I had left Roy Pettus, broke away from him and his terrorist fables about the Russians. I wasn’t leaving New York for London. I wasn’t going into the spook business. Alongside the Belt Parkway was the water, the harbor, the sunlight on the Statue of Liberty making it glisten. I had driven this road a thousand times, past Red Hook and the ancient warehouses, past the new cruise-ship port, the parks and garbage dumps. I knew every landmark, but I hardly saw them now, just drove as fast as I could and listened to Louis Armstrong’s Hot Fives and Sevens, “Potato Head Blues” making me even happier than I already felt. Hearing Val’s voice, I felt happy. And anxious. I wasn’t sure how to behave. For her it hadn’t been—I didn’t know what it had been for her. For me, something else, something like hearing Armstrong for the first time. I was forty-nine years old and I felt like a kid. I went back over every word of the brief conversation we’d had half an hour earlier, when I was leaving Pettus.
