“Think your picture’s back on, 18-wheeler. You’re looking for a role model, you could do worse than Ray Milland, maybe you should be taking notes?”

“Yep, always been a The Thing with Two Heads (1972) man myself.”

Maxine resumes the disc. The truck is in motion again. The gray unprophetic miles unrolling. After a while Eric sez, “This ain’t the civil war, by the way, case you were wondering. What we talked about last time. Not even Fort Sumter. Just a li’l spin up the interstate’s all. Bleeding-edge development phase yet. We could be heading anywhere, Alberta, Northwest Territories, Alaska, we’ll see where it takes us. Sorry about no more e-mail, but we’re all down where you might not want to be bringing your family computer anymore. Inappropriate content plus crashing the machine in ways you’ll be unhappy with. From here on, contact will have to be kind of intermittent. Maybe someday—” The picture goes dark. She fast-forwards looking around for more, but that seems to be it.

39

Sometimes, down in the subway, a train Maxine’s riding on will slowly be overtaken by a local or an express on the other track, and in the darkness of the tunnel, as the windows of the other train move slowly past, the lighted panels appear one by one, like a series of fortune-telling cards being dealt and slid in front of her. The Scholar, The Unhoused, The Warrior Thief, The Haunted Woman . . . After a while Maxine has come to understand that the faces framed in these panels are precisely those out of all the city millions she must in the hour be paying most attention to, in particular those whose eyes actually meet her own—they are the day’s messengers from whatever the Beyond has for a Third World, where the days are assembled one by one under nonunion conditions. Each messenger carrying the props required for their character, shopping bags, books, musical instruments, arrived here out of darkness, bound again into darkness, with only a minute to deliver the intelligence Maxine needs. At some point naturally she begins to wonder if she might not be performing the same role for some face looking back out another window at her.

One day, on the express headed downtown from 72nd, a local happens to leave the station at the same time, and as the tracks at the end of the platform draw closer together, there’s a slow zoom in onto one particular window of the other train, one face in this window, too clearly meant to invite Maxine’s attention. She’s tall, darkly exotic, good posture, carrying a shoulder bag she now briefly unlatches her gaze from Maxine’s for long enough to reach inside of and pull out an envelope, which she holds up to the window, then jerks her head toward the next express stop, which will be 42nd. Maxine’s train meantime accelerating and carrying her slowly past.

If this is a tarot card with a name, it’s The Unwelcome Messenger.

Maxine gets off at Times Square and waits under a flight of exit stairs. The local rolls and hisses in, the woman approaches. Silently Maxine is beckoned down into the long pedestrian tunnel that runs over to the Port of Authority, on whose tiled walls are posted the latest word on movies about to come out, albums, toys for yups, fashion, everything you need to be a wised-up urban know-it-all is posted on the walls of this tunnel. It occurs to Maxine that if hell was a bus station in New York, this is what ALL HOPE ABANDON would look like.

The envelope doesn’t have to get closer to her snoot than a foot and a half before there it is, the unmistakable odor of regret, bad judgment, unproductive mourning—9:30 Cologne For Men. Maxine is taken by a chill. Nick Windust has staggered forth again from the grave, hungry, unappeasable, and she doubts, whatever’s in the envelope, that she needs to see it.

There’s writing on the outside,

Here’s the money I owe you. Sorry it isn’t the earrings.

Adios.

Half glaring at the envelope, expecting only the ghost outline of the wad that used to be there, Maxine is surprised to find instead the full amount, in twenties. Plus some modest vig, which is not like him. Was not. This being New York, how many explanations can there be for why it hasn’t been made off with? Likely it’s to do with the messenger . . .

Oh. Seeing the other woman’s eyes begin to narrow, enough to notice, Maxine makes a judgment call. “Xiomara?”

The woman’s smile, in this bright noisy flow of city indifference, comes like a beer on the house in a bar where nobody knows you.

“You don’ t need to tell me how you were able to contact me.”

“Oh. They know how to find people.”

Xiomara has been up at Columbia all morning, chairing some kind of seminar on Central American issues. Accounts for her being on the local maybe, but little else. There are always secular backup stories, some comm link in Xiomara’s shoulder bag, not yet on the market outside the surveillance community . . . but at the same time there’s no shame in going for a magical explanation, so Maxine lets it ride. “And right now, you’re headed for . . .”

“Well, actually the Brooklyn Bridge. Do you know how we’d get there from here?”

“Take the shuttle over to the Lex, ride down on the Number 6, and what’s with the ‘we,’” Maxine wishes to know also.

“Whenever I come to New York, I like to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. If you have time, I thought you could, too.”

Jewish-mother defaults switch in. “You eat breakfast?”

“Hungarian Pastry Shop.”

“So we get over in Brooklyn, we’ll eat again.”

Maxine can’t say what she might’ve been expecting—braids, silver jewelry, long skirts, bare feet—well, surprise, here instead is this polished international beauty in a power suit, not some clueless eighties hand-me-down either, but narrower in the shoulders the way they’re supposed to be, longer jacket, serious shoes. Perfect makeup job. Maxine must look like she’s been out washing the car.

They start off cautiously enough, politely, before either of them knows it, it’s turning into morning talk-show TV. Had Lunch with Ex-Husband’s Ex-Girlfriend.

“So the money, you got it from Dotty, the widow in D.C., correct?”

“One of a thousand chores she suddenly finds on her list.”

And it’s also possible, given the depths of Beltway connivance running parallel to and just behind the visible universe, that Xiomara is up here today at not so much Dotty’s behest as that of elements interested in how doggedly Maxine’s apt to go after the truth behind Windust’s passing.

“You and Dotty are in touch.”

“We met a couple of years ago. I was in Washington with a delegation.”

“Your— Her husband was there?”

“Not likely. She swore me to secrecy, we met for lunch at the Old Ebbitt, noisy, Clinton people all milling around, both of us picking at salads, trying to ignore Larry Summers at a distant booth, no problem for her, but I felt like I was auditioning for something.”

“And the topic under discussion, of course . . .”

“Two different husbands, really. Back when I knew him, he was a person she wouldn’t have recognized, an entry-level kid who didn’t know how much trouble his soul was in.”

“And by the time she got to him . . .”

“Maybe he didn’t need quite so much help.”

Classic New York conversation, you’re having lunch, you talk about having lunch someplace else. “So you ladies had a nice chat.”

“Not sure. Toward the end Dotty said something strange. You’ve heard about the ancient Mayans and this game they played, an early form of basketball?”

“Something about,” Maxine dimly, “ . . .vertical hoop, high percentage of fouls, some of them flagrant, usually fatal?”

“We were outside trying to hail a cab, and out of nowhere Dotty said something like, ‘The enemy most to be feared is as silent as a Mayan basketball game on television.’ When I politely pointed out that back in Mayan times there wasn’t any TV, she smiled, like a teacher you’ve just fed the right cue to. ‘Then you can imagine how silent that is,’ and she slid into a cab I hadn’t seen coming, and disappeared.”