“Whadaya mean, an anecdote?”

“No, I think something interesting for us.”

So they were making a meet, except it hadn’t happened yet. Amid the coughing buses and snarling delivery vans of Madison Avenue the occasional empty cab did go by, cheerful rooftop light gleaming its invitation, some even pausing fractionally to see if Dortmunder felt like hailing anything, but none of them was piloted by Murch’s Mom, so he let them pass.

But then one did arrive with Murch’s Mom herself glaring out from behind the steering wheel. It angled to a stop at Dortmunder’s feet, and he quickly took shelter in the back, already occupied by Stan, a carroty-haired guy with a skeptical slant to his brow.

“Harya,” Dortmunder told him, and to the driver’s reflection in the rearview mirror, “Morning.”

“It is,” she agreed. “Hold on, let me get over to Eighth Avenue.”

Dortmunder nodded. “That’s where we’re going?”

“I need a traffic jam,” she explained, “so I can talk without distraction.”

“Oh. Okay.”

As Murch’s Mom headed across Thirty-seventh Street toward her traffic jam, Dortmunder said to Stan, “How we doing?”

“I don’t think we are doing,” Stan told him. “I think we come to a stop. The last time I looked in my wallet, we’re growing mushrooms in there.”

“Does your mother’s anecdote have a cash crop in it?”

“I hope so. Mom wanted to wait and tell us both together.”

“So you don’t know what the story is here.”

“Nope. Mom wanted to wait and tell us both together.”

Since the conversation had deteriorated to a loop, Dortmunder abandoned it and looked out his window instead at the thin sunlight out there, until Murch’s Mom made the right turn onto Eighth Avenue and sank contentedly into the perpetual blockage there, a traffic snarl well into its second century, running—or not running—from below Penn Station up to above the Port Authority bus terminal.