peacefully or often.
“Oh God,” Emily croaked, “look at my hands.” The veins on the backs were standing up like cables, and her hands were shaking so hard they almost blurred.
Tallow gave her her purse. She took it with difficulty, but held on to it. Tallow watched. The shaking diminished, but it didn’t go away. He hunkered down by her side, leaning on the car. “Can you take another shot at telling me what happened, Emily?”
He was oddly saddened to see deception crawl across her eyes like rainclouds.
“I, I don’t really know,” Emily said. “I haven’t been, I guess, I haven’t been well for a while. A, um, I’m not sure what you’d call it, an emotional problem, mental issues, I don’t know, anything I say makes me sound crazy, right? Things just get on top of me sometimes. I get frightened easily, maybe? And that man. He just. Wrong moment.”
She looked down at her brooch and plucked at it with hate, giving a laugh and a sob all in one horrible heartbroken sound. “And this stupid thing, it doesn’t…”
She looked at him, and caught herself. “…doesn’t matter.”
Tallow indicated her purse. “You have your phone in there?”
She nodded, unzipped, and produced it. The phone was very new, a model he’d only read about: just a thin slice of flexible, scratchproof plastic with an artful streamer of antenna wire baked into the back.
“We get given prototypes by phone companies,” Emily said, by way of explanation or apology.
“What’s your husband’s name?” he asked, taking the phone.
“Jason. Jason Westover,” she mumbled.
He opened the phone’s contacts, found the name Jason, and pressed Call. The warmth of his hand activated something in the phone’s structure, and it curled in his grip, taking on the curve of an old-style handset.
“Yes, Em, what is it,” said a tired man’s voice. Not a question; more a resigned statement.
“This is Detective Tallow, NYPD. Is this Mr. Westover?”
“Oh. Oh Christ.”
“It’s all right. Everything’s okay. Am I speaking with Jason Westover?”
“Yes. Yes. I didn’t—”
“It’s all right, sir. I’m with your wife. She’s had a bad scare, and I don’t judge her fit to drive home safely. She’s very shaken up. If you can let me know where you live and arrange to meet me there, I’d appreciate it.”
“Oh. Oh, I see,” Westover said. “Yes. Of course. Thank you. We live at the Aer Keep. I’ll head home as soon as I can and meet you in the main foyer. What about the car?”
“It’s locked and I have the keys. I realize it’s inconvenient—”
“No, no, don’t worry. I’ll have someone come home with me, and I’ll give them the keys and have them pick the car up. Where is it?”
Tallow gave him the address and listened to the scratching of Westover writing it down with a very sharp pencil on paper with a rich tooth.
“Thank you,” Westover said. “Thank you for doing this. I’ll start out for home now.”
“We’re heading to you. Thank you, sir,” said Tallow, and ended the call.
Emily seemed more miserable. “Was he angry?”
“He was just glad you’re safe. Now, can I get you to move over to the passenger seat? I’m not allowed to let you drive.”
She almost smiled at that. But then, thought Tallow, it was only almost a joke. He helped her up, walked her around to the passenger seat, and installed her in it. Getting in the driver’s seat and strapping in, he had a thought.
“I have to ask,” Tallow said. “If you live in the Aer Keep, what were you doing all the way down here?”
She gestured at the storefront. “They have the best sandwiches,” she said.
Tallow aimed the car uptown.
“It’s really very kind of you to do this,” Emily said.
“I couldn’t leave you stranded down in the 1st, and I really didn’t think driving was a good idea for you.”
“The 1st?”
“1st Precinct. The NYPD breaks the city up into zones, precincts, and we’re in the 1st Precinct right now.”
“How funny,” Emily said, without smiling. “Invisible walls for Wall Street.”
“I suppose,” Tallow said.
“Wall Street. Named for the wall the Dutch put up to keep the Native Americans out.”
“You like history?” Tallow asked.
Emily went inside herself a little. “I’ve been doing a lot of reading in the past year or so. I don’t really like coming down here. It’s not far enough from Werpoes.”
“Werpoes?”
“It was a major Native American village. Just by the Collect Pond. You can look at the little park there and almost imagine that you can see a bit of it. But I only went there once.”
She was rubbing the brooch again, chin down on her collarbone and looking at it as if expecting a genie to rise out of it. No, sadder than that: as if knowing that, despite a story she’d been told, nothing was going to emanate from the device.
As they crossed Broadway, Emily asked, “Are we still in the 1st Precinct?”
“Just left it.”
“This was an old Lenape walking trail. So one border of your 1st Precinct is the oldest road in Manhattan.”
“Ghost maps,” said Tallow to himself.
“What? Ghosts?” She sounded genuinely worried, eyes widening.
“Nothing,” he said. “Thinking out loud. What made you interested in Native American history? Or is it just Native Americans in New York?”
Tallow couldn’t tell if she was relaxing or coming apart again. She wasn’t staring out of the windows as if expecting an attack on the car anymore, but her hands were trembling harder and her eyes were wet.
“Just something someone said to me once,” she eventually said. “Did Jason sound very angry?”
“More like shocked.”
“Don’t look at me like that. He doesn’t beat me or anything.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Jason has a lot to deal with. More than anyone should. I don’t like to make things worse for him.”
“I see.”
“No. No, you don’t.” Her eyes glittered at him like well water. “But you want to, don’t you?”
Tallow had nothing to say to that. He kept his eyes on the road and continued to speed uptown. He could feel her look at him, and then look away, and then look back, as if keeping her eyes on him was safer than looking outside. Tallow started to feel like he should say something.
“Ghost maps,” he said.
“What?”
“It’s what I said to myself five minutes ago. You thought I said
Emily’s smile was a ghost of its own. “I suppose it must seem like that,” she said.
“Does to me. Anyhow. He was talking to me about how there’s an invisible map of connections all over the financial district that do transactions at light speed, and how the map doesn’t quite fit the territory? Something that’s physically closer to the Exchange isn’t necessarily…
“You’re talking about low latency,” Emily said with a shade of surprise in her voice.
“I think so?”
“This was the sort of thing that was really taking hold as I was leaving the field,” she said. “Ultra-low latency and algorithmic trading. Ultra-low latency means sending the trading information really, really fast. Algo trading is using specialized computer code to sort of break up every transaction into hundreds of little ones. You can almost think of it like rain, really hard rain hitting the windows of the Exchange. The rain’s eventually going to form one big
