Ernie and Elaine live in a rent-controlled prewar classic seven with ceilings comparable in height to a domed sports arena. Needless to say within easy walking distance of the Met.

Elaine waves a wand, and coffee and pastries materialize.

“Not enough!” Each kid holding a plate piled unhealthily high with danishes, cheesecake, strudel.

“You, I’ll give you such a frosk . . .” as the boys run into the next room to watch Space Ghost Coast to Coast, all of whose episodes their grandfather has thoughtfully taped. “And no crumbs in there!”

By reflex Maxine has a look into the bedrooms she and her sister, Brooke, used to occupy. In Brooke’s there now seems to be all new furniture, drapes, wallpaper also. “What’s this.”

“For Brooke and Avi when they get back.”

“Which is when?”

“What,” Ernie with an impish glint, “you missed the press conference? Latest word is sometime before Labor Day, though he probably calls it Likud Day.”

“Now, Ernie.”

“I said something? She wants to marry a zealot, her business, life is full of these nice surprises.”

“Avram is a decent husband,” Elaine shaking her head, “and I’ve got to say, he isn’t very political.”

“Software to annihilate Arabs, I’m sorry, that’s not political?”

“Trying to drink some coffee here,” Maxine puts in melodiously.

“It’s all right,” Ernie with his palms raised to heaven, “always the mother’s heart that falls out of the shoe box in the snow, nobody ever asks about a father, no, fathers don’t have hearts.”

“Oh, Ernie. He’s a computer nerd like everybody else his generation, he’s harmless, so cut him some slack.”

“He’s so harmless, why is the FBI always coming around to ask about him?”

“The what?” As a gong from a hitherto-unreleased Fu Manchu movie goes off, abrupt and strident, in some not-too-obscure brain lobe, Maxine, though long diagnosed with Chronic Chocolate Deficiency, sits now with her fork in midair arrest, still staring at a three-chocolate mousse cake from Soutine, but with a sudden redirection of interest.

“So maybe it’s the CIA,” Ernie shrugging, “the NSA, the KKK, who knows, ‘Just a few more details for our files,’ is how they like to put it. And then hours of these really embarrassing questions.”

“When did this start?”

“Just after Avi and Brooke went off to Israel,” Elaine is pretty sure.

“What kinds of questions?”

“Associates, employment former and current, family, and yes, since you’re about to ask, your name did come up, oh and,” Ernie now with a crafty look she knows well, “if you didn’t want that piece of cake there—”

“Long as you explain over at Lenox Hill about the fork wounds.”

“Here, one guy left you his card,” Ernie handing it over, “wants you to call him, no rush, just when you get a minute.”

She looks at the card. Nicholas Windust, Special Case Officer, and a phone number with a 202 area code, which is D.C., fine but nothing else on the card, no agency or bureau name, not even a logo of one.

“He dressed very nicely,” Elaine recalls, “not like they usually do. Very nice shoes. No wedding ring.”

“I don’t believe this, she’s trying to pimp me onto a fed? What am I saying, of course I believe it.”

“He was asking about you a lot,” continues Elaine.

“Rrrrr . . .”

“On the other hand,” tranquilly, “maybe you’re right, nobody should ever date a government agent, at least not till they’ve seen Tosca at least once. Which we had tickets for, but you made other plans that night.”

“Ma, that was 1985.”

“Plácido Domingo and Hildegard Behrens,” Ernie beaming. “Legendary. You’re not in trouble, are you?”

“Oh, Pop. I have maybe a dozen cases going at any one time, and there’s always a federal angle—a government contract, a bank regulation, a RICO beef, just extra paperwork and then it goes away till there’s something else.” Trying not to sound too much like she’s addressing anybody’s anxieties here.

“He looked . . .” Ernie squinting, “he didn’t look like a paper pusher. More like a field guy. But maybe my reflexes are off. He showed me my own dossier, did I mention that?”

“He what? Establishing trust with the interviewee, no doubt.”

“This is me?” Ernie said when he saw the photo. “I look like Sam Jaffe.”

“A friend of yours, Mr. Tarnow?”

“A movie actor.” Explaining to Efrem Zimbalist Jr. here how in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) Sam Jaffe, playing Professor Barnhardt, the smartest man in the world, Einstein only different, after writing some advanced equations all over a blackboard in his study, steps out for a minute. The extraterrestrial Klaatu shows up looking for him and finds this boardful of symbols, like the worst algebra class you were ever in, notices what seems to be a mistake down in the middle of it, erases something and writes something else in, then leaves. When the Professor comes back, he immediately spots the change to his equations and stands there kind of beaming at the blackboard. It was some such expression that had crossed Ernie’s face just as the covert federal shutter fell.

“I’ve heard of that movie,” recalled this Windust party, “pacifist propaganda in the depths of the Cold War, I believe it was flagged as potentially Communist-inspired.”

“Yeah, you people blacklisted Sam Jaffe too. He wasn’t a Communist, but he refused to testify. For years no studio would hire him. He made a living teaching math in high school. Strangely enough.”

“He taught high school? Who would’ve been disloyal enough to hire him?”

“This is 2001, Maxeleh,” Ernie now shaking his head back and forth, “the Cold War is supposed to be over, how can these people not have changed or moved on, where is such a terrible inertia coming from?”

“You always used to say their time hasn’t passed, it’s yet to come.”

At bedtime Ernie used to tell his daughters scary blacklist stories. Some kids had the Seven Dwarfs, Maxine and Brooke had the Hollywood Ten. The trolls and wicked sorcerers and so forth were usually Republicans of the 1950s, toxic with hate, stuck back around 1925 in almost bodily revulsion from anything leftward of “capitalism,” by which they usually meant keeping an increasing pile of money safe from the depredations of the IRS. Growing up on the Upper West Side, it was impossible not to hear about people like this. Maxine often wonders if it didn’t help steer her toward fraud investigation, as much as maybe it’s steered Brooke toward Avi and his techie version of politics.

“So you’ll call him back?”

“You sound like what’s-her-name in there. No, Pop, I have no plans to do that.”

•   •   •

IT DOESN’T SEEM to be up to Maxine, however. Next day, evening rush hour, it’s just starting to rain . . . sometimes she can’t resist, she needs to be out in the street. What might only be a simple point on the workday cycle, a reconvergence of what the day scattered as Sappho said someplace back in some college course, Maxine forgets, becomes a million pedestrian dramas, each one charged with mystery, more intense than high-barometer daylight can ever allow. Everything changes. There’s that clean, rained-on smell. The traffic noise gets liquefied. Reflections from the street into the windows of city buses fill the bus interiors with unreadable 3-D images, as surface unaccountably transforms to volume. Average pushy Manhattan schmucks crowding the sidewalks also pick up some depth, some purpose—they smile, they slow down, even with a cellular phone stuck in their ear they are more apt to be singing to somebody than yakking. Some are observed taking houseplants for walks in the rain. Even the lightest umbrella-to-umbrella contact can be erotic.

“If it’s the right umbrella, you’re saying,” Heidi once sought to clarify.

“Picky Heidi, any umbrella, what would it matter?”

“Airhead Maxi, it could be Ted Bundy.”