“ La Tenda,” Silvestro said, with feeling. “‘The Curtain.’”

“It sounds ominous to me,” Dominic had told the young chef. “I wouldn’t want to eat in a place with that name.”

“I think, Silvestro, you should save this name for the very first restaurant you own-when you become an owner-chef, which you certainly will!” Arnaud said.

“ La Tenda,” Silvestro repeated, fondly, his warm brown eyes watering with tears.

“It’s too Italian,” Dominic Baciagalupo told the emotional young man. “This restaurant may not be strictly French, but it’s not Italian, either.” If the former Patrice were given an Italian name, what would Ketchum say? the cook was thinking, while at the same time he saw the absurdity of his argument-he whose Sicilian meat loaf and penne alla puttanesca would, after the Christmas holiday, be added to the more low-key menu.

The baffled Patrice and the shocked Silvestro stared at the cook in disbelief. They were all at a standstill. Dominic thought: I should ask Daniel to come up with a name-he’s the writer! That was when Silvestro broke the silence. “What about your name, Dominic?” the young chef said.

“Not Baciagalupo!” the cook cried, alarmed. (If the cowboy didn’t kill him, Dominic knew that Ketchum would!)

“Talk about too Italian!” Arnaud said affectionately.

“I mean what your name means, Dominic,” Silvestro said. Patrice Arnaud hadn’t guessed Baciagalupo’s meaning, though the words were similar in French. “‘Kiss of the Wolf,’” Silvestro said slowly-the emphasis equally placed on both the Kiss and the Wolf.

Arnaud shuddered. He was a short, strongly built man with closely cropped gray hair and a sophisticated smile-he wore dark trousers, sharply pressed, and always an elegant but open-necked shirt. He was a man who made ceremony seem natural; at once polite and philosophical, Patrice was a restaurateur who understood what was worthwhile about the old-fashioned while knowing instantly when change was good.

“Ah, well-Kiss of the Wolf!-why didn’t you tell me, Dominic?” Arnaud impishly asked his loyal friend. “Now there’s a name that is seductive and modern, but it also has an edge!”

Oh, Kiss of the Wolf had an edge, all right, the cook was thinking-though that wouldn’t be the most salient response Ketchum might make to the restaurant’s new name. Dominic didn’t want to imagine what the old logger would say when he heard about it. “Mountains of moose shit!” Ketchum might declare, or something worse.

Wasn’t it risky enough that the cook had taken back his real name? In an Internet world, what danger did it present that there was a Dominic Baciagalupo back in action? (At least Ketchum was somewhat relieved to learn that, at the height of her phonetic sensibilities, Nunzi had misspelled the Baciacalupo word!)

But, realistically thinking, how would it be possible for a retired deputy sheriff in Coos County, New Hampshire, to discover that a restaurant called Kiss of the Wolf in Toronto, Ontario, was the English translation of the phonetically made-up name of Baciagalupo? And don’t forget, the cook reassured himself-the cowboy is as old as Ketchum, who’s eighty-three!

If I’m not safe now, I never will be, Dominic was thinking as he came into the narrow, bustling kitchen of Patrice-soon to be renamed Kiss of the Wolf. Well, it’s a world of accidents, isn’t it? In such a world, more than the names would keep changing.

DANNY ANGEL WISHED with all his heart that he had never given up the name Daniel Baciagalupo, not because he wanted to be the more innocent boy and young man he’d once been-or even because Daniel Baciagalupo was his one true name, the only one his parents had given him-but because the fifty-eight-year-old novelist believed it was a better name for a writer. And the closer the novelist came to sixty, the less he felt like a Danny or an Angel; that his father had all along insisted on the Daniel name made more and more sense to the son. (Not that it was always easy for a stay-at-home, work-at-home writer, who was almost sixty, to share a house with his seventy-six-year-old dad. They could be a contentious couple.)

Given the disputed presidential election in the United States-“the Florida fiasco,” as Ketchum called George W. Bush’s “theft” of the presidency from Al Gore, the result of a 5-4 Supreme Court vote along partisan lines-the faxes from Ketchum were often incendiary. Gore had won the popular vote. The Republicans stole the election, both Danny and his dad believed, but the cook and his son didn’t necessarily share Ketchum’s more extreme beliefs-namely, that they were “better off being Canadians,” and that America, which Ketchum obdurately called an “asshole country,” deserved its fate.

WHERE ARE THE ASSASSINS WHEN YOU WANT ONE?

Ketchum had faxed. He didn’t mean George W. Bush; Ketchum meant that someone should have killed Ralph Nader. (Gore would have beaten Bush in Florida if Nader hadn’t played the spoiler role.) Ketchum believed that Ralph Nader should be bound and gagged-“preferably, in a child’s defective car seat”-and sunk in the Androscoggin.

During the second Bush-Gore presidential debate, Bush criticized President Clinton’s use of U.S. troops in Somalia and the Balkans. “I don’t think our troops ought to be used for what’s called nation-building,” the future president said.

YOU WANT TO WAIT AND SEE HOW THAT LYING LITTLE FUCKER WILL FIND A WAY TO USE OUR TROOPS? YOU WANT TO BET THAT “NATION-BUILDING” WON’T BE PART OF IT?

Ketchum had faxed.

But Danny didn’t relish America ’s impending disgrace-not from the Canadian perspective, particularly. He and his dad had never wanted to leave their country. To the extent it was possible for an internationally bestselling author to not make a big deal of changing his citizenship, Danny Angel had tried to play down his politics, though this had been harder to do after East of Bangor was published in ’84; his abortion novel was certainly political.

The process of Danny and his dad being admitted to Canada as new citizens was a slow one. Danny had applied as self-employed; the immigration lawyer representing him had categorized the writer as “someone who participates at a world-class level in cultural activities.” Danny made enough money to support himself and his father. They’d both passed the medical exam. While they were living in Toronto on visitors’ visas, it had been necessary for them to cross the border every six months to have their visas validated; also, they’d had to apply for Canadian citizenship at a Canadian consulate in the United States. (Buffalo was the closest American city to Toronto.)

An assistant to the Minister of Immigration and Citizenship had discouraged them from a so-called fast-track application. In their case, what was the hurry? The famous writer wasn’t rushing to change countries, was he? (The immigration lawyer had forewarned Danny that Canadians were a little suspicious of success; they tended to punish it, not reward it.) In fact, to escape undue attention, the cook and his son had made the slowest possible progress in their application for Canadian citizenship. The process had taken four, almost five years. But now, with the Florida fiasco, there’d been comments in the Canadian media about the writer Danny Angel’s “defection;” his “giving up on the United States” when he did, more than a decade ago, made the author appear “prescient”-or so the Toronto Globe and Mail had said.

It didn’t help that the film adapted from East of Bangor had released in theaters only recently-in ’99-and the movie had won a couple of Academy Awards in 2000. Early in the New Year, 2001, a joint session of Congress would meet to certify the electoral vote in the States; now that there was going to be a U.S. president who opposed abortion rights, it came as no surprise to Danny and his dad that the writer’s liberal abortion politics were back in the news. And writers were more in the news in Canada than in the United States -not only for what they wrote but for what they said and did.