Trans Am

Author

PROLOGUE

TOOTS TURTLEMAN EDGED FORWARD onto the long finger of the promontory, his feet slithering on the frozen rocks, scrabbling for a hold. Ahead of him was one of the most famous views in the world, or at least part of it, but the way few visitors ever saw it, glistening with diamond-hard ice particles, as if it had been dusted with confectioner’s sugar.

He looked over to the left at the valley, felt the familiar whirls in his head, the clash of senses as optic lobe, semicircular canals and cerebrum all sent different messages, screaming at each other: it can’t be this big, that far down, this complex. It is, he reminded himself, and it’s beautiful.

If the walls and buttes were merely sprinkled with frost, the opposite side of the canyon was thick with a layer of snow and ice that wouldn’t be gone until May. He shuddered as a sprite of cold wind curled up from the sheer walls below and ripped straight through his thin jacket. The sun was falling already, as if the effort of rising even so low in the sky had exhausted it, and soon it would be bitterly cold. But he wouldn’t be here to feel that.

Toots remembered how it started. Wished he had never shared the dream, the dream they had turned into a nightmare.

He should have known. He pulled them all in and they came, mostly, he had to give them that, but all they did was gripe and snipe. It’s the best chance you’ll ever have to get your pride back, he told them. It’s like a second time around. Make it sweet. Make it beautiful. Make us rich. Yeah, they said, but what about this? What about that?

Hey, Toots had said: they forgot us, didn’t they? They are ashamed of us. They think we got our ass kicked, and they want us buried. You a Vietnam vet? Well here, take our sympathy, look at this wall we built for your fallen brothers. Gulf? Jesus you guys got a rough deal. Let’s have a congressional investigation. And maybe some compensation. But us? We get the heads turned, the eyes downcast. God that was a mess. But they are wrong, he insisted. The mission was accomplished. We got the targets, we fought a whole town to a standstill. A whole fuckin’ town. No, a city. A ragged-ass city, for sure, but a city. Sure we lost guys. They lost more. We did well. So let’s show them what Chalk Five can really do. Let’s stick it to them.

One by one, as they got drunker and drunker, they all told him in a different way he was crazy. They would all do time, or worse, they kept saying. All too yellow to try. He could see them all now. Nash. Fuckin’ Nash, always so smug, superior, like he had read the book when you couldn’t find page one. Coogan. Fucked up. Had this thing about boys. Jones. Mr Normal, retreated into some suburban let’s-go-to-the-mall-kids middle age. Flint had a new wife, guy was in lurve.

Maybe they were right. Perhaps he was crazy. He had set it all up, the timetable, the hardware—one dry run, one hit. All those dollars. Hundreds of thousands. No takers.

His head was full of noise, of static, of tumbling thoughts, voices pulling him this way and that. The headaches would come back soon. Then the black gloom, the dark place where his soul shivered in fear. He didn’t want that.

He looked at the birds again and tried to will himself into their minds, feel what it would be like to have such mastery over this hole in the earth, floating over a mile-deep ocean of free space without fear. He still remembered the feeling of falling, and spinning, the terrible jolt as he hit the earth, when he put his trust—his life—in the hands of a man-made bird.

Toots looked down again, tracing the tiny pathways crisscrossing the rocks of floor, as he had done a thousand times before. He wondered if it was true what they said. That you were dead before you hit the ground down there. He also considered whether it was true about the light, the eye-watering glare of death from which old friends emerged to help you pass to the other side. A friendly luminescence, the complete antithesis of the Bible-black tendrils that would wrap round his heart with increasing frequency. Toots hoped there was light.

Another glacial gust hit him, tugging at his clothes, as if encouraging him. There was only one way to find out what was true and what was not. He took a deep breath and stepped forward into the cold, clear air.

PART ONE

ONE

London, England

HARRY DARLING TRIED TO wind the clock back as he stared at the photographs laid out on the desk in front of him, back to when he had a rank, men under his command, a sidearm and a burning sense of duty. Not to mention a notion of right and wrong, black and white, before grey bled into the picture, blurring the line between the two. That was what he was dealing with now. The days when the grey came into his life.

He had spread the eighteen six-by-eight black-and-whites before him as best he could, crowded and overlapping, some threatening to fall from the desk top onto the floor. They offered varying degrees of clarity, here pin sharp, showing every pore in the face, every whisker missed by the morning shave, there displaying the fuzzy, snatched furtiveness of old pornography.

He stared hard, waiting for the heady rush of unwelcome memory, but time would not move. Stubbornly his reality stayed put, stranding him in the front room of his rambling home in a suburb of North London, with the rumble of cars doing the evening rat-run rather than the squeak of armoured vehicles, the smashing of glass from the recycling collectors, not from the systematic looting of property, the footsteps above him the headlong, almost-falling-over run of a one-year-old, and the more confident steps of his older sister, not the scrabble of panicked figures trying to escape wicked, arbitrary death. Bath time soon, the clomping reminded him. He should go up.

‘Anything?’

The voice on the other end of the phone jerked him back to the reason he was trying to make this temporal transference.

‘Give me a minute.’

Darling redoubled his efforts, squinting now at each visage in turn, trying to get just a flash of an image, of the man in the picture in a different context, a machine pistol at his waist, that carnivorous look in his eyes, the strange misshaped nose, the smell of fear and death and atrocity steaming off his body, framed in the lenses of high-powered binoculars, the freshly painted skull and crossbones on the wall behind him glistening red and obscene. Still nothing came.

It had been too long. Now he wore pinstriped suits and had to force himself to go to the gym once a week to keep a cap on his weight, creeping up because of corporate dinners and informal interviews. Once he had had thirty men under his command, now he had three hundred, but being a personnel director in the City was a tad different from army life. He was trying to make the jump to an alien world he no longer had access to.

‘Roy, look I’m sorry, but—’

‘It’s important, Harry.’

He heard a squeal of joy from up above and wanted to get off the phone. Roy Krok was also from that other world, one that didn’t recognise or care for his kids, the kids he swore he would never have after he had seen the pain, and the agony, they could bring. It had taken him five years to realise that he was unlikely to experience in Highgate the kind of suffering he and Krok had once seen. Now he was sorry he had waited so long, especially when he saw fathers twenty years younger running around the park, while he worried about his knee giving out whenever he kicked a ball to his son. ‘I know, Roy. I know.’

‘You don’t sound convinced.’

‘Who are you these days, Roy?’

‘Who am I?’

‘What are you?’

‘Same old, same old. State Department.’

‘So why are you in New York?’

‘This is where the most visa fraud is. Immigration and Naturalization Department, one of the busiest in the country.’

‘So you’re on visa fraud now?’

A touch of evasiveness. ‘Um. It’s a means to an end.’ The tone suggested Harry shouldn’t be asking these questions down an unsecured line.

Darling knew Roy Krok would be working for some strange sounding little unit within the State Department, one that was a shape and name shifter, coming up with new goals and acronyms every six months. It kept the prying eyes on their toes—‘One thing about the Freedom of Information Act,’ he remembered Krok saying, ‘Is you gotta know what question to ask and who to address it to. So we keep changing the address.’

‘Roy, I have to go. I wish I could help.’

‘You still can, Harry. Look, you’re the only guy we know who saw him.’

‘Bollocks.’

‘Excuse me?’ He could picture Krok at this moment, shirt sleeves rolled up, playing with the cigarette he wouldn’t be allowed to smoke, big bullet head still shaved close, the stubble of fair hair flecked with grey now. He would bet he wasn’t spreading around the girth, though.

‘Bullshit. He was around for months, almost a year. I only saw him through some bins, Roy. Binoculars. I simply do not believe you can’t find anyone else who knew what he looked like.’

‘OK, I’ll rephrase that. You are the only reliable guy we have—impeccable credentials, no axe to grind. Credible witness. Not someone who could be accused of a vendetta or hysteria. There are no photos of him, Harry—he had the last guy who took one beheaded—’

‘Roy—I found the bloke.’

‘Oh, yeah. Shit, Harry. I know I Fedexed a whole stack of photos, but I got a gut instinct about five of them, and there are two who smell real bad. I want you to come over.’

‘Over where?’

‘Here. I want you to stare them in the eyes.’

‘As in a line-up?’

‘No, more casual than that. You’ll bump into them on the street, in the elevator, on the subway. Full back-up from us. But when you see him, smell him, you’ll know. Either that or you ain’t the same guy I knew.’

I’m not, he wanted to say. Far from it. He wasn’t sure those senses that Krok was talking about even existed any more, if they ever did. ‘I should have got a sniper up there and shot him. Nobody would’ve known.’

‘Man, nobody this end would have blamed you. But you didn’t. British officer, rules of engagement, and all that bullshit.’

‘Is this official?’

‘If he’s here he has committed visa fraud.’ There was something in his voice told him it was still personal. And that Roy was in a hurry. Why rush at it now, he wondered?

‘Is that all you can get him on?’

‘It’ll get us to the plate. Get me up to bat. I just need to be sure. If we go with the wrong guy, the real one’ll just slip away, straight down into the sewer like the turd he is. Look, you won’t have to travel coach, and we’ll VIP you. Meet you on the tarmac airside—’

‘Collect me at the gate, Roy, I don’t want all that melodramatic black limo stuff.’ He realised he had fallen straight into it.

There was just a hint of suppressed elation in Krok’s voice: ‘Is that a yes? You’ll come?’

He thought about taking leave for a week or maybe even two just as the salary review was imminent, about abandoning Sarah with the kids when Jessie was about to start nursery school and hesitated. Then he looked back at the photographs and felt a sudden jolt. Number six. The bulky, balding guy getting out of a cab, face blurred, features indistinct. But maybe. Strip away seven years and twenty pounds, it could be him. He grabbed his nose and squeezed his nostrils, as if trying to prevent the smell that had hung everywhere back then from entering, the cloying, choking smell of burnt hair and bone, the one it took thirty minutes under the shower to scrub away.

He closed his eyes and, finally, he did flash on that day. Just for a second, he saw the Warrior personnel-carrier in front of him lift as if pulled on a string, the percussive slap of the mine’s detonation reaching him a moment later, followed by the rolling thunderclap of high explosive punching his ears. The vehicle left the ground and started to rotate, slowly displaying its underside, before landing on the roof with a sickening, crumpling sound, bouncing once, and coming to rest, the creaking and groaning of torn metal mixed with the unbearable shrieks of the injured inside.

That was when he had scaled a wall and scanned the village ahead for the minelayers and seen that man, the one who might be on the table in front of him now, standing before the spray-painted symbol of his murderous paramilitary unit, suitably crimson on the whitewashed wall.

‘Harry? You still there? Is that a yes?’

‘I suppose it is,’ he found himself saying.

TWO

Scottsdale, Arizona

THE BUILDING WAS ON one of the new roads that spring up around Scottsdale every few months. The community simply kept growing, sending new tentacles into the scrubby desert, or subdividing existing block systems to create new housing and malls. Wendy drove around several junctions before she got the right address. Solutions Inc was located in a new two-storey adobe-style structure between a bookstore and a bank, with a small parking lot around the back.

She hesitated before turning in, so long that she jumped when someone honked her to get a move on. Too late to stop now. She parked up, checked herself in the mirror, and prepared for the blast of the summer heat as she left the air-conditioned cocoon of the Saturn. She hoped Pete was all right, that Duke was looking after him OK, then put him out of her mind. This was mostly for him, after all.

Wendy walked briskly towards the entrance of Solutions Inc, knowing if she hesitated she would start melting in the heat, her prim two-piece spouting unladylike dark patches. And she had to be cool and controlled for this one, something she hadn’t been for a long time.

The receptionist led her straight through a maze of what looked like hastily constructed offices, with electrical and computer and telephone leads snaking haphazardly across the floor. It wasn’t what she expected. She had imagined clinical, steely. This looked like an overworked tax audit office.

She was led into a cubicle where a forty-ish woman in a white overall stood up and took her hand. ‘Miss Blatand. I’m Marion Volker. Thank you for coming. Can I get you something? Coffee? Soda?’

She declined. The rituals of pouring coffee or opening a soda would fluster her. She could feel the woman’s eyes examining her as it was, making her jittery. ‘You must excuse the mess out there. Business is … well, booming. Which is good news for you. Demand has never been higher.’

Wendy managed what she hoped was a positive smile. Volker picked up a form she recognised, one that was the size of the Phoenix yellow pages. It had taken her two days to fill it in, and a lot of phone calls.

‘I’m afraid I couldn’t complete all the sections on my grandparents. About illnesses.’

Volker flicked to that page. ‘Yes, but they both lived until they were into their eighties. Very good. I have to be honest with you, Miss Blatand, but three, maybe even two years ago we would not have been seeing you. You are twenty-nine, and we find that demand drops off considerably after thirty. Also you … well, you already have a child. You know, college students are our most common applicants.’

‘That’s what I want the money for. To go to college.’

‘Well good, that’s nice to hear. Anyway, those restrictions do not apply in this case,’ she lowered her voice conspiratorially. ‘You are blonde blue-eyed of strong Swedish stock from—uh—’

‘Minnesota.’

‘Minnesota. You are what the market wants right now. It’s a terrible cliché, and I wish we could help some of the … darker women who come in. But it’s market forces. Now, Wendy, can I call you Wendy? Wendy, are you clear about the procedure?’

‘I did, you know, read the literature you sent.’

‘I am afraid by law I am obliged to go through it again, and get you to sign a release.’

‘Sure.’

Volker started the litany, trying hard to keep the I-speak-your-weight tone from her voice. ‘For three weeks you will have to inject your stomach with a drug called Ergon. What this does is put your ovaries into a state of stasis. Basically they won’t be working, and none of your egg follicles—you know what they are? Good. None of your egg follicles will ripen. Then you will inject FSHs, what we call follicle stimulating hormones, into your hip. Your eggs will then start to ripen, like a clump of grapes. Eight days of that, and then HCG, human chorionic gonadotrophin, and boom, your eggs are ready for collection.’

‘Does that happen … here?’ Wendy waved her arm around the office.

‘Good grief, no. You think we move the telephones off the desk and clear a space every time one of our donors comes in? You will go to the Solutions Fertility Facility, which is three blocks away. We have to put you under, and then the eggs are simply hoovered up, fertilised and implanted. But the last bit needn’t worry you, Wendy. Now, I am also obliged to tell you by law that some research—not backed up by subsequent studies—but some research suggest the chemical stimulation of the ovaries increases the risk of ovarian cancer down the line. We can refer you to the papers in question if you wish. Do you have any questions?’

She knew about the cancer scare, had decided that the five years she smoked from seventeen to twenty-two were probably more of a risk. ‘Yes. It said in your literature about … gifts.’

‘That is right. Gifts. Our standard fee to you is seven thousand dollars per session. We don’t recommend more than four sessions, incidentally, and reserve the right to refuse further extractions at any time. Is that clear? Now, the question of gifts is between you and the client. It has become a … convention for girls with certain attributes—let’s say blonde hair and blue eyes for the sake of argument—to be offered bonuses if the eggs take. You may find several clients contacting you and offering these various inducements. These can be … considerable. I only have one comment. Get it in writing, and get it looked over by a lawyer. Anything else?’

‘Do they get to interview me? The women I mean.’

‘Usually both wife and husband, but I don’t think you have anything to worry about there. You have no prior convictions do you?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘A criminal record of any kind.’

‘Speeding.’

Volker laughed for the first time. ‘Well, I suppose speeding could be a genetically inherited trait.’

‘Why do you want to know?’

‘Increasingly clients are asking about the donor’s circumstances as well as their genetic profile—do they drink, take drugs, steal, have promiscuous sex? Not all our behaviour is a product of our environment. So I am afraid that we try to exclude anyone with a criminal background.’

‘I’m a single mother.’

‘I know—’

‘But my mom wasn’t, so it hardly runs in the family.’

‘Relax. It isn’t a criminal offence. Not yet, anyway. And the explanation in here about your boy—’

‘Pete.’

‘Pete, and the tragic death of your fiancé will satisfy everyone.’

Wendy felt herself blush. Her so-called fiancé was shacked up with her sister somewhere in Chicago as they spoke. After a stupid, stupid party he had managed to have sex with both of them consecutively, without the other’s knowledge, something that won him a hundred-dollar bet, and got them both banged up. She and Joanna had always done everything together—sports, books, dating, their periods and, it subsequently seemed, their ovulation. Even Mr Superstud could only marry one of them, and he chose Jo. Wendy had left before Pete was born and moved south, falling down the country like a pinball, bouncing off cities and towns, until she came to rest in Tucson.

‘So when do I start?’

‘As soon as a client selects you from the candidates. Which won’t be long. But before that, one more little formality. I am afraid where the academic records are incomplete, like yours, clients do like to see an IQ test. It won’t take long.’

Fifty minutes later she was back in her car, with the air conditioning up full blast, trying to unscramble her brain, to block out shapes and words and squiggles that had filled it during the test. Four cycles at seven thousand dollars, twenty-eight thousand, plus ‘gifts’, which she knew could at least double that. True, the thought of all those needles made her queasy, but what the hell, it was the kind of money to get her and Pete out of the trailer park for good.

THREE

Federal Plaza, New York City

AS THE MAN STEPPED onto the Plaza from the recently reopened Jacob Javits building the heat hit him hard, a soggy wet blast of fume-laden fug, pressure-cooked in the glass, steel and concrete that surrounded him. He slipped off his jacket and loosened his tie, aware that his shirt was sticking to his body already. The air was like a wet sponge that had been microwaved, scorching his throat.

Shouldering through the irritable lunch-time crowds turning out from the city admin buildings all around, he took the steps up to Broadway and squeezed through the newly erected steel-and-concrete planters that studded the frontage of the complex.

He crossed the Great White Way and strode beneath the clusters of neon signs advertising all kinds of dubious legal advice and translation services, and struck off down Chambers Street, glancing up at the twin towers of the World Trade Center to his left as he crossed Church, then turned right on West Broadway, passed Odeon, where the usual well-heeled expense-account crowd were tucking into lunch, and slipped into Lagoon, the new Australian/Polynesian diner. After a second luxuriating in the iced stream of air funnelled across the entrance, he was shown to a table, ordered a Tahitian fajita, then went out back to the call box, leaving his jacket on the chair to indicate occupation.

He found the piece of paper in his billfold—it was a different number each week, sometimes e-mailed to him first thing Monday, other times whispered in a cryptic call. He dialled and waited, four rings, then hung up. Then he dialled again, and the receiver at the other end was picked up. He could hear the steady breathing somewhere down the line—it was a New Jersey number he had noted—but nothing was said. He cleared his throat. ‘One-one-seven. Eleven-fifty-five.’

There was no reply so he repeated it.

‘Two-Sixty Madison Street. After six,’ came back. Seeex. Like a cartoon Mexican.

‘Madison?’ he asked with some astonishment. Christ, they were going upmarket.

‘Madison Street.’

‘Where’s tha—?’

But the line was dead. Two-Sixty Madison Street. He felt the little tickling in his stomach, the sensation that always came when he crossed the line, the mix of anticipation and dread he swore he would never court again, but there it was cajoling him, seducing him. He felt himself stiffen at the prospect, and walked quickly back to the table, adjusting himself as discreetly as he could. He took out the mini-street atlas of New York from his jacket pocket and found Madison on the Lower East Side, heading for Alphabet City. Downtown this time.

His hand was shaking slightly when the food arrived, and he clumsily knocked some of the flatware on the floor. Calm down, mustn’t get flustered. Got to get through the rest of the afternoon without thinking about it. About her, whoever she was, lying in a darkened room, not knowing—how could she even guess?—what he had in store for her. Would she be blonde or one of those wild, gypsy-looking brunettes? Hairy or smoother, big-breasted or pert? The options scrolled before him like a sexual-preferences menu. He didn’t mind. The variety was what made it interesting.

He looked down at the stuffed maize tube, the steam curling off it into his face, and suddenly realised he wasn’t hungry.

FOUR

Bloomsberry, New Jersey

JIM BARRY COULDN’T BELIEVE his wife was making him do this. A forty-mile drive after work, just so they could coo over someone else’s baby. After a trip to the liquor store for champagne and the mall for flowers and baby clothes, it was getting on for seven-thirty by the time they left Bloomsberry and turned north, heading for the State line that would take them across into New York. In the back of the Lexus sat Tommy, trying hard to put the Yankee stickers into the book straight. Yankee stickers. He was barely five and someone was poisoning his mind. Jim didn’t want to bring up a Yankee fan. There were enough of them already, like locusts. Like particularly smug locusts, he corrected himself.

‘Who gave you the book, Tommy?’ he asked, not wanting it to sound like an issue.

‘Mike Crichton,’ he replied.

That figured. Dick Crichton’s boy. It was some kind of subtle attempt to undermine him. They had to choose new uniforms for their ball team and Jim wanted them based on the Mets. Dick was all for pinstriped Yankees. Maybe this was part of his campaign. What was irritating was that Dick had only really become a full-on Yankees fan in ’99, the season when they won twelve consecutive World Series games, twenty-two out of twenty-five, and Giuliani crawled up their collective asses to regain his flagging popularity. Jim had stuck with the Mets. It had been pain and pleasure in equal measure. Sure, you couldn’t point to any glittering prizes. Certainly not a subway series. Instead you had to revel in the small victories—Piazza carrying on with a swollen thumb, Dunston, stealing bases under everybody’s noses, or Melvin Mora’s record in throw-outs. For a Mets fan God had to be in the details, otherwise you’d end up a baseball atheist.

He remembered what he should have been doing and hissed to Belle: ‘I wanted to go through pitching with Tommy tonight.’

‘I thought practice was tomorrow?’ said Belle, as casually as she could. She was not in the mood for a fight. She had the envelope on her lap, toying with it, secretly thrilled. She didn’t want Jim to dent her pleasure.

‘It is. This is practice for the practice, you know that. Couldn’t this have waited?’

‘Look, Saturday you have a match with Chesterville, don’t you? And on Sunday my mom is over. Besides, Mamie was so pleased when I told her you were coming. She always liked you.’

‘Why they wait so long to invite us, then? I mean, most new parents invite you over to see their little darlings when the umbilical cord is still attached. How come we had to wait months?’

‘I told you. Doctors were concerned about her immune system. Mamie didn’t want to take any chances. Shoot, Jim, you remember how precious we were? Always worried Tommy wasn’t going to make it through the night? Called out the doctor at every cough? Worried about rolling over on him if we co-slept, and Sudden Infant Death syndrome if we put him in a crib? Cut them some slack, Jim. They waited a long time for this.’

Jim grunted noncommittally. All he wanted to do right now was be out there throwing and catching and batting and running. He had sworn that he wouldn’t deny his son the opportunities he had missed. His old man, he hated sports of any kind. The other kids just didn’t believe it. He’s a writer, Jim would explain to anyone who would ask why his dad never helped out. Yeah, he remembered one of the other dads saying, so was Hemingway, but he wasn’t no pussy.

Well, nobody was going to accuse him of that. So he’d enrolled a Bloomsberry side in Pocket League, a kind of pre-Little League for New Jersey and New York States and set about creating a team around Tommy, who had one hell of an arm for a five-year-old.

‘We nearly there, yet?’ asked Tommy.

‘No, son, but I tell you what—Uncle Morgan has a scale model of Wrigley Field.’

‘Wriggly?’

‘Wrigley. I told you, like the gum.’

‘Not wriggly like a worm?’

‘Tommy, we went though the grounds last week. Let’s do it from the top. Shea Stadium.’

‘Mmmmts.’

‘Pardon me?’

‘I’m tired.’

Jim glanced in the rearview mirror and watched the boy close his eyes and instantly feign sleep. He felt a sudden stab of irrational anger, as if he wanted to smack the boy. Tommy lacked concentration for such things. He was sure that when he was five he could do not only all the baseball grounds, but when they were built, too.

Belle could see the tendons strumming in his neck and she touched his knee. ‘Jim. He’s five. He’s had a long day. You’ve had a long day. Me too. Relax. He can do it when he wants to—’

‘I know, that’s what makes me so mad. He keeps deliberately messing up the names—Mickey Mangle it was last week. Pete Wose. Wouldn’t say it right. Deliberately.’

The sun was dropping in the sky now, and the fields and white houses around them had taken on a warm, orange glow. It looked beautiful, he thought, like America was meant to look, bathing in God’s own sunshine at the end of a perfect day.

‘Jim. It doesn’t matter. The baseball.’

He shot her a glance, a quick hard stare, one he hoped that warned her not to blaspheme like that. It Doesn’t Matter. Like she knew jack shit about baseball and why it did or didn’t matter. But she just smiled back, a smile that was superficially warm and conciliatory, but she was savvy enough to know this was flirting with danger. If this blew up, it wouldn’t be their first snit about the national sport.

He decided to let it ride. Belle was great at indulging him, but it seemed there was a line he shouldn’t cross. He knew there was some kind of razor wire behind that grin when she wanted it to be. They had left their trenches and were dancing in no-man’s land. At any moment the flares could go up and the shelling would begin, followed by hand-to-hand combat. Time to let it drop.

He nodded his head towards the envelope. ‘What’s that?’

She couldn’t help the toothy smile that expanded across her face. She poked a thumb under the edge of the flap and ripped, pulling the remittance advice form out and flipping it open. ‘Oh my God. Ohmigod.’

‘What?’

She held it in front of his eyes, and he had to brush it aside so he could see the road. ‘Tell me.’

‘One hundred and twenty-two thousand dollars.’

‘Ohmigod.’

‘Oh, yes, I know it’s small apples compared to what Si wants to stuff in your billfold—’

‘No, no. It’s … wow.’

‘Wow,’ she repeated. Wow and it was all hers. Her book, ‘The Maximum Child: Releasing The Full Potential Of Your Offspring’ had been on the New York Times bestseller list for fifty weeks now, and was still selling. It was almost like a dream. Thirty months previously New York magazine had featured her in an article on ‘boosters’—the new breed of motivational therapists who specialised in counselling already-gifted children to make sure they didn’t squander their talent and burn out.

A publisher subsequently approached her with an idea for putting her ideas down into a self-help manual for people who felt their child was better-than-average, which turned out to be most people in the Metropolitan area. It was essentially a guide to compartmentalising—helping your child separate and order their thoughts, rather than have to cope with the over-active, free-association stream of images and concepts that plagued so many gifted children. The Edison effect it was called—after the genius whose random juxtapositions had generated so many groundbreaking innovations. Her job was to calm the constant brainstorming, help them separate static and signal, and focus. OK, they may not invent the equivalent of the telephone, but it might help them excel in one field rather than be spordically brilliant in many.

Now she was based in the exclusive Institute for Child Enhancement on the Upper East Side four days a week, and charging three hundred bucks an hour to repeat verbatim what was in the fifteen-dollar book to star-struck parents and their precocious children.

‘Well done,’ said Jim, trying not to sound patronising. He must keep the irritation out of his voice. He had always hoped to be the first in the family to publish. True, hers was just one of those improvement manuals that always sells to the gullible, and his would be a novel, but still, the shelf at home held a dozen proudly displayed copies of ‘The Maximum Child’, and no work by him.

‘Ye-es,’ she said slowly. ‘If it keeps on coming, maybe I could give up ICE. You know, I had one couple in today wanting to know why their daughter seemed to be the only Asian in America who wasn’t a violin prodigy. Three hundred dollars for me to tell them that, hey, somebody’s got to be in the audience.’

The truth was, much of the time it wasn’t the kids who needed talking up, but the parents who required talking down. Now and then she felt like saying, what this child needs is a couple of hours a day to kick a tin can round an empty lot or watch Dawson’s Creek and eat junk food. But, it seemed, doing nothing was a luxury most kids didn’t get these days. ‘Next left, up here,’ she said.

‘I know.’ Snappy.

The Starkeys’ house was a handsome turn-of-the-century grey stone structure, two storeys, with detached garage, set well back from the road, with close to an acre of grounds around it. Morgan, however, had done his best to ruin the lines of the house, in a way that simply would not be tolerated in the city. The original wooden windows