"We went walking. Must have been three miles. It was d.a.m.nhot out, too. She didn't break a sweat once. It was like in highschool, like we were off to get milkshakes with Jughead and Ver-onica." Some cashews appeared on the table. "Ryan, do youknow that before I made my decision to put myself out of com-mission I'd been really sick?"

"No."

"I was. I technically kicked the bucket over at Cedars-that's what the doctors said. And you know what I saw when I flat-lined?"

"What?"

"Susan."

"What can I say to that?"

"You tell me."

"John-come to the light!"

"Alright, so it was a Meet the Blooms rerun that was on the hos-pital TV a few minutes before I bottomed, but it took memonths before I figured that out. But it was still her. You knowwhat I mean?

And I'd just gotten used to the idea that seeing her face and voice was meaningless, and then today happens-andnow I don't think it's so meaningless anymore."

A waiter came by. Ryan's drink was empty. He ordered an-other. "A Singapore sling, please." He didn't know what to sayto John.

"A Singapore sling?" said John. "Where are we? In a BobHope movie? I feel like I'm having drinks with my mother."

"It's a jaunty ironic retro beverage."

"You little twerp. I pioneered irony and retro back when youwere s.h.i.tting your Huggies." John looked at the waiter: "A rustynail, please."

Ryan was fidgeting. John said, "Well, I suppose you probablywant to discuss your script. We'll buy it.

Don't get an aneurysmor anything." Ryan looked relieved but nervous. John said, "Youdon't have an agent, Ryan, do you?"

Ryan's face was flushed. "Nope."

"Good for you. You just saved yourself forty-five grand."

Ryan's flush drained away. His face stopped.

"Oh, this is good," said John. "I can see the little cartooncogs and wheels in your head trying to do the arithmetic to fig-ure out the offer. I'll put you out of your misery. Three hundredgrand."

"You're messing with me.""You have a s.h.i.tty poker face, Ryan."

Ryan's drink arrived, but he pushed it away. "I want to re-member this clearly."

"You've got a stronger const.i.tution than I ever had." He heldhis gla.s.s up. "A toast." They clinked gla.s.ses, sipped and then John said, "Ivan doesn't trust something unless it's way over-priced. If I told him I'd gotten 'Tungaska' for five grand, itwould have ended right there. I pulled the number 300 out ofthe air. I could have made it more."

Ryan sat, immobilized.

"Hey, c'mon, Ryan," John said. "Sing-dance-do a little jig or something. Make me feel like an aging benevolent fart."

"No. John. You don't understand. You've just changed my lifeas if you'd given me wings or blinded my eyes. I feel dizzy."

"Believe me, this isn't the way it usually happens. Normally,Ivan and I would be trying to engineer some way of f.u.c.kingyou ragged on the deal. But I'm feeling mentorish. I'll hook you up with a lawyer. Sign the paper and you're set."

A c.o.c.ktail of money, shared secrets and ironic beverages madeRyan bold. "John-what was the deal with last year? I knowabout as much as anybody does who reads the tabloids. What happened? What was it you were wanting to do back then?"

John looked at Ryan kindly but sternly. "Not now. Nottonight. Tonight is about success."

They soon split up, but some hours later, after zoomingthrough Susan's tapes, John phoned to ask Ryan if he could takehim up on his corny offer to indulge his feelings for Susan. It was past one in the morning, and Ryan was polishing "Tun-gaska" and didn't want an interruption, but John persevered.And then Ryan revealed he had to go out on an errand andwould be busy.

"Okay, Ryan, you can just tell me your offer to riff about Su- san was a courtesy, like telling some loser actor to come playsquash sometime to get rid of him."

"John, I've got to go help my girlfriend with something."

"Girlfriend?"

"What's that tone in your voice?"

"Me? Nothing. All I said was 'Girlfriend?'

"You think I'm gay."

"Did I say that?"

"It was in your voice."

"Well, you are, aren't you?"

"No."

"I don't believe you."

"G.o.d, let me make a phone call. Hang up, eat a s...o...b.. Snackand I'll call you in five minutes."

John hung up. Three minutes later the phone rang. "Vanessasays you can come help us."

"Help with what?"

"You'll see." He gave John Vanessa's address in Santa Monica.They agreed to meet in one hour, but John was early.

Vanessa opened the screen door, calm and bookish in horn-rimmed gla.s.ses and a wool sweater set imported from someother part of the century. John thought Vanessa looked like oneof the murdered Clutter daughters of Kansas. She asked him tosit on a side chair. "Would you like something to drink, maybe?"

"Uh-a c.o.ke."

"Sure."

She went into the kitchen. John heard the fridge openand close, along with other friendly kitchen sounds.

Vanessalooked smart in a way John knew she was helpless to conceal.She had the laser-scanning eyes of the highest-paid personala.s.sistants, the ones who single-handedly made Neanderthal teensploitation film producers seem cla.s.sy and hip by scripting 46O.

the brief, urbane speeches they gave while donating comically large checks to well-researched and cutting-edge charities.

Vanessa was quite obviously some freak of nature maroonedon the sh.o.r.es of the bell curve's right-most limits. "What do you do for a living, Vanessa?" John asked, stretching out his neck asif it would help lob his words around a bend in the wall.

"I work at the Rand Corporation."

This didn't surprise John. "No s.h.i.t. Doing what?"

" Think-tanking."

"You sit around in beanbag chairs all day and think up mili-tary invasion strategies and ways to suppress the development ofelectric cars?"

She pretended not to have heard that and came in and handed him his c.o.ke. He took a sip and paused.

"Hey-this is really de-licious!" The sweetness delighted him, and he chugged downhalf the gla.s.s. "Wow.

I'd forgotten how good a simple c.o.kecould be."

"It's not the c.o.ke, it's me. I added sugar to it.Two teaspoons."

John hacked. "You added sugar to c.o.ke? That's revolting."

"Don't be stupid." She sat down on an IKEA couch-sofa bedthen in the couch mode. "Everybody b.i.t.c.hed and moaned whenCoca-Cola went and changed their formula in the eighties. Ifyou want 1950s-style c.o.ke, add some b.l.o.o.d.y sugar to it. Be-sides, John, you seemed to like it."

They sipped in silence for a minute, and then Vanessa said to John, "Ryan says you think he's gay."

"Well?" Obviously she didn't.

"He's my boyfriend, John." She took a sip of her drink."Mine's a Diet c.o.ke, but I mixed sugar in with it.

It has a reallyperverse taste." John stared her down. "I love Ryan, and heloves me."

"I love my friend Ivan, but I don't date him.""Oh, shut up. Eros. Agape. s.e.x. Friendship. All of that. I'm not dense."

"You mean there's some eros in there?"

Vanessa's eyes glinted, but she said nothing. "Well, it's not likeTarzan and Jane, but it's real. He's genuine about me."

John bit an ice cube. "You're obviously the Nurse Crandalltype. You know, Nurse Crandall lets down her hair and Dr. Hun-nicutt says, 'Nurse Crandall, good G.o.d but you're gorgeous. Ihad no idea.' "

"That would be me." She looked out the window. "Ryan'scar's here. We didn't have this chat, okay?"

Ryan walked in and the trio was off to Long Beach. Ryanleaned in between the driver's seat and the front pa.s.senger seatand said to John, "If you want to talk about Susan with Vanessa,go right ahead.

She's totally cool."

"Thank G.o.d," said John, embarra.s.sed.

"Susan Colgate was an idol for me, John," said Vanessa. "Youknow, the role she used to play on TV-the smart daughter find-ing meanings and patterns in this nutty world. It's like my ownfamily."

John said, "I know what you mean. I have this feeling likeshe's got my keys. You know, like she knows my combinationeven though I can't get it right."

"That's what Vanessa does for a living," Ryan said. "At Rand.She finds meanings and patterns.

Combinations."

"What's your specialty?" asked John.

"Like Ryan said, I'm a finder."

"A finder?"

"Just what it sounds like. Ever since I was a kid, if something got lost, people came to me to find it for them. I'm able to locatethings. I ask questions. I look at data. I make connections. Andthen I find what's lost.""Bulls.h.i.t."

"My my,a naysayer-how quaint." Vanessa took on thecharged aura of an ATM about to feed forth large quant.i.tiesof cash.

"Give him an example," said Ryan.

"Fair enough. Let's talk about you, John Lodge Johnson, bornNovember 5, 1962, Miraflores Locks, Panama Ca.n.a.l Zone. Youhave one undescended t.e.s.t.i.c.l.e and you smoked Kent cigarettesheavily between the years 1983 and 1996. You've been ques-tioned but never charged in a dozen a.s.sorted narcotics investi-gations since 1988. You're right-handed, but you use your lefthand for throwing baseb.a.l.l.s and masturbating. As of two years ago, you owed the IRS just over 11.3 million dollars, which wasrepaid eight months ago after a complete liquidation of youra.s.sets, as well as a cleansing of your bank accounts, two ofwhich, in Davos, Switzerland, you didn't think the IRS knew about, but they did, and you're lucky you revealed their exis-tence or they would taken a fork and dug out your undescended t.e.s.t.i.c.l.e and eaten it for lunch. You blood type is O, and your IQ is 128. You've been prescribed over thirty different psychoactivePharmaceuticals in the past decade, invariably obtained withoverlapping prescriptions throughout Los Angeles, Ventura andSan Bernardino counties. You're heteros.e.xual but have done three-ways with guys a few times, only at the request of thepresent female. Months ago, before your much publicizedvanishing, you attempted to transfer all of your copyrights and future royalties to the Ronald McDonald House, but thanks to your friend Ivan, the courts rejected the transfer and instead set up a trust, which will soon be convening to evaluate your men-tal fitness, restoring to you a whack of dough you had seriouslythought was gone forever. I'd send Ivan a fruit basket, John Lodge Johnson."

John was mute.

"Isn't she great?" said Ryan.

"You want more?" Vanessa said. "Almost ninety-five percentof your phone calls go to either New York or California. Yourmonthly consumption of phone s.e.x averaged ninety-five hun-dred dollars across the years dating from 1991 up to your van-ishing. If you've made a s.e.x call since, I have yet to know about it. Your single most frequently dialed number is that of celebritymadam Melody Lanier of Beverly Hills, who, I bet you didn'tknow, has recurring bouts of malaria and who also lost her left baby toe in a Vespa crash in Darwin, Australia, in 1984. n.o.bodyavoids the scrutiny of I, Vanessa Humboldt. There. Ta-da!"

"Melody is not my madam. And you're a monster."

"Don't be so thick. It's all out there. You just have to knowwhere to look."

"She's good, eh?" said Ryan. "She could find you an abor-tionist in Vatican City."

"If it makes you feel any better, I'm not creative. I leave thatto my boy genius here." She patted Ryan's knee.

Quickly the car off-ramped, and Vanessa pulled into the front of a sterile blue mirrored-gla.s.s cube, a large laboratory buildingsurrounded by a dense putting-green lawn. "We're here," she announced. "This is the office where a certain weasel namedGary Voors cheated me out of a few grand in freelance research commissions."

"She got hosed," said Ryan.

"Fifteen grand. But I did some research on him and this-out of the car."

Standing in the parking lot, Ryan asked Vanessa which win-dow was by the staff lunchroom. She pointed out one nearby.She then went to the trunk of the car and removed a 4-gallonred plastic gas can.

John skittishly approached Vanessa, whosaid, "Put out your hand." John balked. "Oh, be a man about this, John." He held out his hand and she poured a fine, granularsubstance onto it.

Vanessa said, "These tiny, almost invisible little bowling b.a.l.l.sare clover seeds. And now we are going to use them to have fun with spelling."

She began pouring the seeds out in a large flowing script, onto the putting green gra.s.s. John understood that she was writing something. "What are you writing?"

"She's writing out the words 'Gary's banging Tina," " said Ryan.