The accidental death of the bestselling author’s son-not to mention the violent murder of the writer’s father, and the subsequent shooting of the cook’s killer-had been big news. Danny could have insisted that In the After-Hours Restaurant be the debut novel by Daniel Baciagalupo; their complaining aside, and however reluctantly, Danny’s publishers would have agreed. But Danny was content to let his next novel (it would be his ninth) be Daniel Baciagalupo’s debut.

In the After-Hours Restaurant got a warm reception and mostly good reviews-the author was often praised for a nowadays-atypical “restraint.” Maybe the oft-repeated restraint word was what bothered the writer, though it was meant as praise. Danny would never know what Ketchum thought of In the After-Hours Restaurant, but restraint had never been a prominent part of the logger’s vocabulary-not in the category of admired qualities, anyway. Would Danny Angel’s last novel have satisfied the former river driver’s demand that Danny let himself go-that is, be more daring as a writer? (Apparently, Danny didn’t think so.)

“You keep skirting the darker subjects,” Ketchum had told him. In the case of In the After-Hours Restaurant, would the nightly efforts of the gentle sous chef to teach himself his illustrious father’s trade constitute more of the same “writing around the periphery of things”-as Ketchum had unkindly put it? (Danny must have thought so; otherwise, why wouldn’t he have proudly put Daniel Baciagalupo’s name on the new novel?)

“His most subtle work,” one reviewer had written glowingly about In the After-Hours Restaurant. In Ketchum’s unsubtle vocabulary, the subtle word had never been uttered in praise.

“His most symbolic undertaking,” another critic had commented.

There was no telling what Ketchum might have said about the symbolic word, Danny knew, but the writer didn’t doubt what the fearless riverman would have thought: Symbolism and subtlety and restraint added up to “dodging the squeamish stuff,” which Ketchum had already criticized Danny for.

And would the old logger have liked how Danny answered the repeated political questions he was asked during the promotional trips he took to publicize In the After-Hours Restaurant? (In 2005, the novelist was still answering political questions-and there were a few translation trips for In the After-Hours Restaurant yet to come.)

“Yes, it’s true-I continue to live in Canada, and will continue to live here,” Danny had said, “though the reason for my leaving the United States has been, as an old friend of my family once put it, removed.” (It had been Ketchum, of course, who’d used the removed word in reference to the deceased cowboy-more than once.)

“No, it’s not true that I am ‘politically opposed,’ as you say, to living in the U.S.,” Danny had said, many times, “and-just because I live in Canada, and I’m a Canadian citizen-I do not intend to stop writing about Americans, or about behavior I associate with being an American. It could even be argued that living in a foreign country-especially in Canada, which is right across the border-enables me to see America more clearly, or at least from a slightly less American perspective.” (Ketchum would certainly have recognized the writer’s sources for that answer, though the combative woodsman wouldn’t necessarily have appreciated how tactful Danny usually was in answering those questions regarding the novelist’s political opposition to his country of birth.)

“It’s too soon to say,” the writer was always saying-in response to how the attacks of September 11, and President Bush’s retaliation to those attacks, had affected the United States; in response to where the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were headed; in response to whether or not Canada would be dragged into a recession, or a depression. (Because the U.S. was fast approaching one, or both, wasn’t it? From the Canadian journalists, that was generally the implication.)

It was going on four years since Ketchum had called the United States “an empire in decline;” what might the old logger have called the country now? In Canada, the questions Danny was asked were increasingly political. Most recently, it had been someone at the Toronto Star who’d asked Danny a battery of familiar questions.

Wasn’t it true that the United States was “hopelessly overextended, militarily”? Wasn’t the federal government “wallowing under massive debt”? And would the writer care to comment on America ’s “belligerent, warmongering nature”? Wasn’t the bestselling author’s “former country,” as the Canadian journalist referred to the United States, “in decay”?

For how much longer, Danny wondered, would the answers to these and other insinuating questions fall into the too-soon-to-say category? The writer knew that he couldn’t get away with that answer forever. “I am a slow processor-I mean, as a writer,” Danny liked to preface his remarks. “And I’m a fiction writer-meaning that I won’t ever write about the September Eleventh attacks, though I may use those events, when they’re not so current, and then only in the context of a story of my own devising.” (The combined evasiveness and vagueness of that cautious manifesto might have elicited from Ketchum something along the lines of the embattled woodsman’s mountains-of-moose-shit expletive.)

After all, Danny was on record for saying that the 2000 U.S. election-the one Bush “stole” from Gore-was, indeed, a “theft.” How could the writer not comment on the 2004 version, when Bush had beaten John Kerry with questionable tactics and for the worst of all reasons? In Danny’s view, John Kerry had been a hero twice-first in the war in Vietnam, later in his protests against it. Yet Kerry was viewed with disfavor by America ’s bully patriots, who were either stupid or stubborn enough to still be defending that misbegotten war.

What Danny had said to the media was that his so-called former country occasionally made him remember and appreciate Samuel Johnson’s oft-quoted “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” Regrettably, that wasn’t all Danny said. In some instances, sounding like Ketchum, the writer had gone on to say that in the case of the 2004 U.S. election, the scoundrel was not only George W. Bush; it was every dumber-than-dog-shit American voter who’d believed that John Kerry wasn’t patriotic enough to be the U.S. president.

Those remarks would be repeated-especially that bit about the “bully patriots,” not to mention singling out “every dumber-than-dog-shit American voter.” The novelist Daniel Baciagalupo had indeed written and published eight novels under the nom de plume of Danny Angel, and Danny and his father had fled the United States and come to Canada-an act of emigration to evade a madman who wanted to kill them, a crazy ex-cop who eventually did kill Danny’s dad-but the way it appeared to most of the world was that Daniel Baciagalupo had chosen to stay in Canada for political reasons.

As for Danny, he was getting tired of denying it; also, sounding like Ketchum was easier. Danny, pretending to be Ketchum, had commented on a recent poll: Twice as many Americans had expressed more unrestrained loathing at the prospect of gay marriage than they’d registered even mild anxiety about the outcome of the war in Iraq. “Bush’s regressive gay-bashing is reprehensible,” the writer had said. (A comment like that further contributed to Danny’s political reputation; sounding like Ketchum was very quotable.)

On the refrigerator in his Toronto kitchen, Danny had compiled a list of questions for Ketchum. But they didn’t look like a list; they hadn’t been assembled in an orderly way. There were many small scraps of paper taped to the fridge. Because Danny had dated each note, the recorded information on the door of the refrigerator resembled a kind of calendar of how the war in Iraq was proceeding. Soon the fridge would be covered.