Ahmad eases the truck forward, less in die way of traffic, waiting for an instruction. "Straight ahead, and left when you can," he is told. "I don't want to go back into any tunnel witJi you and this thing, thanks. We'll take the George Washington Bridge. Could we put the safety catch back on, do you think?"

Ahmad reaches down, fearful now of disturbing the carefully rigged mechanism. The little yellow lever says snap; the ponderous payload remains quiet. Mr. Levy in his relief at still being alive keeps talking. "Turn left at tbe light up there, that should be Tentii Avenue, I think. I'm trying to remember if the West Side Highway takes trucks. We may have to get on Riverside Drive, or just work up to Broadway and stay on it all the way up to the bridge."

Ahmad lets himself be guided, taking the left turn. The path is straight. "You're driving like a pro," Mr. Levy tells him. "Feel O.K.?" Ahmad nods. "I know you're in shock. Me, too. But there's really no place to park this crate. Once you get to the bridge we're almost home. It turns into 80. We'll go right to police headquarters, behind City Hall. We won't let die bastards intimidate us. Your turning this truck back in one piece makes them look good, and if they have half a brain they know it. It could have been a disaster. Anybody tries to bully you, remind them you were set up by a CIA operative, in a sting operation of very dubious legality. You're a victim, Ahmad-a fall guy. I can't imagine the Department of Homeland Security wants the details out in the media, or hashed over in some courtroom."

Mr. Levy is silent for a block or two, waiting for Ahmad to say sometbing, tben says, "I know this may sound premature, but I wasn't kidding about you making a good lawyer. You're cool under pressure. You talk well. In tbe years to come, Arab-Americans are going to need plenty of lawyers. Uh-oh. I guess we're on Eighth Avenue, I thought I had us on Tenth. Keep going-this'll take us onto Broadway at Columbus Circle. I rbink they still call it that, though the poor wop isn't p.c. any more. The Port Authority Bus Terminal on your left-I'm sure you've been there once or twice. Then we're going to cross Forty-second Street. I remember when it was real raunchy, but the Disney Corporation has cleaned it up, I guess."

Ahmad wants to focus, amid the yellow taxis and the traffic lights and the pedestrians clustered at every corner, on this novel world around him, but Mr. Levy keeps having thoughts. He says, "It'll be interesting to me to find out if that damn stuff was really connected, or if our side had managed a double cross and it wasn't. That was my hole card, but I was just as happy not to have it played. Thank God you chickened out." This sounds crass in his own ears. "Or relented, let's say. Saw the light."

All around them, up Eighth Avenue to Broadway, the great city crawls with people, some smartly dressed, many of them shabby, a few beautiful but most not, all reduced by the towering structures around them to the size of insects, but scuttling, hurrying, intent in the milky morning sun upon some plan or scheme or hope they are hugging to themselves, tlieir reason for living another day, each one of them impaled live upon the pin of consciousness, fixed upon self-advancement and self-preservation. That, and only that. These devils, Ahmad thinks, have taken away my God.

A Note About the Author

John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker, and since 1957 has lived in Massachusetts. He is the father of four children and the author of fifty-odd previous books, including collections of short stories, poems, and criticism. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the American Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award, and the Howells Medal.