“And more towels,” May said. Smiling at Anne Marie, she said, “One nice thing about John following this man Fairbanks around is, we get a lot of very good hotel towels.”

32

The Saab not only had MD plates, they were Connecticut MD plates, the very best MD plates of all. Here, said these plates, we have a doctor with a stream on his property, running water. A tennis court? You bet. Walk-in closets. Music in every room. When you traveled in this forest-green Saab with the sunroof and the readout on the dashboard that told you the temperature outside the car, you weren’t just traveling in an automobile, you were traveling in a lifestyle, and a damn good one at that.

Andy Kelp explained all this to Anne Marie Sunday morning, as they drove across town to pick up Dortmunder and May. Anne Marie nodded and listened and learned and, following May’s advice, spent most of her time looking out the Saab’s window at the scenery.

She was in it now, and not just in the Saab, either. In the Rubicon, maybe. She hadn’t so much crossed the Rubicon as dived straight into that turbulent stream fully dressed. Her stay at the N-Joy—enlivened toward the end by a massively intrusive but amusing police investigation—was over now, her room occupied by some other transient. Her return ticket to KC was dead; having been a special fare, it was nontransferable, and had ceased to exist when she’d missed that Saturday plane. Nobody she knew could have any idea where she was. Friends and family back in Kansas, even Howard, should Howard decide to change his mind about their marriage, none of them could find her now. On the other hand, and this was a bit unsettling to realize, there was nobody she could think of who would try really really hard to track her down.

So maybe this wasn’t such an insane mistake, after all, sitting here in a freshly stolen mint-condition Saab. Maybe this was a good time to start over, start fresh. These might not be the most rational people in the world with whom to begin this new life, but you can’t have everything. And, for the moment at least, hanging out with these strangers was rather fun.

Since last night, she was living in Andy’s apartment in the West Thirties, though who knew for how long. Also, she wasn’t the first woman who’d ever lived there, as various evidences had made clear. When she’d asked him about those previous occupants he’d looked vague and said, “Well, some of them were wives,” which wasn’t an answer that would tend to prolong the conversation.

Play it as it comes, she thought. Don’t worry about it. Watch the scenery.

“Be right down,” Andy said, when he’d double-parked in front of the building where Dortmunder and May lived.

“Right,” Anne Marie said.

The scenery wasn’t moving at the moment, but she went on watching it, the scenery here being mostly sloppily dressed people in a hurry, a lot of battered and dirty parked cars, and grimy stone or brick buildings put up a hundred years ago.

Am I going to like New York? she asked herself. Am I even going to stay in New York? Am I actually going to become involved in a crime, and probably get caught, and wind up on Court TV? What would I wear on Court TV? None of the stuff I brought with me.

That was a strange thought. Most of her clothing, most of her possessions, were still at home at 127 Sycamore Street, Lancaster, Kansas, a modest two-story postwar wooden clapboard home on its own modest lot, with detached one-car garage and weedy lawns front and back and not much by way of plantings. Anne Marie and Howard had bought the house four years ago—another of their flailing attempts to unify the marriage—with a minimum down payment and a balloon mortgage, which meant that at this point the house belonged about 97 percent to the bank, and as far as Anne Marie was concerned the bank was welcome to it. And everything in it, too, especially the VCR that never did work right. All except the dark-blue dress with the white collar; it would be nice if the bank were to send her that. It would be perfect for Court TV.

Two hundred fifty miles between New York City and Washington, DC, give or take a wide curve or two. Through the Holland Tunnel and then New Jersey New Jersey New Jersey New Jersey Del Maryland Maryland Baltimore Baltimore Baltimore Baltimore Maryland lunch Maryland outskirts of Washington outskirts of Washington outskirts of Washington, and now it was up to Anne Marie to be the harbor pilot who would steer them to their berth.

They had run along two kinds of highway. One was country highway, with green rolling hills and leafy trees and a wide grassy median between the three northbound and the three southbound lanes, and it was all pleasantly pretty every time you looked at it, and it was all the same pleasantly pretty every time you looked at it, and the goddam green hills were still there every time you looked at it. And the other was city highway, where the lanes were narrower and there was no median strip and the traffic was full of delivery vans and pickup trucks and there were many many exits and many many signs and the road’s design was a modified roller coaster, elevated over slums and factories, undulating and curving inside low concrete walls, sweeping past tall sooty brick buildings with clock faces mounted high on their facades that always told the wrong time.

“Suitland?” May and John in the backseat had been looking at maps, just for fun, and now May looked up, looked around at the scenery, and said, “There’s a place next to Washington called Suitland?”

“Oh, sure,” Anne Marie said. “That’s very close in, over near District Heights.”

“The whole place should be called Suitland,” John said.

May said, “Are we going by there?”

“No,” Anne Marie told her, “we’re taking the Beltway the other way around, through Bethesda.”

Andy, driving with the nonchalance of somebody who didn’t much care if this car picked up a dent or two, said, “I’m on the Beltway? Or inside the Beltway? Or what?”

“You’re on the Beltway,” Anne Marie told him. “Pretty soon you’ll cross the river and then turn off—”

“What river?” Andy asked.

Anne Marie, surprised, said, “The Potomac.”

“Oh, right. The Potomac.”

“I’ve heard of that,” John said, from the backseat.

“I’m going to take you into the city from the south,” Anne Marie explained. “That’s the quickest way to get to the Watergate area. So we’ll be crossing the Potomac twice.”

John said, “Andy, you got to introduce this person to Stan Murch.”

Andy said, “I was just thinking the same thing.” Seeing Anne Marie’s raised eyebrow, he explained, “That’s a friend of ours that takes a particular interest in how you get from point A to point B.”

Anne Marie said, “Doesn’t everybody?”

“Well, Stan kind of goes to extremes,” Andy said. “Is this your river?”

“Yes,” Anne Marie said. “You want the exit to the George Washington Memorial Parkway.”

“The George Washington Memorial Parkway? They really lean on it around here, don’t they?”

“After a while, you don’t notice it,” Anne Marie assured him. “But it is a little, I admit, like living on a float in a Fourth of July parade. Here’s our turn.”

There was a lot of traffic; this being Sunday, it was mostly tourist traffic, license plates from all over the United States, attached to cars that didn’t know where the hell they were going. Andy swivel-hipped through it all, startling drivers who were trying to read maps without changing lanes, and Anne Marie said, “Now you want the Francis Scott Key Bridge.”

“You’re putting me on.”

“No, I’m not. There’s the sign. See?”

Andy swung up and over, and there they were crossing the Potomac again, this time northbound, the city of Washington spread out in front of them like an almost life-size model of itself, as though it were all still in the planning stages and they could still decide not to go ahead with it.