Shadow Watch

would appear within minutes, chugging along at close to seventy miles an hour on the straight downhill gradient.

He watched the signal, which was now displaying a yellow “slow” aspect.

The clank and rumble of the train grew louder.

Closer.

Kuhl watched the signal. He thought he perceived a rise in the generator’s hum, a crackle in the air around him, but doubted it was anything more than his gaining anticipation.

The first pulse was initiated.

Kuhl watched.

The yellow light fluttered off, on, off. Then stayed off.

A breath hissed through his teeth. His jaw muscles tight, he whipped his head to the left and saw the approaching locomotive’s lights splash across the ties. Then it nosed into sight below him, the figure of the engineer visible through the windows of its raised cab, a long, streamlined set of passenger cars hugging the slope behind it.

The dish rotated silently on the roof of the van and released its second pulse.

* * *

She was tall, tan, young, lovely, and from Ipanema, just like the girl in the old song. Christina from Ipanema, could you believe even her name rhymed with the title?

Darvin had met her in a bar at Barra Funda station, where he had stopped for a martini while waiting for his train. He’d been sitting there sipping from his glass, thinking about the big-money deal he’d clinched for his company in New York — well, his father-in-law’s company, if you wanted to nitpick — when she came walking along, just like in the song, strutting right past the bar in this light, scoop-backed, flowery cotton shift — dia — mond earrings, black pearl necklace, chic mehndi lotus tattoo on her bare shoulder, her hips swaying to the rhythmic Afro-samba music blasting from the P.A. system, her hands loaded with shopping bags from the expensive boutiques downtown. Christina from Ipanema.

Darvin had scarcely been able to believe it when he’d found himself leaning off his stool to ask her if she wanted to join him for a drink, first because he was a married man — it had been six months since he’d tied the knot, not at all coincidentally the same length of time he’d been employed as a salesman for Rinas International Hotel Supplies — and second because he hadn’t had a pot to piss in before that, when he’d been hawking costume jewelry door-to-door at thirty bucks a ring and thirty-five a necklace for some Israeli gonif who had his office on 10th Avenue, getting a ten-percent commission on each piece of soon-to-discolor crap he unloaded, his assigned route running from 125th Street in Harlem to Washington Heights — try to earn a living wage that way, bro.

Back then, before he got hitched, before his wife’s father consequently became his boss and handed him the company’s plum Brazilian accounts, Darvin wouldn’t have had the cash or confidence to so much as dream of picking up a woman in Christina’s league, which was kind of funny if you thought about it, like something you’d expect to read in Penthouse Forum. Maybe he ought to send in an article, use one of those dumb pen names to protect his identity: Marrying to Score Babes, by Lucky Strike.

At this very moment, in fact, streaking through the inky South American night toward Rio and Darvin’s room at the Ritz Carlton, snuggled close together in the dimly lit coach of the express train — the fifth of six cars coupled to the locomotive — they were engaged in an activity that would itself make for a great opening teaser. Ten minutes earlier they had asked the attendant for an afghan and thrown it over their laps, not because either of them was cold, but because Christina from Ipanema, who had herself been waiting for the train after an afternoon shopping spree in Sao Paulo with a girlfriend — or so she said — had put her mouth to his ear and whispered a suggestion or two about how they might while away the long hours of the ride, provided they could keep from being noticed by prying eyes.

This being a luxury line, they’d already had a nice amount of privacy. Their high- backed, buttery leather chairs blocked the view of them from behind. The wall-to-wall carpeting muted most of the sounds around them and, more importantly, most sounds they might make. The fluorescent lights over the central aisle had been switched off for the benefit of passengers wanting to catch some shuteye, and many of those who weren’t asleep were in the buffet car having cocktails and canapes. Small incandescent lamps with rose-colored shades mounted between the windows gave off a subdued glow that was enough to read by, or whatever, and was also kind of romantic. The afghan, therefore, had niftily finalized yet another major deal for Darvin, giving them all the added cover they’d needed.

Now Darvin looked over at her and gasped. She looked back at him, her lips curling upward, and produced a soft, furry moan. Their faces were almost touching, their breaths mingling in moist little puffs. Their hands roved beneath the blanket like a couple of warm, burrowing animals, hers delving industriously into his unzipped and unbelted pants, his digging deep under the hem of her dress.

Darvin was about to reach the unquestionable high point of his journey — or this leg of it, at any rate — when the fluorescents running over the middle aisle abruptly flickered on, flooding the train with their stark radiance. Startled from her rapture, Christina from Ipanema straightened beside him, her hand becoming frustratingly still under the afghan, then slipping all the way out of his pants. She looked around in distracted confusion. Most of the dozing riders had been awakened by the sudden surge of light and were doing the same. Though Darvin remained dug in under her dress, figuring he’d stay there until explicitly asked to leave, he likewise found himself glancing about the coach. It wasn’t just that the lights were on. It was that they were buzzing loudly and seemed much too bright, as if their wattage had been turned up to a hot, glaring level. And the attendant, who was staring up at the ceiling of the car, looked as bewildered as everyone else.

“O que e isto?” a guy behind him asked loudly in Portuguese. “Tudo bem?”

What is this? Is everything okay?

Seconds later, the speeding train jolted on the track and the emergency horn in the locomotive burst into clamorous, ear-splitting sound, making it clear that everything was very definitely not okay.

Minutes after that, Darvin, the woman who called herself Christina, and twenty-five other passengers aboard the car were dead.

* * *

When they were young and struggling to meet the rent in the Baltimore rowhouse apartment where they’d raised their four children, Al and Mary Montelione had played a silly little game with each other virtually every time they went to the supermarket. It had started soon after their next-to-youngest, Sofia, was born. Because they’d been living exclusively off his modest postman’s salary and had needed to cut comers wherever possible, they would very carefully compare prices on grocery items, household supplies, really anything and everything they purchased.

One Fourth of July weekend during a particularly lean spell, they’d decided to treat the family to some ice cream, but standing at the dairy freezer, had suddenly realized they could scarcely afford even that meager indulgence, given that they’d had not a cent in the bank and about ten dollars cash between them to stretch over the holiday. Seeing the crestfallen look on Al’s face as he’d read the price labels, Mary had grabbed him by the elbow and exclaimed: “Come on, mister, go for it! Whoever finds the cheapest quart wins a free trip to Rio!” It was one of those situations when you either had to laugh or cry, and her mock announcer’s voice had pushed Al’s precarious emotional balance toward the former. Cracking up hysterically, he’d plunged into the freezer as if he actually had been a contestant on a game show, all at once a whole lot less depressed than he’d been a moment before — which, of course, had been Mary’s intent. Though she’d outscrounged him by twenty-two cents that evening, they had bought the ice cream for the family and he’d come home feeling like a winner for a change. From then on, the “trip to Rio” bit had become a standard tactic they’d used to relieve the strain of their constant financial woes. After a while even the kids had gotten in on it.

Four decades later, living simply but quite comfortably on Al’s postal supervisor’s retirement pension — things had gone well for them after his promotion, except for a health scare three years earlier, when he’d developed a severe cardiac arrhythmia that required normalization with an artificial pacemaker — Al and Mary were celebrating their Golden Anniversary with a real trip to Rio as well as other sight-seeing locales in Brazil, the travel and hotel reservations fully paid for by their now grown and married children, who had cooked up the idea as a surprise gift.