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It came to me that detectives and politicians were somewhat similar. We dealt in passion while pretending to be objective, if not without sin.

“I don’t know a name. Whoever it was called the office. She told the switchboard operator that she was my girlfriend. That got her to my aide. She told her that she knew about a detective investigating me when I was in New York. Our system captured the number. I could send it to you from my office.”

I liked him, even when he was trying to find my identity.

“Sure,” I said. “Send it to [email protected].”

“What’s that?” he asked while writing down the e-mail.

“My electronic address,” I said, and smiled. “Tell me, Congressman, why did you go to that motel when you knew there was a detective on you?”

He looked down and then up. He shook his head and gave me the weakest smile.

“You said her name was Mimi Lord?” he asked.

I wrote down the number on a small piece of paper from a notepad I carried. Tearing out the leaf, I handed it to him.

“She’ll take care of you,” I said, and then I stood.

“What about those pictures?”

“What about ’em?”

“What will you do with them?”

“Erase them from my tablet and forget them after that.”

“How can I be sure?” he asked, reminding me of a very old popular song.

“There’s no reason for me to hurt you, Congressman. If I wanted to do that I’d either give these to Stoneman or double the price on you.”

“You said you were a Democrat,” he suggested. “Maybe you don’t like my politics.”

“Ever since Reagan busted the unions, both sides of Congress have become lackeys to the rich. They all get made, paid, and laid out of the picked pockets of men like me.”

Acres frowned a bit. Maybe he felt insulted, maybe not. At any rate he nodded at me and I returned the gesture.

I left Gucci’s Diner feeling better than I had in quite some time.

6.

I was back in the office at a few minutes past three. My good mood had subsided in equal proportion to the memory of solitary confinement and the ramifications of Beatrice Summers’s letter.

A letter.

Who sent letters anymore? The unlined paper was tinged pink and the ink was peacock blue. The writing was even and without blobs or cross-outs. There were no misspellings, and the written lines were straight and parallel to the top and bottom of the machine-cut sheet.

All these details said something. There was intention behind that letter. One or more rough drafts were written down somewhere else and then copied onto the good stationery with a sheet of bold lines beneath it to make the lines even; onward, Christian soldiers.

The NYPD database system, which I had access to because of Patrolman Henri Tourneau, had no Adamo Cortez working anywhere in the department. The Private Investigator’s Database, which I paid eighteen hundred dollars a year for, told me that for the past nine years Beatrice Summers had lived in Odumville Township, outside of Saint Paul.

I wondered what the former Nathali imagined when she thought of God or what the deity might have envisioned when considering his sinful, repentant acolyte.

For my part, whenever I closed my eyes I was in that lightless cell again. It smelled of piss and sweat. Fluttering insects flew through the darkness. Men groaned and complained beyond the sweating metal door of my detention.

A silver bell sounded.

Opening my eyes, I was looking out the second-floor window onto Montague Street again. It was November, but the cold hadn’t set in yet. The sun was shining brightly. A woman stopped across the street and, looking up, saw me.