In the taxi on the way home, there’s loud traffic in Arabic on the radio, which Maxine figures at first for a call-in show till the cabbie picks up a handset and joins in. She glances at the ID up on the Plexiglas. The face in the photo is too indistinct to make out, but the name is Islamic, Mohammed somebody.

It’s like hearing a party from another room, though Maxine notices there’s no music, no laughing. High emotion all right, but closer to tears or anger. Men talking over each other, shouting, interrupting. A couple of the voices might be women’s, though later it will seem they could have belonged to high-pitched men. The only word Maxine recognizes, and she hears it more than once, is Inshallah. “Arabic for ‘whatever,’” Horst nods.

They’re waiting at a light. “If it is God’s will,” the driver corrects him, half turning in his seat so that Maxine happens to be looking him in the face. What she sees there will keep her from getting to sleep right away. Or that’s how she’ll remember it.

29

The spread on the Jets-Indianapolis game Sunday is 2 points. Horst, regionally loyal as always, bets Ziggy and Otis a pizza that the Colts will win, which in fact they do in a 21-point walkover. Peyton Manning can do no wrong, Vinny Testaverde is a little less consistent, managing in the last five minutes for example to fumble on the Colts’ 2-yard line to a defensive end who then proceeds to run the ball 98 yards to a touchdown, as Testaverde alone chases him up the field while the rest of the Jets look on, and Ziggy and Otis lapse into intemperate language their father doesn’t see how he can call them out for.

It’s a warm evening, and they all decide instead of ordering the pizza in to walk over to Columbus, to Tom’s Pizza, a local soon to fade into Upper West Side folk memory. First time in years, it occurs to Maxine later, that they’ve done anything all together as a family. They sit at a table outside. Nostalgia lurks, ready to ooze from ambush. Maxine thinks back to when the boys were little, the local practice in neighborhood pizza parlors then being to cut slices into small bite-size squares as an accommodation for little kids. When the kid can handle a whole slice, it’s a kind of coming-of-age. Later on, with braces, there’s a return to smaller squares. Maxine glances over at Horst for any outward signs of an active memory, but no dice, old Stolid Geometry is occupied with stuffing pizza into his face at a steady rhythm and trying to make the boys lose count of how many slices they’ve had. Which itself, Maxine supposes, you could call family tradition, not specially admirable, but hell, she’ll take it.

Later, back home, Horst settled in in front of his computer screen, “Guys, come here, look at this. Darnedest thing.”

The screen is full of numbers. “This is the Chicago Exchange, toward the end of last week, see? there was a sudden abnormal surge of put options on United Airlines. Thousands of puts, not a heck of a lot of calls. Now, today, the same thing happens for American Airlines.”

“A put,” Ziggy sez, “that’s like selling short?”

“Yeah, when you’re expecting the stock price to go down. And trading volume meanwhile is way, way up—six times normal.”

“Just those two airlines?”

“Yep. Weird, huh?”

“Insider trading,” it seems to Ziggy.

•   •   •

MONDAY NIGHT VYRVA CALLS MAXINE with panic in her voice. “The guys are freaking out. Something about this random-number source they’ve been hacking into suddenly going nonrandom.”

“And you’re telling me this because . . .”

“OK if Fiona and I come over there for a little?”

“Sure.” Horst is out at a sports bar someplace way downtown watching Monday Night Football. Giants and Broncos, at Denver. Planning to sleep over at the apartment of his colleague in arrested adolescence Jake Pimento, who lives in Battery Park City, and then go in to work at the Trade Center from there.

Vyrva shows up all loose ends. “They’re screaming at each other. Never a good sign.”

“How was camp, Fiona?”

“Awesome.”

“Didn’t suck.”

“Exactly.”

Otis, Ziggy, and Fiona settle in in front of Homer Simpson, playing an accountant of all things, in a film noir, or possibly jaune, called “D.O.H.”

Vyrva showing signs of early parent bewilderment. “She’s suddenly doing Quake movies. Some of them are online, she has a following already. We’ve been cosigning distribution deals. More clauses than a North Pole family reunion. No idea what we’re agreeing to, of course.”

Maxine makes popcorn. “Stay over, why don’t you. Horst won’t be back tonight, plenty of room.”

Just one more of these into-the-night schmoozathons, nothing special, kids off to bed without too much drama, television programming that’s better with the sound off, no deep confessions, business chatter. Vyrva checks in with Justin around midnight. “They’re bonding again, now. Worse than the other. I think I will stay over.”

•   •   •

TUESDAY MORNING THEY ALL CONVOY over to Kugelblitz together, hang around the stoop till the bell rings, Vyrva peels away to grab a bus across town, Maxine heads for work, puts her head in a local smoke shop to grab a newspaper, and finds everybody freaking out and depressed at the same time. Something bad is going on downtown. “A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center,” according to the Indian guy behind the counter.

“What, like a private plane?”

“A commercial jet.”

Uh-oh. Maxine goes home and pops on CNN. And there it all is. Bad turns to worse. All day long. At around noon the school calls and says they’re shutting down for the day, could she please come and collect her kids.

Everybody’s on edge. Nods, headshakes, not a lot of social conversation.

“Mom, was Dad down there at his office today?”

“He was staying over at Jake’s last night, but I think he’s mostly been working from his computer. So chances are he didn’t even go in.”

“But you haven’t heard from him?”

“Everybody’s been trying to get through to everybody, lines are swamped, he’ll call, I’m not worrying, don’t you guys, OK?”

They’re not buying it. Of course they’re not. But they both nod anyway and just get on with it. A class act, these two. She holds their hands, one on either side, all the way home, and though this sort of thing belongs to their childhood and generally annoys them, today they let her.

The phone starts ringing after a while. Each time Maxine jumps to pick it up, hoping it’s Horst, it turns out instead to be Heidi, or Ernie and Elaine, or Horst’s parents calling from Iowa where everything is an hour closer to the innocence of sleep. But from the slab of beef who still, she hopes, shares her life, no word. The boys stay in their room watching the single constant telephoto shot of the smoking towers, already too distant. She keeps sticking her head in. Bringing snack food, mom-approved and otherwise, that they don’t touch.

“Are we at war, Mom?”

“No. Who says we are?”

“This Wolf Blitzer guy?”

“Usually countries go to war with countries. I don’t think whoever did this, that they’re a country.”

“It said on the news they’re Saudi Arabians,” Otis tells her. “Maybe we’re at war with Saudi Arabia.”

“Can’t be,” Ziggy points out, “we need all that oil.”

As if by ESP, the phone rings, and it’s March Kelleher.

“It’s the Reichstag fire,” she greets Maxine.

“The what?”

“Those fucking Nazis in Washington needed a pretext for a coup, now they’ve got it. This country is headed up shit’s creek, and it isn’t rugriders we should worry about, it’s Bush and the gang.”

Maxine isn’t so sure. “It seems like none of them know what they’re doing right now, just caught by surprise, more like Pearl Harbor.”