The Frumious Bandersnatch

“Tamar?”

“Yes, Barney.”

Across the room, an agent was asking an AT&T operator to determine the number of the cell phone and track its location.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine, Barney.”

“Nobody’s hurt you, have they?”

“No, I’m fine.”

“I’ll get the money they want, Tamar. You’ll be home soon.”

“Thank you, Barney.”

“How’s the CD doing?” Tamar asked.

“Very well, actually.”

“First tower’s tracking,” one of the agents reported.

“Am I gonna be a star?”

“Oh, you betcha, kid. A real diva.”

“Good. I have to go now, Barney. He wants me to get off the phone.”

“I’ll see you soon,” Loomis said.

The man’s voice came on again.

“Okay?” he asked. “Satisfied, Mr. Loomis?”

“Second tower’s got it.”

“Yes. Thank you,” Loomis said.

“Get the money by threeP.M. ”

“Keep him on,” Endicott said.

There was a click on the line.

“Shit!”

“The way this works,” Corcoran said, yanking off his ear phones, “is the landline company hands us off to the wireless provider, who tracks the call through the base station towers handling it. It’s called triangulation. These are threeradio towers, you understand, a cell phone is aradio phone. The first tower judges a rough distance to the caller. Second tower narrows the choice to two points. Third tower pinpoints the location. Unfortunately, our guy got off before the third tower could zero in.”

“He’s out on the Island someplace, that’s for sure,” one of the agents said.

“Here comes the info now,” a second agent said, and joined him at the computer. They both turned to look at the printer as it began spewing paper. Two detectives rose from their phones and immediately put on their jackets.

“How does it jibe with Sands Spit?” Endicott asked.

“Rosalita Guadajillo,” the first agent said, yanking the printout free. “3215 Noble. Nowhere near. She’s right here in the city.”

“Maybe an accomplice,” Corcoran said.

“Move on her,” Endicott ordered, and the two agents went out the door, followed immediately by the two detectives. Carella, sitting by his new green toy with his thumb up his ass, looked at Special Agent in Charge Stanley M. Endicott.

“We have experience in such matters,” Endicott explained, and shrugged.

“What’s happening?” Loomis asked, coming out of the booth.

“We lost him,” Endicott said.

“This is going to be elaborate,” Corcoran said.

“How do you know?”

“We’ve had experience with these things.”

“She’s alive,” Barney said. “Thank God for that.”

“Everything’ll be fine,” Endicott told him. “You’ll see.”

Carella said nothing.

“You pissed off about something?” Endicott asked.

SPECIAL AGENT HARVEY JONESdefinitely thought he saw cockroaches in the hallway. Which was better than rats, he supposed. His cousin was an agent in Los Angeles, and she told him there were rats in Beverly Hills. Driven down into populated areas because of the drought. Drinking from rich people’s swimming pools. Imagine you’re a movie star and you go out for your early morning swim in your big private walled pool and a hundred rats are in the water with you! In this part of the city you expected rats—although all Jones had seen so far were cockroaches. In Beverly Hills, you didn’t expect rats. Jones had grown up with both cockroaches and rats; he was sensitive to both.

This part of the city was familiarly calledLa Perlita, after an erst-while notorious slum in San Juan cynically namedLa Perla, which was Spanish for “The Pearl,” and some pearl it had been, honey. The reincarnation here wasn’t much better. Nicknamed by the so-called Marine Tigers who’d first migrated from the island in the early forties (aboard a vessel called theMarine Tiger, hence the derogatory appellation),La Perlita was still predominantly Puerto Rican and somewhat dangerous, even for four men carrying guns and badges.

A lot in this city had changed since the forties but notLa Perlita. Maybe nowadays, third-and fourth-generation Puerto Ricans no longer sounded likebanditos. Maybe nowadays, men going to work in business suits weren’t necessarily hit men for drug posses. And maybe nowadays teenage girls wearing short tight satin skirts and stiletto-heeled sandals were only heading to the prom and not the nearest street corner to peddle their wares. But however you looked at it,La Perlita was still a sprawling slum rife with drugs, prostitution, and…yes, rats. Come to think of it, it was a lot like Beverly Hills, don’t write me letters, Jones thought.

As they climbed to the fourth floor of the tenement at 3215 Noble Street, the four men were discussing a TV show Special Agent Forbes had seen on television. Special Agent Forbes was saying he’d been watching this writer on C-Span the other night, giving a book talk in a book store in Seattle someplace, and the writer was telling the audience that he once got a letter from some lady who said she wasn’t going to read his books anymore because there were too manypeople in them.

“Can you imagine that?” Forbes asked. “Too manypeople in them?”

“No, I can’t,” Jones said, shaking his head in agreement and amazement. “In fact, one of the things I like most about this job ismeeting different people. So how can there be too many people in abook? ”

“Besides, they aren’tpeople, ” Detective/First Grade Lonigan said, “they’recharacters. ”

“Who was this writer, anyway?” Detective/Second Grade Feingold asked.

“Some mystery writer,” Forbes said.

“Well, that’s different,” Lonigan said, changing his mind. “In a mystery, you can’t have too many people, that’s right. That’s because all the people are suspects…”

“The characters, you mean.”

“Are suspects, correct. So if you can’t keep track of them, then you can’t possibly figure out who committed the murder, which is the whole point of a mystery, anyway, isn’t it?”

Listening, Jones wondered if that was the whole point of a mystery, anyway.

“I still think he was right,” Forbes said. “A woman telling him there’s too manypeople in his book. If she wants fewer people, she should go read ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.’ ”

Or “The Three Little Pigs,” Jones thought, and all four men stopped outside the door to apartment 4C. Because they’d had experience in such matters, they listened at the wood before they knocked. Because they’d had experience in such matters, they also drew their weapons. This was maybe an accomplice to a kidnapping behind this door here.