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more sense to take a short cab ride—the red-suited hilljack would pay for it, it was no great expense, a very short ride—to his sister’s apartment and just keep calling around until they had Mr. Houston, actual and solid, on the other end of a telephone line. The more she regarded the state of things, the more it seemed that her luck was running. Rather than spend a miserable number of days hunting Bill Houston without a hint of where to start, she would take up the search in the company of one of his friends—a very poor dresser, admittedly, but a person who knew the layout and believed in good deeds. And she was beginning to feel quite sharp. Getting the kids and suitcase out to the street and into a cab was no trouble. The ride was a rocket. As she got out of the cab, holding Baby Ellen in one arm and dragging Miranda onto the pavement with her free hand, she was stunned by the world. The bricks in the building before her were keen-edged and profound. Everything had a definite quality. The fuzziness of Chicago had been burned away. Mr. Redsuit was handling things with the flourish of a Fred Astaire, and had her up two or three flights of stairs, with her kids and her suitcase, in what seemed a matter of seconds.
    The hallway they travelled now was carpeted with a wide strip of black rubber down its middle. The doors to the various apartments, behind which the secret interiors seemed to breathe and mutter all around them, were of flat plyboard. One, she noticed as they passed it, was sealed from without with a padlock. Another sported a red and green bordered sign:
    DR. DEL RIO, PHD .
    CAN SEE, IDENTIFY , &
    REMOVE YOUR DEMONS .
    And the door across the hall from it opened before them onto an obviously frightened woman standing in a cramped kitchen. The expression on the woman’s face was confusing to Jamie, because Jamie was feeling good.
    â€œOh, thanks, Ned,” the woman said as the four of them spilled into the place. She held a can of beer in her hand, and cuddled it to her chest. She wore a great big overcoat and a blue beret, but did not appear, actually, to be going out. Behind the stove she now backed up against, a black scorch mark fanned out across the wall, the record of a mishap involving flames.
    â€œJesus, Ned,” she said.
    â€œThis is so temporary I don’t want to waste my breath on the whole big explanation,” Ned said, brushing off his red suit as if it had accumulated some foreign matter out in the streets. Jamie, still holding the baby in her arms, realized now that he wore no overcoat—just motorvated on through the winter nights, warmed by the zeal of his mission. He moved now to embrace his sister, a gesture that seemed to startle her.
    From the recesses of a darker room just off the kitchen came Anne Murray’s voice singing “(You Are My) Highly Prized Possession.” A man wearing thick tortoise shell spectacles now appeared at the entrance to this room and leaned against the doorframe and said nothing.
    â€œWe’re going to be here about three-quarters of an hour,” Ned said. “We’re just going to use the phone awhile. Okay?”
    â€œThe phone doesn’t work,” his sister said. “They cut the phone off. You know that.” She looked at the wordless man, from whose fingers dangled a bottle of beer by its neck. “He knew that two days ago,” she said to him.
    â€œOf course I know that,” Ned said. “We’d just like you to look after the kids for forty-five minutes, while we make a few calls down at my place.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?” His sister appeared more than agitated. She had a wild, phosphorescent tension about her that brightened the whole kitchen. “You don’t have a phone.”
    â€œOf course I have a telephone,” Ned said, smiling at her. He smiled also at the other man, who raised his beer and took a pull without altering the cast of his features.
    The