mecca of high-rises and corporate logos. Lilly passed the headquarters of VISA and The Gap. She remained hunched in her seat—not that difficult given her tiny frame—and chanced another glimpse at the rearview. Galileo remained fifteen feet behind her, steady as a stone.
She took Pine and then north to Kearny, and the neighborhood began its transformation from California chic to Mandarin peasantry. Tiled awnings stretched out over entrances. Cubical buildings became pagodas, and signage—so commonly horizontal—now hung vertical, to better suit the ancient language being conveyed.
The major thoroughfare in Chinatown was Grant Avenue, so Lilly made sure instead to take one of the slender side streets. So many of these were dead ends, but Lilly knew the area well and avoided getting trapped. Galileo was still on her tail, but the overall foreignness of the area had to be frustrating him, and his chunky blue Ford barely squeezed between the brick buildings in a narrow lane like Ross Alley.
Take that, motherfucker…
Lilly felt her grip ease up a bit on her wheel. She was actually going to win. She, Lilly Toro, was going to defeat the big bad wolf. Strangely, she suddenly thought about her parents, and not with malice. They would be proud of her. They, who loathed her lifestyle, who had kicked her to the curb at age sixteen, would be bragging about her victory to their neighbors.
When she saw the police substation coming up on the right, her nascent joy blossomed into unbridled bliss. She was home free. She had made it. She pounded on her horn, which got the attention of the three or four cops hanging out on the station’s front steps, and then she pulled alongside the curb.
“Can we help you?” one of them asked.
“Yes, I…” Lilly looked back to point at the Ford—but it was gone.
“Ma’am?”
“I was being followed,” she said with a grin, “but I guess I lost him.”
As the cops glanced back down the street at the complete absence of a threat, Lilly shifted into Park and got out of her car. Her legs felt rubbery from tension, but alive. Alive! Her cell phone rang. It was probably Tom Piper, finally calling her back. Late again. She put the phone to her ear.
“Yo,” she said.
“Thank you for standing still,” answered Galileo, and from 2,000 feet away he tugged the trigger of his rifle and ended Lilly’s life.
16
“Fear,” said Rafe, “and desire.”
He wrote the words in large black ink on the dry erase board, and some of the more dutiful freshmen in the lecture hall jotted them down. Rafe took a moment to smirk at this—would they forget those two words if they didn’t copy them down? Then again, these were college students. With their away-from-home-for-the-first-time overindulgence of alcohol, drugs and sleep deprivation, who knew what condition their recently matured brains were in?
He continued his talk.
“It’s the dialectic of human psychology. When we say that people ‘push our buttons,’ there are only two buttons and these are they. And as societies can be said to have a collective psychology, we can too list them on this paradigm. To wit—the Roman Republic falls closer to Fear, yes? The xenophobia of the early Romans allowed them not only to be on guard for the elephants of Hannibal but also informed the way they absorbed nearby cultural memes and without exception colored them decidedly Roman. The psycho-sociology of the Roman Empire, interestingly but not surprisingly, is another story altogether.”
He paused again, to allow the note-takers (few and far between as they were) to catch up. Rafe knew that the effectiveness of using historical examples to explain sociological concepts was waning with each passing year, but in his heart of hearts he was a history buff and couldn’t resist the efficacy these comparisons provided, at least to the astute in the room. Catering to mediocrity was not his style.
His mind drifted to his old father, now ensconced in their guest bedroom with his dumbbells and his magazines, and to his wife, for all intents and purposes an invalid on the living room divan. Much like the Romans of old, his life of late had shifted quite dramatically along the Fear-Desire paradigm.
A student raised her hand.
“Yes?”
“How do you spell ‘Hannibal’?”
When Amy Lieb laughed, which she did with inordinate frequency, she sounded very much like a panting dog. Oftentimes when Amy had launched into one of these laughing fits, Esme felt the need to take a step back, lest she be splashed with hot air and germs. So even