another a philosophical treatise on death and consciousness, and the last a thick history of Afghanistan published in London in 1936. I have absolutely no idea who this guy is, she told herself. She popped open the glove compartment. Engine repair records, clipped carefully together. Beneath them lay a ten-inch bowie knife, the handle worn and taped over. She slipped the knife out of the sheath an inch or two. The blade gleamed. It scared her and she slipped it back.
From there she looked under the seats. Beneath the driver's side was a standard roadside emergency kit, with flares, flashlight, and jumper cables. Under the passenger's seat she pulled out a girl's yellow canvas tennis shoe. Everything about it suggested flirty sexiness. She set it next to her own foot. Too small for her. A fine dainty foot. A thin sexy foot attached to thin sexy ankles. Not worn at all, new. She felt a little jealous now, a little mad. Ray had definitely had sex with the woman who'd lost this shoe. You just knew these things. That was what he meant when he said the word 'confessional.' Maybe this woman was the one who'd broken it off. But why? Who would dump a guy like Ray? she thought. She suddenly remembered the gasping noises she'd been making in bed, her hands clutching the sheets.
Frantic to know something, to do something, she swept her hand all the way under the truck seat. Her fingers found a Tupperware container. She popped open the top. Inside was what-a dead animal? No, it was hair, thick and curly and black. How disgusting! A note was tucked inside. She pinched it up, careful not to touch the hair. The note said:
Hey Ray-Gun, I told you I'd send you my beard. What did you do with yours? I'm riding the surf here in Melbourne. Come visit me if you want. I'm with you-given up e-mail. It's too fast. I need to slow down, a lot. I'm just waiting for the next assignment. Also I got some weird head pains from those pills they made us take. I am having my usual postmission meltdown. It's the little bodies that do it to me most. You understand, I know you do. Sorry to hear about your dad. I know you love him so much. Not sure if I can keep doing this. Will drink and whore my way to higher consciousness. Maybe you survive it better than me. Maybe not. I don't have many ideas anymore, not sure if I'm actually a genuine American. Might not be. Can't see myself going home, just too weird. You get any good ideas, send them to me. Let me know if you get a new assignment. All right, surf's up in like an hour.
Beneath the scruffy hair was a photograph of two muscular men with long beards. Ray and another man, presumably Z, the one who'd written the letter. Deeply tanned, in dirty T-shirts, mountains behind them. Soldiers? she wondered. She didn't see any weapons. Her eyes lingered on Ray's arms and shoulders, their obvious strength. She knew what they felt like against her fingers.
The phone in her pocket rang, startling her. She folded up the note and shoved it and the photo back into the Tupperware and the shoe back under the seat, as if the caller might be able to see her. It was her mother, ready to have the usual conversation. She hopped down from the truck and went back into the kitchen.
'Mom, let me call you back.'
But her mother wouldn't. They got into it from there. The doctor's visit. Your father's arthritis. Another ten minutes of her life gone to this. She found herself drifting into the bedroom to look at the rumpled bed. The sheets seemed to still have some of Ray in them. But he was gone.
'You sound like you're crying,' her mother said. 'You crying? What's the matter?'
She hung up. All right, she was crying. She meets a great-looking guy in her driveway, lets him screw her brains out for an hour, and she's happily cooking him dinner when- hello? — a bunch of gangster-ish Chinese men drag him out the door? Who wouldn't be freaked out by that? Of course I'm going to cry! In the kitchen, she found a flashlight in the drawer. Maybe there was more stuff in Ray's truck. She went to the kitchen door and opened it.
The old red pickup truck was gone, like it had never been there. Like Ray had never been there, never been with her… and she knew, with that odd true knowledge that sometimes reaches far beyond oneself, that she would never see him again.
They took the Belt Parkway toward Manhattan, gliding at a smooth seventy, the open water to their left. One of the big ocean liners was leaving the harbor, portholes lit up in the dark, a silent enormity. The four Chinese men around him didn't seem to notice. They appeared lost in their own thoughts, as if Ray were an inanimate package they were transporting. He told himself to relax. What were they going to do-kill him? He doubted it. There was just the beginning of a logic to all this. Jin Li had told him one night at dinner she couldn't see him anymore, that she was very sorry, there were things she couldn't explain. Yes, it had to do with her brother Chen, she admitted, the one who lived in Shanghai and considered himself a big-deal businessman. She'd sounded anxious. Ray had tried calling. They hadn't fought. He'd been worried about her, cursed himself, and called a few more times. But nothing, no communication, for two weeks. Long enough that you think it really is over. Long enough to get lonely. Maybe the men knew why Jin Li hadn't answered her phone. How had they found him? They must have located his father's house, forced him to tell them where Ray was, gone to that address, seen the truck, seen the lights in the nice woman's kitchen. Seen Ray sitting at the table.
'Guys,' he said. 'I need to call my father, that okay?'
The men looked at him silently.
Ray pulled out his phone. 'He's sick and I have to check-'
One of the men grabbed the phone and handed it to the man who had spoken to Ray in the kitchen. He scrolled through the numbers. He looked up at the others and said something about Jin Li.
'Yes, her number is in there,' Ray admitted. 'I've called her a lot.'
'Who else did you call?' asked the man.
'Not too many people,' said Ray. He waited. 'So let me call my father, guy.'
They didn't answer him and he counseled himself to be patient, not to overreact to what was obviously some kind of kidnapping. He hoped that his father had pushed the button on the little electronic box that delivered a preset bolus of Dilaudid, which was synthetic morphine only much stronger. The machine, which had a tube that went straight into his father's arm, provided dosages at regular intervals but also allowed his father to receive a limited number of optional doses when the pain became too great, which happened more frequently now. Ray prayed his father had taken the extra doses and been knocked out, would sleep through Ray's absence. He'd said he'd be home before nine, and that wasn't going to happen. His father got anxious when Ray wasn't there and pawed the blankets in worry, twisting his head painfully toward the doorway. Ray was just going to have to assume that Gloria, the night nurse who had cared for hundreds of terminal patients, would be sure his father was comfortable. He'd set up the hospital bed in the living room, which had more space for equipment and chairs for visitors. Ray was paying for private-duty hospice nurses around the clock, $10,000 a week to care for his father. The policemen's medical insurance didn't do enough. The six houses together were worth at least a couple of million. So spend it. All those windows fixed, crummy bedrooms repainted and repainted again, more than twenty-five years of dealing with deadbeat tenants, busted water pipes, broken refrigerators. Now it was payback time. His dad deserved the best. Ray had gone down to the local bank where his father had first gotten his mortgages, long paid off now, and explained the situation. He'd cashed out one of the houses, and even at $10,000 a week, the money would last many months. It was his father's time that was running out.
'Hey,' Ray tried again. 'What about the phone?'
The Chinese man in the suit looked at Ray, pushed a button that made the window drop, and flipped the phone into the rushing darkness outside. The cool air swirled around inside the car, then the window went up.
The permanent government of New York City, the true and lasting power, is found in the quietly firm handshake between the banking and real estate industries. Nearly every other business-television, publishing, advertising, law firms, hospitals-is comparatively insubstantial. Only the banks and the developers can tear out a section of the city and replace it with something new. Can alter the feel of a neighborhood, where people walk, eat, and live, and thus actually change what New Yorkers say and feel about themselves, remap their minds even as their city is remapped beneath their feet. The developers destroy the past to improve the future, they make nothing into something, they push away humans they can't use and pull in new ones they can. Who else could gouge a hole large enough for five thousand swimming pools at the southwest corner of Manhattan's Central Park, then erect the Time Warner building, a garish twin-towered, tuning fork of an edifice, stuff it at the lower levels with the very same luxury-junk stores found elsewhere, then charge $40 million for enormous apartments above it?
Of course the apartments were all quickly bought by aging movie stars who didn't care about being hip anymore, Saudi princes with dyed beards, London speculators, the newly rich Spanish, Russian oilmen who'd gotten
