I didn’t hang up. I said, “Mrs. Horowitz, maybe we shouldn’t go into this on the phone.”

“No?”

“My phone is tapped.”

“Oh, God!”

I thought her reaction might be a little extreme. When one is a recognized subversive, the unashamed member of any number of organizations pledged to the violent overthrow of one government or another, one learns to regard every telephone as tapped until proven otherwise. The Central Intelligence Agency maintains a permanent tap on my telephone, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation reads my mail. Or perhaps it’s the other way around. I can never remember.

“I have to see you,” Mrs. Horowitz said.

“Well, I’m sort of busy-”

“This is a matter of life or death.”

“Well, I have this thesis I’m writing, you see, on, uh-”

“You know where I live, Tanner?”

“No.”

“In Mamaroneck. You know Mamaroneck?”

“Well-”

She gave me the address. I didn’t bother writing it down. “You’ll come right up to me,” she said. “I have everything here. I am waiting with my heart in my head.”

She hung up, and a few minutes later so did I.

“I have never been on a train before,” Minna said. She was squinting through a very dirty window, watching the very dirty East Bronx roll by. “Thank you for bringing me, Evan. This is a beautiful train.”

Actually it was a terrible train. It was a commuter local of the New York, New Haven and Hartford, and it had left Grand Central a few minutes after five, and some minutes after that Minna and I had boarded it at the 125th Street station. Soon, albeit not soon enough, it would deposit us in Mamaroneck.