletta said.

“Assessment. You can’t know what to do in any situation until you’ve assessed it. Keep your eye on the weapon and remember: It’s just a tool. Not magic.”

None of them looked as though she believed me.

“Once you’re breathing, we go on to other questions: What does your attacker want? Will you be in more or less danger in a few minutes? Pick your moment to act. When you do act, begin with a distraction.”

“Wait,” Pauletta said. “Can we go back to the part about—”

“I’ll take questions later. An attacker with a weapon will be concentrating on that weapon. It will be a kind of talisman, a psychological crutch. The armed attacker’s focus will be very narrow indeed.”

“I’m getting lost here,” Pauletta said.

“Sandra, give Pauletta your razor. Pauletta, come and stand here. Threaten me with the razor. Sandra, where were you, as the attacker?”

“Getting my oil changed.”

“And what did you want from Pauletta?”

“To make her weep,” Sandra said matter-of-factly. Weep. Very biblical. Very melodramatic. I’m special, her tone implied. My life is worse than anyone here can possibly imagine. Except you, of course. But I was tired of her nonsense.

“All right,” I said to Pauletta, who was staring at Sandra. “We’re in a garage. Pauletta, you’re going to try and make me weep.”

“I don’t . . . Okay.” She waved the polystyrene self-consciously. “Kneel down, bitch. Kneel right here.”

“Okay,” I said, putting my hands up in the universal “Hey, whatever you say” gesture. “Just tell me what you want.”

“I’m gonna make you cry.” Her hand went to an imaginary zipper. Always the same. Too many movies. “Get on your knees.”

“Right,” I said, pretending to be about to go down on one knee, and then started to retch.

“Eeeuw!” Pauletta said, and stepped back.

“There. That’s a distraction. Other distractions could include picking your nose . . .”

“Gross!”

“. . . drooling, shouting, acting like a crazy person. The point is to break your attacker’s vision of the event. Don’t let him orchestrate. Don’t, ever, buy into his world.” They weren’t getting it. “In this instance, as soon as my attacker gestured towards his fl?y, it was clear he wanted close personal contact. He was having some kind of power and sex fantasy. Vomit has probably never fi?gured in them. Vomit is visceral: wet and hot and stinking. Nothing like the vision he’s been constructing for months, years, decades. The point of vomiting or picking your nose is to break his vision of you. You are not a victim. Don’t act like one.”

Jennifer looked as though she wanted to cry. Tonya seemed confused.

“Which part don’t you understand?”

“Me, I don’t understand why you’re so pissy today,” Nina said.

“Pauletta wanted to ask a question earlier and you just steamrollered over her.”

“Yeah,” Pauletta said.

It was true. I didn’t want to be here, in the closed basement. I wanted to be outside, bare feet in the grass, breathing fresh air. But I had agreed to teach these women. No one else would. “I apologize. Pauletta, what was your question?”

“I was wondering, when you said you have to know what they want and pick your moment to act. What did you mean? How do we know what he wants?”

“Yeah,” Nina said. “You said no one is a mind-reader.”

“That’s right. No one is a mind-reader. You don’t have to be. With an attacker with a weapon, you most probably won’t even have to ask. Just listen.”

They were nodding even before I could explain, taking my word for it. I said, “Most attackers who arm themselves do it because they’re nervous. If they’re nervous, they’re very likely to be verbal. They’ll be talking from the fi?rst second they threaten you: ‘Give me your purse, lady, give me your purse, put the fucking purse on the ground,’ and so on. That’s the simple situation; if someone says that, nine times out of ten the best thing to do is to give them the purse and they’ll go away. But you can’t always trust what someone is saying. For example, if your attacker is saying, ‘Don’t scream, don’t say a word, I’m not going to hurt you, keep quiet and I won’t hurt you,’ you might not want to believe them, because, generally, if someone is saying something over and over again, it’s for a reason. It means they’re thinking about it.”

“Even if they’re saying the opposite thing?” Kim sounded more puzzled than skeptical.

“Yes. You’ll be able to tell the difference.”

“How?”

“You will know. You’ll feel it.” The body always knows. “Feeling it, knowing it, is the easy part. The hard part is trusting that knowledge and acting on it.”

“I don’t understand,” Therese said.

“It’s women’s intuition,” Katherine said.

Suze snorted.

“Women’s intuition makes it sound like magic, and it’s not. In reality such knowledge, a visceral understanding of a situation—you could even say empathy itself—is based on a biological system. Your mirror neurons.”

They looked perfectly blank.

“Tonya, you and Suze and Christie, go get me three of those chairs, and, Pauletta and Nina, bring the bench. Chairs here, bench here, as though these are stools by a bar. Sandra, bring me my satchel, please, then sit opposite me. Therese, you sit there, you’re drinking quietly, idly watching me and Sandra talking while we drink.” I rummaged in the satchel, found a big fl?atended Magic Marker, and set it on the bench so that it stood up. “Imagine Sandra and I have shot glasses and this”—I gestured at the marker—“is a bottle of whiskey. We’re just drinking and talking. Everyone is relaxed. We’re talking quietly. Therese can’t hear a thing we’re saying.” I leaned confi?dentially towards Sandra, and she adopted a matching pose. “I pick up the bottle, like so, to pour. Then suddenly I stiffen, and start to hold the bottle differently.” When I changed my grip Sandra swayed slightly: a sudden, instinctual urge to move backwards, out of harm’s way, negated by her conscious mind. “What’s going on? Therese?”

“I don’t know.”

“Trust your fi?rst instinct.”

“Looks like you’re about to slam that bottle across his, her face.”

“Anyone disagree?”

None of them was ready to commit, either way, though it was clear from their body language—tilted heads, hands clasped in the small of the back—that they knew what Therese knew, they just didn’t understand how they knew and they weren’t ready to say so.

“Therese is exactly right. I was getting a better grip, getting ready to break this bottle on Sandra’s face. You all knew that, instinctively.” Sandra in particular, but she had also learnt from long experience not to fi?ght back because she was never going to make her defi?ance permanent, never going to run away and get to safety, and in the long run, the more she resisted, the worse her beating would be. “You saw the way I changed grip, and the act of watching me do that triggered a cascade of signals in your inferior parietal cortex.”

And I’d thought they’d looked blank before.

“You’ve probably all seen the way children imitate things to understand them. They’ll pretend to roll out a pie crust right along with you, they make noises and pretend to change gears as you drive. This happens in your brain, too. When we see someone pick up a bottle, a whole set of nerve fi?bers, called mirror neurons, pretend to be picking up the bottle, too. Whether you’re actually picking up the bottle or just watching someone do it, those neurons fi?re in the same pattern. Your body understands intimately how it feels. So when I shift grip, your brain shifts grip, too. And these mirror neurons are hooked into your limbic system, to the part of your brain that handles emotions. So your brain knows what it means when I’m turning the bottle like that. You know, deep down, in that intuitive part of you, what’s going on, in a way that your conscious mind probably doesn’t.”

Katherine looked thoroughly confused.

“You can look it up when you go home. For now, think of the mirror neurons as re-creating the experience of others inside ourselves. We feel others’ actions and sensations in our own cortex, in our own body, as though we ourselves are having those sensations, doing those things. In a very real way, we are doing those things. Think of your mirror neurons, your hunches, your intuition as a powerful adviser, an interpreter.”

“So,” Nina said slowly, “when you said the fi?rst week that no one is a mind-reader, you lied.”

Next time I taught this kind of class, I was going to do things differently. Completely differently.

“Well?”

Next time. I set that aside to consider later. “Think of the two concepts as complementary. The body knows, the body doesn’t lie. But our conscious mind doesn’t always want to believe what it knows. It’s not convenient. This is true for an attacker, too. They will tell themselves a story about how the attack will go. They’ll ignore what they know—they’ll ignore the mirror neurons telling them that you don’t want to talk to them, that you don’t want to be their friend—and believe what’s convenient.

Because they don’t want to hear what you have to say they’ll pretend you’re not saying it, so it’s good to state your wishes and intentions clearly.”

“Loud and often,” Kim said with the half smile that meant she was thinking of her children.

“If you say something clearly and specifi?cally to a potential attacker, two things will result: One, he won’t be able to pretend to himself that he doesn’t know you don’t want his attentions. Two, you yourself won’t be able to pretend that everything’s fi?ne. Your conscious and subconscious mind will be aligned. That’s a very powerful feeling.”

“The power of the righteous,” Sandra said.

Silence.

“It could be described that way, yes: knowing you’re doing the right thing, even if others don’t understand. Sometimes self-defense or the defense of others requires actions that no one understands. Sometimes you have to do them anyway.”

Everyone pondered that.

“Now, let’s go back a little, to the importance of knowing what your at-tacker intends. Any ideas about why that’s important?”

They all shook their heads.

“It’s important to know what they intend so that you can judge whether the situation will get more or less dangerous, more or less opportune for you to act. For example, Suze, what do you want?”

She blinked.

“You’re threatening Christie with an ice pick. Why? What do you want?”

“Okay, yes. Her money.”

I looked at her polystyrene. She raised it menacingly. “All right. Christie, what did I say about ice picks?”

“Good for stabbing, not cutting or throwing or bludgeoning.”

I smiled. I hadn’t said anything about throwing; she’d come up with that one all on her own. “All of which means your attacker has to be very close indeed to do you any terrible damage. So what would you do?”

“Throw my purse on the ground and run.”

“Good. Why?”

“Because.”

“Think about it.”

“Just because.” I waited. “Because he’s mentioned money?” I nodded.

“So throwing the purse would be a distraction?”

“Yes. Excellent. Because even if he wants more than money, you know money is on his mind because he’s mentioned it. If you judge it’s time to act immediately—and this sounds like a situation in which it might be—a distraction is often a good fi?rst step. Then you remove yourself from danger. Nine times out of ten that will mean what?”

“Run,” Katherine said.

“It depends,” Tonya said.

“Yes,” I said.

“But which?” Jennifer said. “It can’t be both.”

“It is both. Everything always depends. In the absence of other data, in this imaginary mugger scenario, leaving if you can is a good option. This is an example of a situation where it appears to be a good idea to act immediately, whether by running or engaging. Other examples of times to do that are when you think your attacker plans to put you in an even more dangerous situation, where your options will be narrowed. For example, if he traps you by your car and instead of saying, Give me your keys, he says, Get in the car and drive me.”

“What about, what about if . . .” Jennifer couldn’t bring herself to say it. She was very pale. The make-believe KA-BAR hung loosely in the hand at her side.

“What if he wants to rape or torture you?”

I think she nodded but her neck was so stiff with tension it was diffi?cult to tell. I’d never had this problem with rookies. I thought for a moment.

“Jennifer, I want you to relax, if you can, and breathe. I’m going to ask you to imagine some bad things, but they’re not real.” I looked at the others.

“We’re all right here,” Nina said, and stood close enough for Jennifer to feel her body heat. “No one’s going to hurt you.”

Suze stepped up, too. “We’d kill the fucker.”

Jennifer smiled tremulously.

“So. Jennifer, you’re planning to rape Therese.” I raised my eyebrows at Therese: Are you all right with this? She nodded and, too late, I remembered that Therese was probably one of those who had answered yes on the have-you-been-assaulted exercise. There again she was confi?dent and contained, she had trained with guns, she had what-iffed. With luck she wouldn’t have a meltdown. “You have a KA-BAR. It’s big, it’s frightening. You have it at Therese’s throat. You want to rape her. She knows that”—

again I checked with Therese, who nodded minutely—“and she’s too frightened to do anything but what she’s told. What do you do now?”

“I don’t, I don’t . . .”

“Rape. What does it involve?”

“Sex.”

“How can you have sex if you’re both fully clothed?”

“Oh. Well. Okay.” She jabbed her polystyrene in Therese’s general direc tion. “Take your clothes off!”

Therese, also pale now, put her hands to the buttons of her polo shirt.

“See how we’re all staring at that, waiting to see if she’ll actually take off her shirt? Someone who is contemplating rape will be staring, too. His focus will be split now between the weapon he’s holding and the deliciousness of getting a grown woman to be his puppet. This would be an excellent moment for Therese to act. But let’s say she understands that there will be an even better moment soon. So let’s imagine that she’s taken off all her clothes. Now what?”

“Now I guess I rape her.”

“So will you push her against the wall? Onto the ground? Let’s try the wall.” The class parted like the Red Sea and Therese walked to the wall. Most stranger rapes are fast and brutal, an overwhelming battering force, with no time to think, only to act immediately. Violence, like love, always happens when you least expect it. But that was not an analogy I wanted to use in a self-defense class.

Therese stood, back against the wall.

Most rapists who preyed on a stranger literally couldn’t face their victim. But this wasn’t a real-life reenactment. This was a lesson.

“So, Jennifer, now what?”

Jennifer swallowed.

“To fuck her from there your dick would have to be about a yard long,”

Pauletta said.

Jennifer looked involuntarily at her crotch and everyone grinned.

“Pauletta’s right. You’re going to have to get very close. Let’s . . . Therese, you step out. I’ll take over.” Therese, stiff-legged with tension, pushed herself away from the wall. “Jennifer, would you like someone else to take over for you?”

She shook her head.

“All right then,” I said to her. “You know I won’t let you hurt me. You know I won’t hurt you.”

She nodded.

“Where’s your knife?” She showed it to me uncertainly. She was going to need some direction. “Put it against my throat.” I turned to the rest of the class. “Now what would he do?”

“Whip out his whanger,” said Nina.

“Can you pretend to do that?” I said as gently as I could to Jennifer. She looked down again at her crotch.

“At this point he’s distracted again. This would be a good time to take some action.”

“But what if he was strangling you, too?” Katherine said. Pauletta hooted. “He can’t strangle her, hold a knife at her throat, and pull out his dick at same time. He’s a rapist, not a three-armed superschlong.”

I could have kissed Pauletta but settled for smiling with everyone else.

“That’s absolutely right. So this is an ideal moment to do something. What?” Blank. “Let’s try it. Everyone without a weapon, against the wall. Everyone with a weapon, put it against your partner’s cheek. Closer, Suze, you’re not even touching her face with that ice pick. So, now, those against the wall. He’s fumbling with his zipper—everyone, put your hands on your fl?y.” No one moved. Southern women. I sighed. “Okay, just hook your thumb into your waistband and let the hand dangle in roughly the right place. Good. Now, remember, a weapon has no power in and of itself. If you knock away the arm holding the weapon, you’ve knocked away the weapon. Give that a try.”

No one moved. “How would you do it?” Katherine said.

I gestured her away from the wall and took her place under Tonya’s bottle. “It’s always best to knock the weapon away from your body, not towards it or across it. So here I would knock her right arm away from me to my left, her right. If she had the bottle on my other cheek,” I tapped Tonya’s wrist and pointed; she shifted the bottle obligingly, “I’d want to knock it away and to my right, her left. Think about that for a minute.” I could see them mentally thinking right, then no, left, no, right. “A forearm block is best. If the bottle is here, on my right cheek, I would use a left forearm block.” I demonstrated in ultra slow motion as I talked. “See how that means I twist to my right, and that moves my right cheek back out of reach of the bottle and at the same time presents less of my body towards my attacker as a target.”

Lots of frowns. Clearly too much information at once.

“Just remember to knock away from your body.” I demonstrated again, very slowly. “Try it.” I gestured Katherine back into place and walked up and down the line of pairs. “Slowly, very slowly. Imagine it’s a game of slow motion. Pivot, bump your forearm into theirs. Yes, good.” It wasn’t, but it would get better. “No, Pauletta, see how that drags the razor right across your face if you knock it across your body and Sandra’s? You want to spin the other way, knock with your left arm, to your right.”

“But I’m right-handed.”

“All right. Sandra, for now, hold the razor against her other cheek.”

Sandra gave me an amused we-know-it-wouldn’t-be-this-convenient look, and swapped hands. She was beginning to annoy me.

“Now,” I said to Pauletta, “try again. Pivot, yes, cross slam, yes. Excellent. But try to use the outside of your forearm, like this.”

“Why?” said Pauletta, as though it were just another detail I was using deliberately to confuse her. Sandra maintained her veiled-secret expression; she already knew.

“Because there are fewer important nerves, blood vessels, and tendons to be damaged on the outside. Also, it will hurt less when you take the impact on muscles when you’re hitting as hard as you can. Also,” I said, raising my voice to the whole class, “when you move, yell. Not only will it remind you to breathe, it will be a further distraction to your attacker. You can never have too many distractions or too much noise.” I plowed ahead before they could get twisted up about that. “We’ll do it together. On the count of three. Okay. Knives on cheeks. One. Deep breath. Focus. Three. Yell! And pivot. Slam. Excellent. And again. Knives. Breathe. Yell and pivot. And again.”

“Ow!” said Jennifer.

“Slow motion, Therese, but very good.” Pauletta had hit Sandra twice as hard, but Sandra hadn’t made a murmur. “And again.”

“Ow,” Katherine said, too, as Tonya’s bottle ran across her throat for the second time.

“Try again,” I said.

She did. Same result. “I can’t do this,” Katherine said.

“Sure you can,” said Tonya.

“I can’t.”

“Not yet,” I said. “That’s why you have to practice.”

“If Tonya was a great big guy and that was a real bottle, do you think I’d really have a chance?”

“Yes.”

“It’s ridiculous. I can’t do this.”

“All right,” I said.

“All right? All right?!”

“I’m not going to force you.”

“I just, I want . . . I want you to teach us how to not get hurt.”

“Infallibly? I can’t. No one can. There is no perfect security. Yes, most men are taller and stronger than most women. That’s not the point. You can be seven feet tall, and in fi?ghting trim, and there will always be someone out there who is bigger and stronger and faster. The point is to do the best you can, then stop worrying.”

“Stop worrying? I dream about this stuff every night now. I worry that someone is lurking under my car, that they’re assembling clues from my e-mail conversations, that they’ll watch my every movement and rape me on the subway platform.”

“The fact that you’re worrying about these things now makes it less likely for them to happen. You’ll never be carjacked by someone lying underneath your car because now you look.”

“Maybe you’ll die of worry,” Suze muttered.

“I heard that.”

“Hey, then at least you’re not deaf, just stupid.”

“All right,” I said. “Everyone, swap roles. Five minutes. Then we’re going to sit.”

When they were done, I carried around the bin so they could ceremonially throw away their polystyrene weapons.

“You did well. Yes, even you, Katherine. You’ve all learnt a lot in the last six weeks. You’re not perfect killing machines, no, but there again, that was never the goal.”

“Hey, speak for yourself,” said Suze. Surprisingly, Therese nodded agreement.

“My goal is to make sure you’ve thought and planned and practiced so that you can relax in everyday life. Here’s something that might help.” I handed out the list I’d compiled after last week. “Read it carefully and we’ll talk about it next week.”

“Hell,” said Nina, fl?ipping the page, “now we’re all going to die of worry.”

“Next week?” said Jennifer. “Next week’s a holiday. I’m going out of town.”

“Then the week after is fi?ne.”

“We should get together anyhow,” Katherine said. “Have a picnic or something. Leave the guys at home.”

“A fi?eld trip,” Nina said.

“I’ll be out of town,” Jennifer said again.

“I’m gonna be here,” Suze said.

“And me,” “Me too,” “I’m not going anywhere.”

They were all looking at me.

“How about my place on Lake Lanier,” Therese said. “A social event, not a class, so it doesn’t matter if some people can’t make it. A covered dish.”

EIGHT

WE DRANK CHAMPAGNE. KICK WAS AT THE SIX-BURNER STOVE, STIRRING A HUGE pot with a wooden spoon. “The stew sticks if I don’t watch it,” she said. She was wearing the same striped trousers and white T-shirt, but no sandals. Her feet didn’t look cold. I sat on a hard chair by the counter. The windows were open but screened. The breeze had died to a sigh and the night that seeped in was soft with moisture, potent with change. In the low atmospheric pressure the voices of moviegoers leaving the theaters on 45th, the sudden metallic judder of engines fl?aring to life, the music from the Jitterbug restaurant and Murphy’s Pub carried clearly and mixed with earthy blues from her CD player. The city-lit sky swam with clouds, sleek as seals.

The kitchen was big, and open, all cherry and pine—even the ceiling was pine—and continued to the dining room. I carried my champagne over to the dining room windows. Judging by the slight unevenness of the fl?oor and the change in windows, it was an extension built less than ten years ago. It jutted out over a patio. A pear tree rustled against the left-hand window. On the other side, a little farther away, the silhouette of a cherry tree overhung the extension and the garage. Beyond the patio the garden seemed stepped, maybe to a lawn.

The house smelled like Spain in April: bread and olive oil and simmering beans and lemon juice and garlic. Some kind of unctuous meat roasting. If it were Spain it might be kid, but it was probably lamb. I went back into the kitchen. My mouth watered.

“Ah,” she said, “want something right away?”

I nodded.

She got two small dishes from a cupboard near my head, and turned off the gas under the pot. “Spoons in that drawer in front of you. Napkins in the drawer underneath.” She got busy with a ladle. “Here.” She handed me a bowl without ceremony. “Pond-bottom stew.”

It was a reddish-brown soup. I put it on the counter and handed her a spoon. She refused the napkin and just ate a couple of mouthfuls, leaning back against the stove.

I spread a napkin on my lap and balanced the bowl carefully.

“Spilled stuff cleans up. Just taste it.”

I dipped my spoon into the stew cautiously. “It smells a bit like faso-lada. ”

“Same basic principle. Lots of olive oil and celery and garlic, some lemon, but instead of just white beans, I’ve added kidney beans and carrots. Really it’s a fall stew, hearty, warming. But it seemed like something you’d enjoy. When it’s cooked as long as it should, it gets sort of sludgy, like something you’d scrape off the bottom of a pond. Eat.”

I ate.

“Well?”

It tasted as fresh and clean as a shoot bursting free of winter-hard dirt. It fi?lled me with hope that I might enjoy food again. I had the ridiculous urge to burst into tears.

“Do you like it?”

I showed her my empty bowl. She smiled. I eyed the pot on the stove.

“No. No more right now. I’ve made half a dozen things. I thought we’d try a bit of this and bit of that, just graze, see what works.”

Graze. Maybe that roasting smell wasn’t for me. “Is it all vegetarian?”

She smiled. “You don’t strike me as a vegetarian. Let’s move to the table so it doesn’t get messy.”

There was no ceremonial laying of places or careful positioning of silverware. No candles, no shimmering crystal. Just the music, and the champagne, and the food.

We began with salad: greens and sprouts and grated carrots and sunfl?ower seeds. “Try both dressings,” she said. “This one is tofu and basil.” It was astonishing—creamy and smooth and clean. “The vinaigrette’s fl?axseed oil and balsamic.” Totally different, warm and aromatic, as subtle and rich as cello music.

I didn’t say anything, but I didn’t have to. Her cheeks pinked with pleasure.

“Now for the hummus.” It didn’t smell like any hummus I’d ever encountered: toasty, almost sweet, but also tangy, with the familiar sting of lemon and garlic. She slathered it on black bread and handed it to me.

“Here.”

I bit into it. It was coarse and hearty, much rougher than any hummus I’d ever had before.

“And here—” She crossed in three light steps to the fridge, brought back a bowl and a jar of mayonnaise, and went back to the cupboard for two dishes. Her hips were round and tight with sheathed muscle.

“Homemade cole slaw,” she said, and mixed up the shredded vegetables with mayonnaise in her dish. “Put it on the hummus.” She heaped it on the bread-and-hummus mixture. “Here. Try it.” I tipped and mixed and heaped. “Just pick it up. It’s messy, but that can’t be helped. At least you’re not wearing that nice dress.”

I bit into the bread and hummus and cole slaw.

“I thought you’d enjoy the different textures.”

I did. I didn’t know how she’d known that I would. The cole slaw fell off, smearing over my hand and plopping onto my plate. I picked it up with my fi?ngers, fi?nished it, made myself another slice.

“How much weight have you lost?” she said.

“I don’t know.” I chewed a few more times, swallowed. I wanted to stuff the world in my mouth.

“You like food.”

“Yes.”

“It must have been hard.”

“Yes.” I hadn’t realized just how hungry I’d been. Still was. “Thank you.”

She nodded. “When you were talking on the set, I thought: It sounds like what happens to people’s tastes when they have chemo. And I know what to do about that. It’s partly a saturated-fat thing. Stick with things like olive oil and fl?axseed oil. Avoid your dairy and your eggs and your beef, especially aged beef.”

“And broccoli.”

“Yeah, well, I said partly. The rest . . . I don’t know. But have you ever noticed that broccoli sometimes smells sort of fi?shy?”

I nodded, surprised.

“Whatever makes it smell like that is one of the things that your taste buds, or what’s left of them, won’t like. Very, very fresh seafood should taste okay. Oysters, for example.” She grinned. “Hold on.”

She disappeared into the living room. The music stopped and restarted with Ella Fitzgerald singing Cole Porter. . . . oysters down in Oyster Bay do it.

“The taste buds,” I said, when she returned. “Chemo destroys them?”

“Yep.” She settled back on her chair. “Though I’ve never heard of it happening so fast, or after just one dose.”

“And does it come back, the taste?”

“Most likely. Might take a while, though. Months. Even a year or two.”

A year or two . . . Let’s do it, let’s . . .

“Until then, distract them with other tastes, anything aromatic is good. Ginger. Garlic. Lemon. Vinegar. Tomato. Thai, Indian, Greek, northern Italian. And texture. I guessed that you’d like things that contrasted, that were unexpected: cold and crunchy cole slaw with room-temperature tangy hummus, unrefi?ned bread. Also something you could build, literally. You like being in charge.”

“An arrogant toad?”

“Well, no. But you looked like you might be, that fi?rst time. And then you came hammering on my door—but you seemed so, I don’t know, reduced. I wanted to make you feel better, but I couldn’t even feed you. Though the crack about how awful I looked made me worry less about that.”

“Yes.” The gift of tongues.

“Is it true you’re paying everyone’s hospital expenses?”

Rusen. I shook my head.

“It’s not true?”

“No. It is true.” I just didn’t want everyone to know.

“And then I saw how you dealt with that rent-a-cop. And you, I don’t know, you looked different in a dress.” She poked at a shred of cabbage on her plate.

“You look different in shoes.” Inane. She seemed to bring it out in me. But she didn’t look up from toying with the cabbage and I understood that what mattered here wasn’t the words. I poured the last of the champagne.

“I have more in the car. If you like.”

Now she looked up. “What, you always drive around with a six-pack of bubbly in the backseat?”

“Not always.” I stood, waited. She nodded.

Outside, I could still hear the hum of pub music from Murphy’s. Judging by the smell, someone across the street was getting high. I felt every stir of light Seattle air on my forehead and cheeks. The food was pleasantly present in my stomach, but did nothing to blunt the other, growing hunger.

I went back in. Defi?nitely lamb. “It smells like Catalonia at Easter.”

“Never been there,” she said. “Been just about everywhere else, but never Spain. Or France.”

I put one bottle in the fridge and opened the other. I would have to buy her a champagne bucket. “Can you cook French food, too?”

“I can cook anything.”

I can cook anything. I studied her, one bare foot tucked underneath her, the other swinging back and forth, and remembered the scent of sleepy, naked woman.

She fl?ushed. “It’s my job.”

“Yes,” I said.

“At least it is, now.”

“Yes.”

“Why did you come?”

I gestured at the food, but she shook her head.

“No. The fi?rst time. At three in the morning. Why did you come?”

Because she had stained her white coat and I wanted to know if anyone would wash it for her. Because she needed someone to bring her tea when she was tired, hold her when she saw her career falling about her in ruins. And that wasn’t me. Couldn’t be me.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I know. I got the fl?owers.” She leaned forward. In the slanting light the tops of her breasts looked as if they had been dusted with gold. “But why did you come?”

She leaned closer, tucked her hair behind her ears. She missed a strand. I reached out and tucked it back for her. It felt as slippery as a satin camisole.

“Tell me why.”

I tucked hair back behind her other ear. “I was angry.” I reached for her hand. She tensed slightly, then let me lift it to my mouth. Her knuckles smelled of garlic and, faintly, that naked, sleepy, buttery-toast scent my back brain was already beginning to recognize. I turned her hand over. Blood bloomed under the skin of her breast and throat. I kissed the center of her palm. Her head fell back, and I caught it. The back of her skull felt as small and hard as a cat’s. I lifted her hand again, and this time kissed the inside of her wrist. All those nerves. She made an unconscious pushing motion with her feet on the fl?oor. Her hips lifted slightly. I bent until my lips were inches from hers. Her breath pistoned in and out. Her eyes were black. I kissed her. It was like opening my mouth to a waterfall; it fi?sted through me. I pushed the table to one side, picked her up, and laid her on the rug.

“God,” she said hoarsely. “God.”

TWO HOURS later I found myself kneeling on the fl?oor next to the rug. The CD player had turned itself off. The wooden fl?oor was cool on my shins. Kick was on her back, naked.

“God,” she said. She sat up. There was a carpet burn on her chin. She shivered.

“You’re cold.” I handed her a random assortment of clothes, hers and mine. She stared at them blindly. “Here.” I sorted through the heap, found her T-shirt. It was inside out. I pulled the sleeves carefully back through the shoulder holes. “Lift your arms.” Dazed, she did, and I slipped the T-shirt over her head. Her face emerged, blinking and puzzled, then frowning.

“Tell me you didn’t plan that,” she said.

I shook my head.

“You’re right,” she said. “Who the fuck could plan that?” She found her underwear. Paused. “The lamb will be ruined.”

IT WASN’T. It was more well done than lamb should be, but it was good, fatty and strong and grass-fed, and we ate, and talked carefully, and gradually she started to fl?ush again, but when I reached out she tensed. I put my hand in my lap and waited. “You don’t live here,” she said.

“No.”

She got up and closed the windows, and put on the kettle, and brought me a cut-glass plate of rich, dark French chocolate, and stood next to me, hip against my shoulder, and I breathed in her sharp, buttery wood-smoke scent and stared at the chocolate, and told myself it didn’t matter. She stood, and I sat, very still, and the kettle began to rumble. I turned my face so that my cheek rested against her thigh. The faint vibration of her femoral pulse alongside her femur became a trip-hammer. Her legs shook. I put my arm around her waist.

I meant simply to steady her, but she softened into me, almost sagged, and my arm tightened, and my need, and she let herself go so that I was holding her up with one arm and pulling her pants down with the other.

“Bed,” I said, and my voice was tight and savage. She pointed at the stairwell, and I carried her.

THE SKY LIGHTshowed a night sky of brass and acid. The thick scar that snaked through the crease between the top of her thigh and her hip bone looked dark grey, though downstairs it had been the color of raspberry sorbet. To my fi?ngertips it felt like soft old leather trim. It was a clear, clean incision.

“How long has it been?”

“Two years.” She was very still, her face in shadow.

“Does it still hurt?”

I felt her shrug.

I kissed it. The skin under my hand moved as the muscles in her belly tightened. I slid on top of her. Kissing her was not like kissing Julia, who had been all length and plum softness, and whose messages had been very clear. Kick was like a powerful trapped beast. She stirred restlessly, one hand in the small of my back pulling me closer, one on my shoulder pushing me away. I eased to one side, weight on my right elbow, head propped on my hand. I stroked her belly. The muscle loosened. She sighed. The sigh sounded as though it had a smile in it. I smiled back in the dark. She ran both hands up my left arm.

“You have scars, too. But they all feel different.”

“That one was a bullet.”

She explored it carefully. No one had done that before. “When?”

“Almost exactly a year ago. In Norway.”

“Norway.”

“Yes.”

“And this one?” She stroked the thin line just above my waist, on the left side.

“A knife. Two or three weeks before the bullet.”

She nodded. I dipped the tip of my little fi?nger in her belly button, stroked my thumb over the jut of her bottom rib. Then the next one, and the next. I ran the back of my hand under the curve of her breasts. Her breathing was rhythmic and strong. I kissed her. This time both hands slid to the small of my back and tugged. I eased on top of her, slid my arm carefully under her head.

“Ummn,” she said, and began to move, and I moved with her. This time, when we were done, she was defi?nitely smiling.

I lay on my back and she knelt by me and ran her hands up over my face, down the sides of my head, my neck, across my collarbones, down to my breasts, around and around, down to my waist, up again to my neck. The sky had softened to the color of old buttercup petals.

“And this,” she said, touching the scar on my throat. “This must have been very bad.”

“That was just six months ago.”

“I didn’t know owning things could be so dangerous.”

“The danger is an unavoidable by-product.”

“Of owning things?”

It seemed to be working that way with the warehouse. “I used to be police.”

“But not now.”

“No.”

Silence while we both thought our own thoughts. “Why did you come?”

“Because you invited me.”

Her laugh, a silvery, delighted squeal, like the laugh of a six-year-old thrilled by some childish wickedness, astonished me. I sat up. She poked me with her elbow. “To Seattle.”

“To sort out my real estate problems. To get out of Atlanta for a while. To see my mother and meet her new husband.”

“Ah.”

“What do you mean, ‘ah’?”

“She’s a somebody, isn’t she?”

“You met her?”

“I saw her, at the hospital. Everyone paid attention. And then there were all those no-mentions of you in the press. Tell me about her.”

She has hands like mine, I wanted to say. “Her name is Else Torvingen.”

It suddenly occurred to me to wonder whether she had changed it when she married. No. She hadn’t changed it when she married my father. “She’s the Norwegian ambassador to the Court of Saint James’s.”

“The court of—The ambassador to England? She got the job because she’s rich?”

“She’s not rich.”

“But you are.”

“From my father. They divorced when I was thirteen. He died three years ago. He left me—It was a surprise. The amount.” It still was, sometimes.

“So what’s she doing here?”

“Semi-offi?cial trade negotiation. Computers, mainly. And seeing me.”

“But you—”

“Live in Atlanta. Yes. Like Dornan.”

The tension ran through her like a current. She pushed herself away, got up, and found her robe. She stood by the window, looking out.

“Kick?”

“I’m having dinner with him tomorrow.”

I got up and stood a little behind her. I wanted to pull her to me, cradle her, but I knew she would pull away.

“That’s Queen Anne Hill,” she said, pointing south across rooftops to three radio towers blinking with red lights. It looked better from this perspective. “And down there is Gas Works Park. During the day, seaplanes come and go, landing on Lake Union.”

“Kick.”

“You should come here and see that sometime before you go away, back to Atlanta.” Her arms were wrapped around her body. I couldn’t tell if she was cold or feeling defensive.

“Kick,” I said again. “Kick.” She turned slowly. “I’d like that, like to go to the park. I like you.”

“He’s a kind man.”

“Yes.” I held out my arms, and she stepped in and I held her.

THE SMELL of baking woke me a little after nine. I dressed and went downstairs. Kick was taking a tray of muffi?ns from the oven. Her hair was damp. I hadn’t even heard the shower.

She looked a little tired, but the smile she fl?ashed was bright: it was morning; all doubts and revelations of the night before were done. “Banana raisin oatmeal rice fl?our muffi?ns. Invented fresh this morning. But you woke up too soon. They have to cool.”

“I should go shower.”

“Do it later. Open the windows, would you?”

She disappeared into the living room, and a moment later oboe music fl?owed through the kitchen.

Sunshine and baking had made the kitchen and dining room warm. A house fl?y explored the windowsill, back and forth, like a confused, hunchbacked old man. I pushed up the two side windows but it couldn’t get out because of the screens. The breeze was cool and soft on my face. She had cleaned up the kitchen, moved the table back in place, showered, dressed, and baked while I’d lain naked and blissfully unaware. I had relaxed completely. I had a nasty feeling that I knew why. The kitchen began to smell of . . . “What is that?”

“Nutmeg. And smoked salmon—it should be haddock, but I didn’t have any.” She opened a plastic tub. “And brown rice. And—pass that dish, would you? Thanks—boiled egg.”

Kedgeree.

She stirred, turned down the heat. “You remember where the napkins and silverware are.”

I laid the table. Now that I wasn’t dazed with drugs or hormones, I saw that it was an old piece, solid cherry carcass, with a polished mahogany veneer. I found cork place mats piled on the stretcher of a battered-looking secretaire in the corner, gave us two each. Green cotton napkins. Knife, fork, spoon.

She dished onto two plates. Carried them to the table. Nodded at the kettle, from which steam was still easing, which I took to mean Make thetea. A small teapot, some green tea, and two beautiful mugs stood ready. I brought the pot and mugs to the table. Put a mug each on a place mat, got out another for the pot. Sat.

Albinoni streamed as clear as the sun into the dining room. The old mahogany glowed like bronze. The fl?atware winked. The smoked salmon in the kedgeree was fl?ecked with nutmeg and nestled amid nutty, moist rice. Kick wore blue and grey.

Soon I’d be fl?ying back to Atlanta with Dornan.

“You look as though you don’t know if you’re in heaven or hell.”

“Kedgeree is my favorite breakfast food.”

She smiled, as playful as an otter. I leaned over and kissed her. The fl?y ran back and forth. I poured tea for us both. This was where I asked her what she was doing tonight, but I already knew. The silence grew. The otter slowly submerged.

“Will I see you on the set this afternoon?” I said.

“I’ll be busy.”

“I see.”

“No, you don’t. We have location shots.” The otter popped back up. “But tomorrow is another day. Now I have to eat and run.”

She ate at lightning speed, with clean, deft movements of fork to mouth, cup to mouth, napkin to mouth and then plate, and rose from her chair like an acrobat, with no visible effort.

“You take your time.” She kissed me, not a millimeter of lip in the wrong place, not an ounce of weight on the wrong leg, perfectly balanced. She scrutinized me for a full two seconds, but gave no hint of what she thought. “Let me know how you like the muffi?ns. Drop the latch on your way out,” she said, and left.

I fi?nished my kedgeree, poured more tea, and listened to the rest of Albinoni. TEN O’CLOCK. Sixty-nine degrees, light breeze, cheerful pedestrians. I drove carefully.

She had left me in her house. I could have done anything: stolen her things, searched out her secrets, fi?ngered through her most personal possessions, spat in her milk. But she knew I wouldn’t. She probably knew I would look for airtight tubs to put away the remainder of the kedgeree; fi?nd a tin for the muffi?ns; make sure the kettle was unplugged; rinse the dishes and turn on the dishwasher; make the bed. Turn off the CD player. Check that the lights and oven were off. Leave my cell phone number on her table. Just as she had known that I liked food with different textures. Just as she had known that I liked to wrap my arm around her waist and hold her tight against me as she moved. Just as I knew nothing of what she thought, or why.

I pulled over on Westlake, dialed her number, and after three rings got the machine.

“It’s Aud. It’s . . . There’s a fl?y. In the dining room. It can’t get out. You’ll probably have to take off the window screens. You’ll need a ladder to get at them from the outside. I can do it, if you like.”

Or she could just open the front door and shoo it out. Or catch it in her hands. I imagined her small hands cupping the fl?y. The scent of her fi?ngers. I’m having dinner with him tomorrow. I closed the phone. Stupid, stupid, my forebrain said. But another part of my brain, the old, animal limbic system, sat back on its heels, raised its face to the sun, and crooned. And, unbidden, the underside of my arms remembered the soft swell of her breasts as I turned her in bed, the press of her lips and slick of her tongue, and the car felt as alien as a mother ship.

A truck rumbled by, the driver singing to something on a classic rock station, looking pleased with and in charge of his world. I shut my windows. Opened them again. Breathed in, deep and slow, and out again, long and slow and steady, using the muscles in my abdomen to force the air out in a steady hiss. In again, for a count of ten. Pause. Out, to ten. In. Out. Then I called Dornan.

It rang and rang. I imagined him looking at my number on his screen and deliberately turning it off. I hung up before his voice mail fi?nished inviting me to leave a message.

IN MY suite I walked naked and dripping from the shower to my laptop, where I searched randomly through Norwegian and English dictionaries. Elske. Elsker. Forelske seg. That disposition or state of feeling with regard to a person that manifests itself in solicitude for the welfare of the object, and usually also in delight in his or her presence and desire for his or her approval; warm affection, attachment. The affection that subsides between lover and sweetheart and is the normal basis of marriage. The animal instinct between the sexes. Liker. To feel attracted to or favorably impressed by. Kjœreste. One who is loved illicitly . . . I called Dornan again. This time I left a message.

WE MET for lunch at a bistro on First Avenue. The menu was aggressively French. I chose the soup—lentils and chicken livers, with a Rainier cherry compote—mainly because I couldn’t imagine how it would taste. It also had the sets of ingredients Kick had recommended.

We ate without saying much, and I wiped up the last traces of lentil and cherry with bread. “Good soup.”

“But it’s a shame about the service.”

“Yes.” West Coast hipsters trying to do French attitude.

“Seattle,” he said. “If you don’t like the weather, wait ten minutes; if you don’t like the service, wait ten minutes.”

It was Kick’s phrasing, Kick’s intonation; she could have been sitting between us. I didn’t know how to begin. How did friends talk about something like this?

The sun spilled right down the center of the avenue as we walked to the gallery. Before I met Julia, I never went to art galleries. When she died, I began to visit them, because they reminded me of her. Now it was merely a habit.

The gallery wasn’t as empty as I’d expected, but there were few enough people that we could move from painting to painting at our own pace. I worked along the right-hand wall, Dornan the left.

The heart-of-pine fl?oor creaked as I walked from picture to picture. Hyperrealist still life in oils. It seemed to glisten, as though coated with glycerine. An American artist. Interesting, but not something I’d want in my house. A series of fuzzy-looking black-and-white lithographs of cityscapes viewed from second-story windows, empty industrial complexes, a stand of silver birches in the snow. None of them worth more than a minute. Two huge abstract French pieces, nine feet by six, of what looked like something between Christmas ornaments and the insides of a clock. Then a woman in a red silk Chinese robe, bending over a guitar, glass beads in her hair. I paused. It was ugly, drenched with hatred—the woman’s face wasn’t deformed, but it made me shudder—but the beads were irresistible; like a child, I wanted to scoop them up and put them in my mouth, and something about the light slanting across the fl?oor intrigued me. I leaned in close. The brushwork was textured and confi?dent. The next was by the same artist, a nude reclining on a couch, her back to the room. It was a twenty-fi?rst-century painting in the style of a nineteenthcentury Russian or French master, every tassel of the velvet rope hanging from the bedpost, every strand of hair exquisitely rendered, yet the background was curiously abstract. The model’s profi?le was Asian, but the body was fl?eshy and Dutch. I went back to the fi?rst painting, and the block of text about the artist. Lu Jian Jun. Forty-two. Chinese, winner of several national prizes, now living in San Francisco. I don’t know how long I stood before the third painting. At some point Dornan came and stood by my shoulder. Neither of us spoke for a while. A woman in a silk robe leaned back in a chair and looked straight out. She formed a diagonal slash across the square canvas. Behind her was an antique dressing table, with beads piled on the distressed wood. The colors—her face, the robe, the slant of light across the fl?oor, the jewels piled thickly on the dressing table, the table itself, the chair—were all the same palette: pinks, greens, and browns. I had no idea how he had done that. The pigment was brushed, and layered, and slathered—even, here and there, troweled. There were two places where it looked as though he had smeared it so forcefully he had cut through the canvas. But the woman was serene, a Chinese-American Mona Lisa. There was nothing to hint at the time period. It could have been the nineteenth century, or the twentieth, or the twenty-fi?rst. The woman could have been sixteen or twenty-fi?ve. She could have been a prostitute, staring into space after servicing a client, an actress who had just left the stage after a particularly fi?ne performance, a young girl dreaming of her love. A face of many stories, some fi?nished, some beginning.

Antique Dressing Table, 2002.

“She reminds me of Kick,” I said.

“Yes?” he said. “She is beautiful.”

Silence. “Do you like her?”

“Oh, yes, very much.”

“No. Dornan, do you like her?”

He met my gaze. His eyes were very blue. “I like her very much.”

“Will you—” I dropped my gaze, turned back to the painting. “Is it the kind of thing you would buy, do you think?”

“I couldn’t say. It would be a big decision, with many things to weigh carefully. Look now, look at this.” He tapped the price placard. “That’s more than I paid for my house six years ago.”

I struggled on doggedly. “But you like her.”

“I do. Though I wonder if she might look ridiculous on my wall. Maybe she’d be better suited to a glittering palace, to a great and terrible queen whose eyes are as pale as diamonds, who drinks bloodred wine, and trails a cloak of dark glamour.”

I didn’t know what to make of this fey mood. He was the one who was supposed to make conversations easier. “You could change your house.”

“Ah, but maybe I don’t want to change my house. Maybe I like it just as it is. Maybe when I come home at night I want comfort and the smell of coffee and to feel safe. But I’m not sure yet.”

“Maybe you’ll fi?nd out tonight.”

“Maybe I will.”

We stared at the painting. So beautiful but so fl?imsy, just daubs of oil on thin canvas. How did one keep such a fragile thing safe?

I dropped Dornan at his hotel, and then drove around for a while to fi?nd a video rental store. I talked to a pimply, concave-chested clerk about movie stunts and all-time best performances, and left with six DVDs, four of them featuring Kick.

I RE RAN IN slow motion a scene of Kick dropping from a ninth-story window in what was meant to be London’s fi?nancial district but looked more like Chicago. Her face had been digitally erased and replaced by the star’s, but I would have recognized anywhere those shoulders and tight waist, the way she turned like an eel thrown through the air, as though she had all the time in the world.

I paused the fi?lm, and called my mother. She answered on the second ring. The sound quality was awful. I could hear traffi?c.

“Where are you?” I said.

“Just about to get into the car to drive to Redmond.”

“What’s on the agenda today?”

“More of the same. Security concerns. Details on limited source code sharing. Licensing.” Noise. Movement: the car.

“Yes,” I said. Traffi?c noise, cutting in and out as she started to move. She’d be sitting in the back, her driver in the front. “When you move back to Norway, won’t you have to drive yourself ?”

Pause. “Aud? Are you all right?”

“Mor, when did you know?” Mor. Mother.

Noise. “Aud?”

But I knew the answer: you never knew. Love wasn’t a state change. Romance might be, and lust, and like, but they were just the preconditions. Love was the choice you made; day in, day out. I could choose no.

“Never mind. The night the police took me to Harborview. I assume you pulled some strings to keep my name from news reports.”

Traffi?c noise. “Yes.”

“I assume this was just refl?ex. I assume you wouldn’t mind if I correct the press’s lack of information?”

“No.” Noise. Muffl?ed conversation. A suddenly better connection: she had asked the driver to pull over, so that we stayed on one cell. “You are an adult. You must feel free to tell them anything you think necessary. As always, though, I recommend caution.” Pause. “Are you all right?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

Silence.

“Yes. Yes, I’m fi?ne. It’s just . . . There’s been some fallout for a woman who isn’t . . . I just want to make sure that no one else suffers who doesn’t have to.”

“I see. Aud, I’m busy for the next two hours, but would you like to join me for dinner?”

“And Eric?”

A longer silence. “No. Just you and me. You can tell me what you’ve been up to for the last couple of days, and we can talk some more about the newspapers. I might be able to be of some help.”

“Dinner, yes.” Help, no.

MINDY LEPTKE had a large corner cubicle, with a window view. She looked like a stoat: small and bright-eyed and probably vicious when cornered.

“I usually get the quirky stories, the ones where no one gets hurt and there’s some heartwarming moral at the end that makes everyone feel good while they swallow their last mouthful of coffee.”

I wondered how many of her readers that morning had paused, coffee hot in their mouths—did it taste just a little odd?—and got up to spit in the sink.

“But I persuaded the editor to let me go for it this time.” She tapped the issue of the Seattle Times with the page-three headline, “TV Pilot Poisoner,” and its lurid tale of vomit and madness, followed the next day by an update on chemical analysis of the drugs, and a no-holds-barred graphics sidebar of just what happened to brain cells under that kind of toxic load.

“Excellent piece,” I said.

She nodded in satisfaction. “Espresso sales were down for nearly sixty hours.” She looked at the clock, no doubt wanting to go home. Everyone else had.

“But you didn’t get all of it.”

She shrugged. “You never do.”

“I want you to do a follow-up,” I said.

“There’s nothing to say.”

“What about a political exposé, tying together Seattle real estate devel opers, the infl?uence of foreign governments on the media”—I hoped my mother would forgive me—“the fi?lm industry, and corrupt city and county councillors?”

“Your proof ? No, wait, don’t tell me. You want me to fi?nd that, right?”

“No. I will.”

“Right.” She rolled her eyes. When I didn’t wither under her cynicism, she said, “What’s your interest in the matter?”

“I was one of the people who drank the coffee that day. Those people drugged me.”

“They drugged a lot of people.”

“I own the warehouse where it happened.”

She turned to her keyboard. Tap tap tap. “And you are?”

“Aud Torvingen.”

“Torvingen . . . Torvingen . . . Not seeing your name.” She fi?shed a spiral notebook from the bag hanging over the back of her chair, fl?ipped back a few pages, fl?ipped forward one or two. “Nope. Some corporation owns the warehouse.”

“I own the corporation.”

“Can you prove that?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. We can come back to that.” She picked up a blue plastic pencil and twisted it until the lead popped out. “You say you drank the coffee prepared by Film Food?”

She didn’t have to check for that name. It was a good name, no more and no less than it had to be. Did Dornan make fun of it in front of Kick?

“The coffee. Yes. I did.”

“How come you’re not on my list? I have sources both in the SPD and Harborview.”

“My mother is Else Torvingen, the Norwegian ambassador to the U.K.”

I gave her a second to absorb that. “She has been in town just a few days.”

Only a handful more to go.

“I see.” Now her pencil was poised. I wondered why she didn’t use a voice recorder. “And your name again is Aud Torvingen?”

“Yes.” I spelled it for her.

“And you’re saying your name was deliberately withheld from the media?” As though CNN had been camping on my doorstep.

“No. Not in the sense that there was any particular reason for doing so. It’s more of a refl?ex action.” Tighten. Control. Assess. My mother’s PR

mantra, or one of them. Another was: Drown them in unnecessary detail.

“You see, if you grow up with a diplomat as a parent, they do everything they can to protect you from even a whiff of scandal, even if you’ve done nothing wrong, because your name is inevitably linked to theirs, and then theirs to their government. Diplomacy is all about low profi?le.” War with smiles and fi?rm handshakes. “But in this case there’s no reason to keep it secret. I didn’t do anything illegal or unethical. Nor did my mother or the Norwegian government. I was a—” In this context there was no avoiding the word, and I’d said I would get her back her reputation. “I was a random victim. As was Victoria Kuiper, the proprietor of Film Food.”

“They withheld her name as well?”

“No. That’s the point. She and her company were named. You named her.”

“It sounds vaguely familiar.”

“But none of this was her fault, although it would be easy for most readers to infer otherwise. Her business is suffering. I want you to write something about that—about how it wasn’t her fault.” She wasn’t writing anything down. “You could set the record straight.”

“No one would care.”

“Make them. You could talk about her stunt career. You could write about her wonderful food.”

She was looking at her watch. It was almost six o’clock.

“How do you feel about heights?”

She shrugged.

“Stand on your desk.”

“What?”

“I want to help you understand something.”

“By standing on my desk.”

“Humor me.” I stood and pushed aside her mouse and telephone and a few sheets of paper. “I’ll help you up.” I held out my hand and looked as though it were the most normal thing in the world to ask someone to do. She stood. “What about my shoes?”

They had broad, two-inch heels. Stable enough. “Leave them on. But put the pad down. Sit on the desk fi?rst, that’s right, then scoot over, get your feet under you, I’ll balance you, then . . . up you go.”

She stood there, swaying. She might have fallen if it were not for my hand on her hip, anchoring her. A pillowed hip, utterly unlike Kick’s.

“You are less than three feet off the ground. Feels farther, doesn’t it? A long, long way down. Perhaps you can feel your stomach churning just a little.” The power of suggestion. “Now imagine it’s a hundred feet. Kick Kuiper was the fi?rst woman to take a hundred-foot dive for fi?lm. That’s thirty or forty times higher than this. Higher than the whole building. Look out of the window. Imagine it.” The swaying got worse. “Now imagine the wind rushing. And imagine you’re wearing high-heels and a thong bikini.” I had to use both hands to keep her steady. “And now imagine you’re not just standing there, but that you have to walk to the very edge, and look down, and jump.”

“Let me down.”

“All right.”

“Let me down right now.”

“Take my hand. And the other one. Sit down slowly.” She sank to her haunches. Sat. Pushed her feet out in front of her. Eased off the desk. Sat in her chair.

“Now imagine you did all that, you jumped, you fell forward, face-fi?rst. A hundred feet. Falling for about four seconds.” I nodded at the big clock on the far wall. We watched four seconds pass. “It feels like a long time, but there’s just time to close your eyes and breathe a prayer. And then you hit. And then you realize you’re alive. You did it. You broke the record, and you’re alive. And everyone’s clapping you on the back. And fi?fteen million people in darkened movie theaters will watch you take that fall and feel their hearts slam under their ribs, then grin with relief when you walk away. And you’re going to get a big check for it. And then imagine one day you can’t do that anymore, but you love the movies so much you start from the beginning in some other fi?eld, and you work—day in, day out—

clawing your way back into people’s good graces, doing your best to ignore the fact that they pity you, that you could do their jobs six times better than they could, if only you didn’t have a hip held together with a dozen steel pins, ignoring the fact that it hardly pays, and that cutting tomatoes is just not the same as falling through the air like a stooping eagle. And then imagine that some fool takes even that away.”

She started writing. After a minute, she slowed and looked up. I could see the cynicism reasserting itself. “Human interest isn’t enough. Before I start in on the work, the hours of backbreaking, mind-numbing work, asking people questions, searching archives, combing the Web, bring me something.”

“If I bring you proof you’ll write about Kick?”

“Bring me proof of government corruption and I’ll write about anything you want.”

MY MOTHER and I turned to face the elevator door. I pressed the button for the lobby. I’m having dinner with him tomorrow. Today, now. Tonight. She raised her eyebrows, nodded at my thumb, which had turned white against the steel button. I let go. “The newspaper woman I saw today was less than cooperative,” I said.

“Ah.”

The bell dinged. My mother got out fi?rst. We headed for the hotel’s oyster bar.

“Journalists,” she said. “Very annoying. Particularly photographers.”

“Yes.”

“One understands how they get punched so often.”

We found a seat at the bar. The bartender brought us menus. My mother ordered a glass of cabernet. I chose champagne.

“I have never punched a person,” she said as our drinks arrived. “I don’t believe I’ve ever punched anything.”

I shook pictures of Kick and Dornan from my mind, kept my place in the menu with my fi?nger, and looked up. “Never?”

“No.”

“But . . .” If my mother said Never, she meant not even a cushion when she was a child. I sipped my champagne. My mouth bubbled, as it had last night. “Would you like to?”

“Now?”

I pushed my champagne away. “There’s probably a bag in the gym.”

She slugged back her wine and stood, prepared for battle in her cream silk sweater, taupe linen pants, and delicate evening sandals. In the gym, a woman with hair pulled back and ears sticking out was yanking at the handles of a lat machine as though trying to pull the legs off her boss; a young, slightly overweight man knelt on all fours on a blue yoga mat, morphing from cat to cow and back again. His back was very fl?exible. In the best hotel gym tradition, everyone ignored everyone else. The bag was a heavy boxing bag, and my stomach squeezed: it was the same brand as the one I’d used for my class. This was my mother, I told myself. I was just teaching her to punch. It would not end in blood and death and the feeling that I’d done more harm than good. The bag looked brand-new. I checked the hook and chain, nonetheless, ran my hands over the casing. Smooth and soft. Acceptable for her beginner’s hands. I had a sudden fl?ash of Kick’s small hands. I like her very much.

“If you’re going to hit with both hands, you’d better take off your wedding ring.” She touched it, then twisted it off and put it in her pocket. No tan line. Maybe you’ll fi?nd out tonight. “And your shoes.” Her sandals were low-heeled, but I didn’t know enough about her balance to be sure. She slipped them off. She seemed more comfortable in bare feet than most of my class had. I held my hands up, curled my fi?sts. She copied me inexpertly. “Imagine the pads at the base of your fi?ngers are an iron bar. Don’t clench too hard. All tension should be in the wrist. Okay?”

“Okay.” The whiteness around her knuckles eased.

“There are seven basics to learn about striking. One, strike from a fi?rm base. Two, most of your power comes from the torque generated by—” She was shaking her head. “What?”

“Show me.”

“All right.” Different rules for my mother. “Hold the bag for me like this.” I showed her how to get behind it and brace it against her shoulder.

“Ready?” She nodded seriously. I hit it, hard. I like her. She moved back half a step. I hit it with the other hand. I like her. She set her feet and her face. I let fl?y with a right-left-right combination. I like her very much. My mother’s serious expression smoothed, replaced by a bland mask. I didn’t have to turn around to know that Yoga Boy and Bat Ears were watching.

“Show me again,” she said. And I obliged with a left-right-left. “Do I have to make that noise?”

“What noise?”

“That ‘ush’ sound. Sometimes a ‘hut.’ ”

Ush. Hut. Well. “Make whatever sound you like. Anything. Just as long as it pumps air from the deep part of your lungs.”

“Does it hurt?”

I looked at my fi?sts, the pinking knuckles. As we swapped places I started worrying about her spraining a wrist, breaking a fi?nger, crushing a knuckle. Not being able to get her wedding ring back on. “Start gently.”

She assumed the same position I had, took a moment, then punched. Coordinated, but too careful to be graceful.

“Again. Try the other hand.”

She stepped into it, and connected squarely, but the bag didn’t move.

“Stop being careful now.”

She hit the bag. She was only two inches shorter than me, and despite having gained ten pounds or so in recent years, she was strong. I had seen her wallop a tennis ball hard enough to smash an opponent’s teeth out. She should have made me stagger.

“Again,” I said. “Remember to breathe.”

She hit the bag, and huffed as though trying to blow out the candles on a birthday cake. Tidy, controlled, self-contained.

“Don’t think about those people watching you.” I said it loud enough for the man and the woman to hear. The woman’s ears turned beet red. She looked like Mickey Mouse after a gallon of Thunderbird.

“Comics,” I said. It was faintly embarrassing talking about this to my mother. It felt more personal than talking about sex.

“Comics?”

“Comic sounds.” I gestured for her to swap places. “When Spider-Man hits the Green Goblin. Pretend that’s you. Blam!” Thump. “Pow!” Thud.

“Whap!” Movement would carry me through. My blood pumped. “It’s not you standing there, not a recently married career diplomat in the gym of the Fairmont. You’re on the wild fjell. You’re a troll, or the Hulk smashing the farmhouse.” Thump, thud. “A golem destroying an SS Panzer division.”

Her eyes kindled. I braced the bag.

“Norway fi?ghting the Danes.”

“Ha,” she said, “Hothead Paisan!” and walloped the bag. I staggered back. She crowed and thumped it again. “That surprised you!”

The whole of the next ten minutes surprised me. After Hothead Paisan, it was characters from newspaper strips, then TV cartoons. She began to laugh like a berserker, sending me staggering back six inches every time she hit the bag, sending Bat Ears and Yoga Boy sniffi?ng from the gym in high dudgeon. We took turns, running through all the Loony Tunes characters, then the Wacky Races—she was particularly fond of the Slag Brothers and their clubs—and ending with Roadrunner. Every time her fi?st thumped meatily into the bag, she seemed to expand, glow more brightly. Her knuckles were glowing, too. “Time to stop,” I said. “Your hands will hurt if you don’t ice them soon.”

She looked at the bag, slitty-eyed as a cat by a mouse hole. “And I’m getting hungry.” My muscles hummed, coursing with oxygen. If someone cut me now, the blood that splashed on the fl?oor would be crimson.

WE HAD prairie fi?res—tequila shots with nine drops of Tabasco—and oysters on the half shell, followed by more shots. She clenched her fi?sts and stuck them in the crushed ice where the shellfi?sh had nestled. I remembered our fi?rst night in Seattle, Dornan looking at the last oyster. For once I’d be prepared to fi?ght you for it.

“So,” I said. “Hothead Paisan?”

“That surprised you.”

“It did.”

“Eric has all the comics. He has a roomful of comics. Comics spin-offs from TV shows, too. He’s partial to the strong-woman genre. Xena, Warrior Princess. Buffy.”

All the ones where the troll doesn’t win in the end. Mostly. “Are there any Norwegian comics?”

“Do you know, I’m not sure. But Eric would know.”

We talked about Eric and his biotechs. About her day with software companies and wrangling over source code and security intellectualproperty issues. I told her about my run-in with Mindy Leptke at the Seat-tle Times. “I just wanted her to print a follow-up about Kick. The caterer. It’s not fair that her business should suffer.”

“Indeed,” she said.

“So now I have to get her proof.”

“Will that be easy?”

“I don’t know. The basic rule is, follow the money. I know who is behind this—a woman called Corning—but I don’t know how far it goes, how deeply woven into local politics. I don’t know who she hired. Once I know that, I can take it to the papers and get Kick’s name cleared. So, on paper, yes, it should be easy. But . . .”

“But life rarely works like that. There are often so many other matters that require our attention.”

“Yes.” Maybe you’ll fi?nd out tonight.

After a slight pause, she said, “I never did meet your other friend. Julia.”

“No.”

“I had thought perhaps, when you fi?rst mentioned Dornan . . . but then I realized not.”

“No.”

“No,” she agreed. She took her wedding ring from her pocket and slid it back on. Yellow and white gold. Clean style, heavy gauge. Substantial. “Eric and I will be here only another few days.”

“Yes.”

Someone tapped a microphone. We turned to look. A jazz trio was getting ready to play. We turned back to the bar. I shook my head at the bartender’s raised eyebrows and made a signing-the-tab motion. “It might be nice to meet Kick before we leave,” she said.

“It depends.”

“I see.” She stood. “Meanwhile, with that reporter, before you present her with information, insist on a fi?nal review and veto for her article.”

“Yes.”

“And don’t worry, you’ll know what to do.”

LESSON8

FIFTY YEARS A GO THE U.S. ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS DAMMED AND DIVERTED the waters of the Chattahoochee and Chestatee rivers to form a twenty-sixmile-long lake, Lake Sidney Lanier. It’s named after a poet who, ironically, wrote about the natural beauty of Georgia, including “The Song of the Chattahoochee,” which, these days, was being reduced to a moribund murmur as cities, farmers, and recreation-seeking citizens took a bite out of it. Housing surrounds the lake like scum on the edges of a stagnant pond, everything from rentals to log cabins to palatial CEO second homes. Therese’s place was an eighties-built four-or fi?ve-bedroomed socialclimbing recreational space. There was parking for a dozen cars, and decks visible from every angle. I was hoping I’d arrived late enough—six o’clock instead of fi?ve—to avoid the inevitable Tour of the House, complete with requisite “Oh, my goodness,” “Oh, how cute,” and “How in the world did you come up with such amazing colors?”

I rapped on the frame of the screen door and Therese opened it wearing the modifi?ed country-club casual wear usual for these things, including boat shoes. I deposited my dish—green beans sautéed in bacon fat, with lemon and oregano and chopped tomato—on the kitchen counter with a dozen other containers and made my way through French windows to the deck that jutted out over the water. On the east side was a huge hot tub, big enough for a congressional delegation, steaming aggressively in the sixtyfi?ve-degree early evening. Built-in benches ran around the perimeter of the deck.

Suze, in cut-offs, muscle-T and Keen sandals, clearly hadn’t got the country-club-casual memo. Nor had Kim, the only other person out there, who glittered in a sparkly halter top, deep-blue nails, and a fancy hair clip. Even the heels on her pumps glittered. I sat next to Suze, who gestured with her can of Coors to a cooler under the bench.

“What’d you bring?” she said as I popped my can.

“Green beans. You?”

“Three-bean salad.”

We drank beer.

“Lotta beans,” Suze said eventually.

Kim joined us. She held a frosty pink cocktail, which she raised in my direction. “Hey.”

I nodded. “Where’s everyone else?”

“Getting changed.”

Suze squeezed her can and tossed it in a box lined with a garbage bag.

“Therese just happens to keep around bathing suits in, you know, fi?fty zillion sizes. For her guests. So they can either throw themselves in the lake or parboil themselves like lobsters in the party hot tub. Or the pool.”

“You didn’t fancy a dip?”

“Hot baths should be private, and it’s getting too cool for the other kind.”

When I looked at Kim, she fl?icked her nails in the direction of her hair and makeup: she wasn’t going to get wet for anybody after all the trouble she went to.

THE EIGHT of them—Sandra hadn’t shown up, either—had forged a classroom relationship based on common ignorance, but here on the deck overlooking Lake Lanier, as the sky shaded from Limoges butterfl?y blue to Wedgwood to inky Delft, even level-the-playing-fi?eld bathing gear could not disguise their differences. Tonya’s hair had been carefully ironed for the occasion, and she kept smoothing it, worried about humidity; rings winked on four of Christie’s fi?ngers—probably from her toes, too, though those were in the tub—and in her left nostril, and a rose tattoo twined over her shoulder; Therese’s arms and legs were bare of any ornament but fabulous grooming—nails manicured and buffed but not polished—and glowing great health; Nina wore spiderwebbed varicose veins on thighs and calf and spent more time than probably was comfortable sitting up to her waist in the hot tub. She was also drinking a lot, something bright green.

They had all left their shoes right by the tub, as though bare feet were somehow unnerving.

Balanced between the cool March lake air and the warm foaming tub water, between social situation and a meeting of strangers, alcohol, food, and the southern woman’s gift for small talk held the evening together: recipes, husbands, pets. Inevitably, the talk turned to children: Therese’s twins, a boy and a girl, Kim’s two girls, Nina’s grandchildren.

“I don’t have kids,” Suze said.

“Well, of course you don’t,” Pauletta said.

“What’s with the ‘Oh, of course’?”

Pauletta adjusted the gold cross hanging between her breasts, splashed idly at the water foaming by her leg and said nothing.

“I don’t have kids, either,” Christie said.

“Nope,” said Nina, “but you will. I can tell.” Perhaps it was just the confi?dential, you’re-one-of-us tone, but I thought I detected a slight slur.

“How do you mean?”

“With some people you can just tell these things. Some people you can’t. So how ’bout you, Aud. You got kids?”

“Not as such, no.”

Pauletta fl?ipped her ponytail from one shoulder to the other. “The hell does that mean?”

“It means I don’t want to talk about it.”

Everyone in the tub closed up slightly, like water lilies preparing to shut for the night, and smiled extra hard. Suze and Kim looked away, as though not wanting to be associated with such a blunt breach of the social code.

“So,” Nina said, “where you come from they don’t talk about their kids?”

Where you come from. Planet Different.

Therese stood up. “It’s getting cold out here, don’t you think?” No one admitted what she thought. She stepped out of the tub and slipped her shoes on. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we all went in and ate some of the lovely food we’ve brought.”

One by one they began to climb out, and I noticed how each one, before even picking up a towel, put her shoes on.

Nina stayed in the tub. I didn’t think she felt confi?dent of getting out without falling down. When we were the only ones left on the deck, I took a towel from the pile, shook it out, and carried it over to her. I held out my hand.

“Haul yourself up on this,” I said.

She reached for my hand but instead of pulling herself up she pulled me close. “I gave a daughter up for adoption once, too,” she said sadly. “She’d be about your age. I think about her. I wonder what she’s doing, if she’s all right. I wonder if she keeps herself safe. It’s so hard to keep kids safe in this world.”

“Yes,” I said. “Come on, now. Let’s get to the kitchen before the food’s all gone. I’ll help you. Wrap this around your shoulders. Sit here. That’s right. I’ll get your shoes. Okay now? Good.”

Once she was standing she was fi?ne, but just in case, I stayed close as we walked through the living room to the guest room where her clothes were.

“So. Your daughter. Why did you give her away?”

“It was before I was married. I thought she’d have a better life. But now I don’t know. How can I know? I just hope her adoptive mother was kind.”

“What would you want from an adoptive mother—who, what kind of person would you want for her?”

“Someone kind but stern. Kids like boundaries, you know? I learned that too late for my two . . . my two that I kept.” Her face crumpled.

“Hey,” I said. “You have grandchildren, though, yes?”

“I do. Four of ’em. And, trust me, they’re being brought up right.”

“Brought up right.” I nodded. “So tell me more about your vision of the perfect mother.”

“Perfect?” She looked muddled. “Nobody said anything about perfect. No such thing. But who I imagine for my little Katie, my little Katie’s mom, she has no . . . issues, you know? Nothing to take out on Katie. No money worries, no problems with health or other members of the family being weird. Normal. Good, strong values. And consistent. She’s consistent. Oh, thank you.” She took the cardigan I’d held out. “And kind. Did I say that?”

“You did.” We sat quietly on the edge of the bed, then I stood. “You ready for some food now?”

She nodded. “I think you should teach us about kids,” she said. “You should teach us how to keep them safe.”

“I’ll give it some thought.”

IN THE KITCHEN—there were four varieties of beans, but Therese had provided a ham—Nina worked hard to include me in conversation. “So that

‘bam, pow’ stuff in the fi?rst class—you like comics?”

“I’m not very familiar with them.”

“My son, Jason, used to bring home comics and I’d say, Read a real book! And he’d say, This is a real book, Mom! And he gave me a couple. And, you know what? They were pretty good.”

Everyone looked at her blankly.

Therese stepped into hostess mode. “Isn’t this lovely potato salad? Kim, can I have the recipe?”

“Sure. I’ll e-mail it.”

“We could set up a chat group,” Nina said. “Everyone should give me their e-mail address.”

“What about Sandra?” Katherine said. Then, “Wonder where she is?”

No one said anything. No one was willing to say it.

NINE

WHEN I WOKE, MY JAWS ACHED WITH TENSION. WHAT LITTLE SLEEP I’D HAD WAS fi?lled with dreams of paintings and cold, empty chairs.

According to Gary, Karenna Beauchamps Corning lived in Capitol Hill. The address turned out to be one of those high-priced, high-security condo buildings that went up fi?ve years ago and would probably come down in ten: all marble facing on porous concrete and inferior-grade rebar. Morning sun gilded the polished steel letters (lowercase, Helvetica) that spelled out the name of the building: press. Press what? I rang her buzzer. No response. I got back in the car and phoned. Nothing. I watched for a while.

A man with a very small white dog headed for the main door. I got out of the car, pretending to talk on the phone, feeling in my pockets for a nonexistent key.

“—goddamn it, Jack,” I snapped into the phone. “I promised Harris we’d have those projections by tomorrow noon and we’ll goddamn well have them by tomorrow noon. Am I making myself—Hold on one sec.”

The man was opening the door. I swapped the phone to my other ear, felt in my trouser pocket. “Yeah,” I said, “yeah. Are you listening, we’ve—

Hold on.” I swapped sides again, felt in my other pocket. Spared a harassed glance at the man and his dog. He obligingly held the door open for me. “No, Jack. No. Absolutely not. Tomorrow. Look—” I swapped the phone one more time. “Thanks,” I said in an undertone to the man, waved him ahead when he looked as though he was about to hold the elevator door for me. The dog cocked its head at me. “Tomorrow is the absolute—” The elevator door dinged shut. I put the phone away.

I took the stairs down to the parking basement. The slot marked 809

was empty. The oil spot wasn’t fresh. I walked up to the eighth fl?oor. The air in the stairwell felt thick and unused.

The door was good quality. Pine stained to look like oak, but solid. Heavy brass fi?ttings. One simple mortise lock. I pulled on latex gloves. I was out of practice. It took three minutes to open. I listened. No beeping: no alarm. Or maybe a very, very expensive alarm. Given the lock, I doubted it. I checked her bedroom closet, only two hangers empty, and then the bathroom: a gap on the second shelf of the medicine cabinet where three or four things might usually sit. I looked in the fridge: eggs, juice, a wilted head of lettuce. An opened and restoppered bottle of chardonnay. Thai takeaway cartons, limp with grease that had had four or fi?ve days to settle. I went back into the bedroom and looked in her dresser. The lingerie drawers seemed more than half-full. I prowled through the rest of the condo. One lonely paperback in the living room, a Da Vinci Code knockoff. The second bedroom had been converted to an offi?ce very recently: it smelled of new carpet and plastic electronic component cases that were still out-gassing. Fake woodgrain fi?ling cabinets, fax, phone, computer, paper shredder. The bin beneath it was empty. I looked in the kitchen. The garbage can was also empty.

I sat on her Italian leather sofa and stared through the picture window at Elliott Bay. A container ship plowed heavily south and west to the docks. One ferry was slicing its way out, one in. Overhead the sky was bright and clear, but bluish grey clouds were slipping over the western horizon.

I reconstructed what had happened. Already shaken from my visit on Thursday, on Friday she had taken any incriminating fi?les from her offi?ce. On Saturday morning she had picked up the newspaper and read with mounting panic that someone had drugged half the crew on the Feral set: her minions had overstepped their bounds and someone had nearly died. She had stuffed a few days’ worth of underwear in a bag, with some vague notion of keeping out of the way until things blew over. But keeping out of whose way? Mine? The police? Her political cronies? Someone else? And where had she gone?

I opened her fi?ling cabinet. It was mostly empty; the green cardboard hanging fi?les, the buff folders, the fi?les, the paper, all smelled new. The labels on the hanging folders were unfaded, and there were very few of them. I leafed through what there was, but nothing occurred to me. I turned on her computer. No password screen. A green Carbonite backup icon at bottom right. I went to her most recent documents, scanned the folders, found one labeled Da Vinci, and smiled. I opened it. A quick look confi?rmed my guess: it was a list of passwords and user names, including the one for Carbonite. Sometimes people made it too easy. I copied it to the fl?ash drive on my key ring, and found myself humming. The odds of getting caught on the premises of a break-in increase exponentially once you pass the ten-minute mark. One more minute at the screen, in case something unexpected happened with Carbonite, then two minutes searching her papers.

I found her calendar and pulled it up.

It was all in personal shorthand: 5/14: JB 10:30. Usual. Wtd upd. 5/15

11:45 dtwn lun. push harder. 1:30 upd. Will JB get ETH? 5/18 . . . I wasn’t scheduled, which meant these entries were from before our encounter. I scanned the rest. An entry for the coming Monday caught my eye. 5/22:11:00—ETH!! Whoever JB was, she or he had come through. I copied that, too, just in case. Some of it was easy enough to guess at—

wanted update, downtown lunch—but I wouldn’t know who was pushing whom harder or about what until I identifi?ed JB and ETH. It took more than two minutes to fi?nd her bills because, rather than being fi?led neatly, they were tossed in a kitchen drawer. I found her cell phone bill, and noted the phone number, her car insurance information—she drove a Lincoln Navigator—and her credit card details.

IN ATLANTA I would have taken the information to Benny or Taeko and had what I needed an hour later. In Seattle, I had to do the grunt work myself. At least I could do it outside.

Gas Works Park. I’d seen it from Kick’s bedroom window. She’d said I’d like it. After mapping it on the MMI, I drove north, detoured past Kick’s house. Her van wasn’t there. Maybe it hadn’t been there all night. I refused to think about that.

Gas Works Park was the southern spit of Wallingford, a green tongue poking into Lake Union. It was the old city gasworks, turned into a park thirty years ago. Kick obviously liked this place, and perhaps Dornan would appreciate the postmodern picture of rusting gasworks surrounded by parkland, but to me it felt wrong. Natural beauty and heavy industry did not belong together.

I carried my laptop case along a broad path. To the east of a big hill, surrounded by grass, two of the old gas towers still stood, covered in graffi?ti and quietly rusting to themselves. To my left, the exhauster-compressor machinery left from the fi?fties had been bolted fi?rmly in place and painted thickly with cheerful enamels, an industrial jungle gym for small children. I couldn’t imagine wanting to bring children to play in a place like this. The grass might be green and the engines brightly painted, but the dirt must be drenched in contaminants.

Ahead of me, framed by sparkling water, a man threw a Frisbee for his red setter. The dog writhed impossibly up and up toward the sun and snapped the yellow plastic from the air and brought it to its owner, who threw it again. Over and over, joyously, tirelessly.

The breeze off the water was steady and strong. I climbed the hill by the water’s edge. At the top was a huge sundial. It took me a minute to work out how to tell the time and date, a task complicated by the fact that the clouds that had been on the horizon only an hour before now kept obscuring the sun. I wondered what kind of faith in the universe the artist must have had to create and build such a thing in Seattle. The city rose in a sheen of glass and chrome beyond the water, the Space Needle off to the right. Small craft plied to and fro. An arrowhead of geese sliced in to land, followed by a tiny seaplane. The sun came back out and the water turned navy blue, the various waves like cream lace. It looked like a sixties fantasy of what a science-fi?ction city of the future should look like, and I realized that that was the point, that this was a new kind of city for the New World, proud to show its history and heritage and dreams, even if that history was, to European eyes, sadly stunted.

I found a bench that looked down and across the water but was sheltered from the breeze. I took out Corning’s cell phone bill, wrote down the numbers that appeared more than once, and started calling.

“Hey, it’s Janice,” said a recorded voice. “I’m running errands but call me back, ’kay?” Janice: JB? No way of knowing. I tried the next number. “You have reached the law offi?ces of Leith, Bankersen, and Heshowitz, how may I help you?” A male voice. Seattle had the highest number of male receptionists I’d ever come across. “What kind of law do you specialize in?” I asked him. “We are corporate tax specialists.” “Could I have the names of your principals?” “Certainly.” None of them matched the initials. The next number. No reply. The next. Another male voice, but this one an entirely different animal. “Thank you for calling the reelection campaign offi?ces of Edward Thomas Hardy. I appreciate your support. I’m afraid all my lines are busy right now but your call is important to me, so please do leave your name and contact information, and I’ll try get back to you as soon as humanly possible.” Wordy. Like all elected offi?cials. ETH. I circled the number. I called the others, but got nothing of note.

I opened my laptop, hooked it to my phone, and while the networks sorted themselves out, I downloaded the calendar information from my fl?ash drive, and read it thoroughly. Then I ran a Web search on Edward Thomas Hardy.

It was slow work, using the cell network, but eventually I started getting results.

He was a Seattle city councillor, running for reelection. He had started fi?fteen years ago as an environmental zealot and was now the current chair of the Urban Development and Planning Committee. He had been instrumental in pushing through several of the zoning changes on the South Lake Union biotech development. An image search turned up pictures of a worried-looking man in his late forties. White. Unexpectedly deep-set hazel eyes. ETH. And someone called JB had “got” him for a meeting with Corning next week.

The Seattle City Council website told me that, in addition to two councillors and two alternates, the zoning committee had three legislative assistants, one of whom was Johnson Bingley. JB. Bingley turned out to be twenty-eight, recently married, and to have blond hair (and an expensive haircut) and a political science degree from UC Irvine. With a bit of work I turned up the abstract of his dissertation: a piece of nonsense about interstate politics that was all generalities in a blatantly cut-and-paste plagiaristic style. Bingo. Criminals looked for shortcuts. Entry-level politics were full of them. I did another long, slow search to make sure Bingley was the only staffer with the initials JB. He was it. But ETH was his boss. The question now was, on which side of righteousness did ETH fall?

A cloud scooted away from the sun and I shaded my eyes. I closed the laptop and unhooked my phone, weighed it. I didn’t know whom to call, Kick or Dornan, and I didn’t know what I’d say if they answered. I plugged it back in and started a deeper search on Edward Thomas Hardy.

I DROVE BACK up Myrtle, past Kick’s house. No van in the driveway. It was only midday, but traffi?c on 45th was almost stationary. It got hot in the car, but I didn’t want to roll up the windows and turn on the AC.

Traffi?c crawled over the bridge, and again through downtown. As I got closer to the warehouse my stomach tightened.

Kick’s van wasn’t in the parking lot. Where were they? What were they doing?

The set rang with the clang of hammer and wrench on metal pipe: people putting together a huge scaffold. It was hot. Joel hovered, looking worried, occasionally consulting what looked like a wiring diagram. Everyone—the costumers, Bernard, Peg—was carrying pipes, hauling on command, or standing back to admire the growing edifi?ce.

There was no sign of Kick or Dornan, and the food on the craft-services table was conspicuously packaged sandwiches and a coffee urn with the lid taped down.

“Any idea where they are?” I said to Peg.

She put down her end of a piece of scaffold. “Where who are?”

“Kick. Dornan.”

“Dornan’s her friend?”

No, Dornan’s my friend. “How about Rusen?”

“Editing.”

“Where?”

“On the Avid.”

I said merely, “It’s probably a good idea to wear gloves when you do this kind of work.”

I went back out into the parking lot, to the trailer, and knocked. Traffi?c roared in the distance. I knocked again. The door opened. Hot, rebreathed air rushed out. Rusen blinked at me. He had that can’t-change-focus look of someone who has spent twelve hours sitting in one place staring at a screen. He hadn’t shaved for at least twenty-four hours. He’d had even less sleep than I had.

“May I come in?”

“May . . . ? Sure, sure.”

Inside, images were frozen on six screens. He sat on the chair in front of them, seemed momentarily confused when I remained standing. “Something urgent?”

“Not urgent. But we do need to discuss your problems with OSHA and EPA.”

“Problems? Right. OSHA. EPA.” He focused on the screens, reached for the console, paused, hand above the big hockey-puck frame-by-frame advance control. “Do you mind if I just fi?nish this . . .”

Scene? Act? Track? I had no idea. As soon as his hand touched the controls, he seemed to lose touch with his verbal centers. I looked around until I found a chair, rolled it over, and watched for a while. He turned the big dial on the console, and one of the pictures would move forward. He’d dial it back, and forward again. He’d look at one of the other screens, punch a button, dial that back and forth. And another. Sîan Branwell stood and sat, stood and sat, stood and sat, turned and turned back, over and over. He muttered something to himself, chewed the cuticle on his right-hand ring fi?nger, dialed again. Nodded. Punched other buttons. Ran one of the pictures again. The turn of her head was subtly different. Perhaps two frames missing before the screen cut to her beginning to stand, then back. Or—no, he had zoomed in. I didn’t know you could do that. It was like watching someone play God, rearranging time, making the puppets dance differently. It didn’t look as though he were going to stop anytime soon.

“Rusen.”

“Um?” He didn’t look at me.

“Rusen.” I leaned forward, laid a fi?nger on the back of his hand. He blinked, focused on it. Blinked again. Looked at me. Reluctantly withdrew his hands from the console, tucked them under his thighs.

“Sorry. Boy howdy, that thing’s addictive.”

“Yes. We need to—” But he was focusing on the screens again. Visual capture. I studied the console. Identifi?ed what appeared to be the master power switch. I had no idea, though, if it was all saved to disk or whatever one did with these things. I looked again, until I began to understand the layout. Then I reached out and turned off one of the screens. He jerked as though he’d been shot. I turned off a second.

“No,” he said. “No.”

“It’s just the screens,” I said. And extinguished the others in rapid succession. “You haven’t slept, I’m guessing you haven’t eaten. There isn’t enough oxygen in here to sustain a bacterium, and we need to talk about a few things. I think you should take a break.”

He considered it, then reached out and punched a button. A background whine I hadn’t noticed powered down. He stretched. His spine cracked. He looked at his watch. Frowned.

“Let’s go eat something.”

He squinted and shielded his eyes from the sun before stepping down from the trailer, like a drunk leaving a bar in the middle of the day. I let him adjust and didn’t talk until we were sitting down in the corner of the set farthest from the scaffolding and he was biting into a turkey sandwich. I let him chew and swallow, chew and swallow, and look around for a minute.

I looked around, too. Where were they? I turned back to Rusen.

“How’s it going? The editing?”

“Good. Better than good. Working with the Avid’s making me wonder if I shouldn’t have shot in digital to begin with.”

I gestured for him to explain.

“The digital editing. It feels so fl?uid. And the quality . . . I don’t see the difference. I thought I would. We shot on fi?lm. Expensive, but better visual quality. Or that’s the conventional wisdom.” He shook his head. “So, anyhow, we take the fi?lm and make a digital copy, and I edit the copy. That way it doesn’t matter if I mess up. I’m just doing a rough cut. A real editor will do all the fi?ne work, and cut the negative.” He bit, chewed, swallowed. “But editing is . . . well, I’d no idea. The possibilities are pretty much endless. Imagine if we’d shot digital from the beginning. The effects, boy. I can make this fi?lm say anything on this machine. It’s like . . . it’s like statistics. I can rearrange the story completely. Which is good, because I’ve completely changed the ending. Or I think I have. Which means we have to change the beginning. Otherwise it won’t make sense when we blow everything up.”

“You’re going to blow up my warehouse?”

“Not literally. But we’ll build around that scaffolding, shoot some stuff on the soundstage, then take it outside, and blow it all up in the parking lot. At least I think we will. The director was supposed to fi?gure all this stuff out with the stunt guy. But if we’d been doing this in digital, there’s all kinds of effects . . .” His eyes lost focus again.

“So why didn’t you just shoot in digital to begin with?”

“Because . . .” He shrugged. Chewed. Swallowed. Sipped coffee. “It’s my fi?rst fi?lm.”

“It’s a backdoor pilot.”

Someone dropped some scaffolding. Hoots, shouts. All good-natured.

“Boy, I know that. Finkel reminded me of that just today. But it’s a fi?lm, too. And I can cut it that way, so it gets its time in the light.”

“Finkel is back?”

“Didn’t I tell you? No, clearly. This morning. He buried his son yesterday and got on a plane. You should meet him.”

I had absolutely no wish to stare grief in the face. “Later. Meanwhile, it might be an idea not to try to penny-pinch on the set, particularly when it comes to safety. Those people building the scaffold should be wearing goggles, and gloves.” They should be professionals, but that was his business.

“And you should be running the air-conditioning.”

He half stood. Looked around. “We’re not?” I let him work that one out for himself: the shirt sticking to him, the scaffolders stopping to wipe their brows. His body was also beginning to realize it was exhausted. His eyelids drooped, the muscles over his cheekbones sagged. “You’re right. We should fi?x that.”

“It would make OSHA happy. As would gloves and goggles and protective headgear.” I reminded myself that getting involved in others’ problems led to nothing but trouble.

He put the half-chewed sandwich down, too tired to eat any more. Or maybe it was just that his appetite was ruined knowing that, had OSHA walked onto the set while he was lost to his digital edit world, they would have closed it down.

“The editing’s important,” he said.

“If you say so.”

“I’ll pay more attention.”

“Someone should.”

“I need to look at the budget. Protective gear . . . But the editing . . .”

His focus began to drift again.

This wasn’t my problem. And Kick wasn’t here.

I stood. “Well, I’m glad Finkel’s back. He can help.”

“Finkel. Of course.” He stood, and walked with me to the door.

“AC,” I reminded him. After all, Kick would be back at some point.

“Right.” He called over to Joel and suggested the AC. Joel, in turn, called over one of the hands who didn’t seem to be doing much. Bri’s young friend.

The sun was still shining. After the heat of the warehouse, the air in the parking lot was cool and refreshing. I pointed the remote at the Audi, but Rusen beckoned me over to the second Hippoworks trailer, opened the door.

“He’ll want to meet you,” he said as we went in, at which point it was too late.

Finkel stood when we entered. He was a little under average height, and his eyes were wide and his hair parted just to the right of where it should be, for his cut. Grey showed strongly at the roots. Grief was a strong wind, blowing away the habits and vanities of a lifetime. There were no papers on his desk.

“Anton, this is Aud Torvingen. The owner. The one I told you about.”

“Pleased to meet you,” he said, and shook my hand, and gave me a huge smile that belonged to someone else, perhaps the person he had been before his son died.

“I’m very sorry about your son,” I said, and because there is no possible reply to that, other than thank you, which to me always felt like thanking your executioner, I said, “I’m afraid I don’t know his name.”

“Galen,” he said. “The last two years he always told people to call him Len. I hated that. But I understood. I called myself Tony when I was twenty.”

He smiled at some memory. His lips were the color of old-fashioned rouge at the center, but the edges were dry. He had probably forgotten to drink plenty of water on the plane.

When Julia had died, I hadn’t slept for days. “Well, it looks as though you got back just in time. Rusen needs help with some production details.”

“Yes?” he said, turning to Rusen.

“Nothing that can’t wait,” Rusen said.

“No. Tell me.”

“Protective gear. Goggles and things.”

“The crew won’t wear them?”

“Money. Do you have any idea what these things cost?”

“Do you?” From the straightening of Rusen’s neck I took this to be a fl?ash of the pre-grief Finkel. “Besides, who says we have to buy new? Is there a clause somewhere? Half the people on set will have something at home they could use. Or maybe we could work out a rental agreement with a hardware store for product placement.”

“Product placement? We’ve fi?nished all the shooting except for the fi?nale and a couple of effects.”

“Never too late for product placement,” he said, though with an abstract air, as though he couldn’t believe he was talking about such things when his son lay dead, dead.

“Right,” I said. “I can see that you two are going to be pretty busy. I’ll leave you to it. It was good to meet you.”

I closed the door quietly, and stood for a moment on the tarmac with my eyes closed, remembering the feel of the world when I was grieving—

like a cold wind on a chipped tooth.

Kick’s white van was backed up fi?ve yards from the warehouse door. Someone, hidden by the back doors which were both open, was pulling something heavy along the bed preparatory to hefting it out, someone humming Kevin Barry. Dornan.

A pause in the humming, followed by a low oomph, and a murmured,

“What do they put in these things?” He stepped backwards into view, holding two cases of soda with one of bottled water balanced on top. He started to lift one hand to push the van door closed, but the weight was too much for one arm. He pondered. Tried with the other hand.

I stepped up behind him. “I’ve got it.”

“Christ almighty.” He clutched convulsively at the water, which nearly slid off, and started a smile which was abruptly extinguished. “Torvingen. What are you doing here?”

I raised my eyebrows. “It’s my property.” The words glinted between us, naked as a sword jerked halfway from its sheath. My property.

“So it is.”

Nothing on his face but wariness. “Do you need a hand?”

“I’ve got it. Thanks.” No. More than wariness. Resentment? Anger?

“I’ll get the doors, then.” I put my hand on the warm metal. Kick’s van.

“You’ll have to back off.” After a moment he backed up two steps. My biceps bunched as I swung the doors shut. “Kick around?”

“She’s at her sister’s.”

“Her sister’s.”

The case of coffee slipped a little. He had to grab it with one hand. I made no move to help. Her sister’s.

“You should carry those in.”

“My time is my own, I believe.”

“They look heavy,” I said.

“Well, yes, I suppose they are.” He didn’t budge.

We measured each other. I could break his spine with one hand. We both knew it. “Is she coming here later?”

“I’m not her keeper,” he said.

“No?” He lifted his chin, and it would have taken just one step, one swing with a crossing elbow, to break his jaw. “You look tired. Did you have a long evening?”

His pupils were tight and I saw him swallow, but he kept his voice steady. “We had a perfectly lovely evening, thank you.”

He had cried when Tammy left him. He had helped me countless times. He was my friend. I breathed, in and out, and took a step back. Gravel rolled and crunched under my boots as I walked away.

I got in my car. Reversed carefully. Signaled before I merged with Alaskan Way, then I called Corning’s cell phone. “You know who this is,” I said. “You missed our Monday meeting, but don’t worry, I’ll fi?nd you.”

I would fi?nd Corning and slam her head in a car door. First I would fi?nd Edward Thomas Hardy and break both his thumbs.

I hadn’t even known Kick had a sister.

I CALLED AHEAD, and this time a bouncy-voiced assistant answered. I explained that I was in Seattle visiting some real estate interests and checking up on the yacht they were building for me down at the lake. I was considering the possibility of moving here, of making a signifi?cant contribution to Hardy’s campaign, assuming I liked the cut of his jib. The assistant was very happy to slot me in, right away. I gave my name as Catherine Holt. I’d be there in fi?fteen minutes. They wouldn’t have time for meeting prep or any kind of background check.

Hardy’s reelection offi?ces were in Fremont, a neighborhood immediately west of Wallingford, along the ship canal. I drove back north. The Audi’s lack of connection with the feel of the road annoyed me. I drove faster than I should, longing for the bite of tire on pavement. When I got there, the assistant ushered me into Hardy’s offi?ce—which, with its pressed-wood furniture and artifi?cial-fi?ber carpet did not give the impression of wealthy corruption, though perhaps he was just smart—and left us alone.

Old Ed Tom Hardy stood and smiled a politician’s smile, and came out from behind his desk. He extended his hand.

I studied him. Medium height. Face thinner than his body.

“Hardy,” he said, in a resonant voice, hand still out. “It’s a pleasure.”

“Not really,” I said, and sat.

He wasn’t stupid. He pulled in his hand and studied me in turn. “I take it you don’t really intend to make a huge campaign contribution.”

“No.”

“And that your name isn’t Catherine Holt.”

“No.”

“Should I call the police?”

“Have you done something wrong?”

“You look as though you want me to have.” His voice buzzed very slightly and he edged prudently behind his desk, but like Dornan, he wasn’t going to roll over without a fi?ght. The difference was, Edward Thomas Hardy wasn’t my friend.

“I’m considering making you eat your chair.”

Unlike Dornan, his chin went down, rather than up. “I have no doubt you could do that.” His Adam’s apple bobbed, but when he spoke again his voice was admirably steady. “We could begin by you telling me what you think I’ve done.”

“The zoning committee.”

“Ah.” He sat wearily. “I’m sorry if your parents have lost their lease, or your brother his job, but Seattle needs the South Lake Union development.”

“I don’t have an opinion about South Lake Union.”

“I don’t understand.” No apology, no irritation, no fake smile. He was pretty good.

“Do you know somebody called Karenna Beauchamps Corning?”

He opened his mouth, and his lips began to shape no, but then his eyes fl?ickered, up and left, as he remembered something.

I nodded. “You’re meeting her Friday. Johnson Bingley set it up.”

“He’s one of the council admins.” No guilt in his voice. But perhaps he was an excellent poker player.

“I know.”

He was smart enough to wait and see where I was going.

“Did you read about that drug incident in the warehouse district last week?” Wary nod. “The drugs were administered by Corning’s proxy. She wants the leaseholder to go bankrupt and leave the land vacant so that she can buy from the owner at a reduced price. I think she’s meeting you on Friday to ask for a zoning variance on a lot, or several lots, along the Duwamish, which she’ll develop for a profi?t. I think Johnson Bingley will get a cut of that profi?t for introducing you.”

There was a very long pause. “That’s illegal.”

I knew that tone. I’d heard my mother use it at a press conference when she’d been sandbagged by a question about improprieties by one of her staffers.

“Yes.”

“You don’t appear to be accusing me of improper behavior.”

“Not at this time. I understand some of the realities of politics. Sometimes there are good reasons for zoning variances. I’m simply pointing out that Corning is a criminal.”

“Perhaps you should take the matter to the police.”

“Perhaps I should.”

He acknowledged the called bluff with a long blink.

“The police can’t help me get what I want. You can.”

Another pause. “I don’t even know your name.”

I made a decision. “Aud Torvingen.” I leaned forward and held out my hand. He shook. A good handshake, the kind my mother would classify as under siege but not overwhelmed, morally or politically. “I’m the owner of the property Corning had been devaluing—she was my broker. I’m hoping that we can help each other.”

“And how do you think I could help you, exactly?” He didn’t need to ask how I could help him; he was a politician running for reelection, and if I owned industrial property, I had money.

“Information. About zoning and development in Seattle. How much would Corning have made if she’d succeeded?”

It took him a moment to change gears, but politicians live or die by their ability to seize a proffered alliance. “Let’s start at the beginning. Tell me about your warehouse.”

“It’s a cross-shipping facility on Diagonal Avenue South.”

“Near the Federal Center?”

“Yes.”

“That whole swatch of Duwamish is designated wetland and the environmental lobby want it declared an estuarine restoration site. We couldn’t buy your land, of course, if you didn’t want to sell, though the recent rulings on eminent domain are interesting, but if the surrounding land were purchased by the city and protected, your plot would be almost impossible to develop.”

“Almost?”

“Impossible, period, if you want to make a profi?t.”

“It’s just a profi?t thing, then?”

“What else is there in real estate?”

I studied him. “I’ve read your fi?rst campaign statement: it is part of a city councillor’s job to be a steward of the city’s natural resources.”

He swiveled his chair this way and that. “That was a long, long time ago. In the years since, it has been represented to me, forcefully, that my job is jobs and profi?t.”

“Let’s pretend, just for a minute, that you still believe you are a steward of the city’s natural resources. Tell me about the wetland zoning, the estuarine restoration.”

“You really want to talk about the environment?”

I matched his former, light ironic tone. “What else is there in real estate?”

His expression didn’t change, but his cheeks pinked slightly and where his collar was tight against his neck, I could see his carotid pulse. Hope was something to be feared in politics.

I upped the ante. “I don’t need to make a profi?t. Tell me about the wetland.”

He tapped his appointment book, thinking; opened it, checked his schedule. “Would you like some tea or coffee?”

I accepted. He left the room for a while. When he came back he was carrying two mugs of coffee and a large rolled map tucked under his arm. His face was damp and his hands smelled of lotion. He unrolled the map and anchored it to his desk with his coffee mug and appointment book.

“The Duwamish,” he said, pointing, unfastening one shirt cuff. “It used to teem with salmon and heron. You could dig oysters and shoot duck.”

I looked at the concrete-straight lines.

“Harbor Island, here, is a Superfund site.”

Spiky, industrial geometry of piers and jetties and pipelines where the Duwamish met Elliott Bay.

“As warehouses and industrial complexes close, we’ve been buying up land, slapping restoration orders on it, and waiting for the economy to turn around so we can remediate.”

“How much?”

“To do it properly?” He rolled up his sleeves while he mused. “Hundreds of millions. Just labeling the land ‘wetland’ costs a fortune. The regulations are tortuous.” He opened a fi?ling cabinet and selected a stack of paper. “Here. Director’s Rule 6-2003, City of Seattle Department of Design, Construction and Land Use: The Requirements for Wetland Delineation Reports. The whole thing is a rule about the presentation of the rules of the mapping of wetland. Thousands of words, none of which even begin to say what wetland is, and why it’s important.”

“But my land has already been designated wetland.”