He looked up at her from his height of one foot smaller. Looming over the driver, the woman seemed less the fat lady and more a regal presence. She leaned down, put her face in his face, and spoke in tones that did not carry.

The cabby nearly ripped the door off the hinges in his haste to open it. He jumped into the cab and laid a squealing strip of burning rubber all the way out of the square.

Mallory nodded in rare approval of the giantess.

CHAPTER 3

Charles Butler tapped his toes and willed the elevator to move faster. He would be ten minutes late if he was lucky, if the elevator made no more stops. He looked down at his shorter fellow passengers who had conspired to slow his descent by stopping the elevator on every other floor.

Of course, Mallory would be on time for their appointment sixty blocks south and as many flights down. She would be knocking on the door of his empty office on the hour, not a second before or after. She was as compulsive about time as she was about neatness.

And now he remembered he had two things to be anxious about. His new office, a recently vacated apartment across the hall from his residence, would be best described as an Escher maze of tall stacks of paperwork and books, an unholy gathering of spiders and dust.

The elevator stopped again, and he glared at the boarding passenger. He was taking every stop quite personally now. These people had had all morning to ride the elevator up and down as much as they liked. However, on the upside of slowing down, Mallory might decide not to wait around. There might be a reprieve long enough to give the office a proper cleaning.

This morning, he had made a stab at straightening up, but correspondence still littered every surface. Quarterly tax forms, state and federal, bulged out of desk drawers and cardboard boxes, all waiting on a day when he was in the filing mode. And then there was all the added paperwork that went along with owning an apartment building. The hundred-odd books and a few years' worth of journals were only in proximity to the new bookshelves.

How would she react to the mess? She might assume he'd been vandalized. He could walk in behind her and feign shock.

Mrs Ortega, his cleaning woman, had arrived while he was scrambling around on the floor, trying desperately to clear a few square feet of the carpet. Putting his head out of the office door as she was turning her key in the lock of his apartment, he had smiled at her, his eyes filled with hope. Her own eyes had turned hard. Fat chance I'm going in there, said the back of her as she had disappeared into his residence which was her territory and all that she might be held accountable for.

He knew Mrs Ortega believed him to be a visitor from somewhere else, perhaps some point straight up, miles out, but nowhere on the surface of her own earth which was square, shaped by the streets of a Latino neighborhood in Brooklyn.

And he supposed he was a bit alien. He had grown up in the sheltered community of academia and then transferred to the closer-knit community of a research institute without stopping off in real life until very recently. A year ago, when he had given Mrs Ortega the new address, she never asked why he would leave the luxurious boulevards of the Upper East Side for the narrower, dirty streets of Soho. She had always known the ways of out-worlders were not the ways of Brooklynites.

In the last few minutes before he'd had to leave off the cleaning up and straightening up to keep his uptown appointment sixty stories in the sky, he had considered reaming the office out with a blow torch.

Now, his stomach was rising, independent of the rest of him, as the elevator stopped again. A woman and a child got on. As the doors were closing, the child reached out and pushed ten buttons.

Mrs Ortega's mother was Irish and had the same green eyes and red-gold hair as this stranger at the door. But Ma had not been a cop. Mrs Ortega smelled cop when the woman ordered her to open the door of Mr Butler's office across the hall. There was never a question of cop, or not a cop.

She turned the key in the lock and opened the door on a room in hell for cleaning women who had been sinners while they lived. She didn't like having the key to the office. Mr Butler might get the idea that she would one day clean here, too. No way, not Shannon Ortega. She knew her rights. He couldn't make her clean it, not this mess.

She had been happy enough when he took this apartment over for his office, sweeping the whole nasty mess of papers and books across the hall. And it gave him another place to be, not underfoot while she was vacuuming and scrubbing. But no way was she going to deal with this pit, this mother of all dust-collectors. All that she approved of were the freshly painted walls. The windows were at least a bucket of ammonia's worth of grime on each pane, and in the spaces between the tall stacks of paper, spiders were spinning elaborate webs with a confident sense of permanence. She had never ventured into the other rooms to see what he had done with them. She had a bum heart.

Oh, kiss a dead rat if the cop wasn't smiling. And it was not a friendly smile or a happy smile. A cat's smile it was, a cat with a live mouse in its teeth.

In the black of the stopped elevator, suspended fifteen floors above the ground, the passengers were speculating on what to do when the elevator fell. One passenger had read somewhere that it was a good idea to jump up and down. That way, the man explained to his captive audience, you had a fifty-fifty chance of being in the air when the elevator crashed.

"And breaking your legs," added Charles. "You're still falling at the same rate of speed as the elevator."

Oddly enough, the eleven-year-old boy was the only one to grasp the principle of free-fall and gravity. The other passengers were now jumping up and down in the dark.

On the other side of the jammed doors, a fire marshal was urging them to remain calm via a loudspeaker. "Knock that crap off, you idiots!"

Mrs Ortega was backing up to the wall. The cop had neatly cut off her escape route to the door.

"No English," she said, when, in fact, she did not speak any Spanish. She was fourth-generation American born and spoke only Newyorkese.

After much repetition of street names, Charles and the non-English-speaking cab driver were finally in agreement. Once under way, the cab driver was disappointingly law-abiding, and not at all competitive with his fellow drivers, never changing lanes once in forty-three blocks, actually slowing down for yellow lights, and carefully looking to the left and right before proceeding across the intersection on a green light.

This was outrageous.

Charles tightly clasped his hands in his lap, lest they act as independent culprits. There was really no need to kill the driver, not on his very first day as a cabby. The next passenger would certainly do that.

Charles met Mrs Ortega in the hall. She passed him by with her head lowered, not seeing anything but the carpet, determined that nothing would halt her steady progress down the corridor to the elevator, to freedom, muttering "Damn cops", in return for his cheerful "Goodbye. See you next week."

The office door was open. He walked through the foyer and into a perfect world of order. The windows glistened, the carpet was clear of the paper avalanche which had buried it on the very day it was put down, and the naked desk was dark wood, just as he remembered it from the Sotheby's auction of five weeks ago. Neat file-holders with price tags on them were stacked on top of the antique mahogany filing cabinet. Other file-holders, sans tags, were being put in their proper drawers by hands with long red nails. Twelve years of trade journals and a small library of books now filled the shelves of one wall.