Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise for Nicola Griffith and Aud Torvingen

“Griffith is a writer of considerable gifts. Her sentences shimmer, her powers of observation and description are razor sharp.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“Aud Torvingen is one of my favorite kick-ass, supercompetent, cool-headed, hot-blooded, semilegal girls. . . . She knows how to fight, kill, survive, and think.” —Salon

“Griffith has a fine way with character and sure talent.”

—Los Angeles Times

“Griffith’s real genius is a portrayal of the brilliant, though damaged, Aud . . . a woman who loses herself in the beauty and balletic control of pure violence yet seeks salvation.” —The Village Voice

“The sexiest action figure since James Bond, six blond feet of sinew, muscle, and bone. She’s also an ex-cop, a martial arts instructor, a master carpenter, and a private dick for hire. She’s beautiful, she’s independently wealthy, she’s in perfect shape: she’s downright deadly. And sorry, guys: she’s into girls.” —Seattle Weekly

“[Aud] is sleek, sexy, and decidedly dangerous . . . everything a suspense novel heroine should be.” —The Advocate

“Stay is simply gorgeous—a powerful character study in the rough domain of mystery and adventure. It is also a courageous and frank portrait of grief, deeply complex and completely true. There was not one misstep, not one moment when I was not being pulled along hoping for some life-saving miracle. And when it happens, it feels real—stubborn human nature doing what it does. Stay made me glad to read it.”

—Dorothy Allison

"A noir thriller with a female protagonist who makes La Femme Nikita look like a Powerpuff Girl.” —Details

"Griffith’s tautly balanced prose perfectly complements her heroine’s erratic progress. . . . [She] skillfully links sensual details with emotional content, anchoring us firmly in Aud’s brutal, beautiful world.” —The Seattle Times

“Griffith employs a crime thriller’s page-turning audacity and hard-boiled heroine without succumbing to cheap genre clichés. Like the protagonist, the language has a steely snap to it. . . . Stay is a captivating read.” —Out

“Aud, the protagonist of this novel, is an intuitive, old-fashioned sleuth who would do Elmore Leonard proud.” —Entertainment Weekly

“Griffith’s prose is at once brutal and beautifully wrought. Stay has a central character both hard-boiled and a softie at heart, and momentum like a car wreck.” —The San Diego Union-Tribune

“Griffith switches genres and breathes life into an appealing heroine in this smoothly plotted pulse-slammer. . . . Readers will want to see more of Aud Torvingen.” —Publishers Weekly

“Well-crafted, evocatively written and swift paced, The Blue Place is for devotees of classic, hard-edged detective tales. . . . But this isn’t simply a thriller [but] an excursion into the more disturbing sides of psyches. . . . Ultimately The Blue Place is, as all good thrillers and all the best literary fiction are, a novel of quests and identity.” —Lambda Book Report

“Griffith has already won herself Lambda and Nebula awards . . . and she seems destined to add to her laurels.” —The Washington Post Book World

“A heroine who is a cold-blooded killing machine . . . but superfit, super-bright Aud is certainly one watchable sleuth and may win Griffith quite a following of less squeamish readers.” —Booklist

"The novel goes down like honey, full of the quirky detail that makes a good mystery great. . . . If pretty girls and danger don’t grab you, the plot will.”

—Out

“Griffith clearly challenges us to understand a radically atypical—or perhaps just typically ignored—aspect of the female psyche: the fine line between brutality and passion. She produces passages that provoke and startle . . . finely rendered observations. The novel soars. Aud’s ‘blue place’—where women glow with the elated, bluish tinge of power rather than the black and blue marks of victimhood—is a peculiar and unsettling place indeed.” —The Woman’s Review of Books

“Griffith proves she can write crime fiction that stacks up more than favorably with the work of the best writers in the field. . . . Dennis Lehane, Andrew Vachss, and James Lee Burke have each taken crime fiction to a new level and each has expanded the possibilities of the genre. Nicola Griffith is the next name on a very short list.” —The News Tribune

ALSOBY NICOLA GRIFFITH

STAY
THEBLUE PLACE
SLOW RIVER
AMMONITE

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eISBN : 978-1-4406-2971-6

1. Torvingen, Aud (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Ex-police officers—Fiction. 3.
Lesbians—Fiction. 4. Self-defense for women—Fiction. 5. Real estate investment—Fiction. 6.
Fraud investigation—Fiction. 7. Atlanta (Ga.)—Fiction. 8. Seattle (Wash.)—Fiction. I. Title.
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For Kelley, my queen

ONE

IF YOU WALK INTO A BAR AND THERE’S A MAN WITH A KNIFE, WHAT DO YOU DO ? Walk out again. If you can. In Atlanta it had been a kitchen, and a woman, and I couldn’t.

It’s a five-hour nonstop flight from Atlanta to Seattle. I had slept the first three hours, but I didn’t want to sleep anymore. If you don’t sleep, you don’t dream. I pressed my forehead against the vibrating cabin window and stared down at the Rockies, visible only as winks of snow in the setting sun.

Next to me, Dornan stirred and put his guidebook facedown on his lap. He peered over my shoulder at the scenery below. His T-shirt was still very white and his eyes very blue, but his hair, just long enough to hint at waviness, was flat at the back. “Looks like Mars,” he said.

I nodded. There were places there where no one had walked. Perhaps one day I would go exploring.

Dornan leaned back. “You missed dinner.” It was unclear from his tone whether he thought that was good or bad.

“I can eat when we get there.”

“I don’t know,” he said, and tapped the book on his lap. “I’ve been reading the tourist guide. The good restaurants mostly seem to shut at ten.” Right around when we’d be landing. “There’s always room service.”

You can’t learn much about a city from a hotel room, and I needed to hit the ground running. My mother would arrive in two days. “Let’s talk about it when we get there.”

Books were all well and good—I’d already read several histories, maps, and guides to Seattle since deciding on the trip—but I preferred somatic information to extra-somatic. I would know what I wanted to do when I smelled the air and tasted the water.

“So,” Dornan said. “You haven’t told me much about the new bloke.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Your new stepdad.”

I looked at him.

“Well, he is, technically. So what’s the story? You haven’t even told me his name.”

I opened my bag—once again I resented the nasty ripping sound of the Velcro flap, and missed the bag I’d given away—and pulled out the report.

“Eric Loedessoel,” Dornan said, reading over my shoulder. “Wait.” He pulled back. “You researched your stepdad?”

“It wasn’t difficult.”

“That’s not . . .” He shook his head.

I leafed through the list of sources: medical bills, brokerage accounts, limousine service, phone records, grocery bills, restaurant bills, and so on. Then the data itself. There was a photograph of Loedessoel taken last year in Washington, D.C., and a photo of his new wife, dated two months ago.

She was wearing a hacking jacket and turtleneck, a riding hat tucked under her left arm. I wondered what the photo opportunity had been, and why she looked happy. She hated horses. Her hair was dark honey streaked with grey, and cut in a soft, chin-length bob. It looked all wrong; my mother had had long hair for as long as I could remember. She had gained a few pounds. She looked younger and softer.

“Thumbnail sketch,” I said. “Male Caucasian, mid-fifties, five feet eleven, hundred and seventy-eight pounds, grey hair, grey-blue eyes. Born in Bergen to Norwegian parents; two sisters, one brother. Parents deceased. First year of medical school in Oslo, where he married a Danish woman, and the remaining years in Seattle, at the University of Washington. Graduated in the top third of his class. Never practiced, though.” No hint as to why. “Divorced the Danish wife a few months after graduation.”

“Children?”

“No.”

“Thank heaven for small mercies.”

My stomach squeezed. The possibility of step-siblings hadn’t occurred to me. “Job in Washington, D.C., with the Norwegian trade delegation. Climbed the ladder. Directorships in several pharmaceutical and biotech companies. Financially stable. Current residence in London.” Chelsea. I wondered if and when he would move into my mother’s official ambassador’s residence. I wondered if she still actually lived there.

I read some more. Dornan returned to staring out the window.

Loedessoel’s net worth was nearly four million dollars. Well matched with my mother’s assets. It would have seemed a lot to me four years ago. I started skimming. Clothes, hair, and manicure spending about what you’d expect for someone in his position. Cars: many purchases and resales. In the last three years, a Porsche Carrera, a Jaguar S-type, a Maserati, a vintage Bentley—that one had been sold after numerous high bills for replacement parts.

“He likes cars,” I said.

“Lots of men do.”

I skimmed the list of affiliations, memberships, and subscriptions: Mystery Guild Book of the Month Club, local wine society, the American Museum of Natural History, chamber of commerce, the local Gilbert and Sullivan Society. “He likes operetta.”

“That’s not exactly sinister.”

“Well, no.”

“But you’re frowning.”

“I’m trying to imagine my mother beaming fondly at a man dressed as the lord high executioner.”

“Giggling behind a fan.”

I stared at him.

The seat belt light went on. “Look at that,” he said, and busied himself with the tray table and footrest.

WE WALKED past the tired people in baggage claim and to the man holding a sign saying Torvingen.

“I’m Aud Torvingen,” I said.

He didn’t bat an eye at the Norwegian pronunciation but said, “Jeff,” and led us to the town car.

I fastened my seat belt and opened my window, and we pulled smoothly past the hordes waiting for taxis.

“Maybe you aren’t potty after all,” Dornan said, leaning back on the grey leather. He’d thought I had lost my mind when I’d first suggested FedEx-ing the luggage. Then I’d offered to pay, and suddenly it hadn’t been such a bad idea.

Traffic was light. The cool air, heavy at first with jet fumes, then the scents of late cherry blossom and second-growth conifer, reminded me of Oslo last year. It had been May then, too.

The engine hummed. I’d never driven a Lincoln, but I suspected it would handle like a squashy pillow. The interior wood trim, black bird’s-eye maple, was so heavily varnished it looked like plastic.

If I’d done my research correctly we were on Highway 99, which ran north and west into the city along the waterfront. I could sense the empty horizon stretching to my left, but I couldn’t see or smell it; there was a steady offshore breeze and the moon was hidden behind dense cloud. In Atlanta it would be twenty degrees warmer. In Oslo, twelve degrees closer to the Arctic Circle, the sky would still be light. There would not be so many cars on the road. My mother and new stepfather would be in the United States by now, in New York, or possibly Vancouver.

From a distance the Edgewater Hotel looked like a warehouse building, but as we approached, it became clear that what had seemed to be corrugated iron was in fact massive vertical timbers. Fir, I thought. Very Scandinavian. It was just after ten-thirty when we pulled into the parking lot. “Wait,” I told Jeff. “We’ll be out in ten minutes.”

The lobby was all exposed wood—definitely fir—and polished slate. I handed my Total Enterprises credit card to the woman behind the desk. She handed me two keys.

“They’re not next to each other. I’m sorry.”

“Not a problem,” I said, and gave one to Dornan. “Don’t unpack if it will take you longer than ten minutes.”

In my room were two faxes, and a large FedEx box. I put everything on the bed and opened the window, which was less than eight feet above the water. I listened a moment; all I heard was the slap and slip of Puget Sound against the pilings driven deep into the muck of Elliott Bay. I closed the window. Being so close to the water was less than optimal, in terms of security. I took a dime from my wallet and balanced it against the glass. There were a dozen portable intruder alerts on the market, but low-tech worked well enough.

One of my credit cards wasn’t plastic but specially sharpened ceramic. I extracted it from my wallet and slit the tape on the FedEx box. The clothes were still on their hangers. I hung them in the wardrobe, and my toiletries bag above the mirror in the bathroom. I set up my laptop but didn’t connect to the local network—security precautions took time—and glanced at the faxes, one from Laurence, one from Bette, both of which could wait. After a quick visual check of the room I shut the door, rattled it to make sure it was locked, and headed for the lobby.

Dornan was four minutes late. He had changed his T-shirt and put a sapphire in his right earlobe.

“Belltown,” he said. “That’s the only place we’ll be able to get anything to eat at this time. Belltown,” he said again to Jeff as we got in the car. “Somewhere called the Queen City Grill?”

“On First,” Jeff said, and turned left out of the parking lot.

“First and what?” I tried to visualize the city plan, which was a confused mix of the original diagonal and later north-south grids. If you could believe the maps there was even a spot, north of here, where “First” intersected with “First.”

“First and Blanchard.”

Blanchard. Between Bell and Lenora. A little north and east of downtown, a little south and west of here. “Why are we heading north?” Northwest.

“If I take you south there’s no cross street for a while.”

“Thank you.”

We turned right, heading northeast, and then right again, finally moving south and east.

“After all these years I still can’t believe how early Americans eat their dinner,” Dornan said, as we passed dark storefronts. “Look at that. Can you imagine a U.K. city the size of Seattle shutting down at ten?”

“No.”

“It makes no sense.”

It did to me. The city was full of Norwegians and Swedes who had formed the backbone of the fishing and shipping industry and a large part of the paper and lumber industry, and then settled back to work hard, live quietly, and grow. They would write back to relatives dug into their fjell-side seters, or boiling and freezing in sod houses in the Midwest, and tell them about the good life, the teeming salmon and the miles of trees, and how it hardly ever snowed. Inevitably, the children of the brothers and sisters left behind would come for a month in summer to visit. And here I was.

AT THE Queen City Grill we were shown to one of the dozen or so booths running alongside the bar, a huge expanse of mahogany that looked as though it had been there a hundred years. It was enhanced by a double handful of the young urban gorgeous. One woman with long glossy hair and skin the color of toasted flax smiled and tipped her head back to laugh. Her companions laughed, too. She sipped her martini, and when she leaned forward, the cream silk of her dress pulled tight across her hips. Her lips left a red print on the rim of her glass.

“See anything you fancy?” Dornan said, studying the menu, which was very short and specialized in steaks and seafood with an Asian tang.

“Crab cakes look good.”

The wine list turned out to be heavy on Washington and Oregon vineyards I’d encountered only in travel guides. I put it down. The woman at the bar laughed again, and the server appeared.

“What do you have on draft?”

I settled on something called Hefeweizen, Dornan ordered a kamikaze, and we asked for oysters to start. The Hefeweizen came with a wedge of lemon in it, and looked like cloudy lager. It tasted better than it looked. The oysters were cool and slippery and tasted like the beach at low tide. We focused on the food for a while.

The woman at the bar slid from her stool and stood, gathering purse and wrap.

“It’s good to see your appetite returning,” Dornan said. He was concentrating on squeezing the last drop from his lemon onto the oyster on his plate. I let him tip it into his mouth and swallow, then nodded at the last remaining half-shell.

“How’s your appetite?”

“Let me put it this way, Torvingen. For once, I think I’d be prepared to fight you for it.”

We ordered another dozen.

Two intense twenty-nothings took a seat at the bar and started arguing about whether cyberpunk owed its attitude more to Materialist philosophy or to a misguided interpretation of Descartes’ interpretation of Aristotle.

“So,” he said. “How are you?”

“How do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. It’s been nearly a year. And then the incident with your self-defense student. And now your mother is coming. Talk to me. Tell me how you feel, what you think.”

I thought Mr. Materialism was about to get lucky: Ms. Cartesian Dualism was leaning forward in the kind of unnatural pose that had been practiced in front of the mirror because someone once told her it made her throat look delicious, and holding her hand palm up while she talked, tilted towards him in a way that could be interpreted only as Touch me. And indeed, Mr. Materialism was beginning to stumble over the bigger words as his subconscious figured out what was going on and diverted blood from his brain to more important organs. Although Dornan’s degree from Trinity was in philosophy, I doubted that’s what he meant. I shook my head.

He drank off his kamikaze, sighed with pleasure while he refilled his glass from the cocktail shaker, and nodded over at the debating couple. “Did you ever argue philosophy with a girl in a bar?”

“There are easier ways.”

He nodded. “Buying her a drink always worked for me. So have you tried any interesting approaches lately?”

I looked at him.

“You could at least reassure me that since, ah, well . . .” He hated to mention Julia’s death. “I just don’t think it’s natural to be so—Look, I know how you are, what you’re like. You shouldn’t deprive yourself . . .”

“I haven’t.”

He sat back and looked expectant.

“Her name was Reece.”

His expectant look didn’t waver. Ever since I had let him help with the cabin in North Carolina last year he seemed to believe he deserved a window into my life. I had not yet worked out how to shut him out, or whether I wanted to.

“When I went back to the cabin last month Tammy had a party. She introduced me to Reece. We had a conversation that ended up in bed. She’s a very pleasant woman. It was a very pleasant evening. I doubt I’ll ever see her again.”

I had needed the animal warmth of the sex, had welcomed the familiar building heat of skin on skin, the harsh breath, the shudder that starts in your bones. The terrible urge afterwards to weep until I howled had been new.

“That Tammy. Isn’t she something?” It had been three months since she’d returned his ring, but his voice still throbbed with pride.

“She is.” She was a piece of work. He was better off without her.

SOMEONE HAD turned on the fire in the corner of my room. The dime was undisturbed. I turned off the fire, put the dime in my pocket, and opened the window.

I read the faxes. Details from Laurence about how my Seattle real estate revenues had fallen against local benchmarks, the addresses of my local real estate manager and my cross-shipping warehouse, and a list of leaseholders of that property in the last eighteen months—far too many. Bette’s fax was a detailed, itemized list of OSHA and EPA complaints leveled by person or persons unknown against either me, as the property owner, or various lessees, along with pages of definitions of various regulations, and the names of relevant people at both regulatory offices to deal with the complaints.

I turned to my laptop. The fan hummed and the hard drive chuckled as it ran its anonymizer software and automatically cleaned itself of anything but the most basic programs: no documents, no cookies, no automatic updates downloaded from the Web, no e-mails, no address book, nothing. Just an operating system unencumbered by experience or past history, lean and sure, memory constantly scoured and reset for instant, optimum efficiency. Stupid, to be jealous of a computer.

I set every firewall I could, then hunted for and matched the hotel network. I logged in to my e-mail account. Nothing.

I logged out, wiped all the cookies again, just in case, and checked my antivirus software. All my personal data was safe on the flash drive on my key ring.

It was late, according to my body clock. Nearly four in the morning.

I tapped the faxes into a neat pile and put them next to the phone on the cherry-veneered desk by the window. I’d study them carefully in the morning. On top of the pile I put my maps and two books about Seattle. Tomorrow I’d start learning this city the way I liked best, by moving through it.

I undressed and carefully laid my clothes over the back of the desk chair, easily to hand in case of emergency.

I stood naked by the open window. The water was black. Kuroshio, the Black Current, the vast ocean stream that poured past Japan and arced north, keeping the inlets of the Pacific Northwest from freezing. I could lower myself into the lightless water and slide beneath the surface, leave it all behind. Give it all away and never look back. I wish my father had left all his holdings to my mother instead. I wouldn’t have to be in Seattle to deal with a real estate manager stealing me blind. I wouldn’t have to meet my mother and brand-new stepfather. I wouldn’t have been at leisure to teach a self-defense class.

The room felt as warm and moist as the womb. I got dressed.

ON FOOT, I could head south. I walked through the night, swinging my arms, glad that there was nothing to my right but Elliott Bay. I could feel the open water, taste salt on the breeze. I walked up and down artificially graded hillocks of grass, avoided a tree. When I ran out of park I turned left, under the Alaskan Way viaduct; I saw traces of the homeless—a burnt-out trash can, a slashed sleeping bag—but the streets and train tracks were silent.

In Atlanta at one o’clock on Thursday morning I would have had downtown to myself, but Seattle’s center flickered with flashes of restless, contradictory life. As I walked down First, south of Queen City, I could have been looking at two different boulevards. On my left, the fifty-foot-tall sculpture of The Hammering Man banged away silently in cultural ecstasy outside the Seattle Art Museum. On my right, a man and a woman stepped into the street from the Lusty Lady, whose pink neon sign flashed cheerily, its letter board declaring VENI, VIDI, VENI. Peep shows for the classically educated.

Pioneer Square wasn’t really a square but a triangle, partially cobbled, with a totem pole and a drinking fountain. The buildings were old brick and wrought ironwork, painted to match the blue-and-rust paintwork on the Tlingit totem. There had been more trees in the guidebook photos, plane trees. I couldn’t think of any diseases specific to plane trees, and wondered why they had been taken down. It was still a picture-perfect vision of the heart of an established city whose industrious citizens slept well—or would have been without the thump of club music, and the homeless who lay on benches or leaned against the wall in knots of two or three, not unlike the hipsters at the bar earlier. Some of them were young and some smoked, but none wore white and none of them laughed; most had more tattoos than teeth. They stopped talking as I neared. I nodded. They smelled of tobacco and old wine, like old people in hot countries, which is not how the homeless in Atlanta smell.

Guidebooks never told you everything. Seattle was another country.

LESSON 1

SELF-DEFENSE IS NOT JUST A SKILL, IT’S A WORLDVIEW. LIKE THE SCIENTIFIC method—or religion, or motherhood, for that matter—once you accept its method-or religion, or motherhood, for that matter—once you accept its precepts you see things differently. I didn’t intend to tell my students this. Just as you don’t try to interest six-year-olds in natural history by discussing physiology and adaptive evolution—but take them, instead, to a pond to watch tadpoles turn into frogs—on the first day of class you don’t tell grown women to change their lives. You show them how to punch a bag.

I parked outside Crystal Gaze, under the only streetlight. It was a long way from the side door. I turned off the Saab’s heater and got out. 5:56 on the second Tuesday of February. My breath hung in a cloud as I zipped my jacket. The sky was the heavy grey of unpolished pewter, shading to iron in the east. The still dark reminded me of Mørketiden, the days of Norwegian winter when you don’t see the sun.

Crystal Gaze is Atlanta’s alternative bookshop and personal wellness center, more comfortable with chakras than choke holds. My class, the advisory board had decided, could go ahead as long as it was in the basement space. It was a very nice space, they said, even without a window: newly painted, new carpet, and a room air-conditioner; big and bare, eminently suitable for physical activity. It also had its own convenient side entrance. In other words, sweaty women reeking of the body would not trample through the main floor and disturb patrons who were browsing their way to the next level of spiritual enlightenment. They agreed I could bring in four big mats and a punch bag and leave them for the duration of the course.

The stairwell smelled of concrete dust. My boots echoed. There were damp footprints on each tread, including one set of those pointy-toed, needle-heeled shoes that look as though they would leave the wearer utterly crippled. I peered more closely. Two sets of pointy toes. Or—no, one set whose owner had walked down, then turned and taken a couple of steps back, then decided to head back down and go through with it.

Americans rarely have the same appreciation of punctuality as Norwegians, so when I opened the basement door at precisely six o’clock I was mildly surprised to find nine women already sitting on the corded blue carpet. Nine pairs of shoes were lined up neatly under the bench. Second from the right were the pointy-toed spike heels: brown fake-alligator ankle boots. Several of the women could have owned them—lots of lower-tier business clothes and careful makeup—though I’d bet on the white woman with the curly hair in a powder blue blouse with a wide silver stripe. At least she was wearing trousers, unlike the woman in the brilliant green skirt and matching jacket.

“We will begin with the closed fist,” I said. “Please stand.”

They gaped at me, then a stout woman with wiry grey hair and sensible workout clothes stirred, said, “Don’t need names for that, I guess,” and hauled herself to her feet. One woman who had been sitting in full lotus position with her palms up stood with the ease of a dancer, or perhaps a yoga practitioner, though the muscles around her eyes were tight. Another—matte black dye job, who had sat with legs spread and weight tipped back on her many-ringed hands—rose with the awkwardness of a day-old foal, just a bit too quickly to match the boredom she was trying to project. There were several obvious cases of nervous tension, including Blue Blouse; one openmouthed possible breathing difficulty, which I hoped wouldn’t develop into asthma due to poor air quality; and one set of tilted shoulders that looked to be more the result of habitual bad posture than a structural deficit. On first assessment, the only possible powder keg was a white woman who jerked to her feet and kept her chin down; who didn’t lift her eyes from the floor, even when the door banged open behind me.

“Oh,” said the latecomer. Softball muscles played in her forearm as she shifted her gym bag from right hand to left, and through her warm-ups her quads bulged like those of a soccer player. “Sorry I’m late.”

I wheeled the punch bag and frame away from the painted breeze-block wall and into the center of the room. The heavy bag swayed. I dropped the stabilizer on each leg and slapped it into place.

“This bag is filled with sand. You can’t hurt it.” It couldn’t hurt them, either, because I’d had it fitted with a custom cover of latex over foam to protect their beginner’s hands. I nodded at the middle-aged woman with the wiry hair. “Come and give it a try.”

“Me?”

Basic rule of animal behavior: control the leader of the herd. For a group of women who had been together less than ten minutes, that meant the cheerful motherly one. “Stand here. Make a fist. No. Keep your thumb out of the way.”

I found their ignorance difficult to believe. Dornan had tried to warn me. He had watched me thumbtack my poster to the public board in one of his cafés and shaken his head. I don’t think you know what you’re letting yourself in for. Anyone could show up. Southern women with big hair, big teeth, big nails. Women with husbands and babies.

“The thumb always goes on the outside of the fingers,” I said, and raised my hand to show them. They all nodded and flexed experimental fists. I got behind the bag and steadied it against my body. “Now hit it.”

The stout older woman glanced around, but didn’t seem to find any hints, so she stepped up to the bag, and gave it a tentative tap. Self-consciousness, the curse of Western womanhood.

“Again, only this time, say ‘Blam!’ ”

“Blam?”

“Like a cartoon. Pretend you’re in a Saturday-morning animation: Blam! Pow! Zap! You’re an invincible superhero. It’s not really you hitting this bag, it’s the character you’re playing.”

She pulled a face at her audience, moved half a pace closer to the bag, said “Blam!” like a ten-year-old boy waving a homemade lightsaber, and thumped it. The difference was audible. “Cool!”

Everyone grinned. I nodded at her to go again.

“Whap!” she said. “Zammo! Bam bam bam!” Her face got red and her hair stuck out.

“Okay. Good. Next!”

They lined up. The newcomer assaulted the bag with a flurry of ferocious punches, added a couple of elbow smashes, and finished with a “Whomp, whomp, you asshole!”

“Next.”

The yoga woman, light but competent, followed by Dye Job who shrieked “Fuck!” when her fingers got mashed between bag and ring metal, a lesson she wouldn’t forget in a hurry. Blue Blouse and Green Skirt surreptiously removed rings and pocketed them. Blue Blouse was clearly embarrassed but hit the bag anyway, after a fashion. Then, because it was her turn and it was expected of her, Carpet Starer came to the bag, managed “Bang, bang,” in a tight whisper, and poked it with her knuckles. I nodded and called “Next!” because I had seen so many women like her—in shelters, in hospital emergency rooms, bleeding bravely in their homes—and it was important not to let her know I was paying attention. Next was Green Skirt, who unselfconsciously hitched up her skirt, brushed back her bangs, and flipped her hair over her shoulders before beginning. Then Sloping Shoulders, then Breathing Difficulty.

Now that everyone had had a go, I made the line hustle.

“Run!” I said. “Faster. Hit it three times. And again. Experiment: stand closer, try the other hand, point the other leg forward. Shout when you hit it. Hit it five times. Don’t think. Do. And run. And again.” The air began to hum, and muscles plump, and just before the room kindled I clapped my hands and said, “Enough. Please sit.” They did, in an obliging circle, some smiling, and Blue Blouse scooted to her left with an ingratiating bob of her head—teacher’s pet—to make a space. I took it.

“I am Aud Torvingen. Aud, rhymes with crowd.” They waited for more, but I wasn’t interested in proving I was qualified to teach them, and the name of the class, Introduction to Women’s Self-Defense, was self-explanatory. I nodded to Blue Blouse that it was her turn. She told us she was Jennifer, and we went round the circle briskly: Pauletta, with the green skirt and a gold cross. Suze, the latecomer. Katherine, the bad posture. Sandra, the carpet starer. Kim, with long red nails. Therese, the yoga woman. Christie, the dye job. Tonya, the breathing difficulty with carefully straightened hair. Janine, the middle-aged woman, “Or Nina, I don’t mind which.”

“Pick one,” I said.

“Nina, then.”

“Fine.” I waited a moment. “Self-defense has only one goal: to survive.”

“And kick butt!” said Nina.

“No.” They blinked. “One goal, to survive.”

“Wait a second,” Suze said, “just hold on.” She leaned forward. “You’re saying we can’t fight?”

“I’m saying that from a self-defense perspective, the only goal is to survive. Fighting is neither here nor there.” Wrinkled brows. The flick-flick-flick of Kim’s long red nails, one by one, against her thumb. “Of course, once you’ve ensured your survival, kicking someone to death is an option.”

Therese lifted her shoulders, momentarily losing that Zen poise as nasty reality intruded on her nice, clean middle-class understanding.

Suze was still frowning. “So are you saying we should or shouldn’t fight?”

“You’re grown-ups. Make your own choices. My job is to show you the basic tools and techniques of self-defense: how to stay out of trouble, how to recognize it if it finds you anyway, how to deal with it using what’s available—whether that means words, or body weapons like elbows and teeth, or found objects.”

Therese probably thought of found objects as sea-etched glass and drift-wood from Jekyll Island. For Kim it might be a lottery ticket. Sandra, now, she would understand the concept: the heavy-buckled belt he pulls from his pants, the quart bottle of Gatorade he’s drinking from when she foolishly mentions she forgot to buy the mushrooms, the broom handle brandished like a quarterstaff when he sees a footprint on the kitchen floor.

“What you do with those tools is up to you. I can tell you what I might do in any given situation, or at least give you my best guess, but that doesn’t mean you should do the same.”

Pauletta touched her crucifix lightly. “So, okay, what would you do if you walk into a bar and there’s a guy with a knife?”

“Walk out again.”

“That’s it?”

“It’s one option. Prevention is better than cure.”

“But what if he’s threatening someone?” Suze asked.

“This isn’t Bodyguarding for Beginners or Heroism 101.”

“So you’d let him cut some girl, just walk out and leave her?” Pauletta.

“Depends.” It always depends.

“On what?” Suze, leaning forward again.

“Everything. How I’m feeling that day, what city I’m in—even what part of town in that city. What the assailant looks like, and the potential victim. The number of exits. The general mood of the bar.” They were not getting it. Women with babies . . . “Anyone here have kids?” Nods from Therese, Nina, Sandra, and Kim. “What would you do if your child came home from school crying?”

“Oh,” said Therese after a moment.

“Right,” said Kim, nodding, “it depends.”

“I don’t get it,” Suze said.

Therese said, “If my twins come home at the end of the day it means one thing, if it’s at eleven in the morning it means something else—”

“If Carlotta’s crying because some girl stuck gum in her hair I have to do different things than if it’s because her teacher died in a car crash,” Kim said.

“But you always comfort them, first,” Nina said. “You make sure they’re safe—”

“And that they feel safe,” Kim said.

“Yes,” said Therese. “And you always try to find out what happened, make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

“Basic principles,” Nina said. They smiled at each other, pleased.

Suze frowned and opened her mouth. I forestalled her. “Basic principles. That’s what I can give you. Any mother will tell you that if you take a favorite toy from a two-year-old he will scream. I can tell you that if you kick the leg with enough force at a particular angle you will detach the kneecap.”

Suze brightened. “So are you going to show us that kneecap thing now or what?”

I studied her a moment. I nodded at her quads. “You already know how to kick things. That’s not why you’re here. One of the things you need to learn is who to kick, and when.” I looked around the circle: different ages, races, classes. Different ways of looking at the world. “When do you hit someone?”

“Depends,” Nina said. Fast learner.

“Yes. On what?”

They all looked hard at the carpet, like teenagers desperate not to be called on in class.

“Everything?” Christie said.

I smiled. “Yes. Let’s go back to what Pauletta said earlier. Walking into a bar . . .”

Every student learns at school how to fake attention. I watched it start to happen now.

“Or a supermarket at night. Or an empty church.” Most of them came back. “How do you approach it? What do you do? What do you look for?”

“I walk in like, Don’t fuck with me!” Suze said.

No one said anything.

“Not looking like a victim is a good first step. But it takes a lot of effort to project aggression all the time.” I paused, trying to think of a metaphor that might mean something to all of them, something American. “You’ve all seen old westerns. The gunslinger steps through the saloon doors and stops.” Nods. “That is exactly what not to do.”

If gunslingers really had paused in the saloon doorway, conveniently backlit by the noonday sun and blind in the sudden interior gloom, their days would have been short. The unassuming ones would have lived longest, the ones who slipped through the swinging doors behind someone else, slid along a side wall, and looked over the room before ghosting up to the bar and ordering what everyone else was drinking. By the time the bad guys in the black hats at the card table had realized he was there, he would have known who was the ringer with the derringer in his pocket, where the exits were, and whether the gang leader might be delayed on his draw by the necessity of first dumping the pretty saloon girl from his lap.

“Imagine you’re walking into—Tonya, pick a place.”

“Kroger.”

“What time, what day?”

“A weeknight, after work, but late, maybe nine o’clock.”

“So it’s dark outside and bright inside. First thing: park near the entrance, under a light. Don’t unlock your door until you’ve looked around. Keep your eyes open and your hands free. If you have to turn a corner on the way to the door, take it wide.”

“Why?” Therese said.

It took me a moment to realize she was serious, she really didn’t know why. I had planned this lesson meticulously: an orderly progression of building blocks. We had already wandered off the road, out of necessity, and it was clear that sticking to the plan would be like digging a foundation in sand. I let it go. “Because then you’ll see anyone on the other side before they see you.” Therese nodded thoughtfully, filing away the information for further reflection. Suze said, “Huh,” but quietly. Jennifer looked worried. “So now you walk into the supermarket. It’s bright. What do you do?”

“Wait for your eyes to adjust,” Kim said confidently.

Like a sun-struck calf waiting for the hammer. “It would be best to keep moving. Head towards the grocery carts or baskets, and as you do, sweep the place visually. See them before they see you. You’ll grasp things instantly that you don’t consciously know you know. Your subconscious works a lot faster than your conscious mind. So let it do the preliminary work. Swing your gaze slowly from one side of the aisles to the other. If something or someone snags your attention, you can hang a mental tag on it to come back to later. That sweep should take no more than three or four seconds. Whatever you see, don’t stop.” No point spotting a guy in a black hat minding his own business at the other end of the bar if there’s some grinning idiot right next to you swinging an axe. “The trick is to not draw anyone’s attention until you’ve completed the sweep.”

“So what if there is a dangerous person?” Jennifer, for whom Kroger was suddenly looking like a jungle.

“Hey, I know the answer to that one,” Nina said. “Leave, right?”

I nodded.

Jennifer was not convinced. “But what if they follow you?”

“Then you get in your close-by, well-lit car and drive away.”

“But what if you trip or something and he catches you first?”

Suze stirred restlessly. “Then you fucking hit him.”

“Right,” I said to the group as a whole. “So let’s go back to the fist.” I stood and motioned for them to do likewise.

I lined them up, facing me, and held my right hand up, showing them how to make a fist again while I walked along the line, rearranging fingers and thumbs. “Think of your fist as the point of a spear. The forearm is the spear shaft. It has to be strong and straight, no weakness at the wrist. The wrist is where you want all your tension. Good. There are seven basic points to remember when hitting or kicking.” There could just as easily have been six or eight, but human brains find sevens and threes significant. “One, strike from a firm base. The firmer the better, because, two, most of your power comes from the torque generated by your hips. Stand with both feet firmly planted and swivel your hips as you punch—throw that spear forward, don’t push it. You can’t get good movement from a bad base. Three, strike on the out breath, preferably with a good loud yell.”

“Blam?” said Nina.

“Whatever you like.”

“What do you yell?”

“Probably depends,” Suze said to Christie, who giggled.

“Four, strike hard and fast. Power comes more from speed than weight.” More strictly, the greater the mass and acceleration, the greater the force. “Five, strike right through the target. There’s no point stopping on the surface. Six, you almost always need to be closer to the target than you think. Seven, be prepared to strike more than once. Let’s try it. Suze, hold the bag. Jennifer, you’re up.”

It was tempting, watching them flail at the bag one by one, to stop them, to show them how it’s really done, but although I would have enjoyed the whip of power, the hard ram of bone on compact sand, it wouldn’t help. They would try to imitate my stance, my noise, my expression; they would try to learn the lessons I had learnt, not their own.

They watched each other, subconsciously took note of what seemed to work: when Suze took her weight on her back leg, Jennifer, who was holding the bag, moved back a good inch; when Suze stepped into the punch, Jennifer moved five inches. When Nina tapped the bag, then moved closer by half a step and walloped it, they noticed. Gradually, they adjusted their stances, their speed, their noise, feeling out what worked for them and what didn’t. I wanted them to learn something unique to them, that came from them, not an artificial overlay that would evaporate in the first flash of fear adrenaline if they were ever threatened.

“Kim,” I said, the second time she hit the bag, “you can hit it harder than that.”

“I can’t.” She unfolded her fingers and held out her hand, showing me the four perfect crescent-moons on her palm.

“You’ll have a hard time with some of the finger strikes, too.”

“What can I do?”

“Cut your nails.”

“I’ve been growing them two years!”

“Your choice.”

She wasn’t the only one who gave me the withering look so many southern women—of any age, or race, or social standing—learn before puberty: a combination of scorn and the deep existential fear of being the one to stand out in a crowd and risk being pecked to pieces. They seemed surprised when I didn’t wilt.

By now, Suze—and Christie, copying her—were whaling satisfactorily on the bag. Therese had become efficient, and Pauletta and Nina were encouraging each other with whoops and catcalls. In a pinch, all five of them might throw a punch. The other half of the class—Katherine and Tonya, for whom the idea of punching anything induced agonizing embarrassment, or at least blushes and giggles, Jennifer, who looked away whenever she sidled up to the bag to hit it, and Sandra, who could not seem to make a sound—would probably never hit anyone with their fist even if their lives depended upon it.

I clapped my hands. “Some of you will find punching easy—fun, even. Practice when you can: at home, at work, in the garden. Some of you will find that punching doesn’t suit you; don’t worry about it; we’ll find something that will. Punching a person, though, isn’t the same as hitting a bag. Suze, where would you punch an attacker?”

“Right in the fucking nose.”

I nodded. “Noses are full of nerve endings; even a comparatively weak blow will cause pain and tearing. A stronger blow will break the nose. One problem, though.”

“Yeah?”

“Step in front of me. Imagine you’re going to hit me in the nose.” Suze was about five-seven, five inches shorter than me. “You need to be closer.” Clearly she had never hit anyone before.

She moved in another six inches. We were standing almost belly to belly.

“Now, in slow motion, throw the punch.” As her fist neared my nose I said, “Freeze there.” She stopped with her arm fully extended, at an upward angle of about forty degrees. I turned to the rest of the class. “She has to hit up as well as out, which reduces both power and accuracy. A fist strike to the nose of a standing opponent is not efficient when they’re taller than you.”

“What about his chin?” Jennifer said.

“Nearly as high up, and very hard on the knuckles. Never hit bone with bone unless you have to.” How did people survive long enough to reach adulthood without knowing these things?

“So knock him to his knees, then hit him,” Nina said, looking around for laughs.

“Fine. But how? Suze, you can put your arm down.”

“Solar plexus,” Therese said. Not gut or belly but solar plexus. Lots of time with a massage therapist, personal trainer, or individual yoga instruction.

“Good. Come out here and show me. Slow motion, like Suze.” She threw a slow, tidy punch targeted one inch below my xiphoid process. “Freeze it there.” I turned to the rest of the class. “See how she’s thrown the punch beyond the skin so that the fist would end up buried to the wrist? Assuming your assailant doesn’t have abs of steel, that would put them down for at least a minute.”

“One minute?” Pauletta said. “You mean like sixty seconds? That’s it?”

“Kick him in the nuts,” Tonya said, then blushed. Half the class hooted.

“Tonya’s on the right track. If you want a downed opponent to stay down, a kick’s probably the best choice. All right, a volunteer to pretend to be the attacker Therese has just put on the ground and Tonya’s about to kick to death.”

I wasn’t a bit surprised when Tonya looked at Katherine, who stepped forward. Always easier to kick the one you know, however slightly.

“On the floor. Curl up as though you’ve just been hit in the stomach— no, tighter. Where would your hands be? Right, curled around yourself. Now, think: you can’t breathe, so what would you be trying to do?” She struggled in mock weakness to sit up. “Good.” And it was. In my rookie police classes, the women had always been better at role-playing than the men. I made another mental note, to exploit that. “Good,” I said again. “Okay. Stay like that.” I turned to Tonya. “What could you kick?”

Tonya circled the reclining figure dubiously.

“Huh,” Pauletta said, “she’s sitting on her balls.”

A few sniggers at that. “Tonya?”

More circling.

Suze couldn’t stand it anymore. “In the face, right in the fucking face!”

“That would work,” I said. Tonya was no more likely to be able to kick a person in the face than punch them. “Anything else?”

“Lower ribs,” Therese said.

“Good, yes. The floating ribs are easily detached, from front, back or side. Anything else?”

“His spine,” Nina said unexpectedly. “Circle round and get his spine.”

“Or the back of his head,” Kim added.

“Or you could try a combination of spine and head: kick the place where the back of the neck meets the skull.”

Tonya liked that idea much better: he wouldn’t be watching her kick him. She stopped behind Katherine and took a deep breath.

“Slow motion,” I reminded her.

She tried. She would have missed by a couple of inches, she nearly fell over, and she blushed afterwards, but that didn’t matter: she did it, and she didn’t giggle.

“You can get up now,” I said to Katherine. In the next class I’d show them how to break someone’s spine even with bare feet, but right now I didn’t want them getting locked into one type of body weapon. Beginnings are delicate times. “Now we’ll move on to the fingertip.”

“Pretty anticlimactic,” Nina said.

“It’s certainly a different kind of tool,” I said. “Its target—its job, if you like—is different, too. Smaller, more vulnerable, like the fingertip itself. Think of the soft places: the eye, the hollow of the throat, the mouth.”

“The mouth?”

“Are you willing to be a guinea pig?” She lifted her hands, as if to say, How bad could it be? I crossed to her side in one stride, hooked two fingers into her mouth along the cheek, and stepped past her so that she arched back on her heels and my hand was on my shoulder as though carrying a sack.

“Jesus,” someone said.

Nina was wide-eyed and struggling and would have fallen, helpless, if I wasn’t supporting her against my back. “I won’t let you fall,” I said. “Are you all right with this?” She swallowed—her whole face moved—but nodded gamely. “From here I can throw her sideways, backwards, or rip half her face off. Not everything is about hitting.” I turned, eased her upright, and took my fingers out. “Thank you.” I walked to the bench and removed a packet of handiwipes from my jacket pocket.

She flexed her face a few times while I cleaned my hand. “That was . . . It felt so wrong.”

It was an important lesson: shock, the breaking of the social compact, was as difficult to deal with as being hit in the face with a shovel. But we’d go back to that another day.

“You could’ve bit her,” Pauletta said to Nina.

“I could not, not the place she had her fingers. Here, open your mouth—”

“Nah-ah.”

“Do it your own self, then,” Nina said, and for the next thirty seconds they all hooked their mouths with their fingers, like suicidal fish, all except Jennifer, who said loudly, “That’s disgusting!” and Therese, who, when she saw me noting her lack of participation, merely raised her eyebrows and held her hands out as if to say Not unless I wash them first, and shook her head. I nodded. I wouldn’t put my hands in my mouth without washing them, either.

“What else?” said Suze. “How do you get the eyes?”

“Like this,” Christie said, “ha!” and did an uncoordinated imitation of Bruce Lee doing bui tze, the shooting fingers.

“You could,” I said, “but it’s hard to be accurate with that move.” And if she missed, she’d break her fingers. “There’s an easier way. All of you: point your index finger at me.”

“Left or right?” Katherine.

“Whichever you’d use to point at something. Now bend it down a little. Tuck the tip of your thumb underneath your index finger’s middle joint. Keep your finger and thumb joined together like that and pretend to tap on someone’s window with it. Put some play in the wrist, whip it back and forth—like Jennifer—so your hand looks a bit like a chicken pecking at something.”

They all had it.

“Now peck the center of your palm. Go gently.”

They did, over and over.

“Now imagine what that would do to an eyeball.”

“Like popping gum,” Kim said admiringly.

“Eeeuw.” Jennifer flung both hands away from her. “I couldn’t do that!”

“Anyone else?”

“I’m not sure,” Therese said, troubled.

“I could do it, no problem,” said Suze. “Yeah.”

I considered them. “Self-defense isn’t magic,” I said. “In any kind of real fight, unless you cold-cock someone from behind with a pipe, you will get hurt. No matter how good you are, things go wrong. Adjust to that now: nothing goes to plan, ever. You’ll get hurt, and you’ll have to hurt them. But you mend. And what happens to them isn’t your problem.”

All rather disingenuous, of course, given the demographics of attacks against women, but at the beginning it’s important to keep things simple and not scare them to death.

“In the next class we’re going to role-play a little. We’ll learn how attackers think and what they look for, and what you can do about that. Meanwhile, I’d like you to do something for me before the next class. Make a list of all the reasons you wanted to learn self-defense in the first place. All the things you or your mother or your friends worry about. Put them in a column. In the column next to them put what you’d be willing to do to your attacker to stop it. So, for example, decide if you would rather be raped than feel the rapist’s eyeball burst all over your hand. Decide if you would rather blow someone’s head off with a twelve-gauge shotgun rather than let them pinch your backside. Decide whether you’d be willing to let a teenager torture your cat instead of dislocating her shoulder, whatever. It won’t be easy. But think about it as clearly and fully as possible, and decide. ”

TWO

I WOKE EARLY, STILL ON ATLANTA TIME, SHOWERED, REREAD BETTE’S FAX, SAW her note at the end, and called. I was shunted straight to her voice mail, which surprised me. Bette was almost always at work. It’s how I imagine her: behind her big teak desk, lizard brown and stick thin, chin wattles hidden by pearls, her Prada and Chanel suits always two years out of date. Seven years ago she had looked sixty-five; she still did. I dialed her home number and she picked up on the first ring.

“Aud? Well, hell, somebody call Ripley’s. You did as I asked for a change.” Her incongruously lush, Lauren Bacall voice was always startling. “You signed those papers I gave you last week?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I haven’t decided.”

“I spent a hell of a lot of your money making those adoption papers watertight. Sign or not, you’re getting a bill.”

I ignored that. Laurence had probably paid her already.

“Well, you talked to OSHA yet?”

“I haven’t even had breakfast yet.”

Silence, one of her go-for-broke silences. I knew what was coming.

“So. When you going to get around to telling me about that envelope from Norway?”

“Bette . . .”

“Now don’t ‘Bette’ me, not this time. I didn’t trouble you with it last year because your friend just died. I didn’t trouble you with it when you came in for your year-end taxes because you still looked thin and peaky. I didn’t even trouble you with it last month, when you were here to talk about your will and power-of-this and power-of-that, because of that mess with your student. But, look, sweetie, it’s been a year—”

“Not quite.” Not until the seventeenth.

“—you’re looking good again, and I need to know just what it is I’m holding in my safe. It smells bad, for one thing.”

The day I had written that letter, had bled all over the envelope, Julia had still been alive. Twelve hours earlier she had sat on my lap in her blue dress . . . Or had it been grey? And I couldn’t remember how she’d worn her hair.

I heard the faint tick-tick that meant Bette was fiddling with her big clasp earrings, which also meant she was frowning.

“It was a kind of insurance. I don’t need it anymore.” Most of the people named in the letter were now dead.

DORNAN AND I ate breakfast in the hotel’s huge dining room cantilevered out over Elliott Bay. There wasn’t much to see; the bay was draped in low cloud and fine rain like mist. I ate bacon and eggs and sausage. Dornan, tourist book on one side and maps on the other, crunched happily on toast. His fireplace, he said, had a remote control, and someone had thoughtfully provided a teddy bear. “Of course, I didn’t find it until I crawled under the covers, when I got the fright of my life.” I added a little salt to my eggs. “Do you have a bear?”

“I have little rubber ducks in my shower.”

“I went for a walk this morning. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a proper morning. Bless the time difference. Did you know there’s a nice park near here? And dozens upon dozens of little espresso carts selling latte and Frappuccino—Frappuccino in this weather.”

It would be in the high sixties today, about twenty degrees cooler than in Atlanta. I ate some more sausage.

“What do you want to do? It’s not the sort of day to play tourist in the outdoors,” he said.

He had lived most of his life in summers like this, in Dublin, and I had grown up in Norway and England. But I’d been in Atlanta since I was eighteen, and Dornan only a few years less. Sometimes the body acclimatizes so thoroughly that we forget things have ever been different.

“I have some business. We could meet for dinner. You?”

“I consulted the very nice concierge, who tells me that once you’re downtown you can ride the buses for free.” Free was a magic word for Dornan. “I thought that if I might persuade you to drop me somewhere I’d spend the day doing my research: eating and drinking and absorbing whatever it is that makes Seattle . . . well, whatever it is.”

The name of the very nice concierge turned out to be Pascalle, and after breakfast she told me that, yes, the Audi A8L Quattro I had ordered had arrived twenty minutes earlier, and here were the keys.

THE AUDI felt like a banker’s car: beautifully machined, competent but not compassionate, giving the driver a sense of admiration but not involvement. The six-speed transmission had very sensitive shift-mapping, matching revs on the downshifts, moving for an instant to neutral and selecting the lowest gear. It was almost as seamless as a manual transmission. I switched briefly to the hybrid manu-matic, then switched back. Too fussy. So was the MMI, the multimedia interface. I turned off the navigation and turned on the radio. Rain spattered the windshield and was automatically wiped away. I rolled up all the windows except the one on the driver’s side.

THE OCCUPATIONAL Safety and Health Administration deals mainly with employers, the leaseholders rather than owners of any particular piece of real estate. The offices of Region Ten, OSHA, were on Third Avenue. The lobby was the kind one would expect of an office building in any big city, hard floors, steel-doored elevators, people carrying briefcases. But every other person walking across the echoing space carried a go cup, and business attire was casual, Eddie Bauer slacks speckled with rain. Many, I guessed, had used public transport and then walked. In my Armani suit I cut through the crowd like a hammerhead among trout.

The OSHA suite was on the seventh floor. I lied to a perfectly nice man called Michael Zhao, expressing extreme concern for my cross-shipping facility on Diagonal Avenue South, in the Duwamish district, professing an overwhelming affinity for statistics, and asked for CFR citation and OMB control numbers regarding intermodal containers, confined and enclosed spaces, conveyors, docks and loading docks. I smiled winsomely and asked if he’d be willing to let me take a peek at the records for my place, and had he any experience himself of walk-through inspections? He talked happily for two hours.

The EPA, on Sixth, was another matter. It was a much bigger operation, for one thing. The woman I eventually found my way to was about fifty with faded red hair and shoulders that slumped more from weariness than habitual bad posture. Her nameplate read Antonia Merrill. I nodded sympathetically at the empty cubicles around her and said, “It looks as though this year’s budget cuts are hitting you hard. I’m hoping I can help you with at least part of your workload.”

KARENNA BEAUCHAMPS CORNING, my local property manager, had an office suite on the twenty-third floor of Two Union Square. The door to Corning’s suite was frosted glass, the handle substantial. The young man at the front desk looked up when I walked in.

“Good morning?” he said, not sounding too sure. Perhaps it was because I wasn’t carrying a briefcase. He glanced at his appointment book.

“Which is Ms. Corning’s office?”

“It’s the first on the l—That is, is she expecting you?”

“No, but I doubt I’ll take more than an hour of her time. If she has any other appointments, it would be best to cancel them. I take my coffee with cream, no sugar.” He paled before he flushed.

The door to Corning’s office was solid-framed oak. She looked up from her keyboard, and then past me. “Where’s Gary?”

“At the front desk.” I shut the door and took a seat opposite. She frowned.

“Is he all right?”

“My name is Aud Torvingen. Of Total Enterprises.”

Her frown flickered, then deliberately eased into a smile that was just a touch quizzical. It was nicely done. “Ms. Torvingen. I’m surprised, of course, but . . .”

She waited for me to apologize for the inconvenience. “Diagonal Avenue South,” I said. “Revenue from my property there is sixty percent below that of comparable properties.”

She smiled. “It does sound bad, doesn’t it? But Seattle has been hit harder than many cities by the recent slowdowns. The last two years have been hard on the import and export of goods in particular, which will of course have a great impact on cross-shipping facilities.” My silence seemed to encourage her. “In addition, I’m afraid your property has suffered by comparison with the recent upgrades undertaken by most of your competitors. You may recall that I recommended we follow suit some time ago. As it is, we had to let it on a short-term lease to a movie production company. ”

She held her up her hand, as though I were about to interrupt her.

“But, you’re probably thinking, there’s been no shortage of tenants. And that’s true. But while it was certainly the case ten years ago that a company that signed a lease would have been a sure thing, times change. Productivity is the key in this business, as in many others, of course, and companies will spend a great deal to abandon a seemingly profitable position if they can increase their long-term productivity by breaking a lease and moving to new premises. Particularly if there’s been trouble with regulatory agencies.” She smiled and picked up the phone. “Would you like some coffee?”

“Does that usually work?”

She stopped, finger an inch above the intercom button. “Excuse me?”

“The smile and the patter, does it usually work?” There was a tap at the door and Gary came in. The spoon on the saucer rattled a little as he put the coffee on the desk. He left without saying a word and I realized I hadn’t thanked him.

“I’m sorry?” Corning said, staring at the gently steaming cup.

“I’m not particularly interested in an apology. You’re fired. I have already instructed my attorney to that effect.” I stirred and sipped. Just the right amount of cream. “However, I would like to know why you have let one of your valued clients lose money hand over fist for more than eighteen months. Or perhaps I’m not the only one?”

Her eyelids swelled slightly. “It is not within my power to control calls to OSHA and the EPA.”

“You’ve been in this business for a long time and know everyone in the relevant local bureaucracies—city, county, state, and federal. It is within your power to mediate with those agencies. It is within your power to apprise me of developments. It is within your power to negotiate with the leaseholders towards a satisfactory outcome.”

“The regulations—”

“Don’t matter much, as you know. If they did, the relevant agencies would have prevented you from leasing the facility anew each time and taking your percentage.”

“If you’re suggesting—”

“What I want from you is a full and frank explanation of the situation and I’d like it by Monday. Do you think that’s possible?”

“The situation is extremely—”

“Do you think that’s possible?”

“I don’t know.”

“I can of course find out for myself, though in trying to duplicate what you already know I might inadvertently dig up all kinds of information you would rather keep private, and which I would have no compunction in turning over to the authorities. Take a minute to think it over while I finish this excellent coffee.” I sipped while she wrestled with whatever conscience she had left.

"It’s possible.”

“I’m delighted to hear it.” I stood. “Monday. Nine o’clock sharp.”

Walking down Third Avenue to the car, I passed a chocolate boutique. I stopped and ordered a dozen truffles which I sent, along with an apology for my rudeness and thanks for the coffee, to Gary.

NEXT ON my list was the Fairmont Olympic Hotel, where my mother and her new husband would be staying. The hotel was set back a good twenty yards from the street behind a U-shaped driveway. Even on a sunny day the huge building would keep the doorway in shade.

The events manager was in his early twenties and a zealot. He declared he would show me around personally, and proceeded to do so, leaving no function room unturned, beginning with the ballroom, “which, should you choose to celebrate your special day with us, is as you see more than adequate to accommodate a wedding party of up to three hundred.” From there we admired the “sweeping staircase, perfect for those unforgettable moments.” He actually clasped his hands to his chest. He regurgitated the publicity brochures while I noted guest and staff exits, elevator and stair distance, and window placement. He did pause in his flow when I insisted on sitting at four different tables in the formal Georgian Room, “just to get the feel of the place.” I found two tables that gave a view of all entrances and exits. The tiny private dining area, “The Petite, for more intimate dining, ” gave me a few concerns, but Shuckers, the pub-like oyster bar, was easy enough to parse. Then it was on to the lounges, the Terrace, and the Garden, “winner for three years in a row of the Seattle Best Martini Award, a light and airy atrium featuring innovative finger foods, an assortment of cocktails, and jazz from nine till one a.m.” Perhaps in the evening, with the right lighting and a band to disguise the echo, it would feel less like a grandiose greenhouse.

When he had finished his tour he gave me a dazzling smile and asked if I wanted to step into his office to look over rates and sample menus. I nodded vaguely and said I’d think about it and, oh, was that the time?

I had no idea why my mother had chosen such a place to stay. The rooms themselves were gracefully proportioned, with high ceilings and huge windows, but the fussy chandeliers and potted plants, the ornate balustrades and striped-silk upholstery would have led to lifted eyebrows and a comment about elegance and simplicity from the Else Torvingen I had grown up with. The idea of her playing Yum-Yum began to seem not so far-fetched.

BY MIDAFTERNOON, as I drove south on the curving Alaskan Way viaduct towards my warehouse, the low grey overcast and misty rain had been replaced by blue sky and puffy white clouds. The city was laid out on my left: the post-pomo industrial skeleton of Safeco Field, glittering office towers, stepped condominiums with rooftop gardens, and a massive neon goddess sign that turned out to be the Starbucks logo, serene under the light, luscious air. On my right, Puget Sound glittered in the sunshine, making even the container ships and huge orange cranes along the wharves look mischievous and elfin, a good-humored joke that lay lightly on the earth. The traffic was heavy but astonishingly well behaved; vehicles stayed in their lanes and signaled when they turned, and the drivers kept their free hands on their oversize go cups rather than their horns. I listened to KUOW, the local NPR station, with half my attention, and looked for the right exit.

Two miles south of the city center Highway 99 returned to ground level and the view was of oil-streaked concrete aprons and rusting shipping containers. My exit led through a series of yards and warehouses and rail spurs, the clanging heart of a working port. The streets were named after states and Native American peoples: Colorado Avenue, Duwamish, South Nevada, Snoqualmie.

I parked outside a corrugated steel warehouse. At some point it had been painted pale blue, but now it was mostly grey and rusty orange. The docking gates down the side were shuttered. Instead of semis in the parking lot, there were two trailers with Hippoworks Productions blazoned on the sides, a couple of vans, and an assortment of SUVs, all sparkling with sunlit raindrops. This was all mine, even the puddles on the worn asphalt, gleaming with oil rainbows, but it didn’t feel like mine, and I didn’t really want it. I’d never wanted it. Once I’d sorted out the problems, I’d sell.

NOONE checked my ID, no one even noticed as I stepped through the open rolling doors of my warehouse. I stood for a moment in the shadows by the right-hand wall.

I had thought that stepping onto a film set would be like being dropped inside a manic depressive’s head: periods of frantic activity punctuated by stressful, motionless silence as cameras rolled, followed by people rushing around setting up the next scene, with perhaps the occasional diva- or director-style tantrum to relieve the tedium. Here, the atmosphere reminded me of watching a road crew set up in an arena on the sixtieth stop in a world tour, or riggers raising the traveling circus’s big top: purposeful and brisk, with just the hint of a swagger, experts saying with their bodies and their competence, This is our world.

Forty or so people did not come close to filling the space, which was bigger than I’d expected, and more than fifty feet high in the center. In the far left corner, carpenters sawed and hammered; in another, two middle-aged men with paint-spattered clothes said something to a woman in a white coat at a makeshift counter, who was brushing back her mid-blond hair with her wrist. I hung a tag on the woman. A man and woman were walking with loaded plates over to a woman who presided over what looked like piles of Goodwill clothes. One man jumped off a platform about fifteen feet high onto an inflated bag that made a gassy whoosh, and then rolled off and started climbing back up to the platform while air compressors thumped. At the far end, in a blaze of lights, about two dozen people crouched behind cameras and cranes and dollies—they seemed to have adapted some of the decades-old rail tracks inset in the floor—or paced out marks, while a worried-looking man with glasses checked and rechecked snaking cables and a control board. Two men were lifting something from a box and onto the pile of old clothes. I hung a tag on them, too. There were monitor screens everywhere, even by the entrance and food counter; people glanced at them reflexively every so often. Something squawked over my head: a speaker on a makeshift shelf nailed to a joist. No one yelled Lights! or Camera! or Action!

I went back to the two men. One of them, slim and cocky as a flamenco dancer, had turned to say something to a woman dismantling an arc light, but the other was looking in my direction, and it was immediately clear why my subconscious had told me he didn’t fit. He had dark hair and a bony face—the kind of face teenage boys develop during their first major growth spurt. I doubted he was even sixteen, far too young to be on a film set. An anomaly, but not a danger.

The woman in the white coat was the caterer. She said something to the two men with the paint-spattered clothes that made them laugh, then pointed with a big knife to a platter of sandwiches, and went back to chopping. Perhaps it was the big knife that had flagged my attention. It shouldn’t have. My subconscious should have put the knife and the coat and the food together and given me the green light. I watched a little longer, but she just kept chopping, and she chopped like a caterer. No threat there.

Now people began to glance at me: quick flicking looks. Perhaps it was the suit. But they were obviously used to strangers. No one came over to find out who I was.

After a while, a pattern emerged: the woman with the heap of clothes was sorting through them, hanging some on the racks behind her, laying some on the table, dropping others in a series of cardboard boxes. The costumer. The worried man with the glasses was some kind of technical coordinator. I couldn’t tell who was the director or the producer or cinematographer, but every now and again someone would walk over to a man who sat to one side of the soundstage with a clipboard and pen that glinted gold. He also wore glasses, and the self-conscious frown I’d seen people adopt when they feel uncertain but want to look authoritative. In half a dozen places there were easels with placards that declared: FERAL: A FINKEL AND RUSEN PRODUCTION. Underneath, in hand lettering: LADYHAWKE MEETS DARK ANGEL! Everyone wore jeans or khakis or cutoffs. Several were very young, too young to drink, but only the one I’d tagged earlier was still obviously school age. No one looked remotely like a star.

Judging by the body language on the soundstage—moments of stillness, tightened jaws, short nods—it looked as though there were two sets of opinion about something. Before it could be resolved, a large truck pulled up outside, followed by another. There was a slamming of cab doors and the rattle of a tailgate, then the beep-beep-beep of a large vehicle backing up slowly.

A handful of people detached themselves from their tasks and headed my way, just as three people came in, two men and a woman with short, glossy hair, each pushing and pulling two loaded wardrobe rails, and laughing. Someone on the soundstage started shouting names, and half a dozen more people left what they were doing and made for the exit. Three or four more took the opportunity to head for the food counter and get some coffee. I wandered a little closer.

A few more of those flicking glances but they didn’t interrupt their conversation. There was a massive coffee urn and a commercial espresso maker. Most people seemed to prefer the urn.

The caterer was handing a plate to one of the carpenters. “. . . to Rusen. Tell him I know he’s busy. Tell him I said to eat.” He ambled off, plate in one hand, coffee in the other, towards the soundstage.

I examined the food: roast chicken breasts in rosemary, bread, rice salad, pasta salad, potato salad, skewers, two piles of roast beef sandwiches and tuna salad sandwiches, ready-cut pizza, and fruit on shaved ice. While I watched, the caterer lifted out the half-empty fruit platter and replaced it with halved strawberries and melons still oozing from the knife. Her hands were gloved, small for her height—she was five six or seven—and her movements as clean as a poem. I was surprised and not sure why. She felt my gaze and looked up. Grey-blue eyes, soft as dove feathers.

A crew member trundled a cart of shrubbery between us. Two others waddled by with potted palms. Most of them were heading towards the soundstage, where a woman halfway up a ladder was pointing and ordering this here and that there in a seemingly endless series of commands. Midstream she yelled, “Joel. Joel!” The man at the control panel pushed up his glasses and frowned. “Cut the stage lights.” Joel pointed at his watch and shook his head. “There won’t be any shoot at all if you keep those . . . Ah, hell with it—” She jumped down from her perch and strode over. She waved her arms. A moment later the arc lights went down with a thunk. The activity onstage seemed to increase. The man with the pen sat by himself, but now there was a plate of chicken on the floor by his foot. Rusen. I walked over. Up close the fineness of his sandy hair and his smooth skin told me he was in his late twenties or very early thirties, much younger than his clothing style or attitude. He looked rather forlorn, like an eight-year -old in a suit who has just lost his first chess championship.

“Busy time?” I said.

He looked up, mouth pursed, then leapt to his feet. “I’m so very glad you could—” He realized his hands were full, and turned and dropped the clipboard on his chair. He held out his hand again. I shook it and smiled gravely, wondering who he thought I was. “They’ll be at this for a while longer, but, please, come this way. We”—he remembered the food, and picked it up—“I have to—Bri?” The boy at the props table, the one with the bony face, looked up. “Bring me a coffee, would you, and—no, no, never mind, Ms. Felter and I will get our own.”

Ms. Felter? The boy, Bri, at least, didn’t seem surprised by Rusen’s mental U-turns. The man I’d seen Bri with earlier—also young, but not a teenager—joined him. Rusen and I walked to the counter, where the carpenters were taking advantage of the temporary chaos to get another cup of coffee. The caterer was chatting, standing wide-legged and easy, knife moving idly this way and that as she talked, taking up her space a little too aggressively, the way women who have been raised with a lot of brothers tend to do in a group of men. It was clear she had never considered using the knife for anything but food preparation; there was no awareness of its edge and balance as it related to the soft skin of the men around her.

She saw Rusen. “Hold it,” she said, to her audience and to Rusen, who stopped guiltily and waited while she filled a cup from the urn, added a pretty swirl of cream and a sprinkle of sugar, and handed it over. He looked apologetically at me before he took it, which made her frown. She studied me, and after a moment she picked up her knife and hefted it. Perhaps the body language was unconscious, but the message was clear: if you hurt him, I’ll hurt you. I smiled. After a measuring moment, she nodded. Something about the way her head moved made me realize she was very tired. She turned back to Rusen, looked at the plate, raised her eyebrows. “Yes,” he said. “I will.”

Rusen led me outside to one of the trailers, which was crammed with a heavy-duty digital editing suite at one end and a miniature office set up at the other. I sat on an office chair, a brand that costs almost a thousand dollars. He put his coffee and his plate down carefully.

“Now I appreciate that we’re several days behind schedule, Ms. Felter, but I hope the fact that CAA has sent you all the way up to our humble set bodes well, despite the, ah, the various delays.”

Felter. CAA. An accounting firm? It didn’t matter. I wouldn’t correct him. I would learn more and, if it seemed desirable, would take advantage of his confusion. “Go on.”

“The cancellation from Fox was very disappointing but I have high hopes, very high hopes, that our unique brand of televisual entertainment will find its niche.”

“Niche?”

“Niche, did I say niche?” He chuckled, but it didn’t sit well on his boyish face and he kept glancing over my right shoulder. “What I meant to say was demographic. I am still convinced that we have an untapped market in the fifteen- to twenty-four-year-old male and female urban viewership.”

“Still?”

“Yes, yes, it’s true we’ve been trying for eighteen months now to secure a network deal, but they seem to lack vision, they’re not willing to get behind a new concept, to take a glorious risk!”

“Risk?”

His blink rate rose and he started to tap his pen on his thigh. “Not that this project’s risky. No, not at all. Not in the sense of perhaps failing. No, no, it’s sure to succeed, practically guaranteed.”

I said nothing, having no idea what he was talking about.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and sighed, and smoothed his face with his left hand. “Using that word was foolish. I know there are no guarantees in show business. Let me begin again. I believe in this project; I believe we have a good product. The delays are not our fault. We have a good crew who are willing to work, and we can be back on schedule by the beginning of next week. I’d be willing to give your agency a very substantial part of the back end in exchange for . . .” He stopped. Sighed again. “I’m doing this all wrong, aren’t I? Oh, jeezy petes, I wish Finkel was here. He’s good at this.”

Finkel and Rusen. Producers. “Mr. Rusen, I’m not from CAA. I own this property.”

“You’re the landlord?”

“Yes.”

“You got my letter? I was beginning to think Ms. Corning hadn’t forwarded it. I was getting desperate.”

“You sent me a letter?”

“Yes. About the EPA stuff? They wouldn’t talk to me, and Corning said it would all have to go through you. She said—Ah, jeepers. You didn’t get it, did you. You’re going to kick us out.”

“No.”

“You’re not going to break the lease?”

“It’s in both our interests for you to be able to stay and do your work.” The place may as well be earning until I decided what to do with it. “Let me be sure I understand you. You tried to talk to the EPA?”

He nodded. “But they said I wasn’t the owner and it would have to go through whoever had the legal authority to make decisions. I looked at the lease, and I thought that would be Corning, but she said, no, it was you. She suggested I write a letter explaining things. She said she’d forward it. That was seven weeks ago.”

“And OSHA?”

“They’re talking to me. At least they were. I thought I was getting somewhere, but then the guy I was dealing with got transferred or something, and the new guy, Zhao, said we’d have to start over. And I was beginning to despair, because with Finkel away, there’s just too much stuff to do. And he’s better at this kind of negotiation than me.”

“Where is he?”

“He had a family emergency.” He made a vague gesture with his pen.

“When will he be back?”

“I don’t know.”

“When will you know?”

“Not sure about that, either.”

I breathed slowly and evenly. “If you had to guess, when do you think it might be?”

“A week? His boy’s sick. Real sick.”

“It might be better not to wait.” He looked nervous, more like that child chess player than ever. “I’ve already talked to Zhao at OSHA, and to EPA. Informally. Most of the write-ups are minor infractions: they only investigated because they had to, it’s the law, but if you make suitable apologies and promises, they’ll let you off with a stern letter and a proposed inspection schedule.”

“Yeah, that’s what the first guy said.”

“We can persuade Zhao to agree, but you’ll have to make the approach, as a representative of the employer, and it’ll have to be cap in hand.” I frowned. I had no idea why I was offering to help. Perhaps it was because he so clearly needed it. “Do you have any of their correspondence here?”

He blinked, then nodded, then scooted his chair to a keyboard and tapped a few keys. “What do you need?”

I remembered one of the OSHA sheets. “They have complaints about severely limited natural ventilation, potential to accumulate or contain a hazardous atmosphere, and other things relating to a definition of a confined space. Which this warehouse clearly isn’t. That would be a place to begin.”

“Confined space,” he said, and touched four keys. The printer began spitting.

“That was fast.”

“New software,” he said. “My design. It works like a spreadsheet, so you can organize by category, but virtually—you don’t have to designate the category beforehand. The tricky part was the search engine. I came up with a sweet algorithm . . .” He leaned forward and stopped tapping, and as he talked about each problem he had solved he started to look less like a precocious child than a confident MBA. When it was time to lead the conversation back to OSHA all his vagueness was gone.

“Two more things. Are there any minors on the set?”

“Minors? Children?”

“The laws are slightly different for anyone under sixteen. You’d have to be careful. Also, you might want to consider getting security at the door. You have a lot of valuable equipment here.”

“We have access cards. And when we’re shooting we have a person on the door, but there’s always someone around—” His pocket tweedled. “Excuse me.” He answered the phone. “Rusen. Boy, already?” He looked at his watch. “You’re right. Okay. One minute.” He folded the phone away. “Sorry about that, hadn’t realized how late it’s getting. They’re ready to run tape on a stunt shot we’ve been trying to set up for hours. Want to watch?”

IN THE warehouse everyone—props and catering and wardrobe and grips— was standing close to a monitor and checking obsessively. Rusen walked to his place by the soundstage, which now looked like a messy jungle with a vinyl floor. The heavy scent of lilies was overpowering. My throat itched.

Two of the people who had brought the extra costumes earlier now stood with the caterer, juice cartons in hand. She had wide shoulders, a tight waist flaring into rounded hips, and muscles on her fingers and forearms and neck. I guessed her back was also finely muscled, and her legs. It was muscle that comes with intensive training from an early age, the kind a trapeze artist or free climber or high diver develops. Not something acquired behind a food counter.

She was drinking water from a bottle labeled Rain City while the wardrobe assistant woman talked.

“. . . so I said, No shit? And he said, ‘Do I look like I’m kidding, ma’am?’ So John and me”—the assistant nodded at the man next to her—“got out of the car and they opened up the van and made us show receipts for, like, half the shit we bought this afternoon until they decided to believe we hadn’t stolen it. I thought Kathy was gonna punch my lights out for being so late. But if—”

A klaxon hooted, lights flashed red. Everyone instantly shut up and turned to the monitor, and then it was so quiet I could hear John breathing through his mouth. When I looked at the monitor I saw that through the eye of the camera the soundstage now looked like a huge florist’s wholesalers. I looked up at the stage and the image disappeared, back at the monitor and it reappeared. All about perspective.

“Roll sound,” a man with a self-important goatee and one heavy gold earring said loudly. “Roll camera. And . . . action!”

The diver, now dressed in the kind of tight black gear Hollywood thinks elite law-enforcement units wear, ran along his platform, looked behind him, and took a dive onto his air bag.

“Cut!”

Some thin applause from the direction of the soundstage. The caterer said to no one in particular, “Waste of film.”

“C’mon, John,” the wardrobe woman said. “Kathy’ll be having shit fits.” They left. I stayed. The caterer tipped her head back and finished her water. Her throat moved strongly as she swallowed, but she moved just a fraction more slowly than I expected. She watched me as she crushed her bottle— she wasn’t wearing gloves now; her fingers were short and powerful—then picked up the large triangular knife and turned back to her chopping board. I couldn’t tell what she was cutting. Sometime in the last half an hour she had retied her hair.

“What did you mean, that it was a waste of film?” I said.

Her chopping didn’t miss a beat. “They’ll have to reshoot.”

“Why?”

Chop, chop, chop. “You could see his face.”

“It looked good to me.”

Now she turned around. “It wasn’t good. I should know. I did that job for six years.”

“But not anymore?”

She gestured at her counter and chopping board with her knife. “What does it look like?”

It looked like tomatoes. I smiled. “I’m Aud Torvingen.”

“Well, good for you.”

I kept smiling. She was busy. I was a stranger. Perhaps she thought I was here to hurt Rusen in some way. “I don’t know your name.”

She pointed the knife at a Plexiglas sign that said Film Food and held a small tray of business cards. I picked one up. “Victoria K. Kuiper.”

“But no one calls me that,” she said, with a certain satisfaction, and started to turn away, but the klaxon hooted again, and the red light flashed, and we turned obediently to the monitor.

The director shouted, the camera whirred, the stunt actor dived onto the bag.

“Better,” the caterer said to herself, nodding.

“It looked exactly the same to me.”

“Nope. He tucked his chin more: not so much face.” She was studying me again, and now that she was still I could see the vast fatigue moving below the surface. “So, Aud Torvingen. You didn’t say why you were here, but I can guess. And my answers are the same as they were last week: I have no clue about and no interest in finding out just how fast this company will crash and burn. My business is food, not reporting bad management.”

“Bad management?”

“Gone deaf?”

I shrugged. It didn’t work on everyone. “Tell me why you think the set’s badly managed.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to know.”

“Now that I believe: you want something so you expect you’ll get it. You people are all the same. I don’t know what song and dance you sold Rusen in his trailer but I’ve been around film half my life”—she must have started barely in her teens—“and I’m not in the market for bullshit. Oh, and anything you take from this table, you pay for.”

“I’m not selling anything.”

“Walking in here in Armani like a CAA toad, and Rusen going all gooey-faced, like you’ve just offered him prime time for his useless pilot?” She pointed the knife at me. “Sure you are.”

Her grey eyes were red-rimmed, and the shadow under them almost matched her irises. She had been up a very long time. She clearly wasn’t happy. Let her keep her knife, then. “I’d really like to talk to you about your thoughts on the management of this set.”

She picked up a cloth and wiped the blade. “I don’t need people like you getting in my way. Stunt work wraps after this and the crew’ll want coffee before hair and makeup arrive to do the actors and we have to start all over again.”

“What about tomorrow?”

“With any luck at all I’ll be sleeping all day tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow night?”

She turned her back to me and started chopping. She swayed very slightly. I wondered how many hours she’d been up. There was a smear of tomato between her pocket and her lower ribs where she might have leaned against a counter. It would stain if she didn’t put it to soak soon, but that would be the last thing she would want to do when she got home, exhausted. Maybe she had someone to do that for her.

IT WAS six-thirty by the time I got back to the hotel. Pascalle gave me several suggestions for places to eat in typical Seattle neighborhoods. I scanned the list. One had the same prefix—547—as Kuiper’s business number. The Jitterbug, in Wallingford. It seemed as good a place as any. I got directions, then collected Dornan from his room.

We drove north on I-5 and exited on North 45th. After a mile or so I took a random left and drove slowly down a quiet, tree-lined street. Crafts-man bungalows mainly, with gardens tending towards the English country cottage perennial, but the well-lit front rooms were affluent and urban: paintings and sculpture, books, exposed brickwork and oiled wainscoting, brushed-steel audio-visual equipment, good lighting, sophisticated interior color.

“These people have got to be Scandinavian,” Dornan said. “Look at the cars.”

Most houses had two cars to a driveway, one an old favorite such as a dull red Saab from the late eighties, or a mustard yellow Volvo of the same era, the other something new and imported: a Lexus RX, a Subaru, an Audi. Maybe I should have rented a Ford. “They’re good cars.”

“And so very practical.”

Dornan mused aloud on the Norwegian nature of the city: a hotel on the edge of the water called Edgewater, a wine bar in a bungalow called the Bungalow, a bakery called the Bakery. “The Boulangerie doesn’t count,” I said. “It’s in French.”

I got back onto 45th and in the Jitterbug we were seated in a booth in the cozy back bar.

Dornan, after a lengthy conference with the server about the pros and cons of triple sec (sweet) and Cointreau (less so), ordered another kamikaze, and I chose a pilsner. The calamari we shared as an appetizer was fresh and tender.

I told Dornan about my visit to OSHA and EPA, and Corning.

“So you think she’ll actually tell you what’s going on on Monday?”

I shrugged. “She’ll tell me or I’ll find out on my own. It’s not rocket science. Like any other investigation, you just follow the money. But why do the work if I can get her to admit her part?” This way I wouldn’t have to bother bringing charges or being a witness.

“I thought you were just going to sell and walk away.”

“I am.” Probably.

“Then this is about you wanting to win first?”

“Something like that.”

“You could just kick her round the block a few times.”

“This is less effort.”

He gave me the look that said he knew there was more to it, something to do with what had happened with my self-defense class, but said only, “What do you suppose rockfish is?”

We asked, and were told that Europeans called it mullet, which set me thinking about red mullet and how the Romans had prized them. I ordered the Thai steamed rockfish, he took the oven-roasted chicken.

“The drive to the warehouse was nice,” I said as we ate, and told him about it. “But the site had no security. I just walked right onto the set. I tried to talk to the producer but he—What?”

“Set? A film set?”

“A company called Hippoworks is filming a TV pilot.”

“What kind of pilot?”

I thought about it. “It’s called Feral.”

“Who’s starring?”

I shrugged.

“Christ, Torvingen, it could have been someone famous. You could have had lunch.”

“Do you want to go?”

“It’s a film set.”

I took that as a yes. “I’m going back tomorrow. You can come if you want. I have to talk to one of the producers. And maybe this most annoying woman, who seems to have some opinions.” I dug out her card. “She runs a catering company, oh, excuse me, craft services. Film Food.”

He looked at the card, gave it back, grinned. “Is she Norwegian?”

“You can’t say things like that when you meet my mother.”

“I don’t intend to say anything to your mother except ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’ Are you picking her up from the airport?”

“The consulate will see to that.” She would be taken off the plane and ushered through the VIP courtesies and probably be at the Fairmont before the economy passengers were clearing the gate—if she was flying. For all I knew, she could be arriving by train or car. However she traveled, at some point she would be standing in her suite at the Fairmont, and then she would phone me.

“When was the last time you saw her?”

“Let’s talk about something else.”

“Fine. How’s your fish?”

“Delicious. But it’s not mullet.” I made a note to look up “rockfish” later.

IN THE car, I said, “Do you know what CAA is?”

“In what context?”

“The Film Food woman said I looked like a quote CAA toad unquote in my Armani suit.”

“Ah. That would be Creative Artists, a big Hollywood agency. I believe they do all wear Armani. Apparently they also move together in groups, like killer whales.”

“How do you know all this stuff?”

“I read Entertainment Weekly.”

Which just reminded me of Loedessoel.

Dornan was grinning again. “Did she really call you a toad?”

IN THE hotel, I had a phone message from my lawyer, Bette: “I faxed those papers, but let’s talk before you sign ’em.” It was one o’clock in Atlanta; it could wait until tomorrow. I checked the fax: twenty-two pages of poor-resolution printing. I wished Bette would join the twenty-first century and use e-mail like everyone else.

I booted my laptop. An e-mail from Laurence, my banker, with estimates of the worth of my property should I choose to sell. Let me emphasize once again, though, the importance of local expertise. I’ll send you a list of eminent local real estate agents tomorrow. I sent him a quick acknowledgment, then opened a search box.

Rockfish turned out to be a kind of bass, not mullet at all. Rusen, it seemed, had graduated from UCLA film school just a few months ago. Before that he had been some kind of software wunderkind. His small company had been bought out by a local behemoth. He was probably bankrolling his own production.

My eyes felt dry and gritty. I closed the laptop.

I emptied my pockets onto the dresser, pondered the Film Food card. Victoria K. Kuiper. Sounded Dutch. But no one calls me that.

Someone had turned the covers back. I found the teddy bear and dropped it on the floor. Found the remote for the fire and turned it off.

Vicky? Definitely not. Vic wasn’t right, either, nor Tory. Those muscles on her arms. Kory? Kuiper? Per? Stupid woman, waving that knife around. Film Food. Very Norwegian. My mother . . .

LESSON 2

THE HEATING DUCT HISSED AND FILLED THE BASEMENT WITH THE SMELL OF burnt dust but not much warmth. I made a mental note to talk to the Crystal Gaze advisory board about that. At some point in the last week someone had left a whiteboard balanced on the stacked chairs by the bench, and a grey pegboard against the far wall. Suze was there on time. They all were, which surprised me. I’d expected two or three dropouts. Today no rings glinted, no earrings dangled, no chains apart from the crucifix around Pauletta’s neck. But there were two pairs of wicked heels under the bench. Everyone wore pants and a tank top or a short-sleeved T-shirt, except Sandra. It wouldn’t surprise me to find she had a lot of long-sleeved shirts in her wardrobe. Kim’s fingernails were maroon today, and still long.

“Did everyone do their lists?” General nodding, a few movements towards bags or coats. “No. I don’t want to see them. I want you to remember, during this class, what you wrote down.”

Suze stirred slightly. I gestured for her to speak.

“You ever write one of those lists?”

“No.”

“So how do you know what you’re willing to do, when it comes right down to it?”

I could point to the bullet scar on my arm and the thin white seam under my ribs, I could tell her about the man I had put in a coma at the end of last year, or the gunman I had killed with a flashlight when I was eighteen. But she wasn’t really asking about me. “We can never know. Not really. Every situation is different.”

She frowned.

They know nothing, I reminded myself. “Are you willing to be a guinea pig?” I said.

“Sure,” said Suze.

I stepped to the center of the room, beckoned for her to join me, and the instant she began to move I lunged at her, fist raised. She flinched and stepped back and turned away, hands going up to protect her head. Most of the others—but not Sandra—shot backwards like iron filings suddenly attracted to the wall. After a moment Suze looked up to find me standing two feet away, arms at my sides.

She started to uncurl. “What the fuck was—”

I lunged again, and again she flinched and stepped back, but this time she didn’t turn aside, her eyes stayed on me, and her hands went only halfway up. Everyone else was pressed flat against the wall.

“One more time,” I said, and lunged, and once again she flinched, but her step back was small, her hands were in fists, and her chin pointed up. Therese looked as though she was about to protest.

I raised both palms and stepped back two paces. "Thank you. I won’t do it again—to you or anyone else—without warning.” It took Suze a moment to decide to believe me, then she lowered her fists, but not her chin, and rejoined the others who were stepping cautiously away from the wall.

“So,” I said, “what did we learn from that?”

“Never volunteer.” Pauletta, and she sounded put out.

“Besides that.” No one said anything. “All right. What did Suze’s first response look like to you?”

“Like you scared the shit out of her for no good reason,” Nina said.

“And what about her second response?”

“The same, but less.”

“I was not scared.” Several of them nodded sympathetically, even though every single one of them knew this wasn’t true. Christie patted her on the arm.

“And the third time?”

“Like she was about to run but changed her mind.”

“She was going to fight,” Christie said. More nods.

“She did flinch,” Pauletta said, sounding as though she were trying very hard to be fair, even though I didn’t deserve it.

“Yes. Almost everyone will flinch. Suze did very well.” Christie smiled. Therese looked slightly mollified. I wondered whether to file flattery under useful teaching technique or craven behavior. “So, the same apparent situation, three different responses. They were different responses because Suze interpreted each of my attacks differently. She gained experience. She extrapolated. By the third time she knew I wasn’t going to hit her. She’d also had practice at responding. In other words, each situation was different. Even though what I did was exactly the same, Suze’s experience level had changed, so it was a different situation.”

Which is why Sandra had moved only after she saw that everyone else had and might notice if she didn’t.

“One way to get some experience without being in real danger is to do a little role play. Has any of you ever done any acting?”

They all studied the carpet very carefully.

“Not since fourth grade,” Nina said eventually. “The nativity play.”

“Yeah?” said Pauletta. “Who did you play, the donkey?”

“Pauletta, Nina, you’re our first volunteers. Pauletta, stand over here. It’s night. You’re waiting at a MARTA station. You’re the only one on the platform, and the train’s late. Imagine that. Pretend you’re doing it.”

Most women learned very young how to play the roles expected of them. Girls’ games were built on the notion: play Mom, play nurse, play teacher. They played and played and played until they learnt to inhabit the roles.

Pauletta started looking up and down the imaginary train line, rising onto her toes, then rocking back onto her heels. She put her hands on her hips, sighed in exasperation. The picture of a tired, irritated commuter.

“Nina, over there. You’re male, about thirty, you’ve had a couple of shots of Jack Daniel’s, you feel like a big man. Imagine how that feels. You walk onto the platform and see this sweet young thing waiting at the other end. You realize that if you wanted to, you could have some fun.”

Women observed male behavior closely, learnt to parse every nuance. Like antelope with lions, their safety sometimes depended on it.

Nina leered and sauntered forward, head relaxed, gaze moving here and there, taking in the fact that they were the only people, slowing as she approached the woman on the platform. Pauletta turned her shoulders slightly away from the man and put her hands in her pockets.

“You can speak, if you like.”

“Um-um,” said Nina, appraisal vibrating in every syllable. “Hello, darlin’.”

Pauletta looked away. Perfect.

“Okay. Freeze frame.” I turned to the rest of the class. “What do you see?”

“She’s frightened,” Jennifer said.

Nods.

“She’s hoping he’ll just go away,” Tonya said. More nods.

“Do you think he will?”

“Fuck no,” said Suze.

“How do you know that?”

“Look at him. He’s gonna play with her. He knows she’s not gonna stop him.”

“So what do you think will happen next? Therese?”

“I’m not sure,” she said. The delicate muscles at the top of her shoulders flexed as she folded her arms. “It depends on what she does.”

Sandra was watching the imaginary platform intently. I said, “Does anyone think Pauletta could stop him at this point? Sandra?”

When she heard her name her belly tightened—the waistband of her sweatpants moved a good inch—and she didn’t look at me, but nodded.

“Why do you think that?”

She looked at me sideways. “Because he doesn’t really want to hurt her.”

Pauletta broke her pose and turned round. “What—”

“Nina, stay exactly as you are. Everyone, look at Nina. Look carefully. Remember what you see. Nina, tell us what you were imagining your character to be thinking. You can move now if you want.”

She turned round. “I was thinking, Hey, I feel good, she looks good, wonder if she wants to chat. When she turned away, I thought, Uptight bitch, and got ticked off. She messed with my mood, you know?” I could almost hear a voice from her teenage years: Smile, foxy lady, I’m feeling so mellow. . . .

“Who are you calling an uptight bitch?” Pauletta said.

The two of them clearly trusted each other reasonably well. I wouldn’t do what came next with Sandra or Jennifer or Katherine. “Pauletta, if you’d go back to how you were before you saw the man come onto the platform, that’s right, turned this way, hands out of pockets to begin with. Nina, I want you to imagine that this time you mean business. You were out drinking because you just got fired. You don’t feel good, and you want this woman to not feel good, either. You want to hurt her. Think about it, get a clear picture in your head of how you’re going to hurt her. No, start back here again. Good. Go.”

The difference was obvious. This time there was no swagger. Her head did not turn, because she already knew they were on their own. Her gaze was focused on Pauletta, chin slightly down. One hand came forward, the other stayed in her pocket, but tense. Unease rippled through the women behind me.

“Okay. Stop. Thank you. Take a moment to stretch.” More to shed the role than anything. I turned to the rest of the group. “Did you see the difference? ”

Everyone nodded. “It was creepy,” said Christie. “He—she—had a gun in his pocket.”

“Nina?”

“A knife,” she said. “Short and wicked.”

“Man, you had me convinced,” Pauletta said. “You are scary for a little round white person.”

“So,” I said. “We all knew before he even opened his mouth that it was different, that this time he was starting out serious and the first time he wasn’t. It could have become serious, but it didn’t start that way, and right at the beginning Pauletta could have stopped him without laying a finger on him.”

“No touching?” Pauletta said.

“The force is with you, Luke,” Nina said.

Everyone smiled very hard.

“You can think about it that way if you like. I see it more as taking up space. Imagine I’m the woman on the platform. I’m looking for the train. The man, the first man, enters. Now, instead of turning away, putting my hands in my pockets—which is basically taking up less space, pretending to be invisible and hoping he’ll just go away—I turn towards him, look him in the eye, and nod calmly. I’m saying, I see you, we’re alike, you and I: two people waiting for a train. Equals going about our business.”

“Yeah, but you’re six feet tall,” Kim said. Lots of nods.

“It’s not about how tall you are.”

“Right.”

“I was Atlanta PD. I’ve met carjackers and muggers and psychopaths. They all go for someone who looks like a victim: who doesn’t take up space, who apologizes, who doesn’t want to appear rude, who tries to pretend nothing’s happening. All of them go for the low-hanging fruit.”

“Fruit?” Pauletta said.

“Wait, wait.” Therese. “Clarify your statement for me, please. Are you saying we have to act the way you do, marching about like some, some . . .” She searched for the right word, couldn’t find it. “That we have to deny our femininity?”

“No.”

“Then what are you saying?”

“Yeah,” Kim said. “Why should we have to cut our fingernails, then cut our hair even shorter?”

“No shoulds from me. Only information to help you make choices. For example, Kim, do you cut your nails and have a wider arsenal of possible responses to attack or do you choose to keep them long and either spend a bit more time learning palm strikes or accept the fact that one day something could happen where having shorter nails might have made the difference?”

“They’re my nails!”

“Yes.”

“I don’t see why I should cut them.”

“Then don’t.” I wasn’t seeing the problem.

“What about short hair, and always wearing pants?” Therese said.

“Not everyone could wear it like that,” Jennifer said, with an ingratiating smile in my direction, “but it does look super nice on you. And there’s nothing wrong with pants as a personal choice.”

They all shifted, reminded that it wasn’t nice for southern women to insult another’s appearance.

“And, hey,” Nina said, “maybe she doesn’t wear pants when she’s not in class.” She looked at Kim. “You sure stopped wearing skirts quick enough.”

“No point flashing booty just for sisters.”

“Only makes sense,” Pauletta said.

She and Kim and Nina eyed each other, then nodded, allies.

“Besides, short hair is very attractive in its own way,” Nina said, stroking her own carefully shaped grey cut.

“Totally,” Christie said. “I think about cutting mine all the time.”

“Oh, don’t do that,” Tonya said. “It’s lovely. So long and straight.”

“No one has to cut their hair, no one has to wear pants, no one has to trim her nails. It is in your best interests to know what all your choices mean. Looking as if you’re afraid means you’re more likely to be attacked. Statistically.”

“Cite your sources,” Therese said.

“My own personal experience as a police officer. The Women Against Rape survey published in London in 1985. Ongoing U.S. Department of Justice statistics.” The WAR survey had held up remarkably despite the intervening twenty years and four thousand miles.

“She was a cop,” Pauletta said.

“She’s our teacher,” Jennifer said, nodding.

“Trust or don’t trust, just don’t question?” Therese put her hands on her hips.

“What is your problem?” Suze said.

“I’m curious about what she’s trying to teach us here, exactly.”

“Why don’t you ask her?”

“I think that’s what she’s trying to do,” I said, and gestured for Therese to go ahead.

She struggled for a moment. I could guess what her essential problem was, but it took her a while to get there. “It’s not fair.”

“No,” I said.

“We shouldn’t have to act differently, just to not be attacked in the street. It’s not fair.”

“No. But that doesn’t matter.”

She looked puzzled.

“What matters is what happens. The strong attack the weak.” I wasn’t sure how I could make it more plain. “Big countries invade little countries, the alpha hippo savages the beta hippo, the jock beats the nerd. Why? Because they can. Because they believe they don’t have a lot to lose but a great deal to gain. In economist-speak, they have strong incentives.”

Tonya looked interested. “So what we’re doing is learning to disincentivize them?”

“Yes.”

“But we shouldn’t have to,” Therese said.

“No. But shoulds and shouldn’ts don’t matter.”

The corners of Therese’s eyes and mouth pulled away from the center and her head moved back half an inch, as though someone had shoved a bucket of raw tripe in front of her and suggested she eat it. It was the way of the world. There was nothing I could do to change it. The only way to help her was to continue with the lesson.

“Now, where were we with the role play?”

“Not looking like a victim,” Tonya said. “Disincentivizing.”

“Pretending we’re six feet tall,” Pauletta said.

“Yeah, you do it with mirrors,” Nina said. Everyone except Katherine smiled, relieved that we were all on the same side again. I raised my eyebrows at her.

“It’s okay for everyone to make jokes,” she said. “But what if you’re really not six feet tall? What do you do if a man at the MARTA station starts talking to you?”

“Would you want him to talk to you?”

“No!”

“Then say so.”

“Say so?”

“Clearly and simply: I won’t talk to you.”

“Isn’t that kind of rude?”

Rude. To a man who had invaded her personal space, made her afraid, and was testing to see what kind of victim she’d make.

“It’s neutral. A statement of fact.”

“Wouldn’t it provoke him?” Jennifer.

“Nina, would it have provoked you?”

“No-o,” she said. “No, I don’t think so. It would’ve made me shrug, maybe, and think, Bitch. Maybe I would’ve said that to her face.” Jennifer flinched.

“Something to add to your list: would you rather be called a bitch or put up with an hour’s harassment by a drunk at a MARTA station who may or may not be working himself up to jump you? Bear in mind that if you do tell him to go away, you need to also make sure your body is saying the same thing as your words: everything in line, no ambiguity.”

“But if he’s drunk he won’t listen,” Jennifer said.

“He certainly won’t if you don’t say anything. No one is a mind reader.”

Blank looks. There were times when I felt that although we had arrived in the same room, we had traveled through different dimensions.

“You have to say the words out loud. Again, fair play doesn’t matter. What you want, or what you think he should already know, doesn’t matter. What matters is what you actually say—with your body and your words. No one can read your mind. If you say, ‘I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want you anywhere near me. If you so much as touch me with the tip of your finger, I’ll call the police and have you charged with assault,’ he’ll understand.” He wouldn’t necessarily listen, but he would understand.

“That seems a little excessive,” Therese said.

“If that’s the first thing you do, maybe. If you’ve already made it plain with body language, and already told him verbally you don’t want to talk, then no.”

Enough chitchat.

“Let’s practice. Pair up. No, Tonya, you go with Nina, Katherine with Pauletta.” Time to do a little mix-and-match. “Therese, I want you over here with Sandra.” Therese was physically and emotionally contained and wouldn’t intimidate Sandra. “Suze with Kim.” Perhaps the nail issue would get sorted there. “Christie, you’re with Jennifer. Nina, Pauletta, Therese, Suze, and Christie, come and get two chairs each, put them wherever you like, just make sure they’re next to each other, like a bench. Sit down. You’re on a bench in Piedmont Park, on your lunch break. It’s a lovely day. You’re by the lake. All the other benches are empty but there are people playing Frisbee in the distance. Then someone—that’s your partner, ” I said to the women still standing, “some stranger comes along and sits on your bench.”

“Man or woman?” said Pauletta.

“That’s up to you.”

“Is he—or she—a creep?” Christie.

“Anyone who sits next to you when all the other benches are empty is a fucking creep,” said Suze.

“Point,” said Nina.

“He could be blind,” said Katherine.

Or an alien or a secret agent. “He’d have a white cane,” I said. “There again, perhaps it’s simply a woman who admires your shoes and wants to know where you got them. You decide. Get as loud as you want, but nothing physical, not at this stage. You have two minutes, then swap places. Begin.”

I stood by Nina and Tonya but focused my attention on Therese and Sandra. Role play could bring up powerful emotions, and if I was right about Sandra, she was a walking time bomb.

I could tell by her open shoulders and legs that Sandra had chosen to play a man, which didn’t surprise me: it was a way to feel powerful. When s/he sat, he gave Therese a quick, uncertain smile and opened his hands and widened his eyes. I didn’t hear what he said but Therese leaned forward.

By this time Nina had already laughed in Tonya’s face, and they had switched roles. Christie and Jennifer seemed to be in a stilted conversation about hairstylists.

Sandra/the young man edged closer to Therese, who backed up a little, and it was clear from the expression on the young man’s face and the way he almost reached out to touch Therese’s sleeve, then dropped his hand suddenly and put it in his lap that he was saying something like, No, wait, please, I’m sorry, I know this must seem weird, but you’re the only one who can help me. And Therese looked around, the way we do when we wish help would arrive in the form of a loud-voiced acquaintance with whom we can leave without appearing discourteous, and the young man chose that moment to put his face in his hands. Therese hesitated.

On the other side of the room, Katherine was backing off as Pauletta said, “This is my bench, asshole. Go find your own.” Kim was sitting fairly close to Suze, smiling into her face, touching her hand, and Suze was blushing.

Sandra’s young man hitched himself just a little closer—very natural-looking, and with a pleading expression—and Therese still hesitated, and then it was too late: he had fixed her gaze with his and she was deep in the well-bred woman’s trap.

I stepped in. “Are you two all right?”

Sandra, still as a young man, said, “Fine, Officer, just fine. It’s . . . well, my dog, Earl, died, and this was the place he liked best. We used to come out here—but you don’t want to know that. I was out walking just one more time, only—it was just that I imagined I saw him, leaping up for that Frisbee, and I got this lump, and I just had to sit, and this kind lady . . . well, it’s embarrassing, but we’re just fine now, thank you.”

We. He’d taken the reins and made it impossible for polite, appropriate Therese to say anything without looking rude or stupid.

“You do that very well,” I said. No doubt because she’d been living with an expert. Sandra—because, just like that, she was Sandra again— laughed, and her laughter was low and self-mocking and shot through with bitterness. To the class in general I said, “Switch roles if you haven’t already,” and sank to my heels by Therese, who was sitting very upright.

“I fell for it,” she said. “I can’t believe I fell for it.”

“A lot of people do. That’s how Bundy worked: put his arm in a sling and got his victims to feel sorry for him. Women are trained to take care of people. It’s a habit, a dangerous one. Take a moment, then let’s see you swap roles.”

Elsewhere in the room, the pairs were becoming partners, Christie saying to Jennifer, That was awesome. I mean, I totally didn’t want to sit on your bench. But what if I tried . . . and Kim to Suze, who was still blushing, So, what, you’d let any female who told you you had pretty hands get up close and personal? You don’t think a girl might be more interested in that wallet in your back pocket than your flustered ass?

Sandra settled herself on the imaginary bench and looked off into an imaginary distance. Therese took two deep breaths; her face smoothed and her shoulders dropped. She sat down on the bench. Sandra looked up at her/him—Therese’s body language was so neutral it was hard to tell—and said, “I am so very, very tired and I want to be alone. Please leave my bench.” Therese started to get up—as any reasonable person would—but then, mindful of her recent embarrassment, sat down again. Sandra said indifferently, “I’m going to stand and walk over to another bench. I can’t stop you following me, but if you’re hoping I’ll run or scream or faint in terror, you’ll be disappointed. I just don’t care.”

An intuitive leap, an apparently inexplicable impulse, can save your life or someone else’s, but it’s rare to find a person who can trust their instincts to that degree. You have to be able to get out of your own way. It’s always fascinating to watch. Therese looked up at Sandra, momentarily blank, then understanding swarmed over her face and she said in an ordinary voice, “I don’t believe that’s true. You do care. That’s why you’re here.”

They faced each other, perfectly still.

I stepped back. “Time’s up, people.” I waited until I had their attention. “Okay. Things we’ve learnt. That an assailant will use your sense of polite-ness and good behavior against you. He or she may flatter and flirt. Flattery is an enormously useful tool.” Kim nodded significantly at Suze, who scowled. Christie looked from one to the other, puzzled. “He or she will try to affiliate, to persuade you that you are in some way a team. She may ask to come in and use your phone; he may say he has had an accident. Remember, you owe strangers nothing: no explanation, no apology, no thanks, no smile, no assistance.”

“But . . .” Katherine. She shut her mouth, frowning.

“Go on.”

“It’s . . .” She shook her head in frustration.

“It’s hard,” Therese said. Everyone turned. “We’re supposed to be nice. It’s at the heart of everything we do. I hadn’t realized that. But then I was playing at sitting on the bench, and this young man comes and sits next to me. He starts talking to me, and I’m thinking, Why’s he doing this? because, as Suze says, you know anyone who sits on your bench without even asking is weird or wants something, no matter what they say, but he talks and I don’t do or say a thing. Even when a police officer comes along, I say nothing. He had me. I’m smart, I’m educated, and he had me. It was as though he’d tied me up and stuffed my mouth with a rag. All he did was hint I was stupid to think he was any threat—just hint, not even say it out loud. I didn’t want him to think I was foolish. So I did nothing. I knew he wasn’t right but I still did nothing. And I don’t understand.”

“Embarrassment,” I said. “Self-consciousness.”

“Yes,” she said, “but why?” She practically vibrated.

“Define for me the words feminine and ladylike and womanly.”

Silence. Then, “Pretty,” Nina said.

“Soft,” said Suze.

“Kind,” said Jennifer.

“Sexy.”

“Nice. Well behaved.”

“Weak—” said Therese.

“Nurturing,” and “Motherly!” Pauletta and Tonya said together.

“—emotional, hysterical, and irrational.” Therese was breathing hard.

“Vulnerable,” said Christie, and looked it.

THREE

DORNAN AND I SAT OPPOSITE EACH OTHER AT A SMALL WOODEN TABLE BY THE window of Tully’s coffee shop in a neighborhood called Greenwood, sipping and watching the world go by as the sun sailed out from behind clouds, then hid again. The chairs were plain pine with a clear, polyvinyl varnish, a marvel of modern design and construction: cheap, comfortable for just long enough to drink a cup of coffee, easy to pick up and put down, durable, washable. Quite unlike the Wiram art chair I’d seen in Atlanta before I left.

“What’s the use of a chair you don’t want to sit in?” I said.

“To get your guests to leave early?” He wasn’t really paying attention. He was watching the growing queue at the counter, studying the customers, how the throughput worked. It’s how I’d persuaded him to come with me to Seattle in the first place: to discover the secret to coffeehouse empires. His café chain, Borealis, had seven outlets. He wanted more. We had already had latte and espresso and Americano and green tea at separate Tully’s in Capitol Hill, Wallingford, and the University District. I was now drinking something called Safari Tea, because it was caffeine free, and trying not to think about meeting my mother.

“I like the Tully’s layout,” I said. "I can sit almost anywhere and have a view of the door, and if I have to have my back to it, there are enough windows to see moving reflections if trouble heads my way. There are no hidden corners, no blind spots. No shadowed places by the entrance to deter customers.”

“Deter customers?” Now he was paying attention.

“I’ve told you this,” I said. “People are more comfortable if they can sit with their back towards a solid wall, even if they don’t know why.”

“I thought you were talking about design nonsense, about feng shui.”

“No.”

We were quiet for a while. I mused some more on the Wiram chair.

A man with a bad hairpiece came in, stood in line for thirty seconds, saw it wasn’t moving, and left.

“Jonie wouldn’t have let that happen.”

“No.” Jonie, his favorite barista, was always watching. I had seen her bring him a fresh Americano, just as the thought was forming in his mind.

“I wonder how she’s managing.”

“Fine,” I said.

“I’m having to pay her more,” he said.

“She deserves it.” I didn’t know why she stayed. We were quiet a minute, watching the young Tully’s barista begin to slowly fall apart. Dornan stirred; I could tell he wanted to go help.

But the Seattle customers remained unfazed. Someone said something that made everyone smile, even the barista, and Dornan relaxed. I wished I could. My mother might be in Seattle by now.

“Feng shui does, in fact, mention solid walls,” I said. “Good design is good for a reason. Did I tell you about the chair I saw in Atlanta just before we left? It was an art furniture exhibit at the Lowe Museum . . .”

The first item in the exhibit had been a two-drawered nightstand. From a distance its dark red wood looked top-heavy and unstable, as improbable as the skeleton of a T. rex. The catalogue told me it was a cubist-constructivist side table, and talked about its construction of sixty perpendicularly aligned rods, two hundred forty sides, and seventy-eight joints, all perfectly machined to within three one-thousandths of an inch—aerospace tolerances. It talked about Wiram’s early modern influences, about Fibonacci numbers, negative space, and Euclid’s harmonic proportions. It did not tell me what kind of tree the wood was cut from.

“. . . I looked at this furniture, and I thought what a cold life the maker had led, and how I could have ended up like that.”

“If you hadn’t met, well . . .”

“Julia. Yes. And it made me think about Luz.”

“I don’t know anyone else who thinks of a ten-year-old girl when she sees furniture.”

“She’s happy with the Carpenters—”

“Carpenters, ha, I get it.”

I stopped. Carpenters. Luz’s stepfamily. Their name had never really registered before. “Not that,” I said. “She’s happy there, or she was a few weeks ago, and they love her. But they’ve got no money, and they don’t know how to fight the kinds of things she’ll have to deal with. It would be easy to say, Oh, I don’t know anything about kids, here’s a big fat check every month, but I’m responsible. I should legally adopt her. I intend to legally adopt her. But what does that mean? Adoption is like marriage, it should mean something, it shouldn’t just be a piece of paper.”

“Okay.”

“But there’s no order in a child’s life, no clear goal. You can’t orchestrate the experience, things just happen. And when I was looking at this furniture, I knew, as clearly as I know this tea is disgusting, that no child ever ran into that man’s workshop at a critical juncture and made his chisel slip a hair and cut the ball of his thumb, spill the blood in a Rorschach spatter that pissed him off, but then made him go, Oh!, and gave him an idea. No. Here was a man who might notice a bloody and magnificent sunset over the city but not really see it, because he couldn’t see something like that unless he was on vacation, wearing shorts and sandals and with a glass of pinot noir in his hand. Am I making sense?”

“Well, no, not really.”

“It’s the difference between cold-blooded and taken-on-the-volley decisions. If you get your arm caught in a bear trap and then you see a hungry grizzly thundering down the trail, you have a choice: cut off your arm or die, right there. No time to think. Boom, you do it. But if you get caught in a trap and then nothing happens for a day you have to deliberately consider what it means to cut your own arm off. You have to worry about whether or not you’ve made the right decision. Even when you pick up your Swiss Army knife you wonder if you’re doing the right thing. When you lay the blade against your skin you wonder. Even when you’ve cut through the skin and fat and muscle, severed the first tendon, are unfolding the saw for the bone, you think, It’s not too late to stop.”

“I do wish you wouldn’t talk about things like that.” His head had pulled back, the way a cat’s does when you peel an orange. “And I don’t understand how adopting a child is like . . .” He flapped his hand squeamishly.

“It’s not about having kids. It’s about everything. It’s about the fact that with rescuing Luz, it was the bear trap and the bear, but with my mother, with adoption, it’s a deliberate choice.”

“Ah. Your mother.”

I moved my tea to one side.

“Love isn’t like losing an arm,” he said.

“Yes, it is. Except it’s your autonomy, not your arm.”

“It’s not the same. Look”—he tapped the table until I did, literally, look at him—“you talk about control and order and structure, but that’s not really who you are. No, let me finish. You do plan and prepare and practice, and you do like your life to be orderly, but—Okay. Think of it this way. You’re standing on a deserted road in Arkansas with a small child and suddenly a woman pulls a gun. You’re in someone’s house and the intruder turns out to have a knife. You’re driving down the street and the car in front of you hits black ice. What do you do?”

“Whatever it takes.” Fast and free and fluid.

“You improvise. Exactly. That’s what life is, one big improv session.”

“Improvisation is not . . . reliable.”

“No. But that’s the way it is—”

Shoulds don’t matter.

“—life is about doing the best you can. Living with ambiguity. Risking failure. Letting go of the notion of perfection.”

We reflected on our shoes for a while.

“So tell me more about this furniture you hated so much.”

“I didn’t hate it,” I said, surprised. “It was fascinating. Some of the pieces looked as impossible as the flight of a jumbo jet.” Yet they had cried out to be touched. For the drawer to be pulled in and out, sliding with the extravagant precision of a luxury handgun. For flesh and bone to trace the intersection of one plane with another, follow the distribution of tension across space, weigh the amazement of an empty fulcrum—a false one, a joke, if you like—until you figure out the real center. Yet it had all felt like lies. “You know what it was? It wouldn’t just stand there and be. It tried to hide behind its own cleverness. It wasn’t brave.”

“Furniture as philosophy?”

“You’d think so, from the catalogue.” I related snippets of the catalogue blurb, quoting liberally from the artists’ statements.

“They said it was what?” he said.

“A chair taken seriously as such,” I repeated. “A chair truly interrogated, a chair raised to the level of a question.”

“Is that right,” he said, and shook his head, and we both laughed.

ON THE drive to the Tully’s in Ballard, the sun came out and stayed out, and the car began to smell comfortably of Dornan’s new leather jacket and the bag of unground beans he’d bought on Capitol Hill. The red brick of the side streets glowed and for a moment the city looked almost European.

I’d let him pick the radio station. He chose jazz. I listened and tried to understand why people liked it. It reminded me of the Wiram furniture: afraid to stand still and be known.

“About my mother,” I said. “She sent e-mail from the plane last night. She’s arriving this afternoon and will call my room at the Edgewater.” Only Dornan, Luz, and Bette had my cell phone number. “They’ll be jet-lagged, so I’ll meet her for an early cocktail in her suite, their suite, and spend more time with her tomorrow—which is when you can meet her, if you like.”

He nodded. “We’re still on for visiting your film set this evening?”

“Yes.” I slowed behind a pickup truck that seemed to think twenty-five miles an hour was degenerate and risky. “After lunch, do you want to go to the museum?”

“Shouldn’t you be getting back in case your mum calls?”

“I spent too many years as a child sitting and waiting for a phone call.” I accelerated past the truck.

“I think we could slow down a little.”

“Sorry.” I eased back on the accelerator.

“It’ll be fine,” he said. “You’ll be fine.”

I nodded.

“Have you considered taking her a gift of something, a present? Flowers, maybe.”

“Flowers?”

“I always take my mum flowers.”

He liked his mother.

AFTER LUNCH I went to the Pike Place market and bought calla lilies, and then walked along Western to buy a Loetz glass vase—art nouveau, in iridescent blue-green and silver—to put them in. When I got back to my dim hotel room, I filled the vase and trimmed the flowers and wondered how I would get the full vase and loose flowers to the Fairmont. So I put the stems in two tooth mugs—I had to prop the flowers against the bathroom mirror— poured the water out of the vase, and dried it with a towel, which left lint all over it. And then the lilies, which were too long to stay in the tooth mugs, fell out and smeared the mirror with pollen, which, when I wiped it away with a hand towel, stained the white cotton deep orange. I started to feel the way I had when I was five and had tried, for Mother’s Day—which in England is in March—to make a collage of spring flowers poking through the snow from sugar paper and glue and Rice Crispies, and ended up ruining the granite counter in the kitchen. The smell of the lilies was thick and cloying, and the center of the flowers, with their deep, speckled pink throats and thrusting yellow stamen tongues, looked diseased. I threw them in the bin.

The room was too hot and smelled heavy and sweet, like rotting jungle. My scalp itched with sweat. My heart rate was high, close to ninety, my breathing shallow, my muscles trembling very slightly. Dornan and his stupid caffeine.

I called room service and ordered chamomile tea, and then opened the armoire, sat on the bed, and surveyed my wardrobe.

My mother was used to the high fashion of London, and if we had been meeting in a chic restaurant in, say, Atlanta, the occasion would have demanded the Vera Wang dress or the Armani or Max Mara suit, but this was Seattle, and I was her daughter, and the meeting would be private.

The first time I remembered my mother talking about clothes was when I was ten years old and we went shopping together. Normally, I would go with my father, when he was in town, or one of my mother’s smooth-faced assistants. I picked whatever I liked, without consultation, and they paid. Sometimes, if I was in Yorkshire, I went with my friend, Christie Horley, the Honourable Miss Christie, whose purse was held by her nanny, or, on rare occasions, her older sister. At those times Christie and I picked things for each other, commented rudely on each other’s choices, laughed, tried on something else. On the day I went with my mother to the designer boutique of a London department store to find a jacket, I wasn’t sure who was supposed to choose. I would lift a hanger from the rail, hold the jacket against myself, and look at my mother. She would nod in her noncommittal diplomat’s way: I acknowledge the jacket. I got more and more restless; I was doing something wrong, but I didn’t know what, or what to do about it. Looking back, she probably had no more idea of how to go mother-daughter shopping than I did, and neither of us was capable of simply asking the other for opinions or suggestions: asking made one vulnerable. Eventually, after about fifteen jackets, clumsy with self-consciousness and embarrassment, I tried to jam the hanger back on the wrong rail, which was full, and the jacket fell on the floor. I wanted her to hold out her arms, I wanted to run away and cry, I wanted to kill something. “This is a stupid shop and I don’t want a stupid jacket!” She nodded, picked up her purse, and said, With clothes, err on the side of elegance: rich but simple, in color, cut, and cloth. I nodded as though I understood, and she stood, and we left. We went to a tea shop and drank coffee. What we wear sends a message, she said, as though we’d been having a continuous discussion on the matter. It broadcasts our confidence, our means, our taste. You can insult a host by underdressing, and hurt a friend by overdressing. If in doubt, choose simple style and top-quality cloth. Casual elegance.

It was useful advice, but I had gone home that day without a jacket, and I never went shopping with my mother again.

I wondered, as I pulled on a sleek, forest green silk-and-cashmere turtleneck, beautifully cut lamb’s wool skirt, and four-hundred-dollar boots, if my mother had any friends. It was difficult to picture her at a party other than a polished diplomatic function. No nightclubs, or walking tours of the Mediterranean, or weekends in wine country. I couldn’t imagine where she had met Eric. I remembered the photo of her, laughing. Perhaps a charity hacking event. Did they shop together? For what kind of clothes?

I popped loose a button taking off the skirt. She’d married a man who liked fast cars and Gilbert and Sullivan; the suede trousers would be more suitable.

On the way out, I put the lily-laden wastebasket in the corridor to be emptied. The smell made me want to retch. I put the Loetz vase on the backseat of the car where I would see it tomorrow and remember to return it. I opened all four windows.

Halfway down Second Avenue, I changed my mind, and instead of continuing to University Street, turned right on Stewart and drove to Pike Place. The market was closing and stank of fish-slimed tile and discarded ice. All the flower stalls but one were shut tight, and that was in the process of closing.

“Wait,” I said, “I need some flowers.”

“Not much left, but take pick,” the tiny Korean woman said.

There were no roses or orchids, no lilies or carnations, nothing left but the kind of raggedy garden flowers that were one step up from weeds: snapdragons and gerbera daisies and freesias. They smelled light and lovely, and their colors were bright and cheerful. The exact opposite of elegance. I bought a handful of each, and gave her an extra twenty dollars for the plastic bucket of water to stand them in until I got to the hotel.

BETWEEN THE valet parking station and the reception desk in the lobby of the Fairmont, two bellboys offered to carry my sloshing bucket and little vase. When I gave my name at the desk, the receptionist summoned the special elevator, then asked if I’d need any help getting to the Presidential Suite. If she had said, Ma’am, that bucket is ugly, please let one of the staff take it up via the service elevator so our guests won’t have to see it, I might have accepted. Instead I took a perverse delight in pretending to misunderstand. “Oh, it’s not heavy, but thank you.” She nodded in that You are of course crazy, but you’re the customer and, hey, it takes all kinds Seattle way, and appeared unperturbed when I changed my mind and told her I’d take the flowers and leave the bucket with her, and did she have any spare tissue paper to wrap the vase?

THE PRESIDENTIAL SUITE had double doors and a bell push. My first surprise was that my mother answered the door herself. The second was that her hair was almost wholly grey. I was still staring at it when she plucked the vase and flowers from me, put them on a table, and took both my hands in hers. They felt smaller than they should have, and very cool.

“Aud,” she said, and we stood there without speaking, and then she ran her thumbs over the backs of my knuckles. It had been twenty-five years since she’d done that, but my body remembered, and it was telling me I should be half my mother’s height, while my eyes told me I was, in fact, an inch taller. She smiled, squeezed, and let go. My hands sank to my sides, though in some alternate reality they reached out. “Aud, I would like you to meet my husband, Eric Loedessoel. Eric, this is my daughter, Aud.”

A man stepped forward from nowhere, and the world snapped back to its proper dimensions. I held out my hand, he grasped it in his, and shook vigorously.

“Aud, I am so very, very pleased to meet you.” A mid-Atlantic accent. We were speaking English, then. I looked at his hand, and he let go. He smiled. The dental work was not visible. “My apologies,” he said. “It’s just that I’ve wanted to meet you for so long.”

“The flowers,” I said. “They need to be in water.” I looked around for the usual efficient assistant.

“Come and sit,” my mother said, and picked up the vase and flowers and moved through the double doors to the sitting room. She even moved differently, as though she had been unbound in some way. Eric and I followed.

There were flowers everywhere, huge formal arrangements in stately vases. A purple petal fell off one of the snapdragons and settled forlornly on the red carpet. She pointed to a sofa upholstered in cream-striped beige silk.

“I won’t be a moment.” She stepped into the guest bathroom and ran water. Now that I couldn’t see her I realized I had no idea what she was wearing. Something green?

“Aud?” I looked up. Eric gestured at a wet bar, and a row of bottles and glasses. “Something to drink?”

“A kamikaze,” I said, just to see how he’d handle it.

“Ah. Well, a kamikaze just happens to be one of the hundreds of cocktails I have no idea how to make.” His shoulders were loose and relaxed. “If you have your heart set on one, we could figure it out between us. Failing that, we can get the bar to send one up, or I could promise you I’ll learn how to make it for next time, and meanwhile make you something I’m more familiar with.”

I said nothing.

His pause was very brief. “I understand gin and French pretty well, but admittedly only straight up and on the dry side. I understand a good malt whiskey and fine bourbon. Your mother made sure we have akevit— though I tell you frankly I don’t know good from bad—and of course we have a variety of beer. Or we could simply try the wine the hotel sommelier recommended to match the food.”

On the table, not at all hidden by the flowers, were three beading bottles of white wine, two decanters of red, and an ice bucket with champagne. In the center was an artful arrangement of silver salvers: seafood, antipasti, salad, and glistening caviar with the old-fashioned accompaniments of toast points and minced onion and chopped egg.

“I know,” he said, nodding. “I’d hoped for turkey on rye or tuna salad, but the chef’s pride seems to have been at stake.”

I’d forgotten he’d spent a lot of time in Washington, D.C. He was wearing a white turtleneck in knitted silk and casual trousers in grey. His shoes and belt were thick and polished. His hair was also thick, with a natural-looking wave. He looked like a cross between a gay soap opera star and a member of the Senate.

“There,” said my mother, and put the Loetz vase and flowers on a side table. “Lovely. The perfect antidote.” She waved at the heavy vases, the stiff drapes, the gleaming silver, and glistening fish eggs, and her whole body swayed, like that of younger woman. Though her waistband was a little larger than it had been. “You always did have a good eye.”

Waistband. Jeans. She was wearing jeans.

“Aud?” I dragged my gaze away from the little rivets on her hip pocket. Both of them were looking at me. “A glass of wine?”

“Good,” I said. “Yes. Please.”

My mother in jeans, married to a man wearing Polo. The glass in my hand was reassuringly cold. I kept sipping until it was empty.

“An Oregon pinot gris,” Eric said as he refilled it. “I’m glad you like it.”

“Yes,” I said, and they talked some more, some polite chitchat about Vancouver and flights and food while I gathered my wits.

After a while my mother noticed I was beginning to understand what they were saying. She put her wineglass down. “How are you, Aud?”

“I’m . . . well.”

“When did you arrive in Seattle?”

“We’ve been here since Wednesday.”

“We?”

“Dornan. He’s . . .” He drinks coffee. I kill the people who mess with his girlfriends. “He’s a friend.”

Like Eric’s, my mother’s pause was barely noticeable. “I’m so sorry not to have invited him. We must meet tomorrow. For dinner, perhaps. Yes. Dinner. Tomorrow.” It had been a while since I had seen my mother surprised enough to repeat herself.

“What do you think of the city?” Eric said.

“I like it. An interesting blend of American and Scandinavian. And you—how long will you be staying?”

“A week, perhaps ten days.”

“I hear you have family here.”

“I do, but due to an unfortunate accident of timing, they are halfway through a six-week visit to India.”

“We want to spend much of our time with you,” my mother said. “I want to hear about your life. Do you have pictures?”

“Pictures?”

“The filthy American habit,” Eric said, but in a tone that meant he approved. “Photos in your wallet, pictures of your house, your children, your dog, your corner office.”

“One of many habits Eric learnt in this country,” she said, and laid a hand on his arm. They smiled at each other. She looked at me. “For the first time I think I appreciate the sentiment. I, for example, will be very pleased to see a picture of your daughter.”

We were still speaking English but she was beginning not to make sense again.

“The little girl,” she said. “The one who was in such difficulties last year.”

“You want to see a picture of Luz?”

She nodded. Perhaps she wondered if I had had brain surgery in the years since we’d last seen each other. “Eric tells me that when you live in America and have a child, it is expected.”

“I don’t know if I do have a child, exactly.”

“Then you need to make up your mind.” While I tried to parse that one she turned to the hors d’oeuvres and with quick, economical movements dabbed caviar on a toast point, which she put on a plate and handed to me. Her hands were slender and much bigger than Kuiper’s.

My mother made a toast point for Eric, and one for herself, took a sip of wine, and again laid her free hand on Eric’s arm. The look she gave me was full of meaning, but I had no idea what it was. “I can’t tell you what is right,” she said, “but I can tell you what is expected—by others, and by this child. It doesn’t matter what she calls you, Mor or Tante or Aud, if legally you are her mother, somewhere inside she will one day expect you to behave as one. It doesn’t matter if this is likely, or even possible, it is what she will expect. One day.”

Her fingers were white at the tips. Eric would have a bruise tomorrow. I ate my toast point.

I WAS AT the Edgewater bar, halfway down my second pale green cocktail, when Dornan joined me.

“Is that a kamikaze?”

“I thought I’d try it.” I pushed the glass aside. Too much lime. “Ready for that film set?”

“You saw your mum?”

“I did.” I dropped cash on the bar and stood. “She wants to invite you for dinner tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?”

I nodded. He reached past me for the kamikaze and drained it in one swallow.

THE PARKING lot was full, and the air trembled below audible range with generators and the subtle pheromones of stress and excitement. The light slicing from the partially open warehouse door was blue-white against the inky sky, and the air was stiff and charged, as though before a storm. I felt every bone snug in its socket, and Dornan’s eyes shone.

Inside the warehouse, the noise and heat and light were intense. He paused on the threshold, trying to take it all in, then made a beeline for one of the Hippoworks posters.

Kuiper and another woman at the food services table were shoveling food onto plates that were snatched out of their hands by a seemingly endless stream of actors, grips, sound technicians, and extras in street-kid clothes.

“Killer Squirrels,” Dornan said.

“What?”

“Anton Brian Finkel.” He tapped the notice. “He made a film in the eighties about squirrels who eat alien nuts or something and go rogue. Great film to watch when wrecked, all these tiny squirrels flying about, trying to look menacing. It’s got to be the same man.”

“I don’t know.” From here Kuiper looked very busy.

He saw that I wasn’t really paying attention, and followed my gaze. “You going to introduce me?”

“Maybe when she isn’t so busy. I’ll take you to Finkel’s partner, Stan Rusen.”

We headed through the streams of eating extras to where the lights and cameras were clustered, but the one giving orders was the bad-tempered Goatee Boy, who today wore his earring in the other ear, not Rusen.

I led Dornan back outside, to the Hippoworks trailer, the one with the lights on. I banged on the door. I was just about to bang again when it was yanked open by a woman talking over her shoulder to whoever was at the other end of the trailer.

“. . . can’t tell you how pissed off I get when he does that. Oh. Well, who the hell are you?” It was the woman who had been ordering everyone about on the soundstage last time I was here. The set dresser.

“Good evening,” I said, and gestured for Dornan to follow me inside.

“Hey,” she said as I brushed past her. “I said, who the hell are you?”

“She probably heard you the first time,” a man near the door said. I recognized him, too: the technical coordinator she had been arguing with yesterday.

“Joel,” I said, remembering. He shifted in surprise, and that’s when I saw Rusen, who was sitting at his keyboard looking overwhelmed. When he saw me, he jumped up.

“Aud, hey, glad you came. Peg, Joel, I’m sorry but we’ll have to do this later. Boy,” he said when they’d gone, “all those two do is squabble: I can’t do my job when he does this, I can’t get any work done when she does that. This is not like film school.” He rubbed the back of his ear. “I’m worrying if I can afford to pay anyone next week and they’re carrying on like a couple of kids.”

I introduced Dornan. They exchanged pleased-to-meet-yous. “So can you? Pay them next week?”

“Maybe. I’m hoping Anton will be able to figure out a way to sweet-talk the bank.”

“Know when he’s due back?”

He shook his head, then forced a smile. “Say, I probably sound as bad as Peg and Joel. You didn’t come here to listen to me complain. What can I do for you?”

I nearly said: Have you eaten? Kuiper would no doubt be nicer to me if I could tell her he had. “I need some information.”

He sat back at his keyboard. “Okay.”

“To begin with, general details on everyone who works here: names, résumés, references, date of hire. Anything you think might be useful background information. Former workers, too, please.”

“Not a problem.” He started tapping.

“Also any documentation you have with regard to meetings or correspondence with EPA and OSHA.”

“Easy enough.”

“Yesterday, someone on the set mentioned that she thought this production might crash and burn. Any idea what she might have meant by that?”

He dragged his eyes away from the screen and rubbed behind his ear again. “Well, the OSHA thing is killing us.”

“Apart from that.”

“There have been some delays. Annoying things. Little things.”

“Such as?”

“The lighting tech spending five hours getting the set lit right, and then coming back from break to find someone’s messed it all up. Hours of night footage lost on the way to the lab. When we reshoot during the day using day-for-night exposures, we find it’s all screwy, though the camera guy swears it was set up right. Not so little, that one.”

“Write it all down. E-mail it to me.” I gave him the address. I couldn’t spend every minute with my mother. It would give me something to do while I waited for Monday. And unlike Atlanta, this time I’d be helping people to help themselves. “I’d also be happy to take a look at your accounts, see if I can see a way out of this mess, but I’d understand if you felt uncomfortable with that.”

If he didn’t give it to me, I’d just take it, but there was no harm in playing nicely, especially when it saved time and effort.

“I’ll have to talk to Finkel about that,” he said. “Anything else? Did you read the promo material?”

“Not yet, no.”

“Oh,” he said.

“But my friend Dornan here is a big fan and would no doubt love to hear all about it. He was just telling me about Killer Squirrels.”

“Oh, jeepers. You saw that? What did you think?”

Dornan paused, then shrugged. “Well, it’s a fine film if you’re twenty and out of your head and it’s two in the morning and there’s nothing else on the telly.”

Rusen laughed. “Boy, it’s awful, all right. It was way before my time but even Anton admits it. Feral, now . . . Oh, this one’s sweet, real sweet. It’s about this girl—young woman, I guess—who wakes in an alley completely naked, and it’s night, and she’s in a strange city. There’s all this—”

“I’ll be on the set,” I said, and they both nodded.

“. . . with shots of steam, strategically placed to keep it PG-thirteen, but it’s not cheesy, not even a bit, it’s ambience, and then there’s this noise . . .”

I shut the door on their strategic wisps of steam. The second woman from the craft-services table was lugging a stack of crates out to the Film Food van. Inside, the food line was down to four people: the bony-faced Bri and his friend, one of the carpenters in overalls, and the assistant wardrobe woman. I watched while Kuiper served them what looked like Thai food, shook her head at something the last one said, and picked up her huge knife again, this time to divide a big, squashy-looking cake. “Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres,” she said, and no one got it. She seemed used to it. She wiped down the counter, those muscles around her wrists sliding over each other like the reins of a stagecoach, controlling everything precisely, checked the coffee urn, added coffee and water, and then turned to the pile of fruit waiting on her chopping board. She pretended she didn’t see me. I let her chop for a while. Her hair was twisted up into a knot, and as the knife thunked rhythmically on the board, a loose swatch hanging by the side of her neck shook. Sometimes it looked blond, sometimes light brown. Her earlobe was as pink as a baby’s tongue.

“Good evening,” I said. If I hadn’t been paying attention I would have missed the fractional hesitation between chopping. “Has Rusen eaten anything yet?”

“He’s carrying a lot of weight on this picture. He needs to eat.” She sounded defensive.

“What about the director?”

She snorted and kept chopping.

“I found out what CAA is.”

“You must be thrilled,” she said. Then she sighed. “Rusen told me who you are.” It was an apology, I think.

I filled one of the cups with a stream of pungent coffee. I felt her watching but took my time, adding just the right amount of cream. Didn’t stir. Sipped. Even more assertive than it smelled. “So,” I said, and when I looked up, she was chopping again. “Unusual to find a caterer who knows Caesar’s commentary.”

“You really know how to endear yourself to a girl.”

“I expressed it badly.”

“No, you didn’t. I could quote you more: quarum unam incolunt Belgae, aliam Aquitani, tertiam qui . . . But your eyebrows are already in your hair, proving my point. You couldn’t be more surprised if I were a trained hamster singing ‘Happy Days.’ ”

No, I wanted to say, let’s not do it this way. Let’s talk Latin. Do you know Petronius? Ovid? The Aeneid? But her look could have drilled granite. “Tell me about this production.”

“Not my place. I’m a caterer.” Chop, chop.

“But clearly Rusen talks to you. Why is that?”

She didn’t say anything. I swallowed more coffee, noticing for the first time in months the slight tightness on the right-hand side of my throat where a razor had opened the skin like silk. That had been a rusty blade. Kuiper’s knife would cut bone deep without effort. “All right. Let’s talk about catering. If I said I was planning a wedding at the Fairmont and wanted you to cater for three hundred guests, what kind of menu would you suggest?”

“You’re not planning a wedding.”

“I’m just—”

“Bullshitting me. I don’t know why.” The knife thunked energetically on her board. She’d take her fingers off if she wasn’t careful.

In this light, her hair was the color of sandstone. She was like sandstone: a spire of rock rising from an otherwise featureless desert. No toeholds. I thought about toes for a minute, wiggled mine in their boots. Sipped at my coffee. Now that it was cooler it was beginning to taste almost smoky, not at all like that stuff from Tully’s. “So,” I said, “Rusen talks to you.”

“It’s not a crime.”

“But as you’ve pointed out, you’re a caterer.”

She turned around. “And that, of course, makes me not worth talking to.” It was interesting, the basic dichotomy between her behavior and her face. She sounded and acted as though she were angry, or perhaps very sad, but the set of her facial muscles and the few, faint lines told a story of laughter and enthusiasm and occasional stubbornness. That was the woman I wanted to talk to.

“I’ve never been on a film set before in my life. I have no idea how it works. I own this warehouse. It’s in my best interest to see that the production is profitable and keeps paying rent.”

“So you’re just here to help.”

“Well, yes.” Isn’t that what I just said? “I’m trying to understand how things operate. It might help everyone. So, please, tell me how sets like this work.”

“There aren’t any other sets like this one. There are a lot of raw people. Finkel’s an old hand, but he’s not here, and Rusen’s carrying everything. And it’s his first film. He was a software architect.” An image of someone building a skyscraper from Dalí-like drooping girders popped into my head. “He’s smart, but this isn’t film school. This might be my first craft-services job, but at least I’ve been on movie sets before.”

“So he talks to you.” Does he like it when you talk Latin?

“He hired me. You could say we’re learning our jobs together.”

A job. “So he asks your advice on things? When there are problems. And there have been problems. You said so.” Just a job. Very good. “More than there should have been?”

“Like I say, there are a lot of beginners. Two of the camera operators. The sound guy. But there are a lot of old hands, too. Grips, carpenters, technical—”

“Joel,” I said, looking at her small hand with its big knife.

“Joel. Peg. Kathy in costume.”

“Which is why I’m wondering if there’s been some deliberate sabotage.” I was also starting to wonder how to describe her hair. Sandstone wasn’t quite right. Not blond, exactly. Not brown, either. All sorts of different snakes of color in this light, and shiny.

“Why are you giving me that weird look?”

“Weird as a beard,” I said, and gave her my best smile. Beards were weird, when you thought about it. Always a different color to head hair. Animals didn’t have different color hair on their heads and bodies, did they? Birds did, chickadees and woodpeckers. And badgers, too, come to think of it. Did they even have badgers in this country? Probably not. Hogs, though, they had hogs. “Gif me a hog!” I said in a bad German accent, and flung my arms wide. Now that I’d thought of it, it sounded like a lovely idea, luscious woman, luscious hair, but the woman stepped back and put a tray of stuffed mushrooms between us. Mushrooms. Not as good as truffles. Truffles. They used to use hogs to find them, get the hogs to snuff under the trees in the forest. “Snuffle my truffle,” I said, grinning. Truffles, food of princes. Princes ate hummingbirds, too—hummingbirds with long, long tongues. Hummingbirds baked in honey, eaten in a palace. “Tongue palace,” I explained, and the woman behind the mushrooms reddened. I reached for her, wanting to take her perfect pink earlobe in my mouth, but my stomach rippled.

“Oh,” I said.

She said something, with a question on her face, but someone had turned the sound off.

I put my hand on my stomach. “It’s like a heartbeat, but too low down.” She put her big shiny knife on the counter and started to come around to my side. This time my stomach pulsed. I frowned. “Where’s the bathroom? ” She pointed. “ ’Bye,” I said.

The bathroom was cavernous and the toilets very small and a long way down. I vomited on target. Very satisfactory. Mouth tasted bad, though. And why was the stall door so far away?

I lurched at the sinks but once I had my hand wrapped around the tap they steadied down. I rinsed my mouth. The water felt like chrome in my mouth: hard and brilliant. Very odd. Everything was odd. I couldn’t quite work out why.

I frowned, and the sink zoomed away and back again, like a fast-focus pull. And it was very shiny. Definitely not right. Maybe someone could explain what was going on. But that cook person, that Kuiper, I didn’t want to look silly in front of her, no, and I couldn’t remember where I’d put Dornan.

Fresh air. That might be useful. I knew where that was.

The night air was spicy and soft and quite delicious. I breathed it, in and out, in and out, and my stomach stopped rippling and I felt as light as meringue. By the time I reached the car I felt like a god.

Driving was marvelous. The wheel felt so good under my hands that I jigged it this way and that, and loved the way the tires bit into the road and the car seemed to be climbing a path to the stars, up and up and up, gliding over water that sparkled in the city light like fairy dust. The city was a wonderland. On one side, by the water, a herd of orange brontosaurus nosed at the stacks of little boxes saying Hanjin piled at their feet. I watched carefully but they seemed to be frozen in a line. Floating on the other side of the road in its own glow was the head of a vast green goddess. Lovely.

I jigged the car again, this time on a tight curve, and lights flared red around me. It was like being in a hunting print: mounts with red-coated riders, and the sound of horns. I tooted merrily. The road wound on, and then somehow I wasn’t on it, but had been deposited in an open place. I stopped and got out. Funny-looking benches. I wandered over to one—I checked every few steps to make sure my feet were still there—and found that on the bench someone had left a pile of coats and old newspaper.

“Oh,” I said, and the lump jerked and sat up, scattering coverings. “I know this place.” A square, a triangle. “You must be a pioneer.” The pioneer hopped off the bench and scuttled over to some of his friends.

“You dropped this,” I told the group of pioneers as I advanced, holding the paper. None of them reached for it. I put it carefully on the end of the bench. Their eyes were very round. “I’m Aud,” I said, “I love you all!”

I folded cross-legged to the grass, only it wasn’t grass but gritty concrete, and started to tell them about the beauties of the night.

Now I saw that there were others crossing the square, and they were young and smooth and golden, and the music came from a doorway with a woman standing in front of it.

“Dance with me,” I said to a young woman in a soft leather jacket, and held out my hand, but her eyes rounded, too, and she hunched up, like an anemone poked with a pencil. Strange and delicate thing. I laughed, spun on my heels. I danced for a while, with myself.

Soon there were many people watching, but none of them would dance with me. I would go find someone who would.

I wandered up and down the street, looking for my Saab, and felt enormously pleased when I remembered it was in Atlanta and I wasn’t. “An Audi,” I said to myself, and then there it was. Lovely.

Somewhere to my left, the night sparkled blue-white, blue-white, and people moved aside.

Key. I smiled and pulled the key from my pocket. I dropped it. The world swooped a little when I picked it up again. I dropped it again.

Two police officers appeared—where had they come from?—but I was more concerned with my key. Someone had made it very slippery. One of the police officers said something. I finally managed to grasp the key firmly. The other police officer said something, quite loudly, and approached, hand on his belt. I bowled him aside and pushed the little button on my key.

“Boop!” I said, like the car, delighted. It was magic: lights and everything. I pushed it again. Boop! Flash! Boop!

One of the officers was shouting now, and pointing something at me. “That’s dangerous,” I told her. “That’s a weapon.”

“Yes, ma’am. Please step away from the vehicle.”

“It’s my vehicle,” I said.

“Yes. Step away, ma’am. Now.”

“No, it’s mine.” You had to be very patient with stupid people.

“You are intoxicated, ma’am.”

“No, I’m not. I’m . . .” I almost said I’m Norwegian but I wasn’t really sure that was true anymore. Not like my mother, anyway. “I’m from Atlantis. ” That wasn’t quite right, either. I shrugged. Close enough. I put my hand on the car door.

“Step away from the vehicle!”

No Please, no Thank you, no Ma’am. Just plain rude. And couldn’t she see that I had to leave, I had to leave right now?

“Put your hands in the air and step away from the vehicle!”

Oh, now she was making me cross. And who were all those people, and what were they staring at, and why was the other officer hiding behind his car door? Everything started to hop about. I frowned.

“Oh, shit, Henry, you better get that backup down here now!”

They ought to shut up and stop swaying. The officer crouching behind his cruiser stood and aimed at my torso. He had to steady something on the car roof. The flashing blue-white, blue-white of the lights gleamed on the sweat at his forehead. I felt sorry for him, but it had to be done. I raised my magic wand. The officer in front of me swallowed.

My phone rang.

And then something went zzzsst, and hit my chest, and I felt as though my insides were boiling away in a blue electric current. I blinked. Another zzzsst.

The world bounded to one side and I found myself lying with my cheek on the pavement. My phone was still ringing. Luz. It might be Luz. But when I tried to reach into my pocket, nothing happened. I wasn’t sure where my arms were.

The phone rang and rang and rang. The world tilted again, and jerked, and then I was sitting in the back of a car and slowly toppling sideways. My nose came to rest on the vinyl seat. “It smells,” I said, but no one was listening.

My phone rang and rang. My door opened and a small animal jumped into my jacket pocket—no, it was the woman’s hand—and then she was talking to someone on my phone.

“. . . Officer Matsuo. And you are? Yes, sir, Seattle PD. Torvingen? That’s the owner of this handset? White female, weird pale blue eyes, about six feet tall. English accent, or—Say again? Her mother is who?” A long silence. “I see, sir. Yessir. Um-hm. Bye.” She closed the phone, said, “Shit,” very softly. “Shit.”

I fell asleep for a while and woke when the seat bumped and mysteriously turned into a hospital gurney. A harassed-looking triage nurse in greens said, “Christ, not another one. What’s her name?” A man said something. I turned my head—it was very heavy. The police officer. Henry. “Aud,” the nurse said, “look at me.” Bright light. “No, keep your eyes open. Aud, I need them open.” It was difficult. Strange dry-warm feeling on my eyelids: latex-clad thumbs. More bright light, moving from side to side. “Aud, are you one of the movie people?”

I said, No, or tried to, but my mouth seemed glued shut—

“She says she’s from Atlantis,” Henry said helpfully.

—but then I remembered a woman with blond hair talking about cameras and falling and—

LESSON 3

ALL TEN WOMEN WERE DAMP-SKINNED. OUTSIDE IT WAS IN THE HIGH FORTIES but the repaired thermostat was clearly set by people upstairs who weren’t doing much in the way of exercise. I’d shown my class the axe kick, a coup de grâce delivered with the heel and used to break the spine when your assailant was down—though none of them, of course, had really understood the implications of that; I was just showing them how to kick a bag—and the side kick, which used the edge of the foot like a guillotine and was perfect for either neatly displacing the kneecap or more messily wrecking all the ligaments that hold the knee joint together, depending on the angle of attack.

The bag, which I’d unhooked for the exercise and rested end-up on the floor, sagged sadly at knee height. Therese and Kim were braced against it while Katherine let loose a good one.

“Again,” I said. “You might not be accurate with the first kick. Always keep kicking. Once is almost never enough.” She whomped it again. “And once more, this time with some noise. Use your lungs. They’re like bellows, pumping oxygen. Fuel for your fire.”

This time when she kicked she squeaked like a furious guinea pig, a sound that at least had the startle factor in its favor.

“Good, thank you. These kicks are what you use when you are in a serious fight, when you have to put them down long enough to get away.”

“How long is that for?” Katherine said, breathing hard. She kept eyeing the bag as though willing it to straighten up and act threatening so that she could kick it again.

I looked at the class. “How long do you think?”

“It depends,” they chorused.

“Exactly. Long enough to ensure your safety, whatever it takes. And every situation will be different. Let’s say you’re in the parking lot at Kroger. How long then?”

“Two minutes?” Jennifer said.

Tonya shook her head. “It doesn’t matter how long, just as long as you’ve got the time to get to your car.”

And get in and lock the doors.

“Or maybe just long enough to get back into the store and get help,” said Therese.

“Also good. Now, what about being in Piedmont Park at night? Suze?”

“It would have to be longer, because it’s a big park, and it’s dark.”

“How long do you think?”

“If you were in the middle of the park? Twenty minutes. It would take about that to get to the lights, and people.”

“That’s on a normal day. If you’re hurt or in shock, you won’t be thinking clearly or moving fast. You’ll need even more time.”

“Or you could call nine-one-one and hide,” Christie said.

“Calling nine-one-one is a good idea no matter what,” I said. “But just because you call doesn’t mean they come. To be safe you take them down long enough for you to reach safety.”

They thought about that for a bit. Tonya was the first to see where it was heading.

“Twenty or thirty minutes is a real long time. . . .”

And now Therese was folding her arms: she saw where we were going, too, and she didn’t like it one bit.

I nodded. “Sometimes the only way to survive is to disable your attacker, not just hurt them. Hurting them makes them not want to run after you, but disabling them means making sure they can’t.”

No one said anything.

“In this kind of extreme case, you go for the eye, the knee, or the throat. Eyes, because if they can’t see you, they can’t find you. Knee, because they can’t chase you if a leg doesn’t work. Windpipe, because if they can’t breathe they can’t do anything.”

Compromise oxygen supply, structural integrity, or visual acquisition of the target—though Jennifer, of course, might want to know how you’d deal with a blind attacker who was already used to following people they couldn’t see.

Therese tightened her arms and lowered her chin. “If you’re talking about cutting someone’s air supply for twenty minutes while you’re not there, you’re talking about maybe killing them.”

“Yes.” Another way to cut off oxygen would be to cut off its medium of transport, the blood supply—open the carotid, for example—but I imagined she would like that idea even less.

“I can’t believe that would be necessary.”

And that was the problem, mine as well as theirs, because part of me hoped they never had to believe, never came to a personal understanding of the necessity for these techniques.

“Could you kill someone to save yourself?” Therese said.

“Yes.”

“You sound very sure.”

“If you decide to hurt someone to save yourself, you need to commit to it completely.”

“Do or don’t do, there is no try,” Nina said in a Yoda voice.

“Something like that,” I said over the nervous laughter. “But about whether or not learning this is necessary, think of all the other things you learn that you’ll probably never need. Like fire drills. It’s unlikely that you’ll ever need to scramble from your workplace at three in the afternoon because of a massive fire, but you learn the procedure just in case.” But fires weren’t directed personally at their target, they didn’t sneer and call you bitch, and if you got burnt, your friends didn’t think it was your fault. Women weren’t reared from infancy to fear fire.

“So,” I said, “the knee, the eye, the throat. The knee is a good target, difficult to protect against one of those kicks we just learnt. The eye is extremely vulnerable.” Tonya made a pecking motion. “The throat is more complicated. There are two targets. The larynx, or voice box, which you can feel if you tilt your head up and run your finger down your windpipe until you feel a bump, your Adam’s apple. No, higher up than that, Christie. Kim, would you show her—about where her mole is, yes. It’s easier to find on a man. If you hit that bump hard it will fracture and swell. The windpipe closes.”

“Sounds easy enough,” Pauletta said.

“It is.”

Easy did not mean fast or clean. Suffocation takes minutes, and when the victim clutches at his swelling throat it grates, like a knife point dragging along a brick wall.

“It sounds easy, but how many of you think you could do it?”

They looked at one another.

“You need to know you can do it. You need to know it will work. We ended last week with Christie saying that feminine means vulnerable. And that’s what we’re told, yes, but here’s a question. If an average man attacks a woman, intending to rape her, what do you think will happen if she struggles?”

“It’ll just make things worse,” Jennifer said. “He’ll get mad and hurt you worse.”

“No, not according to Justice Department statistics. Their latest available figures say that women fight off unarmed rapists successfully seventy-two percent of the time.”

They were quiet.

“But what if he has a knife?” Jennifer again.

“Then she’ll fight him off fifty-eight percent of the time.”

“A gun?”

“Fifty-one percent.”

“More than fifty percent, even with a gun?”

“Even with a gun. Government statistics.” The media wouldn’t say that, though, because fear is what sells papers and commercial spots. “And we’re talking about untrained, unarmed women. Even before you set foot in this class the odds were in your favor: if you fight back, you’ll probably win. Most stranger attackers, even serious ones who have planned their attack extensively, rely on the attack being fast and quiet. An attacker will watch you: read your body language. Depending on the situation they will test you, to see how easy you’ll be: they’ll spin some story about needing your help. They’ll flatter you, flirt with you. They imply that you’re being unreasonable or not nice or impolite or illogical. You have been brought up— programmed, if you like—to respond to these suggestions.”

“Those fuckers,” said Suze.

“You have been trained to seek approval, to please, to not draw attention to yourselves. It’s powerful training. Don’t underestimate it. I can teach you to snap spines with your bare feet, to break free of a stranglehold, to fracture a larynx with the side of your hand, but if you’re too worried about a stranger’s disapproval to even tell him you want to sit by yourself on a park bench, you won’t be able to use any of it.”

“So what’s the goddamn point?”

“Remember the first class, hitting the bag?”

“Blam,” said Nina.

“It was a way to think around the programming. A mental trick. Therese, how many children do you have?”

“Children? Two. Twins, boy and girl. Six years old.”

“How would you have felt if you had seen that man, the one Sandra played last week, sitting on the bench next to your daughter?”

“I would have dragged her away fast, and maybe reported him to the police.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s a child!”

“But he was just talking about his dog.”

“No, he wasn’t. He was a creep and a liar.”

“How did you know this?”

“Because I could tell.”

“How?”

“The way he sat, the way he looked at me.”

“People who lie expertly with their words give themselves away with their bodies. And your body knows that. It’s a language clearer than English. If words and actions conflict, believe the body.” I would explain why another time. “You read him correctly, Therese. You were willing to act on that knowledge to protect your child, but not yourself. Why’s that?”

“Because it’s cool to go all mother lion if it’s your kid,” Kim said.

“Exactly. So next time you’re in a situation like that, ask yourself what you’d do if it was your daughter sitting there, or your frail, elderly mother. If you’d be willing to risk embarrassment for their sake, why not your own? And then ask yourself this: what’s the worst-case scenario if I act on my belief?”

“You’re totally wrong and end up feeling like a dork,” Christie said.

“Right. But then ask yourself: what’s the worst-case scenario if I don’t act on my belief?”

Silence, then “Huh,” said Pauletta.

I nodded. “Right. I end up dead.”

“You make it all sound so easy,” Katherine said, “like it was a . . . a . . .”

“Cost-benefit analysis,” Tonya said.

“That’s what it is. When you go home tonight, get out your list and add another column: feeling like a dork. Compare that to how it would feel to being dead, or being raped, or having both arms broken, or your cat tortured or your car stolen, and make some decisions.”

A couple of them looked thoughtful.

“For now, let’s move on to some physical tricks. Remember that MARTA station from last time? We’d just left a scared young woman about to be attacked. Who wants to play that part?” Christie stepped forward. “Do you remember how she was standing?”

Christie put her hands in her pockets and turned her head from us.

“I’m going to play the attacker. I won’t do anything to hurt you, so try to relax. Okay, the rest of you, how should I attack her?”

“Grab her from behind,” Nina said. “Like you’re going to drag her off into a dark corner.”

I wrapped my arms around Christie. “What can you do from there to escape?”

She struggled halfheartedly and subsided. “Not much.”

“See how having her hands trapped in her pockets means she’s lost one whole set of body weapons,” I said to the class.

“But even with her hands free she couldn’t do much with them from there,” Pauletta said.

I let go of Christie. “You grab me this time.” She did, gripping her own wrists and getting a solid base. “Okay, my arms are still trapped by my side but this time my hands are out of my pockets. My attacker’s expecting me to try to pull them free.” I made as if to do that and Christie tightened her grip obligingly. “But think about what I can reach if I move the other way.” I moved both hands easily to her inner thighs. “The groin’s very vulnerable from here, but he won’t be expecting me to go for it because he thinks I’ll be struggling to escape. Okay, what else can I reach? Think about the different body weapons.”

“Kick him,” Katherine, sounding excited. Kicking seemed to be her thing.

“Yes, right foot or left: a stamp straight down onto the top of his foot would hurt, especially if I was wearing heels. There are also lots of nerve endings in the shin. You could scrape”—I lifted my left foot and ran the bare heel gently down Christie’s shin—“or I could kick back, like a donkey. ” I demonstrated in slow motion. “What else?”

“Nails,” Kim said, with a ha! look. “ ’Specially in summer.”

“Yes, if his legs are bare you could get his thighs, maybe even behind his knees if he’s really tall. Lots of blood vessels behind the knees, and the hamstring. The femoral artery in the groin. Perhaps you could reach forward to get the back of his hands. Very sensitive there.” And a lot of tendons. “What else? What about his face?” Blank looks. “Think. Use your head, literally.” I did a slow-motion head butt. “It would depend on his height, but you could get his nose or chin or collarbone.” Break the collarbone just right and bone splinters would tear up the big blood vessels that lead up to the neck.

“Wouldn’t that hurt?” Jennifer said.

“The skull’s very thick at the back, near the top, and there aren’t many nerve endings. What else? What would he be expecting? Think about different dimensions.”

Silence, then “Downwards,” Nina said. “You could go down, to the floor. Wriggle out like a kid would. He wouldn’t expect that. Unless he had three-year -olds at home.”

“Good. Or if he’s trying to drag you off, you can go limp, like a child, make it really hard for him to carry you. Okay, thank you, Christie.”

She let go and I flexed my arms a couple of times.

“There are endless ways to deal with any situation. What I want you to do is find ways to use an attacker’s expectations against them. If they expect you to go forward, go back. If they think you’ll pull, push. You could do worse than remember Nina’s words: like a kid would. A very badly behaved kid. Be loud, be definite, be badly behaved, kick up a fuss: refuse to do as you’re told. Don’t be afraid to call attention to yourselves. Think in three dimensions. Be stubborn, be contrary, be totally self-absorbed. It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks, especially your attacker. You don’t owe anyone an apology, or explanation, or information, or help, or even understanding. Be selfish. If you wouldn’t let it happen to your child or your parent, don’t let it happen to you.”

That would help only so much. Their training was bone deep. I wanted them to leave today with one thing, just one, that would make it permissible for them to hurt someone to protect themselves, a way for them to impersonalize the choice.

“Imagine it’s summer. You get a new grill that burns so clean you can’t see the flame, all you can see is the heat shimmering over it. You invite your neighbors, all adults, around for a barbecue, but you warn them, each and every one, about the grill—that it’s hot, they’re not to go near it—yet the woman next door sticks her hand in it and gets burnt. Whose fault is that?”

“Wouldn’t be mine,” said Pauletta. I looked at Katherine, who nodded, then Jennifer, who said, “The neighbor’s. Absolutely.”

“So, what?” Suze said. “We should set ourselves on fire?”

“Yes. In a way.” They gawped at me. “Split into two groups, one this side of the room, one that. Each group subdivides into a two and a three. The two face the three. I want the twos in the center facing out.” The room would be just about big enough. Nina and Tonya faced Pauletta, Katherine, and Kim. Suze and Christie faced Sandra, Jennifer, and Therese. Nina grinned and started to click her fingers: the Sharks versus the Jets. “So, Nina and Tonya, and Suze and Christie, you’re two friends out somewhere— where?”

“The parking lot outside Kroger,” said Nina.

“The soccer fields in Piedmont Park,” said Suze.

“So you’re walking along, minding your own business, when these three shady characters”—I couldn’t imagine a less shady trio than Therese and Sandra and Jennifer—“step across your path. It’s already clear—maybe from what they’ve said, maybe something they’ve already done, but there’s absolutely no ambiguity—it’s clear that they intend to hurt you. You either have to hurt them back, or get badly injured.”

Each immediately edged closer to her partner.

“Now what?” Nina said. “Is this where we get six feet tall?”

“This is where you set yourselves on fire. Start to swing your arms in a circle perpendicular to the floor. Big, easy circles. No muscle tension.” I demonstrated. “Start slowly. Backwards or forwards, doesn’t matter. Try it. Good. Feel the blood rush to your hands. A little faster. Clench your fists. Remember the first lesson: blam, pow, zap! Feel the blood bulging in your fists, making them heavy. Ever seen a kid windmilling on the playground? Charging at a group of other kids? That’s what you’re going to do. Faster. You’re on fire. When you charge, if they don’t get out of the way, it’s not your fault. Blam, pow, zap. Faster, as fast as you can! Charge.”

Suze bellowed like a bee-stung bullock and charged, with Christie a split second behind; Tonya leapt forward with a screech and Nina followed, laughing. Their opponents, sensibly, ran away. Tonya, still screeching, galloped after them, chasing Pauletta and Katherine, then Jennifer, who had run all the way around the wall to get away from Suze.

“Okay, quick, Therese and Sandra, Kim and Katherine, in the center. Pump your arms, charge!”

Therese did not make a sound, but I didn’t worry about that. Sandra’s silence was more troubling. Katherine squealed and Kim hooted, and the other women were shouting or laughing so much that it didn’t matter.

“And Jennifer and Pauletta, and Suze and Christie again. Mill those arms. Go!” This time I definitely heard Christie, and Pauletta made a sound a bit like a police siren. “Yell,” I said, “anything, any sound you like. All of you, attacker and defender. Make it loud. Anything. Your lungs are bellows pumping the fire.” The noise was deafening. Through it I heard Jennifer making a thin Eeeeee! like an otherworldly kettle about to boil over. Pauletta’s ululating siren began to climb in pitch, then soared into a scream that sliced across the room and brought the action stuttering to a halt like a video glitch.

“Enough. Good.” They were all grinning. Pauletta was high-fiving Nina. “If you charge like that at a bad guy and he doesn’t get out of your way, it’s not your fault he gets hurt. Clarity of communication is the key.”

“But what if one of them had a knife?” Jennifer asked.

“In that case you’d break for one of the unarmed assailants.”

“What if they all had knives?”

“I can show you variations on the hand technique to protect blood vessels and tendons, but in all likelihood you’d get some kind of cut.”

“What if one of them had a gun?”

“Handguns are notoriously inaccurate, even when the shooter is well trained. And it’s very hard to be accurate when someone is charging at you, screaming.”

“What if they all had guns?”

Or a flamethrower, a tank battalion, a tactical nuke . . . We could play this game forever. “You would use all that you know to stay alive. You know more today than you did yesterday. In every class you’ll understand more. But let’s be clear, there is no magic bullet, no funny handshake, no secret decoder ring. Nothing and no one can keep you perfectly safe. There are only probabilities. We prepare, we practice, we do the work, and then we try to forget about it, because no matter how big and fast and strong you are, how heavily armed or well trained, there’s always going to be someone out there who is bigger, faster, or stronger. Always.”

FOUR

I LAY IN A BED, ON MY BACK. I COULDN’T OPEN MY EYES. BREATHING FELT LIKE an effort. Silk clung to my calves and forearms—clothes, no, pajamas— and I could move my arms and legs a little. Firm mattress, good-quality cotton sheets tucked in neatly, warmth but no weight—a down comforter. Very quiet. I listened to my breath: no echo, which meant soft surfaces. Not a hospital. I focused on the air moving through my nose and mouth and caught a hint of . . . perhaps cologne, perhaps high-end toiletries. A hotel. I couldn’t move my head. I listened harder, and felt someone outside my line of sight, watching, assessing, waiting.

MY MOUTH tasted vile. I could make out dim, reddish shadows on the ceiling that moved a little then stilled. I turned my head slowly—the signals from brain to muscle seemed to be routed through another dimension—and saw glowing numbers. A clock. A bedside table. The numbers changed again, from 5:03 to 5:04.

Someone had drugged me. They’d put it in the wine, or the kamikazes, or the coffee; sprinkled it on the food, or sprayed it on the flowers.

When I tried to sit up the world tilted violently and I had to lie down again. I panted for a while, but couldn’t seem to get my breath. When the world steadied, I raised myself cautiously onto my right elbow. I reached out and up with my left hand, which swung back and forth like a weather vane before I managed to put it on the cold lamp base and find the knoblike switch. I pushed at it three times before it clicked on. The light was cozy and yellow, but bright enough to see the phone, some clothes folded neatly on a chair, and heavy drapes. Definitely a hotel, a good one.

The dizziness hit again before I could pick up the phone.

THE LIGHT was still on. There was a woman standing by the bed. Phone, I thought, but I couldn’t stop staring at her head.

“Are you awake?” she said.

“Your head is pink.”

“Yes,” she said, then realized what I was worried about, and touched her hair. “It really is pink. Fuchsia.”

“Um,” I said, so I didn’t have to nod.

“Dizzy?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll be right back.” She came back, too quickly for me to sit up or reach for the phone, carrying a blood-pressure cuff, stethoscope, and clipboard. “My name’s Suzanne. Left arm, please.”

It was more of an effort than it should have been to lift my arm. As I straightened it, I felt a twinge inside the elbow. She pushed up the pajama sleeve—whose? I don’t wear pajamas, but they weren’t new—and I saw the neat hole in the vein. “Let’s use the other arm.”

She wrapped the right biceps in the pressure cuff, and pumped. The back of my right hand started to ache. There was a hole in a vein there, too.

“Please keep still.” She let out the air, listened, made a note on her clipboard. Unwrapped the cuff and took my wrist in her hand.

“What—”

“Hold on.” She finished counting, made another note. “Sorry. What were you saying?”

“What day is it?”

“Saturday. Five-thirty Saturday morning. Can you sit up?”

I did, very slowly. She rubbed her stethoscope warm, then listened to my lungs and heart. I studied the clothes folded on the striped chair. They were mine, but not what I’d been wearing last night. The door to the left of the chair was double, and louvred. I was in a suite. Then I recognized the coffee and cream stripes on the upholstery: the Fairmont.

I’d been in a hospital. Police.

“You okay?”

Pioneer Square. Those things I’d said to Kuiper. Someone had done that to me.

“If you’re too warm I could strip off some of these bed covers.”

“I’m fine.” Snuffle my truffle. That’s my vehicle. Tongue palace.

She took a penlight out of her pocket, turned it on. “Look at the light, please. Sorry,” she said when I flinched. “Touch your nose with your index finger.” I had to move slowly. “Good. Other hand.” I was panting again. Someone had done this to me. “You can rest now. I’ll get you some water.”

I’d been in a hospital, and now I was in a hotel suite. Someone had moved me and I didn’t remember a thing. She came back with a pitcher and a glass on a tray. She poured for me, only half-full.

“Can you manage?”

I took it from her grimly, managed to drink most of it before the glass began to slip. She eased it from my hand. “Lean forward, please.” She cradled my forehead on her shoulder and efficiently rearranged my pillow. “There. Lean back. Comfy? Good. I have to make a call. I’ll be right back.”

My muscles felt hot and hollow and soft, like just-blown glass. A red light on the phone winked as Suzanne talked on another extension. I heard snatches of her side of the conversation. “. . . sit up . . . pressure low but not dangerous . . . talk to her?”

The chair holding my clothes stood about six feet from the end of the bed. I could do it if I had to.

“Aud.”

I didn’t realize I’d shut my eyes until I had to drag them open. My mother stood several feet away. Not in the wine, then. She wore black yoga pants and a charcoal fleece zip-up. Her face was clear and clean and her hair caught in a clip at the base of her neck.

"How are you?”

In the kamikazes at the hotel bar? Just as I remembered Dornan slugging back the rest of my cocktail, it struck me that I had gone to all that trouble to wear the right clothes last night and here I was at half past five in the morning, half-naked in a strange bed, and my mother perfectly poised and coiffed, as usual.

“Aud?”

I forgot what I’d been trying to remember. “Tired.”

“That’s only to be expected.” She came a little closer. “I am very glad you are all right.”

“Reta—relative term,” I said. I still couldn’t get my breath.

“Indeed.” She cleared her throat and gestured at the edge of the bed. “May I?”

I nodded. She sat gently, careful to not rock the bed.

“Is Suzanne treating you well?”

“Pink hair.”

“Yes. But her references are excellent.” In the silence my breath sounded light and gasping, like a frightened girl’s. “They wanted you to stay in hospital but I believed you’d prefer a less . . . structured environment. The nurse was Eric’s idea. She says you’re doing well. Your blood pressure is a little low, but your pulse is strong and steady.” Her eyes moved in a search pattern: my eyes, my mouth, my chin, my chest, and back again. “She says you have good hand-eye coordination, your pupil dilation is improving rapidly, and your eyes should be back to normal in a few hours.” Her eyes never kept still. “The breathlessness might take a little longer. A day or two.”

“I’m fine.”

“Yes.”

“Fine.”

“Yes, and very lucky. After what you took—”

“Given.”

“Of course. Were given, yes.” Her gaze settled on a spot between my eyebrows. “I’m told that so far they have identified MDMA, barbiturates, amphetamines, opiates, psilocybin, and PCP, and some other substances that haven’t yet been classified. Quite a cocktail.”

Ecstasy, magic mushrooms, oxycodone or something similar, angel dust, speed.

“The medical team wanted to give you a stomach pump, but as Eric pointed out, it would have been a needless procedure given the fact that you’d ingested the drugs in liquid form. In the coffee, they think. Most of the damage would already have been done. Plus it was clear that you had been vomiting.”

I frowned.

“Your clothes,” she said gently. “Apparently you can thank the wine you drank for that. Those who hadn’t had any alcohol weren’t so lucky.”

Lucky. Dancing around in Pioneer Square with vomit on my clothes.

I lifted my right hand, needle hole towards her. “This?”

“Saline IV. Dehydration apparently is one of the main side effects of MDMA, or ecstasy. Suzanne will be insisting that you drink plenty of water.”

“And this?” I nodded at my left elbow.

“Blood draw.”

I remembered none of it. Someone had done this to me.

“Your clothes are being cleaned, but I thought you’d want to have something to hand immediately.”

“Yes.” Thank you, I wanted to add, but didn’t have the breath.

“Aud.” She started to reach for my hand.

“You said. Others.”

“I’m sorry, yes. A score of people from a film set were admitted to Harborview Medical Center before you arrived. I thought I had told you.” She smoothed her eyebrows with her fingertips—for my mother, a shocking expression of fatigue, which reminded me of my surprise when she had repeated herself yesterday, and why.

“Dornan?”

“Your friend is unaffected.”

“Information?” I was too tired to say more, but she understood.

"Perhaps when next I speak to the police liaison he will be able to tell us something.”

The coffee urn. Had to be. Kuiper? No, she had been surprised when I’d said, when I said those things. Somebody had made me say and do things that . . . Somebody had rendered me helpless, somebody . . . "Uh,” I said as my heart skipped a beat and then slammed against my rib cage in the wrong place.

“Aud?” She was leaning over me. “Aud?” I didn’t have the breath to speak.

Suzanne ran in from the other room, brushed my mother aside, thrust her stethoscope through a gap in the pajama top.

“Fine,” I said. “I’m fine.”

“Shssh,” she said, and frowned—the skin between her eyes rolled in a plump sausage—and moved the stethoscope slightly.

Whatever it was seemed to be over. My heart pulsed neatly, in the right place.

Suzanne straightened and slung the stethoscope around her neck. “Mild arrhythmia,” she said. “Not too worrying, but a doctor might be a good idea.”

“I’ll see to it,” my mother said.

Suzanne hesitated, then nodded, and went back into the sitting room. No one had asked my opinion. I struggled to sit up.

“Please, Aud, try to rest. I don’t think you realize just how serious this could have been.” She smoothed her eyebrows again. “I consulted with your friend about your accommodations and we agreed to install you in a two-roomed suite so that Suzanne can remain here as long as you feel she can be helpful. Your friend also has been very helpful.” Oh, yes, very. “The police have promised an extensive inquiry, and I’ll keep you updated with any developments. All your belongings have been brought over from your hotel. If there is anything else you need, ask Suzanne or call me. Now I will speak to your friend, and to Eric. He should be here within the hour.”

Her back was very straight as she walked away, despite the fact that, on top of jet lag, she must have been up all night taking charge of my life.

It took a long time and a lot of effort but I eventually dragged the room service menu from the bedside table to the bed, and dialed the right numbers. I knew exactly what I wanted, but found I kept ordering random words from the menu (“delicious,” or “sales tax”). After a few tries I found that if I kept my sentences to two words or less—scrambled eggs, two please, tea, English breakfast—I could manage. I concentrated on the fact that I could manage, not the fact that I had to.

Breakfast arrived ten minutes before Dornan. The food tasted like something forced from a crack in the earth.

“Well,” he said, looking at the tray on the bed, “it doesn’t look as though that was a success.”

“Taste those eggs.”

“Thank you, but I’ve already—”

“Taste them, Dornan, or at least get the tray out of my sight. They taste vile, and they smell even worse.” Or at least that’s what I tried to say, but it came out as a river of muddled syllables. I stopped. Tried again. Stopped. His eyes glistened. “Bad,” I said. “Bad food.”

“The eggs are bad?”

“And the butter is rancid and the milk for the tea curdled.” Cremble degg. Runny kid. I took a deep breath. “Butter. Milk. Ranky—rancid.”

“I see.”

“Do you? My taste. They’ve done something. The drugs. Everything tastes of sulfur.” I stopped, this time in surprise, because I had made sense, and was shocked to see Dornan half close his eyes in relief. Brain damage. My mother hadn’t mentioned that possibility. He hopped up, lifted the tray, carried it to the dressing table, grinned as he popped a strawberry in his mouth. “Shame,” he said, sitting down again. “They’re delicious.”

“The fruit was all rall—right,” I said.

“You want me to bring that back, then?”

“No. Yes. I don’t know. Forget the food. Why did you let my mother take over?” Mumbly ho-taker. But most of it had come out all right.

“All her suggestions seemed like sensible ones.”

I said carefully, “Why her hotel?”

“Better than being in hospital under restraint.”

“Wasn’t that bad.” I should have signed those papers, made sure he had power-of-attorney for health care.

“You weren’t making any sense whatsoever. And you were seriously alarming the natives. One of the police officers who was brought in had to be treated for a bruised shoulder and seemed pretty cross about something. They had to Taser you, Torvingen. Twice. I’m guessing that if it weren’t for your mother you’d have a few bruises of your own and be facing charges.”

“You were at the hospital?”

“I was. I have to say you seemed to be happier when you were stoned. You might have been talking gibberish, but your smile was radiant.”

Poison had made the world so beautiful. But I wouldn’t be able to say that. “Strawberries,” I said. “Bring me them.”

He brought me a napkin, a fork, and the dish of fruit and put them by me on the bed.

I ate one. “Still at the Edgewater?”

He nodded. “I’ve kept your room there, too, just in case. But I thought you might like to stay here, perhaps, for some privacy.” He said that with a slight question, but I had no idea what he meant by it. When I didn’t respond, he said, “Your mother wanted me to stay with you. She isn’t easy to refuse.”

“No.” We sat in silence for a moment. “So. You met her. Tell me.”

DORNAN FOR GOT to take the tray with him when he left and I was too tired to call out to Suzanne.

When Eric Loedessoel arrived five minutes later, his eyes strayed to its contents while he explained why he was there.

“I have an M.D. but am not a practicing physician. I can’t treat you or formally advise you in a medical capacity, but I have consulted with colleagues at Harborview Medical Center, and believe I can help you with any questions you might have, on a stopgap basis. But I want to make it clear that in my opinion tomorrow you should consult a fully qualified and licensed physician.”

“Thank you,” I said. “For your help so far.”

He looked at the tray again. “I see you didn’t eat much,” he said. “Was it the taste? But you can still smell?”

I nodded.

“Many of the other victims are displaying similar symptoms.”

Victims.

“Those that are conscious, that is. One of the as yet unidentified compounds has a tendency to depress the autonomic nervous system. Two of the victims are being assisted with their breathing. There was a third, but he is already managing to breathe nicely on his own again. The reasonable conclusion is that the effects are probably temporary.”

I had never been a victim before.

“. . . worry about, as long as you avoid over-exertion. I’d like to look at your notes, if I may?”

I nodded.

He left and came back with the clipboard. This time I noticed his faint scent of cologne, and knew whose pajamas I was wearing.

“. . . few days, probably an unnecessary precaution.” He was looking at me.

“I’m sorry?”

“Suzanne noted an arrhythmia. It’s probably nothing to worry about, a result of toxic stress, but I’d suggest avoiding taxing your heart in the next few . . .”

I lost track again of what he was saying. All these favors mounting up. Reduced to relying on the kindness of strangers. I had to get back to my own hotel.

“. . . emotional lability . . .”

It was all that caterer’s fault. Kuiper. She should watch her coffee more carefully. Dancing in Pioneer Square.

“. . . hallucination flashbacks . . .”

I woke midafternoon. My breathing was a lot better. When I sat up, the walls shimmered but didn’t dance.

My clothes on the chair were carefully chosen: Eileen Fisher trousers in black linen, with pockets; a layering T-shirt, white; a V-necked silk sweater; underwear; cashmere socks; low-heeled boots. They would do for any occasion and temperature. I knew as surely as though I’d seen my mother do it that she had chosen them. I looked around the rest of the room: my laptop on the dressing table, not where it belonged, but where I would see it when I was well enough to sit up for any length of time; my jacket laid casually over the back of an armchair; my luggage stowed beneath the window, again, not where it belonged, but where I would see it and infer that the rest of my belongings were in the closet. My wallet, I knew, would be in the pocket of the jacket; my toiletries would be in the bathroom.

After five minutes of sitting and turning my head this way and that without dizziness, I felt confident enough to drag myself to the bathroom.

I sat on the toilet, and thought about beauty and poison, and the fact that my mother knew me so well she could use my own belongings to send the kind of message that would get through the drug fog: I was able to leave anytime I needed to. I stared at the silk pajama bottoms pooled at my feet and kicked them off, then unbuttoned the top and dropped it on the floor. My skin still smelled of cologne, but faintly.

I came to with a start, cold, and hauled myself to my feet, and flushed the toilet. Suzanne came into the room just as I got to the bed. The left side of her hair was flat; she must have been taking a nap, too.

“Need some help?” She reached out, but hesitantly, unwilling to touch naked skin without permission. Or maybe she had just never seen healed knife and bullet wounds.

“No. Thank you.” I climbed onto the bed, trying to look as though it cost less effort than it did, wondering, even as I did so, why I bothered. Suzanne wasn’t a predator waiting to pounce at the first sign of weakness; she was a nurse.

“Actually, yes. You could help. My laptop. It’s on the dresser.” Four-word sentences were now easy.

She brought me the laptop, set it up—it didn’t take long; the signal here must have been better than at the Edgewater—and refilled my water glass. “Make sure you drink it,” she said, and left.

I had two e-mails. One was from Luz, one from Rusen: the information I’d requested. While it was downloading, I fell asleep.

When I woke up, it was dark again. After midnight. I was viciously hungry, but couldn’t face the idea of fruit. Rusen’s document blinked at me. I scrolled through it. The text bulged and shrank on the screen like a squeezed accordion. I found I was stabbing the keys so hard the casing creaked. I drank the water. The fact that I had to annoyed me. The nasty nylon laptop case, the fact that my laptop was there—that I was in bed in this room—that my clothes were laid out neatly on the chair, that some strange woman was sleeping in the room next door and that I had had no say in any of it made me want to hurl the glass at the wall. I wasn’t even sure if I could. I didn’t even know if the room was registered in my name. Was I being treated like a dependent, like a child? I was wearing Loedessoel’s pajamas. Even my skin smelled of him, the man who had married my mother. My mother, who had crooked her finger and said, Come, and I’d climbed obediently onto a plane.

I put the glass down. My heart squeezed and released, squeezed and released as my adrenal gland pumped hormones into my bloodstream and arteries widened and surface capillaries shut down. The muscles in my jaw pulled my teeth together, my thighs twitched, I was too hot. And somebody had done this to me. They had dumped a cup of powder in a coffee urn and turned my life inside out, like a sock.

They wouldn’t have been able to if that bloody woman, Kuiper, had been paying attention. And why did she think I was out to hurt her precious Rusen, anyway? No doubt she was laughing, laughing right now, telling a friend all the stupid things I’d said.

And then I was hunting for her information, and found it: Film Food, Kuiper, Victoria K. prop., 4222 Myrtle Avenue, in Wallingford, just four blocks from the Jitterbug, according to MapQuest. And it made perfect sense to get out of bed and put on those carefully selected clothes, collect the draped-just-so jacket, complete with wallet and car keys, and leave.

MURPHY’S, THE pub on the corner, was shut. Restaurants, bars, and movie theaters were dark. Lights changed at an empty intersection. It was so quiet I could hear the new leaves of the maple tree under which I’d parked hiss and shiver. The moon was small and bright. Wallingford slept. Well, Kuiper wasn’t going to.

Number 4222 was a small, wooden bungalow, original pre-World War I cedar shakes painted sage green, woodwork bright white. No light on the porch. No light on most of the porches; obviously a low-crime area. Sodium streetlights pooled like pale brass on sidewalks, whose concrete had been wrenched out of true decades ago by the growth of tree roots. Here and there it gleamed more palely, where the concrete had been replaced. Still silent, no tree frogs, no crickets—just the river of interstate traffic about a mile away. The scent of spring flowers, delicate as lace, there and gone again. Utterly unlike Atlanta.

From the path, three concrete steps—dark, with moss growing on the uprights—led to eight wooden steps, painted a darker green than the cedar shingles, to a wooden porch. The door had glass insets, and a brass lock plate that hadn’t been replaced for forty years.

Both sets of steps had rails, but added recently, sometime in the last five years, though not very competently; the right-hand rail wobbled. Cheap, gimcrack thing; aluminum painted black to look like cast iron. Out of place.

There was no knocker on the door, no doorbell. I banged on the white gloss-painted panel between the glass. The house boomed. The sound rolled up and down the silent street. I banged again, thumping the door panel with the meaty part of my fist, five times, putting some weight behind it.

“I know you’re here,” I shouted cheerily. Her van was in the driveway. Bang. Bang, bang. Not a single neighbor’s light flicked on. Polite, circumspect, incurious. Very Scandinavian.

“It’s me”—bang—“a victim”—bang—“of your coffee.” Bang, bang. “I don’t”—bang—“even like”—bang—“coffee.” Bang, bang. “Kuiper.” Or whatever she called herself. “Kuiper.” Bang. “Come out.” Bang, bang.

Between one bang and the next, the hot, tight clarity of adrenaline drained away and I found myself panting. Something in my peripheral vision fluttered. My palm squeaked as it slid down the glossy woodwork. I locked my knees.

“No,” I said. "You won’t. You will not.” And I hung there, between standing and collapse, smelling the mysterious flowers again, wondering what they were.

The porch vibrated briefly, and with an effort that made the scar near my jugular tighten, I pushed against my hands and swayed back onto my heels before a deadbolt rattled and the door opened.

Bare feet on a lovely, ribbon-work inlaid oak floor. They must be cold. White toweling robe to her knees, and hair trapped under the collar where she’d pulled it on in a hurry. Phone in her left hand. Didn’t she know that the time to call the police was before opening the door? I opened my mouth, but the graphite sheen under her eyes, her drawn face, shocked me silent.

“What—” she began, but the flutter in the corner of my eye turned to flapping, and I lost the lock on my knees. “Fuck,” she said, and grabbed me under the arms before I went down. The phone dug into my armpit. For a moment my face hung near the opening in her robe, and I breathed the soft, buttered-toast scent of sleepy, naked woman. Then she shifted her grip, stepped in close enough to lean my forehead on her collarbone, and stuffed the phone in her pocket. “Fuck,” she said again, and half dragged me across the living room to a three-seater sofa. She dropped me awkwardly, but the old leather was soft. Luz would have liked it.

She rearranged her robe, then leaned across me and switched on a table lamp. She looked down. The exertion had given her a bit of color. “Tell me why I shouldn’t call the police”—she bent and peered at me more closely— “or maybe an ambulance.”

“I’ll be all right,” I said, sitting like an abandoned rag doll. I was so very tired of feeling helpless.

“What are you doing here? No, never mind. Just keep still. I’ll call you a cab.” She straightened and turned this way and that, as though looking for something.

“No need. I have a car.”

“You’re not fit to drive.”

“I drove here.”

“Right. And that worked out so well for you.” She wasn’t really paying attention, still scanning the room for whatever it was.

“I’m fine.”

“Of course you are.”

The color was fading in her cheeks, and she looked ill again. “Did you take some, too?”

“What?”

“Drugs. Did you take any?”

She looked at me this time. “No.”

“So why do you look so terrible?”

She folded her arms. It took me a minute to understand that her strange expression was hurt.

“No, that’s not . . . I didn’t mean it to sound . . .” I wanted to shrink to the size of an ant and creep into the cracks of the sofa.

“You do seem to have the gift of tongues. Speaking of which, you’ll have to explain the ‘tongue palace’ reference to me sometime.” She went back to scanning the room. Stilled. Sighed. Fished the phone from her pocket. “Now, a cab.”

“No cab. I’ll call my friend, Dornan.”

“Oh,” she said. “Him.”

I couldn’t interpret her tone and she didn’t offer any hints. “His number’s—”

“I have his number.” She crossed to an enormous chair, in the same battered-looking leather, at the other end of the living room, consulted a notebook, and dialed. While it rang she pulled her feet up under her, tucked her hair behind her ears, brushed an imaginary fleck from her robe. “Hey,” she said, “it’s Kick.”

Kick?

“Oh, don’t worry, I know. Three-thirty. Yep.”

Her name was Kick?

“That’s right,” she said, staring up and to the right at nothing, as people did on the phone. “Because I have a friend of yours prostrate in my living room. Uh-huh, the very same. Yes. Well, fairly lucid. Soon? Okay.”

She put the phone down and wiped her face with her hand. “He might not be able to get here for half an hour. Depends how long it will take him to get a cab.” She stood wearily. “I don’t imagine you want coffee.”

I shook my head. Three-thirty in the morning. What had I been thinking, banging on her door at this time?

She walked into the kitchen, carefully, as though she were not sure of her step. An injury? Might explain why she didn’t do stunts anymore. Water ran in the sink, then a kettle. A cupboard opened and shut. Half an hour. How many more stupid things could I say in half an hour?

I woke to find her draping me with a blanket. I struggled upright. She stepped back and pulled her robe tighter, and I got another waft of that soft, naked smell.

“I woke you,” I said. “Before. Earlier.” The smell had unmoored me. “It’s late. I’m sorry.”

She sat at the other end of the sofa, and tucked her legs up again. Her toes poked out beneath the robe. Small, like her hands. I imagined them soft between my palms.

“I’m sorry,” I said again.

She nodded tiredly. “I don’t need this. The police already kept me for hours. Did I have a grudge? Why? And when they got past that, it was, Did I know who did have a grudge? Did I know against whom? Did I know why? Had I seen any strangers on the set?”

“What did you say?”

“That you were the most suspicious character I’d seen all day.” She glanced at her wrist, realized it was naked. She got up again and tucked my blanket in around my shoulder. “Sorry. But it’s true. Besides, you know the police won’t come after you. Lift your hand.” She tucked my arm in. “Whoever you are, you’re off limits. To the reporters, too. My face was splashed all over the papers—and Sîan Branwell’s, of course. You? Nowhere to be found. But me, all anyone will think of now when they see the name Film Food is poison.” Her voice sounded distant, almost dispassionate. “The mad poisoner of Seattle. I worked so hard.”

I didn’t say, Don’t blame me. I didn’t say, It’s not my fault. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t her fault, either, but people were still blaming her. She had still lost her reputation. “Did you? See any strangers on the set?”

It seemed an effort for her to come back from her bleak internal landscape. “No.”

“Then I’ll get it all back. Your reputation.”

“Why would you care?” she said wearily.

Because your feet are turning blotchy red with the cold and I don’t want to think about why I want to warm them with my hands, why I want to make you tea, bring it to you, right here, and stroke that heavy hair— which gleams like soft metal that’s been cut with a knife—back from your cheek and tell you not to worry about the stain on your white coat, not to worry about anything.

“I’ll find them.”

She nodded, but she wasn’t really listening. She was too tired to care.

I carefully folded back the blanket and levered myself to my feet. The least I could do was let her get back to bed. “I’ll wait outside.”

She also stood, but this time with a slight smile. “No, you won’t.”

“I won’t?” I said, stupid in the face of my own horrible, insidious tenderness.

“No. Because I hear your ride.”

All I could hear was the uneven lumping of my heart. I concentrated. Outside, a car door thunked and a diesel engine rattled as the cab pulled away. She opened the door before he could knock.

He looked at me, then her. No one spoke. Then she stood to one side. “Can you walk?” Dornan said to me, and I nodded. “Keys?” I touched my jacket pocket, nodded again, and stepped forward. My knees held. “Tomorrow?” he said to Kick, who also nodded. She looked ill and tired and walking once again in her bleak world.

“I’ll find them,” I said.

Dornan walked by me down wooden steps, then concrete. I didn’t hear her shut the door behind us, but I couldn’t afford to split my concentration to turn and see if she was watching. I leaned both hands on the car roof while he opened the passenger door. He stood close while I eased myself into the seat, made sure my fingers were out of the way before he slammed the door. Then I looked. Kick’s door was closed.

Dornan fussed with the seat and seat belt and then the mirrors, the way people who rarely drive do.

“Do you know the way?”

“Mostly. I think.” He started the engine, released the brake, and we rolled down the street. There was absolutely nothing on the road, but at the traffic circle he checked his mirror twice, indicated, and drove counterclockwise all the way around to the left before turning.

We reached the interstate without incident.

“What happened?” he said.

I shrugged tiredly. I didn’t really know. He nodded as though I’d answered, and drove some more.

"Sîan Branwell,” I said.

He spared me a quick sideways glance.

“The name of the star of Feral: Sîan Branwell.”

“Yes. I found out yesterday.”

That wasn’t the only name he’d found out. “Why did she tell you her name and not me?”

“Maybe because I asked her nicely.”

And then the freeway was passing beneath what looked like the hanging gardens of Babylon. I blinked and tried to refocus, but the vision remained, and it was real: a park built over the interstate. It wasn’t hard to imagine the city overtaken by forest, fifty years after the apocalypse. For a moment I thought I smelled the rank breath of an unseen predator, big and lithe, pacing the car, hidden by trees.

LESSON 4

THIS WEEK THERE WAS STILL LIGHT IN THE SKY WHEN I PARKED, AND UNDER THE greasy hydrocarbon fumes of drive-time traffic, a hint of life scented. Twigs were swollen at their tips.

The white board was gone, but magazines were stacked under the pegboard. I tried to imagine how this space was used when I wasn’t here. Some kind of low-rent group-counseling space? A beggars-can’t-be-choosers law clinic? Sandra was absent. I wondered if she would come back. No matter. My guess was she already knew the most important things I would be teaching today.

We would begin, though, with action. Make them all feel big and strong. “The larynx,” I said. “To fracture it, you use the edge of your hand, like this.” I showed them how to make a knife-hand. “The tension is in the fingers, the thumb is bent. It’s easier and faster to strike outwards, palm down. Practice with both hands. If your attacker is on his back, you can come straight down, like a hatchet. If he’s on his stomach, you’d be better off with an axe kick to the spine.”

They spent a minute or two slashing the air, then I ran them through a few attacks on the prone bag. After that I hung the bag back on its frame, and we did some side strikes.

“The knife-hand will work very well, though obviously you’d have more reach with a pipe, even a length of hose. No,” I said, as Nina opened her mouth, “not panty hose. Garden hose.” Suze punched Nina on the upper arm and grinned. “Any other household objects that might work?”

“Wrench,” Suze said.

“Hammer,” said Katherine, after a moment’s thought.

Objects from Man World. “What about the kitchen?” They looked blank. “Anything fairly flat to get under the chin.” Silence. “A cake slicer,” I suggested. “A spatula. Even a dinner plate, if you hold it in both hands and jab forwards.”

“A dustpan?” Kim said.

“A skillet. Swing it.”

“Good, Tonya. What else?” Another pause. “Anything can be a weapon if you think about it that way.”

Therese folded her arms. “The Joy of Cooking?”

“A little unwieldy if you’re going for the larynx, but it would work well against the back of the neck or side of the head, or even slammed down on a hand. One of those thin hardcovers would work, though, just like a plate.”

“Man,” Pauletta said. “You sit around all day thinking up this shit?”

“More than fifty percent of attacks on women happen in the home. It makes sense to have weapons close by. Imagine your house not only as a refuge but as a garden of weaponry.” I might as well have been talking Farsi. “So think. What else? What’s in the kitchen, apart from recipe books and cooking utensils?”

They just couldn’t seem to make the connection between the kitchen and violence. The one who would have understood that bad things happen more often in sunny breakfast nooks than in midnight alleys wasn’t here.

“Food,” I said. More blank looks. “Anyone here cook with linguiça or andouille or chorizo?”

“Sausages?” Suze said. “You’re saying if some wacko breaks into my condo I should hit him with a fucking sausage?”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s food.”

“So,” Nina said after a moment, “an andouille sausage. Should it be fresh or frozen?”

“That, of course, depends. Fresh might be a little slippery for a proper grip, but you’d get that whiplash effect for extra power. Plus you could dispose of the evidence more quickly because it’s faster to cook and eat the weapon if you don’t have to defrost it first.” I smiled to show them I was being witty. They seemed to find that disturbing.

“Pasta!” Jennifer said. “You know, that dried spaghetti in the packet. Well,” she said to herself, “it’s flat.”

“Cooking with weapons,” Nina announced brightly. “A book of recipes for the modern woman!”

Their hilarity lasted almost a minute; they would remember it, and the lesson.

“Just because we’re talking about the larynx and blunt-edged weapons doesn’t mean you can’t use something sharp. In the kitchen, the perfect tool for this kind of job would be a cleaver. Now,” I said, while they looked at me uncertainly—was this another joke?—“let’s move on to the second target, which is here, in the hollow of the throat.” After a moment they changed gears and started touching their throats. “Careful. Don’t press too hard. The trachea there is close to the surface, very fragile, vulnerable to swelling. It’s a small target, so if you’ve no other weapon but your hands, your best bet is your fingers. Like this.” I made a slow, upward stabbing motion. “It’s the same basic form as the knife-hand, but this time you strike forwards, like a spear tip. The thumb is curled again, but this time keep your fingers slightly bent.” I went along the line and bent and pointed and curled. “Hit the bag a few times. Start gently on this one, you’ll see why. Kim, you do this instead.” I showed her an extended knuckle strike. “I don’t want you to rip the bag.” Or split her nail bed to the cuticle.

Suze, of course, went a little too hard to begin with and jammed her knuckles. “Shake it out,” I advised. “Use the other hand for now.”

I watched for a minute to make sure no one was going to break her fingers.

“Okay, good. Now we’ll start putting some of this together. Stand closer than you think you need to. Strike through the target. Good, next. Strike more than once. And again. Strike harder now, harder. Next. Good. Next. Strike fast. Remember: that’s what gives you power. And, good, speed it up. Fist strike, knife-hand, fingertip. Next.” They were trotting to the bag now. “Good. And a little faster.” Now they were running. “Lungs, I want to hear your lungs working. Fist, finger, knife. Right hand, left hand, right hand. Fist, and finger, and knife.” Now they were moving to a beat, fist and finger and knife, fist and finger and knife, hearts filling and clenching, pumping shocking red blood to muscles greedy for oxygen. Heat bloomed under their skin, their lips opened, and the room filled with the susurrus of breath. My nostrils flared at the sharp tang of adrenaline-charged sweat, my own breathing deepened, and they were like a vast horse I rode bare-back, skin to skin, gripping that muscle and bone between my thighs, moving with its rhythm, urging it on—more, faster, harder—as it stretched out and its hooves cut into the turf and it thundered over the plain, running without effort, without fatigue, without end. And then Jennifer stumbled and Katherine ran into her and the rhythm broke and it was just women hitting a bag.

“Good. Stop a minute. Get your breath.”

They did, bending over, some with hands on each other’s backs, chests heaving, skin pink and damp, faces smooth.

"Sit,” I said. They sat differently, more loosely, more present. I could still smell them. “So, you’re back in your house. What weapons would work on the hollow of the throat?”

“Knife,” Tonya said promptly.

“Fork,” said Jennifer.

“Broom handle.”

“Beer bottle.” That was Suze.

“Good. Now think of something that doesn’t fit in the hand like a spear, or something that’s not hard.”

“Like what?”

I rose, crossed to the pile of bags and shoes, picked out a blue pump with a three-inch spike heel. Kim’s. “Hold it with the sole in your palm, strike sideways. Or”—I went to the pegboard and the magazines—“how about this?” I picked up an Atlanta magazine.

“It’s just paper.”

I rolled it into a tube, slid it through my right hand until I held it like a stumpy ski pole, took a step sideways, and slammed the end into the pegboard. It punched right through. I examined the edges of the round hole: painted particle board, not metal. Cheap. I put aside my irritation.

“Magazines make good weapons. They can be two different kinds of tools—deadly”—I pointed to the hole—“or not.” Now I held the magazine like a flyswatter and slapped it against the edge of the board. “They’re particularly useful in a situation where your actions are legally dubious, or could be made to seem so. Very few prosecutors would be prepared to charge you with assault with a deadly weapon if you were armed only with a magazine.” I hadn’t meant to mention prosecutors at this early stage.

“Can I have a go?” Suze said.

I handed her the magazine.

She rolled it up, hefted it a couple of times, then whipped it viciously into the board. A neat circle of plywood popped out the other side. “Awesome! ”

“Anyone else?” I’d have to buy the center a new pegboard anyway, and nothing brings home a blow’s power better than the satisfaction of destroying something. It would also distract them from my mention of the law.

Six people stood at once. Therese and Jennifer were only seconds behind.

Five minutes later, after a combination of backwards, sideways, up, down, single- and two-handed blows, the board was reduced to a metal frame and a pile of splinters.

“So, what else in the room would work as a weapon? Set aside a moment the idea of throat strikes.”

“Man, I was just getting used to that.”

“So what should we be thinking of?” Jennifer said.

“Remember the first lesson, when I asked you to list the reasons you came here in the first place. And a couple of reasons why your friends and family would encourage you to come. Pick one of those friends and family situations. Doesn’t matter how trivial you think it is. It’s not your reason. It’s theirs.” I let them take thirty seconds to pick something. “So. The room as weapon. Someone, anyone, give me a situation, then give me what you could use.”

“If some guy is, like, making kissy noises and all his friends are laughing, you could hit him with a purse,” Christie said.

“It would certainly send a strong signal, which is useful in a social situation. If you wanted to do some damage, though, it would depend on the purse. But think about the room itself.”

“You mean the bar?”

“All right, the bar.”

“Well, there’s bar stools . . .”

“Beer bottles.”

“Glasses.”

“Tables.”

“You can’t just pick up one of those tables,” Pauletta said. “It’s not like on TV. Those mofos are heavy.”

And the bottles wouldn’t break if you used the closed end, and the chairs wouldn’t conveniently splinter. The fighters wouldn’t grin afterwards, either, then belly up to the saloon bar and order each other rotgut whiskey.

“You don’t have to lift the table, you could use it another way, particularly if it’s low. If you push someone a little and the table’s behind them it will upset their balance and they’ll go down. But supposing this drunken guy has pushed you up against the wall and is still making kissy noises at you. What then?”

“Kick him,” Katherine said.

“Head butt right in the fucking face,” Suze said. “Wham.”

“Both would work.”

“Yes, but what did you mean about using the room?” Therese said.

“Think about what we did last week, using expectations against your attacker. Christie, stand against the wall.” I faced her, leaning against the wall, a hand on each side of her head, face nine inches from hers. “What would he expect you to do?”

Everyone’s face went blank.

I sighed to myself. “What would a TV character playing a young woman in a college bar do?”

“Depends on the show,” Tonya said. “She’d either cry and hide her face until her boyfriend showed, when she’d watch the creep get stomped, or she’d tough it out, give him a big smooch so that he went red and his friends laughed, then she’d sort of strut away.”

Everyone nodded. I had no idea what kind of shows they watched.

“Let’s swap roles,” I said to Christie. I bent my knees considerably so that we were the same height. “Now lean in, as though you’re going to kiss me.” She hesitated. “Don’t worry, I won’t let you.” She leaned forward. I put my right palm on her sternum and pushed back, just a little, just enough to make her feel her own strength. She leaned harder. I heaved an exaggerated sigh, tilted my face up as though about to give in, and slipped my left hand to the back of her neck: just like a starlet about to kiss the hero. In one move I slid down the wall, jerked Christie’s face down and forwards, and twisted, and shot my right hand up fast enough to catch her forehead just before it smashed into the painted cinder block.

“In real life, of course, you wouldn’t catch his head. Thank you,” I said to Christie, who was still blinking. She touched her forehead a couple of times to make sure it was still there.

“What I did was use the wall as both a weapon against my attacker and an aid to balance. I could bring my entire weight to bear on his neck because I was using the wall to keep me from falling backwards. If you practice this at home with unsuspecting spouses, I’d recommend you put a mattress against the wall first.”

Therese folded her arms. I gestured for her to speak.

“You’re in a bar. He’s drunk. You shouldn’t have hurt him like that.”

“The fucker deserved it,” Suze said, chin out.

I looked around. “Anyone else?”

Pauletta stirred. “Now I think about it, then maybe yeah, it could be a bit harsh. Dude only wanted a kiss.”

“Yeah, but he should’ve stopped when she said stop,” Suze said.

“I didn’t hear her say stop,” Therese said.

“So what should she do?”

They all turned to me.

“It depends.”

“Man, how did I know she was going to say that?”

“It always depends,” I said. “Always. Every situation is different. What do you do if your car breaks down on I-75? You don’t call a tow truck and say, ‘It’s Tuesday, bring a wrench,’ or ‘It’s Thursday, bring gas.’ You look at the context. This is a college bar. This man is drunk. He has friends. We don’t know if Christie has friends—Christie, do you have friends?”

“Well, yeah.”

“In the bar. And how old are the man and his friends?”

“Twenty-one?”

“In that context, yes, you shouldn’t have needed to get to the face-smashing stage. Therese, come over here and play Christie. I’ll be the drunk.”

Therese stood straight. I leered and staggered. “Give us a kiss, then.”

“No. Go away.”

“Oh, don’t be like that. Smile, go on.” I moved closer.

“No.” She backed up half a step but didn’t turn away, didn’t smile. “Go away.”

“Just one kiss . . .” I started to reach out.

“Don’t touch me,” she said loudly.

“Jeez, lady, I just wanted a—”

“Don’t you dare touch me. Lay one finger on me and I call the police.” Her pupils were small and tight, her whole face pointed at mine. “If you touch me I’ll have you sued for assault. You’ll never get your degree, you’ll never get a job. Don’t touch me!”

I turned to the others, raised my eyebrows. They applauded. Therese grinned, fiercely.

“It all goes back to what we were saying last week: communication and body language. Don’t let them use embarrassment against you. You won’t die of embarrassment. But let’s suppose he’s pushed you against the wall and he’s leaning in for the kiss. At that point are you warranted in using the maneuver I showed you earlier?”

“Yep,” said Suze.

“Not in that kind of bar,” Christie said.

“Just what kind of bar is it?” Suze.

“Suze, come and play the drunk who’s got me against the wall. Okay. Suggestions?”

“Just say no, like before. Real loud,” Kim said.

“Let’s say I’m so scared my mouth’s gone dry and I can’t shout,” I said. I would teach them another time how to deal with fear and its effects. “Let me show you one or two other tools you could use. Remember the knife-hand. ” They all made knife-hands. “Watch.” I laid the edge of my hand against Suze’s larynx. “If she tries to press towards me, that’s going to get very uncomfortable. You’re not deliberately hurting him, but you’ve drawn an unmistakable line. You’ve set yourself on fire. If he pushes harder, any damage is his fault. Try it. Gently.”

I let Suze try it on me, but kept the muscles in my throat expanded protectively.

“Good. One other thing. Kim, remember that knuckle extension I showed you?” She held out her arm obligingly. Everyone copied her. “Good. Now support your middle knuckle with your thumb and tuck the other fingers in, as though making a fist. Face your partner.” I moved Suze into position. “There’s a spot right in the middle of the breastbone where the nerve lies very close to the surface. Feel for it. Now put your knuckle on your partner’s breastbone and push.”

“Ow!”

“Shit!”

Everyone sprang apart rubbing their sternums.

“This is a very useful little tool. Appropriate for delicate situations, particularly those times when you have no wish to draw attention to yourself.” Appropriate. My mother would approve. I knew Therese would go home and practice that until it hurt to breathe. “Remember, the right tool for the right job. Even naked in an empty room you have plenty of tools. But the first tool you should practice is communication: Know what you want and don’t want, be prepared to communicate that clearly. Make sure your body and your words send the same message. Don’t apologize, don’t explain, don’t threaten. It’s all information they don’t need, and information is currency. It’s power. It’s a tool.”

They frowned. I thought for a minute.

“Jennifer.” Her jaw twitched. “When was the last time you got a wrong-number call?”

“A wrong number?”

“Yes. When?”

“About six months ago.”

“Remember how it went?” I picked up an imaginary phone and held it to my ear. “They called, and you picked up the phone and said . . . what?”

She picked up a phone, too. “Hello?”

“Hey, is this Annie?”

“Er, no.”

“Well, who is this?”

“Jennifer.”

“Is Annie there?”

“No, no one called Annie lives here.”

“Annie Contin. Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure, it’s just me and my husband.”

“And it’s not Contin?”

“No, I’m sorry.”

“Well what number is this?”

“555-2658.”

“Well, that’s Annie Contin’s number and I’m supposed to deliver a load of dog chow this afternoon. What’s your address?”

“We don’t have a dog. We have a cat. And . . . and you don’t need my address! ” and she slammed the imaginary phone down. Everyone was giving her sympathetic looks, the kind that in the South mean Dear Lord, what a moron. In the space of half a minute she had given a total stranger her name, her phone number, the fact that only two of them lived there, that she had a cat and no dog, and that she could be browbeaten without too much effort.

“Anyone think they can do better?”

“Yep.” Suze picked up the imaginary handset. “Hello.”

“Hey, is this Annie?”

“Nope, fuck off, asshole.” Slam.

“That’s always an option,” I said. “But similar to using a pile driver on a picture nail. Anyone else?”

Therese raised a phone to her ear. She smiled. I nodded. “Hello.” “Hey, is this Annie?”

“No. What number are you trying to reach?”

“Is this Annie? Annie Contin?”

“No. I believe you have the wrong number. Good-bye.”

“Excellent,” I said. “The less people know about you, the less they can hurt you. Think about it: who in your lives has the power to hurt you most, to wound you cruelly with a word?”

“My mother.”

“My husband.”

I nodded. “The people who know us best can hurt us the most because they know us, know how we think and what our vulnerabilities are. Any information you give a stranger can be used against you. Anything. Information is valuable. Don’t give it away.”

FIVE

I WOKE AT NOON ON SUNDAY WITH MY MUSCLES STEADY AND MY MIND GATHERING speed, cold and clear as a bobsled in its ice run. I got out of bed without having to think about it, called room service without referring to the number listings, and ordered breakfast—fruit and cheese—without a hitch.

The shower fittings were solid nickel-plated steel, heavy and cool. I twirled taps, watched the steam curl up from the tile floor. Even the water smelled different from the water in Atlanta; no heavy chlorine tang.

The water pressure was strong, the shower like a fizzing drill on my skin. I soaped thoroughly, found the light blue stain of small bruises on my inner upper arms, where the police officers had taken a grip, a scrape on my left shin and three tiny cuts on my right ankle, like paper cuts. I’d probably never know where they had come from.

Hard white tile, as in a hospital room. I increased the hot-water flow and my goose bumps went away.

My mother had moved me here while I was unconscious and had no say in the matter. But the Edgewater was a dark and damp place. Despite its moneyed smugness, the Fairmont was lighter and brighter, and my room accessible only via the door, not the water. So I’d stay. I didn’t need Suzanne anymore, so she could go.

I toweled my hair dry, smoothed moisturizer methodically on my back, and shivered—as I hadn’t for more than six months, since the nerves healed—when my hand ran over the bullet scar on the underside of my left arm.

AT THE breakfast table by the bar, Suzanne did her best to take it philosophically. “Well, I guess it’s good that you’re feeling better. I mean, it is good, definitely.” She looked around wistfully while I wrote her check, and indeed the suite looked beautiful: thick glass tabletop gleaming in the sunshine, flowers vivid, Barber playing on the Bose.

I signed the check, handed it over. “I’m sorry about the lack of notice, but I’ve added a bonus.”

When she saw the amount, her pupils, clenched tight against the bright sunshine, expanded briefly. She folded it and put it in her pocket.

I stood. “Do you have more work lined up?”

“Oh, well, I work through an agency. It’ll be okay.” She touched her pocket unconsciously, and stood. “I’ll be okay.”

Even in Seattle I imagined it wasn’t too easy to get work as a private nurse with pink hair and a nose ring. I doubt my mother would have hired her if it hadn’t been a middle-of-the-night emergency.

She shrugged. “Well, hey, time to pack.” She gave the silk upholstered sofa one last pat and went into her room.

I set up my laptop on the table and opened Rusen’s spreadsheet, the employment information. It looked as though he’d been thorough.

No one knows for certain if it was Einstein who said, Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler, but it is a useful guiding principle. This wasn’t, as the police appeared to think, a one-off grudge or a prank. There had been trouble with my property for two years. The trouble had continued with Hippoworks Productions. The drugging incident meant more trouble. It seemed entirely possible that there was some kind of connection. Also, as William of Ockham said, pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate. And Kick had seen no strangers on the set.

Hippoworks LLC had two partners, Rusen and Finkel, and two permanent employees, both of whom worked at their Culver City office in California. For the Feral production, they employed about four dozen others on a contract basis. They were nonunion contracts, but at scale, with the exception of Sîan Branwell, who, being the star, had a few extra clauses and a bit more money. The end-date of her contract surprised me: less than a week away.

I scrolled to Kick’s information. Not much: addresses, references, a City of Seattle business license for Film Food, plus a notation that Rusen had checked her bond and insurance information and had two outside references on file. I opened a Web search bar and typed in KUIPER, VICTORIA K, and got several dozen hits, all relating to Film Food. Her website was rudimentary: a few menus, contact information, a professionally shot photo of Kuiper in white coat and hat, knife in hand and smiling self-consciously.

I changed the search to KICK KUIPER, and this time got several thousand hits. IMDb had a list—a long list—of her films. Stunt! had a cover interview with “Top Diving and Driving Artist ‘Kick’ Kuiper” from four years ago. The picture was of a woman in a red harness suit smiling brilliantly, bright with that reckless shine that comes only from riding a wave of adrenaline to survival. The caption read “Kuiper on the set of Tantalus.” I remembered that film. The action hero had been too old for the actress. The action scene with the actress had been good—Kick’s scene, I now realized.

There was also a smaller piece, about a year later, another interview, with Kick saying, “Hell yes, I’ll be back. The docs say the pins will be out in a month. Two months after that I’ll be as good as ever.” She sounded like a character from a fifties western, not like Kick at all. I backtracked, and found the news item—reported in Variety and Hollywood Reporter, even a one-liner in EW—about the fall that went wrong. I paid the subscription fee for the first two and read the articles.

“It’s pretty much a miracle she survived at all,” Benton “Buddy” Nels told us. “You fall from a hundred feet and you have to land right, you have to hit that sweet spot. You miss it and the bag flings you sideways at a wall or the sidewalk, hard, and real fast. Like shooting an egg from a catapult. You just break.”

And break Kuiper did, cracking two vertebrae and several ribs, and shattering her pelvis and right hip. Fortunately she landed on dirt that had just been dug over and fluffed for a horse-fall scene minutes earlier.

“They’re saying it was the dirt that saved her, and I understand that, but that’s not the whole story. Beyond that, there’s her superb physical condition. And beyond that, hell, I can’t explain it. There must’ve been some angel looking out for her that day.”

The word miracle cropped up three times, along with unbelievable and inexplicable.

Something caught my eye: a report a year before her accident from BusinessWeek, about product liability and various industry insurance rates. There was a thumbnail photo of Kick, noted stuntwoman Victoria “Kick” Kuiper, and a quote from her about why she wasn’t planning to sue the makers of her harness. “Stunts are dangerous,” she said. “***t happens.” I followed the link and found that that time it had been a broken scapula.

All that work, all that risk, and now she cut fruit for a living. Maybe she was good at it, but did it ever make her smile like the sun?

I looked up. Suzanne, eyes tired and cynical, held out the check. “You forgot to date it.”

I took it. “So I did. Do you have—” She handed me a lime green plastic pen. “And what is today’s date?”

“May seventeenth. Holy shi—I mean, are you okay?”

“Absolutely. Yes, fine.”

I watched as though from the wrong end of a telescope while she picked up the piece of splintered pen that had skittered across the glass-topped table. Where I had snapped it, the lime green plastic had turned milky pale, like the sepals that protect new tree blossom in spring.

“My apologies for that,” I said. “I will of course reimburse you for the damage.”

“It’s a pen,” she said, and bent to pick up the rest of it from the carpet. I got another from the laptop case, took off the cap, tested it on the back of the check. Blue. I turned the check over, aligned it carefully with the edge of the table, and wrote in the date. My hand didn’t shake. I capped the pen, returned it to the bag, refused to look at the photo of the woman who still smiled because she hadn’t lost anything.

“Excuse me,” I said, and stood. “Please see yourself out.”

I stood with my back against the bedroom wall until she left, thinking nothing.

I WALKED TO the waterfront. Waves slapped and seagulls squabbled, as at any other beach, but traffic fumes wafted over the grass. It was crowded with smiling people wearing sandals and shorts, even though it was only in the mid-sixties, and they seemed unreal, though I couldn’t put my finger on why. I walked north, to the Seattle Aquarium, but I remembered pictures from the guidebook and couldn’t bear the idea of being trapped beneath the surface with marine otters swimming ceaselessly from one side of their tiny concrete tank to another. I kept going north, the water to my left. Past the Edgewater— I wondered what Dornan was doing today; I should call him and invite him to move to the Fairmont—past the Pacific Science Center, which on another day would be interesting, and on through Seattle Center, the theater district. At some point I found another park with fewer people. Instead of gulls, this one was full of crows. One strutted along the path in front of me. In the sunshine its feathers shone with a dull, oily sheen, as though carved from slate.

I watched the water and the sky, where cumulonimbus massed on the eastern horizon, zinc and pewter.

After a while, I headed back south and then east, down more of a gradient. For the first time that day I found myself panting slightly. A few days, Loedessoel had said. I slowed, and breathed more easily.

South again, Boren Avenue, Howell Street, where the city began to look like any inner urban wasteland: empty blocks, patched pavement. In Atlanta the air would have felt heavy and tired; here it was light and capricious, as contradictory as the waterfront park.

It was as I was walking past a low, industrial-looking building with the unlikely name of Re-Bar that I realized I was being followed: a white man sixty or seventy yards back. About forty, my height, casual dress, not an athlete but moving easily enough. Usually I was the one doing the following. I stopped, and pretended intense interest in the sign that said, Open at Eight. The man slowed, took out a phone. I shook my head at the sign in mock regret, and started back south, but slowly, hoping he would close the gap. He didn’t.

A professional, which made it unlikely I had been picked at random. Which raised a very interesting question. Was he connected to the people who were steering the warehouse mess, the people who were systematically reducing its value? Time to start getting answers.

I turned, as though going back to something I’d just seen. Once again, he slowed. I kept walking. He stopped. He put his phone away.

I ran at him.

After a split second, he ran, too. He ran with concentration, no backward glances, no tension in his shoulders, but I began to cut the distance. Fifty yards. Forty. My lips skinned back in a grin. Thirty. Soon we’d find out what was going on. Twenty. Then we hit a hill. In five seconds I was breathless and in fifteen he was gone.

It took me half an hour to get back to the hotel. No one followed me. I wasn’t sure what I would do if they had. I thought of the laptop as I’d left it: Kick’s smile as brilliant as burning magnesium. I’ll get it back for you, I’d said. No one could ever give her that back.

THE CONCIERGE, whose name was Benjamin, was African-American, which surprised me, and I realized what had seemed so unreal about the crowds by the waterfront, and nearly everyone I had seen in Seattle so far: they had been ninety-five percent white, with a handful of Asians and a sprinkling of Hispanics and Native Americans. Nothing like Atlanta, where more than half the population was black.

I introduced myself. He smiled—he had a tiny birthmark just to the left of center on his bottom lip—said he knew who I was, and asked how he could help me this morning.

I didn’t like the idea of anyone knowing my name.

“I’d like to arrange for the delivery of a large floral bouquet, today. Special delivery, if necessary.”

“Certainly.”

“Whatever’s in season will be fine.”

“A particular occasion?”

“A thank-you.”

“Formal or informal?”

“Formal. And a note, to read, My apologies once again for the disturbance. Thank you for your kindness. Best wishes, Aud Torvingen.”

“Return address?”

“No.” And that was that.

I DELETED the search results and Kuiper’s picture flicked out. I read Rusen’s file for five minutes, then closed it. I hadn’t even been able to understand that Seattle was almost wholly white. There was absolutely no point scanning a document in the hope of spotting an anomaly. I simply didn’t know the city well enough. I shouldn’t have come. In Atlanta, I knew law enforcement and criminals, journalists and politicians; I understood the lines running between money and power. Here, I knew nobody; nobody knew me.

Perhaps I could do something about that.

BENJAMIN LOOKED UP. "Ms. Torvingen. More flowers?”

“No. Something else.” He smiled, to indicate that he was sure that whatever it was, it was within his capabilities. I wondered where concierges went to school to learn that responsive, intelligent attentiveness. “This is my first visit to Seattle and I don’t know a soul. I was hoping you might help me overcome that.”

“Of course.” Face still open, still attentive, but eyes speculative. “Perhaps you could be more specific.”

“This evening I’d like to relax privately here at the hotel in the company of someone attractive and discreet.”

“Attractive and discreet. Certainly.” I could have been asking to rent a car. “Should your companion have any specific attributes?”

I pondered. “I require a certain level of maturity. A grown-up.” Someone who paid attention to the world.

He nodded courteously. “What time would it be convenient for him— or her?—to visit?”

It was about two-thirty. “I’d like her to be here as soon as possible.”

“Very good. And for how long would you like the pleasure of her company? ”

How does one time such things? “Perhaps she should be prepared to devote the entire afternoon and evening.”

“I’ll make arrangements and fax them to your suite.”

WHEN I GOT back to my suite, paper was churning silently from the fax machine: Four-hour sessions max. available, $1,100 per. Poss. negot. consecutive sess. at time of payment—cash preferred, credit card accepted. Meeting scheduled 4:30 pm.

One hour and fifty minutes from now.

I turned my laptop on again, and opened the e-mail from Luz.

I just finished a book by Lloyd Alexander have you read any? They’re okay but not as good as Narnia I borrowed them from my friend Natalie.

Had she mentioned Natalie before?

Natalie says they’re for kids but I might like them, she’s also lent me one called Eragon that she says is excellent. I read the first page but then Aba told me to turn the light out and not read anymore tonight so I’m writing to you instead.

Perhaps I should write to Adeline about the need to explain the spirit as well as the letter of the law when making suggestions to Luz. Adeline still thought of the computer as a complicated typewriter. It wouldn’t occur to her that with the lights off, Luz could send e-mail, surf the Web, work on her LiveJournal, add to her Sims family. It was doubtful that she knew Luz and I talked to each in any other way than the stiff little thank-you notes Adeline made her write, fountain pen on lined paper—Thank you very much for paying for my new dresser and desk. They are mission style, stained medium oak, and will be very useful when I do my homework—and then included with the progress report she dutifully sent every month, a list of expenses, church events, and health or educational matters. The handwritten notes were grammatically perfect. I suspected Luz wrote a rough draft and Adeline then went over any mistakes and had Luz copy it out in her best hand. Perhaps that’s something I should be doing with these e-mails.

But it was Adeline’s role to correct Luz’s grammar and tend to her manners, not mine.

It doesn’t matter what she calls you, Mama or Tante or Aud, if legally you are her mother, somewhere inside she will one day expect you to behave as one.

But what did that mean, exactly?

IN MY mother’s suite, the afternoon sun fell against the eastern corner of the sitting room and spilled over the carpet and up the legs of the coffee table. It flashed on her wedding ring, white and yellow gold, geometric Italian design, and the enameled Norwegian flag pin in her lapel. She was talking about her day: meetings at Microsoft, a tour of the Nordic Heritage Museum in Ballard, and an honorary marshal spot in the Syttende Mai independence day parade. She saw me looking at the flag. “I forgot to take it off,” she said, and pulled it casually from the silk. She dropped it on the table and cradled her coffee, and continued her account of all the Americans celebrating their Norwegian heritage, eating polse and ice cream, the children wearing bright red bunad, the Sons of Norway with their heavy banners and the fiddlers dancing behind them. Every now and again she would pause, and wait for me to add something, and when I didn’t, she would go on.

Every now and again, too, she tilted her head. She knew I’d come to talk to her about something.

Help me, I wanted to say. Talk to me about how it was. Tell me about family.

“. . . realize that today is short notice, but perhaps tomorrow? If you’re well enough.”

Dinner. “Yes, tomorrow would be fine. Thank you.”

“And your friend, would he like to come?”

“I’ll ask him.” It was quarter to four. I had to get cash. “Yes, probably.”

She put her cup down, smoothed her dress. “Good. Tomorrow it is, then. Although if you don’t have plans for tonight . . . ?”

“I have plans.”

She nodded, and we stood, and I was struck by how she moved. She wore a dress—not a suit, not a gown, but a dress—and she was happy. She was tired and a little tense, but underneath it all she was at home with herself in a way I’d never thought I’d see. When I was a child, I had dreamt of how she might be in a perfect world—the grin, the hug, the surprise trip to the zoo, the maternal mysterious knowledge of my innermost secret desire for a ham sandwich or chocolate biscuit—but I’d never imagined this lightness, a woman who finally had some air folded into her mix, who had risen like a fairy cake.

“I’m . . .” But there wasn’t time. “Thank you. I’m happy for you. It’s good to see you.”

She laid her hand on my upper arm briefly—her fingertips touched the hidden scar. “Audhumla.” The giant cow from the beginning of the world, who was made of frost, and licked the frost from stones. I had forgotten. She had first called me that when I was five, and she had found me sucking the creamy ice that had risen from a milk bottle left on the doorstep at dawn and frozen. Then she had laughed. Now she didn’t.

ROOM SERVICE had called and left the champagne. I counted out eleven one-hundred -dollar bills, and then again, and left the two slight stacks next to each other on the sideboard. I stowed the rest in the drawer beneath the TV, with the remote. Now I had half an hour to shower, and arrange the furniture and lighting. The welcoming ambience wasn’t strictly necessary, and might not make any difference to the end result, but I wished to acknowledge that although my companion might be bought and paid for, she was a human being. It seemed only polite.

AT 4 : 3 2 , there was a confident knock on my door.

“I’m Isabella,” she said, in a voice like myrrh, and I let her in.

She took it all in—the chilling champagne and two glasses, my bare feet and still-damp hair, the lack of underwear beneath silk shirt and trousers, the closed inner drapes in the sitting room and the bedroom door standing ajar and showing a hint of shadow and candlelight—in one sweeping glance, and said, “Thank you,” when I offered to take her wrap. It slid from her bare shoulders into my hands like an offering. Her skin smelled of heat and spice. I carried the light wrap to the closet, and took my time hanging it.

The cash was gone when I returned, both piles.

She looked out over the city while I poured the champagne, and when I sat on the sofa, she sat at my feet as though it were the most natural thing in the world, and laid her hand on my thigh.

“Aud,” she said, “it is very good to meet you,” and I wanted to believe her. Her eyes were sunlit honey. Summer eyes. Nothing to do with frost or snow or death.

“It’s very good to meet you, Isabella,” and then I couldn’t think of anything else to say, because her hand had started to stroke my thigh, almost absentmindedly, and she was looking at me as though I were her queen.

“Aud, it’s an unusual name.”

“Yes.”

“Are you visiting from another country?”

It felt like it.

“Aud. Am I pronouncing it right?”

“Yes. It’s Norwegian, after Aud the Deepminded. She founded Iceland.”

“Iceland,” she said. “I hear it’s a beautiful country. Contradictory. Ice and glaciers and molten lava. And hot springs.”

And so controlling of its citizens: only certain things on television, certain names legally allowed.

“You have such lovely muscle here, such strength.” She stroked down, paused thoughtfully, stroked up, ending just a fraction higher than she’d started. Her cheekbones shimmered, as though gilded. Through the thin silk of my trousers her hand was warm and alive. “Do you like to work out?”

“Um?”

“You work out?”

“Yes.”

She propped her cheek on her fist and went on stroking. “Swimming? Or perhaps some other kind of sports.” She knelt like a handmaid, eyes never leaving mine, waiting for a signal. “Tell me what kind of sports you like.”

“Competitive.” I tried to organize my thoughts but she was calling heat from me as effortlessly as flame from a lamp, and my mind was drowning.

She bent and pushed off her shoes—her scalp was white and clean, her hair smelled of attar of roses—then leaned across me for the champagne. Her breasts plumped warmly on my legs for a moment and then she topped up my glass. I should be doing that. I should be doing all sorts of things. But all I could focus on was her hand.

“Your champagne,” I said. “Don’t you like it?”

“It’s delicious, a very good choice. But this evening is for you. I’m here to make you happy.”

She rested her palm, very gently, on my belly. If I let her, she could make me very happy. All she had to do was turn her hand and her fingers would brush between my legs. I took her wrist, and I meant to put her hand away, to say something, to explain, but I couldn’t help it, I turned it palm up and leaned forward and kissed it.

She arched, until her throat was inches from my mouth. “Tell me what you want,” she said, and I watched myself take her head in my hands and kiss her. I hadn’t meant to, but then I found her mouth hot and sliding under mine and I couldn’t stop. I folded down next to her and, hands still in her hair, eased her flat on the carpet and knelt over her. She reached for my leg and tugged, gently, insistently, until I lifted it, and straddled her. Her dress rode up over smooth, golden legs and a tight curving belly. She was small in my arms, and her heart beat as fast as a rabbit’s.

She reached up and brushed my left nipple through the silk very lightly with the back of her hand, and I groaned. She blinked at me, very slowly, and touched my top button, and undid it, and touched the next one, and unfastened that, and the next, and I didn’t stop her, and she freed my left breast and held her palm beneath it, not touching, until I lowered my breast to it; and she drew her hand down another inch. Again I bent, until my breast was three inches from her mouth. She moved her hand. Her breath was feathery, her lips red.

“Give it to me,” she said, “make me take it,” and opened her mouth.

I wanted to stop. I wanted to weep. I wanted to make her take my whole breast in her mouth and slide off my trousers and straddle her naked belly, hot and soft.

Someone knocked on the door. She went very still beneath me.

“Aud, it’s me.” Dornan.

I couldn’t think. I felt dazed, too hot and swollen for my clothes.

“Aud?” He knocked again.

I sat back on my heels and took a ragged breath, and then another. I fastened a couple of buttons. Isabella closed her mouth and ran her hands through her hair. I breathed some more and stood.

Isabella sat up. “I don’t do couples.” She pulled herself onto the sofa and tugged her dress into place.

Dornan knocked again. “I’m not going to go away until I know you’re all right.”

I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand—her lip gloss smelled the way all makeup does, waxy and womanly—and walked to the door and opened it.

“I’m sorry,” Dornan said, walking in. “I should have remembered earlier. ” I closed the door mechanically. “We were in a bar in Ballard, and these men came in dressed as Vikings. So I said, What’s going on? And someone told me it was Syttende Mai, and I said, What’s that when it’s at home? And they said, May the Seventeenth, Independence Day, and so I thought of you, and how you must be feeling, so I . . .”

He saw the champagne, the two glasses, and stopped, puzzled. Then he noticed the woman on the sofa with smudged lip gloss and no shoes, and turned to me and took in my half-buttoned shirt, my still-flushed cheeks, and swollen eyelids.

“I see,” he said. “I find I’ve been foolish.” He spoke slowly, in the educated, guarded accent he hadn’t used with me for years. “It seems I’ve been making unwarranted assumptions. Well. I apologize for the interruption and will be out of your way as soon as I may.”

He nodded politely to Isabella, gave me a distant, measuring look, said, “I really don’t understand you at all,” and left, stepping briskly.

Isabella ran her hands through her hair again, then picked up her champagne glass and took a hefty swallow.

I hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign and locked the suite tight. For the first time since her wrap had slid into my hands and her smell had punched into my brain, I could think, and I did. “A friend,” I said. “I’m very sorry about him bursting in like that. Please finish your champagne and let me pour more.” In her world, unplanned interruptions no doubt tended to have dangerous repercussions, and I needed her relaxed and willing to take a risk. “You’re safe with me. You can leave anytime you like. However, I’d like the chance to make it up to you, if I may. We could talk a little, and relax, and later I’ll order us dinner, if you’re willing.”

“I would love to talk,” she said, with only a fractional pause. Whatever it took to make me happy. Twenty-two hundred dollars was a lot of money, and satisfied customers were more likely to return. She patted the seat beside her. “Sit with me.” The myrrh was back, the promise of damp skin and tumbled sheets and hoarse cries in the dark.

I sat, and sipped, and she took my hand and held it, and looked at me with those honey and amber eyes.

“Let me help you relax,” she said.

“You’ve had a fright. I feel bad about it. You’re not under any obligation.”

“But I want to. Being with a woman is different. Special. It’s not like a job, not at all. It’s pure pleasure.”

It was a lovely fiction, and she told it so well. She read the temptation in my face and smiled.

It’s nonsense that the eyes are the gateway to the soul. The smile tells all. Broken people can lift the corners of their lips and crinkle the skin around their eyes, but the center is always missing: the tiny muscles at their brows and beneath the eyes, at the curve and bow of mouth, the hinge of the jaw. The smile is empty.

I lifted her hand, put it gently on her lap, and let go. “I don’t want sex,” I said. “I want information.”

She looked at my hard nipples and then between my legs where the silk was dark, and laughed. She put her arm along the back of the sofa. “Certainly we can talk first, if you like.”

“I’ll rephrase. I will not have sex with you. I want information.”

“What do you want to know?” She touched the back of my neck. You know you want me, her hand said, and I’m paid for.

I stood up. “Excuse me one moment.”

I closed the bedroom door behind me, found underwear and jeans. Even while I pulled them on, part of me was listening, heart beating high, hoping she would tap on the door and I would open it to say no, and she would kiss me and crawl onto the bed, and then lift her face from the sheets and turn back to look at me, and I wouldn’t be able to help myself. I might even be able to make her feel good. What was so wrong with that?

And now the extent of my self-delusion was obvious and pitiful. The lack of underwear, the open door—good manners, yes, put Isabella at her ease, yes, lull her suspicions so she would give me what I needed. Give me what I needed. A way to have sex without guilt: She made me do it, Officer, I couldn’t help myself.

But that wasn’t the point. The point was that Seattle as a city was closed to me. I needed a way in.

I laughed at myself, fastened every button, and went back in.

“Five thousand dollars,” I said. "You give me a name and address, and anything else I need to talk to the man or woman who sets things up for you.”

“I’m an independent.”

Perhaps that’s what she liked to pretend, but a hotel with a client list like the Fairmont would not deal with a random service provider. They preferred the reassurance of organization; the kind of people who could short-cut my search for whoever was trying to devalue my real estate. “Who gets a cut of your price?”

She didn’t like that. “It’s a referral fee.”

I opened the drawer under the TV and pulled out a brick of cash.

“Five thousand, cash, on top of the twenty-two hundred I’ve already paid, and not a soul will know the information came from you.” Which meant no one would take their cut.

“Thank you, no.”

After what had occurred between us, I couldn’t bring myself to force her.

AFTER SHE had gone, I tidied away the champagne, blew out the candles, and stripped naked. I could smell my own need.

I placed my feet exactly, put my palms together, and reached for the ceiling. I breathed out, slow and controlled, and reached some more, until two vertebrae popped and settled, then I bent to the floor, palms flat, and breathed four smooth breaths, six seconds in, seven seconds out. I began the slow-motion movements of a tai chi form.

When I was done, I began again, even more slowly. And again, until sweat coursed down my body.

LESSON 5

THEY WERE ALL THERE. ALL EXCEPT SANDRA APPEARED HAPPY AND RELAXED: glad for it to be spring at last, finding it easier to travel to a strange part of the city now that it was no longer dark when they arrived, now that they no longer had to be afraid when they got out of their cars.

“Sit for a minute,” I said, and they folded to the floor with varying degrees of ease. Sandra moved more carefully than usual. I wondered what color her torso was. “Let’s talk about fear.”

“Let’s not,” Nina said, and though she was smiling, as usual, she wasn’t joking.

“Fear,” I said, and waited. “What is it?”

“There’s all kinds,” Kim said. I raised my eyebrows. “Like scary movies are good.”

“But being pulled into your supervisor’s office is bad,” Tonya said.

“And worrying that you’re being followed.” Katherine, of course.

“The Goliath at Six Flags is kind of cool.” Suze.

“But thinking you might have cancer isn’t.” Nina.

Silence. “And all these things are fear?”

“Well, yeah.”

“How are they different?”

“Some are good, and some are bad.”

“Why?” Blank looks. “All right. How do you feel when you’re afraid?”

“Frightened,” Nina said in a duh voice.

“How do you know you’re frightened?”

They all stared desperately at the carpet, saying with their entire beings: don’t like this, won’t go there, la la la.

Finally Christie offered, “I shake.”

“Yes,” I said, “and probably your mouth goes dry.”

“Damn,” said Kim, “that’s right.”

“It’s the same for everyone. Fear is a physical response to real danger, immediate danger. It’s glandular and fast as lightning. There’s nothing you can do about it.”

They looked appalled.

“But fear isn’t the enemy. Fear is your friend. It tells you the truth about what’s going on. In that sense, it’s a bit like pain.”

“Pain is not my friend,” Therese said.

“Reliable messenger, then. We don’t always want to hear what it’s got to say, but once it’s arrived, it doesn’t pay to ignore it.”

Pauletta was frowning. “That’s it? I paid good money to hear you say we’re gonna get hurt and scared and there’s nothing we can do about it?”

“That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that when you’re in danger, your glands release all kinds of hormones that are instructions your body cannot disobey.”

“So some guy scares us and we run shrieking down the alley, that what you’re saying?”

“No.” I put on my earnest, friendly face. “One of the most important hormones involved in the fear response is adrenaline. Its prime function is to shunt power to necessary systems, basically to make sure you’re ready to fight or run or both. So, Christie, when you tremble, that’s adrenaline flooding your long muscles, your arms and legs, with power. If you’re not running or fighting, you shake, like a shuttle trembling at the launchpad.”

“I’m not a shuttle,” Kim said. “I start to shaking, and the next thing I do is pass out.”

“For real?” Pauletta said.

“Once. Went down, whap, like someone broke my legs. Busted my teeth out on the ground.”

“No shit?”

“Just baby teeth. Loose anyhow.” She shrugged.

Jennifer was breathing far too fast for it to be healthy, and her upper lip glistened. “You pass out? But if you pass out, you’re helpless. . . . I’m going to buy a gun,” Jennifer said. “I am. A big, big gun.”

“Guns don’t help,” Sandra said. The whole class looked at her.

“Okay,” I said. “All right. I’m going to tell you what happens and what can happen when we’re scared. And then I’m going to show you some ways to get around some of those things. No one has to pass out with fear ever again—”

“You said there’s nothing we can do about it.”

“—and no one has to buy a gun.”

Now I had their attention.

“Fear is an emotion, a glandular reaction. It’s physical. It affects what we do, how we think, and how we feel. Fear is the body’s response to an understanding of real and immediate danger. Remember those key words: real and immediate. Your glands flood your body with a variety of hormones, like adrenaline. Adrenaline instructs your body to rev up the parts and processes essential for you to fight or run, and to shut down the nonessentials. So, for example, the capillaries in your face close, making you go pale. Your digestion—from saliva production to excretion—turns off, so your mouth goes dry.”

“Is that why I get sick to my stomach?” Tonya.

“Yes. You get queasy because your stomach, usually churning away constantly, essentially freezes. Your heart and respiration rates go up—your heart pounds, you feel breathless—to get oxygen, lots of oxygen, to the long muscles of your arms and legs, getting you ready to respond at your maximum. Fear is a good thing.”

“But getting scared isn’t.” Pauletta was stubborn.

“There’s nothing good about being in danger, no.” Except that it means you’re not yet dead. “But fear, when you are already in danger, is a good thing. Adrenaline also affects the way your brain works.”

“Panic,” said Jennifer, nodding.

“Not necessarily. What happens in times of real and immediate danger is that your unconscious brain, a kind of emergency expert system, takes over. Panic is a system conflict. It’s what happens when your conscious and unconscious brain fight.” And melt down, and all sense just runs and hides. That had happened to me for the first time last year, in New York. Tonya was saying something. “I’m sorry.”

“I said, like a robot trying to compute when the scientist says, I always lie.”

Nina made robot-in-a-loop motions, like something from a bad 1980s music video. The tension was beginning to ease.

I blinked. “Yes. Very good. Just like that. And just as a robot in these stories is always naïve, our conscious mind can be, too. It can persuade itself of things an idiot child wouldn’t believe.” I shook off memories of last year. “I’ll come back to that, because it’s important.” It was the heart of everything, but I couldn’t get there from here. “For now, I’d like you to think a bit more about what fear is and where it comes from.”

I stood. They watched warily as I walked to the back of the room and my satchel. Tension was high again. I retrieved the packet of blank three-by -five index cards and the box of Sharpies and handed them out.

“On this card I want you to write the one thing you’re afraid of, that you hope taking this class will help with.”

“Small card, big pen,” Nina said.

“That’s because I want you to keep it short. And add, at the bottom right, a simple yes or no, in answer to this question: Have you ever been assaulted? By which I mean physically or sexually attacked.” There were a dozen ways to define assault, but for my purposes, that would do. “You won’t be reading these aloud, and I don’t know your handwriting, so be honest, be specific.”

Caps popped as they came off and the air filled with Sharpie scent— Tonya sniffed hers meditatively; she’d have a headache later—there were lots of faraway looks, some scribbling. Sandra’s pen moved vigorously but never touched the paper.

“Time’s up. Cap the pens, please, and pass them back to me.”

“What do we do with the cards?”

“Hand them to Nina.” There was some standing, some timing of the thrust of card from their hand to Nina’s: attempts to disguise who had given what. “Nina, shuffle them and give them to me.”

She did. While they sat down again, I sorted the cards rapidly into the yes pile, three; the no pile, six; and the blank card. I set the cards to one side, facedown.

“According to the 1985 London WAR study, eighty-one percent of women sometimes or often feel frightened at home alone in the daytime. This percentage rises for when we’re outside or it’s night or both.” I looked around the circle, waiting until everyone but Sandra stopped looking at the cards and met my eye. “So what, exactly, are we afraid of?”

Sandra lifted her head. Her face was waxy with intensity, the tiny muscles in her brown irises pulled so tight that in this bad light the plump fibers had an amber sheen. I’d seen a woman look like that once whose boyfriend had their son in a cupboard with a gun against his head. She was ashamed. She couldn’t tell me; she wanted me to know.

“In an earlier class I gave you Department of Justice statistics on the chances of avoiding rape if you fight back.”

“Seventy-two percent if he’s unarmed, fifty-eight percent if armed with a knife, fifty-one if armed with a gun,” said Tonya.

“Many of you expressed surprise at that.” Nods. “That’s because the information we get, every day, from TV and newspapers and online, is all about the rapes that are completed, the lives lost, the pain suffered—preferably with blood and body parts and panicky eyewitness accounts. Why? Because that’s what gets an audience, and the bigger the audience, the more the media can charge for their commercials. More than eighty percent of us spend our lives afraid because that helps soap makers and computer manufacturers sell product.”

“Same old same old,” Nina said. “The military-industrial complex.”

“The capitalist system,” Christie said. I couldn’t have been more surprised if she’d turned purple and exploded. “Someone was talking about this at school last semester. The patriarchy.”

“The patriarchy,” Nina said. “Haven’t heard that word since I did women’s studies in college.”

“They had college back then?” Pauletta said.

Nina ignored her; she was getting excited. “I remember now. Some big feminist, one of those dead ones, said men teach us to be afraid to control us.”

Andrea Dworkin: “We are taught systematically to be afraid. We are taught to be afraid so that we will not be able to act, so that we will be passive, so that we will be women . . . ,” in Our Blood, though I had no doubt she’s said it in some form or other in all her books. The male conspiracy against women. When it came to the media I had always thought corporate greed was a much simpler explanation.

“It’s been estimated that the media publicize thirteen completed rapes for every attempted but uncompleted rape. If you round up the chance of getting away from an unarmed attacker from seventy-two to seventy-five percent, that means you have a three in four chance of getting away.”

“Or kicking his fucking head in,” Suze said.

“And then if you take the thirteen-to-one completed-versus-uncompleted -rape media figure, it means that the papers and the news underreport fight-back stories by five thousand two hundred percent.”

“Math makes my head hurt,” said Katherine.

“Imagine you’re listening to WSB while you drink your mocha and drive to work. Imagine it’s a slow news day, so you hear about a grand-mother who fought off a rapist with her umbrella. Think about the other fifty-one women who got away.”

Tonya got it. Her eyes shone, and it was a different shine than Sandra’s. “Much of what we call fear is actually worry about imaginary situations, ” I said. “It’s learned. It can be unlearned. When you read about someone being raped, remember the three others who got away. On those rare occasions where you do hear about a woman getting away, remember the fifty-one others who did, too. Better yet, don’t read or listen to that kind of news.”

“Not listen to the news?” Jennifer looked shocked.

“The news exists to make people anxious, so that they keep watching, so that the provider—the website, the network, the publisher—can sell advertising space. But anxiety and worry are not the same as fear. There’s very little useful about them. Worry, or stress, or anxiety are responses to long-term or persistently imagined danger, not real danger, not immediate danger. Horror and dread, again, aren’t usually about the immediate, but about the future: the suspense of waiting for what you think will come. Note that: think. When you lie awake at night and start imagining mad axe murderers or hooded rapists, we’re not smelling them, not hearing them, not feeling the vibration of their footsteps.”

I picked up the cards and turned them over.

“Let me tell you something about what’s written on these cards. The ones with no in the bottom right list fears like ‘being raped,’ ‘being followed, ’ ‘dark places,’ and so on. Do you see any similarities between them?” I waited.

“Horror-movie stuff,” Tonya said. “Kind of generic.”

“Yes,” I said. “The ones who wrote yes were more specific.”

“Like what?” Suze, one of the Nos.

“Waking in my hotel room to find the bellboy exposing himself, my old boyfriend getting drunk and paying me a visit, being beaten with a garden rake.” I looked around the circle of faces. Therese and Kim’s faces were closed, Nina looked particularly detached. “Some of you seem unhappy.”

“You just said we’re afraid of make-believe things,” Pauletta said.

“Those of you who have never been assaulted are worrying about the wrong things. You’ve paid for my advice, so listen to me now. Fear is a good thing, worrying about fear is not. All right. On your feet.”

“What?”

“Up.” I stood. “Stand in a big circle. Good. Fear releases adrenaline. Adrenaline will make your heart pound, and make you pant. It’s the panting that leads to hyperventilation, which leads to passing out. Some people pass out because they’re so frightened, they forget to breathe at all. So if you’re not breathing, start. A good way to do that is to exhale sharply, even if you feel you’ve got no air, and that’ll trigger an inhalation. It’s enough to get you going. But then you have to not hyperventilate. I’m going to show you how.”

Their chests rose and fell with rapid, shallow breath.

“Stand in a stable, comfortable position. Push your tongue up into the roof of your mouth and clamp your back teeth together. This will control your jaw and neck muscles, in case you’re shaking, and also, if you get hit on the jaw, it’s less likely to break. Keep your back straight.” Their notion of straight was pitiful. “Try to feel your spine in one long line, like a plumb line. Don’t stick your chin in the air because that will put a strain on your vocal cords, which we’ll need nice and relaxed for later.” Though there was a good physiological argument, too, for lifting the chin: it reduced the emotional response and promoted blood flow to the frontal cortex. But one thing at a time. “Keep your shoulders down. Not only does that look more confident and relaxed but it reduces muscle tension and therefore speeds any emergency response. Breathe through your nose, breathe deep from the diaphragm. Feel your belly swell. Put your hand on your stomach. There.” I walked around, adjusting posture. “Make that hand move out. Your chest should hardly move at all. In through the nose, deep and slow, your belly swells. Out, a long gush through the mouth. In, deep and slow, and out. In. Out.”

Their faces grew pink.

“Now that you’re breathing nicely and there’s no more danger of passing out, it’s safe to address some of the other fear symptoms. If your arms and legs are trembling, but you don’t yet know if you should run or fight, try clenching and relaxing them. If your mouth is really dry, open your mouth slightly—if it’s safe to do so—and run the underside of your tongue over your bottom front teeth. That should make your mouth water. Do this for a few seconds, and swallow a couple of times, and gradually the dryness will go away and your larynx will relax. So now we’re ready to use our voices.”

Ten pairs of shoulders rose. Well, they were going to have to get over that.

“Voice is an important body weapon. In its way, it’s as useful as a kick or punch. Voice can embarrass or frighten a potential attacker. It can summon help, give warning, and say no, loudly and clearly. It can give you confidence, and deafen your attacker, actually damage an eardrum. Voice can immobilize an attacker or potential attacker for a split second.” Therese made a slight huh of skepticism. I started walking around the inside of the circle. “Voice increases the power of any physical move you might make because it helps you focus your attention and your strike. Voice depends very much on the way we breathe. Make the voice come from deep down, as though it’s from your thighs and stomach, not your throat and head. You want a deep, explosive sound.” I stopped in front of Therese. “Like this:

“Huut!”

The sound slammed into her face and blew her backwards. Her arms pinwheeled. I resumed walking while she shook her head and pulled herself together.

“Spread out just a little. We’re going to do some squats.” I demonstrated. “Slow and easy. Breathe out through your mouth as you go down, in through your nose as you come up. Down, out.” The less self-conscious made a kind of ooourff as they went down. “Up, in. Down, out. Up, in. Now a little faster. Down!” More oourffs. “Up. Down! Good. Let me hear some noise now. A deep sound, a boom. Feel it blast out of you, like a train from a tunnel. Ooosh! All together. Ooosh.” The entire circle dropped, like a falling hoop. Half made a noise. “Up, and in. And oosh.” More of the hoop sounded. “And up and in and oosh.” Gaps in the hoop only from Jennifer and Katherine and Sandra. “And up and in and oosh!” Katherine sounded. Not much, but something. The circle was almost closed. “Up and in and oosh! Up, in, oosh!” An uncertain ooh? from Jennifer. Almost. “Up and in and oosh!” Jennifer’s ooh firmed and strengthened. Katherine was as loud as the rest. “Up and in and oosh! Louder. Ooosh! Louder. Ooosh!” I walked around, breathing, booming, listening. And there, at last, a thin, hesitant sound, wavering like a ghost. “Louder. Ooosh!”

The hoop dropped, the sound flared up, unbroken, like a ring of fire. My face stretched in a fierce grin: you breathe, you make a noise, the next thing you know you’re talking back, and then, next time he thinks about hitting you, you leave.

Ooosh.

Ooosh.

Ooosh.

“Louder! Blow your attacker into the back of next week. Use that fear, use that anger. Louder. And up, and in, and one last time. Ooosh!”

The sound was tremendous; I felt it through the soles of my feet. If there had been a window, it would have rattled.

“Yes!” Suze said, pumping her arm.

Everyone was grinning. Tonya turned away briefly, but not before I saw the sparkle on her cheeks. Sandra looked as though she had seen God.

“Whoo!” Kim said. “We kicked ass!”

The basement door opened.

It was like watching a pride of lionesses lift their dripping muzzles from the belly of the dying zebra and zero in on the giggling hyena.

The face of the long-haired woman in the doorway went white. Classic fear response. The scent of mass-produced incense, and the whine-and-tinkle of Crystal Gaze’s sound system—three women with nasal problems singing Om-mani-padme-hum—drifted into the basement. The woman swayed, clutched for the doorknob, missed, nearly fell.

“Breathe,” Nina advised.

Everyone laughed. The woman in the doorway looked as though she might cry. I recognized her from behind the cash register upstairs. “How can I help you?”

“I, uh.”

“Breathe, honey,” Nina said again.

We all waited politely. “You, uh, that is, the customers were wondering . . .” She didn’t seem to know how to proceed.

“Were we too loud, honey?”

“Yes. Loud. You were loud.”

“They heard you upstairs,” I told everyone. “Through the concrete and the floors and over the sound system.”

“Excellent!” Christie said.

SIX

I CALLED DORNAN BEFORE BREAKFAST. HE WOULDN’T PICK UP. I LEFT A LONG message. When I called again, half an hour later, he answered.

“It didn’t look like work,” he said.

“No.”

“In fact, it looked to me as though I showed up just in time.”

An image popped into my head of Dornan in baggy blue shorts and sagging tights, cape askew, kicking down the door to my suite to the accompaniment of melodramatic music.

“I did, didn’t I? Show up in time?”

Depends how you look at it. “Yes.” Though I hadn’t got the information I’d wanted.

“Aud, don’t take this the wrong way, but are you sure you’re all right?”

“How do you mean, exactly?”

“Last night just . . . well, it’s not like you. The whole idea strikes me as baroque and too complicated, all that potential for things to go wrong. And the timing. It’s almost as though you set yourself up for it. At best, it seems uncharacteristically silly.”

Irresponsible. Then a victim. Now silly. “Every week a new high.”

“Yes, well, that’s probably some sort of joke, but those drugs were truly wicked. Most of those other people are still in hospital. One of the carpenters just had to go back on a ventilator, for God’s sake.”

He was very well informed.

“Look, why don’t we just go back to Atlanta? You don’t really care about your warehouse anyway, and you’ve seen your mum. I’ve seen enough of the Seattle chains. I have some ideas to be working on, and, besides, the business is probably dissolving with no one looking after it. Let’s just leave. Don’t get distracted. What happened with the drugs is irrelevant, like, like an earthquake. It affected you, yes, but it wasn’t aimed at you. It wasn’t personal.”

“Oh, but it was.”

“More than a dozen people—”

“Dornan, think about it. This whole thing has been aimed at getting me to sell the warehouse cheaply. Who I was didn’t matter, it was the fact that I owned the warehouse. They began by reducing my cash flow sharply, by calling OSHA and EPA to harass my leaseholder, which they hoped would make whoever owned the warehouse view it as a liability. It was a liability. But then Rusen came along. He started trying to deal with the problem, he tried to talk to EPA and OSHA, so then whoever was engineering all this had to start messing with the production itself.” The day-as-night exposures, the lighting setup, the props. “And when Rusen, with his unexpected corporate efficiencies, starts trying to find ways to finesse that, and keeps making his payments to me, they start to scramble and dump drugs in the coffee. Which I drink. Ironic if you stop to think about it. Two months ago all they would have to have done is make me an offer. As you’ve said, I didn’t really care. The only reason I came out here in the first place was to be distracted.”

“And because of your mum.”

“Yes. But mainly to get away from Atlanta. Only now I find I’m being manipulated again.”

“This is different.”

“Is it? They drugged that coffee, and I drank it. They slid their nasty little hands inside my head and paddled about. I can’t rely on myself anymore. Is what I see real? Can I walk up a hill without my heart faltering and the oxygen not getting to my lungs because some compound that I can’t even name has altered my metabolic cycle? If I have to run I don’t know if I can. If something, someone comes for me, I don’t know if it’s really happening. Do you know what that’s like?”

“No.”

“So, yes, now I care. I’m going to get these people. And you know what?” And it slowly dawned on me that this was true. “I’m going to enjoy it. Because, as you say—and you’re obviously more well informed than I am—someone is still on a ventilator, and the people who did this to her—”

“Him.”

“—him deserve whatever I can mete out. This is something I can do something about. It won’t be easy, because Seattle isn’t my town, and I’ll have to do things differently, but I’ll find them.”

“I’m getting that.”

“I’m going to get information from Corning’s office and follow it. And if, in order to get to these people, I have to deal drugs or talk to kiddie-porn merchants or get naked with gorgeous women I’ve given a lot of money to in the privacy of my own suite, I will.”

“Though you didn’t. Get naked.”

“No.”

“Though she was very decorative.”

“She was, wasn’t she?”

“But not really your type, in the end.”

“No.”

“Maybe if she’d pissed you off,” he said. “That seems to work for you.”

I said nothing.

“Well, I don’t imagine there’s any way I can help, but if there is, let me know.”

“There is something,” I said, and imagined him flinging himself skyward and hurtling around the earth faster and faster until it slowed, and reversed, and the film of my life ran backwards through the last year to the afternoon when Julia sat on my lap by the fjord and said she was going to Oslo and there was no reason for me to go with her, she would only be gone twenty-four hours, and I said all right. “Have dinner with me tonight. ”

“You’re eating again?”

“Not by choice. Come be my moral support. With my mother and Eric.”

Silence. Then he sighed. “What time?”

“Seven. I’ll pick you up.”

THE SUN was bright and the air soft. It was going to be a hot day, for Seattle. The sunshine seemed to puzzle and provoke the normally placid local drivers. Crossing Fifth Avenue, I heard the tire squeal and horn honk of two separate near misses.

I got to Corning’s office at two minutes to nine. Gary was hovering by the door, already agitated.

“Miz Corning’s been . . . there’s . . . I’m afraid your appointment is postponed.”

I moved him aside gently. The reception area was brightly lit, and the adrenaline coursing through my system made it seem brighter still. Corning’s door was ajar, and her lights off. “Don’t move,” I said. I listened.

“She’s . . .”

I walked in, turned on the lights. Perfectly tidy and normal, apart from a lone piece of paper facedown on the floor. I picked it up. Page two of a standard commercial lease, blank. “Gary?” He ventured in behind me. “Where is she?”

“That’s just it. I don’t know. She hasn’t been in, and she hasn’t called. It’s not usual.” Emphasis on the last word.

I turned and waited.

“She’s very particular about clients. Always here half an hour before an appointment, always wanting the file so she can appear to have remembered everything about the client. The personal touch, she called it.”

Past tense. “When did you get here?”

“Usual time. Eight o’clock. Well, five minutes late, so I was worried she’d . . . I’ve been working on a presentation on the new . . . on the presentation she was going to give later this week.”

Was going to give. He was young, but not stupid. Perhaps he knew something he didn’t know he knew. “Why are you so worried?”

“I just am. It’s not usual. When she still wasn’t here after I’d finished my coffee, I waited another minute or so, then called her cell, in case she was stuck in traffic, so I could ask her if there was anything I could do to prepare for her meeting, you know, so she wasn’t cutting it too fine, but there was no answer. She always answers her cell. So I thought maybe she was sick, so I called her home. Nothing. So I checked her appointment calendar, and she hasn’t canceled anything, so I was thinking maybe she’d had an accident.”

“Yet you haven’t called the police.”

Silence.

I sat in Corning’s chair. “Why don’t you take a seat and we’ll have a little chat.”

He sat stiffly.

“How long have you worked here?”

“Fourteen months.”

“Fourteen months. Long enough to know that not everything that happens in this office is aboveboard. You’re smart. You know that you should probably have reported some of these things to somebody. But it’s your first real job and who could blame you if you listened to your boss when she told you that everybody does things this way. Business is business.”

His face was set.

“But, as I say, you’re smart. And no doubt you understand by now that at least one of your clients, me, does, in fact, blame you for conniving in irregular, unethical, and very probably illegal activity. But perhaps you and I can work something out.”

He wavered for a moment, then sat as straight as a plumb line and lifted his chin. How annoying. I could break something—it probably wouldn’t have to be a bone, a desk lamp would do—but he was young, and I’d bought him chocolates last time I’d been here.

“Do you know what money is, Gary? It’s a lubricant. Money makes the things you want possible. It can’t buy love, but it can buy sex, and respect. Money gets you security and attention. It can buy health and it can pay for justice. So if I said I would offer you an undreamt-of sum, what would you do? If you could have anything in the world, what would it be? Take a minute to think about it.”

He crossed his left leg over his right, linked his hands over his knee, and began to sweat.

Dornan would ask for an empire of some kind, six thousand coffee shops all over the world, and guaranteed bargains every time he shopped. Maybe he would ask for Tammy back. My mother? For all political and business negotiations to be reasonable and rational. Luz would want a pair of leather trousers and permission to have the light on all night. Kick, oh, I would bet my bank account I knew what she wanted: the impossible.

Gary cleared his throat. “To be in charge. I’d want to run my own real estate office.”

It’s impossible to look at someone and know whether they are being brave. For an agoraphobic, walking down the street is a heroic act. For someone with absolutely no imagination, running into a burning building to save a baby is not hard. Bravery is relative. Perhaps it’s the same with dreams.

“Staying out of jail would be the first step, and I can help you with that. Let’s begin with you bringing me my file. I’ll make us some coffee.”

There was no espresso machine in the break room, but I found a French press and an interestingly scented light Arabica blend. While the kettle boiled I leafed through the magazines and newspapers on the table. One was the Seattle Times with the story about the drugging.

Back in Corning’s office, Gary was kneeling on the floor by the filing cabinet, looking baffled.

“It’s gone,” he said.

I considered. “What else is missing?”

“How did you—”

“What else is missing?”

“A lot.”

“How specific is the loss?”

“I don’t understand.”

"Particular files, files that are connected in some way, or random chunks?”

“I don’t know.”

“Find out. Do you want cream or sugar?”

He was still riffling through files when I brought back the coffee. I settled comfortably behind the desk and sipped, content to wait now that he’d begun.

“I’m going to have to cross-check the computer records file by file against the paper files to know for sure what’s gone, but I can tell you one thing I’ve noticed. She’d had me make calls about three lots in the last couple of months that are connected. More or less. I mean, literally. They’re next door to each other. Contiguous.”

“Is one of those lots mine?”

He nodded.

“You said more or less.”

“That’s the thing I don’t get. There’s one lot between the others that isn’t for sale. It’s the Federal Center. You can’t buy that. Also, I don’t remember any calls to other investors about these other three lots.”

“You think she wanted it for herself?”

“I don’t know. And it’s pretty useless land, anyhow. Warehouses. Who wants those?”

“Close the file cabinet and come sit. Talk to me about real estate here in Seattle.”

I TOOK THE Seattle Times with me and read the story carefully in the car. I tried to imagine I was Corning. I highlighted the names of those admitted to Harborview Medical Center. I asked the MMI for a map.

At Harborview, I found that they had all been released, except for one man, Steven Jursen, who had been transferred that morning to the University of Washington Medical Center.

According to the MMI, the UW Medical Center was less than a mile from Kick’s house. I drove down her street, even though it wasn’t strictly on my route. Her van wasn’t in the driveway. I wondered if she had got the flowers. Of course she had. Benjamin was an efficient concierge.

The lobby of the medical center was stuffed with art. The floors were clean enough to eat from, if I’d wanted to eat. Nothing was white. The elevator took an age.

Jursen was in a private room. The door was partly open. I stepped close, lifting my hand to knock, and the smell hit me: that hospital scent of disinfectant and fear and floor polish, of bleached linens and sugary drinks, of sleek equipment with its contacts recently wiped down with alcohol and ready to lie cold and stinging against warm skin. I knocked. No response. There again, if he was on a ventilator, there wouldn’t be. I pushed the door open.

He was asleep. Sunshine poured through the large window, gilding the brushed steel and putty white of the equipment standing ready around the room. He was breathing on his own. On the set, I remembered a man in his late fifties with hard hands and grey hair who wore overalls and walked with slightly bowed legs. A manual worker all his life, whose parents or grandparents had come from Sweden and had expected a hard life of hard work. No great ambition for success, just a steady job with one company, maybe in construction, who paid him on time and took care of everything. A mid-twentieth-century man trying to live in the twenty-first.

Asleep, he looked quite different, not younger but purer, untouched by the experience and compromises of age. A preacher from the eighteenth century, say, who knew he was doing God’s work. I looked at his chart. He’d been off the ventilator since midnight. There were EKG records and an order for an echocardiogram and something called a MUGA test. Under marital status a woman had written in blue ink: divorced. I adjusted the slant of the blinds so that the sun wasn’t in his face, and watched his chest rise and fall, then went to find a doctor.

I DROVE A circuitous route—no one followed me—to a café on Boat Street that I’d read about. I pulled into the parking lot. It was lunchtime and I was hungry, but I didn’t get out of the car; I doubted my hunger would stand in the face of food that tasted of sulfur and burnt rubber.

Jursen had congestive heart failure. The overdose had nearly killed him—an overdose he’d been fed because he was connected to me. His near-death was a consequence an order of magnitude greater than spoiling a few rolls of film, and very public. Corning was running scared, scared enough to try to erase her tracks, starting with pulling the tail on me. Good. I would let her stew in her own juices another day or so. Fear would do my work for me.

KICK’S VAN was parked outside the warehouse, but it was her assistant at the craft-services table. Rusen stood by one of the soundstages, talking to Peg and Joel.

“—can’t,” Joel was saying. “It just doesn’t make sense to do it that way with these time constraints.”

“You’re always saying what you can’t do,” Peg said. “Why don’t you try looking at what you can, just for once in your miserable, whining life. We’ve—” She saw me and broke off. They all turned.

“Don’t let me interrupt,” I said.

“No, no,” Rusen said. “Are you looking for your friend?”

“Dornan? He’s here?”

“He was. Or maybe that was yesterday . . .” He pushed his glasses up his nose, realized that it was him I’d come to talk to, and turned to the other two. “Sorry, guys. Later.”

“But—”

“Later, Joel, okay?”

As we walked through the set to his trailer, someone dropped a microphone boom, someone else started shouting. Rusen’s stride was small and tight.

His trailer was painfully neat. He took his customary seat behind his keyboard and began organizing paper clips into rows.

“Things seem a little tense,” I said.

"Sîan Branwell has to be in Spain in four days to shoot a feature. We’re having to reorder the production sequence to get all her scenes in the can. It’s causing . . . complications. Disagreements with the director and stunt coordinator. And money is, well, you know how the money is. And Finkel isn’t coming back tomorrow, after all.”

“His son is worse?”

“He’s dying.” Silence. “Boy howdy, it does seem wrong to be worrying about money and production schedules and bickering crew when a boy is dying.”

“Letting your dream go won’t keep him alive.”

“That’s right,” he said. Then, more strongly, “That’s right. And, anyhow, our people need these jobs. The industry’s in a bad place with Vancouver siphoning off business. We can’t . . . But, hoo boy, you didn’t come here to listen to me. What can I do for you?”

“We should start planning our strategy for OSHA and EPA. Let’s begin with payroll and benefits. How’s health insurance?”

It turned out that his people had major medical but both co-pay and deductible were very high, and the company’s secondary insurer was making a fuss about covering the difference.

We talked about that for a while. He began to look a little less harried.

“I took a long look at your payroll and I don’t see any information on the young person I noticed the other day. Even if he’s an unofficial intern, we need some paperwork.”

“Bri’s not an intern. He’s Finkel’s son. Bri Junior.”

“I thought his son was dying.”

“His other son.”

I mulled that. “How old is he?”

“Bri? Fifteen—no sixteen now.”

“Unless he sits around reading comics all day, get some paperwork going and formalize some kind of payment. Figure out what would make OSHA happy. And how old’s his friend?”

“Mackie? Oh, he’s twenty at least.”

We talked for another hour. When I stood to leave, his tension was no less but it was focused. He had a plan. “We can keep it together,” he said. “It’ll work.”

Back on the set, I wandered over to the craft-services table. The woman behind the counter was standing around looking bored.

“Kick around?”

“Nope. Taking a break.”

“Know where she went?”

“Nope. For a walk or something. Said they’d be back in”—she looked at her watch—“I guess about forty-five minutes from now.”

They.

“Hey, want some coffee?”

“No. Thank you.”

“That’s what everyone says these days.”

I COULD GO talk to the Times reporter. I could go to the police and use my mother’s name. I could forget letting Corning soften herself up in a fear marinade and go find her. But if anyone gave me information I didn’t know where it might lead me, and yesterday, on the hill, I had found myself breathless. There might be other shortcomings I wouldn’t notice until I leaned on them and found them wanting.

GOOD DO JOS are often found in bad neighborhoods. Seattle Aikikai was on Aurora alongside Korean massage parlors, a gun shop, and several love motels.

The dojo smelled deeply familiar: chalk, sweat, the white vinegar used to keep the canvas mat clean and bleached. One young woman and five men were stretching on the smaller mat. They were friendly enough. A heavyset Chinese-American introduced himself as Mike. The woman said her name was Petra and that if I didn’t have a gi, I could see if any of the ones hanging in the women’s changing room would fit. The changing room was tiny, with flimsy walls and a crooked shower stall no doubt installed by a hapless volunteer. The pleasantly amateur feel reminded me of my first martial arts classes in England. I hung my dress on a hanger and contemplated the gis. None of them would ever see bright white again, but one tunic was reasonably clean. The cleanest trousers were too small, and the white belt stiff and difficult to tie.

There were covert glances when I came out to stretch, but it was considered impolite to ask questions or appear to be interested in another’s level of training. Aikido is built on Taoist principles; competition is frowned upon.

When the bell chimed twice, we moved to the large mat and knelt in a line along the long side. Despite the supposed lack of competition, it was traditional to line up according to rank; as the newcomer, untested, I politely took the low-rank spot on the right. Mike took the left-hand position. The sensei, full of his own dignity, descended magisterially from upstairs, hakamas, the bloused trousers of dan rank, swishing like a long skirt. The students exuded awe; I guessed he was very high-ranking, sixth or seventh dan. He was in his early forties, and his hands were reddish around the knuckles. His hair was very dark brown, and crinkly, and his forehead crinkled to match when he saw the newcomer in the ill-fitting gi in his dojo, but the ceremony had begun and there would be no talking until after the final bow.

We all bowed to the kamiza in the center of the long wall, then he turned and we bowed to him and said in unison, “O-ne-gai-shimasu.” Please practice with me.

He moved through what was obviously an unvarying set of warm-ups, which began with loose shoulder swinging, moved on to spine stretching, wrist working and blending exercise, and ended with shikko, a kind of duck-walking on the knees, and finally roll-outs, forward and back. Everyone moved easily, and I guessed none had been studying less than a year. Serious students.

We knelt in our line again, and the sensei motioned Mike onto the mat as his attacker, or uke. They stood in hanmi, though Mike began with right foot forward rather than left and had to change. Probably left-handed.

“Shomenuchi,” the sensei said, and Mike stepped forward smoothly with a right-hand knife-hand chop at the sensei’s forehead.

In karate or judo, the nage would block solidly, meeting strength with strength, the muscle-sheathed arm bones clashing like swords. If you were good, if you struck at the right angle and speed, your opponent was already off balance and in pain by the time you punched out his floating ribs, if you were a karateka, or took him crashing to the mat, if you were a judoka. It was a wasteful way to work, with so much effort expended in negating one force with another.

When Mike’s hand came down, there was no bone-on-bone shock, no meeting of force at all. The sensei stepped out of the way, an easy turn at the hip and glide back and out, and laid the side of his right hand on the uke’s right wrist, the left hand behind his right elbow, then was behind the uke, guiding him, helpless in a stiff arm bar, along his original path, facedown to the mat, where he was pinned. It was like watching a leaf get sucked into a whirlpool.

A young man made a late entrance and hurried through his bow and rushed into the men’s changing room.

“Shomenuchi ude osae,” the sensei said, describing the technique, and Mike slapped the mat twice, and the sensei let him up. He demonstrated twice more, slowly, and then once at full speed. The final time, Mike slapped the mat in earnest, and when he stood, he was sweating.

The newcomer came out to the mat, still tying his belt, but instead of kneeling he waited for me to move down a space. When in Rome.

Sensei gestured us to our feet. The others paired off instantly, which left me with New Boy. He bowed at me sulkily, and assumed hanmi, waiting. I dutifully stepped into shomenuchi.

He was rushed, and clumsy, and if I’d been a beginner he might have sprained my shoulder, but he was uncertain enough that my arm was not fully extended, and he moved stiffly, using muscle rather than technique, and I could control him without appearing to and go down without injury. He frowned. He knew something wasn’t exactly right, but had no idea what.

Part of the noncompetitive ethos of aikido is to help and guide each other: the uke helps the nage with the technique; the nage ensures that the uke goes down without injury. The greater the disparity in skill, the greater the responsibility. A ninth dan should be able to take down a rank beginner with speed, grace, and precision, without anyone getting a bruise. He should be able to help the beginner do the same to him.

The woman who had taught me aikido in Atlanta, Bonnie, had talked about sensing ki, and blending energies. She showed me an exercise called the unbending arm. We faced each other, and she asked me to hold my right arm out straight and make a fist. Then she turned it palm up and laid my right forearm on her shoulder. “Don’t let me bend it,” she said, and interlaced her hands, and began to press down at the elbow. I gritted my teeth and locked my arm. “You’re strong,” she said, but after three or four seconds, my arm bent. She smiled cheerfully. “Want to see if you can make me bend my arm?” So we exchanged positions, and I pulled on her elbow, and nothing happened. She looked bored, even pretended to yawn while I grunted and exerted more and more pressure. “You look like you’re going to burst something,” she said. So I asked her what the trick was. “Trick? It’s not a trick. Here, put your arm back up.” I did. “Now bend it a little. And spread your fingers wide. Relax, relax your shoulders and neck and back. Root your feet to the earth.” The earth was covered in concrete foundation, steel I-beam construction and bamboo flooring, but I didn’t comment. “Now feel the energy coming up from the earth and through you and down your arm. Stay relaxed, keep your fingers open. Channel your ki through your fingers. It’s pouring out of you in a stream of light.” And my arm didn’t bend, and it took absolutely no effort. And I didn’t understand it at all.

“Are you really trying?” I said, and she said she was. Later that day, I found Frank King, my first APD partner, six-feet-three and two hundred thirty pounds, and put my arm on his shoulder and said, “Bend it,” and he couldn’t.

I didn’t believe in ki, or the energy from the earth, or light shooting out of my fingertips, but the fact was, when I relaxed and thought about energy flowing smooth and liquid through my arms, my arm didn’t bend.

I wrestled with the idea for a week, and I told Bonnie the idea of ki was nonsense, and she shrugged and said, “What does it matter?” and after a while, it didn’t. I could feel when I got into the zone and became fluid and unbendable. And then one night Frank and I were called to a fire. The firefighters were already there, herding people back, unspooling their hose, locking down the connection, but just as the water began to stiffen and bulge through the flattened canvas, a chunk of burning roof pinwheeled in orange flame onto the lead hose man, and he’d gone down. The hose whipped and snapped like a dying moray eel and snaked itself ten yards across the pavement, leaping and spraying the crowd before I got to the hydrant and cut the water supply. When another firefighter took the nozzle and shouted, “I’m good!” I opened the hydrant again, and watched the hose turn into a live thing, and something I couldn’t articulate clicked in my brain.

In one of those strange coincidences, when I got home, too wired to sleep, I turned on the Discovery Channel and saw a program about crocodiles. “This twenty-two-foot croc can run more than twenty miles an hour,” the narrator said in an Australian accent, “but when you take a look at its spinal structure, that doesn’t seem possible. Researchers at the University of Melbourne tell us that the key to this incredible strength and flexibility is hydraulics.” And they showed two geeky-looking academics draping an empty hose over two saw horses fifteen feet apart, turning on the water, and watching the hose transform from a limp tube to an arcing, stiff sausage. They hung weights from it; it didn’t bend.

Hydraulics. It wasn’t the bone and ligaments and tendons that made an arm strong, it was the blood pumping through the vascular system, the plasma in the cells of sclera and muscle.

New Boy didn’t yet know this. Directing him, from my position as an uke, was a little like trying to direct a high-pressure hose from the hydrant end instead of the nozzle.

Then it was my turn as nage. It would have been very easy to breathe in two long gushes and take him down in a perfect moving spiral, pin him helpless to the mat, nod unemotionally when he slapped, let him up, do it all again. But he wouldn’t learn anything, and neither would I. And so the first time, I took control very gently, like sliding my palm under a tap runoff and tilting it so it was almost, but not quite, perpendicular and the water landed an inch to the right of the drain. For a moment, he tried to fight. He tried to draw his wrist up, but my palm on his elbow was firm and I guided him kindly to the mat.

He slapped, and leapt up, rubbing his shoulder, and then looked confused when it didn’t hurt. But the sensei had seen it, and came over.

“Everything okay here? Jim?”

Jim looked at me, then nodded slowly.

“Continue,” the sensei said, and watched while I assumed hanmi, and Jim came at me, and I took him down, just as before. The sensei nodded, and gestured for us to swap roles, and I attacked Jim. I used my body to guide his hands and he took me down with the same puzzled look as before.

The sensei motioned Jim away, said, “Watch,” assumed hanmi, and nodded for me to attack.

We barely touched each other, but we felt each other’s strength clearly, and it was the difference between the exuberant rushing together of two mountain streams and the vast movement of ocean currents—the Kuroshio gliding past the North Atlantic Drift, separated by the continent of North America. I went down, and slapped, and stood.

He bowed with a thoughtful look.

When we sat again for the next demonstration, it wasn’t in rank order. I sat between Petra and an older man with red cheeks and grizzled hair, and the sensei held his wrists out behind him for a man with a tense face and long, black hair to take in ushiro tekubitori. The student flinched, even as he grabbed the wrists, and the sensei stepped backwards into tenchi nage. The student was already up on the balls of his feet, longing to go down so that he wouldn’t have to anticipate it anymore. Sensei threw him; the student rolled out well enough for me to guess he was perhaps yonkyu rank and to wonder why he would keep studying if he were so afraid.

We stood. Petra hesitated just a fraction before turning away and bowing to the student on her left, which left me with Mike.

Mike knew what he was doing. When he took my wrists, his arms were relaxed. It was clear he was ready to deal with a complete beginner or a master. I swept my right hand up and left down, stepped back smoothly with my left foot, then scissored my arms and sent him flying into a forward roll. He rolled like a big cat and came up grinning. I grinned back.

This time when we knelt, sensei beckoned me onto the mat to be his uke, and held out his left wrist. I grasped it in my right, careful to grip with my little finger, which so many people forget. We didn’t look into each other’s eyes, not yet, because this was for the class, not between us, but he paid me the courtesy of not holding back when he whipped me into kotegaeshi, and I had to twist in midair and break-fall to save my wrist and ribs, and when he flipped me onto my stomach, he moved fast and not gently and he not only put me in a wrist pin but locked out my elbow and braced my upper arm against his thigh to torque my shoulder at an uncomfortable angle. I slapped. When I stood, the row of kneeling students were sitting very straight, eyes wide, except Mike, who was grinning even harder.

This time when we paired, Petra didn’t hesitate.

She was light and whippy but I took particular care to guide her neatly. “Wow,” she said, when she came up. Her eyes were wide-set and hazel, under straight brows. “Your energy is, like, really clear.”

I smiled and held out my other wrist, and she took it. It was like playing with a lariat: twist this way, twist that way, and everything is neatly coiled on the floor and perfectly still, with no more ability to get up and move without permission than a piece of old rope.

She held her left wrist out, and I took it with my right, and she frowned in concentration, turned her left hand over and out, stepped back with her left foot, pulled her elbow close to her body, put her right hand over mine and turned. I went down, but in real life I would simply have moved behind her on the diagonal, put my hand up, and kept turning until she was unbalanced and I could flip her over my hip. Or I could have twisted faster in midair and turned out of the wrist lock. But I went down, and waited patiently until she decided which way to step over me to flip me onto my stomach. A bit more fiddling and she had me in a decent shoulder pin.

I got up and took her wrist again, but this time before she moved, I said, “Spread your fingers. Just imagine it for a moment, then do it.” She frowned again. “Relax your shoulders. Imagine you can do this perfectly, and then do it.”

She did. She beamed. Held her left wrist out eagerly.

“This time, with your right hand, guide mine, turn it as though you’re rolling a fat sausage over in the air.” She did, and it gave a tighter, faster torque to the wrist lock. This time I wouldn’t have been able to do anything but go down.

“Cool,” she said.

The dojo was not air-conditioned. Soon everyone was glowing with sweat. Mike was drenched. Every time he rolled, sweat spattered the mat.

The tense student, whose name turned out to be Chuck, was hard to work with. It was like dealing with a panicked deer. When he was nage, he would begin a technique, then stop and say, “Shit, shit, no, no, let me try again,” pleading as though I were a judgmental father who would beat him for any mistake. I found myself moving very, very slowly, breathing loudly so that he would take an unconscious cue from my respiration rate and slow his own, and keeping my face quite still. Once or twice I found myself trying not to get between him and the light in case he bolted.

The grey-haired man was Neil, and although he was competent, it was clear he was not well. His cheeks acquired a faintly purple tinge and he ran out of breath very quickly, and had to rest every now and again. Everyone seemed used to that.

We knelt again. Sensei surveyed us, paused, and said, “Free play.” Electricity rippled down the line of students. Petra and Jim moved regretfully off the mat and sat to one side. Free play is not for beginners.

Chuck, Mike, Neil, the two men I hadn’t worked with, and I ranged in a circle around sensei, Mike looked around, nodded, said “Hei!” and Neil charged at sensei, and then flew through the air in a tucked ball, and one of the anonymous students ran and was flung on his back, and then Chuck, whom sensei stepped to meet so he couldn’t collapse with fear before making contact, and then Mike, who rolled backwards, then me. I ran without breathlessness, smiled as the currents brushed and I described an elegant spiral and rolled out and was on my feet again even before Neil came charging in once more.

The more truly expert an aikido player is, the more closely movement on the mat during free play resembles the Brownian motion of particles in suspension. Sensei moved slowly across the canvas, flinging bodies random distances, never letting the group close in or a pattern develop. But against six opponents no one can keep that up forever without taking them out permanently, one by one, which is why, generally, only those who aren’t too far from being yudansha take part in free play: gradually, no matter how good one is, things start to get just a little ragged, just a little rough. The goal becomes one of pushing away rather than guiding. I’ve seen more than one person get hurt in such situations.

Sensei lasted two and a half rounds before the raggedness became serious. He stiff-armed Mike in the center of the chest and he went down with an ashen-faced thump; sensei immediately stood straight and clapped his hands twice. Everyone sagged a little. Neil was gasping; the others were breathing fast. So was I, but not in distress.

Sensei offered his arm to Mike, who came off the mat looking fine.

“Angelo,” he said, pointing to the student with the mustache whom I hadn’t worked with, and we began again. Angelo was ragged after two people: shoulders tense, fists clenched, steps small and abrupt. Sensei let everyone have a go at him before pointing to someone called Donny. Then Neil.

And then it was my turn, and Mike charged first, like a young bear, and I smiled and bowled him neatly into the path of Chuck and they went down in a tangle, and then I turned to help Neil fly, and then sensei ran at me and dived to roll and come at me feet first and I refused the challenge and leapt over him like water bursting over a stone and sparkling clear and bright in the sun, before dipping and rising under Angelo, tossing him up like a whitewater rapid flips a raft, and joy fizzed under my skin as he turned turtle and came down flat on his back and I was spinning, taking Donny into a headfirst fall that would have broken the neck of anyone who didn’t practice falling two hours a day. Blood rushed sweet and hot under my skin and laughter bubbled up through me and I loosed it. It was a lovely day.

DORNAN WORE black jeans and a jacket and had taken the sapphire out of his left ear.

“What are you smiling at?” he said crossly as we drove north to meet my mother and Eric.

“Not a thing.”

He wriggled uncomfortably, tugged at his jacket cuffs and then his seat belt. I wasn’t sure why he was so tense. He’d already met my mother. She hadn’t eaten him.

“We’re going to be early,” he said.

“Yes.” If you were early, you could check out exits, and crowd choke-and vantage-points before you had to settle down. You could scan the clientele, get a feel for who might do what. Except that when we parked by the massive totem outside Ivar’s Salmon House and went in, my mother and Eric were already at the far side of the enormous room at a table cornered by two picture windows, sitting drenched in the westering sun that poured across Lake Union and turned their chardonnay to bottled summer, but they rose with such glad smiles, such open shoulders and wide hands, that I smiled, too, and felt a jet of the same joy I’d experienced that afternoon.

I walked to the table slowly, absorbing the vaulted space, the forty feet of native canoe suspended from the roof beams, the rounded faces of the Inuit and Aleut servers—not unlike the Sami in the north of Norway and Finland—the deep reds and creams of painted native carvings on the walls. Even the music sounded Sami, too, which made sense when one considered the fact that Alaska and Siberia were separated only by the narrow Bering Strait. The smell of salmon did not fill me with horror.

They had thoughtfully left the two chairs facing the best view, which meant I had to sit with my back to the door, but if I turned in my seat slightly I could watch reflections in the window. There were three possible exits.

We all sat as though we meant to stay: shoulders down, feet flat, back relaxed. To start, everyone but me ordered the clam chowder. I opted for the green salad, on the theory that if I could manage fruit, I should be able to manage green leaves. The chowder arrived first. It smelled like pale, thick brimstone. I swallowed. When my salad came, I found that if I avoided the cheese, it would be edible.

We talked of our day. I told them about aikido, about Petra obviously thinking it was a stigma to work with another woman, about the joy of falling at speed.

Dornan talked of his morning, lunch at a French bistro downtown, the growing franticness of the film production. “Time is getting short. They only have another four days on their star’s contract, and she wants to leave before that. The director is threatening to go, too, and take the stunt actor with him.” Eric wanted to know who the star was, and he and Dornan talked happily about favorite TV shows. My mother and I smiled at each other, and I realized that I was quite relaxed.

We talked of Eric’s day at Spherogenix and then Encos, the companies’ focus on bioengineering specific immune-system proteins. He sounded urbane and relaxed, but it was clear he was passionate on the subject.

“You’re a scientist?” Dornan said.

“I have an M.D., but I don’t practice.”

“Why is that?”

He paused. “I was twenty-five. I was a doctor. Patients would put their lives in my hands and trust me to help them. I found myself unwilling to play God. I don’t mind playing business but people’s lives . . . I was afraid.”

I had been wondering why he didn’t practice, and Dornan had simply asked.

“Are you still afraid?” he said.

“No. Or at least I don’t think so. Plus I’ve come to see that negotiating development licenses ultimately affects many people’s lives. It’s different, though. Doing so at one remove.”

The difference between squeezing someone’s warm neck with your hands and launching a smart bomb from two miles up. I nodded.

“Plus,” he said, “I get to have lunch with all the big-shot investors, mostly famous CEO-type people.”

Else laughed. “But what he really likes is the people the famous CEOs attract.”

He smiled at her, then at me and Dornan. “I admit it. I like the shallow glitz.” And he and Dornan talked about the relationship between celebrity and big business, and when the conversation morphed back into a discussion of what was going on with Seattle biotech, I watched a cormorant airing its wings on one of the dock pilings.

“But of course a lot depends on a proposed South Lake Union real estate development project.”

I focused. “Real estate? How does that tie into biotechnology?”

“One of the city’s major developers is trying to get various concessions from local government—a spur from the proposed light rail line, relaxed commercial/residential zoning, and so on—in order to essentially create a biotech hub on the lake’s south shore.” I tried to visualize the area: the northern edge of downtown, then I realized that those were probably its lights shining across the water. “If he succeeds, then half the people I’m talking to would relocate, at favorable lease rates and certain city and county-level tax breaks. But in order to assure those favorable terms, they would in turn have to make concessions, commitments to employment levels, diversity quotas, environmental controls, and so on.”

Something in my brain began to tick.

“Naturally, all this affects pricing and long-term product viability, which are my major areas of concern.”

“So if the city’s getting less tax money, why is it a good thing?” Dornan said.

“Hubs are good because they attract other businesses. Like, for example, software nexuses in Silicon Valley and here in Seattle.”

“Coffee,” Dornan said, nodding. “Tully’s, Starbucks, Seattle’s Best.”

“Exactly.”

“Also beer and tea and chocolate,” he mused. “Seattle’s Best Chocolate, Dilettante, Fran’s, Red Hook, Stash, Tazo—though those might be Oregon, now that I come to think of it.”

All delivery mechanisms for nice, respectable drugs; all things that would get a Scandinavian through the winter.

“That’s the way it seems to work,” Eric said. “Once an industry perceives that the business climate is favorable, that the employee base has the right education, that others will travel to a particular city in order to take employment there, then it will relocate. Others follow.” He made a rolling motion. “It snowballs.”

“Ah.” Dornan nodded wisely. “Fashion.”

Eric laughed. “Of course. Though they’d hate to admit it.”

The cormorant launched itself from its perch and flew out over the water.

“Zoning,” I said. “Is it hard to change?”

“Not as hard as it should be,” my mother said.

“It depends,” Eric said, with a glance at her. “There are some good arguments for keeping zoning flexible. But perhaps there’s a particular reason you asked?”

“My warehouse.” My mother looked at me. Dornan looked at his wineglass and sighed. “I was thinking of selling it, only now I discover that that’s exactly what someone wants.” And I explained what I believed had been happening. “This morning I found out my agent has run off, and taken my files and a few others with her. Her assistant tells me that she’d been negotiating to purchase several properties along that stretch of the Duwamish, all industrial property. Only he couldn’t figure out why, who she was negotiating for, or who would be interested in it. So I was just thinking, maybe she’s found a way to change the zoning. How would she go about that?”

“City or county council vote. Most of the time they just rubber-stamp the recommendations of a zoning committee chaired by one councillor and half a dozen civil servants. They will usually indulge in a pro forma public meeting before formulating their recommendations. For high-visibility issues, though, the individual councillors will make up their own minds. That is, they’ll let interested parties make it up for them by means of campaign contributions, promises of future development dollars, and public and behind-the -scenes support for the councillors’ pet projects.”

“Buying votes—that simple?”

“Pretty much.”

“The way of the world,” my mother said. “Favors for favors. For example, that’s one of the reasons I’m here: the Norwegian government’s licensing agreement with a large software company is ending shortly and there are interesting new parameters to explore, particularly relating to security. I’m talking to the executive team purely informally, as a favor to the Labour Party.”

I forgot the zoning issue. “The party, not the government?”

She nodded.

Party politics operated only in the domestic arena. “You’re thinking of going back to Norway.”

Her face smoothed into that automatic pseudo-candid expression all career diplomats—all politicians—learn, but then she paused and glanced at Eric. He shrugged: your daughter, your decision. She took a deep breath. “Yes.”

“What have they offered you?”

“The Ministry of Culture and Education. For now.”

“Well, well, well.”

“What?” Dornan said, looking from me to Else to Eric and back again. “What?”

Eric took his wife’s hand. “Aud has just discovered that her mother has greater ambition than she knew.”

“You’re aiming for the top,” I said.

“Yes.” Now that she had made up her mind to tell me, she seemed quite calm about it.

“What’s your timetable?”

"Move back later this year, assume the junior cabinet position next year, then ...”

“Madame Prime Minister.” We all looked at each other. “But why?”

“Victor Belaunde,” she said. “Do you remember?”

It had been a long time, but Belaunde, onetime Peruvian ambassador to the UN, had been quoted in our household all through my childhood. My mother was very fond of quotations.

I said from memory, “When there is a problem between two small nations, the problem disappears. When there is a problem between a big country and small country, the little country disappears. When there is a problem between two big countries, the United Nations disappears.”

“It’s even more true today than it was then. Norway needs to be bigger. We have work to do. But the sense of importance must come from inside. That’s what I want to do.”

“You want to change the world.”

She didn’t deny it.

Dornan looked around the table, shook his head, and said, “It’s genetic.” Which everyone seemed to find funnier than I did.

“Aristotle,” Eric said, with the air of a magician producing a rabbit from the hat. “Humans have a purpose in the world, and that purpose is to fulfill their destiny.”

“Destiny is a pretty creepy word,” Dornan said, and then, with a disarming smile, “depending on the context.”

“Quite so. There again, Aristotle also said that greatness of soul is having a high opinion of oneself.”

“Yes,” Dornan said in his best Trinity debating voice, “but do we believe him or Socrates when it comes to moral action? Socrates declared that it’s impossible to know the right thing and not do it. Aristotle, on the other hand, asserted that one can have the knowledge but fail to act because of lack of control or weakness of will.” He was enjoying their surprise. “Straw poll: Aristotle or Socrates?”

“Aristotle,” said Eric.

“Aristotle,” my mother said, but more slowly.

They looked at me. “Socrates,” I said. “Because it’s all about what you mean by ‘knowledge.’ And ‘the right thing.’ ”

They looked interested.

“There are hierarchies of knowledge. It depends on which you privilege: somatic knowledge or extra-somatic. If you tell a child the fire will burn if she sticks her hand in the flame, she’ll only believe you if she knows what hot means.”

“You mean like the razor?” my mother said.

“Razor?”

“You were seven, or perhaps eight—old enough, anyway, to have had more sense—and you found a razor blade on the turf at York races, and picked it up, and I said, ‘don’t touch it, that’s sharper than any knife,’ and you just couldn’t help yourself, you had to see how sharp it was. You tested the edge on your thumb and bled all over your new shoes.” She turned to Dornan. “We had to spend half an hour in the first-aid tent until she stopped bleeding.”

Dornan grinned. I looked at my thumb.

“You were saying?” Eric said.

“Oh,” I said. “Well, think of religion. If you believed, really and truly, that you would spend eternity burning in hell for having sex with your brother’s wife, you wouldn’t do it.”

“Unless you couldn’t help it. And if you’re nineteen and in the grip of powerful hormones, you’re next to helpless. Reason might not exist.”

“Yes, but while you’re feeling the rush of hormones, at that moment, you know—physically, somatically—that having the sex is the right thing. It doesn’t matter what your frontal cortex is trying to tell you. Except that I sound as though I think our minds and our bodies are separate things, and they’re not.”

Before I got myself even more muddled by trying to explain how I thought of the layered brain—the limbic system not under conscious control, the cerebral cortex being a lightly civilized veneer over everything— Dornan stepped in.

“So,” he said, with a Groucho Marx eyebrow waggle, “if Aristotle is right, are we to believe that (a) most politicians are weak, or (b) uncontrolled, or (c) just not smart enough to know the right thing?”

“Politicians are like con men,” my mother said. “They persuade themselves to believe ridiculous things, and then pursue them in all sincerity.”

Startled silence.

“Which is why powerful people need people they love by them, to say the unwelcome thing, to help them believe what is right.”

It was the first time I had heard her use the word love. We had never said to each other, I love you. When I was little, it had never occurred to me to believe otherwise. By the time I was old enough to wonder, I would not make myself vulnerable enough to ask.

Over after-dinner drinks we talked about politicians, and family members and lovers who had damned or saved them, and Eric paid the bill, and we walked outside and stood on the dock for a while. Dornan and Eric moved down the ramp a little, and a Canada goose waddled fatly behind them, hoping for a handout.

My mother and I watched the water. It was the blue-black of an old-fashioned Beretta that someone had oiled lovingly for twenty years. It heaved lazily, constantly, and the reflected boat lights smeared and ran like Day-Glo paint.

My mother and I watched the water for a while. “You didn’t say what you thought of my plan for national politics.”

“Eric seems as though he would be willing to say the unwelcome thing. I would, too.”

“Thank you,” she said, “I would listen.” And I imagined us clasping hands in the dark, though neither of us moved.

LESSON 6

AS I GOT OUT OF THE CAR AND STARTED UNLOADING THE TRUNK, THE SLANTING sun turned my windshield to gold. It wasn’t just the light, it was a faint dusting of pollen. Yesterday there had been one minute less than twelve hours of daylight, today one minute more; it was twenty degrees warmer than the past week; tomorrow there might be rain: spring gamboling as senselessly as a new lamb.

I opened the basement door with difficulty at 6:01. That familiar scent of dust, competing perfumes, and carpet.

“Sorry I’m late,” I said, and kicked the door shut behind me.

“What the hell is all that?”

"Swords,” I said, dropping one bag, “or maybe they’re lightsabers, it’s hard to tell.” I dropped another bag, the one full of T-shirts and the sponges and the red ink, and set down the cheap gas station cooler. I pulled one of the plastic toys, lime green, from the first bag and examined it. “No, it’s a sword. A cutlass, I believe.”

“This has got to be a lightsaber,” said Pauletta, picking up another and holding it like a shocking pink banana.

“Let me see. No. It’s meant to be a katana.”

“A what now?”

“Katana. Japanese sword.” A hollow plastic imitation of the one I had at home, with a braid-wrapped ray-skin hilt and signed tang and a blade that shone like watered silk.

“I think I’m pretty safe in saying that is not a sword.” Nina pointed at the white polystyrene cooler.

“Take a look inside.”

She toed off the lid and peered in. “Water pistols.”

“Unfilled,” I said. “Two volunteers to fix that.” Suze and Christie won the privilege and practically ran from the room. “And a volunteer to kick the cooler to bits.”

Katherine and Tonya decided they could manage that between them, and did. The polystyrene squealed and squeaked. I half expected Nina to say, “Scream, sucker,” in an action-hero voice but she just watched. Perhaps she didn’t like mysteries, perhaps it had been difficult for her last week admitting, even to herself, that she’d been assaulted.

“Everyone else, stretch out and warm up.” They were doing that, and the cooler was a pile of jagged polystyrene splinters by the time Suze and Christie got back with the loaded guns. Christie’s hair was wet and the back of Suze’s T-shirt was sticking to her spine. Clearly they’d felt obliged to test-fire a couple.

They settled into stretching with the rest. “Today we’re going to talk about weapons: guns, knives, sticks, and swords. What they can do, what you do if faced with one.”

Several laughed, some nervously. Weapons weren’t made of Day-Glo plastic; plastic couldn’t hurt them. Right?

I picked up the shocking pink katana, twirled it like a baton, then balanced it on my index finger, thinking. “Who thinks they can stab my hand with this?”

“Me. You bet,” said Kim. I tossed it to her. She caught it on the blade. A martial arts class would have stopped everything to explain about taking the weapon seriously, treating it with exaggerated respect, but that was not what I was after.

From the bag I took two large white T-shirts, a sponge, and a bottle of red ink. I pulled one of the T-shirts over my head, then poured a little red ink into the sponge. “Give the sword back a minute.”

I squeezed the wet sponge around the sword below the hilt and pulled the blade through my fist so that it gleamed redly. I gave it back to Pauletta, then wrapped the second T-shirt around my hand like a cartoon bandage and held out my hand.

“Stab this. Leave a big bloody mark in the middle.” I stepped back a little. She edged forward. I edged back.

“No fair. Keep still.”

“If someone was standing opposite you with a sword, or a knife, or a gun, would you stand still?”

“Then how can I stab you?”

“Good question.”

She charged, stabbing madly, and I moved away, and she missed. She looked mortified.

“It’s very hard to hit a moving target—with a blade, or a bullet.”

I gestured for her to give me the sword. The ink was dry; I leaned it against the wall, picked up a water pistol.

“Who wants to have a go at shooting my hand with the gun?”

“I’ll do that,” said Suze.

“Choose your weapon.”

She picked an orange-and-red ray gun and held it in two hands, like a TV cop.

“What kind of gun is it?”

“A big one,” she said with relish.

“Anyone, give me the name of a handgun.”

“SIG-Sauer P210,” Therese said. “Or a Smith and Wesson 627, if you prefer revolvers.”

Everyone looked surprised, or perhaps impressed. I certainly was.

“That’s a heavy gun,” I said.

“Nearly three pounds, unloaded. But it takes eight rounds.”

“How many’s the other one got?” Suze asked her.

“The Sig? Eight in the magazine, one in the chamber.”

“Then that’s what this is.”

“All right,” I said, and stood about ten feet away. “Shoot me.” I sounded like something from a bad porn film.

Suze took a wide-legged stance, aimed, and I waved the T-shirted hand very slowly to one side just as she began to squeeze.

“Shit.” She squirted again. I made the wave a lazy, three-dimensional figure eight. She began to swear and pump furiously with her index finger and I simply walked up to her, still waving one hand, though a little more randomly, and took the gun away.

“Of course,” I said to the class, “I doubt I’d be as calm if that were a real gun. Then again, with the noise and the weight and only nine bullets, she probably wouldn’t have been as accurate.”

“She missed!” Pauletta said.

“Yes. Most people do, most of the time.”

“Handguns are more accurate than water pistols,” Therese said.

“In the hands of an expert, and on the range, wearing ear protection and aiming at a stationary target, yes. In real life, no. A shooter will hit a running target only four times out of a hundred—and even then the bullet is extremely unlikely to find a vital organ. You can improve even those overwhelmingly favorable odds by not running in a straight line.”

“But . . .” Nina said, and couldn’t think of anything to add.

“If someone pulls a weapon on you, keep breathing and start thinking.”

“Start running.”

“Yes, if you can. If you can’t, start asking yourself questions. What weapon is it? What kind of person is holding the weapon?” They all looked monumentally blank. “Ask yourself what they want. If you know what they want, you can make some good guesses about what happens next, where your advantage might lie. So, what do they want?”

“To hurt you.”

“Sometimes.”

No one else had anything to offer. I decided to approach from another direction.

“Remember that they can’t hurt you with a stick or a knife unless they can touch you with it. They can’t hurt you with a gun unless they can hit you. That means stay out of reach, and start moving.”

“What if he’s already behind you in the car?”

“He won’t be, because you will have parked in a well-lit spot, and before you get in the car, you have looked through the window.”

“I will?”

“Yes. As you approach the car, you have your keys ready. You are not overburdened by bags. You examine the car by eye as you get closer, noting whether there are any extra shadows under or inside the vehicle.” Why didn’t they know this?

“Underneath?”

“Attackers have been known to hide there.”

“Jeez, I never thought of that.”

If they spent time worrying about being attacked in the first place, why didn’t they spend time considering realistic possibilities and responses?

“So what do we do if there’s someone under the car?” Jennifer said.

I looked around with raised eyebrows and waited. “Leave?” said Christie.

I nodded. “If he can’t touch you, he can’t hurt you.”

“Unless he has a gun.”

Either they were unable to listen or they couldn’t connect the dots. “The hit rate of four times in a hundred only applies under usual circumstances. If the assailant is squeezed under a car I imagine the number is even smaller. Also, as we’ve learnt before, you can use almost anything as a weapon. You could throw your groceries at him before you run. A can of tomatoes makes a formidable weapon.” Or a cup of hot coffee. Or a good yell. Or a spray of oven cleaner.

Nina made a rock, paper, scissors hand. “My tomato beats your gun.” They all laughed.

I wasn’t in the mood for it today. “I’ve given you statistics,” I said. “Now you tell me what it is about guns and knives, even toy ones, that makes you all so nervous.”

No one offered an answer. Katherine shifted from foot to foot. Kim started flicking her nails.

I sat down. “You may as well make yourselves comfortable. This may take a while.”

They sat one by one.

“This is a serious question. Why do knives and guns scare you so much?” Flick, flick, flick. Tonya’s faint wheeze.

After a long thirty seconds, Therese said, “We’re afraid of getting hurt.” “Let me tell you something about the times you’ve been hurt, all of you, every single one: it didn’t kill you.”

“But getting hurt . . . it hurts.” Pauletta.

“Certainly. So does having routine blood tests. Or dental work. Having children, spraining your ankle, menstrual cramps. A hundred and one things you’ve all been through before and survived.”

“But a knife. Being cut.”

“None of you has been cut while chopping vegetables?”

“Do you really not understand?” Therese said. “It’s the malice. It’s the fear. It’s the idea of some masked man with a knife threatening to torture you, and you being so scared that you do anything he says. Anything. You humiliate yourself just so he won’t . . . damage you.”

“So he won’t cut your nipples off and rape you with the knife!” Jennifer said.

There was a gelid silence and they all looked away.

The bogeyman with a knife. Afraid of the bogeyman, because they didn’t know that 76 percent of women who are raped and/or physically assaulted are attacked by a current or former husband, cohabiting partner, or date; that for women ages fifteen to forty-four, domestic violence was the leading cause of injury. They have met the bogeyman and they are married to him, at least according to the Journal of the American Medical Association.

I had encountered ignorance before in my brief stint as a community liaison officer. They didn’t understand, they didn’t know. They hadn’t been twelve when their mother had visited a London domestic violence center in her ambassador’s clothes, chatted politely to the executive director, and been given a green-covered, amateurishly designed book titled The Women Against Rape Study. Their mother hadn’t given that mysterious-looking book to her assistant. They hadn’t taken the book from the assistant’s desk the next day and leafed through it, trying to understand who their mother was and what it was that other people thought interested her.

I had gradually become fascinated by that book, with its columns and tables of statistics, its quotes from women who had been attacked by husbands and brothers and boyfriends, by bosses and transport workers and babysitter’s fathers.

I had read that green-bound book over and over, in between novels like The Lord of the Rings and Narnia and Dune, and had gradually come to believe it was my job to be the wise and powerful one, the wizard, the warrior, the seer; my job to lead my people and protect them from harm. I was the one with the noble brow and the secret book of runes, I was the one who knew. And so I became that person. I taught myself. I read that book, and others. I watched people. I studied their faces, their hands, their words. I learnt karate, and later wing chun, and boxing, and aikido, and tai chi. Killed a man who pointed a gun at me when I was eighteen. Joined the police force. And gradually forgot that I had ever had to learn, that I hadn’t been born this way, that nobody is.

I stood and pulled my shirt off.

“The fuck . . . ?” Suze said.

I pointed to a silvery line about three inches long on my left side, just above my hip.

“This thin scar here, that was a knife. At the time it felt as though someone had drawn a pen along my ribs. I barely noticed. Adrenaline does that.” I walked slowly around the circle of women. Look. See. Know. This is what it’s like to have your skin opened like the thin skin of a peach and watch the juice run out. “It bled a fair amount, but I didn’t even need to go to the emergency room, I just bound it up.”

“It didn’t hurt at all?” Tonya looked as though she wanted to put her fingers on it, in it. Doubting Tonya.

“It hurt the next day, a kind of deep ache, a bit like the worst time I sliced my finger when cutting up carrots.”

I showed them that scar on the tip of my left index finger. There was a scar on my thumb, too, but I couldn’t remember what that was from.

“Cutting carrots?” Katherine said, with a look that said, Are you fooling with me?

“I took naproxen and that helped.”

“Like for period pains.”

“Yes. Pain is pain, whether it’s ‘natural’ or not.”

They chewed on that.

“Were you afraid?” Jennifer said.

“No. It happened too fast. It often does.”

“Was he trying to kill you?”

“No.”

“What did he want?”

“He, they, wanted to escape. I was in their way. It wasn’t personal.”

“Not personal!”

“No, I don’t think so. He wasn’t expecting me there in the first place. He didn’t care whether I hurt or not, whether I died or not, he only cared about himself.”

I couldn’t tell what they were thinking.

“This”—I bent my left arm and put my fist on my shoulder to show the pink furrow running along the line between triceps and biceps, then turned so they could see the entry wound by my left shoulder blade—“this was a rifle bullet, fired from a scoped weapon. I couldn’t tell you if that was personal or not. It was for money. He was an expert, who was lying prone and ready in the snow. Snow. I was a dark target against a white background. As you see, it missed all my vital organs. I was hit here on the shoulder and the bullet traveled just under my skin, down my arm, and out near the elbow. I lost blood but was able to drive myself back to safety eventually. I’m told that the scar can be repaired nicely. This—”

“Wait. How did that feel?”

“At the time, it felt as though someone had punched me in the back.” And then I had been worrying about not getting shot again, about hypothermia, and bleeding too much, and, overwhelmingly, worrying for Julia.

Therese said something.

“I’m sorry?”

“After that? After the punch in the back?”

“It hurt. But pain is just a message. Just a note to let you know that something is wrong. You can ignore the message.”

“You can’t ignore a hole in your back.”

“You can. You can ignore anything if your life depends upon it. Pain is just a message. Of course, I did take some morphine.”

“Morphine.”

“Yes. And later I went to hospital.”

“Did the police catch him, the guy?”

“They found him.”

“Did he go to jail?”

“No. He didn’t make it that far.”

Most of them didn’t get it, but Sandra was looking at me, face very still, eyes like a photograph of an eclipse: pupil a black hole, iris blazing, almost writhing, like a corona. I didn’t understand her message. “That one,” she said, pointing to my neck, “that looks personal.”

“An addict. An adolescent with a straight razor. I couldn’t tell at first if it was a boy or a girl. It turned out to be a boy.” I had seen his naked, skinny little chest when I had taken his sweater. I could have killed him. I nearly did. “As I say, an addict, or schizophrenic.” Funny, that had never occurred to me before.

“Were you scared?”

“I thought I was going to die, but I’m not sure I was scared.”

“What did you do?”

“He had the blade against my jugular. He’d probably seen how from television. For a little while, I gave up. I just started telling a story.” I had spent months trying not to think about that night, how I had known, really known, I would die, how sordid I found the situation, the understanding that this was it, right there, in the dark, in a park full of homeless people in a city where I knew nobody while wearing the clothes of a man I had just beaten half to death, and that there was nothing, nothing to be done.

“A story. Like a Dick and Jane type story?”

“No. I don’t remember, exactly. I just talked and talked, and then he wavered, because he was young and he needed his drugs, and his arm dropped, and I took the razor away from him.”

“Did you hurt him?” Suze said.

“No.” But there had been a moment when I considered cutting his throat, watching his blood gush out and down his chest. It would have been black in the faint city light among the trees. “No. I left.”

“Don’t tell me, no hospital, right?”

“Right. A plane, to North Carolina. Then healing. There was some . . . some blood loss.”

“No shit.”

“But not everyone’s like you,” Kim said. “We can’t let someone shoot us, stab us, slit our throats, and then go home and take an aspirin.”

“The human body is very strong, very difficult to kill, unless you’re facing an expert.” If I put a razor to someone’s throat, they’d die. “And they, I, you heal. Look.” I sat down and pulled up my left pants leg, past the two-inch white scar just below the back of my knee. “This happened when I was nine. Or eight, something like that. A nail sticking out of a piece of wood. I was running around in the garden, jumped over something, felt a little scratch, then—”

“Blood for days,” Nina said, nodding. “Cuts on the plump parts, near a joint, they just gush. ’Specially if you’ve been running. See this?” She flexed her right arm, showed a very similar scar just above her elbow. “Barbed-wire fence. And this”—she showed us four neat indentations across the tops of the fingers on her left hand—“a steel tape measure. We were running around on this construction site when I was a kid, three of us holding the tape, only I tripped over my own ankles and fell over and, zzzt, they ran on and the tape cut me open.”

“I have a burn scar,” Katherine said, and then they were all rolling up or unbuttoning or pushing down something and showing scars, and saying, “You’re right, it didn’t hardly hurt to start with,” or “It bled like crazy,” or “I had nineteen stitches! Hurt like a motherfucker the next day.”

Sandra talked about her crooked middle finger, how it got caught in her sweater sleeve when she was trying to take it off and running to catch the school bus when she was eleven, how she’d tripped and fallen and her finger was broken to pieces. She didn’t mention the burn on the back of that hand that looked much more recent. She didn’t point out the damaged thumbnail. Nobody asked her about those things, either, though Pauletta did say to Kim, “So, that scar on your chin. That’s from when you bashed your own teeth out on the pavement?”

“This? Nah. That was from going facefirst down a slide and forgetting to put my arms out.”

So then the conversation became about playground mishaps, and I was struck by the fact that none of them talked about being hit or strangled or knocked down with malice by the school bully; though Pauletta admitted to having been a bully when she was a kid. “That was my momma. She told me I needed to take care of my business, so I did. And then I started to take care of business that wasn’t mine, you know? You look at me crosswise and I slam you against the lockers. You don’t ask me to your party and I trip you up and kick you in the stomach and take your lunch money.” She saw the way Therese was looking at her and shrugged. “Hey, I was a kid. I don’t do that now. You never hit somebody?”

Therese shook her head.

“What, not ever, not even as a kid?”

“I never did, either,” Tonya said.

“Nor me.” Jennifer. “Or me.” Katherine.

They stared at each other and I stared at them all. Sandra stared back. “You’ve hit people,” she said. “What’s it like? Does it feel good?”

“No.” But surviving did, feeling brilliant with life, huge, vital. Winning: one life between us and it is mine.

She nodded slowly, knowing there was more to it, knowing, too, that I wouldn’t talk about it. This was private, the way being hit and burned and cut and strangled at home was private. We could acknowledge it between us, as long as it remained unspoken.

“So what’s the broken-up cooler for?”

I stretched across the carpet and lifted a shard from the pile. “This?” It was a little over a foot long. “It’s a KA-BAR.”

“A what?” Jennifer said, clearly prepared to be frightened.

“A hunting knife. The blade is about nine inches long, partially serrated. ” I handed it to her. “This”—I picked up another piece, a bit shorter—“this is a broken bottle. Who wants it?” Tonya held out her hand. I picked up another piece, small and slim. “What should this be?”

“A razor,” said Sandra. “I’ll take it.” I wished I could read her mind.

I took two more pieces of polystyrene from the pile, which turned out to be a bread knife for Kim and an ice pick for Suze. “Everyone stand. Those with a weapon choose an unarmed partner.”

Several of them looked at the wall clock, but there were six minutes left. “Stand opposite each other. Attackers, move in until your weapon touches your partner on the chest. Now look at your feet. None of you are more than eighteen inches apart. Some of you only a foot or so. It’s not too hard to make sure you don’t get that close to someone, especially if it’s a stranger. If you’re paying attention to your surroundings, to what’s going on around you, no one will get that close to you. Unless it’s a public situation: a line at the grocery, a seat on MARTA, getting in an elevator.” It occurred to me that I had no idea what a PTA meeting was like, or singing in the church choir, or a ladies’ coffee morning. But from what I had gathered, these were not things that frightened them.

“You can’t watch everyone all the time,” Therese said. “You’d be stressed out of your mind.”

“But you’d be alive,” Sandra said.

I found I didn’t like being on the same side as Sandra. “You don’t watch everyone all the time. Not consciously. You don’t spend your life on red alert. More like amber, except in your secure home. You take simple, automatic precautions, like having your keys ready, taking the corner wide, parking under a light, checking the car before you get in, not giving out information you don’t have to, never unlocking the door without looking and putting a chain on first, and so on.”

“That’s a lot to remember,” Kim said.

“Not really. You’ll get used to it and eventually won’t even think about it. You all already remember to turn the gas off, to check both ways before you cross the road, to not pick up kitchen knives by the blade, to avoid broken glass, to not breathe water, to not pick up a roasting pan without an oven mitt, and a thousand and one other things. Checking your car and carrying a phone and locking your door are like that. Just sensible precautions.”

“You’ll have to make us a list,” Nina said. Jennifer nodded vigorously, forgetting the hunting knife she was holding at Therese’s breastbone. A list was something she understood, something she could master. Better than nasty knives.

“I will. And we’ll go through it together.” Because the best defense was to need no defense, to see them before they saw you. “Meanwhile, back to our weapons.”

They all straightened. The women with the polystyrene shards assumed vicious expressions and their partners looked nervous.

The clock clunked as the hour hand moved.

“We’ll have to pick this up next week.” I handed out Sharpies. “Write your name and weapon on the polystyrene and give them to me until next week. Meanwhile, everyone who had a weapon, decide what it is that you want. Money? Your victim’s car keys? Murder? Rape? A nice long chat about state politics? Are you hungry? Are you cold? Are you bored? Young? Smart? Angry? Frightened? Who are you? What do you want?”

Jennifer looked panicked. Decisions are hard.

“Unarmed partners, remember that no one waves a knife at you just because. They want something. Something tangible or something emotional. You have to figure out what. Think about that before next week.”

SEVEN

I WOKE LATE AFTER A LONG, DREAMLESS SLEEP. I EXERCISED IN THE HOTEL GYM, showered, then sat in my underwear and opened the file Rusen had sent. I looked through it with growing frustration. I had no more idea of what might be relevant than I had before Isabella. Outside, clouds scudded by and the tops of trees shivered in bright sun. I closed the laptop, put on a summery silk dress and jacket, and set off to learn some Seattle neighborhoods.

Queen Anne was rather staid, even twee, the Seattle equivalent of Atlanta’s Virginia-Highland area. Farther north, I walked around Greenlake in the breezy sunshine. I attempted to eat a sandwich in a café by the water but was defeated by the extraneous aiolis and mustards and strange pickled vegetables. Even before the destruction of my taste buds, my idea of a good sandwich was simple ingredients: fresh whole-meal bread, Danish butter, chicken roasted at home without garlic or rosemary or anything else. Chicken, butter, bread, perhaps a little fleur de sel. Nothing to clutter the essential flavors.

I considered returning to the hotel but doubted the spreadsheet would have become any more meaningful. I needed to go to the set, talk to people, get a feel for what was going on. Perhaps SPD had missed something.

Mercer Street was choked with traffic. I checked the time. Just after four o’clock. Later than I thought. The light had fooled me; I was used to more southerly latitudes.

I called Dornan. “I’m heading for the set. Want to join me?”

“Already there.”

“Oh.” Traffic was at a complete standstill. For the first time since I’d got to Seattle, someone started honking.

“Hello?”

“I’m here.” It was getting hot. Without movement there was no airflow. More honking. Despite the noise, I didn’t want to close the windows and use air-conditioning. “Hold on.” I unfastened my seat belt, took off my jacket, refastened the seat belt.

“Look,” Dornan said, “things are getting busy here.” I heard Kick’s voice in the background, and Dornan said something about the director, and the stunt actor, but in the rumble of stationary traffic and honking horns, I missed it. “I have to go,” he said.

I eventually merged with traffic on Alaskan Way, and watched my rearview mirror. Nobody followed me. How disappointing. Today, he wouldn’t have got away. Today, I would have got some answers. I lifted my left hand from the wheel and flexed it, then my right. I sat up straight and stretched my spine as I drove.

A MAN STOOD in front of the closed side door, brown hair parted on the left, feet in Velcro-fastened cross trainers that looked like bowling shoes, set wide. Near the door, the asphalt was turning to greying gravel crumbs, which could prove dangerous underfoot. A potential liability issue; I made a mental note to mention it to Bette, and put on my jacket. The late afternoon was a little too warm, but it freed up my hands and would protect my bare arms. When I approached, the man held up his hand, palm out. Left hand. The right stayed at his side, but not limp. The tendons at the wrist were relaxed, brown eyes alert. I stopped about ten feet away.

“ID?”

I reached into my inside breast pocket. His eyes followed my hand, but despite his right hand remaining conspicuously free, there was none of that subtle body turning that meant he was ready to pull a gun, that he was thinking of the gun under his arm or at his belt, that he had a gun at all.

“I’m glad to see they’ve finally got some security,” I said.

He nodded, but didn’t take his eyes off my hand. I took out my wallet and extended my driver’s license. He beckoned me forward a little, stepped to meet me, accepted the license with his left hand, and stepped back, still trying to make his body lie. His gaze flicked down, then back up at my face. After a moment he nodded and transferred the license to his right hand, then extended it towards me between the tips of his index and middle fingers, again leaning forward slightly, moving back when the transfer was complete. He didn’t step aside.

“Is there a problem?”

“Nope,” he said. “It’s a closed set today.”

“A closed set?”

“No one in who isn’t on the list.”

“I see. Any idea why?”

“Nope.” But his eyes moved side to side; he was about to confide something. “Closed set is usually when they’re doing naked stuff.”

Wisps of steam. But I’d had the distinct impression that that had been filmed already, and that Rusen and Finkel were aiming for a teen audience. I still hadn’t read the script, though, so I couldn’t be sure.

“I need to talk to someone inside. Any idea how I should go about doing that if you don’t let me in?”

“Nope.” A sudden gust of wind blew a stiff, finger-wide hank of hair over his right eye.

“I’ve been having a relaxed day,” I said. “It seems a shame to lose that tranquillity.” I resisted the temptation to do a quick hamstring stretch. “Step aside.”

“A closed set, lady, means you can’t just walk in.”

Personal space is adjustable—in a crowded room, for example, we expect less; in a deserted park, more—but we always know when it’s being invaded. Various bodily signs from a stranger prepare us for the possibility: heavy sweat and a pale face hint at high adrenaline levels; muttering alerts us to craziness; hunching of shoulders or raising of hands shows preparation to move forward, as does a show of teeth or narrowing of the eyes. We send and receive a myriad of signals. But if you give a warm smile and wear a pretty dress and stay relaxed, their conscious mind overrules their subconscious understanding of the signals.

I smiled and walked right at him, shoulders down, arms swinging freely, and got to within eighteen inches of his face before he finally processed the information and grabbed at my upper arm. I swayed slightly to the left, clamped his hand firmly to my right shoulder with my right hand, and turned clockwise so that his arm locked out and I stood behind him, left palm on his skull, behind his right ear. His hair was crispy with hair spray. Gravel crunched under his feet as he maintained his balance. I shifted the grip on his right hand to turn it into sankyo, a wrist lock.

He froze. “What—”

“Be quiet and keep still.” I lifted my hand from his neck to the thin metal skin of the warehouse wall. Lots of vibration: lots of noise. No filming in progress. I released him, slid open the door, and went in.

It was as hot and active as a termite nest ripped open by an aardvark and exposed to pitiless light, only here, instead of the South African sun, it was arc lights, dozens of them, and rather than a heaving mass of insects around the grublike queen, three cameras on cranes and nearly a score of people surrounded and focused on Sîan Branwell. And this was merely the inner circle.

She was younger than I expected, still soft with the remnants of teenage-hood. Her hair was the soft brown-black of mink. She was saying, “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” to herself, like a chant.

“It’s going to be great,” Rusen said to her. “It’s going to be amazing. Okay, people. We need this. We need perfection. Sîan, you’ll be just great. Okay. Okay, people.”

He was talking to himself, too. Everyone was talking, and sweating, and pale. I could taste the adrenaline in the air as one person powdered Sîan’s face; another tweaked the fold of her formal ballgown; someone changed a filter on a light; Joel said “Check” into his headset; Peg pointed like a setter at a leaf out of place on the soundstage; and an assistant scurried forward, bending like someone approaching a helicopter, and scooped up the errant greenery. The greenery reminded me of that long-ago trip to York races with my mother, when I had picked up the razor blade. Bright silks, a humming crowd, the racehorses moving to their gates, something they had done a hundred, a thousand times before. Their nostrils were wide and red, their tails twitching, the muscle and skin over their withers shivering, a trickle of sweat, great hearts pumping. Then the last gate closes, the starters’ assistant nods to the booth, the crowd focuses, the flag goes up, jockeys lean forward—

I heard the door open. “Freeze!” shouted the security guard.

White faces swung in my direction, focused past me. I turned. The guard had followed me and now looked vaguely foolish with nothing to point.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Branwell kept saying, only more loudly now, and more insistently, like an autistic child keeping the world at bay.

Someone to the side of the soundstage moved her head in a tight, clean turn: Kick, standing behind an empty craft-services counter and mostly obscured from view by a sweating man in tight black clothes. She wasn’t wearing her white coat, but striped cotton trousers and sandals and a form-fitting long-sleeved white T-shirt with a neckline that showed her collarbones. Something hung from a black cord around her neck.

I stepped forward but, “Out!” shrieked Peg, and ran at the guard as though she would hack his head off with her clipboard. “Out! Do you have any idea how close you came to—Do you realize—Have you any idea—”

“Hush,” I said, and touched her on the shoulder.

“You,” she said, puzzled.

“It’s all right.”

“He nearly . . . Three cameras! You have to—I mean—”

“It’s all right.” Joel pulled his headset from his ears until it hung around his neck. He was frowning. A restive ripple ran through the crew. “Don’t let it disturb the shoot.”

“But—Everything’s riding on this, it—”

Once at the races I’d seen a horse buck as it came out of the gate. Four horses had crashed into him, delicate patens snapping. Two had had to be destroyed. The race was canceled. “There now. It’s all right. I’ll take care of it. There now. Look, Joel needs you.”

“What?” But she turned around to look.

“They need you.”

“All right,” she said, and took a half-step backwards. Rusen looked indecisively from his set dresser to his star to the security guard. I made a Don’t let me interrupt you gesture. He hesitated, then nodded.

“All right, people,” he said. “Okay. One more time . . .”

I turned to the guard. “This way,” I said, and gestured to the open door—the breeze was lovely. “And don’t say a word. If you make a noise when the cameras are rolling the producer will sue you for damages. I’ll also sue you for trespass.” I motioned him through the door. “If anyone tries to get in, stop them, but be polite. Think customer service. Do your job.” I shut the door behind him. Took my jacket off.

The atmosphere began to swell and tighten again, focusing, and the hum of voices, mixed with the occasional Fuck, fuck and Okay, people, all right, began to build.

I tiptoed to a sidewall where I’d remembered there being clothes racks. Now there were piles of stacked scaffolding poles. I was glad to see they were strapped together securely. Rolling steel could be dangerous.

“No need to creep,” Dornan said from a few feet away. “At least not until the klaxon.” His eyes were alight with the kind of intensity I hadn’t seen since before Tammy had left him. For some reason it made my stomach clench.

“Why is everyone so tense?”

“Three cameras,” he said.

“So Peg said.” And it hadn’t meant much the first time.

“The director walked out, as I said, and the main stunt actor, and now Rusen is risking everything on one throw. This is the last day Sîan will be here, and instead of breaking the scenes down to separate angles, he’s going to shoot from three at once for the close-action sequences and dialogue. If we don’t get it in the first or second take, everyone, we’re screwed. The film cost alone is huge.”

We, I thought. We both looked from Branwell, still chanting to herself, seemingly oblivious to the tweakers and powderers, to Rusen.

“Rusen’s directing?”

“Yep.”

“He’s done it before?”

“In film school. The real director walked out. Said he couldn’t work under this kind of pressure.”

We looked beyond Rusen, who no longer looked like a chess prodigy but like a teacher on a field trip with twenty psychopathic schoolchildren, to Kick.

“Who’s that standing with her?”

“Bernard. The stunt guy.”

“He’s not the same one who was here the other day.”

“No. He left with the director. Bernard’s a beginner. Kick says that if she doesn’t babysit him, he’ll bolt. It’s a something-and-nothing scene: jump over a table, roll, pretend to hit someone. But he’s pretty inexperienced.”

Kick was talking intently to Bernard, who was nodding. He was only an inch or two bigger than Kick. I wondered why she didn’t do it. Dornan probably knew; he always seemed to know these things. Without her white coat, the deep V-shape of her torso and the wide shoulders and narrow waist were clear: a high-diver’s body, or a trapeze artist’s. Her hair was clipped up, and tiny muscles in her neck moved under the skin.

She looked different. Better. “She seems . . . less tired.”

“Yes,” Dornan said.

He sounded almost smug, and I started to feel prickly and restless. “It’s hot in here.”

“The air-conditioning is so noisy we have to keep shutting it down. People keep forgetting to turn it back on again between takes.”

As I watched, Kick mimed a ducking turn for the stuntman, who was looking dubious. She moved easily, a quarter horse to the racehorses: powerful, nimble, responsive, intelligent, present. The thing around her neck swung out and banged back against her breastbone.

“So what’s with the rent-a-cop?” Dornan said.

“Um? No idea. But he won’t be around long. What’s that thing around her neck?”

“A fan. She doesn’t do well with heat. I wish she’d use it.”

I hadn’t known her long but I couldn’t imagine Kick buying something like that for herself. “So is it going well, the filming?”

“Well, yes. I think. People are focused, and Rusen seems to know what he wants. Though they haven’t actually done any filming yet today.”

“No?”

“No. Rusen’s been running everyone through the rehearsals. It’s complicated. The second-biggest sequence of the whole pilot.”

I nodded, not really listening. Kick was now turning her chin into her chest, gesturing to the stuntman, watching him do the same.

“You still don’t know the plot, do you?” Dornan said.

“No.”

“Have you even read the treatment?”

“Whose treatment?”

“The treatment. The story outline.”

“Why don’t you tell me it?”

“And you’ll listen?”

I turned to face him. “You have my undivided attention.”

“Okay.” He seemed mollified. “There’s this woman, Vivienne—that’s Sîan, of course—who wakes up one night and she’s naked, and alone in the middle of a big city.”

I nodded. Wisps of strategic steam.

“She has no idea who she is or how she got there. And she’s just recovering from the shock when she sees the dawn, and as the sun rises, phhttt, she turns into a fox.”

“A fox.”

“It’s pretty cool—metaphor made concrete: foxy woman and all that. Anyhow, the fox, naturally, has no clue about anything. I mean, it’s a fox. So then night comes again, and, phhtt, the fox turns into the naked woman, Vivienne, who once again has no clue, et cetera. Only this time, she remembers, after about an hour of shivering naked behind a Dumpster, that she woke up the day before in the same position and then somehow lost time.”

It was interesting how he assumed a vaguely American accent to tell me all this.

“So she spends the rest of the night thinking and planning, stealing some clothes, scrabbling for food in the Dumpster, et cetera. Day comes, phhtt, she turns into a fox—”

“You don’t have to keep saying phhtt.”

He blinked. “Oh. Well, so she turns into a fox. Fox runs around, eats a bird, all that fox-type stuff. We can use stock nature footage for that. Did you know that foxes live all over the city?”

“Yes. Go on with the story.”

“So night comes”—he made a flicking phhtt gesture with his right hand—“she turns back into Vivienne—that’s easy, apparently; you just do a shimmering dissolve—”

“Dornan.”

“Right. So, anyway, she’s Vivienne again, she doesn’t know anything, but this time she remembers in about ten minutes that she’s done this a couple of times before and trots off immediately to her Dumpster, where she finds the clothes. Which she puts on. And this goes on for a while, with the cycle getting shorter. Eventually she makes friends with other people— street people, to begin with, of course, all of whom, for budget reasons no doubt, seem to live in the warehouse district—which is complicated by the night-as-woman, day-as-fox shapeshifting.”

“The Ladyhawke part.”

“Right. Eventually, through a series of events that, frankly, seem a bit muddled to me, but Kick says will get cleared up in the editing, she gains allies, learns about the fox transformation, makes sure she’s protected while she’s an animal, and starts trying to work out who she is, where she came from, and what happened. With me so far?”

I nodded.

“And it turns out, there’s this bad guy—I don’t know if he’s an evil corporate research scientist or an evil government agent, but he’s evil—”

“And lives in a florist’s shop.”

“What? No. That’s one of the friends. Lots of friends. It’s an ensemble show—that’s the Dark Angel part, that and the government thing, and that it’s in Seattle. Where was I?”

“Lots of friends.”

“Well, there will be, if we ever get to do a series and not just this backdoor pilot. Anyhow, this guy does something to Vivienne, only that, it turns out, is not her real name . . .”

Kick was . . . not frowning, exactly, but getting tight around her cheeks and eyes. The stuntman was looking young and frightened.

“. . . this afternoon’s sequence comes just before the end, where the bad guy has followed her to her friend’s place, the florist, and is sending in the hard lads.” Now the American accent was slipping and he sounded very working-class Dublin, the way he did when he was ebullient. “Lots of action. Viv and her friends fighting for their lives. But all surrounded by greenery, d’you see, instead of the usual shite blowing up. It’s cheaper. And what that means is it’s all internal work for the actor.”

“In addition to the stunts,” I said.

“Well, yeah. The stunts. No one’s exactly sanguine about that. Rusen asked Kick to give Bernard some unofficial coaching.”

Now Kick was pushing the sleeves of her shirt up in frustration. “As well as doing the food?”

“No one’s exactly eating the food. Partly, you know, because of what happened. Partly because, well, who could eat in this kind of atmosphere?”

He was right. The tension was building again. Kick slapped the stuntman on the arm, and he clenched his jaw and walked forward into even more intense light towards what I assumed was his mark. The tweakers left Branwell, who now drew herself up to her full five feet five inches.

“Okay, everyone. Going hot in thirty. Let’s go.”

The building hushed. “Twenty-five,” a voice said. Branwell looked like a brown-furred fox: sleek, well fed, bright-eyed. The stuntman looked like a moron. “Twenty.”

The countdown continued. Joel listened intently to his headphones, then gave a thumbs-up to Rusen, who looked at the camera operators, who appeared to ignore him, the way heavy machinery operators always ignore lesser mortals.

“Ten.”

Branwell had her eyes closed. Rusen smiled at the stuntman encouragingly. He looked as though he needed it.

“Five. Four.” Rusen pointed to the cameras, and to the clapper operator, and nodded to Branwell. “Go now.”

The lights seemed suddenly brighter, the greenery more green, Branwell’s face more alert. She took a great, shocked breath, swung around, flinched—and, “Cut!” shouted Rusen, and the entire set burst into applause.

“Fantastic,” Dornan said, “bloody fantastic.”

“That’s it?” Bernard hadn’t even done anything.

“No, that’s just the beginning. But she nailed it. First time. That’s great. That’s a good omen.”

All around me the termite mound was heaving again: swinging of lights, the rushing of hair and makeup, the nervous pacing of the stuntman, the furious note-taking of two different people. I started for the craft-services table, but Kick was no longer there.

“Okay,” Rusen said, “ready again in thirty.”

And everyone hushed, and this time the scene lasted almost seven seconds, and again Dornan’s face brimmed with delight, and again everyone clapped. Bernard still hadn’t done anything. I watched the intent, focused bustle.

I didn’t understand a bit of it, but it was mesmerizing, as urgent as a trauma team working at the scene of an accident. In the middle of the fourth scene, Branwell’s key light went out with a pop.

“Hold!” Rusen called, and everyone froze to the spot. Branwell closed her eyes and went even paler. Rusen looked at Joel.

“I can have it changed out in about five minutes,” Joel said.

“I need it in two, Joel,” Rusen said.

“The engines willnae take it, Cap’n,” someone said—Peg—and everyone smiled.

“Aye, aye, two it is,” Joel said, and I understood that for two minutes you could hold together the mass delusion that this was possible, that one could make a sellable, watchable film from two bobby pins and a roll of sticky tape. Five minutes would leave time to question the miracle. Every person in the room was willing the impossible to become real with every fiber of his or her being. Magic wouldn’t wait. Technicians worked frantically, stripping gels, repositioning, rechecking light levels.

Kick appeared at my shoulder. She looked supple and alive. She nodded at the stuntman. “He’s in a flop sweat.”

She wasn’t sweating at all, I saw. And her breath smelled of strawberries. On my other side, Dornan shifted.

“Makeup,” Rusen said conversationally, and pointed his chin at Bernard. They rushed up and started powdering his face and neck.

Without the surrounding dark rings, Kick’s eyes seemed brighter and softer. Every individual cell seemed to be humming.

“Places,” Rusen said. “In thirty.”

And again, Bernard did nothing. Again, Branwell nailed it. Everyone was grinning. There were high-fives.

“Don’t get cocky now,” Kick murmured to herself, leaning forward so far I thought she might topple over. The black plastic fan on its black cord hung down like a plumb line. Her waist was tiny. My hands could span it easily. “Not yet. Not yet.”

“Just this one, then we’ll break for a half hour,” Rusen said. “Places.”

The whole room was focused on Bernard, but my focus was split between the actors and Kick, who was practically quivering.

“Going hot. In five, four, three, two. Now.”

And Bernard ran under the lights, tripped over his own feet, rolled with a crash into a stand of greenery, and got up again, looking dazed. No one yelled cut, no one made a sound, but Kick twitched. Bernard leapt over a chair and rolled again.

“And cut.”

No applause.

“Bernard, are you good to go again?” Rusen said.

He nodded.

This time he ran, leapt, rolled, and by Kick’s gush of relieved breath I understood it had gone well. Everyone was grinning. I was, too.

“Thirty minutes, people,” Rusen shouted. “Thirty minutes.”

“Excuse me,” Dornan said, and headed to the bathroom. The huge main doors rolled open, and the brilliance of the lights dimmed for a moment until my eyes adjusted to the different spectrum of the sun. A roar started near the ceiling. Someone had remembered the AC. People flowed out into the sunshine.

Kick and I turned to each other. We stood close enough for me to see the loose weave in the stripe that ran over her hipbone.

“I got your flowers,” she said. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. You’re looking well.”

“You’ve lost weight.”

“It’s hard to eat when food tastes like something shoveled out of a crematorium. ”

Her face sharpened with professional interest. “Still?”

“Worse, if anything.”

“And I thought it was just people not wanting to get drugged again— not eating my food. Jesus. Okay.” She nodded to herself. “Okay. What tastes the worst?”

“Scrambled eggs.”

“Other eggs?”

“Any eggs. Especially boiled. And milk smells terrible. I’ve been drinking my tea without.”

“Butter?”

“Not good.”

“In what way?”

“Sulfur and smoke.”

“Fish?”

“Some are fine. Some aren’t.”

“But fruit is good.”

“Yes. Not all vegetables.”

She was nodding again. A wisp of hair slid gracefully from its clip. “Like broccoli.”

“Yes. How did you know that?”

She brushed aside the question, briskly, impersonally, like a doctor. This isn’t about me, it’s about you. “I have some ideas about what might taste good. Though, hmmm, is it the taste or the smell?” She was talking mostly to herself.

“Everything would taste better if I could find whoever did this and bang their head on the wall.”

She laughed. “That sounds like you mean it.”

I shrugged. “It’s what I do.”

“I thought you owned things.”

“That, too.”

The stripes in her trousers flared and stretched from waist to hip, ran in muscled lines down her thighs. Someone brushed by me. I turned, glad of the distraction. Peg and Joel, carrying milkshakes, laughing for a change. Behind them was Bri, the bony-faced teenager, and his friend, with greasy paper sacks. His brother was dying, and he could still eat.

“Fast food,” Kick said, misinterpreting my look. “No one even drinks my coffee anymore.”

“Then why do you stay?”

“Because I’m stubborn. They won’t be willing to eat fast food forever. And the minute they change their mind, I’ll be ready.”

“All right. How about now?”

She looked me up and down, raised her eyebrows. I nodded. “Okay, then.” She took off the fan, dropped it on the counter, and busied herself with the urn. “It’ll take a minute to make fresh.”

“No cream.”

“No cream.”

People were flowing back in. Cool air eddied from the door and the ceiling. Once she had the coffee on, she got a can of soda from the fridge. Instead of popping it open, she ran it across her forehead and the inside of her wrists.

I laid my hand on hers. “Not the wrist.” Her hand was so small. “Lots of nerves in the wrist and the side of the neck. If you put something cold there for long enough, those nerves will send a message to the rest of the body saying, Hey, it’s cold out here, and all the peripheral blood vessels will close to preserve heat. Those blood vessels are what dissipate heat. So if they close, you won’t cool down. Here.” She let me take the can. I ran it slowly down the outside of her arms, smearing condensation over her smooth skin. I took her hands, one by one, rubbed the can over the backs then palms, tilted her chin, followed the curve and hollow of her face, slid the can to the back of her neck.

She looked up at me. “It was good, what you did with that rent-a-cop. Just leading him out without fuss. Maybe you just act nicer when you wear a dress.” I didn’t say anything. “You said last week that you wanted my help.”

“Yes.”

“Let’s trade. I talk to you, I get you as my food guinea pig.”

“All right.”

“Then come to my house for dinner. Supper. Nine o’clock. You know where it is.”

“Yes.” I brought the can back to her cheek. Moisture from the can trickled down her neck, as far as her collarbones, which rose and fell, rose and fell. I wondered if the water would still be cool or whether it would have warmed running down her skin. “If you really want to stay cool, you should wet your hair. The heat generated by your head will dry it, and the evaporation will cool you down.”

“What are you doing?”

We turned. Dornan. Holding a red-cardboard-bound script.

Kick stepped away and took the can from me in one smooth move. “She’s telling me to go soak my head, in the nicest possible way.” She put the soda back in the fridge, got herself a bottle of water.

“You should use the fan I got you.” Kick pretended not to hear him.

“Is that the script?” I said.

“What? Oh, yes. Here.” He held it out. “You should read it.”

The air conditioner fell silent.

I hefted the script in one hand. Nine o’clock. “I’m going back to the hotel,” I said to him. “I’ll give you a ride.”

“Oh, I think I’ll stay awhile,” he said. “But thanks.”

LESSON 7

OUTSIDE, IT WAS STILL OVER SEVENTY DEGREES. INSIDE, THE BASEMENT AIR-CONDITIONING unit set in the wall rattled like a garbage disposal with a spoon stuck in it. I turned it off. It would get hot. Tough.

I handed out the five polystyrene weapons and lined the women up opposite their unarmed partners.

“A lot of us are scared when we face an edged weapon—a big knife, a broken bottle, a razor. If and when that ever happens to you, the first thing you do is breathe, the way we learnt two weeks ago. Do it now.” They did. In. Out. “Now that you’re sure you won’t pass out, the next step is to demystify the weapon. Look at the weapon—Tonya’s bottle, Kim’s bread knife, Sandra’s razor, Suze’s ice pick, Jennifer’s KA-BAR—and ask yourself: Why is your attacker carrying a weapon in the first place? To boost their confidence? To instill fear in you, his victim? To hide behind it in some way? Then you ask yourself what the potential power of the weapon is. How sharp at the tip? Is it edged? How long is it? What kind of damage can it do? So, for example, an ice pick isn’t very long, and it’s not much use for slashing or bludgeoning, but it’s great for stabbing.”

Suze gave Kim a superior look.

“And Kim’s bread knife,” I said to her, “while it might not be very sharp, nor have a stabbing point, can be used, with sufficient force, to take your nose, or your head, right off.”

They nodded, but they had no notion of the sheets—the rivers, the lakes—of blood, or how much muscle it took to saw through flesh and then bone.

They were waiting for me to continue. I forced myself back into their southern lady shoes.

Suze’s ice pick was traditionally a tool of men, or sexually predatory women in the movies. A bread knife was a tool of the home and hearth, something they handled every day, or that their mothers, at least, had. Not hard to guess which these women found more frightening.

“Next you have to ask yourself how expert the attacker is likely to be with the weapon. We’ve already seen how difficult many of them can be to wield. Bear in mind that very few people are experts with things like razors or bread knives or ice picks. Remember that a weapon has no power of its own. It depends entirely on its user.” And the magic the victim invests in it.

“What’s the point of all this thinking?” Pauletta said.

“Assessment. You can’t know what to do in any situation until you’ve assessed it. Keep your eye on the weapon and remember: It’s just a tool. Not magic.”

None of them looked as though she believed me.

“Once you’re breathing, we go on to other questions: What does your attacker want? Will you be in more or less danger in a few minutes? Pick your moment to act. When you do act, begin with a distraction.”

“Wait,” Pauletta said. “Can we go back to the part about—”

“I’ll take questions later. An attacker with a weapon will be concentrating on that weapon. It will be a kind of talisman, a psychological crutch. The armed attacker’s focus will be very narrow indeed.”

“I’m getting lost here,” Pauletta said.

“Sandra, give Pauletta your razor. Pauletta, come and stand here. Threaten me with the razor. Sandra, where were you, as the attacker?”

“Getting my oil changed.”

“And what did you want from Pauletta?”

“To make her weep,” Sandra said matter-of-factly. Weep. Very biblical. Very melodramatic. I’m special, her tone implied. My life is worse than anyone here can possibly imagine. Except you, of course. But I was tired of her nonsense.

“All right,” I said to Pauletta, who was staring at Sandra. “We’re in a garage. Pauletta, you’re going to try and make me weep.”

“I don’t . . . Okay.” She waved the polystyrene self-consciously. “Kneel down, bitch. Kneel right here.”

“Okay,” I said, putting my hands up in the universal “Hey, whatever you say” gesture. “Just tell me what you want.”

“I’m gonna make you cry.” Her hand went to an imaginary zipper. Always the same. Too many movies. “Get on your knees.”

“Right,” I said, pretending to be about to go down on one knee, and then started to retch.

“Eeeuw!” Pauletta said, and stepped back.

“There. That’s a distraction. Other distractions could include picking your nose . . .”

“Gross!”

“. . . drooling, shouting, acting like a crazy person. The point is to break your attacker’s vision of the event. Don’t let him orchestrate. Don’t, ever, buy into his world.” They weren’t getting it. “In this instance, as soon as my attacker gestured towards his fly, it was clear he wanted close personal contact. He was having some kind of power and sex fantasy. Vomit has probably never figured in them. Vomit is visceral: wet and hot and stinking. Nothing like the vision he’s been constructing for months, years, decades. The point of vomiting or picking your nose is to break his vision of you. You are not a victim. Don’t act like one.”

Jennifer looked as though she wanted to cry. Tonya seemed confused. “Which part don’t you understand?”

“Me, I don’t understand why you’re so pissy today,” Nina said.

“Pauletta wanted to ask a question earlier and you just steamrollered over her.”

“Yeah,” Pauletta said.

It was true. I didn’t want to be here, in the closed basement. I wanted to be outside, bare feet in the grass, breathing fresh air. But I had agreed to teach these women. No one else would. “I apologize. Pauletta, what was your question?”

“I was wondering, when you said you have to know what they want and pick your moment to act. What did you mean? How do we know what he wants?”

“Yeah,” Nina said. “You said no one is a mind-reader.”

“That’s right. No one is a mind-reader. You don’t have to be. With an attacker with a weapon, you most probably won’t even have to ask. Just listen.”

They were nodding even before I could explain, taking my word for it. I said, “Most attackers who arm themselves do it because they’re nervous. If they’re nervous, they’re very likely to be verbal. They’ll be talking from the first second they threaten you: ‘Give me your purse, lady, give me your purse, put the fucking purse on the ground,’ and so on. That’s the simple situation; if someone says that, nine times out of ten the best thing to do is to give them the purse and they’ll go away. But you can’t always trust what someone is saying. For example, if your attacker is saying, ‘Don’t scream, don’t say a word, I’m not going to hurt you, keep quiet and I won’t hurt you,’ you might not want to believe them, because, generally, if someone is saying something over and over again, it’s for a reason. It means they’re thinking about it.”

“Even if they’re saying the opposite thing?” Kim sounded more puzzled than skeptical.

“Yes. You’ll be able to tell the difference.”

“How?”

“You will know. You’ll feel it.” The body always knows. “Feeling it, knowing it, is the easy part. The hard part is trusting that knowledge and acting on it.”

“I don’t understand,” Therese said.

“It’s women’s intuition,” Katherine said.

Suze snorted.

“Women’s intuition makes it sound like magic, and it’s not. In reality such knowledge, a visceral understanding of a situation—you could even say empathy itself—is based on a biological system. Your mirror neurons.”

They looked perfectly blank.

“Tonya, you and Suze and Christie, go get me three of those chairs, and, Pauletta and Nina, bring the bench. Chairs here, bench here, as though these are stools by a bar. Sandra, bring me my satchel, please, then sit opposite me. Therese, you sit there, you’re drinking quietly, idly watching me and Sandra talking while we drink.” I rummaged in the satchel, found a big flat-ended Magic Marker, and set it on the bench so that it stood up. “Imagine Sandra and I have shot glasses and this”—I gestured at the marker—“is a bottle of whiskey. We’re just drinking and talking. Everyone is relaxed. We’re talking quietly. Therese can’t hear a thing we’re saying.” I leaned confidentially towards Sandra, and she adopted a matching pose. “I pick up the bottle, like so, to pour. Then suddenly I stiffen, and start to hold the bottle differently.” When I changed my grip Sandra swayed slightly: a sudden, instinctual urge to move backwards, out of harm’s way, negated by her conscious mind. “What’s going on? Therese?”

“I don’t know.”

“Trust your first instinct.”

“Looks like you’re about to slam that bottle across his, her face.”

“Anyone disagree?”

None of them was ready to commit, either way, though it was clear from their body language—tilted heads, hands clasped in the small of the back—that they knew what Therese knew, they just didn’t understand how they knew and they weren’t ready to say so.

“Therese is exactly right. I was getting a better grip, getting ready to break this bottle on Sandra’s face. You all knew that, instinctively.” Sandra in particular, but she had also learnt from long experience not to fight back because she was never going to make her defiance permanent, never going to run away and get to safety, and in the long run, the more she resisted, the worse her beating would be. “You saw the way I changed grip, and the act of watching me do that triggered a cascade of signals in your inferior parietal cortex.”

And I’d thought they’d looked blank before.

“You’ve probably all seen the way children imitate things to understand them. They’ll pretend to roll out a pie crust right along with you, they make noises and pretend to change gears as you drive. This happens in your brain, too. When we see someone pick up a bottle, a whole set of nerve fibers, called mirror neurons, pretend to be picking up the bottle, too. Whether you’re actually picking up the bottle or just watching someone do it, those neurons fire in the same pattern. Your body understands intimately how it feels. So when I shift grip, your brain shifts grip, too. And these mirror neurons are hooked into your limbic system, to the part of your brain that handles emotions. So your brain knows what it means when I’m turning the bottle like that. You know, deep down, in that intuitive part of you, what’s going on, in a way that your conscious mind probably doesn’t.”

Katherine looked thoroughly confused.

“You can look it up when you go home. For now, think of the mirror neurons as re-creating the experience of others inside ourselves. We feel others’ actions and sensations in our own cortex, in our own body, as though we ourselves are having those sensations, doing those things. In a very real way, we are doing those things. Think of your mirror neurons, your hunches, your intuition as a powerful adviser, an interpreter.”

“So,” Nina said slowly, “when you said the first week that no one is a mind-reader, you lied.”

Next time I taught this kind of class, I was going to do things differently. Completely differently.

“Well?”

Next time. I set that aside to consider later. “Think of the two concepts as complementary. The body knows, the body doesn’t lie. But our conscious mind doesn’t always want to believe what it knows. It’s not convenient. This is true for an attacker, too. They will tell themselves a story about how the attack will go. They’ll ignore what they know—they’ll ignore the mirror neurons telling them that you don’t want to talk to them, that you don’t want to be their friend—and believe what’s convenient. Because they don’t want to hear what you have to say they’ll pretend you’re not saying it, so it’s good to state your wishes and intentions clearly.”

“Loud and often,” Kim said with the half smile that meant she was thinking of her children.

“If you say something clearly and specifically to a potential attacker, two things will result: One, he won’t be able to pretend to himself that he doesn’t know you don’t want his attentions. Two, you yourself won’t be able to pretend that everything’s fine. Your conscious and subconscious mind will be aligned. That’s a very powerful feeling.”

“The power of the righteous,” Sandra said.

Silence.

“It could be described that way, yes: knowing you’re doing the right thing, even if others don’t understand. Sometimes self-defense or the defense of others requires actions that no one understands. Sometimes you have to do them anyway.”

Everyone pondered that.

“Now, let’s go back a little, to the importance of knowing what your attacker intends. Any ideas about why that’s important?”

They all shook their heads.

“It’s important to know what they intend so that you can judge whether the situation will get more or less dangerous, more or less opportune for you to act. For example, Suze, what do you want?”

She blinked.

“You’re threatening Christie with an ice pick. Why? What do you want?”

“Okay, yes. Her money.”

I looked at her polystyrene. She raised it menacingly. “All right. Christie, what did I say about ice picks?”

“Good for stabbing, not cutting or throwing or bludgeoning.”

I smiled. I hadn’t said anything about throwing; she’d come up with that one all on her own. “All of which means your attacker has to be very close indeed to do you any terrible damage. So what would you do?”

“Throw my purse on the ground and run.”

“Good. Why?”

“Because.”

“Think about it.”

“Just because.” I waited. “Because he’s mentioned money?” I nodded. “So throwing the purse would be a distraction?”

“Yes. Excellent. Because even if he wants more than money, you know money is on his mind because he’s mentioned it. If you judge it’s time to act immediately—and this sounds like a situation in which it might be—a distraction is often a good first step. Then you remove yourself from danger. Nine times out of ten that will mean what?”

“Run,” Katherine said.

“It depends,” Tonya said.

“Yes,” I said.

“But which?” Jennifer said. “It can’t be both.”

“It is both. Everything always depends. In the absence of other data, in this imaginary mugger scenario, leaving if you can is a good option. This is an example of a situation where it appears to be a good idea to act immediately, whether by running or engaging. Other examples of times to do that are when you think your attacker plans to put you in an even more dangerous situation, where your options will be narrowed. For example, if he traps you by your car and instead of saying, Give me your keys, he says, Get in the car and drive me.”

“What about, what about if . . .” Jennifer couldn’t bring herself to say it. She was very pale. The make-believe KA-BAR hung loosely in the hand at her side.

“What if he wants to rape or torture you?”

I think she nodded but her neck was so stiff with tension it was difficult to tell. I’d never had this problem with rookies. I thought for a moment.

“Jennifer, I want you to relax, if you can, and breathe. I’m going to ask you to imagine some bad things, but they’re not real.” I looked at the others.

“We’re all right here,” Nina said, and stood close enough for Jennifer to feel her body heat. “No one’s going to hurt you.”

Suze stepped up, too. “We’d kill the fucker.”

Jennifer smiled tremulously.

“So. Jennifer, you’re planning to rape Therese.” I raised my eyebrows at Therese: Are you all right with this? She nodded and, too late, I remembered that Therese was probably one of those who had answered yes on the have-you-been-assaulted exercise. There again she was confident and contained, she had trained with guns, she had what-iffed. With luck she wouldn’t have a meltdown. “You have a KA-BAR. It’s big, it’s frightening. You have it at Therese’s throat. You want to rape her. She knows that”— again I checked with Therese, who nodded minutely—“and she’s too frightened to do anything but what she’s told. What do you do now?”

“I don’t, I don’t . . .”

“Rape. What does it involve?”

“Sex.”

“How can you have sex if you’re both fully clothed?”

“Oh. Well. Okay.” She jabbed her polystyrene in Therese’s general direction. “Take your clothes off!”

Therese, also pale now, put her hands to the buttons of her polo shirt.

“See how we’re all staring at that, waiting to see if she’ll actually take off her shirt? Someone who is contemplating rape will be staring, too. His focus will be split now between the weapon he’s holding and the delicious-ness of getting a grown woman to be his puppet. This would be an excellent moment for Therese to act. But let’s say she understands that there will be an even better moment soon. So let’s imagine that she’s taken off all her clothes. Now what?”

“Now I guess I rape her.”

“So will you push her against the wall? Onto the ground? Let’s try the wall.” The class parted like the Red Sea and Therese walked to the wall.

Most stranger rapes are fast and brutal, an overwhelming battering force, with no time to think, only to act immediately. Violence, like love, always happens when you least expect it. But that was not an analogy I wanted to use in a self-defense class.

Therese stood, back against the wall.

Most rapists who preyed on a stranger literally couldn’t face their victim. But this wasn’t a real-life reenactment. This was a lesson.

“So, Jennifer, now what?”

Jennifer swallowed.

“To fuck her from there your dick would have to be about a yard long,” Pauletta said.

Jennifer looked involuntarily at her crotch and everyone grinned.

“Pauletta’s right. You’re going to have to get very close. Let’s . . . Therese, you step out. I’ll take over.” Therese, stiff-legged with tension, pushed herself away from the wall. “Jennifer, would you like someone else to take over for you?”

She shook her head.

“All right then,” I said to her. “You know I won’t let you hurt me. You know I won’t hurt you.”

She nodded.

“Where’s your knife?” She showed it to me uncertainly. She was going to need some direction. “Put it against my throat.” I turned to the rest of the class. “Now what would he do?”

“Whip out his whanger,” said Nina.

“Can you pretend to do that?” I said as gently as I could to Jennifer.

She looked down again at her crotch.

“At this point he’s distracted again. This would be a good time to take some action.”

“But what if he was strangling you, too?” Katherine said.

Pauletta hooted. “He can’t strangle her, hold a knife at her throat, and pull out his dick at same time. He’s a rapist, not a three-armed superschlong. ”

I could have kissed Pauletta but settled for smiling with everyone else. “That’s absolutely right. So this is an ideal moment to do something. What?” Blank. “Let’s try it. Everyone without a weapon, against the wall. Everyone with a weapon, put it against your partner’s cheek. Closer, Suze, you’re not even touching her face with that ice pick. So, now, those against the wall. He’s fumbling with his zipper—everyone, put your hands on your fly.” No one moved. Southern women. I sighed. “Okay, just hook your thumb into your waistband and let the hand dangle in roughly the right place. Good. Now, remember, a weapon has no power in and of itself. If you knock away the arm holding the weapon, you’ve knocked away the weapon. Give that a try.”

No one moved. “How would you do it?” Katherine said.

I gestured her away from the wall and took her place under Tonya’s bottle. “It’s always best to knock the weapon away from your body, not towards it or across it. So here I would knock her right arm away from me to my left, her right. If she had the bottle on my other cheek,” I tapped Tonya’s wrist and pointed; she shifted the bottle obligingly, “I’d want to knock it away and to my right, her left. Think about that for a minute.” I could see them mentally thinking right, then no, left, no, right. “A forearm block is best. If the bottle is here, on my right cheek, I would use a left forearm block.” I demonstrated in ultra slow motion as I talked. “See how that means I twist to my right, and that moves my right cheek back out of reach of the bottle and at the same time presents less of my body towards my attacker as a target.”

Lots of frowns. Clearly too much information at once.

“Just remember to knock away from your body.” I demonstrated again, very slowly. “Try it.” I gestured Katherine back into place and walked up and down the line of pairs. “Slowly, very slowly. Imagine it’s a game of slow motion. Pivot, bump your forearm into theirs. Yes, good.” It wasn’t, but it would get better. “No, Pauletta, see how that drags the razor right across your face if you knock it across your body and Sandra’s? You want to spin the other way, knock with your left arm, to your right.”

“But I’m right-handed.”

“All right. Sandra, for now, hold the razor against her other cheek.”

Sandra gave me an amused we-know-it-wouldn’t-be-this-convenient look, and swapped hands. She was beginning to annoy me.

“Now,” I said to Pauletta, “try again. Pivot, yes, cross slam, yes. Excellent. But try to use the outside of your forearm, like this.”

“Why?” said Pauletta, as though it were just another detail I was using deliberately to confuse her. Sandra maintained her veiled-secret expression; she already knew.

“Because there are fewer important nerves, blood vessels, and tendons to be damaged on the outside. Also, it will hurt less when you take the impact on muscles when you’re hitting as hard as you can. Also,” I said, raising my voice to the whole class, “when you move, yell. Not only will it remind you to breathe, it will be a further distraction to your attacker. You can never have too many distractions or too much noise.” I plowed ahead before they could get twisted up about that. “We’ll do it together. On the count of three. Okay. Knives on cheeks. One. Deep breath. Focus. Three. Yell! And pivot. Slam. Excellent. And again. Knives. Breathe. Yell and pivot. And again.”

“Ow!” said Jennifer.

“Slow motion, Therese, but very good.” Pauletta had hit Sandra twice as hard, but Sandra hadn’t made a murmur. “And again.”

“Ow,” Katherine said, too, as Tonya’s bottle ran across her throat for the second time.

“Try again,” I said.

She did. Same result. “I can’t do this,” Katherine said.

“Sure you can,” said Tonya.

“I can’t.”

“Not yet,” I said. “That’s why you have to practice.”

“If Tonya was a great big guy and that was a real bottle, do you think I’d really have a chance?”

“Yes.”

“It’s ridiculous. I can’t do this.”

“All right,” I said.

“All right? All right?!”

“I’m not going to force you.”

“I just, I want . . . I want you to teach us how to not get hurt.”

“Infallibly? I can’t. No one can. There is no perfect security. Yes, most men are taller and stronger than most women. That’s not the point. You can be seven feet tall, and in fighting trim, and there will always be someone out there who is bigger and stronger and faster. The point is to do the best you can, then stop worrying.”

“Stop worrying? I dream about this stuff every night now. I worry that someone is lurking under my car, that they’re assembling clues from my e-mail conversations, that they’ll watch my every movement and rape me on the subway platform.”

“The fact that you’re worrying about these things now makes it less likely for them to happen. You’ll never be carjacked by someone lying underneath your car because now you look.”

“Maybe you’ll die of worry,” Suze muttered.

“I heard that.”

“Hey, then at least you’re not deaf, just stupid.”

“All right,” I said. “Everyone, swap roles. Five minutes. Then we’re going to sit.”

When they were done, I carried around the bin so they could ceremonially throw away their polystyrene weapons.

“You did well. Yes, even you, Katherine. You’ve all learnt a lot in the last six weeks. You’re not perfect killing machines, no, but there again, that was never the goal.”

“Hey, speak for yourself,” said Suze. Surprisingly, Therese nodded agreement.

“My goal is to make sure you’ve thought and planned and practiced so that you can relax in everyday life. Here’s something that might help.” I handed out the list I’d compiled after last week. “Read it carefully and we’ll talk about it next week.”

“Hell,” said Nina, flipping the page, “now we’re all going to die of worry.”

“Next week?” said Jennifer. “Next week’s a holiday. I’m going out of town.”

“Then the week after is fine.”

“We should get together anyhow,” Katherine said. “Have a picnic or something. Leave the guys at home.”

“A field trip,” Nina said.

“I’ll be out of town,” Jennifer said again.

“I’m gonna be here,” Suze said.

“And me,” “Me too,” “I’m not going anywhere.”

They were all looking at me.

“How about my place on Lake Lanier,” Therese said. “A social event, not a class, so it doesn’t matter if some people can’t make it. A covered dish.”

EIGHT

WE DRANK CHAMPAGNE. KICK WAS AT THE SIX-BURNER STOVE, STIRRING A HUGE pot with a wooden spoon. “The stew sticks if I don’t watch it,” she said. She was wearing the same striped trousers and white T-shirt, but no sandals. Her feet didn’t look cold. I sat on a hard chair by the counter.

The windows were open but screened. The breeze had died to a sigh and the night that seeped in was soft with moisture, potent with change. In the low atmospheric pressure the voices of moviegoers leaving the theaters on 45th, the sudden metallic judder of engines flaring to life, the music from the Jitterbug restaurant and Murphy’s Pub carried clearly and mixed with earthy blues from her CD player. The city-lit sky swam with clouds, sleek as seals.

The kitchen was big, and open, all cherry and pine—even the ceiling was pine—and continued to the dining room. I carried my champagne over to the dining room windows. Judging by the slight unevenness of the floor and the change in windows, it was an extension built less than ten years ago. It jutted out over a patio. A pear tree rustled against the left-hand window. On the other side, a little farther away, the silhouette of a cherry tree overhung the extension and the garage. Beyond the patio the garden seemed stepped, maybe to a lawn.

The house smelled like Spain in April: bread and olive oil and simmering beans and lemon juice and garlic. Some kind of unctuous meat roasting. If it were Spain it might be kid, but it was probably lamb. I went back into the kitchen. My mouth watered.

“Ah,” she said, “want something right away?”

I nodded.

She got two small dishes from a cupboard near my head, and turned off the gas under the pot. “Spoons in that drawer in front of you. Napkins in the drawer underneath.” She got busy with a ladle. “Here.” She handed me a bowl without ceremony. “Pond-bottom stew.”

It was a reddish-brown soup. I put it on the counter and handed her a spoon. She refused the napkin and just ate a couple of mouthfuls, leaning back against the stove.

I spread a napkin on my lap and balanced the bowl carefully.

“Spilled stuff cleans up. Just taste it.”

I dipped my spoon into the stew cautiously. “It smells a bit like fasolada. ”

“Same basic principle. Lots of olive oil and celery and garlic, some lemon, but instead of just white beans, I’ve added kidney beans and carrots. Really it’s a fall stew, hearty, warming. But it seemed like something you’d enjoy. When it’s cooked as long as it should, it gets sort of sludgy, like something you’d scrape off the bottom of a pond. Eat.”

I ate.

“Well?”

It tasted as fresh and clean as a shoot bursting free of winter-hard dirt. It filled me with hope that I might enjoy food again. I had the ridiculous urge to burst into tears.

“Do you like it?”

I showed her my empty bowl. She smiled. I eyed the pot on the stove.

“No. No more right now. I’ve made half a dozen things. I thought we’d try a bit of this and bit of that, just graze, see what works.”

Graze. Maybe that roasting smell wasn’t for me. “Is it all vegetarian?”

She smiled. “You don’t strike me as a vegetarian. Let’s move to the table so it doesn’t get messy.”

There was no ceremonial laying of places or careful positioning of silverware. No candles, no shimmering crystal. Just the music, and the champagne, and the food.

We began with salad: greens and sprouts and grated carrots and sunflower seeds. “Try both dressings,” she said. “This one is tofu and basil.” It was astonishing—creamy and smooth and clean. “The vinaigrette’s flaxseed oil and balsamic.” Totally different, warm and aromatic, as subtle and rich as cello music.

I didn’t say anything, but I didn’t have to. Her cheeks pinked with pleasure.

“Now for the hummus.” It didn’t smell like any hummus I’d ever encountered: toasty, almost sweet, but also tangy, with the familiar sting of lemon and garlic. She slathered it on black bread and handed it to me. “Here.”

I bit into it. It was coarse and hearty, much rougher than any hummus I’d ever had before.

“And here—” She crossed in three light steps to the fridge, brought back a bowl and a jar of mayonnaise, and went back to the cupboard for two dishes. Her hips were round and tight with sheathed muscle.

“Homemade cole slaw,” she said, and mixed up the shredded vegetables with mayonnaise in her dish. “Put it on the hummus.” She heaped it on the bread-and-hummus mixture. “Here. Try it.” I tipped and mixed and heaped. “Just pick it up. It’s messy, but that can’t be helped. At least you’re not wearing that nice dress.”

I bit into the bread and hummus and cole slaw.

“I thought you’d enjoy the different textures.”

I did. I didn’t know how she’d known that I would. The cole slaw fell off, smearing over my hand and plopping onto my plate. I picked it up with my fingers, finished it, made myself another slice.

“How much weight have you lost?” she said.

“I don’t know.” I chewed a few more times, swallowed. I wanted to stuff the world in my mouth.

“You like food.”

“Yes.”

“It must have been hard.”

"Yes.” I hadn’t realized just how hungry I’d been. Still was. “Thank you.”

She nodded. “When you were talking on the set, I thought: It sounds like what happens to people’s tastes when they have chemo. And I know what to do about that. It’s partly a saturated-fat thing. Stick with things like olive oil and flaxseed oil. Avoid your dairy and your eggs and your beef, especially aged beef.”

“And broccoli.”

“Yeah, well, I said partly. The rest . . . I don’t know. But have you ever noticed that broccoli sometimes smells sort of fishy?”

I nodded, surprised.

“Whatever makes it smell like that is one of the things that your taste buds, or what’s left of them, won’t like. Very, very fresh seafood should taste okay. Oysters, for example.” She grinned. “Hold on.”

She disappeared into the living room. The music stopped and restarted with Ella Fitzgerald singing Cole Porter. . . . oysters down in Oyster Bay do it.

“The taste buds,” I said, when she returned. “Chemo destroys them?”

“Yep.” She settled back on her chair. “Though I’ve never heard of it happening so fast, or after just one dose.”

“And does it come back, the taste?”

“Most likely. Might take a while, though. Months. Even a year or two.”

A year or two . . . Let’s do it, let’s . . .

“Until then, distract them with other tastes, anything aromatic is good. Ginger. Garlic. Lemon. Vinegar. Tomato. Thai, Indian, Greek, northern Italian. And texture. I guessed that you’d like things that contrasted, that were unexpected: cold and crunchy cole slaw with room-temperature tangy hummus, unrefined bread. Also something you could build, literally. You like being in charge.”

“An arrogant toad?”

“Well, no. But you looked like you might be, that first time. And then you came hammering on my door—but you seemed so, I don’t know, reduced. I wanted to make you feel better, but I couldn’t even feed you. Though the crack about how awful I looked made me worry less about that.”

“Yes.” The gift of tongues.

“Is it true you’re paying everyone’s hospital expenses?”

Rusen. I shook my head.

“It’s not true?”

“No. It is true.” I just didn’t want everyone to know.

“And then I saw how you dealt with that rent-a-cop. And you, I don’t know, you looked different in a dress.” She poked at a shred of cabbage on her plate.

“You look different in shoes.” Inane. She seemed to bring it out in me. But she didn’t look up from toying with the cabbage and I understood that what mattered here wasn’t the words. I poured the last of the champagne. “I have more in the car. If you like.”

Now she looked up. “What, you always drive around with a six-pack of bubbly in the backseat?”

“Not always.” I stood, waited. She nodded.

Outside, I could still hear the hum of pub music from Murphy’s. Judging by the smell, someone across the street was getting high. I felt every stir of light Seattle air on my forehead and cheeks. The food was pleasantly present in my stomach, but did nothing to blunt the other, growing hunger.

I went back in. Definitely lamb. “It smells like Catalonia at Easter.”

“Never been there,” she said. “Been just about everywhere else, but never Spain. Or France.”

I put one bottle in the fridge and opened the other. I would have to buy her a champagne bucket. “Can you cook French food, too?”

“I can cook anything.”

I can cook anything. I studied her, one bare foot tucked underneath her, the other swinging back and forth, and remembered the scent of sleepy, naked woman.

She flushed. “It’s my job.”

“Yes,” I said.

“At least it is, now.”

“Yes.”

“Why did you come?”

I gestured at the food, but she shook her head.

“No. The first time. At three in the morning. Why did you come?”

Because she had stained her white coat and I wanted to know if anyone would wash it for her. Because she needed someone to bring her tea when she was tired, hold her when she saw her career falling about her in ruins.

And that wasn’t me. Couldn’t be me.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I know. I got the flowers.” She leaned forward. In the slanting light the tops of her breasts looked as if they had been dusted with gold. “But why did you come?”

She leaned closer, tucked her hair behind her ears. She missed a strand. I reached out and tucked it back for her. It felt as slippery as a satin camisole.

“Tell me why.”

I tucked hair back behind her other ear. “I was angry.” I reached for her hand. She tensed slightly, then let me lift it to my mouth. Her knuckles smelled of garlic and, faintly, that naked, sleepy, buttery-toast scent my back brain was already beginning to recognize. I turned her hand over. Blood bloomed under the skin of her breast and throat. I kissed the center of her palm. Her head fell back, and I caught it. The back of her skull felt as small and hard as a cat’s. I lifted her hand again, and this time kissed the inside of her wrist. All those nerves. She made an unconscious pushing motion with her feet on the floor. Her hips lifted slightly. I bent until my lips were inches from hers. Her breath pistoned in and out. Her eyes were black.

I kissed her. It was like opening my mouth to a waterfall; it fisted through me. I pushed the table to one side, picked her up, and laid her on the rug.

“God,” she said hoarsely. “God.”

TWO HOURS later I found myself kneeling on the floor next to the rug. The CD player had turned itself off. The wooden floor was cool on my shins. Kick was on her back, naked.

“God,” she said. She sat up. There was a carpet burn on her chin. She shivered.

“You’re cold.” I handed her a random assortment of clothes, hers and mine. She stared at them blindly. “Here.” I sorted through the heap, found her T-shirt. It was inside out. I pulled the sleeves carefully back through the shoulder holes. “Lift your arms.” Dazed, she did, and I slipped the T-shirt over her head. Her face emerged, blinking and puzzled, then frowning.

“Tell me you didn’t plan that,” she said.

I shook my head.

“You’re right,” she said. “Who the fuck could plan that?” She found her underwear. Paused. “The lamb will be ruined.”

IT WASN’T. It was more well done than lamb should be, but it was good, fatty and strong and grass-fed, and we ate, and talked carefully, and gradually she started to flush again, but when I reached out she tensed.

I put my hand in my lap and waited. “You don’t live here,” she said.

“No.”

She got up and closed the windows, and put on the kettle, and brought me a cut-glass plate of rich, dark French chocolate, and stood next to me, hip against my shoulder, and I breathed in her sharp, buttery wood-smoke scent and stared at the chocolate, and told myself it didn’t matter.

She stood, and I sat, very still, and the kettle began to rumble. I turned my face so that my cheek rested against her thigh. The faint vibration of her femoral pulse alongside her femur became a trip-hammer. Her legs shook. I put my arm around her waist.

I meant simply to steady her, but she softened into me, almost sagged, and my arm tightened, and my need, and she let herself go so that I was holding her up with one arm and pulling her pants down with the other.

“Bed,” I said, and my voice was tight and savage. She pointed at the stairwell, and I carried her.

THE SKYLIGHT showed a night sky of brass and acid. The thick scar that snaked through the crease between the top of her thigh and her hip bone looked dark grey, though downstairs it had been the color of raspberry sorbet. To my fingertips it felt like soft old leather trim. It was a clear, clean incision.

“How long has it been?”

“Two years.” She was very still, her face in shadow.

“Does it still hurt?”

I felt her shrug.

I kissed it. The skin under my hand moved as the muscles in her belly tightened. I slid on top of her. Kissing her was not like kissing Julia, who had been all length and plum softness, and whose messages had been very clear. Kick was like a powerful trapped beast. She stirred restlessly, one hand in the small of my back pulling me closer, one on my shoulder pushing me away. I eased to one side, weight on my right elbow, head propped on my hand. I stroked her belly. The muscle loosened. She sighed. The sigh sounded as though it had a smile in it. I smiled back in the dark. She ran both hands up my left arm.

“You have scars, too. But they all feel different.”

“That one was a bullet.”

She explored it carefully. No one had done that before. “When?” “Almost exactly a year ago. In Norway.”

“Norway.”

“Yes.”

“And this one?” She stroked the thin line just above my waist, on the left side.

“A knife. Two or three weeks before the bullet.”

She nodded. I dipped the tip of my little finger in her belly button, stroked my thumb over the jut of her bottom rib. Then the next one, and the next. I ran the back of my hand under the curve of her breasts. Her breathing was rhythmic and strong. I kissed her. This time both hands slid to the small of my back and tugged. I eased on top of her, slid my arm carefully under her head.

“Ummn,” she said, and began to move, and I moved with her. This time, when we were done, she was definitely smiling.

I lay on my back and she knelt by me and ran her hands up over my face, down the sides of my head, my neck, across my collarbones, down to my breasts, around and around, down to my waist, up again to my neck. The sky had softened to the color of old buttercup petals.

“And this,” she said, touching the scar on my throat. “This must have been very bad.”

“That was just six months ago.”

“I didn’t know owning things could be so dangerous.”

“The danger is an unavoidable by-product.”

“Of owning things?”

It seemed to be working that way with the warehouse. “I used to be police.”

“But not now.”

“No.”

Silence while we both thought our own thoughts. “Why did you come?”

“Because you invited me.”

Her laugh, a silvery, delighted squeal, like the laugh of a six-year-old thrilled by some childish wickedness, astonished me. I sat up. She poked me with her elbow. “To Seattle.”

“To sort out my real estate problems. To get out of Atlanta for a while. To see my mother and meet her new husband.”

“Ah.”

“What do you mean, ‘ah’?”

“She’s a somebody, isn’t she?”

“You met her?”

“I saw her, at the hospital. Everyone paid attention. And then there were all those no-mentions of you in the press. Tell me about her.”

She has hands like mine, I wanted to say. “Her name is Else Torvingen.” It suddenly occurred to me to wonder whether she had changed it when she married. No. She hadn’t changed it when she married my father. “She’s the Norwegian ambassador to the Court of Saint James’s.”

“The court of—The ambassador to England? She got the job because she’s rich?”

“She’s not rich.”

“But you are.”

“From my father. They divorced when I was thirteen. He died three years ago. He left me—It was a surprise. The amount.” It still was, sometimes.

“So what’s she doing here?”

“Semi-official trade negotiation. Computers, mainly. And seeing me.”

“But you—”

“Live in Atlanta. Yes. Like Dornan.”

The tension ran through her like a current. She pushed herself away, got up, and found her robe. She stood by the window, looking out.

“Kick?”

“I’m having dinner with him tomorrow.”

I got up and stood a little behind her. I wanted to pull her to me, cradle her, but I knew she would pull away.

“That’s Queen Anne Hill,” she said, pointing south across rooftops to three radio towers blinking with red lights. It looked better from this perspective. “And down there is Gas Works Park. During the day, seaplanes come and go, landing on Lake Union.”

“Kick.”

“You should come here and see that sometime before you go away, back to Atlanta.” Her arms were wrapped around her body. I couldn’t tell if she was cold or feeling defensive.

“Kick,” I said again. “Kick.” She turned slowly. “I’d like that, like to go to the park. I like you.”

“He’s a kind man.”

“Yes.” I held out my arms, and she stepped in and I held her.

THE SMELL of baking woke me a little after nine. I dressed and went downstairs. Kick was taking a tray of muffins from the oven. Her hair was damp. I hadn’t even heard the shower.

She looked a little tired, but the smile she flashed was bright: it was morning; all doubts and revelations of the night before were done. “Banana raisin oatmeal rice flour muffins. Invented fresh this morning. But you woke up too soon. They have to cool.”

“I should go shower.”

“Do it later. Open the windows, would you?”

She disappeared into the living room, and a moment later oboe music flowed through the kitchen.

Sunshine and baking had made the kitchen and dining room warm. A house fly explored the windowsill, back and forth, like a confused, hunch-backed old man. I pushed up the two side windows but it couldn’t get out because of the screens. The breeze was cool and soft on my face.

She had cleaned up the kitchen, moved the table back in place, showered, dressed, and baked while I’d lain naked and blissfully unaware. I had relaxed completely. I had a nasty feeling that I knew why.

The kitchen began to smell of . . . “What is that?”

“Nutmeg. And smoked salmon—it should be haddock, but I didn’t have any.” She opened a plastic tub. “And brown rice. And—pass that dish, would you? Thanks—boiled egg.”

Kedgeree.

She stirred, turned down the heat. “You remember where the napkins and silverware are.”

I laid the table. Now that I wasn’t dazed with drugs or hormones, I saw that it was an old piece, solid cherry carcass, with a polished mahogany veneer. I found cork place mats piled on the stretcher of a battered-looking secretaire in the corner, gave us two each. Green cotton napkins. Knife, fork, spoon.

She dished onto two plates. Carried them to the table. Nodded at the kettle, from which steam was still easing, which I took to mean Make the tea. A small teapot, some green tea, and two beautiful mugs stood ready. I brought the pot and mugs to the table. Put a mug each on a place mat, got out another for the pot. Sat.

Albinoni streamed as clear as the sun into the dining room. The old mahogany glowed like bronze. The flatware winked. The smoked salmon in the kedgeree was flecked with nutmeg and nestled amid nutty, moist rice. Kick wore blue and grey.

Soon I’d be flying back to Atlanta with Dornan.

“You look as though you don’t know if you’re in heaven or hell.”

“Kedgeree is my favorite breakfast food.”

She smiled, as playful as an otter. I leaned over and kissed her. The fly ran back and forth. I poured tea for us both. This was where I asked her what she was doing tonight, but I already knew. The silence grew. The otter slowly submerged.

“Will I see you on the set this afternoon?” I said.

“I’ll be busy.”

“I see.”

“No, you don’t. We have location shots.” The otter popped back up. “But tomorrow is another day. Now I have to eat and run.”

She ate at lightning speed, with clean, deft movements of fork to mouth, cup to mouth, napkin to mouth and then plate, and rose from her chair like an acrobat, with no visible effort.

“You take your time.” She kissed me, not a millimeter of lip in the wrong place, not an ounce of weight on the wrong leg, perfectly balanced. She scrutinized me for a full two seconds, but gave no hint of what she thought. “Let me know how you like the muffins. Drop the latch on your way out,” she said, and left.

I finished my kedgeree, poured more tea, and listened to the rest of Albinoni.

TEN O’CLOCK. Sixty-nine degrees, light breeze, cheerful pedestrians. I drove carefully.

She had left me in her house. I could have done anything: stolen her things, searched out her secrets, fingered through her most personal possessions, spat in her milk. But she knew I wouldn’t. She probably knew I would look for airtight tubs to put away the remainder of the kedgeree; find a tin for the muffins; make sure the kettle was unplugged; rinse the dishes and turn on the dishwasher; make the bed. Turn off the CD player. Check that the lights and oven were off. Leave my cell phone number on her table. Just as she had known that I liked food with different textures. Just as she had known that I liked to wrap my arm around her waist and hold her tight against me as she moved. Just as I knew nothing of what she thought, or why.

I pulled over on Westlake, dialed her number, and after three rings got the machine.

“It’s Aud. It’s . . . There’s a fly. In the dining room. It can’t get out. You’ll probably have to take off the window screens. You’ll need a ladder to get at them from the outside. I can do it, if you like.”

Or she could just open the front door and shoo it out. Or catch it in her hands. I imagined her small hands cupping the fly. The scent of her fingers.

I’m having dinner with him tomorrow. I closed the phone. Stupid, stupid, my forebrain said. But another part of my brain, the old, animal limbic system, sat back on its heels, raised its face to the sun, and crooned. And, unbidden, the underside of my arms remembered the soft swell of her breasts as I turned her in bed, the press of her lips and slick of her tongue, and the car felt as alien as a mother ship.

A truck rumbled by, the driver singing to something on a classic rock station, looking pleased with and in charge of his world.

I shut my windows. Opened them again. Breathed in, deep and slow, and out again, long and slow and steady, using the muscles in my abdomen to force the air out in a steady hiss. In again, for a count of ten. Pause. Out, to ten. In. Out. Then I called Dornan.

It rang and rang. I imagined him looking at my number on his screen and deliberately turning it off. I hung up before his voice mail finished inviting me to leave a message.

IN MY suite I walked naked and dripping from the shower to my laptop, where I searched randomly through Norwegian and English dictionaries. Elske. Elsker. Forelske seg. That disposition or state of feeling with regard to a person that manifests itself in solicitude for the welfare of the object, and usually also in delight in his or her presence and desire for his or her approval; warm affection, attachment. The affection that subsides between lover and sweetheart and is the normal basis of marriage. The animal instinct between the sexes. Liker. To feel attracted to or favorably impressed by. Kjœreste. One who is loved illicitly . . .

I called Dornan again. This time I left a message.

WE MET for lunch at a bistro on First Avenue. The menu was aggressively French. I chose the soup—lentils and chicken livers, with a Rainier cherry compote—mainly because I couldn’t imagine how it would taste. It also had the sets of ingredients Kick had recommended.

We ate without saying much, and I wiped up the last traces of lentil and cherry with bread. “Good soup.”

“But it’s a shame about the service.”

“Yes.” West Coast hipsters trying to do French attitude.

“Seattle,” he said. “If you don’t like the weather, wait ten minutes; if you don’t like the service, wait ten minutes.”

It was Kick’s phrasing, Kick’s intonation; she could have been sitting between us. I didn’t know how to begin. How did friends talk about something like this?

The sun spilled right down the center of the avenue as we walked to the gallery. Before I met Julia, I never went to art galleries. When she died, I began to visit them, because they reminded me of her. Now it was merely a habit.

The gallery wasn’t as empty as I’d expected, but there were few enough people that we could move from painting to painting at our own pace. I worked along the right-hand wall, Dornan the left.

The heart-of-pine floor creaked as I walked from picture to picture. Hyperrealist still life in oils. It seemed to glisten, as though coated with glycerine. An American artist. Interesting, but not something I’d want in my house. A series of fuzzy-looking black-and-white lithographs of cityscapes viewed from second-story windows, empty industrial complexes, a stand of silver birches in the snow. None of them worth more than a minute. Two huge abstract French pieces, nine feet by six, of what looked like something between Christmas ornaments and the insides of a clock. Then a woman in a red silk Chinese robe, bending over a guitar, glass beads in her hair. I paused. It was ugly, drenched with hatred—the woman’s face wasn’t deformed, but it made me shudder—but the beads were irresistible; like a child, I wanted to scoop them up and put them in my mouth, and something about the light slanting across the floor intrigued me. I leaned in close. The brushwork was textured and confident. The next was by the same artist, a nude reclining on a couch, her back to the room. It was a twenty-first-century painting in the style of a nineteenth-century Russian or French master, every tassel of the velvet rope hanging from the bedpost, every strand of hair exquisitely rendered, yet the background was curiously abstract. The model’s profile was Asian, but the body was fleshy and Dutch. I went back to the first painting, and the block of text about the artist. Lu Jian Jun. Forty-two. Chinese, winner of several national prizes, now living in San Francisco.

I don’t know how long I stood before the third painting. At some point Dornan came and stood by my shoulder. Neither of us spoke for a while.

A woman in a silk robe leaned back in a chair and looked straight out. She formed a diagonal slash across the square canvas. Behind her was an antique dressing table, with beads piled on the distressed wood. The colors—her face, the robe, the slant of light across the floor, the jewels piled thickly on the dressing table, the table itself, the chair—were all the same palette: pinks, greens, and browns. I had no idea how he had done that. The pigment was brushed, and layered, and slathered—even, here and there, troweled. There were two places where it looked as though he had smeared it so forcefully he had cut through the canvas. But the woman was serene, a Chinese-American Mona Lisa. There was nothing to hint at the time period. It could have been the nineteenth century, or the twentieth, or the twenty-first. The woman could have been sixteen or twenty-five. She could have been a prostitute, staring into space after servicing a client, an actress who had just left the stage after a particularly fine performance, a young girl dreaming of her love. A face of many stories, some finished, some beginning.

Antique Dressing Table, 2002.

“She reminds me of Kick,” I said.

“Yes?” he said. “She is beautiful.”

Silence. “Do you like her?”

“Oh, yes, very much.”

“No. Dornan, do you like her?”

He met my gaze. His eyes were very blue. “I like her very much.”

“Will you—” I dropped my gaze, turned back to the painting. “Is it the kind of thing you would buy, do you think?”

“I couldn’t say. It would be a big decision, with many things to weigh carefully. Look now, look at this.” He tapped the price placard. “That’s more than I paid for my house six years ago.”

I struggled on doggedly. “But you like her.”

“I do. Though I wonder if she might look ridiculous on my wall. Maybe she’d be better suited to a glittering palace, to a great and terrible queen whose eyes are as pale as diamonds, who drinks bloodred wine, and trails a cloak of dark glamour.”

I didn’t know what to make of this fey mood. He was the one who was supposed to make conversations easier. “You could change your house.”

“Ah, but maybe I don’t want to change my house. Maybe I like it just as it is. Maybe when I come home at night I want comfort and the smell of coffee and to feel safe. But I’m not sure yet.”

“Maybe you’ll find out tonight.”

“Maybe I will.”

We stared at the painting. So beautiful but so flimsy, just daubs of oil on thin canvas. How did one keep such a fragile thing safe?

I dropped Dornan at his hotel, and then drove around for a while to find a video rental store. I talked to a pimply, concave-chested clerk about movie stunts and all-time best performances, and left with six DVDs, four of them featuring Kick.

I RERAN IN slow motion a scene of Kick dropping from a ninth-story window in what was meant to be London’s financial district but looked more like Chicago. Her face had been digitally erased and replaced by the star’s, but I would have recognized anywhere those shoulders and tight waist, the way she turned like an eel thrown through the air, as though she had all the time in the world.

I paused the film, and called my mother. She answered on the second ring. The sound quality was awful. I could hear traffic.

“Where are you?” I said.

“Just about to get into the car to drive to Redmond.”

“What’s on the agenda today?”

“More of the same. Security concerns. Details on limited source code sharing. Licensing.” Noise. Movement: the car.

“Yes,” I said. Traffic noise, cutting in and out as she started to move. She’d be sitting in the back, her driver in the front. “When you move back to Norway, won’t you have to drive yourself?”

Pause. “Aud? Are you all right?”

“Mor, when did you know?” Mor. Mother.

Noise. “Aud?”

But I knew the answer: you never knew. Love wasn’t a state change. Romance might be, and lust, and like, but they were just the preconditions. Love was the choice you made; day in, day out. I could choose no.

“Never mind. The night the police took me to Harborview. I assume you pulled some strings to keep my name from news reports.”

Traffic noise. “Yes.”

“I assume this was just reflex. I assume you wouldn’t mind if I correct the press’s lack of information?”

“No.” Noise. Muffled conversation. A suddenly better connection: she had asked the driver to pull over, so that we stayed on one cell. “You are an adult. You must feel free to tell them anything you think necessary. As always, though, I recommend caution.” Pause. “Are you all right?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

Silence.

“Yes. Yes, I’m fine. It’s just . . . There’s been some fallout for a woman who isn’t . . . I just want to make sure that no one else suffers who doesn’t have to.”

“I see. Aud, I’m busy for the next two hours, but would you like to join me for dinner?”

“And Eric?”

A longer silence. “No. Just you and me. You can tell me what you’ve been up to for the last couple of days, and we can talk some more about the newspapers. I might be able to be of some help.”

“Dinner, yes.” Help, no.

MINDY LEPTKE had a large corner cubicle, with a window view. She looked like a stoat: small and bright-eyed and probably vicious when cornered.

“I usually get the quirky stories, the ones where no one gets hurt and there’s some heartwarming moral at the end that makes everyone feel good while they swallow their last mouthful of coffee.”

I wondered how many of her readers that morning had paused, coffee hot in their mouths—did it taste just a little odd?—and got up to spit in the sink.

“But I persuaded the editor to let me go for it this time.” She tapped the issue of the Seattle Times with the page-three headline, “TV Pilot Poisoner, ” and its lurid tale of vomit and madness, followed the next day by an update on chemical analysis of the drugs, and a no-holds-barred graphics sidebar of just what happened to brain cells under that kind of toxic load.

“Excellent piece,” I said.

She nodded in satisfaction. “Espresso sales were down for nearly sixty hours.” She looked at the clock, no doubt wanting to go home. Everyone else had.

“But you didn’t get all of it.”

She shrugged. “You never do.”

“I want you to do a follow-up,” I said.

“There’s nothing to say.”

“What about a political exposé, tying together Seattle real estate developers, the influence of foreign governments on the media”—I hoped my mother would forgive me—“the film industry, and corrupt city and county councillors?”

“Your proof? No, wait, don’t tell me. You want me to find that, right?”

“No. I will.”

“Right.” She rolled her eyes. When I didn’t wither under her cynicism, she said, “What’s your interest in the matter?”

“I was one of the people who drank the coffee that day. Those people drugged me.”

“They drugged a lot of people.”

“I own the warehouse where it happened.”

She turned to her keyboard. Tap tap tap. “And you are?”

“Aud Torvingen.”

“Torvingen . . . Torvingen . . . Not seeing your name.” She fished a spiral notebook from the bag hanging over the back of her chair, flipped back a few pages, flipped forward one or two. “Nope. Some corporation owns the warehouse.”

“I own the corporation.”

“Can you prove that?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. We can come back to that.” She picked up a blue plastic pencil and twisted it until the lead popped out. “You say you drank the coffee prepared by Film Food?”

She didn’t have to check for that name. It was a good name, no more and no less than it had to be. Did Dornan make fun of it in front of Kick? “The coffee. Yes. I did.”

“How come you’re not on my list? I have sources both in the SPD and Harborview.”

“My mother is Else Torvingen, the Norwegian ambassador to the U.K.” I gave her a second to absorb that. “She has been in town just a few days.” Only a handful more to go.

“I see.” Now her pencil was poised. I wondered why she didn’t use a voice recorder. “And your name again is Aud Torvingen?”

“Yes.” I spelled it for her.

“And you’re saying your name was deliberately withheld from the media? ” As though CNN had been camping on my doorstep.

“No. Not in the sense that there was any particular reason for doing so. It’s more of a reflex action.” Tighten. Control. Assess. My mother’s PR mantra, or one of them. Another was: Drown them in unnecessary detail. “You see, if you grow up with a diplomat as a parent, they do everything they can to protect you from even a whiff of scandal, even if you’ve done nothing wrong, because your name is inevitably linked to theirs, and then theirs to their government. Diplomacy is all about low profile.” War with smiles and firm handshakes. “But in this case there’s no reason to keep it secret. I didn’t do anything illegal or unethical. Nor did my mother or the Norwegian government. I was a—” In this context there was no avoiding the word, and I’d said I would get her back her reputation. “I was a random victim. As was Victoria Kuiper, the proprietor of Film Food.”

“They withheld her name as well?”

“No. That’s the point. She and her company were named. You named her.”

“It sounds vaguely familiar.”

“But none of this was her fault, although it would be easy for most readers to infer otherwise. Her business is suffering. I want you to write something about that—about how it wasn’t her fault.” She wasn’t writing anything down. “You could set the record straight.”

“No one would care.”

“Make them. You could talk about her stunt career. You could write about her wonderful food.”

She was looking at her watch. It was almost six o’clock.

“How do you feel about heights?”

She shrugged.

“Stand on your desk.”

“What?”

“I want to help you understand something.”

“By standing on my desk.”

“Humor me.” I stood and pushed aside her mouse and telephone and a few sheets of paper. “I’ll help you up.” I held out my hand and looked as though it were the most normal thing in the world to ask someone to do.

She stood. “What about my shoes?”

They had broad, two-inch heels. Stable enough. “Leave them on. But put the pad down. Sit on the desk first, that’s right, then scoot over, get your feet under you, I’ll balance you, then . . . up you go.”

She stood there, swaying. She might have fallen if it were not for my hand on her hip, anchoring her. A pillowed hip, utterly unlike Kick’s.

“You are less than three feet off the ground. Feels farther, doesn’t it? A long, long way down. Perhaps you can feel your stomach churning just a little.” The power of suggestion. “Now imagine it’s a hundred feet. Kick Kuiper was the first woman to take a hundred-foot dive for film. That’s thirty or forty times higher than this. Higher than the whole building. Look out of the window. Imagine it.” The swaying got worse. “Now imagine the wind rushing. And imagine you’re wearing high-heels and a thong bikini.” I had to use both hands to keep her steady. “And now imagine you’re not just standing there, but that you have to walk to the very edge, and look down, and jump.”

“Let me down.”

“All right.”

“Let me down right now.”

“Take my hand. And the other one. Sit down slowly.” She sank to her haunches. Sat. Pushed her feet out in front of her. Eased off the desk. Sat in her chair.

“Now imagine you did all that, you jumped, you fell forward, face-first. A hundred feet. Falling for about four seconds.” I nodded at the big clock on the far wall. We watched four seconds pass. “It feels like a long time, but there’s just time to close your eyes and breathe a prayer. And then you hit. And then you realize you’re alive. You did it. You broke the record, and you’re alive. And everyone’s clapping you on the back. And fifteen million people in darkened movie theaters will watch you take that fall and feel their hearts slam under their ribs, then grin with relief when you walk away. And you’re going to get a big check for it. And then imagine one day you can’t do that anymore, but you love the movies so much you start from the beginning in some other field, and you work—day in, day out— clawing your way back into people’s good graces, doing your best to ignore the fact that they pity you, that you could do their jobs six times better than they could, if only you didn’t have a hip held together with a dozen steel pins, ignoring the fact that it hardly pays, and that cutting tomatoes is just not the same as falling through the air like a stooping eagle. And then imagine that some fool takes even that away.”

She started writing. After a minute, she slowed and looked up. I could see the cynicism reasserting itself. “Human interest isn’t enough. Before I start in on the work, the hours of backbreaking, mind-numbing work, asking people questions, searching archives, combing the Web, bring me something.”

“If I bring you proof you’ll write about Kick?”

“Bring me proof of government corruption and I’ll write about anything you want.”

MY MOTHER and I turned to face the elevator door. I pressed the button for the lobby. I’m having dinner with him tomorrow. Today, now. Tonight.

She raised her eyebrows, nodded at my thumb, which had turned white against the steel button. I let go. “The newspaper woman I saw today was less than cooperative,” I said.

“Ah.”

The bell dinged. My mother got out first. We headed for the hotel’s oyster bar.

“Journalists,” she said. “Very annoying. Particularly photographers.”

“Yes.”

“One understands how they get punched so often.”

We found a seat at the bar. The bartender brought us menus. My mother ordered a glass of cabernet. I chose champagne.

“I have never punched a person,” she said as our drinks arrived. “I don’t believe I’ve ever punched anything.”

I shook pictures of Kick and Dornan from my mind, kept my place in the menu with my finger, and looked up. “Never?”

“No.”

“But . . .” If my mother said Never, she meant not even a cushion when she was a child. I sipped my champagne. My mouth bubbled, as it had last night. “Would you like to?”

“Now?”

I pushed my champagne away. “There’s probably a bag in the gym.”

She slugged back her wine and stood, prepared for battle in her cream silk sweater, taupe linen pants, and delicate evening sandals.

In the gym, a woman with hair pulled back and ears sticking out was yanking at the handles of a lat machine as though trying to pull the legs off her boss; a young, slightly overweight man knelt on all fours on a blue yoga mat, morphing from cat to cow and back again. His back was very flexible. In the best hotel gym tradition, everyone ignored everyone else.

The bag was a heavy boxing bag, and my stomach squeezed: it was the same brand as the one I’d used for my class. This was my mother, I told myself. I was just teaching her to punch. It would not end in blood and death and the feeling that I’d done more harm than good.

The bag looked brand-new. I checked the hook and chain, nonetheless, ran my hands over the casing. Smooth and soft. Acceptable for her beginner’s hands.

I had a sudden flash of Kick’s small hands. I like her very much.

“If you’re going to hit with both hands, you’d better take off your wedding ring.” She touched it, then twisted it off and put it in her pocket. No tan line. Maybe you’ll find out tonight. “And your shoes.” Her sandals were low-heeled, but I didn’t know enough about her balance to be sure. She slipped them off. She seemed more comfortable in bare feet than most of my class had. I held my hands up, curled my fists. She copied me inexpertly. “Imagine the pads at the base of your fingers are an iron bar. Don’t clench too hard. All tension should be in the wrist. Okay?”

“Okay.” The whiteness around her knuckles eased.

“There are seven basics to learn about striking. One, strike from a firm base. Two, most of your power comes from the torque generated by—” She was shaking her head. “What?”

“Show me.”

“All right.” Different rules for my mother. “Hold the bag for me like this.” I showed her how to get behind it and brace it against her shoulder. “Ready?” She nodded seriously. I hit it, hard. I like her. She moved back half a step. I hit it with the other hand. I like her. She set her feet and her face. I let fly with a right-left-right combination. I like her very much.

My mother’s serious expression smoothed, replaced by a bland mask. I didn’t have to turn around to know that Yoga Boy and Bat Ears were watching.

“Show me again,” she said. And I obliged with a left-right-left. “Do I have to make that noise?”

“What noise?”

“That ‘ush’ sound. Sometimes a ‘hut.’ ”

Ush. Hut. Well. “Make whatever sound you like. Anything. Just as long as it pumps air from the deep part of your lungs.”

“Does it hurt?”

I looked at my fists, the pinking knuckles. As we swapped places I started worrying about her spraining a wrist, breaking a finger, crushing a knuckle. Not being able to get her wedding ring back on. “Start gently.”

She assumed the same position I had, took a moment, then punched. Coordinated, but too careful to be graceful.

“Again. Try the other hand.”

She stepped into it, and connected squarely, but the bag didn’t move.

“Stop being careful now.”

She hit the bag. She was only two inches shorter than me, and despite having gained ten pounds or so in recent years, she was strong. I had seen her wallop a tennis ball hard enough to smash an opponent’s teeth out. She should have made me stagger.

“Again,” I said. “Remember to breathe.”

She hit the bag, and huffed as though trying to blow out the candles on a birthday cake. Tidy, controlled, self-contained.

“Don’t think about those people watching you.” I said it loud enough for the man and the woman to hear. The woman’s ears turned beet red. She looked like Mickey Mouse after a gallon of Thunderbird.

“Comics,” I said. It was faintly embarrassing talking about this to my mother. It felt more personal than talking about sex.

“Comics?”

“Comic sounds.” I gestured for her to swap places. “When Spider-Man hits the Green Goblin. Pretend that’s you. Blam!” Thump. “Pow!” Thud. “Whap!” Movement would carry me through. My blood pumped. “It’s not you standing there, not a recently married career diplomat in the gym of the Fairmont. You’re on the wild fjell. You’re a troll, or the Hulk smashing the farmhouse.” Thump, thud. “A golem destroying an SS Panzer division.”

Her eyes kindled. I braced the bag.

“Norway fighting the Danes.”

“Ha,” she said, “Hothead Paisan!” and walloped the bag. I staggered back. She crowed and thumped it again. “That surprised you!”

The whole of the next ten minutes surprised me. After Hothead Paisan, it was characters from newspaper strips, then TV cartoons. She began to laugh like a berserker, sending me staggering back six inches every time she hit the bag, sending Bat Ears and Yoga Boy sniffing from the gym in high dudgeon. We took turns, running through all the Loony Tunes characters, then the Wacky Races—she was particularly fond of the Slag Brothers and their clubs—and ending with Roadrunner. Every time her fist thumped meatily into the bag, she seemed to expand, glow more brightly.

Her knuckles were glowing, too. “Time to stop,” I said. “Your hands will hurt if you don’t ice them soon.”

She looked at the bag, slitty-eyed as a cat by a mouse hole.

“And I’m getting hungry.” My muscles hummed, coursing with oxygen. If someone cut me now, the blood that splashed on the floor would be crimson.

WE HAD prairie fires—tequila shots with nine drops of Tabasco—and oysters on the half shell, followed by more shots. She clenched her fists and stuck them in the crushed ice where the shellfish had nestled.

I remembered our first night in Seattle, Dornan looking at the last oyster. For once I’d be prepared to fight you for it.

“So,” I said. “Hothead Paisan?”

“That surprised you.”

“It did.”

“Eric has all the comics. He has a roomful of comics. Comics spin-offs from TV shows, too. He’s partial to the strong-woman genre. Xena, Warrior Princess. Buffy.”

All the ones where the troll doesn’t win in the end. Mostly. “Are there any Norwegian comics?”

“Do you know, I’m not sure. But Eric would know.”

We talked about Eric and his biotechs. About her day with software companies and wrangling over source code and security intellectual-property issues. I told her about my run-in with Mindy Leptke at the Seattle Times. “I just wanted her to print a follow-up about Kick. The caterer. It’s not fair that her business should suffer.”

“Indeed,” she said.

“So now I have to get her proof.”

“Will that be easy?”

“I don’t know. The basic rule is, follow the money. I know who is behind this—a woman called Corning—but I don’t know how far it goes, how deeply woven into local politics. I don’t know who she hired. Once I know that, I can take it to the papers and get Kick’s name cleared. So, on paper, yes, it should be easy. But . . .”

“But life rarely works like that. There are often so many other matters that require our attention.”

“Yes.” Maybe you’ll find out tonight.

After a slight pause, she said, “I never did meet your other friend. Julia.”

“No.”

“I had thought perhaps, when you first mentioned Dornan . . . but then I realized not.”

“No.”

“No,” she agreed. She took her wedding ring from her pocket and slid it back on. Yellow and white gold. Clean style, heavy gauge. Substantial. “Eric and I will be here only another few days.”

“Yes.”

Someone tapped a microphone. We turned to look. A jazz trio was getting ready to play. We turned back to the bar. I shook my head at the bartender’s raised eyebrows and made a signing-the-tab motion. “It might be nice to meet Kick before we leave,” she said.

“It depends.”

“I see.” She stood. “Meanwhile, with that reporter, before you present her with information, insist on a final review and veto for her article.”

“Yes.”

“And don’t worry, you’ll know what to do.”

LESSON 8

FIFTY YEARS AGO THE U.S. ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS DAMMED AND DIVERTED the waters of the Chattahoochee and Chestatee rivers to form a twenty-six-mile -long lake, Lake Sidney Lanier. It’s named after a poet who, ironically, wrote about the natural beauty of Georgia, including “The Song of the Chattahoochee,” which, these days, was being reduced to a moribund murmur as cities, farmers, and recreation-seeking citizens took a bite out of it.

Housing surrounds the lake like scum on the edges of a stagnant pond, everything from rentals to log cabins to palatial CEO second homes.

Therese’s place was an eighties-built four- or five-bedroomed social-climbing recreational space. There was parking for a dozen cars, and decks visible from every angle. I was hoping I’d arrived late enough—six o’clock instead of five—to avoid the inevitable Tour of the House, complete with requisite “Oh, my goodness,” “Oh, how cute,” and “How in the world did you come up with such amazing colors?”

I rapped on the frame of the screen door and Therese opened it wearing the modified country-club casual wear usual for these things, including boat shoes. I deposited my dish—green beans sautéed in bacon fat, with lemon and oregano and chopped tomato—on the kitchen counter with a dozen other containers and made my way through French windows to the deck that jutted out over the water. On the east side was a huge hot tub, big enough for a congressional delegation, steaming aggressively in the sixty-five -degree early evening. Built-in benches ran around the perimeter of the deck.

Suze, in cut-offs, muscle-T and Keen sandals, clearly hadn’t got the country-club-casual memo. Nor had Kim, the only other person out there, who glittered in a sparkly halter top, deep-blue nails, and a fancy hair clip. Even the heels on her pumps glittered. I sat next to Suze, who gestured with her can of Coors to a cooler under the bench.

“What’d you bring?” she said as I popped my can.

“Green beans. You?”

“Three-bean salad.”

We drank beer.

“Lotta beans,” Suze said eventually.

Kim joined us. She held a frosty pink cocktail, which she raised in my direction. “Hey.”

I nodded. “Where’s everyone else?”

“Getting changed.”

Suze squeezed her can and tossed it in a box lined with a garbage bag. “Therese just happens to keep around bathing suits in, you know, fifty zillion sizes. For her guests. So they can either throw themselves in the lake or parboil themselves like lobsters in the party hot tub. Or the pool.”

“You didn’t fancy a dip?”

“Hot baths should be private, and it’s getting too cool for the other kind.”

When I looked at Kim, she flicked her nails in the direction of her hair and makeup: she wasn’t going to get wet for anybody after all the trouble she went to.

THE EIGHT of them—Sandra hadn’t shown up, either—had forged a classroom relationship based on common ignorance, but here on the deck overlooking Lake Lanier, as the sky shaded from Limoges butterfly blue to Wedgwood to inky Delft, even level-the-playing-field bathing gear could not disguise their differences. Tonya’s hair had been carefully ironed for the occasion, and she kept smoothing it, worried about humidity; rings winked on four of Christie’s fingers—probably from her toes, too, though those were in the tub—and in her left nostril, and a rose tattoo twined over her shoulder; Therese’s arms and legs were bare of any ornament but fabulous grooming—nails manicured and buffed but not polished—and glowing great health; Nina wore spiderwebbed varicose veins on thighs and calf and spent more time than probably was comfortable sitting up to her waist in the hot tub. She was also drinking a lot, something bright green.

They had all left their shoes right by the tub, as though bare feet were somehow unnerving.

Balanced between the cool March lake air and the warm foaming tub water, between social situation and a meeting of strangers, alcohol, food, and the southern woman’s gift for small talk held the evening together: recipes, husbands, pets. Inevitably, the talk turned to children: Therese’s twins, a boy and a girl, Kim’s two girls, Nina’s grandchildren.

“I don’t have kids,” Suze said.

“Well, of course you don’t,” Pauletta said.

“What’s with the ‘Oh, of course’?”

Pauletta adjusted the gold cross hanging between her breasts, splashed idly at the water foaming by her leg and said nothing.

“I don’t have kids, either,” Christie said.

“Nope,” said Nina, “but you will. I can tell.” Perhaps it was just the confidential, you’re-one-of-us tone, but I thought I detected a slight slur.

“How do you mean?”

“With some people you can just tell these things. Some people you can’t. So how ’bout you, Aud. You got kids?”

“Not as such, no.”

Pauletta flipped her ponytail from one shoulder to the other. “The hell does that mean?”

“It means I don’t want to talk about it.”

Everyone in the tub closed up slightly, like water lilies preparing to shut for the night, and smiled extra hard. Suze and Kim looked away, as though not wanting to be associated with such a blunt breach of the social code.

“So,” Nina said, “where you come from they don’t talk about their kids?”

Where you come from. Planet Different.

Therese stood up. “It’s getting cold out here, don’t you think?” No one admitted what she thought. She stepped out of the tub and slipped her shoes on. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we all went in and ate some of the lovely food we’ve brought.”

One by one they began to climb out, and I noticed how each one, before even picking up a towel, put her shoes on.

Nina stayed in the tub. I didn’t think she felt confident of getting out without falling down. When we were the only ones left on the deck, I took a towel from the pile, shook it out, and carried it over to her. I held out my hand.

“Haul yourself up on this,” I said.

She reached for my hand but instead of pulling herself up she pulled me close. “I gave a daughter up for adoption once, too,” she said sadly. “She’d be about your age. I think about her. I wonder what she’s doing, if she’s all right. I wonder if she keeps herself safe. It’s so hard to keep kids safe in this world.”

"Yes,” I said. "Come on, now. Let’s get to the kitchen before the food’s all gone. I’ll help you. Wrap this around your shoulders. Sit here. That’s right. I’ll get your shoes. Okay now? Good.”

Once she was standing she was fine, but just in case, I stayed close as we walked through the living room to the guest room where her clothes were.

“So. Your daughter. Why did you give her away?”

“It was before I was married. I thought she’d have a better life. But now I don’t know. How can I know? I just hope her adoptive mother was kind.”

“What would you want from an adoptive mother—who, what kind of person would you want for her?”

“Someone kind but stern. Kids like boundaries, you know? I learned that too late for my two . . . my two that I kept.” Her face crumpled.

“Hey,” I said. “You have grandchildren, though, yes?”

“I do. Four of ’em. And, trust me, they’re being brought up right.”

"Brought up right.” I nodded. “So tell me more about your vision of the perfect mother.”

“Perfect?” She looked muddled. “Nobody said anything about perfect. No such thing. But who I imagine for my little Katie, my little Katie’s mom, she has no . . . issues, you know? Nothing to take out on Katie. No money worries, no problems with health or other members of the family being weird. Normal. Good, strong values. And consistent. She’s consistent. Oh, thank you.” She took the cardigan I’d held out. “And kind. Did I say that?”

“You did.” We sat quietly on the edge of the bed, then I stood. “You ready for some food now?”

She nodded. “I think you should teach us about kids,” she said. “You should teach us how to keep them safe.”

“I’ll give it some thought.”

IN THE KITCHEN—there were four varieties of beans, but Therese had provided a ham—Nina worked hard to include me in conversation. “So that ‘bam, pow’ stuff in the first class—you like comics?”

“I’m not very familiar with them.”

“My son, Jason, used to bring home comics and I’d say, Read a real book! And he’d say, This is a real book, Mom! And he gave me a couple. And, you know what? They were pretty good.”

Everyone looked at her blankly.

Therese stepped into hostess mode. “Isn’t this lovely potato salad? Kim, can I have the recipe?”

“Sure. I’ll e-mail it.”

“We could set up a chat group,” Nina said. “Everyone should give me their e-mail address.”

“What about Sandra?” Katherine said. Then, “Wonder where she is?”

No one said anything. No one was willing to say it.

NINE

WHEN I WOKE, MY JAWS ACHED WITH TENSION. WHAT LITTLE SLEEP I’D HAD WAS filled with dreams of paintings and cold, empty chairs.

According to Gary, Karenna Beauchamps Corning lived in Capitol Hill. The address turned out to be one of those high-priced, high-security condo buildings that went up five years ago and would probably come down in ten: all marble facing on porous concrete and inferior-grade re-bar. Morning sun gilded the polished steel letters (lowercase, Helvetica) that spelled out the name of the building: press. Press what? I rang her buzzer. No response. I got back in the car and phoned. Nothing. I watched for a while.

A man with a very small white dog headed for the main door. I got out of the car, pretending to talk on the phone, feeling in my pockets for a non-existent key.

“—goddamn it, Jack,” I snapped into the phone. “I promised Harris we’d have those projections by tomorrow noon and we’ll goddamn well have them by tomorrow noon. Am I making myself—Hold on one sec.” The man was opening the door. I swapped the phone to my other ear, felt in my trouser pocket. “Yeah,” I said, “yeah. Are you listening, we’ve— Hold on.” I swapped sides again, felt in my other pocket. Spared a harassed glance at the man and his dog. He obligingly held the door open for me. “No, Jack. No. Absolutely not. Tomorrow. Look—” I swapped the phone one more time. “Thanks,” I said in an undertone to the man, waved him ahead when he looked as though he was about to hold the elevator door for me. The dog cocked its head at me. “Tomorrow is the absolute—” The elevator door dinged shut. I put the phone away.

I took the stairs down to the parking basement. The slot marked 809 was empty. The oil spot wasn’t fresh. I walked up to the eighth floor. The air in the stairwell felt thick and unused.

The door was good quality. Pine stained to look like oak, but solid. Heavy brass fittings. One simple mortise lock. I pulled on latex gloves.

I was out of practice. It took three minutes to open. I listened. No beeping: no alarm. Or maybe a very, very expensive alarm. Given the lock, I doubted it.

I checked her bedroom closet, only two hangers empty, and then the bathroom: a gap on the second shelf of the medicine cabinet where three or four things might usually sit. I looked in the fridge: eggs, juice, a wilted head of lettuce. An opened and restoppered bottle of chardonnay. Thai takeaway cartons, limp with grease that had had four or five days to settle. I went back into the bedroom and looked in her dresser. The lingerie drawers seemed more than half-full.

I prowled through the rest of the condo. One lonely paperback in the living room, a Da Vinci Code knockoff. The second bedroom had been converted to an office very recently: it smelled of new carpet and plastic electronic component cases that were still out-gassing. Fake wood-grain filing cabinets, fax, phone, computer, paper shredder. The bin beneath it was empty. I looked in the kitchen. The garbage can was also empty.

I sat on her Italian leather sofa and stared through the picture window at Elliott Bay. A container ship plowed heavily south and west to the docks. One ferry was slicing its way out, one in. Overhead the sky was bright and clear, but bluish grey clouds were slipping over the western horizon.

I reconstructed what had happened. Already shaken from my visit on Thursday, on Friday she had taken any incriminating files from her office. On Saturday morning she had picked up the newspaper and read with mounting panic that someone had drugged half the crew on the Feral set: her minions had overstepped their bounds and someone had nearly died. She had stuffed a few days’ worth of underwear in a bag, with some vague notion of keeping out of the way until things blew over. But keeping out of whose way? Mine? The police? Her political cronies? Someone else? And where had she gone?

I opened her filing cabinet. It was mostly empty; the green cardboard hanging files, the buff folders, the files, the paper, all smelled new. The labels on the hanging folders were unfaded, and there were very few of them. I leafed through what there was, but nothing occurred to me.

I turned on her computer. No password screen. A green Carbonite backup icon at bottom right. I went to her most recent documents, scanned the folders, found one labeled Da Vinci, and smiled. I opened it. A quick look confirmed my guess: it was a list of passwords and user names, including the one for Carbonite. Sometimes people made it too easy. I copied it to the flash drive on my key ring, and found myself humming.

The odds of getting caught on the premises of a break-in increase exponentially once you pass the ten-minute mark. One more minute at the screen, in case something unexpected happened with Carbonite, then two minutes searching her papers.

I found her calendar and pulled it up.

It was all in personal shorthand: 5/14: JB 10:30. Usual. Wtd upd. 5/15 11:45 dtwn lun. push harder. 1:30 upd. Will JB get ETH? 5/18 . . . I wasn’t scheduled, which meant these entries were from before our encounter. I scanned the rest. An entry for the coming Monday caught my eye. 5/22: 11:00—ETH!! Whoever JB was, she or he had come through.

I copied that, too, just in case. Some of it was easy enough to guess at— wanted update, downtown lunch—but I wouldn’t know who was pushing whom harder or about what until I identified JB and ETH.

It took more than two minutes to find her bills because, rather than being filed neatly, they were tossed in a kitchen drawer. I found her cell phone bill, and noted the phone number, her car insurance information—she drove a Lincoln Navigator—and her credit card details.

IN ATLANTA I would have taken the information to Benny or Taeko and had what I needed an hour later. In Seattle, I had to do the grunt work myself. At least I could do it outside.

Gas Works Park. I’d seen it from Kick’s bedroom window. She’d said I’d like it. After mapping it on the MMI, I drove north, detoured past Kick’s house. Her van wasn’t there. Maybe it hadn’t been there all night. I refused to think about that.

Gas Works Park was the southern spit of Wallingford, a green tongue poking into Lake Union. It was the old city gasworks, turned into a park thirty years ago. Kick obviously liked this place, and perhaps Dornan would appreciate the postmodern picture of rusting gasworks surrounded by parkland, but to me it felt wrong. Natural beauty and heavy industry did not belong together.

I carried my laptop case along a broad path. To the east of a big hill, surrounded by grass, two of the old gas towers still stood, covered in graffiti and quietly rusting to themselves. To my left, the exhauster-compressor machinery left from the fifties had been bolted firmly in place and painted thickly with cheerful enamels, an industrial jungle gym for small children. I couldn’t imagine wanting to bring children to play in a place like this. The grass might be green and the engines brightly painted, but the dirt must be drenched in contaminants.

Ahead of me, framed by sparkling water, a man threw a Frisbee for his red setter. The dog writhed impossibly up and up toward the sun and snapped the yellow plastic from the air and brought it to its owner, who threw it again. Over and over, joyously, tirelessly.

The breeze off the water was steady and strong. I climbed the hill by the water’s edge. At the top was a huge sundial. It took me a minute to work out how to tell the time and date, a task complicated by the fact that the clouds that had been on the horizon only an hour before now kept obscuring the sun. I wondered what kind of faith in the universe the artist must have had to create and build such a thing in Seattle. The city rose in a sheen of glass and chrome beyond the water, the Space Needle off to the right. Small craft plied to and fro. An arrowhead of geese sliced in to land, followed by a tiny seaplane. The sun came back out and the water turned navy blue, the various waves like cream lace. It looked like a sixties fantasy of what a science-fiction city of the future should look like, and I realized that that was the point, that this was a new kind of city for the New World, proud to show its history and heritage and dreams, even if that history was, to European eyes, sadly stunted.

I found a bench that looked down and across the water but was sheltered from the breeze. I took out Corning’s cell phone bill, wrote down the numbers that appeared more than once, and started calling.

“Hey, it’s Janice,” said a recorded voice. “I’m running errands but call me back, ’kay?” Janice: JB? No way of knowing. I tried the next number. “You have reached the law offices of Leith, Bankersen, and Heshowitz, how may I help you?” A male voice. Seattle had the highest number of male receptionists I’d ever come across. “What kind of law do you specialize in?” I asked him. “We are corporate tax specialists.” “Could I have the names of your principals?” “Certainly.” None of them matched the initials. The next number. No reply. The next. Another male voice, but this one an entirely different animal. “Thank you for calling the reelection campaign offices of Edward Thomas Hardy. I appreciate your support. I’m afraid all my lines are busy right now but your call is important to me, so please do leave your name and contact information, and I’ll try get back to you as soon as humanly possible.” Wordy. Like all elected officials. ETH. I circled the number.

I called the others, but got nothing of note.

I opened my laptop, hooked it to my phone, and while the networks sorted themselves out, I downloaded the calendar information from my flash drive, and read it thoroughly. Then I ran a Web search on Edward Thomas Hardy.

It was slow work, using the cell network, but eventually I started getting results.

He was a Seattle city councillor, running for reelection. He had started fifteen years ago as an environmental zealot and was now the current chair of the Urban Development and Planning Committee. He had been instrumental in pushing through several of the zoning changes on the South Lake Union biotech development. An image search turned up pictures of a worried-looking man in his late forties. White. Unexpectedly deep-set hazel eyes. ETH. And someone called JB had “got” him for a meeting with Corning next week.

The Seattle City Council website told me that, in addition to two councillors and two alternates, the zoning committee had three legislative assistants, one of whom was Johnson Bingley. JB.

Bingley turned out to be twenty-eight, recently married, and to have blond hair (and an expensive haircut) and a political science degree from UC Irvine. With a bit of work I turned up the abstract of his dissertation: a piece of nonsense about interstate politics that was all generalities in a blatantly cut-and-paste plagiaristic style. Bingo. Criminals looked for short-cuts. Entry-level politics were full of them.

I did another long, slow search to make sure Bingley was the only staffer with the initials JB. He was it. But ETH was his boss. The question now was, on which side of righteousness did ETH fall?

A cloud scooted away from the sun and I shaded my eyes. I closed the laptop and unhooked my phone, weighed it. I didn’t know whom to call, Kick or Dornan, and I didn’t know what I’d say if they answered.

I plugged it back in and started a deeper search on Edward Thomas Hardy.

I DROVE BACK up Myrtle, past Kick’s house. No van in the driveway. It was only midday, but traffic on 45th was almost stationary. It got hot in the car, but I didn’t want to roll up the windows and turn on the AC.

Traffic crawled over the bridge, and again through downtown. As I got closer to the warehouse my stomach tightened.

Kick’s van wasn’t in the parking lot. Where were they? What were they doing?

The set rang with the clang of hammer and wrench on metal pipe: people putting together a huge scaffold. It was hot. Joel hovered, looking worried, occasionally consulting what looked like a wiring diagram. Everyone—the costumers, Bernard, Peg—was carrying pipes, hauling on command, or standing back to admire the growing edifice.

There was no sign of Kick or Dornan, and the food on the craft-services table was conspicuously packaged sandwiches and a coffee urn with the lid taped down.

“Any idea where they are?” I said to Peg.

She put down her end of a piece of scaffold. “Where who are?”

“Kick. Dornan.”

“Dornan’s her friend?”

No, Dornan’s my friend. “How about Rusen?”

“Editing.”

“Where?”

“On the Avid.”

I said merely, “It’s probably a good idea to wear gloves when you do this kind of work.”

I went back out into the parking lot, to the trailer, and knocked. Traffic roared in the distance. I knocked again. The door opened. Hot, rebreathed air rushed out. Rusen blinked at me. He had that can’t-change-focus look of someone who has spent twelve hours sitting in one place staring at a screen. He hadn’t shaved for at least twenty-four hours. He’d had even less sleep than I had.

“May I come in?”

“May . . . ? Sure, sure.”

Inside, images were frozen on six screens. He sat on the chair in front of them, seemed momentarily confused when I remained standing.

“Something urgent?”

“Not urgent. But we do need to discuss your problems with OSHA and EPA.”

“Problems? Right. OSHA. EPA.” He focused on the screens, reached for the console, paused, hand above the big hockey-puck frame-by-frame advance control. “Do you mind if I just finish this . . .”

Scene? Act? Track? I had no idea. As soon as his hand touched the controls, he seemed to lose touch with his verbal centers. I looked around until I found a chair, rolled it over, and watched for a while.

He turned the big dial on the console, and one of the pictures would move forward. He’d dial it back, and forward again. He’d look at one of the other screens, punch a button, dial that back and forth. And another. Sîan Branwell stood and sat, stood and sat, stood and sat, turned and turned back, over and over. He muttered something to himself, chewed the cuticle on his right-hand ring finger, dialed again. Nodded. Punched other buttons. Ran one of the pictures again. The turn of her head was subtly different. Perhaps two frames missing before the screen cut to her beginning to stand, then back. Or—no, he had zoomed in. I didn’t know you could do that. It was like watching someone play God, rearranging time, making the puppets dance differently. It didn’t look as though he were going to stop anytime soon.

“Rusen.”

“Um?” He didn’t look at me.

“Rusen.” I leaned forward, laid a finger on the back of his hand. He blinked, focused on it. Blinked again. Looked at me. Reluctantly withdrew his hands from the console, tucked them under his thighs.

“Sorry. Boy howdy, that thing’s addictive.”

“Yes. We need to—” But he was focusing on the screens again. Visual capture. I studied the console. Identified what appeared to be the master power switch. I had no idea, though, if it was all saved to disk or whatever one did with these things. I looked again, until I began to understand the layout. Then I reached out and turned off one of the screens.

He jerked as though he’d been shot. I turned off a second.

“No,” he said. "No.”

“It’s just the screens,” I said. And extinguished the others in rapid succession. “You haven’t slept, I’m guessing you haven’t eaten. There isn’t enough oxygen in here to sustain a bacterium, and we need to talk about a few things. I think you should take a break.”

He considered it, then reached out and punched a button. A background whine I hadn’t noticed powered down. He stretched. His spine cracked. He looked at his watch. Frowned.

“Let’s go eat something.”

He squinted and shielded his eyes from the sun before stepping down from the trailer, like a drunk leaving a bar in the middle of the day. I let him adjust and didn’t talk until we were sitting down in the corner of the set farthest from the scaffolding and he was biting into a turkey sandwich. I let him chew and swallow, chew and swallow, and look around for a minute.

I looked around, too. Where were they? I turned back to Rusen.

“How’s it going? The editing?”

“Good. Better than good. Working with the Avid’s making me wonder if I shouldn’t have shot in digital to begin with.”

I gestured for him to explain.

“The digital editing. It feels so fluid. And the quality . . . I don’t see the difference. I thought I would. We shot on film. Expensive, but better visual quality. Or that’s the conventional wisdom.” He shook his head. “So, anyhow, we take the film and make a digital copy, and I edit the copy. That way it doesn’t matter if I mess up. I’m just doing a rough cut. A real editor will do all the fine work, and cut the negative.” He bit, chewed, swallowed. “But editing is . . . well, I’d no idea. The possibilities are pretty much endless. Imagine if we’d shot digital from the beginning. The effects, boy. I can make this film say anything on this machine. It’s like . . . it’s like statistics. I can rearrange the story completely. Which is good, because I’ve completely changed the ending. Or I think I have. Which means we have to change the beginning. Otherwise it won’t make sense when we blow everything up.”

“You’re going to blow up my warehouse?”

“Not literally. But we’ll build around that scaffolding, shoot some stuff on the soundstage, then take it outside, and blow it all up in the parking lot. At least I think we will. The director was supposed to figure all this stuff out with the stunt guy. But if we’d been doing this in digital, there’s all kinds of effects . . .” His eyes lost focus again.

“So why didn’t you just shoot in digital to begin with?”

“Because . . .” He shrugged. Chewed. Swallowed. Sipped coffee. “It’s my first film.”

“It’s a backdoor pilot.”

Someone dropped some scaffolding. Hoots, shouts. All good-natured.

“Boy, I know that. Finkel reminded me of that just today. But it’s a film, too. And I can cut it that way, so it gets its time in the light.”

“Finkel is back?”

“Didn’t I tell you? No, clearly. This morning. He buried his son yesterday and got on a plane. You should meet him.”

I had absolutely no wish to stare grief in the face. “Later. Meanwhile, it might be an idea not to try to penny-pinch on the set, particularly when it comes to safety. Those people building the scaffold should be wearing goggles, and gloves.” They should be professionals, but that was his business. “And you should be running the air-conditioning.”

He half stood. Looked around. “We’re not?” I let him work that one out for himself: the shirt sticking to him, the scaffolders stopping to wipe their brows. His body was also beginning to realize it was exhausted. His eyelids drooped, the muscles over his cheekbones sagged. “You’re right. We should fix that.”

“It would make OSHA happy. As would gloves and goggles and protective headgear.” I reminded myself that getting involved in others’ problems led to nothing but trouble.

He put the half-chewed sandwich down, too tired to eat any more. Or maybe it was just that his appetite was ruined knowing that, had OSHA walked onto the set while he was lost to his digital edit world, they would have closed it down.

“The editing’s important,” he said.

“If you say so.”

“I’ll pay more attention.”

“Someone should.”

“I need to look at the budget. Protective gear . . . But the editing . . .” His focus began to drift again.

This wasn’t my problem. And Kick wasn’t here.

I stood. “Well, I’m glad Finkel’s back. He can help.”

“Finkel. Of course.” He stood, and walked with me to the door.

“AC,” I reminded him. After all, Kick would be back at some point.

“Right.” He called over to Joel and suggested the AC. Joel, in turn, called over one of the hands who didn’t seem to be doing much. Bri’s young friend.

The sun was still shining. After the heat of the warehouse, the air in the parking lot was cool and refreshing. I pointed the remote at the Audi, but Rusen beckoned me over to the second Hippoworks trailer, opened the door.

“He’ll want to meet you,” he said as we went in, at which point it was too late.

Finkel stood when we entered. He was a little under average height, and his eyes were wide and his hair parted just to the right of where it should be, for his cut. Grey showed strongly at the roots. Grief was a strong wind, blowing away the habits and vanities of a lifetime. There were no papers on his desk.

“Anton, this is Aud Torvingen. The owner. The one I told you about.”

“Pleased to meet you,” he said, and shook my hand, and gave me a huge smile that belonged to someone else, perhaps the person he had been before his son died.

“I’m very sorry about your son,” I said, and because there is no possible reply to that, other than thank you, which to me always felt like thanking your executioner, I said, “I’m afraid I don’t know his name.”

“Galen,” he said. “The last two years he always told people to call him Len. I hated that. But I understood. I called myself Tony when I was twenty.” He smiled at some memory. His lips were the color of old-fashioned rouge at the center, but the edges were dry. He had probably forgotten to drink plenty of water on the plane.

When Julia had died, I hadn’t slept for days. “Well, it looks as though you got back just in time. Rusen needs help with some production details.”

“Yes?” he said, turning to Rusen.

“Nothing that can’t wait,” Rusen said.

“No. Tell me.”

“Protective gear. Goggles and things.”

“The crew won’t wear them?”

“Money. Do you have any idea what these things cost?”

“Do you?” From the straightening of Rusen’s neck I took this to be a flash of the pre-grief Finkel. “Besides, who says we have to buy new? Is there a clause somewhere? Half the people on set will have something at home they could use. Or maybe we could work out a rental agreement with a hardware store for product placement.”

“Product placement? We’ve finished all the shooting except for the finale and a couple of effects.”

“Never too late for product placement,” he said, though with an abstract air, as though he couldn’t believe he was talking about such things when his son lay dead, dead.

“Right,” I said. “I can see that you two are going to be pretty busy. I’ll leave you to it. It was good to meet you.”

I closed the door quietly, and stood for a moment on the tarmac with my eyes closed, remembering the feel of the world when I was grieving— like a cold wind on a chipped tooth.

Kick’s white van was backed up five yards from the warehouse door. Someone, hidden by the back doors which were both open, was pulling something heavy along the bed preparatory to hefting it out, someone humming Kevin Barry. Dornan.

A pause in the humming, followed by a low oomph, and a murmured, “What do they put in these things?” He stepped backwards into view, holding two cases of soda with one of bottled water balanced on top. He started to lift one hand to push the van door closed, but the weight was too much for one arm. He pondered. Tried with the other hand.

I stepped up behind him. “I’ve got it.”

“Christ almighty.” He clutched convulsively at the water, which nearly slid off, and started a smile which was abruptly extinguished. “Torvingen. What are you doing here?”

I raised my eyebrows. “It’s my property.” The words glinted between us, naked as a sword jerked halfway from its sheath. My property.

“So it is.”

Nothing on his face but wariness. “Do you need a hand?”

“I’ve got it. Thanks.” No. More than wariness. Resentment? Anger?

“I’ll get the doors, then.” I put my hand on the warm metal. Kick’s van. “You’ll have to back off.” After a moment he backed up two steps. My biceps bunched as I swung the doors shut. “Kick around?”

“She’s at her sister’s.”

“Her sister’s.”

The case of coffee slipped a little. He had to grab it with one hand. I made no move to help. Her sister’s.

“You should carry those in.”

“My time is my own, I believe.”

“They look heavy,” I said.

“Well, yes, I suppose they are.” He didn’t budge.

We measured each other. I could break his spine with one hand. We both knew it. “Is she coming here later?”

“I’m not her keeper,” he said.

“No?” He lifted his chin, and it would have taken just one step, one swing with a crossing elbow, to break his jaw. “You look tired. Did you have a long evening?”

His pupils were tight and I saw him swallow, but he kept his voice steady. “We had a perfectly lovely evening, thank you.”

He had cried when Tammy left him. He had helped me countless times. He was my friend. I breathed, in and out, and took a step back. Gravel rolled and crunched under my boots as I walked away.

I got in my car. Reversed carefully. Signaled before I merged with Alaskan Way, then I called Corning’s cell phone. “You know who this is,” I said. “You missed our Monday meeting, but don’t worry, I’ll find you.”

I would find Corning and slam her head in a car door. First I would find Edward Thomas Hardy and break both his thumbs.

I hadn’t even known Kick had a sister.

I CALLED AHEAD, and this time a bouncy-voiced assistant answered. I explained that I was in Seattle visiting some real estate interests and checking up on the yacht they were building for me down at the lake. I was considering the possibility of moving here, of making a significant contribution to Hardy’s campaign, assuming I liked the cut of his jib. The assistant was very happy to slot me in, right away. I gave my name as Catherine Holt. I’d be there in fifteen minutes. They wouldn’t have time for meeting prep or any kind of background check.

Hardy’s reelection offices were in Fremont, a neighborhood immediately west of Wallingford, along the ship canal. I drove back north. The Audi’s lack of connection with the feel of the road annoyed me. I drove faster than I should, longing for the bite of tire on pavement.

When I got there, the assistant ushered me into Hardy’s office—which, with its pressed-wood furniture and artificial-fiber carpet did not give the impression of wealthy corruption, though perhaps he was just smart—and left us alone.

Old Ed Tom Hardy stood and smiled a politician’s smile, and came out from behind his desk. He extended his hand.

I studied him. Medium height. Face thinner than his body.

“Hardy,” he said, in a resonant voice, hand still out. “It’s a pleasure.”

“Not really,” I said, and sat.

He wasn’t stupid. He pulled in his hand and studied me in turn. “I take it you don’t really intend to make a huge campaign contribution.”

“No.”

“And that your name isn’t Catherine Holt.”

“No.”

“Should I call the police?”

“Have you done something wrong?”

“You look as though you want me to have.” His voice buzzed very slightly and he edged prudently behind his desk, but like Dornan, he wasn’t going to roll over without a fight. The difference was, Edward Thomas Hardy wasn’t my friend.

“I’m considering making you eat your chair.”

Unlike Dornan, his chin went down, rather than up. “I have no doubt you could do that.” His Adam’s apple bobbed, but when he spoke again his voice was admirably steady. “We could begin by you telling me what you think I’ve done.”

“The zoning committee.”

“Ah.” He sat wearily. “I’m sorry if your parents have lost their lease, or your brother his job, but Seattle needs the South Lake Union development.”

“I don’t have an opinion about South Lake Union.”

“I don’t understand.” No apology, no irritation, no fake smile. He was pretty good.

“Do you know somebody called Karenna Beauchamps Corning?”

He opened his mouth, and his lips began to shape no, but then his eyes flickered, up and left, as he remembered something.

I nodded. “You’re meeting her Friday. Johnson Bingley set it up.”

“He’s one of the council admins.” No guilt in his voice. But perhaps he was an excellent poker player.

“I know.”

He was smart enough to wait and see where I was going.

“Did you read about that drug incident in the warehouse district last week?” Wary nod. “The drugs were administered by Corning’s proxy. She wants the leaseholder to go bankrupt and leave the land vacant so that she can buy from the owner at a reduced price. I think she’s meeting you on Friday to ask for a zoning variance on a lot, or several lots, along the Duwamish, which she’ll develop for a profit. I think Johnson Bingley will get a cut of that profit for introducing you.”

There was a very long pause. “That’s illegal.”

I knew that tone. I’d heard my mother use it at a press conference when she’d been sandbagged by a question about improprieties by one of her staffers.

“Yes.”

“You don’t appear to be accusing me of improper behavior.”

“Not at this time. I understand some of the realities of politics. Sometimes there are good reasons for zoning variances. I’m simply pointing out that Corning is a criminal.”

“Perhaps you should take the matter to the police.”

“Perhaps I should.”

He acknowledged the called bluff with a long blink.

“The police can’t help me get what I want. You can.”

Another pause. “I don’t even know your name.”

I made a decision. “Aud Torvingen.” I leaned forward and held out my hand. He shook. A good handshake, the kind my mother would classify as under siege but not overwhelmed, morally or politically. “I’m the owner of the property Corning had been devaluing—she was my broker. I’m hoping that we can help each other.”

“And how do you think I could help you, exactly?” He didn’t need to ask how I could help him; he was a politician running for reelection, and if I owned industrial property, I had money.

“Information. About zoning and development in Seattle. How much would Corning have made if she’d succeeded?”

It took him a moment to change gears, but politicians live or die by their ability to seize a proffered alliance. “Let’s start at the beginning. Tell me about your warehouse.”

“It’s a cross-shipping facility on Diagonal Avenue South.”

“Near the Federal Center?”

“Yes.”

“That whole swatch of Duwamish is designated wetland and the environmental lobby want it declared an estuarine restoration site. We couldn’t buy your land, of course, if you didn’t want to sell, though the recent rulings on eminent domain are interesting, but if the surrounding land were purchased by the city and protected, your plot would be almost impossible to develop.”

“Almost?”

“Impossible, period, if you want to make a profit.”

“It’s just a profit thing, then?”

“What else is there in real estate?”

I studied him. “I’ve read your first campaign statement: it is part of a city councillor’s job to be a steward of the city’s natural resources.”

He swiveled his chair this way and that. “That was a long, long time ago. In the years since, it has been represented to me, forcefully, that my job is jobs and profit.”

“Let’s pretend, just for a minute, that you still believe you are a steward of the city’s natural resources. Tell me about the wetland zoning, the estuarine restoration.”

“You really want to talk about the environment?”

I matched his former, light ironic tone. “What else is there in real estate?”

His expression didn’t change, but his cheeks pinked slightly and where his collar was tight against his neck, I could see his carotid pulse. Hope was something to be feared in politics.

I upped the ante. “I don’t need to make a profit. Tell me about the wetland. ”

He tapped his appointment book, thinking; opened it, checked his schedule. “Would you like some tea or coffee?”

I accepted. He left the room for a while. When he came back he was carrying two mugs of coffee and a large rolled map tucked under his arm. His face was damp and his hands smelled of lotion. He unrolled the map and anchored it to his desk with his coffee mug and appointment book.

“The Duwamish,” he said, pointing, unfastening one shirt cuff. “It used to teem with salmon and heron. You could dig oysters and shoot duck.”

I looked at the concrete-straight lines.

“Harbor Island, here, is a Superfund site.”

Spiky, industrial geometry of piers and jetties and pipelines where the Duwamish met Elliott Bay.

“As warehouses and industrial complexes close, we’ve been buying up land, slapping restoration orders on it, and waiting for the economy to turn around so we can remediate.”

“How much?”

“To do it properly?” He rolled up his sleeves while he mused. “Hundreds of millions. Just labeling the land ‘wetland’ costs a fortune. The regulations are tortuous.” He opened a filing cabinet and selected a stack of paper. “Here. Director’s Rule 6-2003, City of Seattle Department of Design, Construction and Land Use: The Requirements for Wetland Delineation Reports. The whole thing is a rule about the presentation of the rules of the mapping of wetland. Thousands of words, none of which even begin to say what wetland is, and why it’s important.”

“But my land has already been designated wetland.”

“Yes, and that makes it possible for us to bid on it, when it comes up for sale, because of funds allocated in previous budgets and held in escrow. But the designation is wide open to challenge if someone wants to take our bid out of the running. Somewhere along the line, someone is bound to have broken some of the regulations, which means the designation can be thrown out. And right now the city doesn’t have the money to spend on resurveying. Even if it did, it would take a couple of years.”

“So getting the warehouse and adjacent land rezoned wouldn’t be hard.”

“No.”

“What would you do with the land if you wanted to make a big profit?”

“Mixed light commercial and residential. A marina, a restaurant, condos. ”

“In the middle of an industrial area?” But that was European thinking.

“There’s already a park.” He pointed more or less at my warehouse. “It’s a pocket park. Here, between your land and the Federal Center. On the water, opposite Kellogg Island.”

Kellogg Island was a tiny lump of land in the middle of the river that I hadn’t known was there. “It’s not marked.”

“It’s too new. But I opened it eight months ago. It’s a very sexy combination of industrial district surrounded by nature. Someone willing to drop seven figures on a pied-à-terre would buy one in a heartbeat.”

I wouldn’t have understood that a month ago, but I was beginning to. I studied the map. Gary had said that Corning had been talking about four adjacent plots of land. “Is the Federal Center up for sale?”

He paused, consulted some interior ethics monitor, and nodded. “They’re moving to facilities in Renton, though that’s not general knowledge.”

“Show me what’s their land.” He did. “And if you included my land, and the park, and, say, the two plots north of that, how much would it cost to develop as the kind of place you were thinking of?”

“Hard to say. Mid-eight figures.”

“Easy to get investors?”

“Very. With that park as the natural centerpiece, profit could be forty percent.”

“If the zoning were changed,” I said.

“If the zoning were changed.”

I WALKED along 34th, and between the bricks and mortar of the software industry, Getty Images, Adobe, Visio, I caught glimpses of the ship canal. I stopped and leaned against a low wall. A dilapidated fishing boat chugged by. I watched it as I called Gary. “Get me everything you can on those plots Corning was looking at. Get me estimates of value. Find out who the owners are, and if Corning has been in touch with any of them.”

At the corner of 34th and Fremont I passed a sculpture, of five people and a dog at a bus stop. Someone had recently added balloons and blinding green wigs, and signs around their necks saying Happy Birthday, Alyssa!! The sculpture was called Waiting for the Interurban. A hundred years ago the Interurban had been an electrified rail line running from Renton to Everett, cutting through the warehouse district. Not a bus stop. A commuter light-rail stop. Pity it had closed. I couldn’t remember when. Kick might know.

We had a perfectly lovely evening.

I drove back to the warehouse. I wanted to hear what Kick thought.

IN ATLANTA, the afternoon sky would be bluer, the sun yellower, the trees and grass more green, and the pause before rush hour would have sweltered, sticky with sap and insect song, only lightly sheened with hydrocarbon. Here, rush hour had already started. The Alaskan Way viaduct poured as slow and thick with cars as a carbon dioxide-laden pulmonary vein. I kept pace like a good little molecule, let myself be funneled in due order onto Diagonal Avenue, noting unmarked turnoffs, rail spurs, then the Federal Center, and pulling eventually into the half-full lot of the warehouse. I parked next to Kick’s van, but didn’t get out of the car.

I called Dornan. He answered on the second ring.

“It’s me. Is she there?”

“Where are you?”

“In the parking lot. Is she there?”

“She is not. But stay there. Please. I’m coming out. I want to talk.”

I got out of the car and leaned against the hood. The air was slithery with diesel but now that I was hunting for it, I also smelled the unmistakable rolling underscent of estuarine river. I closed my eyes and visualized the map in Hardy’s office. Very close.

Dornan emerged, holding two cups of coffee. He held one out wordlessly.

I took it. It had cream in it. “I can’t drink this.”

“Why not?”

“It has cream in it.”

“Ah. Not because you’re pissed off at me? You were pretty pissed off earlier. And you pissed me off, actually, which is why, well, why I might have let you take away a false impression.”

“False?”

“You pissed me off. You’re always—Well. There it is, yes: false. Though we did go for a walk, and we did talk a lot, and I do like her very much. But it’ll never go further than friendship. Though friendship, I’ve heard, can go a long way, with the right wind.”

False.

“Do you want to know what we talked about half the bloody night, with the sea soughing gently and the moon out almost full?”

“I don’t know.”

“You.” He sighed. “Move up a bit.” He leaned back against the hood, too, and sipped his coffee. We both turned our faces to the sun. “She’s a fine woman.”

“She is.”

“And she’s very—Oh, stop clutching that coffee as though it’s your long-lost puppy. Looking pathetic doesn’t suit you. If you’re not going to drink it, put it down, for heaven’s sake.”

I set it carefully on the gravel. “You talked about me?”

“Among other things.” His eyes were distant for a moment. “She’s very fond of you.”

“Me, too, her.”

“I’m glad to hear it. She’s not . . . That is, she needs . . . Ah, well. What she needs is her business.”

“Yes.” Hers and mine. He wasn’t the one she had fed. He wasn’t the one who had seen her eyes go black and run a hand down her naked spine. I started to smile.

“You look particularly fatuous when you do that.”

He sounded petulant and it suddenly occurred to me how he might be feeling. “Are you all right?”

“All right? Why wouldn’t I be?”

I didn’t say anything.

He sighed. “I like her, and I think it could have been fine between us, but . . . Well, just but. It’s like a jigsaw piece that doesn’t quite fit. We could hammer it in and call it good, but the pattern would be wrong. I live in Atlanta, for one thing.”

“As do I.”

“So you do.” He could sound very much like my mother sometimes when he used that I know things you don’t tone. “But, Aud, the pattern is very nearly right, very nearly. She means a lot to me. Don’t toy with her.”

Silence. “So. Is she in there?”

“No. But—”

“Do you have her cell phone number?”

“She doesn’t carry one—” He knew so much more about her than I did. Because I asked nicely. “. . . me finish, she’s not on the set, but she is here.”

“Where?”

He nodded at the second Hippoworks trailer, just as the door banged open and she jumped down. She wore jeans and work boots and a salmon tank top. The arms of a cardigan were tied around her waist. Her skin was golden. From here you couldn’t see the freckles on her shoulders. She said to Dornan, “Floozy and the Winkle aren’t—” And then saw me. “Aud.”

Her hair was down. I wanted to plunge my hands in it, pull her to me.

“Well,” said Dornan. “I should be getting back in to help with that scaffolding. ”

Kick and I just looked at each other.

“It’s still hot in there,” he said to her. “Maybe you should stay out here for a bit.”

She nodded.

“Pass your cup, then,” he said to me. I bent and retrieved it, handed it over obediently. He sighed, shook his head, and went inside.

“It’ll be hot in there for a while,” I said.

“Okay.”

“We could go for a walk.”

“What, in traffic?”

“Not exactly.”

THE POCKET park was on the other side of a deserted side road and hidden by a row of straggling hawthorn. If I hadn’t known it was there, I would never have found it.

There was a patch of grass and two benches overlooking the Duwamish, connected by a short path to a grassy clearing. We held hands and sat on a bench, watching the river slide by below, as brown as overbrewed tea. I felt my lack of sleep the night before, and if the wind hadn’t been so strong, I might have dozed. Every now and again the water glinted, like a powdered old lady throwing a roguish smile.

The rocky shore was green-slimed and smelled of rot. Northward, in the direction of Harbor Island, four Canada geese stood splay-footed on the pebbles and honked. Beyond them arced the concrete spans of a massive bridge.

“What’s the bridge?” I asked Kick, stroking the back of her hand idly with my thumb.

“The West Seattle Bridge. And, funnily enough, what it’s connecting to is West Seattle. Typical of this city.”

“Dornan finds all the names in this city amusing.”

“Um.” She sounded relaxed, or maybe she was just sleepy.

“I hear you two were up late last night, talking on the beach.” She was staring out over the water. “So. What was so interesting that it kept you up until two in the morning?”

She turned to look at me, and searched my face the way my mother had done just a week ago. “Oh, this and that.” And she laughed, and kissed my cheek. I put my arm around her.

Gulls wheeling over the old, crumbling pilings that poked like broken teeth from the low water on the shore of Kellogg Island squabbled over something I couldn’t see. Power lines ran here and there, and steam, white as the smoke in a movie magic spell, coiled up from a plant on Harbor Island. The clouds in the west looked like yellowed Styrofoam.

“There’s nothing like this in Norway,” I said.

“Um.” She settled tighter against me. In this light, her hair was like twisted gold wire. I would have been happy never to move again.

A tug plowed by, heading south, upriver, tight and rolling and muscular, cocky as a rooster. Its engine throbbed but the stink of diesel was whipped away by the breeze. Silver flashed in its wake. Salmon.

In the other direction, downriver, near the geese, more movement made me turn.

“Look,” I said, and she lifted her head.

A green-backed heron came in to land, like an inexpertly piloted Cessna. She sat up. “If a stunter dived that badly she’d be fired.”

“Not as graceful as you,” I agreed. “I watched Tantalus.”

“That old thing?” But she sounded pleased.

“You dive like a cormorant.”

She smiled but didn’t say anything. The wind began to pick up. Another heron slipped and slid through the air and splashed tail- and feetfirst into the shallows right in front of me. It plunged its ugly, ancient-looking beak into the opaque water but missed whatever it had been after. Disgusted, it took off again, flapped heroically for a moment, and finally hauled itself into the air, legs dangling.

“I had no idea they were so clumsy. And small. It was a heron, right? I always thought they were bigger.”

“Great blue herons are big.”

“And what’s that?” She pointed.

“A grebe, I don’t know what kind.” And then I was seeing wildlife everywhere, and naming it for her: a kingfisher, some kind of coot, more fish, a bumblebee humming over the mossy grass, a ladybug snicking its wings in and out as it crawled across the back of the bench. I knew that the shallows would creep with crabs and be bobbled with oysters, that the smell of rot meant that living things grew here and then died. And I knew why people would pay a million dollars for a condo in an industrial district.

Kick slid close again, laid her palm against my cheek. Small, cool hands. I turned. Her eyes were very grey. She leaned in and kissed me. “Sometimes your face looks like something carved a thousand years ago.”

I ran my hands over her shoulders, down her arms, around her waist. The muscles in my thighs and back strained and trembled. She was shaking, too, but although her pupils were big, I realized it was with cold as much as desire. I untied the cardigan knotted around her hips, lifted her with one arm, and pulled the cardigan free with the other. I breathed fast. “Put this on,” I said.

While she pushed her arms into the sleeves and tugged I watched the sky. The clouds had grown denser, firming from Styrofoam to incised stone, subtly colored, chiseled and layered and polished. “It’s beautiful,” I said.

She buttoned with her left hand, laid her right on my thigh. “Isn’t Atlanta like this?”

I shook my head. “In Atlanta, in May, the sky is always blue. Later in summer there are storms in the afternoons, and for an hour or so there are clouds overlaying a sky the color of pink grapefruit, but this . . . it’s like intaglio-cut stone.” I pointed. “There. Mica. And amethyst. Rose quartz. Carnelian, and, look, see that grey? That’s what natural, uncut diamond looks like.”

“Kiss me,” she said.

I did, and I wrapped my hands around her tiny waist, then slid them around the swell of her hips, pulled her to me. Her bottom was warm and luscious. I cradled her cheeks, ran my hands back to her waist, dipped my fingers under her waistband. Our mouths were wide. Another tug hooted.

I looked at the grass, decided there were too many goose droppings, and sighed.

She pulled away, grinning, as though she knew what I was thinking. “Oh, well,” she said, “nice park anyway.”

“Glad you like it.”

“I had no idea it was here. Be nice if it was more private, though.” She laughed to herself as she straightened her clothes.

“There’s a woman called Corning who wants to pave all this over with condos.”

“Will you buy one?”

“No.” She shivered again, and I put my arms around her. “Because I’m not going to let her build them.”

She started kissing me again, then stopped. “What time is it?”

“About four o’clock, I think.”

“Shit. I have a—I have to run.” She kissed me again. “Meet you at the house? Around seven?”

AT AIKIDO, the sensei wasn’t there. Mike was leading the class. It was informal and boisterous. I made people fly, and flew in my turn.

Afterwards, as we swept and wiped the dojo, Mike and Petra separately invited me to the Asian Art Museum to see a new display of Chinese art— Mike in a whatever kind of way, and Petra shyly. I declined but suggested they go together, and managed not to smile at their consternation.

THE HOUSE cooled and darkened. We lay under her duvet. My face hurt from smiling. She butted my hand, like a cat; I stroked her head. There were no lights on in the house, and in the long, northern dusk her hair gleamed, dark and light, layered, sometimes pale and silvery like bamboo pith, sometimes heavy and dark, like freshly split pine. “Wood,” I said. “That’s what your hair reminds me of.”

“You think my hair’s like wood?”

“I love wood.” I rolled onto my stomach and stroked her hair, over and over, rounding over the back of her head, feeling the sleekness, like the oak finial of a three-hundred-year-old baluster that has been polished by twelve generations of hands. Figured oak. That was it, exactly.

She rolled onto her stomach, too, so that we were lying next to each other like eight-year-olds looking over the edge of a cliff. “So you know a lot about wood, and about herons and oysters. You didn’t learn that in the police.”

“I wasn’t always in the police.” And I told her of growing up in Yorkshire and on the fjord, in London and in Oslo, while my mother worked her way up the political and diplomatic ladder. Of my travels in the wild parts of the world, working on my cabin in North Carolina: the trees, the birds, the wood.

“It sounds beautiful,” she said. “My parents had a cabin in the North Cascades. It was hot and dusty—dust everywhere. Jesus. It’s basically a desert out there. But that’s where I learnt to ride. Do you ride?”

“I do.”

“English saddle, though, I bet.”

“That’s how I learnt. But I can ride western.”

“I can ride anything. With or without a saddle.”

I can cook anything. I can ride anything. Simple statements of fact. “Even bulls and broncos?” I stroked the small of her back, very gently, running my palms over the tiny hairs there.

“Anything. When I was a kid, I did stunt riding of things like ostriches and goats and llamas. I’ve ridden elephants and alligators and, once, even a very large dog.”

Her backbone was entirely sheathed in smooth muscle. I ran my fingertips down the soft skin. The slanting light threw fillets of muscle into sharp relief. What Kick was saying suddenly registered, and I paused. “When you were a child?”

“It’s a family thing. My mother did stunts. My uncles do stunts. One of my brothers is a stunt rigger. My sister did makeup. My father, in case you’re wondering, is in trucking. How old were you when you learned to ride?”

“Eight. Or maybe nine.”

Downstairs her phone began to ring.

“Pony or horse?” The machine beeped, and someone with a deep voice started leaving a message.

I thought about it. “Pony, I suppose.”

“You suppose? What was his, or her, name?”

“I haven’t a clue.” The voice stopped and the phone machine beeped again.

“You must remember. That moment when . . . You really don’t remember? ”

“I don’t really remember learning things.” I cast my mind back to being a girl, nine, on a pony on the moors; twelve, my mother and the WAR study; a year or so later in Yorkshire’s West Riding, a horse. “Judy,” I said. “One of my horses was called Judy. When I was twelve or thirteen. She was a hunter. Fifteen hands. Her mane was very pale. A bit like yours.” I ran my hands through her hair. “Yours feels better.” I pushed it away from the back of her neck, which I kissed, then some more, and swung my leg over her so that now I sat in the small of her back, like a soft saddle.

“Um,” she said. I reached around and took a plump breast in each hand. She groaned and began to move.

LATER, she said, “Let’s eat pizza.”

When she went downstairs to find the number, I wrapped myself in a sheet and stood by the window. Eastwards, the radio towers on Queen Anne Hill blinked with red navigation lights. I heard her taped voice in the background, then the beep and deep voice of the replayed message. The sun was setting on the other side of the house, drenching the western slope. The stairs creaked as she came back up.

“You’re doing that noble statue thing again,” she said. She wrapped her arms around me from behind, rested her head between my shoulder blades. “What’s so interesting?”

I nodded at the hill, at the sunset reflecting from the windows on Queen Anne in the growing dusk. “They look like campfires. Like an army camped in the hills above Troy.”

Her arms were tight. We stood there a long time. I wondered who had left the message.

Eventually, she stirred. “Get dressed,” she said. “It turns out I have an early appointment tomorrow, so I’m going to kick you out after we’ve had pizza.” She smiled, but it was brief and distracted. “We’ll do something tomorrow. ”

“Good.”

“But I don’t know my schedule. I’ll call you.”

LESSON 9

APRIL. OUTSIDE, NUTHATCHES SANG AND AZALEAS BLAZED ON EVERY LAWN. INSIDE, we all sat on the scratchy blue carpet that smelled less new now, and ten women stared at their copy of the list of general pointers, specific dos and don’ts and miscellaneous hints I’d given them the week before Lake Lanier.

I knew the list. I looked at the women. We’d had a week of solid sunshine since I’d seen them in their bathing suits. A few—Suze, Therese, Nina—were showing the first hint of the gilding common to middle-class Atlanta white women in summer. Many were in short sleeves. Sandra wore short sleeves for the first time, too; things must be going through one of those periodic honeymoon periods at home. She felt me looking at her— she had the sensitivity of a prey animal—and looked back. Her eyes did that brilliant shining thing, trying to share some message that couldn’t be put into words, and I made a mental note to visit Diane at the Domestic Abuse Alliance sometime in the next couple of weeks and chat. From my early days in uniform I knew that simply asking Sandra would send her scuttering back into her burrow, but whatever she was trying to tell me was getting more urgent.

“I’d like to say a word about appropriate clothing. This carpet will take the skin off your knees and elbows when you fall. Soon we’ll be trying out some moves where you will be making contact with the floor. From now on I’d advise long sleeves and long pants. Also, from next week, I’d like us all to be working in bare feet.”

Those who worried about their feet would now have a week to take care