She did not hammer.

She screamed: “I know you’re in there, you prick!”

I smiled to myself. Nibbled some more sandwich. With a show to watch, it went down better.

“ You fucking, cock — sucking prick!”

I laughed a little. I liked her. But I had a feeling she wasn’t a major player in the melodrama I’d just been inserted into. This was the tail end of her performance, I figured, based upon the surveillance info the Broker gave me.

I was right.

“ You mother- fucking, dick- licking son of a fucking bitch! ”

I recalled how much trouble a girl I’d known in junior high had got into when she told a friend of hers, who’d moved in on her guy, to go to hell between classes. A week of detention, and lucky not to be expelled. Things had changed in a very few years in this country.

The door opened, not at all tentatively, in fact with a suddenness that showed the novelist had a non-fictional way of making a point. He was tall and he was skinny, a handsome Ichabod Crane, his face narrow and well-carved with a hawkish nose the dominant feature, his hair dark blonde and shaggy but not hippie-length, his eyebrows unruly. He was wearing a maroon terry-cloth bathrobe, belt knotted at the waist, with a white t-shirt peeking out, and his legs were bare, his feet in slippers.

He looked side to side, perhaps to see if any neighbors were observing this little scene, but his neighbors were well away from him and of course he had no idea I was spying.

He said, “Is this really necessary, Alice? Haven’t we said our goodbyes?”

I think that was what he said. He was speaking at a normal level, and I was across the street, but the clear cold air carried well, and he had a lecture-room baritone.

“You bastard!” she said, and she started pounding on his chest with both gloved fists, at least as hard as she’d hammered the door.