Etiquette for the End of the World

chapter Ten





It was 5:15 p.m. on a rainy Tuesday in early March, the Scrub-a-Dub-Pub was almost empty. It would not fill up until about 6:30.

“Well, if it isn’t the long lost Tess Eliot,” Richie called out when he spotted her at the door. “I was wondering if we were ever going to see you again.”

Tess almost ran to the bar, so happy she was at the welcoming sight of Richie behind it. He had on a pink and red flannel shirt which had a sort of retro look to it, with the sleeves rolled up over his thick forearms. His hair and beard appeared to have been recently trimmed; he was a little less shaggy than usual. Tess thought he was looking like a very neat lumberjack.

“I haven’t seen you since Christmas!” he said, a huge smile on his face. “What’s the deal, anyway? One minute I’m helping you put a bed frame together and the next … . So, once you got want you wanted from me, that was it? You don’t call, you don’t write … .” He set two beer mugs down on the bar hard, as if he were really pissed. But his eyes were twinkling. “I thought maybe you’d found someone who pours a better cocktail. Or that you’d moved to Hollywood with that man of yours.”

Tess climbed up on the bar stool, balancing on one knee so she could reach over the bar to hug Richie. His beard was soft and scratchy like Irish wool. His skin smelled like … soap and something else. Fresh sawdust? She felt practically giddy to see him. She had not realized how much she had missed him. How much like coming home he was.

Tess had not been to the Scrub-a-Dub-Pub since the day Richie had helped her put the frame together. She hadn’t wanted to face him. She felt she’d used up all her “he done me wrong” jokes with the Matt situation, and that there was a fine line between being a wisecracking “dumpee” and being a pathetic two-time loser.

Of course in hindsight her embarrassment over Peter seemed ridiculous. Why had she imagined Richie would judge her? He would have just poured her a drink and told her, “Darling, men are beasts.” On the plane home from Mexico City she had thought about how much she was looking forward to going back to the Scrub-a-Dub-Pub. And so Tess had arranged to meet Ginny—whom she had not seen in weeks either—here after work. It would be Ginny’s first visit to the pub.

Forty minutes later Tess and Ginny were sitting on stools facing each other across the corner of the bar, sipping from their glasses in deep concentration. Richie watched them closely as they drank.

“It’s called a Dryer Martini,” Richie told them.

“Well … it’s certainly good, Richie,” said Tess tentatively. “But … it’s just a martini without any vermouth, right? As in, you know, a glass of gin?” She took another sip.

“Oh, but no, it has the ‘dryer sheet’ in it. Can’t you taste it?” Richie frowned slightly from beneath his red beard.

“The what?” said Ginny, picking up her glass and squinting at it. “Oh, yeah, there it is! It’s so sheer I didn’t notice it was even in there. What is it? I hope it’s not a real dryer sheet, is it?”

“It’s an ultra-thin shaving of ginger,” Richie said proudly.

“Mmmm!” murmured Tess, taking another taste from her glass. “I thought it was just a spicier brand of gin. Hey that is nice.”

“I was going to call it the Dry Cleaner, but I thought that might be going too far,” said Richie. Ginny winced and nodded in agreement.

“Hmm. You could make it with vodka and call it the Absolutely Dry Martini,” Tess piped up.

“You see?” he said, wagging a finger at her, before leaving them to go take an order on the other side of the bar. “You see why I’ve missed you?”

“He is so nice,” Ginny said effusively, waving her hand for emphasis in a reckless way that made Tess instinctively reach out to make sure she didn’t knock either one of their glasses over. Ordinarily Ginny wouldn’t have considered ordering a martini, but Richie insisted they both needed to test out his new recipes, scheduled to go on the bar menu next week. “Tess, no wonder you spend your whole life in here.”

“Oh, stop it! I haven’t even been in here since before Christmas.”

In a few minutes Richie was back. “Tell you what, I’ll make you guys a White Wash next. I need someone to try that out.” Tess started to signal surreptitiously that Ginny needed to stop, but Richie winked at Tess. “Don’t worry, it’s mostly milk.” He added that tomorrow he was going to invent a special drink in honor of Tess’s return, made with tequila, lime, and Jarritos soda, which he was going to call the Mexican Shrinker.

“Perfect,” laughed Tess. “Since I got back from Mexico, I feel like there was this long-term knot in my stomach—which was always there before, or at least as long as I can remember—that has shrunk down so much that now, it’s almost gone. In fact, I think it is gone.”

Ginny waved her glass in the air, spilling a little on the bar. “My knots are all gone too, but I think it’s probably the Dryer Martini at work.”

“No, but really, I feel as if I could … as if I could do something, I don’t know, not just get through everything … ,” Tess insisted, blotting the tiny spill with a cocktail napkin.

“I like the way that sounds,” Richie said to the ceiling, as he organized the glasses in the overhead rack.

“I hate to say it, Tess, but it may just be jet lag and vacation afterglow,” laughed Ginny. “For a whole week after I got home from Spain I was dancing around the kitchen with Bill. Even when he was standing still in the kitchen making coffee, I was dancing. It drove him crazy.”

Tess had only been back in New York for a few days. She couldn’t believe how new everything looked to her, as if she had been away a year instead of two weeks, and as if everything had somehow been altered slightly while she was gone. Her apartment looked like a magazine ad instead of the usual clutter she saw it as (okay, maybe it was not House Beautiful, but at least it was House Cool); the old books and knickknacks seemed like wonderful flavors in a creative soup, rather than the clogging mess she had felt they were before she left. Carmichael, who had been fed by the doorman in her absence, looked like a silver lion-god, moving gracefully through the sunlight pouring down on the blue and red Turkish rug.

Colors looked actually, physically brighter, more vibrant. For the first day she thought it was something that had happened to her retina, from the sun. Except of course Mexico City had been cloudy and not all that warm, so that couldn’t be it. Maybe it was all those orange butterflies.

She also found she was noticing little things she never had before, like the little green vintage “Wash Your Sins Away” towelette dispenser to the left of the sink in the ladies’ room at the bar. It had a tiny graphic of a housewife in a 1950s apron, with happy suds coming up all around her. Had it really been there all along?

“So listen, you guys,” Tess said to Richie and Ginny. “Don’t you think there’s something weird about the fact that there are these missing plans for a deadly computer virus hidden inside a book about beetles, and a man who is planning for the end of the world just happens to collect beetles?” She had filled them in on Wayne Orbus beetle-mania. They both already knew about the alleged blueprints hidden inside the book. “Or am I crazy?”

“You’re crazy,” they answered in unison, and then gave each other a high-five.

Tess ignored them. “I don’t know … there is something … I just can’t put my finger on it … .”

“Maybe you should ask that Mayan elder spirit person you met,” said Ginny. “Do you have his email address? Oh, wait, you don’t need that, you can just tune him in … . Richie, are any of those glasses crystal? Get one down here for Tess.”

Really, Ginny should never drink gin, Tess thought. But then again she should never have said anything about the skulls to Ginny. There are some things that just don’t translate, things that are made more absurd when taken out of context.

“Listen, I know you guys think I’m loco,” Tess said, shrugging. “And maybe I am, but I can still add two and four, as my mother used to say. Number one, WOOSH is preparing for the end of the world, and then I find out from Will Ball in Mexico”—here Ginny started snickering, but Tess just ignored her—“that Wayne Orbus used to have some kind of world-domination fantasy. Number two, some NSA plans that supposedly—I know, I know, it’s all hearsay, but wait—plans that would, if not end the world, cause massive destruction, go missing. Number three, they are hidden in a book about beetles, and Orbus is obsessed with beetles. You do the math.”

“It’s fuzzy at best,” said Ginny.

“Oh please, you’re fuzzy,” said Tess, putting her arm around Ginny fondly.

Richie filled Tess’s water glass, “I don’t think it’s all that fuzzy. I can see how you would connect these things. There are suddenly a heck of a lot of beetles suddenly appearing in your life. But, Tess, it is a little far-fetched, since Orbus is all the way over in England, and he doesn’t seem like the kind of person Betty Phoenix would confide in.”

“Thank you, Richie!” Tess said triumphantly, ignoring the fact that he had basically just gently poured water on her suspicions.

Richie smiled at her affectionately. “Tess, are you saying that the Universe is trying to send you a message, with all this synchronicity? Or are you saying that WOOSH somehow actually has these plans?”

“I’m not really sure. Actually, I don’t know what I am saying.” She frowned. “But it was like I got a flash of something, there at the museum. Like someone was trying to tell me something. I just have a feeling about it,” Tess insisted stubbornly. Ginny rolled her eyes and groaned.

Richie went to the other side of the bar to wait on customers, but came back to them in a matter of minutes.

“Ready to try the White Wash?” He poured the frothy milk drink into chilled lowball glasses.

“Thanks, Richie, but we”—she pointed frantically at Ginny’s head—“need to go get some dinner.”

Ginny excused herself to go to the ladies’ room. “Okay, you guys, I’m off to ladies’ lingerie!” (Tess had always thought the pub’s restroom names a little too cutesy—the ladies’ room was designated “Lingerie” and the men’s room was “Boxers.”)

“Should I be worried about you?” asked Richie, leaning in close to Tess. “You actually seem happier than I have seen you in a while. But you’re talking kind of crazy. What does Peter say?” He straightened up abruptly and took his phone out of his back pocket. “Are you and Ginny meeting up with him?” He looked at his phone while he was speaking. Suddenly he seemed distracted.

“Oh, no, Peter’s out of town … somewhere bilking the rich out of their money.” Tess wasn’t ready to revisit the humiliation of Peter Barrett’s vanishing act.

Without a word Richie turned away to attend to a drink order. He must have gotten a bad text or something, Tess thought.

“So, what are you going to do about this hunch of yours?” Richie asked when he returned from delivering a tray of cosmos to a group of women who, from the sound of the whooping up they were doing at the corner table, were having a major celebration of some kind.

“Oh, well, I’m not going to do anything, particularly … except … I dunno, I may just poke around a little at the library, just to satisfy my own curiosity. Try to find out what really happened to that book.”

“Okay, Sherlock,” said Ginny, who had just returned. She was a little unsteady as she pulled her coat from where it had been hanging on the back of her stool. ”But before you go off to try to solve the world’s insect mysteries, can we please go get some dinner? I’m so hungry I could eat beetles.”



***



Shuffling along slowly in her place in line behind an elegant white-haired couple, Tess kept her eyes on the guide, and kept a polite, anticipatory smile on her face. She was trying as hard as she could to look as if she belonged in this group of wealthy library benefactors, who were being given a rare tour of the underground stacks of the Main Research Library . For the occasion she had actually gotten out the little diamond locket Matt had given her so long ago and put it on with a simple black cocktail dress, in order to effect a more conservative look. There was, in fact, a cocktail party scheduled after the tour, though Tess was not planning to make that part of the evening.

“This way, ladies and gentlemen … ,” the willowy guide was saying in her incongruous Vanna White manner, ushering them into the North Hall of the Rose Reading Room. As the forty or fifty people filed in, the guide walked backward up at the front; she had perfect, shoulder-length blonde hair (complete with a perfect, bouncy up-flip at the ends), a shiny form-fitting pink silk suit, and pink spiked heels. How un-librarian-like, Tess thought. She could not help thinking that Betty Phoenix would not approve.

“The Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, as it has been called since 2008, houses approximately fifteen million items.” The guide’s perfectly modulated, colorless voice echoed through the huge hall. “Among these items are priceless medieval manuscripts, ancient Japanese scrolls, contemporary novels and poetry, as well as baseball cards, dime novels, and comic books. We also have the largest collection of menus in the world. So if anyone wants to add one that we may have missed—perhaps your favorite restaurant from your hometown … .” There were a few titters here, as people looked at one another with smiles that seemed to say, “Ah, so beautiful, and charming as well.” But Tess was thinking, So beautiful, and I hope for my sake, dumb as well.

For several weeks Tess had tried to find out what might have happened to Fix Your Silk Stockings with a Wyoming Walking Beetle. She had begun by looking up the title on the CATNYP site from home, so that she would have the author’s name and the publishing information, and then she went to the library and simply tried to request it. The nice young male librarian at the information desk looked at the computer screen and frowned.

“This book is marked ‘unavailable.’ Not sure why.”

This did not surprise Tess. What did surprise her was how long it took, and how many different people she needed to see, before someone would admit to her that the book was missing from its place on the shelf in the stacks.

“What could be the reason for that?” Tess nonchalantly asked another librarian, a short, sixty-year-old woman who reminded her of a Pekinese.

“Well, it’s not allowed to leave the building,” said the woman sternly, “but someone could have signed it out for in-library use and then misplaced it somewhere among the many thousands of reference books in the reading room. That happens occasionally. We have so many volumes, and there are people who are thoughtless enough to be that inconsiderate of others. But it’s hard to believe it would not be found.”

“And how do I determine if it was signed out?”

“Ma’am, I can’t see that that matters, as the book is unavailable. Perhaps I can help you with something else? Another book on the same subject?”

Tess was on the brink of replying that she would love to see the librarian come up with another book on the same subject, but she stifled the urge.

She had almost given up after that, but she could not dispel the nagging feeling that she needed to continue to pursue the matter. So the next week she went back, after having made an appointment with a research specialist.

“This book is important to my PhD thesis,” Tess lied, trying to sound very determined, and very scholarly, “and I need to ascertain whether it is permanently lost, or if someone signed it out, so I can decide how to proceed. If someone signed it out, there is still a chance it will turn up again.” She held her breath, waiting for Mr. Albreith, a man with perpetually angry eyebrows, to ask her what kind of PhD she could possibly be working on that necessitated her reading a book called Fix Your Silk Stockings with a Wyoming Walking Beetle. But luckily he didn’t. After a brief pursing of his lips, he made a phone call down to the stacks. When he hung up the phone he announced to Tess that there was indeed a paper record of the fact that the book had been signed out by someone, and while it was not supposed to have left the building, the volume had never been returned. It was presumed stolen.

Finally, thought Tess, progress. “Oh, dear. Well, I know you have to provide a photo ID. Can you please tell me who signed it out?”

But at that, the man puffed up just like the blowfish she and her brother used to catch in Rehoboth Bay did, after they tossed them in the bottom of the boat. “Certainly not,” he sniffed, “That is privileged information. We would never reveal that.”

“But … ,” protested Tess, “if the person stole it then why would you protect them?”

“Oh, rest assured, all our librarians have a list of suspected book thieves at their stations and the name is in our system. That person will never be able to borrow a book from this library again. But give you the name? Certainly not.”

It seemed bizarre to Tess, considering the completely public nature of modern life, when you can keep neither your birthday nor your photographic image from being made available to millions of people at a single stroke of a computer key, that she could not persuade anyone to tell her a simple thing like who had signed out this one ridiculous, obscure book. But after that she was even more intent on finding out.

And so, having come across an article on the library’s web site that mentioned there would be a private tour of the stacks on April 30, Tess had persuaded her friend John Penniman to have her put her on the list for the exclusive, donor-only, after-hours event. She was not exactly sure how she was going to locate the information she wanted but she was going to try. She knew one thing: She was going to have to break some rules. “Just don’t call me when you get arrested,” Ginny had said. “Bill is a tenant lawyer, not a criminal one.” Tess had not dared to tell Harriet what she was planning. She would have had a conniption.

Vanna stopped in front of the information desk in the center of the football-field-size room. She stepped up on a small wooden stool (which, Tess felt, considering the height and pointiness of her heels, was an unparalleled act of bravery) so that she could be seen by everyone in the group. “When a librarian is handed a paper call slip requesting a book,” the guide began, “that librarian inserts it into a pneumatic capsule—like this one”—she was handed the plastic cylinder by somebody Tess could not see—“and sends it through the pneumatic tube system, down past seven floors of books below us, where I will be taking you shortly.” There were murmurs of excitement here. “The request is received, the book located, and it is sent up on an ever-turning Ferris wheel. Oversize books are sent up on dumbwaiters.”

“By the way, the pneumatic tube system, also known as the Zip Tube—” Here she swiveled both her arms in one motion, even though one hand was holding the cylinder, to indicate the machine, which looked vaguely to Tess like the top of an old-fashioned jukebox. Really, Tess thought, the way Vanna was over-gesturing it was like one of those car shows. All the woman needed was a turning platform and a microphone. “—works by air pressure, and was once an essential part of New York City life. It was used by the post office until the fifties. In fact, there were tubes that ran at about thirty-five miles per hour from Harlem to the Lower East Side, and even to Brooklyn.” Tess knew that many of the tubes still existed underground, that they had never been dug up. Were they now like horizontal test tubes, teaming with algae and fungi generated from the germs leftover from pieces of mail from decades ago? Maybe there were lost bills, birthday cards, and love letters stuck in junctions of the dark labyrinth.

“At that time they called it the Underground Mail Road,” Vanna smiled, receiving the obligatory laughter from her audience. “While most library services are now computerized, we find pneumatic tubes actually quicker and more efficient than computers for requesting books from the underground stacks. Now I’m going to show you how this works. I am going to request a book. What shall it be? Anyone?”

A man toward the front immediately spoke up in a loud voice, “How about The History of Gold Snuff Boxes by Richard Norton?” He was obviously a plant. They are running this like a carnie show, Tess thought.

Vanna dismounted (with the assistance of a nearby male patron, who more than willingly gave her a hand) and then held up a five-by-seven piece of paper. “This is the call slip, on which I have written the number for The History of Gold Snuff Boxes.” With her long fingernails, she placed the paper inside the cylinder, and with a great flourish, inserted it into the end of the machine. It disappeared with a loud rattling sound.

Tess suddenly had an image of herself, crammed inside a large capsule, careening luge-like through tubes on her way down to the stacks underneath Bryant Park.

“Now, ladies and gentleman, if you will follow me … ,” Vanna was opening an old wooden door behind the information desk. “People with claustrophobia or a fear of enclosed spaces may not want to go on this part of the tour. You are welcome to stay up here with Jim, one of our wonderful security guards, if you like.” No one appeared to want to stay with Jim. “We are going to enter a very narrow staircase, we will reconvene on the fourth level down. Any questions before we go?”

The gray-haired man who was part of the couple that had been in front of Tess raised his hand. “What happens to the call number slips, after the book is delivered to the person requesting it? Do you keep them?”

“Good question. The call slips are still stored in an old-fashioned, real, live wooden filing cabinet”—she uttered this phrase as if no one had ever seen such a quaint thing as a filing cabinet made out of wood— “in the basement—the very bottom level of the stacks—until the books are returned and reshelved.”

What luck! Thank god someone else asked that, thought Tess. She had been thinking she was going to just have to wing it, to try to find where the records were kept. She hadn’t wanted to be the one to ask.

It took a long time for the entire group to descend the narrow metal staircase. They seemed to be clomping down the steps forever. The sound of shoes on the steps reverberated loudly.

At last a door was opened and they all filed into one of the underground stack rooms. In order to fit, they had to snake around through the aisles of a few of the endless rows of bookshelves. It was a very long room; how far back it went was hard to tell.

“We are now on the fourth level,” said Vanna. “And here”—she pulled a book from the shelf near her—“as you can see, is The History of Gold Snuff Boxes!” Some people actually applauded, as if she had done a magic trick. “The books are not stored by subject, but by size, in order to fit the most books into the shelves as possible. Now, if you dare, take a close look at the bottom of the shelves. You can see through all the way down to several floors below … . It may give your stomach quite a jolt!” Here the guide gave a conspiratorial smile. “These shelves not only hold the books, they actually serve as beams to hold up the huge reading room we just came from. They are made in part from Carnegie steel, which …”

Tess backed away slowly, glancing down the large room for another exit. Finally, she spotted one at the opposite end, at least fifty feet away. It looked as though it might lead to another stairway. Little by little she inched her way toward it, keeping her eyes on the spines of the endless rows of books, as if she were merely obsessively engrossed in browsing.

Why was she doing this anyway? Was this the act of a rational person? Maybe she had become one of those forty-year-old women you sometimes heard about, whose hormones misfired and made them do crazy things.

She had now edged away from the rest of the group far enough that it would be difficult, if she was seen, to claim it was unintentional. She wondered whether what she was planning to do—snooping into privileged library information, without permission—was against the law, and if so, how illegal was it? Could she go to jail for this? It wasn’t as though she were stealing first editions or anything. After all, she had not broken into the library. But could she really get away with pretending she were merely lost, should she be found three floors down from where she was supposed to be?

At last Tess was right next to the exit. Thankfully, no one seemed to have noticed her peeling off from the group. She was completely hidden from most of the others by the angle of the stacks. From far across the long room she heard Vanna say, “Okay, people, let’s continue on …” Tess took a deep breath, grabbed the metal doorknob and went through the door. The staircase was similar to the first one—narrow and dimly lit. Her heart beating quickly, Tess, counted down four more floors until she got to the very bottom.

When she opened the basement door, the first thing that struck her was how dark and quiet it was. She could not even hear the faintest of hums. It was like being inside a vault—a book vault. What if she got locked in? Groping with both hands, she located the light switch and, with great trepidation, flipped it up. The fluorescent lights in the ceiling went on one at a time, like a falling line of dominoes. The huge room of books seemed empty, but the bright light was as much frightening as it was comforting. Were there security videos or motion alarms down here?

The only sound Tess could hear was her own heart pounding violently against her chest. What if she had a heart attack? No one would be able to find her. Then she told herself, Just get this thing done. The longer you stay here, the harder it will be to claim you are lost. Walking quickly, she made her way through the shelves. At the opposite end from where she had entered, she spotted the file cabinet. She knew it had to be the one. It was huge, covering practically the an entire wall. When Tess got closer she could see the rectangular labels on the small drawers. Numbers and letters only. She dug into her purse for the call number of Fix Your Silk Stockings with a Wyoming Walking Beetle, which she had gotten from the computerized catalog. The back of her neck and top of her head tingling in fear, she scanned the labels and located what she figured would be the right drawer.

Tess reached out and opened it, feeling with every passing second more like a criminal. There was a large index card for each book. With trembling fingers, she flipped through the cards; all the corresponding call slips were attached to the cards with paper clips. The cards were in alphabetical and numerical order: Vos 29,838 … 29,841 … 29,843! Jesus—there it was: Fix Your Silk Stockings with a Wyoming Walking Beetle, by Donna Mearing and Sue Bastings.

Suddenly she heard a soft noise, like a dull thump. She spun around, panic rising up in her throat, but she did not see anything, and though she held her breath for a full ten seconds, she heard nothing further. She turned back to the card. There were only a few call slips attached. She pulled out the last one, dated November 20, 2010 and looked at the name written under “requested by.”

Alfred Hassenbach.

Tess blinked. No, she had read it right. Alfred Hassenbach.

“Hey! What are you doing there?” came a loud male voice right behind her.



***



“So then what happened?”

Katie had stopped in mid-deal; she was too excited about hearing Tess’s story to continue placing the cards down on the green felt-covered table. Everyone had their hole cards but there were no up cards yet. “I mean, did they put you in library jail for the night or something?”

“Katie, keep dealing,” said Ginny.

“No, wait, this is great, I have to hear this,” protested Katie.

Tess found that just telling the story was pumping her body with adrenaline again. “Well, I couldn’t really claim I was lost, what with me standing there next to the open drawer. The guard asked to see what was in my hand, I guess to make sure I wasn’t stealing the first edition of Hamlet or something, and so, I mean of course I handed him the slip. But then all of a sudden I remembered the old saying ‘Never apologize, always appeal.’”

“That’s not how that saying goes,” said Liz, carefully stacking her chips from the winnings of the last hand. “Katie, deal.”

“I know,” Tess smiled, “but my mother always said it that way. Anyway, so he’s standing there all stern and suspicious, and he takes the call slip from my hand and looks at it, and of course it’s the slip for Fix Your Silk Stockings with a Wyoming Walking Beetle, and that’s when I catch him kind of smiling! Well, the hint of a smile anyway. So suddenly I get this flash of inspiration out of nowhere, and I find myself telling this guy that my recently dear-departed father had owned a pantyhose company—”

“A what?”

“No, Tess you did not.”

“You’re kidding!”

The women were all talking at once.

“I did. I don’t know what happened to me … . I suddenly had chutzpah, chutzpah beyond my wildest dreams. I am telling you it was a chutzpah miracle! I told the guy that everyone used to call my dad the Pantyhose King … . I know, I could not believe this was coming out of my mouth, who would believe this? And I said I was still grieving and I was trying to find this book, because he had always wanted to see it, and he loved old books about stockings and panty hose”—the women were all roaring now—“and the librarians wouldn’t help me and so I just did this on an impulse, and I was well aware it was not proper procedure and couldn’t he please just let me go with a warning?”

“And he bought that?” said Katie.

“Oh my god. He probably just thought you were nuts, and was humoring you,” said Jessica.

“’Let me go with a warning’? You actually said that?” asked Liz. “Did you think you were on the highway with a speeding ticket?”

“If she hadn’t been on the donor’s invite list, if she’d been just a regular everyday peon, they would have called the police for sure,” said Ginny.

“And you did this for some newspaper story about a lost book?” Katie was incredulous.

Tess and Ginny exchanged a quick glance. That morning on the phone Ginny had convinced Tess not to tell the rest of the poker group about Alfred or the NSA “plans” (“Tess,” Ginny had scoffed, “it’s still just the word of an unbalanced ex-librarian and a weird guy on a boat with dirty hair”) for the simple reason that they would think she was out of her mind, and would therefore spend the whole night lecturing her about getting therapy or going on Paxil. So Tess had told the poker gals only that she’d become interested in the missing book because she had witnessed a librarian freaking out about it—that in fact the librarian had actually quit over it—and Tess thought if she could find out why, it would make a good human interest story for an article.

“That was an insane thing to do, Tess,” said Liz, who had never so much as jaywalked in her whole life. “You could really have gotten in trouble, or have been stuck there all night. And in the end you never even got the information you wanted.”

“Well, anyway, here I am safe and sound,” Tess said, purposely not looking at Ginny. “All’s well that ends well.”

“That’s fine,” said Jessica, rapping on the table with her fingertips, “but I’d like this hand to end well too. Katie, deal!”



***



Tess sat in the WOOSH reception area, looking out the window at the rain and listening to the rhythmic gurgling of the water sculpture, thankful for the surprising absence of Enya music. She was going over in her mind what she should say to Dakota Flores. She would have to be very careful. The whole incident about Alfred and the book could still be nothing. True, Alfred could have found the NSA papers, but he might just have them stuck to his refrigerator, or filed them away in a box marked “Government Conspiracies,” along with his favorite photos of Area 51. And, Tess reminded herself, there may be no papers at all. They could, as Ginny was fond of saying, be a figment of Betty’s and Frankstein’s imaginations, or a fraud, or even a practical joke. Let’s face it, this kind of thing did not really happen in real life. Plus WOOSH had been preparing for the end of the world way before November 2010, when Alfred had obtained the book.

So what, if anything, should she say to Dakota about it? “Dakota, here’s the thing. I have reason to believe that Alfred Hassenbach may have some top-secret plans for destroying all the computer systems in the world.” Oh, yeah, Tess, that sounds so possible. And no matter how she said it, there was a very good chance Dakota might just give Tess her usual saintly smile and say something like “Everything happens in its own time; it’s all as it is supposed to be”—the New Age version of “Don’t worry your pretty little head.” And what if, in spite of Dakota’s apparent naïve good intentions, she was secretly in cahoots with Alfred? Maybe all that loving kindness was just an act. After all, these are the people who hired her to write a book for the end of the world. Don’t these types usually think computers and technology are the enemy, the devil’s tools?

“Miss Eliot?” Miss. How nice the receptionist was. She had been getting “Ma’am” way too often these days.

“Yes?”

“I’m so sorry—Dakota had to go into an important meeting, but Alfred Hassenbach will see you.”

Alfred? Uh-oh.

“May I take your coat?”

Tess, her brain scrambling for a new foothold, handed the young man her raincoat, which he hung up in a small closet behind his desk.

“This way, please,” he said. “She followed him out of the sunlit waiting room through the dark corridor and into the by now familiar conference room. She forced herself to take some deep calming breaths. Alfred was the last person she wanted to meet with.

He was sitting at the end of the table farthest from the door. His iPad and a stack of papers were placed neatly in front of him.

“Hello!” Tess said gaily—actually, much too gaily, she realized. She sounded like a person on a boat hailing someone on shore.

Alfred darted a furtive look at her. “Have a seat, Tess,” he said in his soft, rushed monotone.

He had been sitting to the side of Tess in the first meeting. Now, seeing him full on, Tess thought his head seemed stuck onto his body haphazardly. It wasn’t that he didn’t have a neck, but everything looked … kind of glued on somehow.

After she was seated, he got up, came over to her side of the table, and plopped the sheath of papers down in from of her. With some surprise, she saw that it was a copy of her own manuscript—the chapters she had done so far, about seventy pages.

“You’ve never written a book before, have you? It’s kind of obvious from this … your … material.” He oozed the word “material” out as if he were expelling a rotten piece of meat with his tongue.

Tess felt her face go hot and her heartbeat quicken.

“Take a look at the changes I have made,” he said, his mouth uncomfortably close to her ear. “I think you will notice—you should notice—somewhat of a major improvement. Peter did not really provide you with much direction, did he? Much? Oh, it’s all right, it’s not your fault.” She turned to look at him and he smirked down at her. She could make out the tiny scratches on his glasses. Tess suddenly wanted Dakota Flores as much as she had wanted her mother when she was eight and the boy next door threatened her with a garden hose.

Tess swallowed and began to leaf through the pages, which were marked up with a thick, black felt-tip marker. She felt anger boiling up from her stomach. From what she could see, he had cut out all the humorous metaphors; indeed, he had eradicated her voice entirely and made her sentences short and simple—and boring.

Her nervousness supplanted by irritation, Tess fixed Alfred with a cold stare.

“I can’t help asking, Alfred: has Dakota seen this? Last time we spoke, she was quite pleased with what I had done. Very happy, in fact.”

Alfred moved back a few feet from her, crossing his arms. “Dakota doesn’t concern herself at this level, I am … ah, taking care of these details.”

Tess wondered fleetingly why she cared what he did to her pages, as long as she got paid and her name was not on the book. But the fact was that she had put real effort into this guide. All at once she realized it was no longer just a paying job to her. Somewhere along the line she had begun to feel that in many ways the advice she was writing in Etiquette for the End of the World was more “true” than her newspaper column had been. She looked back down at the pages and saw that Alfred had completely scribbled out the entire section she had done called “Hosting When Your House is Just a Haystack.” The page now looked like a poorly-filled-in coloring book. Tess’s veins filled with fury.

In her mind’s eye, she saw her hand holding the library call slip with Alfred’s name on it, and unable to stop herself, she said frostily, “So, what do you do, anyway, Alfred, when you are not at WOOSH? Do you work in publishing? Wait, haven’t I seen you listed somewhere at the research library at Forty-Second Street? Are you on staff there?”

She knew she had gone too far. Alfred’s face twitched and his nose and ears reddened.

“Why are you asking that? About the research library?” he said sharply, staring at her.

“Nothing, no reason,” she said, now flustered, feeling exposed, “except since you line-edited my pages, I just thought … you know … you were using your real-world skills.”

He was still watching her closely, as if he were x-raying her brain. Oh, why had she mentioned the library? She never did well when she was feeling criticized.

“I have many interests in what you call the real world,” he said with a small stiff smile. “Film, graphic novels …”

“Entomology perhaps?” Tess ventured airily. Shit! Somehow she had not been able to resist, even though she knew she was swimming in dangerous waters.

He was silent for a moment. “I happen to share our founder’s … ah … interest in beetles, yes.”

He gazed at her, his eyes now narrowed to malevolent slits, like a reptile’s. Then he walked over to the wall where most of the maps were. He had his back to her now. “I’m sure you miss Peter … . Everyone always found him so charming. How is he? Have you heard from him? Too bad he had to go away so suddenly. Life is so funny, you never know when someone is going to suddenly disappear.” Alfred turned and smiled widely—a creepy, sneaky smile, a smile that bragged of secrets and power. Tess felt her insides freeze.

She remembered Peter that night after the risotto in Gramercy Park, saying something like, “I will let them know about the computer bug angle at the WOOSH dinner.” That was the last time she had seen him. And Alfred, of course, would have been at that monthly dinner meeting on December 21. Alfred had something to do with Peter’s leaving, Tess thought with certainty. And now he knows that I know about the beetle book. He will put it together and realize that I also must be aware of those NSA papers.

After a long moment of silence Alfred left the room, telling her to take her time looking at his “corrections,” and then she could show herself out. She should leave his manuscript behind until he could have a copy made.

Tess stayed all of five minutes more. She would check in with Dakota later about the manuscript. She could not believe Dakota would be on board with what he had done.

She was relieved to get home to the safety and familiarity of her apartment. She petted Carmichael hello and was hanging her green raincoat on the coat rack when she noticed something odd near the lapel. It was a tiny, neat slit, about half an inch long.

Just like Peter’s jackets.