In the night room Page 0,58

with, and now he’s in overdrive. The woman weeping and trembling in the back of his cab has not given him a destination. If she did, he wouldn’t go there on a bet—unless, of course, she were to say, “I’ll give you a thousand dollars to take me to a top-secret government installation in the Sierra Nevadas,” or something similar, in which case he would flip on his off-duty lights and rocket straight for the Lincoln Tunnel.

At last, Willy wails, “I don’t know where to go!” She plasters her hand over her face and says, “They killed Tom! He’s dead!”

After that, the funny noises emanating from behind her hands disturb Patel so greatly that he considers personally ejecting this woman from his cab, by force if necessary. She calms down, however, and begins to look about her, which Patel takes to be an excellent sign. And since he, like his distraught passenger, has no idea where he has taken them, he begins to check around for landmarks, too.

“Where are we?” Willy asks.

“Yes, in several senses,” says Patel, trying to catch sight of a street sign. “Riverside Drive, I’d say, and about 103rd. Yes, there is the sign, miss. We are at 103rd Street. The question is, where do we go from here? The government agents will be mobilizing soon, and the police, too, will be massed against you. If you wish me to continue helping you, it is necessary that you explain the entirety of your situation to me.”

“The police, too?” Willy asks.

“I have no doubt of that, miss. From what I saw, the police are in league with the forces against you. Nothing is as it seems, and those who pretend to act in the name of good in fact serve dark and evil masters.”

“The evil master is my fiancé,” Willy says. “His name is Mitchell Faber, and he isn’t what he seems to be, that’s for sure. He murdered my first husband, and my daughter, too.”

“This is your story. It was given to you, and now you must repeat it. I understand. You are supposed to imitate a parrot. But now your story has reminded me of something I read this morning. It was that name—your fiancé’s name. I am sure of it. Let me check on this, miss.”

“Mitchell’s name was in the paper?”

This seems so unlikely, also so foreign to Mitchell’s character, that Willy cannot believe the driver’s words. Besides that, this driver, although very polite, is also a screwball. She’d known people in the Institute who, like him, were convinced that they had the inside dope on governmental or military conspiracies. The problem with such people was that their theories almost always incorporated a good deal of the truth, as you learned every time governmental officials were caught telling whoppers, and this occasional (even fundamental) accuracy served only to buttress their faith in the wilder branches of their conspiracies.

Kalpesh Patel has pulled up in front of an unusually beautiful brownstone on the corner of 103rd Street, and he is bending over, evidently shuffling through a stack of newspapers on the seat beside his.

“Yes, that was the name. Undoubtedly, we are talking about a bit of disinformation planted by government agents.” Willy hears the sound of pages being turned. Then Patel’s arm stops moving, and his mouth stretches out in a smile. “Oh, my, the lies these people are willing to tell their own citizens. It is shameful. Do you know you have been accused of bank robbery, Miz Patrick?”

“Bank robbery?”

“And your name is Willy? You were given a man’s name? Not even a true, dignified name, but a mere nickname? How did your mother explain this decision to you?”

“My parents were killed when I was a child—I never had a chance to ask her. I want to see that newspaper, please.”

“You must read about your alleged crime,” Patel says, and passes a folded-over copy of the Daily News over the seat and through the rectangle cut into the plastic divider between them.

Willy sees it instantly: a smudgy photograph, lifted from film taken out of a surveillance video camera, of herself seated before the desk of Mr. Robert Bender, president of the Continental Trust of New Jersey. She is dressed in the jeans and cotton sweater she had been wearing that day, and in the hand that rests on Mr. Bender’s handsome desk is a pistol that looks a little too large for her grip. The headline reads Imaginative Newcomer Breaks New Jersey Bank.

“I wasn’t holding a