now. It had zero saturation.
He glanced out the one-way window to his left. It took him a moment to understand that he knew the woman in the rear seat of the taxi that lay adjacent. She was his wife of twenty-two days, Elise Shifrin, a poet who had right of blood to the fabulous Shifrin banking fortune of Europe and the world.
He coded a word to Torval up front. Then he stepped into the street and tapped on the taxi window. She smiled up at him, surprised. She was in her mid-twenties, with an etched delicacy of feature and large and artless eyes. Her beauty had an element of remoteness. This was intriguing but maybe not. Her head rode slightly forward on a slender length of neck. She had an unexpected laugh, a little weary and experienced, and he liked the way she put a finger to her lips when she wanted to be thoughtful. Her poetry was shit.
She slid over and he got in next to her. The horns subsided and resumed in ritualistic cycles. Then the taxi shot diagonally across the intersection to a point just west of Second Avenue, where it reached another impasse, with Torval jogging hot behind.
'Where's your car?'
'We can't seem to find it,' she said. 'I'd offer you a ride.'
'I couldn't. Absolutely. I know you work en route. And I like taxis. I was never good at geography and I learn things by asking the drivers where they come from.'
'They come from horror and despair.'
'Yes, exactly. One learns about the countries where unrest is occurring by riding the taxis here.'
'I haven't seen you in a while. I looked for you this morning.
He took off his sunglasses, for effect. She gazed into his face. She looked steadily, with fixed attention. 'Your eyes are blue,' she said.
He lifted her hand and held it to his face, smelling and licking. The Sikh at the wheel was missing a finger. Eric regarded the stub, impressive, a serious thing, a body ruin that carried history and pain.
'Eat breakfast yet?'
'No,' she said.
'Good. I'm hungry for something thick and chewy.'
'You never told me you were blue-eyed.'
He heard the static in her laugh. He bit her thumb knuckle and opened the door and they stepped across the sidewalk to the coffee shop near the corner.
He sat with his back to the wall, watching Torval position himself near the front door, where he had a broad view of the room. The place was crowded. He heard stray words in French and Somali seeping through the ambient noise. That was the disposition of this end of 47th Street. Dark women in ivory robes walking in the river wind toward the UN secretariat. Apartment towers called Mole and Octavia. There were Irish nannies pushing strollers in the parks. And Elise of course, Swiss or something, sitting across the table.
'What are we going to talk about?' she said.
He sat before a plate of pancakes and sausages, waiting for the square of butter to melt and run so he could use his fork to swirl it into the torpid syrup and then watch the marks made by the tines slowly fold into the soak. He realized her question was serious.
'We want a heliport on the roof. I've acquired airrights but still need to get a zoning variance. Don't you want to eat?'
It seemed, the food, to make her draw back. Green tea and toast untouched before her.
'And a shooting range next to the elevator bank. Let's talk about us.'
'You and I. We're here. So might as well.'
'When are we going to have sex again?'
'We will. I promise,' she said.
'We haven't in a while now.'
'When I work, you see. The energy is precious.'
'When you write.'
'Yes.'
'Where do you do this? I look for you, Elise.'
He watched Torval move his lips thirty feet away. He was speaking into a mouthpiece concealed in his lapel. He wore an ear bud. The handset of his cell phone was belted under his jacket not far from his voice-activated firearm, Czech-made, another emblem of the international tenor of the district.
'I curl up somewhere. I've always done this. My mother used to send people to find me,' she said. 'Maids and gardeners combing the house and grounds. She thought I was dissolvable in water.'
'I like your mother. You have your mother's breasts.'
'Her breasts.'
'Great stand-up tits,' he said.
He ate quickly, inhaling his food. Then he ate her food. He thought he could feel the glucose entering his cells, fueling the body's other appetites. He nodded to the owner of the place, a Greek from Samos, who waved from the counter. He liked to come here because Torval did not want him to.
'Tell me this. Where will you go now?' she said. 'To a meeting somewhere? To your office? Where is your office? What do you do exactly?'
She peered at him over bridged hands, her smile in hiding.
'You know things. I think this is what you do,' she said. 'I think you're dedicated to knowing. I think you acquire information and turn it into something stupendous and awful. You're a dangerous person. Do you agree? A visionary.'
He watched Torval bend a hand to the side of his head, listening to the person who was speaking into his ear bud. He knew these devices were already vestigial. They were degenerate structures. Maybe not the handgun just yet. But the word itself was lost in blowing mist.
He stood by the car, parked illegally, and listened to Torval.
'Report from the complex. There's a credible threat. Not to be dismissed. This means a ride crosstown.'
'We've had numerous threats. All credible. I'm still standing here.'
'Not a threat to your safety. To his.'
'Who the fuck is his?'
'The president's. This means a ride crosstown does not happen unless we make a day of it, with cookies and milk.'
He found that Torval's burly presence was a provocation. He was knotted and sloped. He had the body of a heavy lifter, appearing to stand and squat simultaneously. His bearing was one of blunt persuasion, with the earnest alertness that thickset men bring to a task. These were hostile incitements. They engaged Eric's sense of his own physical authority, his standards of force and brawn.
'Do people still shoot at presidents? I thought there were more stimulating targets,' he said.
He looked for steady temperament in his security staff. Torval did not match the pattern. Times he was ironic and other times faintly disdainful of standard procedures. Then there was his head. There was something in the jut of his shaved head and the aberrant set of his eyes that carried an inference of abiding anger. His job was to be selective in his terms of confrontation, not hate a faceless world.
He'd noticed that Torval had stopped calling him Mr. Packer. He called him nothing now. This omission left a space in nature large enough for a man to walk through.
He realized Elise was gone. He'd forgotten to ask where she was headed.
'In the next block there are two haircutting salons. One, two,' Torval said. 'No need to go crosstown. The situation isn't stable.'
People hurried past, the others of the street, endless anonymous, twenty-one lives per second, race-walking in their faces and pigments, sprays of fleetest being.
They were here to make the point that you did not have to look at them.
Michael Chin was in the jump seat now, his currency analyst, calmly modeling a certain sizable disquiet. 'I know that smile, Michael.'
'I think the yen. I mean there's reason to believe we may be leveraging too rashly'
'It's going to turn our way.'
'Yes. I know. It always has.'
