The timer in her head goes off, jangling, urgent. Somehow, reaching for the Beretta right now will not be a wise idea. “All right Air Jordans—do your stuff!” She turns and sprints back up the corridor, back through the door she shouldn’t have opened, back into the wine cellar to find Randy, who’s been looking for her.

“You OK?”

Depending on how you define OK. “This Vosne-Romanée here, I was wondering . . .”

“Year don’t matter much, grab it, let’s go.” For a wine thief, Randy is suddenly not acting too suave here. They scramble into the rig and head out the way they came. Randy is silent till they reach the lighthouse, as if he saw something back at Ice’s too.

“Listen, do you ever get up to Yonkers at all? My wife’s family’s up there, and sometimes I’ll do some shootin at this li’l ladies’ target range called Sensibility—”

“‘Men always welcome’, sure, I know it, fact I’m a member.”

“Well, maybe I’ll catch you there sometime?”

“Lookin forward, Randy.”

“Don’t forget your burgundy there.”

“Um . . . you were talking earlier about karma, maybe you should just go on ahead, take it.”

•   •   •

SHE DOESN’T EXACTLY PEEL OUT, but neither does she dawdle, casting anxious glances in the mirror at least till about Stony Brook. Roll on, four-wheeler, roll on. Talk about fools’ errands. Vip Epperdew’s last known address a charcoal ruin, Gabriel Ice’s compound ostentatious and unsurprising, except for a mystery corridor and something in it she doesn’t want to know if she even saw. So . . . maybe she can deduct some of this, midsize daily rate, credit-card discount, one tank of gas, buck and a quarter a gallon, see if they’ll go for $1.50. . . .

Just before the country station goes out of range, on comes the Droolin Floyd Womack classic,

Oh, my brain, it’s

Lately started throbbin, and

Now and then, it’s also

uh, squirmin too . . .

and my

precious sleep at night, it’s robbin,

’Cause it’s throb-

bin, squirmin, just for you.

[female backup] Why, does, it

squirm? why does it

Throb, I wonder?

[Floyd] Uh, tell me please, it’s driving

Me insane . . .

Can it be, some

evil spell I’m under? Oh be

Still, you squirmin,

Uh, throbbin brain . . .

That night she dreams the usual Manhattan-though-not-exactly she has visited often in dreams, where, if you go far enough out any avenue, the familiar grid begins to break down, get wobbly and interwoven with suburban arterials, until she arrives at a theme shopping mall which she understands has been deliberately designed to look like the aftermath of a terrible Third World battle, charred and dilapidated, abandoned hovels and burned-out concrete foundations set in a natural amphitheater so that two or more levels of shops run up a fairly steep slope, everything sorrowful rust and sepia, and yet here at these carefully distressed outdoor cafés sit yuppie shoppers out having a cheerful cup of tea, ordering yuppie sandwiches stuffed full of arugula and goat cheese, behaving no differently than if they were at Woodbury Common or Paramus. She is supposed to be meeting Heidi here but abruptly finds herself at nightfall on a path through some woods. Light flickers ahead. She smells smoke with a strong toxic element, plastic, drug-lab fixins, who knows? comes around a bend in the path and there is the house from the Vip Epperdew videotape, on fire—black smoke in knots and whorls, battered among acid-orange flames, pouring upward to merge with a starless overcast. No neighbors have assembled to watch. No sirens growing louder in the distance. Nobody coming to put the fire out or to rescue whoever might still be inside, not Vip but, somehow, this time, Lester Traipse. Maxine stands paralyzed in the jagged light, running through her options and responsibilities. The burning is violent, all-consuming, the heat too fierce to approach. Even at this distance, she feels her oxygen supply being taken. Why Lester? She wakes with this feeling of urgency, knowing she has to do something, but can’t see what.

The day as usual comes sloshing in on her. Pretty soon she’s up to her ears in tax dodges, greedy little hotshots dreaming about some big score, spreadsheets she can’t make sense of. About lunchtime Heidi sticks her head in.

“Just the pop-culture brain I was looking to pick.” They go grab a quick salad at a deli around the corner. “Heidi, tell me again about the Montauk Project.”

“Been around since the eighties, part of the American vernacular by now. Next year they’ll be opening the old air station to tourists. There’s already companies running tour buses.”

“What?”

“Another form of everything ends up as a Broadway musical.”

“So nobody takes the Montauk Project seriously anymore, you’re saying.”

A dramatic sigh. “Maxi, earnest Maxi, forensic as always. These urban myths can be attractors, they pick up little fragments of strangeness from everywhere, after a while nobody can look at the whole thing and believe it all, it’s too unstructured. But somehow we’ll still cherry-pick for the intriguing pieces, God forbid we should be taken in of course, we’re too hip for that, and yet there’s no final proof that some of it isn’t true. Pros and cons, and it all degenerates into arguments on the Internet, flaming, trolling, threads that only lead deeper into the labyrinth.”

Nor, it occurs to Maxine, does touristy mean detoxified, necessarily. She knows people who go to Poland in the summer on Nazi-death-camp tour packages. Complimentary Polish Mad Dogs on the bus. Out in Montauk there could be funseekers infesting every square inch of surface area, while underneath their idle feet, whatever it is, whatever Ice’s tunnel connects with, goes on.

“If you’re not eating that . . .”

“Fress, Heidi, fress, please. I wasn’t as hungry as I thought.”

18

Later in the afternoon, the sky begins to gather a lurid yellow tinge. Something’s on the way in from across the river. Maxine puts on Big Apple news traffic and weather station WYUP, and after the usual string of fast-mouth commercials, each more offensive than the last, on comes the familiar teletype theme and a male voice, “You give us thirty-two minutes—you don’t get it back.”

Seeming a bit too chirpy for the material, a newslady announces, “A body found today in a deluxe Upper West Side apartment building has been identified as Lester Traipse, a well-known Silicon Alley entrepreneur . . . an apparent suicide, though police say murder isn’t being ruled out.”

“Meanwhile, week-old Baby Ashley, rescued yesterday from a dumpster in Queens, is doing well, according to—”

“No,” the way someone much older and more demented might shout back at the radio, “fuck no, you stupid bitch, not Lester.” She just talked to him. He’s supposed to be alive.

She has seen the main sequence of embezzlers’ remorse, tearful press interviews, sidewise please-hit-me glances, sudden onsets of nerve pain, but Lester is, was, one of those rare specimens, he was trying to pay back what he took, to mensch up, seldom if ever do guys like this cancel their own series. . .

Leaving what? Maxine feels an unwelcome prickling along her jawline. None of the conclusions she’s jumping to here look good. The Deseret? The Fucking Deseret? Something wrong with taking Lester over to Fresh Kills and leaving him on the landfill?

She finds herself gazing out the window. She squints past roofline contours, vents, skylights, water tanks and cornices under this pre-storm lighting, shining as if already wet against the darkening sky, down the street to where the cursed Deseret rears above Broadway, one or two storm-nervous lights already on, its stonework at this distance seeming too uncleansable, its shadows too many, ever to breach.