Traffic was finally light at this hour on a Sunday night, and in one of those miracles you shouldn't go through life counting on, there were no vehicles rushing out of the cross street to cream themselves against the side of the truck at that particular instant, only a panel truck delivering tomorrow morning's New York Post, and of course those trucks never travel at more than seven miles an hour — union rules — so its operator had plenty of time to stop, to honk, and to deliver, loudly, a monograph on the encroaching miscreant's pedigree.

The three guys who'd taken their cars away were just then returning, but as Mikey screamed at them they reversed and ran off again to get the cars back, while two other guys ran to the little red Audi 900 parked behind where the driver had placed his truck, and Mikey shrieked, "After it! Get it! Get that guy! Get that truck!" — all of which was unnecessary, because that's what they were all doing.

"For cryin out loud," the driver said. "They'll steal anything in New York."

One of the few guys still standing around, not running hither and yon, gave the driver a New York look. "You wanna make a comment?"

"Not me," said the driver, and a large black SUV, a Chrysler Town Country LX, raced past, headed down Amsterdam Avenue. The driver had time to notice that the Chrysler had doctor's license plates, that it was being driven much faster than most doctor-operated vehicles, and that the traffic light was still red at that intersection down there, although just as the Chrysler arrived and the New York Post delivery truck finally cleared out of the way, the light snapped green and the Chrysler tore on through, only then hitting its brakes.

So did the truck, by now almost to the next corner. All those red brake lights flashed on down there, and now the red Audi leaped away from the curb in pursuit.

But the truck was stopping, and so was the Chrysler, right next to it. Whoever was driving the truck now jumped out of it to get into the front passenger seat in the Chrysler, while the Chrysler's right-side rear door slid back to open and a truly huge man-monster climbed out, carrying an axe.

"Holy Toledo!" the driver cried, as the huge man swung the axe twice at the nearest tires on the left rear of the truck, making two sharp reports very much like gunfire. He then turned to heave the axe at the fast-approaching Audi.

To avoid getting an axe through the windshield, the Audi veered into the rear of the truck as the man-monster climbed back into the Chrysler, which immediately hustled around the corner and out of sight, so that when the three cars that had earlier gone away came screaming back around the block, there was nothing to be seen but a disabled truck and, tucked under its tail, an Audi, starting to smoke though not yet to burn, while the two guys who had been in the Audi now kept trying to run away from it but spent most of their time falling down.

The driver and Mikey and some others walked the block and a half to the truck and the Audi, but as they neared the mess, the Audi did start to burn. Stopping, the driver said, "You know, when a car catches fire, what usually kinda happens next is the gas tank blows."

"He's right, Mikey," said one of the others.

So they all turned around and walked the other way, toward the closed but not empty O.J. Bar Grill. As they walked, the driver said, "You know what this means, I hope."

Now it was Mikey who gave him the New York look. "Tell me, pal," he said.

"This means," the driver assured him, "a whole shitpot of overtime."

23

"I SWITCHED YOUR seat," Medrick said.

At seven-fifteen in the morning, Dortmunder wasn't ready for trick questions like that. "Into what?" he said.

"Another seat." Medrick seemed as bright-eyed and alert at this awful hour as he had while board-gaming Dortmunder into the ground all afternoon yesterday. "I was awake all night thinking about it," he explained, "and now I know what to do. So I need a seat with a phone, and I need you in the seat next to me. So now you got an aisle—"

"I like an aisle," Dortmunder said. He remembered that much, even at an hour like this.

"Well, you got one, and I got the middle, and that's where the phone is."

"Who's got the window?"

"Who knows? Who cares? For two hours and ten minutes, we can put up with it."

"If you say so."

They were on the line at that moment for security inspection, strung along with a whole lot of sleepy, grumpy, badly dressed, overweight people who were traveling even though, from the look of them, nobody would be very happy to see them at the other end. "The plane's gonna be full," Dortmunder said.

"They're all full," Medrick assured him. "Everybody wants to be somewhere he's not, and as soon as he gets there he wants to go home."

"Even when I'm home," Dortmunder told him, "I want to go home."

"When we get through security," Medrick suggested, "we'll have a cup of coffee."

"Probably," Dortmunder said, "I'll be able to find my mouth by then."

The uniformed fat woman at security immediately regretted demanding that Dortmunder remove his shoes; he could tell she did, but she was too professional — or maybe just too stunned — to let it show. With that little triumph over the Security League of the Air behind him, he joined Medrick at a too-small table in an overcrowded franchise, for a cup of rotten coffee, and Medrick said, "I blame smoke signals."

"Uh huh," Dortmunder said.

"For where we are now, I mean."

"Uh huh," Dortmunder said. At this hour, he was prepared just to let the whole shebang slide on over him.

But Medrick had a point and intended to pursue it. "It's communications technologies that did us in," he said. "Now you got your Internet, before that your television, your radio, your newspapers, your telephone, your signal flags, your telegrams, your letters in the mailbox, but it all goes back to smoke signals, the whole problem starts right there."

"Sure," Dortmunder said.

Medrick shook his head. "But," he said, "I just don't think society's ready to go back that far."

"Probably not," Dortmunder said, and yawned. Maybe he could drink the coffee.

"But that's what it would take," Medrick insisted, "to return some shred of honesty to this world."

Dortmunder put down his coffee mug. "Is that what we're trying for?" he asked.

"Right just this minute it is," Medrick told him. "You see, with smoke signals, that was the very first time in the whole history of the human race that you could tell somebody something that he couldn't see you when you told him. You get what I mean?"

"No," Dortmunder said.

"Before smoke signals," Medrick said, "I wanna tell you something, I gotta come over to where you are, and stand in front of you, and tell you. Like I'm doing now. And you get to look at my face, listen to how I talk, read my body language, decide for yourself, is this guy trying to pull a fast one. You get it?"

"Eye contact."

"Exactly," Medrick said. "Sure, people still lied to each other back then and got away with it, but it wasn't so easy. Once smoke signals came in, you can't see the guy telling you the story, he could be laughing behind his hand, you don't know it."

"I guess that's true," Dortmunder agreed.

"Every step up along the way," Medrick said, "every other kind of way to communicate, it's always behind the other guy's back. For thousands of years, we've been building ourselves a liar's paradise. That's why the video phones weren't the big hit they were supposed to be, nobody wants to go back to the eyeball."

"I guess not."

"So that means they'll never get rid of the rest of it," Medrick concluded. "All the way back to smoke signals."