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there; he enjoyed taking curators and dealers into that reddish twilight, amid sleepy Puerto Rican transvestites and a few hustlers taking their breaks from Port Authority. Tito disliked the place. It seemed to occupy its own reptilian delta of time, a dead-end continuum of watered drinks and low-level anxiety.

    COMING INTO HIS ROOM, he saw that one of the socks he’d washed earlier had fallen from where he’d left it to dry, on the wheeled rack. He replaced it.

6. RIZE
    M ilgrim was enjoying the superior brightness of the nitrogen-filled optics in Brown’s Austrian-made monocular well enough, but not the smell of Brown’s chewing gum or his proximity in the back of the chilly surveillance van.
    The van had been parked on Lafayette, where one of Brown’s people had left it for them. Brown had run a red light to get up here and into position, after his earphone had told him that the IF was headed this way, but now the IF was staring into the window of Yohji Yamamoto, unmoving.
    “What’s he doing?” Brown took the monocular back. It matched his gun and his flashlight, that same not-color of grayish green.
    Milgrim leaned forward, to get a better unassisted view through his spy-hole. The Econoline had half a dozen of these sawn through its sides, each one covered by a screwed-on, moveable scrap of black-painted plastic. These coincided, on the graffiti-tagged exterior, with solid black areas of the various tags. Assuming those were all genuine tags, Milgrim wondered, collected by leaving the van on the street, would the van’s disguise still fool a tagger? How old were those tags? Were they the urban equivalent of using out-of-season vegetation for camouflage? “He’s looking in a window,” Milgrim said, pointlessly and knowing it. “Are you going to follow him home now?”
    “No,” said Brown. “He could notice the truck.”
    Milgrim had no idea how many people Brown had had watching the IF stock up on Japanese groceries, while they’d entered his place and changed the bug’s battery. This world of people following and watching other people was new to Milgrim, though he supposed he’d always assumed that it was there, somewhere. You saw it in movies and read about it, but you didn’t think about having to breathe someone else’s condensed breath in the back of a cold van.
    Now it was Brown’s turn to lean forward, pressing the monocular’s resilient lip against the van’s cold, sweating skin, for a closer view of the IF. Milgrim wondered idly, almost luxuriously, what it might be like to pick something up, just then, and hit Brown in the head with it. He actually glanced around the back of the van, to see what might be available, but there was nothing but the upended plastic milk crates they both squatted on, and a folded tarp.
    Brown, as if reading Milgrim’s thoughts, turned suddenly from the eyepiece of the monocular, glaring.
    Milgrim blinked, hoping to convey mildness and harmlessness. Which shouldn’t be that hard, as he hadn’t hit anyone in the head since elementary school, and wasn’t likely to now. Though he’d never been held captive before, he reminded himself.
    “Eventually he’ll send or receive something from that room,” Brown said, “and when he does, you’ll translate it.”
    Milgrim nodded dutifully.

    THEY CHECKED INTO the New Yorker, on Eighth Avenue. Adjoining rooms, fourteenth floor. The New Yorker seemed to be on Brown’s list. This was their fifth or sixth time here. Most of Milgrim’s room was taken up by its double bed, which faced a television mounted in a particleboard cabinet. The pixels in the cabinet’s wood-grain veneer were too large, Milgrim thought, as he took off his stolen overcoat and sat on the edge of the bed. That was something he’d started to notice, how you only got the high-resolution stuff in your better places.
    Brown came in and did his trick with the two little boxes, one on the door, one on the doorframe. They were that same shade of