noises, motors and levers. Not-so-great gears turn, too. It went down. One flo or. It stopped, but the doors didn’t open. Jimmy pushed the bottom button, and it continued. A light over the door pulsed, a soft light behind a circle of ivory, that seemed to be measuring time and not distance. If it was distance, it felt like ten floors. It stopped, roughly.

It opened onto a ten-foot-square room, a room hewn out of rock. With an arched opening to the right, a tunnel leading away.

In the tunnel there were train tracks and a shiny electrical contact centered overhead. It was small.

OK, I’ll bite, he thought, and started down the tunnel.

He could stand upright but thought to keep his head and hands away from the power line. There were lights on the wall every fifty feet, gaslights refitted with clear incandescent bulbs.

He walked a half mile. It stayed level. It was dry. He would have thought it would be damp, wondered how they did it. He came through a section with a great rumbling nearby, vibrating gear sounds from the other side of the rock. (A cable car barn?) Near the end, there was an intersection with a larger tunnel, this one tiled, a look from another age, a hint of Le Métro. It all seemed automatic, as transportation networks go. There was a light, red/green, at the intersection.

It shined green, so he kept going.

There was a sound behind him. He turned just as an open train car stopped inches away from running him down. It was simple, inelegant, an open box on wheels, eight feet long. A Sailor manned the helm, standing in the rear, like a gondolier. His face wore no expression. Back home, this kind of Sailor was called a Walker. It was a good job for a Walker.

He rode a good distance in the second tunnel, was brought into a room. The tunnel and cart and driver continued on beyond it. He stepped out. The conveyance stayed put.

It was a waiting room. There was a pair of empty wingback chairs.

And three doors.

One opened, saving Jimmy from any test of character or intuition.

It was the dog man. “Here,” he said, “this way,” and held the door open.

Jimmy just put one foot in front of the other.

They came out into a room, a room where everybody had a purpose. People came and went, carrying things. Most of the people Jimmy didn’t recognize, but the hippies were there and some of the women from the Yards. There was an air of imminent departure, the train leaving the station. Another train, another station. Jimmy looked for a clock, but there wasn’t one.

Duncan Groner came through carrying a wooden box, what could have been a case of booze. He came out of one doorway and headed toward another.

“You still here?” Groner said, didn’t wait for an answer.

The woman with the short-cropped hair and that French look was right at the center of things. The Lady. She’d changed her clothes. Now she wore a dark business suit, blue almost to black, with a waist-length jacket, a straight skirt, a white collar, heels. Like a stewardess on the Titanic, if they’d had them.

There was something familiar about the outfit. Then Jimmy remembered the nanny that night on the dock. This was the officers’ version of the suit she wore.

The woman gave Jimmy a pleasant smile.

Christina Leonidas came through. She seemed happy, excited, energized, the way schoolgirls are when they’re working on a project. Putting on a play, a fashion show, a fund-raiser.

“Did you see her yet?” she said. “The Lady?”

“The Lady” was still standing there, maintaining the same smile, standing by. So Jimmy didn’t get it.

“The Queen?” Christina said. “She told us to call her The Lady, or even just Mary, but everyone calls her that, The Queen. Queen Mary,” she said and giggled.

And there was a flash of red, like a wink.

Jimmy’s heart fell through a hundred floors.

“She prefers just Mary,” the woman in the suit said to Christina.

Then she turned to Jimmy. “She’s in the drawing room.”

THIRTY-FIVE

She stood facing him when he came in. The woman in the suit had deposited him on the other side of the door and then clicked away in her heels.

The room was lit up bright, the way a child puts on all the lights when a night turns scary, when questions threaten to overtake everything. There were deep green drapes, a heavy weave, closed across whatever windows there were. Two of the four walls were