The Devil's Code

wasn’t me?” I asked, as we waited for a cab to come up.
    “You looked more like a criminal,” she said.
    “Thanks. But I’m an artist.”
    “Oh, bullshit. I know about Anshiser,” she said. “I know what you and Jack did.”
    That she knew about Anshiser was disturbing. Anshiser had been a rough operation which, in the end, had taken down a major aircraft corporation. If I’d known Jack would tell her about it, I wouldn’t have worked with Jack. But then, that might not be realistic. All kinds of people knew a little bit about what I did. They just didn’t know each other so they could compare notes. “You think I look like a criminal?”
    “You look tougher than your friend, with your . . . nose.”
    Hell, I’ve always thought I was a good-looking guy.Forty-something, six feet and a bit, hardly any white in my hair, and I still have all of it. The nose, I admit, had been broken a couple of times and never gotten quite straight. I thought it lent my face a certain charm. “It’s part of my charm,” I said, wounded, as the cab came up. I held the back door for her.
    “Jack said you can be charming . . . if you wanted to be. He said you didn’t want to be, that often.” She got in the cab, and I slid in beside her.
    “What happened to Jack?” I asked.
    “Let’s wait until we get over to your place,” she said, her eyes going to the back of the driver’s head.
    T hough winter was on the way, for the moment it was still in Ontario. St. Paul’s trees were shedding their leaves, but the temperature was in the sixties as we crossed the Mississippi and headed down West Seventh Street into St. Paul. Lane was quiet, checking out the local color: most notably, a cigar-chewing guy humping along, slowly, on an ancient Honda Dream. He was wearing knee shorts and black dress socks. “Sophisticated place, for a Midwestern capital city,” she said.
    “Yeah. We’re blessed with individualism,” I said.
    We spent the rest of the ride in idle chitchat; and I sort of took her in, physically. She was pretty, with a good figure, but a figure that came from a careful diet, rather than exercise; a magazine-model’s figure, not an athlete’s.
    She had an undergraduate degree from Berkeley in philosophy and mathematics, and a couple of graduatedegrees in computer science from Stanford. She now lived in Palo Alto and divided her time between an Internet start-up and teaching at Stanford. The start-up, called e-Accountant, would provide billing, collection, accounting, and tax services to Web sites too small to efficiently do it on their own. She expected to get modestly rich from it. She was no longer married to the guy named Ward.
    “He always said he wanted children, but he always wanted one more thing first,” she said. “A car or a boat or a house or a vacation place. I told him that I couldn’t wait any longer, and if he didn’t want to start on a kid, I was going to pull the plug. Even then, he couldn’t decide.”
    “So you pulled the plug.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “Any candidates for the eventual fatherhood?” I asked.
    “Yes. A very nice man at Stanford, an anthropologist. He’s working on his own divorce.”
    “Ah. Were you involved in his problem?”
    “No. He doesn’t even know he’s a candidate for the new position,” she said. “Although he should be getting that idea pretty soon, now. He’ll be an excellent father, I think.”
    “Good for him,” I said.
    The cab driver’s eyes came up in the rearview mirror, and I caught him smiling. Pretty women are easily amusing.
    I ’m not sure how glad your heart should be when you arrive home in a taxicab with the grieving sister of a friend who’d just been shot to death, but when the cab dropped us, I was happy. Always happy to head up north, always happy to get back. The water gives you ideas, and if you’re up there long enough, you develop an irresistible urge to work, to get the ideas on paper. Bleak was the same way; leave him in a cabin long enough, and he’ll start improving the furniture with his pocket knife.
    And things were going on around home. We had to walk up five flights of stairs because the elevator was jammed full of Alice Beck’s stoneware and porcelain pieces, which she was moving out for a show. Alice yelled down the atrium, “Sorry, Kidd, we’ll be out in ten minutes.” We traipsed on up the stairs, me with the duffel and rod tubes, Lane carrying the tackle bag.
    We stopped on the third floor for a