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I think she may have a spot of boy trouble.” She led him gently away from Maggie’s door, holding him by both hands.
    â€œI’m sorry to hear that,” Browne said. “But it’s no excuse. Did you hear the language she used?”
    â€œPlease let it pass, Owen. I’m sure she’ll apologize. She’s been in a state, the poor kid.”
    â€œFor God’s sake,” he muttered. “I didn’t know she commanded such language.”
    â€œOh, they all do,” Anne said. “She does it to get a rise out of you.”
    Browne let himself be drawn away.
    â€œLook, take your shower,” Anne told him. “I’ll make the pancakes. You cool off and have your shower. Don’t let it spoil your morning.”
    In the shower, Browne tried to salve his bruised propriety and ease the anxiety he felt about his only daughter, whose adventures in the jungle of young America filled him with dread. It was a difficult time to bring up children, he thought, almost as bad as the late sixties and seventies had been. Browne’s expectations were high and Maggie had been an exceptionally dutiful and well-behaved child, more attuned to her parents than to her peers. All this, it seemed, was changing and the New England convent school to which, at great cost, they sent her seemed unhelpful. It had been her mother’s school, but Browne had been very reluctant to send her away. Now it seemed that the other girls there were wild and sometimes unwanted at home. Drug use was more of a problem there than in the public schools. He tried not to think of it. He could not bear the thought of his daughter’s pain and she did not, at this point in her life, seem very clever at protecting herself from it.
    Browne and Anne consumed the pancakes. Maggie sulked in her room.
    â€œI should take her sailing,” Browne said.
    â€œBut the boat’s in Staten Island.”
    â€œWell,” he said, “we could go down there.”
    â€œSurely you don’t feel like doing that today.”
    Browne was not much in the mood for sailing. He was picking at his guilt over having Maggie away at school and neglecting her.
    â€œNo I don’t, really. I should have taken her along when I moved the boat in the fall.”
    â€œWell,” Anne said, “she has other things on her mind.”
    As it turned out, he could not find much to do with the day. Anne went to work in the study he had built for her, finishing the article she was doing for the yachting magazine where she worked as an editor. Maggie hid out and then slipped away. In the early afternoon, Browne put on his mackinaw and prepared to go in to the office. On his way out he knocked on the study door.
    â€œYou should have gone to church this morning,” he told his wife. “To pray for the market.”
    They had a laugh together.

4
    I N THE TAXI from La Guardia, Strickland had the persistent notion of being followed. He rode with one knee up on the back seat, guarding the road behind. He had noticed a man in the bar at Miami airport watching him, a man he was sure had boarded his flight in Belize. Between Miami and New York he had been upgraded to first class, only to find the same tall mestizo in a seat across the aisle. As his cab mounted the Triborough Bridge his eye was on a Ford Falcon that had left the Grand Central Parkway just behind him. A dark-haired man in sunglasses was at the wheel. A second man of similar appearance sat beside him. All the way across the bridge Strickland kept watch, reflecting that there was no more sinister sight in all of the hemisphere than two tall Latinos in a Ford Falcon. It made you want to pray. When the Ford eased past them to leave the FDR Drive at One Hundred Sixteenth Street, he turned his face away.
    Driving downtown, Strickland had a gander at his driver, whose name was presented on the hack license as Kiazim Shokru. He had a bald bullet head and fierce, lustrous eyes