PART ONE

The Hudson didn’t brood in January. It was colder, pitiless. Moonlight slipped between clouds scurrying downriver, unruly ice floes appeared mirage white, gray, or black. My coat collar, as thick as an Italian couturier had ever allowed, prodded my jawline. My foolish hair products yielded icicles preciously small and perfect, no doubt, which pricked my ears.

Indifferent to the wind except to estimate force six, I observed the agitated black sheen and the silent ice from A to B, the survival points. Newburgh, New York, was my first refuge. I walked along its streets. Neighborhoods were attractive and distinguished - two and three story houses easy on the eyes while impressive, and for a country not France, not Germany, not Spain, historic. The sidewalks had been tended after the recent blizzard and I walked at my pace, always with an intention, a place to go, Barbara’s cafe, Ms. Bell’s singular boutique, Tsujisaka’s extra-legal armory, return to the safe house. The river bended there many miles nearer New York, but I could see B, West Point, secure pinpoints of warmth gleaming modestly from the mansions, barracks, and offices. It had a domicile for me, if I was nearer to being found out. A small room in a small building not near the campus core, but very well equipped for communication. I could come in from the cold, the way of hundreds of espionage tales, and to the Commandant and an executive officer and a career infantryman surrender control of my movements for a brief sanctuary, to become their top secret along with three minders’, one in New York, one in Washington, one in London.

“Domicile.” A word my grandfather used. I didn’t try to copy him. It simply came out of me, it mirrored the official relationship. He was English. I had two passports, British, American.

His second wife, his great and only comfort in life well after the horror of seeing his first murdered, was Russian. But I don’t believe the former Tatiana Tarasova ever tried to pass the chaos of a Soviet passport along. My history is too weak to know if it had even been possible.

I had just the two, not counting the fakes safe in Paris and, I dare say, Bogota.

There was a shot, followed by two in quick succession. If the wind force were higher than six per the Beaufort scale, I likely wouldn’t have heard them. The aim was poor. They hit some respectable citizen’s garbage can at the end of the driveway. The shooter was stupid. He or she was in a tree, hiding, so to speak. Perhaps they hadn’t heard of winter on the equator, where we still had some retrogressive enemies. Communists, with their historical necessities - everything was by the book. Hide in unexpected places, at greater elevation than the target, if only by several feet. Did this shooter think leafy cover would sprout while he, or she, waited for the main chance?

Communists today! Fossils. Their atheism, their constructs, now rather sweet. Rarely making headlines.

“Begone!” I shouted, despite my capacity then, fully loaded - although not the way one would expect, cooped up in a safe house with Yve Thirtysoon. The Service still required a Walther. I kept the issue in a valise. Heckler and Koch Expert, rather, in hand, I took aim. It was a Christmas gift from Grootmoeder Tatiana, who never quite disapproved of my career - how could she? - but wanted me to be supremely cautious, and so the pistol which could be carried cocked and locked. And as Grandfather in their younger day had helped Valentino in some small, crucial way in the environs of the Parioli, never to be forgotten these fifty years by a gentleman, the House of Valentino had privately designed an ingenious inner sleeve holster from which even a long pistol could slide without snagging, for me. And I referred to grandmother in Dutch, because it was so near Manhattan, just ninety miles upstream, this fine Newburgh, hearkening to history.

I shouted too in French, Portugese, a Cuban idiom, and Igbo for my poor executioner to begone. Waved my firearm once or twice. I had no intention of retaliating, and I waved the Expert a few more times, directing this sad excuse for a sniper to climb back down. A couple of hooded figures in the front seat of a Mini-Cooper parked a few doors down from his tree whistled. One must say they had a certain panache, waiting and opening the car door while I stood making motions with a large handgun. Frozen by fear or the icy wind, the shooter wouldn’t bolt.

“Allez! Allez!” I yelled. “Shoo! Shoo!” Some of the homes were still festooned with Christmas lights. It was suppertime. No point in making a mess. The encounter revealed all necessary information.

I’d been located.

Since I’d been located by idiots, the superior opposition was probably reading my mind. Their research in mental telepathy was long rumored. So: “Hiya, Godfather!”

The old Mafia’s dregs still sloshed around in a few cities, organized crime at the bottom of the barrel. The Asians controlled the currency and the neighborhoods now.

But the New Mafia, fresh young minds generating a renaissance, had to be reckoned with. They were educated, with viable means, among which were great caches of old money, and they’d revitalized family connections while they were in school. They weren’t spoiled like their parents. They took the initiative to brush and shine the disabled Cosa Nostra’s neglected spheres of influence. And they were sophisticated, courtesy of their MBA’s and law degrees and Doctorates of Medicine (with the epidemiological outlook, spanning whole countries). Scary, and because they had no historical sense that perhaps it was time another group was entitled to power, greedy. Letting the Asians keep the streets simply was a luxury the New Mafia felt it could afford.

They wanted to eliminate me, though. I thought I should quickly pick up Thirtysoon, my partner in hiding, at Caffe Macchiato a few blocks away, but first I’d thaw with Haitian Hot Chocolate, one of Barbara’s specialties. In my week in Newburgh, eating there every morning and afternoon and evening, the task of hiding out taken lightly, I came to the conclusion that everything Barbara prepared was a specialty. Poor Barbara couldn’t get rid of Yve at all. At least I went back to the safe house between meals. Yve, an Irish girl, wanted to “soak up” America. She brought her coded intelligence briefs with her - hundreds of single-spaced pages - and sipped the day away, Americanizing by osmosis. I was happy to let her stay there forever, but Caffe Machiatto had a closing time, so for a least twelve out of the the twenty-four, we spent hours by ourselves under the same safe roof.

My admiration for her started and stopped with her hair.

It was very black and bobbed almost at her chin. Hiding no features while it curved around her face - she was beautiful, God knows why - the ends swept forward. Those long black waves projected to meet like pincers just below the parallel of unpainted crimson lips, made me think of machete blades. Perhaps it was the nubile coastal women of Columbia whom I was reminded of, and from there the emerald jungle, and, progressing subliminally, of the only means to move through it. Was that why I admired her hair? It was likely. There’d been a mission based in Sincelejo, though the camps were far from it. I’d survived without lasting injury and soon received a promotion. The success was facilitated by a machete, black from long use cutting through gummy or burnt flora. Otherwise, I wasn’t inclined to praise much else about her person. I know she was beautiful because she compared to any full page in ELLE.

Putt, putt, backfire! is what I heard. And I saw the Mini-Cooper spin off an ice patch. The evidence was growing it was Cuban assassins. They were agents from a society in chains, but they hadn’t heard of same for tires. And if they actually believed in the guff their government proclaimed, then they weren’t smart enough to have thought of snow tires before going on the chase. Nevertheless, all three hopped out and began firing. I held off on releasing my H&K inside the sleeve. Again, I preferred not to spill any milk in this lovely town. I wanted to just laugh these antagonists off, and as they also didn’t know, with their Caribbean consciousness, about gloves, or had simply forgotten them because they were born stupid, they were easy to laugh off. They fired steel slugs with slingshots, and missed. Their bare hands weren’t functioning well at all in the deep freeze at force six.

I employed gutter patois to the best of my ability and let them know how fatuous it was to be in the employ of an impecunious state. Variously, I called them stupid and without a centavo, drably dressed, poorly fed, and dickless. I poured on every idiomatic degradation from the worst slum of Havana, where I’d once been hidden - quite happily, in the small but respectable, clean, and tidy home of Sr. Cugat (our man in Havana, as it were), the anomaly occurring about every thirty or forty houses in any ghetto in any country in the world, the beacon of hope, the testament to core values. Worst of all, I denounced them personally: “Grow up!” I shouted in Spanish, though not loud enough to travel all the way up the driveways and front paths from the sidewalk. “The dialectic foundered on duty-free shops in every international airport on the planet. Historical necessity halted at the Estee Lauder counter in Ljubljana!” And I laughed madly. The slingshot slugs pinged off mailboxes and lamp poles.

“Pray for bullets, fools!” (Ruegue para las balas, tontos comunistas!)

The commies weren’t pleased.

“Blanco! Gabacho! Madre!”

They must have refueled in Tijuana. At any rate, they were getting a little too riled. A peaceful environment like Newburgh’s Montgomery Street can abide just so many strange noises before porch lights go on. It was time, then, to presume again on the House of Valentino’s ingenious favor and slide out the H&K.

The imprecations became far less personal, based solely on fear. My longish .45 versus their stubby Eisenhower Era Whammos.

“Caramba! Hooey! Hooey! Ay yi yi . . . So sorry, Senor!” They shushed and rushed each other. “Vamos!”

I waved my pistol like a pennant. “Good game!” I shouted, in slum argot, Havana on soccer Saturday under the Red boot.

Putt putt backfire! lurch and putt - I could see, finally, it was an original Mini-Cooper, not BMW’s iteration - and they slowly disappeared in the cold New York winter night, failed.

I skipped and danced few steps, the cavorting of a survivor. It may have looked like hopscotch on the squares of the deserted sidewalk, but I was happy to be alive that moment, despite the ridiculousness of the contretemps, the flimsiness of their tactics. I had been the target, but it was they with tails between their knobby, protein-deficient knees.

I carried the exhilaration into the Caffe Macchiato, and Yve Thirtysoon had to notice. She perked up, as if she weren’t already quite elevated from caffeine taken injudiciously, assenting to “More coffee?” morning, noon, and evening now. When she twirled in my direction, her hair looked like it could slice bamboo.

“Hot chocolate, Barbara, thank you. To go. I’m afraid . . .” I continued at some length with an explanation why I, and Yve, might not be familiar customers from this time forth. “. . . you see. It’s in both of our job descriptions to . . .” I didn’t exactly lie. But I couldn’t reveal my paymaster was a clandestine branch of the United States Government, nor that Yve’s was Her Majesty’s Secret Service. However, I alluded quietly to TNM, The New Mafia, and the gracious yet canny proprietor of New York’s finest small restaurant gave one nod, that she understood. She turned and quietly gave the order in her native dialect, which I failed to understand but for the proper noun indicating “Haitian.” Yve spun again, accusingly, as if she’d been told they were out of the spices which complete the recipe. Stab and chop, was the way I thought of the motion of her lustrous black blades.

“When I get my hot chocolate, we need to make like atoms and split,” I said. Not an order, but nearly so. I didn’t outrank her, but the latest incident gave my initiative a certain irrefutable sway. Yve was sitting with a woman almost as beautiful as she, who appeared to be equally lithe and curvaceous and fit. But one never knew until they stood up, of course.

“Atoms and split?” Yve asked, heavy on incredulity. She was twenty-five years old, long past an era where atomic this and atomic that were on the tip of everyone’s tongue. But Grandfather had passed along to me much of the lore of the Cold War. I felt grandfatherly when I explained the history of the tired witticism, although I wasn’t much farther beyond on the time line, twenty-seven years young.

“It may have been from a claque of Communists - I could have sworn I heard one of the men from the car yakking all kinds of unhappy exclamations in Igbo, but that may just have been his teeth chattering between swoons due to his pure equatorial look. I would KILL for the short sleeve shirt he had on . . .”

When my mind anchored after drifting away to those soft tropical colors, I told Yve if the equatorials could get so close, TNM was probably at another table in Caffe Macchiato. I looked around then for Sicilians and others resembling the lot which comprised The New Mafia.

Yve caught my ear as my neck swiveled and whispered, “Hey, Charlie Brown, cool it. This broadie IS. She’s TNM. Right now she’s believing my tale that you and I are a wife and husband ministry for our Lord and Savior . . .”

“Husband and wife. I don’t outrank you, but I’m senior,” I rather urgently whispered back. She’d addressed me disrespectfully because she was miffed. I may detail why later.

“Just don’t give her any clues. Start talking about lost sheep or something. Dying for the sins of mankind. All that rot.”

Some strategy. Instead, I introduced myself with a false name, but one I’d be able to remember under duress.

I reached over the table to extend my hand - which the Mafiosa took rather too warmly for comfort.

Nevertheless, I managed with sterling aplomb: “My name is Blond, James Blond.”

“Mmm,” she replied, with a look, however, that was directness itself.

Yve fidgeted and piped in, “Why are you using your straw all of a sudden? You wouldn’t even have a straw if the waiter had paid attention. You distinctly told him to take the straw away.” Such umbrage and passion over a little thing like that, while Belle Titolo sipped, if anything, more fervently.

Belle applied the tip of her finger to the corner of her mouth and wiped away a glimmer of melted blueberry ice. She answered with only half a glance at Yve, that she suddenly decided to take her time with the smoothie, as it was better savored slowly than gulp, gulp, gulp.

Yve blushed. That may have been a first for Her Majesty’s Secret Service; moreover, by a licensed killer. While immune, to use the premature self-assessment termed by one of my grandfather’s best known paramours, I wasn’t oblivious to the sexual signals before my eyes. And while Yve blushed, Belle shuddered; but I think it was due to the ice hitting the roof of her mouth too quickly and copiously. I was distracted then, before being pulled into the nonsense, by the occupants of another table. I recognized young Princess Jidean of Bratovia. Her companion also had the air of one of the young European royals of ancient house. So TNM did occupy another table, for this was the secret to The New Mafia’s power and wealth: it had made nice with extant noble lines, and functioning royalty less the House of Windsor, in Europe east and west.

“Wha’?” I ejaculated. Was Caffe Macchiato the States’ version of Rick’s Cafe? A DMZ for players in international intrigue?

Barbara sensed my troubled wonderment, and approached, first sweeping from her alert brow long, full locks which were hers by Italian birthright and, evidently, self-respect. An interesting contest to imagine judging, the beauty of her hair versus the beauty of Yve’s, if I weren’t so worried about the space full of enemies. I was qualified, once having the final say on such things along with a select panel of celebrities at the Miss Universe Pageant, when I was known only as an athlete.

“Worldly spies, Michelin stars in their eyes,” she said to me. Yve and Belle caviled mutely, noses and cheeks, while very pretty indeed, roiling the air which separated them. About me, I should think. With no encouragement from me, I might stress.

Barbara summed up the circumstances as if she’d just been apprised of the latest papal bull. “What can I do? Even undercover agents have to have supper.”

Seeing that great tolerant shrug, borne by her supple shoulders, was like instantly seeing Rome again.

I broke up the hissy tiff the moment Capuccino arrived with my take-out Haitian Hot Chocolate.

“We must get out of here now,” I whispered in Yve’s ear, for which Belle’s demeanor altered from the hissy tiff to a hissy fit, but quietly, while Yve seemed mollified by the appearance of attentiveness on my part. “Don’t you know who those women are? Princess Jidean and her old school chum Princess Lip of Lagergoold. Exit laughing before they sense who we are. Sometimes our transAtlantic double oughts simply shriek.”

Yve was laughing anyway, charmed by her ostensible triumph over Titolo. I took her hand, and the chuckles didn’t shake her belly, as it was too lean for that, but I sensed her stomach muscles rippling joyfully. A certain undulation informed the way her acetate blouse clung at the midriff just then.

“Obrigado,” I said to Capuccino. “Auf Wiedersehen,” I said to Barbara.

They both replied, “Ciao,” the international habit.

But the Caffe Macchiato had become a habit of mine, an admirable one, and I knew I’d be sneaking back from West Point.

Yve dissolved into helpless giggles as I gripped her hand tighter and led us to the door.

“A joyful noise,” I remarked at large, and conformed to Yve’s fiction with a reverent glance straight up.

The princesses could be overheard, noses turbulent up and down as Yve’s and Belle’s were from side to side and round and round. Their anxiety seemed studied, though, as if they’d been spoilt enough to believe everyone automatically agreed with them. Lip of Lagergoold chaffed, “We’ve gone decades, some of us even centuries, without having armies at our disposal. We’re sick of it!” Thus, I quickly deduced, the alliance old crown families made with TNM: urged by petulance.

Back in the night, perhaps half an hour only since the slingshot slugs pinged left and right and the equatorials fled. “Brrrrr, it’s rather chilly!” It was a quote from “Tadpoles,” Grandfather’s favorite record album, just like him from another time indeed. Yve took my spontaneous reaction to the streets’ cold and dark and stone and pavement to slide her free hand between two large buttons of my coat and even under the jacket beneath. She glided over the pique cotton of my white dress shirt, something very fine by Ermenegildo Zenga which had had an approving nod at Valentino, rubbing my chest for warmth. It seemed she didn’t really want to forgo the flattering light and genial aromas and unstinting hospitality of the cafe, and my diaphragm was the only possible substitute. Perhaps it was an aesthetic exploration, as well, her hand gliding over well-toned muscles belly almost to throat. She knew I was required by my service to stay fit, and sensing the symmetry and paucity of excess may have been a comfort when every second was fraught with danger. So I hoped.

“We’ll go to Tsujisaka’s first,” I said. “TNM soldiers may be at the safe house now, or the idiots could be there, even though I thought they were heading back gladly to their sultry climes. They did follow orders. Not well, but they did follow their orders. We’ll give them a little more time if they were directed to the safe house. I’d like to be a fly on the wall if they bump into TNM there, though.” I was wont to muse, “Communists a la sugar cane vis-a-vis TNM.”

Yve giggled, agreeable. It wasn’t agreeable to me she’d become like syrup.

“To Tsujisaka’s first,” I reiterated, commandingly. “Don’t you have gloves?”

“Tsujisaka,” she said with a squeeze which no doubt wrinkled the pure cotton cloth over my right pectoral.

“After the activity, if any, at the house withers away, we’ll go there for our things, then cross the river.”

“Oh, James.”

“Here, I brought an extra pair.”

“James.”

But that last didn’t sound pleased. Good. My hope was she’d jumped on the right track, which led away from little pats and further cordialities.

I swept my arm in half a circle and told her then to behold the children’s tree forts of Newburgh.



PART TWO


It was one or more of the anonymous geniuses at headquarters who thought to exploit what already was there: Newburgh, and the tree forts belonging to its children. A matrix of roughhewn handbuilt treehouses made it possible to flee from Caffe Macchiato to Tsujisaka’s to the safe house, and elsewhere, and beyond, in many variations. And what excellent cover it was, nothing within the scope of enemy imagination, dolts and stylized thugs that Communists and The New Mafia were. There was no sense of play with either of them, with all the ratiocinative necessities of the democratic centralists and the overbearing traditions and rigid politesse of the Mafia neophytes.

This much was expressed to Yve as we shivered in tandem. She was loathe to let go of one hand and withdraw the other, and we still huddled in the near-gale.

“You talk funny,” she said. “You talk like someone from Britain, not an American. Furthermore,” she continued, flourishing a bit herself, “not someone from Britain in the here and now, but before the First World War. And sometimes you’re redundant. I’ve already been briefed about the treehouses. I have a map . . . Mr. Wonderful.”

The more skepticism the better, if it meant she was becoming suitably repelled. Our compatibility was necessary just to get us to West Point, where she could go her government’s way and I mine. But I wanted to see her map. It justified getting to the safe house. And then we could pick up the amber oils we’d purchased separately at Margie Bell’s, which were crucial to joy, eventually, and separately. But for survival first, I hoped her map showed a network extending out of Newburgh, while mine - in awe-inspiring detail - was from the environs of Caffe Macchiato (de rigeur for our kind) to the waterfront. Could the professionals of Her Majesty’s Secret Service be as punctilious, and endearing? My map was beautiful and charming. It was easy, not always simple, to study.

“James?” Yve lolled around the one note.

“Oh, James, can’t we just stay at the safe house for a little while, and . . . rest? I must - definitely - get in the hot tub and sweat all this caffeine. If les Caraibes pulled a switch and still lurk, by now they’ll be jonesing for coffee so much they can pick up our trail by scent, because of me. And I don’t want to be guilty of that.”

“We have to hurry!”

“You are so, so American. Do you think those two Mafia princesses inside, twirling their hair with their fingers, live according to TNM’s honor? They’re royalty without two bob to rub together. They aren’t like your American heiresses with scads of ready money. I bought them off, to buy time. They understood. Their ancient honor surpasses any criminal code. They’ll stay bought.” Yve paused. “We have three hours.”

“For what?” What on earth?

“Oh, James. Well [mumbled] the hot tub. Absolutely a must.”

I could have sworn she mumbled “for starters” and I was distracted again. She had to be put on the right track. Our sole concern was the dash to West Point.

“You’ll sweat it all of it out on the swing from tree fort to tree fort and by the time we get to the house all you’ll need is a quick shower. Let’s plan as though that’s going to be the case. All right?”

“James.” A sad and understanding sound.

What was there to be sad about, or to understand? Things were simple. Survive, and kill Communists and the new breed Mafiosi. Was there any other reason for a career in a secret service? Perhaps Yve needed to be assured explicitly that the United States of America was going to look very fondly upon Ireland and leave it to its own devices, with as much patronage from us as it suited them, and no tampering with their culture, when we were in the full throes of global conquest. So there was no need for this carpe diem attitude of hers. She might be jumped ahead of her English colleagues in the Service, when America ruled the world, if she did well by us now with consumate professionalism. To the toffs’ everlasting consternation, I could add were there a moment for amusing her just then.

I myself resorted to mumbling. “What’s good for the USA will be good for Ireland.” If she heard word for word, I’d explicate it later. In a glance away from Thirtysoon, there was Tommy Tagge’s tree house.

“Tagge House,” I indicated according to my map’s nomenclature. “Eighteen rails up. Elm. Tommy’s father insisted on three nails per rail. Very stable, as of December the twenty-fourth, last surveillance. The gloves.”

Thirtysoon withdrew her hand from my breast pocket, not before tracing the line of my rib with her finger.

“The gloves,” she said, putting out her hands to make me help her. This once, I complied.

“Comfy?” I enquired, with traceable sarcasm. It serves, once in awhile.

This brilliant woman chose not to follow. Even in the confines of a greatcoat it was manifest that her giggling radiated wiggling.

The next move was to climb the eighteen firm tree ladder rungs to get inside Tommy Tagge’s tree fort, which had been surreptitiously lined the previous summer, well after Tommy’s bedtime, with anti-telepathic tin foils. Tin’s daunting properties are too various to enumerate here. Let it be said that my service’s intelligence was still a step beyond TNM’s Research and Development arm, and we were confident that the tin linings our spooks hid between the makeshift walls of Newburgh’s children’s tree forts blocked and nullified The New Mafia’s mind-reading capabilities. Once Yve and I sat in the Tagge edifice eighteen rungs up, we could plan all we wanted about our next move - whether to Jeff Kittle’s tree fort or Henry Cabot Lodge IV’s - and our brain waves could not be deciphered or even located. It would be as if we had gotten in spy movie-type miniature helicopters and disappeared from earth, when the reality was hopscotch from Caffe Macchiato to Tsujisaka’s.

But the neighborhood flared then. I knew the incoming sound from experience in Afghanistan covert operations. Smart rockets hit every doghouse I’d noticed earlier, most in the middle of back yards. Orange and red with yellow sparks, the doghouses became instant bonfires that the wind couldn’t damper. These flare-ups were all over Newburgh, everywhere I could see. The tactic had been saturation bombing, yet targeted for no damage other than to the quaint little havens for man’s best friend. TNM’s ESP wasn’t perfect - there was no better proof. What little ideation of mine I couldn’t prevent with the Om-blocker was deciphered in fragments. I had thought of tree houses and doggone communists generally. The New Mafia’s experts derived their conclusions, and their targets, from piecemeal brain impulses. The intelligence was faulty for not recognizing the gaps. Newburgh was bright with the doghouse fires, looking like a celebration. There was no cause for concern, other than the modest replacement costs for the residents. The dogs, in this weather, were, as far as I could tell earlier, all ensconced in enclosed back porches or even inside their masters’ houses. Taking good care of pets was part of the conversational currency at Caffe Macchiato, and how little Lemon the cat or darling Dusty the dog was adapting to sharing the “big house” were among the tidbits I’d overheard during the week. Further evidence was all the barking just then, right after the explosions.

“They know we’re here,” I said, conceding that it had been verified. “How could they think I would hide in a dog house?”

“Or I!” Yve asserting our equality in all the important matters.

“We can dart about like flickering shadows in this garish illumination while the bulk of the fuel still remains. We don’t need the the tree houses’ foils.”

“I can run!” Yve declared. She made a sudden demonstration of Christian Louboutin's peel-away high heels and soles to reveal treads. It seemed she had her own posh contacts.

“We’ll keep to the sidewalks, then! Hug the trees! We’ll stay on the streets unless there’s another launch of rockets. Only then we’ll climb to the tree forts. Otherwise, sprint between trees lining the streets. There may be some ring around the collar as a result, but West Point no doubt has a dry cleaner that’s Ermenegildo-capable.”

“Indubitably,” cheered Yve, her machete bob crossing her eager chin.

“To the armorer, then? Ready? Now - to Tsujisaka’s!”

“To Tsujisaka’s!” she whispered as fiercely.

We fled to Montgomery Street, to the cache of darts and daggers disguised by Hiro Tsujisaka’s comfortable mansion. Thirtysoon raced on the swept sidewalks like a banshee between bare trees and shadows thrown by the dog house fires. When I wasn’t craning backwards for silent incoming, I respected her knack to elude. At times the lithe figure all in black disappeared completely, then there’d be a glimpse of white betrayed by her faultless Irish face.

I was just several strides behind, sure of overtaking her if it was necessary to command a change of direction. Still, she was swift, elusive, an unpredictable dodger. She was a natural, and that was a great clue to her precocious advancement in the secret service.

Perhaps Tsujisaka would further enlighten why at twenty-five Thirtysoon’s rank equaled mine - and I was on the agency’s fast track. If anything, it was more onerous to make strides in Her Majesty’s Secret Service than in the American counterpart. Perhaps Tsujisaka and I would put our heads together and our pool of information and ken would make some sense of the ought-ought operative who once in awhile succumbed to the giggles. Tsujisaka’s roots went as far back into the shadows as mine, and we were friends since childhood. He was grandson of my grandfather's armourer. The two old men had been at equal rank all along in their careers.



PART THREE


"Paul Race took the beating from the rain. He used an umbrella for sufficient cover for his eyes. But no part of his face could stay dry, and his soaked clothes made him cold. He poked his protection against the wind and stared the other way for a free look at the surging Pacific Ocean, and he absorbed its abstract whites and grays. Finally Paul walked downwind on a low bluff as if, contending with so much mist, the perspective would improve. In fact, it seemed to, although the sand beach fading under very low clouds was ten miles long, and he walked less than a hundred yards. When he walked back, there were rivulets on his hands from drenched shirt sleeves. He ducked into his Aston Martin like that. It wasn't profligate lack of precaution for a very expensive and valued object. The short, slanted jaunt in the storm was business with a naked eye. Perfect fans of spray as thirty foot waves curled were like concepts taking form."

This was how Tsujisaka viewed the enemy, from the frustrated novelist point of view.

Perhaps if he'd devoted his life to writing beyond promising first paragraphs, instead of the quest for the perfect dagger in his day job, he might even have been anthologized by now. If Yve could be a commander in Her Majesty's Secret Service by the age of twenty-five, it wouldn't have been impossible at twenty-nine to be excerpted in Norton's as "Contemporary" - if he'd written a good book. At any rate, he practically shoved this projection of Paul Race's state of mind, three time zones to the west, in our faces after he jerked us through his front door. At least with that proclivity he was a true author. There were two pings off the brass doorknob as Yve's feet left the porch.

She did a mid-air change of direction while Tsujisaka was pulling her arm and shot back at the Cubans, who hadn't disappeared after all:

"Usted falta siempre, usted los dipshits!" (You always miss! . . .)

Oh! If I liked them, she would have done. My only physical attraction was to her complexion, even better than mine - with awe how the Irish, with a history so much under the brunt, did it. A people like priceless pearls. That was my thought exactly, as I stared at the lovely blush emerging in white cheeks. It is an example why I left the vastness of literary ambition entirely to Tsujisaka.

"I just happen to have . . ." said Tsujisaka distractedly, before he even said hello to us by name, " . . . right here . . . at the bottom of the bookshelf . . . something I've used more as a bookend rather than reading material . . . a copy of . . . The Marx-Engels Reader. Willy! Holly!"

Two adorable dogs rushed into the hallway. Just by intuition it was clear they were good-natured. Thirtysoon fawned all over them, but not egregiously. They seemed equally taken with her, nuzzling, but not drooling.

"Nice dogs," I remarked. "Don't recall . . ."

"I'm taking care of them for some friends nearby. In a minute. . . ." He was referring to further explanation. "Holly, Willy, c'm'ere, c'mon, c'mon."

They leapt away from Yve, but joyously, not like an escape. They bounced and ran in a couple of circles as if they'd happily be back to tussle with her again.

"Here, here, look at this. What's this? Huh, what's this?" He proffered the Marx-Engels Reader, which did have the heft of a doorstop, and waved it carefully between their noses. He was a conscientious host, and suddenly thought to feel their noses with his palm, to assure they were healthy then as well as happy.

When they'd had several sniffs of the book, Tsujisaka cracked open the door and said, "Get 'em! Go get 'em!

"The redolence of utopianism and the dialectic, pies in the sky!" Obviously the sight of his furry charges scampering after the Cubans invigorated Tsujisaka.

"Intellectual kibble, I say, say," murmured Thirtysoon.

"Now, Yve, James, welcome. I think your communist friends are being driven out of town, never to turn back."

Indeed, we could hear Holly and Willy barking and yapping and, as if entertaining our spectator ears, growling in between; interspersed with that were the equatorial accents of terror and shock over two brave canines in the cold hounding them back to their defunct workers paradise.

"My compliments to their masters," Yve said, "for raising such cuddly anti-communists. Holly and Willy are adorable and brilliant, and so smart!"

In the distance we heard "Arriba! Arriba!" and screams and finally, tires peeling and screeching. I reflected how much better it was for the peaceful community than gunshots. A medal of some kind was in order for Tsujisaka and Holly and Willie, possibly a modest but meaningful ceremony for the presentation when their masters returned home.

While I pondered which class of merit to recommend, the four-legged heroes jumped into Thirtysoon's open arms.

Now Tsujisaka not only looked invigorated, he seemed elated. Darling dogs and beautiful women, he liked nothing better. But fires burned that were a result of Thirtysoon's and my presence, so I tampered with the glow because I had to.

"You're positing quite specific information about Race. And you just wrote this masterpiece?" I waved my copy of his paragraph.

"Paul Race," Thirtysoon downshifted. "Petraliesi within TNM. We haven't been able to trace back to his birth name. We turned one of his lieutenants and got the cognomen, but that's it. It suggests his origins are around Palermo. But there is no other evidence that we have, no records. Paul Race may be his real name. But he may have plucked it out of a hat."

She was completely focused now on our predicament, yet displayed her multitasking abilities by not disappointing Holly and Willie. She petted and stroked them, the gentle touches syncopating the privileged information.

The gentleness calmed everyone down. Tsujisaka turned his practical side to Yve and me, rather than boasting about vanguard daggers of his device which would save the world. He just spoke calmly about saving us.

"I have a better way to get you from place to place than creating a killing field with each step you take, relying on tactical superiority and superior weapons still unknown to TNM, not to say the commies." Tsujisaka guffawed over the Whammos.

"Our two headquarters appreciate that you draw fire, but it only yields TNM soldiers, not Race. We want Race. So we can pick his brain into little pieces. First hand, not by ESP. Wherever he is, whenever. He's in California at this moment. His plan is to be in Paris by the end of the week. Bogota's next, which should be nice for you if it comes to that - Columbian summer. Back to Sincelejo, eh, James? Hide in plain sight on the beach in Santa Marta, eh, James? Those senoritas with fiery eyes, eh, James?"

My abdomen clutched, but I was a master of my quirks and had no doubt it went unnoticed.

Thirtysoon shot an accusing look at me. Why not I? it said.

"So better than these daggers . . ." He glanced to indicate the back of the house, his workshop. "Better than the .22 caliber . . ."

Willy barked. More communists, although the Cubans surely were gone? Some outpost of the ideology along the equator in South America? Holly barked then. North Koreans? They'd certainly be better prepared for the Hudson River Valley in January.

"Hiro, please, it's time for us to go home." Yve's meaning was the safe house.

I didn't care for the cozy way she put it.

"All right!" he allowed. "Here. What's this?" He passed a bowl half full of silvery matter beneath our noses.

"Glitter," Thirtysoon said without further comment, except, "it appears."

"Glitter?" A little thing, but I verged on being nonplussed.

"Glitter indeed. You are going in disguise as a glam band. Familiar with the genre, James?"

"Just in folklore." Terse to mask my ambivalence.

"Thirtysoon?" Tsujisaka was taking on the airs of the Director, rather than sticking to his guns as armourer (pun unmeant).

"It was before I was born, but there are records, of course. I didn't intend that pun, by the way."

"Very good, Thirtysoon." Tsujisaka could be impossible every so often. Just because he was two years older than me, he felt it was his right. Fortunately, Yve deflected both his pomposity and my disgruntlement by shrieking cutely and sliding to the middle of the living room floor in socks while the Louboutins were treated to a warm spot to dry outside and in. It prompted questioning looks by Willy and Holly, and their wagging tails slowed noticeably. But their fur didn't stand, so they seemed to love my colleague no less. She just seemed, I surmised - not unlike Tsujisaka did concerning Race's thoughts - more complex than they'd expected after receiving boundless affection from her.

The comely shriek, then she started singing,

"Well you're built like a car you've got a hubcap diamond star halo, you're
built like a car, oh yeh."

She strummed a few notes on air guitar.

"Love is like oxygen. You get too much you get too high. Not enough and you're gonna die. Love gets you high."

"Splendid! Splendid! Just so! The paragons, indeed. Very good!"

"The glitter, James," Thirtysoon said. Glam bands, glitter rock. I'll glue the glitter where your cheekbones are most prominent and make little silver stars under your eyes. You'll look the lead singer of Sweet."

"Of course," added Tsujisaka, "this glitter has elements you can't buy in the costume store. It blocks radar. It foils all their known tracking capabilities. You'll be able to fly commercial completely incognito. No expensive military flights necesary."

"It's feasible, James, if you're ready to rock." At that moment Thirtysoon looked twenty-five years of age and not one split second more.

"Of course he is. It's an order - from headquarters." Tsujisaka had a smug look I remembered from school, when his two years of seniority made him proctor, and I had to obey.

"And I'll supply you with rock-smashing scents . . . an amber essence?" He looked over at Yve, who nodded eagerly, and with a secure smile.

"No one will doubt you," she said. "T Rex rules again!"

I knew nothing about this Sweet whom she spoke of, or T Rex, but I felt uneasy, and uncharacteristically wished some North Koreans would break up the party.

"Wig wam wig wambamalam!"

"Glam?" I asked.

"Glam," they nodded.

The pooches obviously thought Thirtysoon was fun again, and their tails thumped, supplying the beat.

She cooed as if she were tickling me, "Don't you want to be a rock and roll star, James? Everybody else does."

She was inexorable. I was impervious. It's well to explain. Thirtysoon obviously was not able to accept, so far, that I was numb to sex. It didn't exist for me - animal, vegetable, or mineral - although I acknowledged the plain fact of it. The Director finally did accept my simple view of life, but posed the philosophical nine hundred pound gorilla in the room: "What about the future of the human race, if your attitude were to prevail?" My answer out loud then was, "The Chinese have managed to find attitudes like mine completely irrelevant, thank you very much." It's my answer now, that the world is in no danger from me, only TNM is.

My asexuality made me the right man for the job. TNM's major weakness was its men all had boners in their eyeballs, and its women an extra brain lobe shaped like a twat. The royals they were aligned with were no different, and it was often why discriminating observers usually referred to most of the descendants of Europe's great houses as "silly royals." But they could be smart, too, and they were uncommonly savvy about staying rich.

Sex was their Achilles heel. I've been called a heel by many women, notably contestants of the Miss Universe Pageant, who for a good week refused to believe, and when they finally did, accept that I was just a judge, not the competition's Love Coach. Miss Finland was in tatters.

In short, sex was not something with which TNM and its associates could delay or distract me. No other secret service agent had this capacity. If it's been a mystery so far why I had come to attain high rank much before my due time, this is the answer. The Director supposed I was the only one who could fit through The New Mafia's crack. But no man is an island, and he gave me Thirtysoon, with many, as I've discovered, precocities and crucial unique talents of her own. Her singular flaw, if that's the term, is that she was at the stage Miss Finland et al were just before they started jumping towel boys and the like after bouncing off my invisible shield.

"Thirtysoon!"

"Yes, James?"

"We'll go to Margie Bell's curious boutique immediately upon boning up on our host's daggers . . ."

"Boning up, James?"

"Becoming apprised of. Boning up is a slang expression for that."

"Oh." Her mouth twisted not unattractively, as if there was some sort of harmless joke being played.

"We'll go there next, before the safe house, to throw them off the scent. Paradoxically. That just occurred to me. Not important."

Then Tsujisaka spread out an array of daggers, and for a most intriguing two hours lectured on gruesome ways to cut out the heart of The New Mafia, one smart criminal at a time. The lights flashing and spinning on scores of fire trucks camouflaged our presence in the armourer's house, and we were able to pay strict attention.



PART FOUR


"Paul Race glimpsed bits of San Francisco Bay through fog clusters. A ship whose prow pointed toward Hamamatsu passed under the Golden Gate Bridge. The fog raced in San Francisco. Race hadn't checked about the weather in Japan. But he would.

"'Blond is alive,' stated The Shadow. Race and The Shadow were so young that their parents were unlikely to know about Lamont Cranston, the legendary Shadow of AM radio theater in a long lost time. The Shadow was as valued for his expertise in mental telepathy as for his psychological astuteness, and was Race's consiglieri as well as his contemporary.

"'And this is being verified now . . . yes, Thirtysoon is alive.'

"With his right index fingertip The Shadow tapped his right cheekbone. There was no necessary symmetry in ESP, although certain parts of the mind were read best after the corner of each eye was tapped simultaneously by the knuckles of the small fingers. The method was as effective as it was awkward - and rather undignified.

"'What are they doing in a scent shop?' he wondered out loud. With his right index finger's knuckle then, he tapped the cheekbone twice more.

"'Why are they alive!' Race roared."

Tsujisaka held the printed page with both hands to appraise his composition. It worked, for content. The agency's ESP was superior. There was no doubt Race was back in TNM's San Francisco office tucked discreetly in a Telegraph Hill apartment building. The vibrations said he was still slightly damp after the long drive from Point Reyes National Seashore. "That is Race's way," Tsujisaka explained, "to ignore Aston Martin's provisions for comfort, exposing himself to the truth inherent in the elements. Clarity is all." To be the Grand Don of The New Mafia before the age of thirty-three - it was more impressive than being a commander in Her Majesty's Secret Service at twenty-five, or a light colonel in the American secret service at twenty-seven. Thirtysoon and I controlled much of our respective departments, which were created after the Second World War; Race controlled much of half the world, known in every corner of the world as the dark side since the beginning of time.

"But 'glimpsed bits' in my second paragraph and 'Race roared' so soon after?"

The man was a nudge with his literary vanity. And his literary inferiority complex. He couldn't complete a page without wanting to toss it into the trash.

He slapped the piece of paper with his right hand. It forced us to witness his self-abasement: "Fog clusters? Prow pointed? Then two words later, 'passed'? I should be . . ."

But Tsujisaka's ESP was practically infallible, so it was entirely correct that Race roared. To Thirtysoon and me that was what mattered.

"Race roared.' How could I? It sounds so trite," he despaired.

"Despite the veracity?" I asked, to comfort. Doleful that instant, Tsujisaka shook his head.

In related matters, hard guesses were in order concerning TNM's improvement in ESP in the course of one evening. They'd misidentified targets and bombed harmless doghouses at about six. Now not quite nine they read my mind correctly about scents.

We needed to get into disguise at Margie Bell's with the sensor-blocking glitter. And open a few bottles of her perfumes to throw TNM leaders and functionaries off our scent. Any nearby, with their figurative boners and so forth, would be drawn to the Bell boutique's allures.

"The tender trap," I said plainly.

Tsujisaka laughed out loud. "James Blond, sex symbol!" My grandfather, who was, was probably in Geneva, steeped in flesh, sturdily priapic according to the situation's needs, even now. What must he think of his offshoot?

"What is funny, Hiro?" Thirtysoon asked. The black blades of her vanguard pageboy practically clicked points, betraying a hypersensitivity not normal for her character.

"I'll explain when you're older," he answered with a litterateur's irony. Since a previous mission he hoped Yve would find him attractive, as attractive as me. He'd observed her quivering as I lectured at sniper school about hiding places, and permitted his imagination to run wild.

"Now, take the daggers and go. I've no sense Race knows you're here. Minutes ago he believed you were already at the boutique. James, no doubt you were anticipating amber essences having an effect the moment you and Yve stepped in. The New Mafia's ESP is faulty, extrapolating when it should be interpolating."

"Dolts," scoffed Thirtysoon.

I heard her whisper to Tsujisaka, leading him on, "I'm older."

I laughed, because we'd been speaking of empire evolving into one Anglo-American state, and Yve spoke empirically just then. Was it the hundreds of doghouse fires and the wayward gunshots and Whammo slugs and the bitter cold that forced a conceptual pun like this? Stress - was that what was behind everything? Was stress - and not an anthropocentric "God" - the Creator? This unspoken pun had come out of nowhere.

I filed the tangential theological problems occurring just then to present to the service's divinity scholars at Emory University in a more peaceful time: for example, Is stress, more than flesh, the image of God? Where does the phenomenon of happiness derive from, if God is stress? Does a God who is Stress have a personality; and is it brittle? Typical endless theological pondering, better left to the professionals in Atlanta, when they weren't off dancing at the Pinhead Club in Buckhead, the hypocrites. In all honesty, while Grandfather was my idol, his ontological musings about his Jamaican boatman vis-a-vis the scheme of things were small potatoes compared to this. But his were close after the end of the Second World War, when spirituality had taken a blow. Mine were part and parcel of the twenty-first century, when it had caught up.

To get us out in a hurry, before Race tapped his knuckle in the right way, he whispered back, "The key to James is world conquest. And our government believes the key to world conquest is James. To make a long story short."

And Yve whispered an hypothesis, "So I only need to be as beguiling as manifest destiny."

She was beginning to get the idea, that there was more to me than lust. But I don't believe she understood yet that anything at all was more to me than lust. The proverbial better paper clip moved me more than lust, as did the inferior paper clip.

Whisper, whisper. They acted as if I was too preoccupied to hear.

"Wait until I get him back to the safe house," she summed up.

Tsujisaka laughed, softly, nervously. He knew me, and must have thought more explanation was futile. Young Thirtysoon would have to learn for herself.

America ruling the world, thoroughly, finally, democratically. Town hall meetings, Peoria-style, from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli. I was fond of this future, and whatever Yve thought her prospects were to make her jitter so lustfully, the prospect of global conquest and the American planet was like inhaling a gust at Marge Bell's of the purest alluring scent, backed by a hit in each nostril of amyl nitrate to jam the pleasure to every extreme. (Grandfather tutored me once about illegal drugs, after Grandfather Tsujisaka procured an array of them - all in the service of being beware.) Little voting booths in all twenty-four time zones just like the ones in Carpenters Hall on election day in Goshen, Indiana. It was a pretty picture. And yes, I forgot for a moment: America, and England, ruling the world.

I laughed.



PART FIVE


"Do you have a copy of The Declaration of Independence?"

Tsujisaka replied that he'd gotten a tattoo of it in microscript. In three columns on his right palm.

"Odd," murmured Thirtysoon. "I should have done . . ." It faded into mumbles about the Magna Carta and the small of her back.

"Okay, very good. If you'll be so kind as to let Holly and Willy sniff it for a few moments, to get the gist."

"Come, pups," he said, and Tsujisaka proffered his ornate hand.

"Good, good," I said. "May I have the commie monograph, The Manifesto? We'll let them sniff that now." That was next to The Marx-Engels Reader, a slim pamphlet in comparison. Just long enough to rouse the rabble with some high-sounding ratiocination.

"See, Holly? See, Willy? 'Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness'? Doesn't that smell good?
Mmm, mmm. Now smell this. Eww, ugh: 'The icy waters of philistine calculation'? Icky. That's how they think! Believe me! You believe me, don't you, Willy, Holly?"

"Ruf, ruf!" They believed. They were adorable, their coats were shiny, they were friendly and their eyes were soulful.

Communists denied the existence of a soul! Grandfather said when the Reds prattled like an aviary full of budgies about the Russian soul, they didn't mean a word. It was all propaganda for the masses, whom the vanguard of the proletariat thought of as simpletons.

Compare Holly and Willy to Russian Wolfhounds. Which would any decent and sane person choose? Perhaps the Russian people have cast off the bulk of the hollow Communist ideology, but their dogs look like they haven't gotten the message yet, and are sorry specimens for it.

I asked Holly and Willy to take another sniff of Tsujisaka's enlightened tattoo, and cajoled them, "This means 'Don't bark.' Now sniff the evil book. For this you bark. Go outside now! Go on! Run around! Have fun! Go to Barbara's and back!" Hiro had mentioned that "Barbara" was something of a code word for them, that it triggered a shot straight to Caffe Macchiato, in any weather, for their evening run. The only difference now was their awareness of malign Reds. I understood that before this they ran to Barbara's as something of an announcement that their masters were on their way, and only barked at birds. Just a couple of friendly yips at Barbara's door until they saw her kind dark eyes look up from whatever she was doing behind the counter, and at full speed they would skitter back to Montgomery Street while their masters strolled to the caffe.

Minutes after they'd taken their snootfuls of good and evil, there was clamorous barking. Thirtytsoon's first impulse was to fear for Holly's and Willy's safety. Mine was to beware of more slingshot steel pellets, as if the Cubans really hadn't been driven to the river and beyond.
Tsujisaka said it sounded like Willy and Holly were in control, if overstimulated by an unknown exigency. These were nothing, he said, like the affable arfs of their usual roundtrip to Caffe Macchiato.

"The Cubans are gone," he pronounced, without any real evidence. But I trusted his instincts, as he trusted Willy's and Holly's, it seemed, as well as their ability to frighten malefactors all the way back to home base on the sultry twenty-third parallel. The barking we could plainly hear now indicated a furious engagement rather than a rout.

And it was true, when we saw the dogs had cornered a tall, frightened, but very chic - if that's a word to describe anyone's presentableness in stormy weather - woman just a block from the caffe.

The barking served to frighten, but Willy and Holly wagged their tails nevertheless. Complicated creatures. Well brought up, one could say, able to distinguish their objective and not allow it to compromise their gentle nature. But obviously the woman heard only the snarls and just viewed the teeth.

My handgun slid out, Thirtysoon's arms opened, and Tsujisaka called off Willy and Holly. They cuddled with Her Majesty's Secret Service's youngest commander in history. I shoved the barrel against the woman's nose, not so firmly that she couldn't answer questions.

I barked, "Name, rank, serial number!"

She managed, "Alva Vanderbilt Belmont the Third, lady who lunches, don't have a number, but Rice Chex." Her eyes moved to the left to check the pooches, then down her nose at the Heckler and Koch Expert.

"Are you a communist?" With a martial bark.

"No!"

"Then why have my . . ." The martial possessive. ". . . four-legged operatives found you so opprobrious that their sweet dispositions have taken second chair to pure aggression?" The confounding language, to put the enemy at a disadvantage, that nevertheless gets the main point across.

"Not a communist! No, no!"

"Then why were my hounds showing their teeth?" The rhetoric becomes more than a tendency by the time the drill sergeants in basic training are done with you. I can still hear one of the Master Sergeants screaming: "Who gave permission for you to stand on my pebbles?"

Her eyes looked down just perceptibly: "Are those Christian Louboutins?"

With that, I believed her. And because Yve had removed the heels, and light was faint from a street lamp far-removed, she couldn't be blamed for having to ask.

"But why did my dogs corner you?"

"My great grandmother was a trade unionist. Maybe the pups can tell! They can smell better and hear better than we can . . ."

Thirtysoon shrugged as if it was possible: "Maybe dogs have a sixth sense about our souls. Seems like." She rubbed them both on the head, and she looked as happy as Willy and Holly were then. All three were indifferent to the cold.

"What?" I barked, with my .45 still pushing up.

Alma Vanderbilt Belmont III struggled to say, "Nice coat."

Taste and an eye passed down through the generations.

"Great Grandmama supported the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union. Understandable in those days, don't you think?"

"Or don't you, James?" piped in Thirtysoon. This had become ludicrous to her, I sensed.

"The pistol, James," she nodded that way.

"Oh," I said.

"Valentino?" asked Ms. Belmont.

I heard Tsujisaka's unmistakable voice a few paces in back of me. Why he followed could be explained later.

"Mrs. Belmont-Wye," he greeted her, and her back to the wall relaxed. I holstered my H&K Expert, up the sleeve, and relaxed accordingly.

"Belmont-Wye?" I asked, mostly to the air.

"Do you think I want my husband to get any of the credit?" Belmont, preceded by Vanderbilt. I understood.

"Those royals are spoiled and insufferable," she said incongruously. It prompted Tsujisaka to dial in. He could route extra sensory perceptions through his iBook, but spoke first himself.

"So right. They're rudely still at Caffe Macchiato, even though it's past closing. A frivolous conversation. Barbara shooting dagger glances. Remind me to bestow a real one, for decoration purposes only." He basically mumbled to the ground.

He did the correct facial taps with a couple of knuckles, and in a moment we could hear one princess to another.

"I give him sex. Endless. Endlessly. That's enough."

"It's not!"

"It is. Why should I pay for a thing? Ever? He's the lucky one."

"It's only human to want a little get . . . at least once in awhile."

"Nein!"

"Just take him to McDonald's sometime, buy him something off the dollar menu. You can eat the fries off his tray. You're out, what, five dollars? What's the return on that investment? Your last bracelet you said was forty thousandish. What's a dollar for a double cheeseburger to you?"

"It's a principal. The man always pays."

"He might feel taken advantage of, and stop. No matter how greedy you are, it's a good strategy to salt the mine once in awhile. So he never wonders if it's fair."

Salt the mine?

"Look at me. And say my name, out loud. He gets all that. Sex and sex and sex, beautiful sex and a bloodline. And I give it without reluctance."

"You could send him a greeting card, spontaneously. I mean he'll believe it's spontaneous. What's a stamp and a card going to cost? Think of it as overhead."

Tsujisaka snapped off the ESP and the laptop.

"'Think of it as overhead'?" Thirtysoon burst into giggles. Holly and Willy jumped for more attention from her.

"Isn't that funny, James?"

"What?" I didn't notice anything funny.

She didn't answer, the momentarily disarming giggles making her wiggle amid the circle on the dark sidewalk, Mrs. Belmont (Wye), Hiro, Holly, Willy, and me.

The machete locks, jostled by her laughter, bobbed up and down like threshers.



PART SIX


The New Mafia found us again, but more precisely. This time no erratic ESP mistook side wheel for sidewalk, like doghouses for the tree houses. Ann Street burst into man-sized flames at a dozen targets, was my sense of the attack. Two were so close we felt the sudden heat. We were in danger. Not so the sturdy steamboat moored at the Historic District's wharf. It was safe even at the farthest edges of the paddle wheels. The wind surely tested its mettle, but the rocket fire was picturesquely distant. This time TNM's telepathic perceptions hadn't slid to the wrong word. Or, those silly princesses at Barbara's caffe weren't too silly to call in correct coordinates.

I thought Mrs. Belmont would look like an ordinary clubwoman, a bit self-conscious, thus conscientious, but all wrong nevertheless. The dancing light from the flames revealed she was statuesque and sleek, and wore a gold stud each earlobe. She wasn't afraid of the cold. She still was miffed about the pistol shoved under the tip of her nose. That is, a rocket landing in the intersection of Ann and Liberty captured her expression for several seconds with its burst. The hoary light revealed sober eyes expressing great displeasure with me. Compared to my expectation she'd be a reminder of Eleanor Roosevelt when presiding as First Lady, she was young. I'd say, thirty.

"There's something about an explosion," said Thirtysoon, yearning, practically. Another clue to the extraordinary fast track she was on with the Service? There are those who are able, and do well. Then there are the able agents who love the action, well beyond any corollary joys to esprit de corps, the naturals who are secure and warmed by the smell of it, for whom action is like a return to home. The fresh baked bread effect, but much danger added.

"My dear!" Ms. Belmont III was surprised, confronting Thirtysoon in the new flare-ups, light lapping and ebbing over each of our faces. "Your hair is darling!" My .45 was nowhere to be seen, safely and sanely up my sleeve, but all of Alva Vanderbilt Belmont's backside still touched the brick building, calves, buttocks, behind her shoulders, the back of her head, and warily she she further embarked on the feminine custom. "May I know . . ." About the hairdresser, obviously.

"Oh, he's in Belfast. But whenever I can. Adorable man."

"Genius!"

"Thank you." Thirtysoon seemed gratified, although not nearly as much as she evidenced for the rockets .

"The way it can meet, just barely, in front of your chin, when you turn some ways. Without any pointy-pointy. I mean, it doesn't, can't meet, but it gives the idea. I'm sure you understand. But," she seemed to find a correction necessary, "I don't mean to say . . . I mean, your hair, I mean your hair, very dark and lovely, your mother's genes, so blessed, I can tell even in the ghastly light of these blasts. My friends at lunch today . . ."

Thirtysoon understood, and thanked her again with a shrug, and simply, "I'm Irish."

Holly and Willy, from mad wagging of tails, darted through the fires on Ann Street toward Caffe Macchiato, away just the length of one block. They'd heard Barbara, not cursing exactly, but expressing displeasure forthrightly. I had. Thirtysoon translated from the Italian. But Willy and Holly, it seemed, understood before we did. My anti-anthropocentric beliefs were justified again, in my mind.

"You push her up against the wall, James, and you just met." Thirtysoon winked at Tsujisaka, but while I saw it in the fluctuating light, I'm not sure Hiro did. I didn't matter, because Thirtysoon launched into an opinion, more revelation to me about her fearlessness and rank.

"Good and evil aside," she said, pausing just then as another rocket hit the intersection of Ann Street and Liberty Street - pausing but not flinching - "Well, there you are. Just as I was about to say. The ghastly light these rocket explosions create make for a fabulous Turner-esque nightscape, don't you think? Or don't you?"

She was well read, too, employing the patois of Evelyn Waugh like that. I didn't know anyone in our generation read him so decisively as to assume his characterizations, no matter the desired effect. With the resumption of the attacks, I couldn't dream of what Thirtysoon's was.
But it said something about being educated in Ireland from the inception.

Mrs. Belmont III, whom I'd backed away from - to give her "her space" as we say in the USA - used the breathing room to respond effusively, like a good clubwoman ought to.

"So apt, my dear. And don't you adore the Tate's cafe? After all that power upstairs, oil by oil by oil, to go to that buffet below and just relax? Coffee or tea, besides. No compunction to order," she shivered, irrespective of the cold and force six wind, for that socialite's way of putting things colorfully, "a beer."



PART SEVEN


"Beyond good and evil . . ." Tsujisaka started.

Thirtysoon was full of mischief and interrupted, "Empirically speaking. . . ."

It was as if Holly and Willy were erudite, because they barked happily as though they got Yve's joke before anyone else.

Tsujisaka added a weary "Ha ha" then launched: "The rockets are getting closer. Race is getting better. And the evening's young where he is. We need to get you to Tommy Tagge's tree house after all. It was the original plan . . ."

"And the original is still the greatest," giggled Thirtysoon, while Mrs. Belmont III flinched from another rocket burst which tore apart a covered bus stop.

"And one of my best inventions is in it, intended to get you to the safe house safely. But it will do just as well, getting you to the airport. Holly and Willy can fetch your belongings and bring them to the Tagges' back yard. Race won't think to track the dogs, and he can't track my invention."

Yve and I gave him that inquisitive shake of the head, histrionic in the television family sit-com way, and she may have regretted it as much as I, that we'd been influenced by the garbage culture against our will. Next thing, we'll be saying "Hello?" when we pose a question with a self-evident answer.

"By the way," he continued, "Mrs. Alva Vanderbilt Belmont III is one of us . . ."

Mrs. Belmont gave the pertinent tinkly wave.

"And it's her own airplane you'll be on . . ."

"Eh?" Thirtysoon had expected only hops, skips, and jumps by land or water around New York. So had I.

"To San Francisco."

"Willy, fetch Commander Thirtysoon's hand grenades. Holly, Commander Blond's cufflinks box. Good doggies. Now run!" Again, the two dodged residual explosions as they zipped away through smoke and fire, with the house pets' ken of the best paths over front yards and back.

Fire and smoke and explosions and gunshots - we're always prepared for danger. But it was surprising to see it crunching over snow in the likeness of Yosemite Sam, mumbling alternating with shouts about the freezing outdoors. A laggard Cuban communist, said Tsujisaka immediately, who'd hung back at Pop's Paradise while his comrades botched the attempts on my life. He smelled as though he'd been served all the drinks he wanted. Stewed, but you probably couldn't blame Pop for a customer with a long red beard which practically hid his whole face. The smell must have been soaked up by the general hard drinking atmosphere, a neighborhood bar packed in the dead of winter.

"Pozo es Sam de Yosemite!" contributed Thirtysoon. Perhaps she had a grandfather, too, who'd apprised her of Looney Tunes.

The comedy ended quickly when the overly hirsute Cuban drew a knife and, as Yve translated excitedly, said with a glare stabbing me directly in the eyes, "I'm gonna cut you."

Mrs. Belmont III wouldn't ignore the transgression, although etiquette, for once, should have been a secondary concern while Sam de Yosemite lumbered forward. She exclaimed, "How rude!"

And here we were, four paragons of the free world versus one dirty, stinking communist, on a dimly lit street, surrounded by snowdrifts and subject to force six winds, the overwhelming majority wondering what to do just then. That is, does one really wish to hurt a drunken fellow so reminiscent of a beloved cartoon character? Would one fight back instinctively if the attacker looked like Donald Duck?

Probably not. It was too hard to imagine a malevolent Donald Duck. But Yosemite Sam comes with the grizzled image preceding him, so the malignant Sam de Yosemite didn't give pause. However, the element of surprise was there, and I backed away instinctively. There I tripped. Later, Yve said she watched rather than leap forward to help because she wanted to see how I'd maneuver. I wished the confidence in me was as great on my own part, and that she'd shot him, or "did her thing" as they said in Grandfather's time, and pierced him to death with flying daggers. My eyes were only on the knife, with Sam de Yosemite's entire body for backdrop, and New York winter night for background. An aerial explosion just then over Ann Street revealed the bricks in the buildings, some cars parked in a way that they looked abandoned, and the ..blade in Sam's hand. My no doubt wide eyes took in his ten gallon hat and nasty eyes and snarl as I fell on my back and he jumped knife in fist, blade aimed at my face. At that moment there was maybe four feet to go until the point stabbed me between the eyes.

I believe it was Mrs. Belmont who screamed, not Thirtysoon. My last recollection was a glint before events turned. The glint was very real, an actual perception. The churl's face, his ridiculous ten gallon hat (one wonders where a Cuban communist came by an expensive Stetson, unless he'd stolen it from a Texan, some West Point cadet slumming at Pop's Paradise), and the knife's shining blade, glinting really, a few points of refraction off the steel.

In short, while there's a slowing-down aspect to terror, fear, consternation, whatever it was in the moment, it wasn't entirely dreamlike. I saw the snarl and I saw the glint, and I still can, albeit more dreamily in retrospect. And I knew he meant to kill me, whether the actually idea of it was in his coarse head or not. It probably was more like, "Stab Blond, James Blond." And with me falling back and him leaping as we did, both without thinking much, the target simply worked out to being the middle of my face. However, he had said he was going to cut me, so there was some conscious intention prior to the drunken lurch.

I only mention this to ascertain, for the reader, my own certainty that this was attempted murder, or assassination if you like, of the bargain-basement equatorial kind. A real knife, a real leaving of his feet which I observed on my way backwards, a real if sudden focus about the direction the blade was going. All the basics. There was growling, as well. His, most definitely not mine. I spoke, something like, "Don't!"

In contrast, it was nothing like being shot at and nearly hit, also in the face. There was a glint about the bullet so close, but I couldn't have actually seen it, compared to sensing it. It was like the intimation of a flying round, real in the sense that I observed energy hurtling faster than the eye can see. But not as empirical as the glint on the blade, the murderous disposition of Sam de Yosemite's lunge. It brought to mind, later of course, the notion that mass in the elementary state is energy. There was a firearm round which I did see, but only as energy, from which the intimation was it was a bullet (mass) whizzing at me, then past. Can't remember if I heard it, though, speeding and spinning by, after the shot. But oddly enough, the quality, the mind's picture, of the intimation was, well, sort of a glint. But a glint lacking the gleam of the knife blade.

Before anyone else could spring forward, to help - Willy, Holly, Tsujisaka, Mrs. Belmont III, Yve - I helped myself. My right leg shot out, the entire bottom of my shoe thumped SdY in the chest and stopped him directly, and now he fell back. I didn't see how, exactly, as I scurried to my feet. When I was up, he was kneeling, looking more stunned than even the drunken state accounted for. But was it instinct? Or was he well trained? Or lucky? He still had the knife in hand.

"James, he has the knife!" I think it was Thirtysoon. I was heeding only the truculent Cuban.

"Ca va sans dire." Yet it didn't go without saying. Thirtysoon's training for these situations may have been to attack directly. Ours was to seek the opponent's weapon. For the American secret service, it went without saying that one would know where all the materials of destruction were. If it was Thirtysoon who spoke, that was consistent with some of the moves Grandfather'd spoken of when he was one of the great paladins in Her Majesty's Secret Service, to seek to destroy. Our paradigm, as gentle Americans, was disarmament first.

SdY was trying to lumber to his feet. I kicked him in the face. The knife wasn't released. Thinking I didn't leverage that kick well, I kicked him there again. He grunted, as if he were saying "Huh?" Again I kicked, as hard as I could. He didn't go down, the knife didn't drop. I stepped back a pace, and rushed and kicked. Nothing changed. He was stunned, but didn't drop, didn't appear to want to surrender. Kick.

How many rum and Pepsis had Pop served him?

"Uh?" It served like Esperanto. Even Willy and Holly, wagging their tails now, understood. The man didn't know where he was. Nor should he, drunk, freezing, and two thousand miles from home. He teetered on his knees, the knife dangled in his bare hand.

"If this rubbed, marred, or scratched my Santonis, your government is going to pay dearly."

How did those two dogs understand so much? They barked merrily, chiding the communist, it sounded like, for jeopardizing the shoes I wore, which were a discontinued style.

Yve tried to be helpful: "I know that Santoni will take them back and make them good as new. For a charge. Not slight. Back to Corridiano. Wait ages! But, you'll have them again, shiny as new. Well, not really shiny, of course. Not Santoni. Blessed be."

Alma Vanderbilt Belmont III added, "I'm going . . . angled stitches . . . tomorrow . . . New York . . . Madison . . . perhaps Hiro . . . something passable . . ."

"Uh?"

"Santoni, you idiot equatorial. Oh, what does a communist know about anything, except arguing and talk talk talk? Surplus wig wam bam value."

"The glitter!" Thirtysoon remembered.

Holly barked. Willy barked. Another rocket exploded, above the ground again, illuminating a telephone pole poster in Spanish, about the Black Flamingo. Perhaps another time.

An explosion within the explosion wrapped another pulse of garish light around the pole, enough for me to read most of the poster under the Black Flamingo's, for a dance and show starring The Chris Lotion Revue at the Carpenter's Hall: "Showtime At Eight!" There were two photos, a glamour shot presumably of Chris Lotion, and another with him in front of a band, I'd say fourteen pieces were I forced to guess. He wore a black suit, the band wore white, and his hair was "sculpted," as Grandfather had described a handsome British teen idol by the name of Cliff Richard. "He was our Elvis for awhile," my namesake minus "l" lectured me. "Created pandemonium all his own, but never so unusual that people didn't argue over who had the most appeal. Seems so childlike now, compared to what you grew up with." He meant, I'm sure, the vicious rappers. (Whom I instantly eschewed more than a dozen years ago for lacking a purpose.)

The poster was a throwback to another age, but it had the full date, which was next Saturday night. I love to dance, and it was one of the few times I wished I could step out of the game and not be the subject of hot pursuit by some government or para-government or another. New York, Newburgh, winter, Showtime Saturday night! Something with which I could make the blokes back home - my overseas home, for school, some family - whose ironic affectations of loving all things American had metamorphosed through compulsive, intense study into genuine love and microscopic curiosity, so jealous that their teeth would freeze. The Chris Lotion Review, just up the Hudson River, at eight!

"Be there or be square," I can hear Grandfather say with his slightly sarcastic undertone. He loved America wisely but not well. Yet I imagined he'd have loved America much more if he'd been an adept at some things which were typically American and not typically British. Like the kind of dancing to Mr. Lotion's fourteen piece band I imagined when it filled Carpenter's Hall with balmy, bouncing sounds through the bleak January night. As the force six winds ripped through the canyon of low rise buildings on Anne Street and burned my ears, I couldn't predict a meteorological warming trend. The dance and show would be Newburgh's figurative port in the storm this Saturday, warm hands and warm cheeks touching while the small orchestra swung in the spotlight.

I swayed like a visible heat wave to the hip hop beat I contrived with rhumba samples, imagining Grandfather's befuddlement in the same ballroom, armed only with lessons in the foxtrot and waltz. I had never and would never denounce the rhythms.



PART EIGHT


How many classes of young spikes and fairest fawns inducted into clandestine service had heard the lecture that a rocket attack was exactly like being in a night club with extremely strong strobe lights--just add shrapnel? The simile was so tired it was onerous. Just out of college, the select, frankly the elect, the chosen few for Her Majesty's Secret Service and Uncle Sam's, we thought our appreciation of the world was keener than anyone's who had lived in it twice as long. We were certain their faculties while not impaired were stale. But it wasn't smart to groan when we heard our instructor compare rocket assaults and discos. A full generation of 00 candidates was so inured to old farts using the analogy, groaning would have been the cliche.

But Anne Street just then was lighted like a strobed disco--add glowing shrapnel. And with the forceful wind and skittering clouds, eerier--add glimpses of empty old pavement moonlit between two story buildings. Whenever the cloud cover was total, and the sparks of the explosions completely extinguished, without a street lamp nearby Newburgh was black. Another rocket exposed Yve and Mrs. Belmont III plainer than day, as if they were digitally photographed under high intensity beams educing every imperfection. It was an odd opportunity I tried to seize upon. Alas, Thirtysoon's imperfections, if any, were under the skin. I began to fear she'd always be my competition.

I'd wondered where the dogs had scampered all of a sudden, and about Tsujisaka. Then sailing lightly down the street was a sight more surreal than the spitting white-hot embers over the curbs and crosswalks of Anne and Liberty.

Willy was wrapped above his front legs to his jaw in a long solid colored scarf waving in the jagged breezes of more rocket explosions. How he managed to look suave in the garish light is a miracle, but he clenched a gold cigarette holder between his teeth, without a care in the world. As he floated closer and slower, with initial rocket shocks abating along with some of the six-force gale for a few moments, I saw a lighted cigarette and I knew, although I exclaimed, "It can't be." He had one of Grandfather's privately made cigarettes with three gold rings embossed near the tip. Evidently he'd just lit up, because I saw the thin old-gold lines clearly when he swooped past my nose a hairsbreadth away on a man-size, or of course, canine size, paper airplane. Holly chased behind, her barks all glee, like just another Newburgh pet let out for a run, leaping as if she wanted to co-pilot. The aircraft made no noise. It was compact, perhaps eight feet long, three wide, a foot and a half high, Willy's fur standing just a bit higher from the excitement. In short, it was clear Tsujisaka had invented a way to defy both radar and ESP, and Willy was the chosen cavalier.

Another rocket blew the long bed off a pick-up truck and created a huge gust upward where we stood. Thirtysoon's black style points scattered back, baring her neck and jawline. I noticed then she had it all. Her earlobes were perfectly lovely, just like her hair, chin, eyes, nose, silhouette and profile, face, and everything else, which I could deduce. I wondered--and I'd ask him when there was time for cigars and brandy--if the Secret Service of Grandfather's day ever presented such an aesthetic within. I knew about Honeychile Rider and Kissy Suzuki, but they weren't operatives for the Queen.

The explosion should have diverted the course of the gossamer-light paper airplane, but Willy appeared to handle the corrective by slightly shuffling his four paws. The craft seemed to pause in front of the Chris Lotion poster, then turned left gracefully and glided amid popping embers and just far enough away from the truck engulfed in stirring orange flames. I had a feeling he was going to show off to Barbara, perhaps to get a treat, now that Caffe Macchiato was closed for the night.

Another explosion seemed to provide an extra surge to an aircraft shaped like a juvenile's quiz sheet, folded for impudence and sailing. Holly bounced on all fours, with eager barks, but Willy, while grinning rakishly in character with his gold cigarette holder and the evenly smoldering tobacco, was purely silent.



PART NINE


"Paul Race mused, 'Blond, James Blond. How dare he! Is nothing sacred?'"

Tsujisaka interrupted his mind reading, looked at me, and said sarcastically without explanation, "A Mafioso with sacred values."

"Race looked at his capo in attendance, nodded at the bottle of Campari and slices of Meyer's lemon and the pewter ice bucket, chilled moist from ice cubes heaped inside. It and the stormy gray night, almost black, matched color. In an original old building, Race's office windows were ample. It invited staring at San Francisco, all the favorite slopes of Nob and Russian hills, North Beach and Telegraph Hill, all the lights where dwellers remained warm. Sometimes the fog wavered on the bay, then rush hour's red and yellow streams filled the Embarcadero. Otherwise, the chiefs stared at bridge towers, the very top, as they talked business.

"'Blond's amassed a posse,' he said. His capo poured another drink of the seriously red aperitif and splashed fresh soda after the ice was drenched in raspberry tone. The lemon came from an innocent, unaffiliated friend's little home garden some few miles north of the Golden Gate. The full thick slice with fruit intact circled the glass's rim before the capo gave one customary bartending tap and dropped it into an easy, sparkling mixture. He knew Race would decline, but observed a formality, a brief glance which conveyed the offer. The New Mafia seemed to comply with some of the respectful old ways.

"'But," Race continued, nodding back even more economically but without any diminution of respect, 'one of the those dogs just vanished.'

"'Two of them before, right, and a new broad? Any names coming through besides Blond's?' he said, then expressed quiet and not inelegant satisfaction with his cocktail's first bitter sip. The only hint of the thug was his residual choice of word for a woman."

I'd have commended Tsujisaka for surpassing one page, and the syntax seemed to have improved, too, since his description of Race's confrontation with raw and extravagant Nature on the other side of the bridge, but three explosions happened at once just then. The New Mafia's ESP couldn't come up with names very well, but their locater had improved rapidly. One cinder--this meant war--adhered to and it would be obvious, permanently marred a black Armani belt I'd found days earlier when I'd only meant to window shop on Madison Avenue.

The deep-dyed black matched Thirtysoon's natural, darkest strands. Since her hair was the quality I admired most among a cornucopia of them, I hoped the ugly brown welts which this rocket's glaring red cinder had singed onto the leather didn't foretell a change of style for Her Majesty's youngest heroine. Beauty and precocity kept her ten steps ahead of any colorist, but one never knows, now that trends are the coin of the realm. "Stay the way you are, always," I
would have written in her yearbook, if spy school had them.



PART TEN


Campari, a beautiful and daring woman, fantastic inventions, true villains, a picturesque locale--it was all too like a tale out of Grandfather's book. It only lacked seduction, but with Thirtysoon's adrenalin pumping from the rocket explosions and her affectionate nature microcosmically piqued by the cuddliness and waggly tails of Willy and Holly, coupled with the irresistibility I inherited, no doubt The Big Moment was imminent.

I'd watched with interest all the movies portraying my grandfather, the initial classical threesome of Dr. No, From Russia With Love, and Goldfinger, the affable Roger Moore contributions, and all of the others--all wanting in greatness, some nevertheless very good, some silly--then the true rebirth of the brand in Casino Royale with Daniel Craig, and I always wondered what the hell was going on with the ladies. Why did Grandfather stop there, as if getting the girl was the reward for his heroism and talents? Didn't it once occur to him that a coup d'etat was within grasp, over and over? That he could have taken steps to build an empire? Instead, he concentrated on the woman in his grasp, the arm candy, and accepted the clandestine approbation of the "Nicely done" and "Well played" and "Good show" proffered by his superiors for maintaining the status quo of the Anglo-American Empire, as it were. But with and in, pun utterly intended, the ladies the irresistible man found his converse.

"These films which portray and honor you are fantastic, Gramps, but your preoccupation--I think your minder, M, regarded it as weakness; I disagree, because it has nothing to do with vulnerability, in my opinion; rather, it's a mindset--is beyond me. And if it weren't, I'd still find it unacceptably distracting, even fatiguing." I once said something like to him, when I was a student. We were in his study. He spun a globe and smoked. I abstained. He was still a handsome man. As alluded to, I got some of that.

"Fatiguing? Then what's the problem," he said. "One's usually in a bed in those situations." He added distractedly, "Not always."

It was a facetious as he ever got, but I ignored it. I said, "There are better things."

His eyebrow shot up.

I continued, "When you really think about it, it seems silly. If it weren't for perpetrating the human race, I don't see the point."

The eyebrow drooped, as if he were disappointed in me. I made a quick emendation.

"No pun intended."

Mollified, but seeming still curious, my famous grandfather couldn't help ask, begin to ask, the question endemic to his and perhaps a couple more succeeding generations in these matters: "Do you . . . ah . . . pref- . . ."

I spared him his misery at stating the question fully.

"I don't see the point of that, either."

He rolled his right hand, as if to say Get on with it, now that that's been clarified once and for all.

"I just don't see it at all, when there are worlds to be won. And if I have to take some orders and take some risks under the aegis of the Secret Service, I will. You have your undeniably beautiful and lovely wife, your honors, your legend, your health, your good and considerable land holding in the shire, by the standards of the shire. These have been the rewards of your life. While I want fifty thousand acres. Now. For starters."

Back to the shocked eyebrow.

"And I want plenty more."

But so does The New Mafia.

While Grandfather never really got the drift, even as I stubbed his spinning globe at California ("I want every bit of that!" I declared; and then I tapped Hawaii: "And that!"), I presently hoped Thirtysoon might, as a member of the generation that was just coming into its own, about to run the world while the old goats, many much younger than my grandfather, puttered and pottered with what they'd chipped off phenomenologically.

Willy barked twice. Tsujisaka interpreted: "Hop on." I took it to mean the paper airplane would get Thirtysoon and me under the radar to a safe place.

There was an alternative, about an hour's drive away. By paper airplane, the ETA was unknown. I reached for Thirtysoon's fingertips and said "Hop on!" in English, and to Willy, "Onward, James" as if we were in an old movie. I don't know if he understood the little drollery, but it was possible, after a week of Tsujisaka's pet-sitting and all the inevitable inculcations in the man's presence. Perhaps Holly enlightened him, after hopping on herself. In any case, he looked like he didn't at all mind being likened to a chauffeur momentarily, as his swagger in the wraparound scarf and uptilted gold cigarette holder diminished not a whit.

"To Bullis Hall," I said quite seriously, and noted with satisfaction that Willy steered the incredible invention north-northeast, in the proper direction to a Relais et Chateaux property whose character the French may not have entirely understood upon accepting it into the privileged fold. My grandfather may have been suspected of staying at Bullis Hall. But entirely extirpated of primitivism, not I. Yet some of the guests there might prove useful, if Race's ESP improved immediately and he sicced the royal dawdlers at Cafe Macchiatto on us.

It would prove interesting if these TNM cohorts had the right stuff to dodge friendly fire, then tail us across the Hudson River in raging wind. Or if they even had the right transportation. Our paper craft made no sound nor provided much of a sight to follow, and passengers and pilot had coats camouflaged by the night. I still hadn't discovered the motor, and without Tsujisaka nearby now for one of his loquacious explanations, it was unlikely I would, as I couldn't translate Dog, and Willy was the only one on board privy to T's secret, notwithstanding serious chats with Holly.

But by pure happenstance Tommy Tagge saw us. What was the boy doing out on school night anyway, in a force six? Evidently worries about a gale undoing his good work had him battening down the tree fort, and as we sailed between his neighbor's second story porch and his family's antique water tower, he stopped hammering when our altitude reached his eye level.

"Your government at work!" shouted Thirtysoon, and by the boy's expression, I believe he heard her. He had to have been wondering why a paper airplane, of any size, didn't rock in the wind. I'm presuming children still flew paper airplanes behind schoolteachers' backs.

Perhaps Willy read my mind, after the Tsujisaka tutorials, and perhaps when he barked then he meant, "For me to know and for you to find out!" Perhaps some of Thirtysoon's infinite jest had rubbed off on him, with all the petting and snuggling. He looked pleased, and I'd swear the cigarette he managed to keep lighted and in line with the elegant gold holder, was not some cheap facsimile of Grandfather's custom mades, and the three gold rings at the short end were the real thing.



PART ELEVEN


Odd that the new James Bond of film is blond, when Grandfather, the legend himself, was very dark in that way. No matter, my name fell right in line with both, with all the letters of Grandfather's and the legally assumed "l" allowing for the near rather than perfect coincidence, as my hair is much fairer than the very fine actor Daniel Craig's, and when I'm not using Mizani Silk Defining Mousse to tamper with it, has natural waves. (Even Grandfather was relieved that the cinematic legend finally had gained a match. He'd rooted for all of them in a sporting way, according to the axiom that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. But I believe he thought Roger Moore, while sustaining the series until the right day came along, and Pierce Brosnan, a fine actor in many and various situations, with work such as "A Tailor of Panama" and "Mrs. Doubtfire," and Timothy Dalton, a true leading man suitable for anything but the role of James Bond, and George Lazenby, who gave it the old school try; that none of them hit the bullseye the way Sean Connery had. I attended a theatrical showing of "Casino Real" [2006] with Gramps, and when his namesake under the portrayal of Mr. Craig reiterated the famous, "The name's Bond, James Bond." it was the only time I ever saw him leap up from his seat and cheer. Since he's practically ancient, it was a heartening occasion.)

It was just a thought. Our flight north was more pressing, yet with Willy behaving as a surfer might on a good day at Carrowinsky, with care and skill while reveling in the unpredictable ride, and with two gold rings left before the glow of his cigarette ash consumed another, he barked in a friendly way at Tommy Tagge, who waved to all of us, and we waved back while singing "Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses," which somehow struck our collective fancy. Perhaps because it was about moving along.

"Race ordered off the attack on Newburgh until Blond and Thirtysoon were located again. They'd disappeared from the aura transmitted faster than speed of light. He presumed they hadn't outrun the aura; simply that TNM's ESP was confronted yet again with something new--another invention of Tsujisaka's, known as "T," who seemed always to be one step beyond. Race shivered, remembering tales his grandparents retold from an incipient television series, "One Step Beyond," to inculcate the sense of fear in a boy who was otherwise demonstrably fearless, and because of that quality on the Highway To Hell."

Texted to me just then by Tsujisaka.

I looked at Thirtysoon, whose jet black hair rippled in the additional breezes of the paper airplane's seamless flight. She was applauding Willy, who hung five and swerved us safely through a gap created by a huge Rubbermaid tool shed and an equally bourgeois, manufactured waterfall--out of service in January, of course, in the Hudson River Valley--of variegated plastic hues of blue.

Willy and Holly were from a good home, according to Tsujisaka, and had probably never so much as encountered anything so kitsch before. Willy's aplomb while sailing us through untouched attested to good training, as well the resources of character derived in the loving, well-met family.

Somehow Thirtysoon intuited this, thus the sincere applause along with relief at not crashing aboard an airplane without walls and with ESP-defying 24 pound bond (never mind the coincidence). Even with wide streets and a pleasing civic aesthetic of expansive front and back yards and plenty of room between houses, Newburgh, like everywhere else, had blind curves and gaps, and by shooting through the inadvertent treachery of a manufactured Backyard Paradise, once again Willy was Thirtysoon's hero, as if he was the one best to protect her from dangerous foibles of the American Way of Life.

Texted from Tsujisaka: "Race was confounded that Blond and Thirtysoon and the two dogs suddenly disappeared from the Extra Sensory Perception field that was like a second pane to the picture windows guarding and warming him from the storm sheets sweeping the canyons of San Francisco skyscrapers. There hadn't even been the warning of waning transmission, waning vibration, waning linearity. No fade, no dissolve; the Double O's, and the dogs which with gradually increasing awareness Race saw must be reckoned as a complementary force on the other side, were simply absent. He was interrupted by one of his criminal lieutenants: 'Compliments of Mr. Pickley, downstairs . . . second floor. . . .' The Underboss, Mr. Concci, frowned as he said so, his reflexive gesture of full approval. He brought in hand himself the Louis Roerderer Cristal, complete with a pewter ice bucket, arctic white ice cubes garlanded by fresh green mint leaves. Race frowned in acknowledgement, with gratitude for the gesture from his grateful and trusted tenant stairs below, but rejected the bottle itself: 'Give it to Mrs. Vapollicelli if she's still here. Leave it in the refrigerator for Mr. Jerrns if she isn't.' (They were of the maintenance and housekeeping staff and patrol staff.) And have Laurel draft me some kind words for Mr. Pickley . . . but since he has been kind enough to remind me, offhand, I want my Monopole!' Of course, he referred to Heidseick & Company Monopole Champagne, a third of the price but more to Race's taste than 'that expensive fruity shit! Their non-vintage stuff is better than that cloying mouthwash they've conned everyone with, with that Easter basket cellophane they wrap it up in! I want my Monopole!'
"'Marky, Marky!' Concci said, shaking a finger at his boss.
"'Huh?' Race shot back, indignant but giving the benefit of the doubt before deciding to kill for insubordination.
"'An old joke, boss,' said Concci, who was thirty years senior, but somehow survived and thrived from the near-breakdown from the old to the resurgence of The New Mafia. 'It's about oatmeal, actually. Sometime when you have time. . . .' He knew the limits of Race's time, and patience.
"Before cautiously leaving the room, to let Race recover his train of thought--for Concci knew Race, like all great CEOs on the job, was always thinking--the Underboss punched up his cell phone for the House of Shields across Market Street, which he knew would be brilliant enough to always be ready to deliver that particular bottle of Heidsieck.
"'Very considerate, and generous, of him, though, the Cristal . . . it must have pinched a little, poor man,' Race mumbled and Concci heard before he closed the door for a few moments, '. . . I'll sign the note myself . . . a little P.S. of my own . . .'
"There were rare times, Concci conceded, when the omega point of The New Mafia reverted to human-ness. This was one of them, but why for Pickley, why during a murderous rainstorm, why over a silly, ornate bottle of Champagne Race didn't even enjoy, Concci had not one clue."

But even with a trace of humanity seeping in, Race unleashed a fusillade of rockets which lighted our way through the alleys and amid the trees shorn of every leaf by the season. Now that we'd gone off TNM's ESP screen without a clue to which direction we might be picked up again, it was as though he was saturating the zone where we were last with mid-air explosions, meant sadistically not to cut us down at our feet, tactically and effectively, but to rip us at gut level, most painfully. Or--his little bit of kindness had lingered then spilled into the launch order, and he didn't want the rockets to hit the streets and create potholes, as the targets were Thirtysoon and me, not the infrastructure of Newburgh.

"What a ride!" Thirtysoon said with a child's glee. When she'd signed up for Her Majesty's Secret Service, I doubt she imagined there'd be pilot dogs with gold cigarette holders and origami airplanes folded out of 24 weight bond, but the thrill of darting and soaring through bombs bursting in air, as we in the American service put it, and the machete points of her own ebony tresses swirling in the resultant breezes complementing nature's force six, must have been in the proximity of her expectations. I could see what my grandfather saw when he joined forces with the likes of Honeychile Rider and Vesper Lynd; I just couldn't feel it.

But Holly piped up with several rowdy barks, looking pleased with herself. Tsujisaka was behind us on foot, sprinting like a kickoff return specialist with audacity and a fear factor at the same time, chary of rocket bursts the way a football crowd's favorite sensed tacklers outside his peripheral vision, and he was laughing harder than he ran. He yelled, "James, ask your grandfather all about what Holly just said . . . barked. He must have seen the commercials when he was in the States! For National Airlines! Before you were born!" Willy evidently paid some attention, and his footwork--hanging five, hanging ten (out of twenty, a surfer with four paws, after all)--retarded the acceleration of our paper craft, to linger within earshot as T struggled to say his piece under top physical exertion and more white-hot explosions above the ground. "Her masters must have enlightened her! I heard about it from my grandfather." Then he resumed laughing so uncontrollably that he stumbled, but managed to come to the point before Willy was forced to resume altitude and speed. "She just barked, 'Hi, I'm Holly. Fly me.' Every male in America loved it! It was a controversy! Feminist weren't so sanguine! Didn't know you had it in you, Holly!"

"What?" I yelled back. Did he mean a command of English, or the lore of television advertising, or incongruities? Well, not so incongruous, I suppose. We were in flight, her companion was the pilot, Yve Thirtysoon and I were the passengers. I suppose it could be construed, superficially, that Holly was the stewardess, retroactively put (before they were called flight attendants). "Has what in her?" I yelled, fortunately, as there was an explosion that ripped apart a swimming pool filter, making as much noise as it did a mess of plastic pipe and metal shell and all the concomitant dials and switches. The dead and dark of night became bright as high noon with each rocket discharge.

"Camp humor!" T hollered, his parting words as we swept higher and faster, although I inferred that he mimicked "Hi, I'm Holly. Fly me." because he finally stopped in his tracks, appearing to be doubled over from laughter.

"Know anything, ever heard of, National Airlines?" I asked Thirtysoon.

With an odd, surprised look, Yve smirked, then said, "Hi, I'm Yve. Fly me." Now I understood the controversy, if this were an ad on prime time network television, and acknowledged that Grandfather, in the same situation in his day, might have boffed her right there on the wing in spite of the cold and danger. Without modesty I confess I wouldn't have qualms about the conditions, I just couldn't feel it.



PART TWELVE


"Sailing, sailing, over the bounding main . . ."

The resemblance was there, like gliding down waves in a stormy sea, getting hoisted up again, then sliding down to the trough, spray everywhere; and leave it to someone from the Auld Sod to turn an adventure to song. Our paper craft sailed with purposeful undulations, up and down and swerving and plowing and skidding mid-air, it felt, to duck a thick branch of an elm that would lop off our heads. Holly yipped and barked at branches, at bombs, Thirtysoon persevered in her sea ditty, Willy puffed the esoteric three-ringed stub all the way to the last sight of white paper plugged into the gold cigarette holder, and I plotted our next step. With such strong back-gusts, the ending wrote itself: we'd eschew the Newburgh safe house and make a race for Bullis Hall, better to outfox The New Mafia. And if the communists somehow had hung about rather than skittering back to the tropics, and had made an insanely good guess that we were headed to Dutchess County, they'd unwittingly bring something to the table at the Relais & Chateaux property--themselves. The hotel's well-heeled guests would never have better targets than trespassers from Cuba. With shirts Sears couldn't sell in the USA and bright-colored polyester trousers whose time was long gone everywhere except the Third World, they'd be sitting ducks. It was goose season in the Hudson Valley, so fair enough. The Bullis Hall guests, self-made reactionary fossils who learned of the finer things in life, like umpteen-thousand dollar shotguns and Dry Clean Only hunting jackets, from articles in Wall Street Journal's Weekend section, could sip Bullis Hall's complimentary sherry and fire away from the comfort of their guest room without getting a single raindrop on the precious feathers in their hunting caps.

"Oh, many a storm the wind shall blow . . ."

Bad timing, to address Yve just as she sang that note full-throated, given her never-say-die romanticism. I asked her to toss me the cell phone so I could call ahead. I hoped they could provide separate rooms, and accepted pets.

"James Blond here."

Whoever answered asked immediately if we had a static problem--his end or mine. I merely said yes, mine, although there was none. It was rocket blasts in the background, which increased the tail wind intermittently. All in all an audible effect, but explaining would have been fabulistic. "Would you believe . . ." I believe that was a phrase meant wittily back in Grandfather's day. Somehow any attempt to describe The New Mafia, and their--and Yve's and my respective secret services'--capabilities with ESP, and Willy as pilot and Holly as co-pilot, and dodging rocket onslaughts in/on a paper airplane, and Newburgh's tree forts, and the force six wind, and the young royals of Europe making Caffe Macchiato their favorite stop on our East Coast, and the Cubans slinging steel slugs with Whammos. . . .

"I'd like a room, or two, adjoining if possible. We'll arrive in about an hour . . ."

I looked at Willy, to be certain. He realized I had no fluency, and barked in a simple way that meant yes, about an hour.

Then he hung ten for a hard right, backed up to hang five paw claws over the wing's edge, and we did a slow, processional circle around the Tagge residence, I presume to acknowledge and thank Tommy for his availability and opening his tree fort to us, although, finally, we had no need. I also submit it may have confused TNM's ESP operation--the incongruity then and there, of a perfect circle.

After salutes to Tommy, we broke off the circle and headed north-northeast again. It was as if we sprinted into the clear.