Perhaps I was being too harsh, though. Maybe there were patterns I failed to see. It was possible that Carvajal’s interest in me was real, that he had some genuine use for me in his lonely life. To be my guide, to be a father-surrogate to me, to pour into me, in the remaining months of his time, such knowledge as he was able to impart.

In any event I had real use for him. I was going to have him help me make Paul Quinn President.

Knowing that Carvajal couldn’t see as far as next year’s election was a drawback, but not necessarily a major one. Events as big as the presidential succession have deep roots; decisions taken now would govern the political twists and turns of the years ahead. Carvajal might already be in possession of sufficient data about the coming year to enable Quinn to construct alliances that would sweep him to the 2004 nomination. Such was my obsession that I intended to manipulate Carvajal for Quinn’s benefit. By cunning question and answer I might be able to pry vital information out of the little man.

It was a troublesome week. On the political front the news was all bad. New Democrats everywhere were falling all over themselves to pledge their support to Senator Kane, and Kane, instead of keeping his vice-presidential options open in the traditional manner of front-running politicians, felt so secure that he cheerfully told a press conference that he would like to see Socorro share the ticket with him. Quinn, who had begun to gain a national following after the oil-gellation thing, abruptly ceased to matter to party leaders west of the Hudson River. Invitations to speak stopped coming in, the requests for autographed photos dried to a trickle — trifling signs, but significant ones. Quinn knew what was going on, and he wasn’t happy about it.

“How did it happen so fast, this Kane-Socorro tie-up?” he demanded. “One day I was the great white hope of the party, the next all the clubhouse doors were slamming in my face.” He gave us the famous intense Quinn stare, eyes clicking from one man to another, searching out the one who somehow had failed him. His presence was as overwhelming as ever; the presence of his disappointment was almost intolerably painful.

Mardikian had no answers for him. Neither did Lombroso. What could I say? That I had had the clues and had fumbled them? I took refuge behind a shrug and a “that’s politics” alibi. I was being paid to come up with reasonable hunches, not to function as an all-out psychic. “Wait,” I promised him. “New patterns are shaping up. Give me a month and I’ll have all of next year mapped out for you.”

“I’ll settle for the next six weeks,” Quinn said grumpily.

His annoyance subsided after a couple of tense days. He was too busy with local problems, of which there were suddenly a great many — the traditional hot-weather social unrest that hits New York every summer like a cloud of mosquitoes — to fret very long about a nomination he hadn’t actually wanted to win.

It was a week of domestic problems, too. Sundara’s ever-deepening involvement with the Transit Creed was beginning to get to me. Her behavior now was as wild, as unpredictable, as motiveless as Carvajal’s; but they were coming to their crazy randomness from opposite directions, Carvajal’s behavior governed by blind obedience to an inexplicable revelation, Sundara’s by the desire to break free of all pattern and structure.

Whim reigned. The day I went to see Carvajal, she quietly went over to the Municipal Building to apply for a prostitute’s license. It took her the better part of the afternoon, what with the medical exam, the union interview, the photography and fingerprinting, and all the rest of the bureaucratic intricacies. When I came home, my head full of Carvajal, she triumphantly flourished the little laminated card that made it legal for her to sell her body anywhere in the five boroughs.

“My God,” I said.

“Is something wrong?”

“You just stood there in line like any twenty-dollar hooker out of Vegas?”

“Should I have used political influence to get my card?”

“What if some reporter had seen you down there, though?”

“So?”

“The wife of Lew Nichols, special administrative assistant to Mayor Quinn, joining the whores’ union?”

“Do you think I’m the only married woman in that union?”

“I don’t mean that. I’m thinking in terms of potential scandal, Sundara.”

“Prostitution is a legal activity, and regulated prostitution is generally recognized as having social benefits which—”

“It’s legal in New York City,” I said. “Not in Kankakee. Not in Tallahassee. Not in Sioux City. One of these days Quinn’s going to be looking for votes in those places and others like them, maybe, and some wise guy will dig up the information that one of Quinn’s closest advisers is married to a woman who sells her body in a public brothel, and—”

“Am I supposed to govern my life by Quinn’s need to conform to the morality of small-town voters?” she asked, dark eyes blazing, color glowing under the darkness of her cheeks.

“Do you want to be a whore, Sundara?”

“ Prostitute is the term that the union leadership prefers to use.”

“ Prostitute isn’t any prettier than whore. Aren’t you satisfied with the arrangements we’ve been making? Why do you want to sell yourself?”

“What I want to be,” she said icily, “is a free human being, released from all constricting ego attachments.”

“And you’ll get there through prostitution?”

“Prostitutes learn to dismantle their egos. Prostitutes exist only to serve the needs of others. A week or two in a city brothel will teach me how to subordinate the demands of my ego to the needs of those who come to me.”

“You could become a nurse. You could become a masseuse. You could—”

“I chose what I chose.”

“And that’s what you’re going to do? Spend the next week or two in a city brothel?”

“Probably.”

“Did Catalina Yarber suggest this?”

“I thought of it myself,” said Sundara solemnly. Her eyes flashed fire. We were at the edge of the worst quarrel of our life together, a straight I-forbid-this/don’t-you-give-me-orders clash. I trembled. I pictured Sundara, sleek and elegant, Sundara whom all men and many women desired, punching the timeclock in one of those grim sterile municipal cubicles, Sundara standing at a sink swabbing her loins with antiseptic lotions, Sundara on her narrow cot with her knees pulled up to her breasts, servicing some stubble-faced sweat-stinking clod while an endless line waited, tickets in hand, at her door. No. I couldn’t swallow it. Four-group, six-group, ten-group, whatever kind of communal sex she liked, yes, but not n-group, not infinity-group, not offering her precious tender body to every hideous misfit in New York City who had the price of admission. For an instant I really was tempted to rise up in old-fashioned husbandly wrath and tell her to drop all this foolishness, or else. But of course that was impossible. So I said nothing, while chasms opened between us. We were on separate islands in a stormy sea, borne away from each other by mighty surging currents, and I was unable even to shout across the widening strait, unable even to reach toward her with futile hands. Where had it gone, the oneness that had been ours for a few years? Why was the strait growing wider?

“Go to your whorehouse, then,” I muttered, and left the apartment in a blind wild unstochastic frenzy of anger and fear.

Instead of registering at a brothel, though, Sundara podded to JFK airport and boarded a rocket bound for India. She bathed in the Ganges at one of the Benares ghats, spent an hour unsuccessfully searching for her family’s ancestral neighborhood in Bombay, had a curry dinner at Green’s Hotel, and caught the next rocket home. Her pilgrimage covered forty hours in toto and cost her exactly forty dollars an hour, a symmetry that failed to lighten my mood. I had the good sense not to make an issue of it. In any case I was helpless; Sundara was a free being and growing more free every day, and it was her privilege to consume her own money on anything she chose, even crazy overnight excursions to India. I was careful not to ask her, in the days following her return, whether she planned actually to use her new prostitute’s license. Perhaps she already had. I preferred not to know.