hat night I went to a meeting and Elaine attended her class, and afterward we both took cabs and met at Mother Goose and listened to the music. Danny Boy turned up around eleven-thirty and joined us. He had a girl with him, very tall, very thin, very black and very strange. He introduced her as Kali. She acknowledged the introductions with a nod but didn't say a word or appear to hear anything anyone else said for a good half hour, at which point she leaned forward, stared hard at Elaine, and said, "Your aura is teal blue and very pure, very beautiful."

"Thank you," Elaine said.

"You have a very old soul," Kali said, and that was the last thing she said, and the last sign she gave that she was aware of our presence.

Danny Boy didn't have anything much to report, and we mostly just enjoyed the music, chatting about nothing important between sets. It was fairly late when we left. In the cab to her place I said, "You have a very old soul and a teal-blue aura and a cute little ass."

"She's very perceptive," Elaine said. "Most people don't notice my teal-blue aura until the second or third meeting."

"Not to mention your old soul."

"Actually, it would be a good idea not to mention my old soul. You can say what you want about my cute little ass. Where does he find them?"

"I don't know."

"If they were all stock bimbettes from Central Casting it would be one thing, but his girls don't run to type. This one, Kali— what do you figure she was on?"

"No idea."

"Because she certainly seemed to be traveling in another realm. Do people still use psychedelics? She was probably on magic mushrooms, or some hallucinogenic fungus that grows only on decaying leather. I'll tell you one thing, she could make good money as a dominatrix."

"Not if her leather's decaying. And not unless she could keep her mind on her work."

"You know what I mean. She's got the looks for it, and the presence. Can't you see yourself groveling at her feet and loving every minute of it?"

"No."

"Well, you," she said. "The Marquis de Suave himself. Remember the time I tied you up?"

The driver was working hard at hiding his amusement. "Would you please shut up," I said.

"Remember? You fell asleep."

"That shows how safe I felt in your presence," I said. "Will you please shut up?"

"I will wrap myself in my teal-blue aura," she said, "and I will be very quiet."

BEFORE I left the following morning she told me she had a good feeling about the calls from rape victims. "Today's the day," she said.

But she turned out to be wrong, teal-blue aura or not. There were no calls at all. When I talked to her that night she was glum about it. "I guess that's it," she said. "Three Wednesday, one yesterday, and now nothing. I thought I was going to be a hero, come up with something significant."

"Ninety-eight percent of an investigation is insignificant," I said. "You do everything you can think of because you don't know what will be useful. You must have been sensational on the phone because you got a very big response, but it's pointless to feel like a failure because you didn't turn up a living victim of the three stooges. You were looking for a needle in a haystack, and it's probably a haystack that didn't have a needle in it in the first place."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean they probably didn't leave any witnesses. They probably killed every woman they victimized, so you were probably trying to find a woman who doesn't exist."

"Well, if she doesn't exist," she said, "then I say to hell with her."

TJ WAS calling in every day, sometimes more than once a day. I had given him fifty dollars to check out the two Brooklyn phones, and he couldn't have come out very far ahead on the deal, because what he hadn't spent on subways and buses he was sinking into telephone calls. He got a better return on his time shilling for monte dealers or assisting a street peddler or doing any of the other street chores that combined to give him an income. But he still kept pestering me for work.

Saturday I wrote out a check for my rent and paid the other monthly bills that had come in— the phone bill, my credit card. Looking at the telephone bill made me think again of the calls made to Kenan Khoury's phone. I had made another attempt a few days before to find a phone-company employee who could figure out a way to supply that data, and had been told once again that it was unobtainable.

So that was on my mind when TJ called around ten-thirty. "Give me some more phones to check out," he pleaded. "The Bronx, Staten Island, anywhere."

"I'll tell you what you can do for me," I said. "I'll give you a number and you tell me who called it."

"Say what?"

"Oh, nothing."

"No, you said somethin', man. Tell me what it was."

"Maybe you could do it at that," I said. "Remember how you sweet-talked the operator out of the phone number on Farragut Road?"

"You mean with my Brooks Brothers voice?"

"That's it. Maybe you could use the same voice to find some phone company vice president who can figure out how to come up with a listing of calls to a certain number in Bay Ridge." He asked a few more questions and I explained what I was looking for and why I was unable to find it.

"Hang on," he said. "You sayin' they won't give it to you?"

"They don't have it to give. They've got all the calls logged but there's no way to sort them."

"Shit," he said. "First operator I call up, she tell me ain't no way she can tell me my number. Can't believe everything they tell you, man."

"No, I—"

"You somethin'," he said. "Call you up every damn day, say what you got for TJ, an' all the time you ain't got nothin'. How come you never tell me 'bout this before? You been silly, Willie!"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean if you don't tell me what you want, how I gonna give it to you? Told you that the first time I met you, walkin' around the Deuce not sayin' nothin' to nobody. Told you right then, said, tell me what you jonesin' on, I help you find it."

"I remember."

"So why you be dickin' around with the telephone company when you could be comin' to TJ?"

"You mean you know how to get the numbers from the phone company?"

"No, man. But I know how to get the Kongs."

"THE Kongs," he said. "Jimmy and David."

"They're brothers?"

"Ain't no family resemblance far as I can see. Jimmy Hong is Chinese and David King is Jewish. Least his father is Jewish. I think his mother might be Rican."

"Why are they the Kongs?"

"Jimmy Hong and David King? Hong Kong and King Kong?"

"Oh."

"Plus their favorite game used to be Donkey Kong."

"What's that, a video game?"

He nodded. "Pretty good one."

We were at a snack bar in the bus terminal, where he'd insisted I meet him. I was drinking a cup of bad coffee and he was eating a hot dog and drinking a Pepsi. He said, "Remember that dude Socks, we was watchin' him at the arcade? He 'bout the best there is, but he ain't nothin' next to the Kongs. You know how a player is always tryin' to keep up with the machine? Kongs didn't have to keep up with it. They was always out ahead of it."

"You brought me down here to meet a couple of pinball wizards?"

"Big difference between pinball and video games, man."

"Well, I suppose there is, but—"

"But it ain't nothin' compared to the difference between video games an' where the Kongs is at now. I told you what happens to guys hang around the arcade, how you can get so good an' then there ain't no better for you to get? So you lose interest."

"So you said."

"What some dudes get interested in is computers. What I heard, the Kongs was into computers all along, fact they used a computer to stay ahead of the video games, know what the machine was gonna do before it could do it. You play chess?"

"I know the moves."

"You an' me'll play a game sometime, see if you any good. You know those stone tables they got down by Washington Square? People bring their time clocks, study chess books while they waitin' to play? I play there sometimes."

"You must be good."

He shook his head. "Some of those dudes," he said, "you play against them, it's like you tryin' to run a footrace standin' in water up to your waist. You can't get nowhere, 'cause they always five, six moves ahead of you in their mind."

"Sometimes it feels like that in my line of work."

"Yeah? Well, that's how video games got for the Kongs, they was five or six moves out in front. So they into computers, they what you call hackers. You know what that is?"

"I've heard the term."

"Man, you want something from the phone company, you don't call no operator. Don't mess with no vice president, either. You call the Kongs. They get in the phones and crawl around in there, like the phone company's a monster and they swimmin' in its bloodstream. You know that picture, whatchacallit, Fantastic Voyage? They take a voyage in the phones."

"I don't know," I said. "If an executive at the company can't figure out how to extract that data—"

"Man, ain't you listenin'?" He sighed, then sucked hard on his straw and drained the last of his Pepsi. "You want to know what's happenin' on the streets, what's goin' down on the Deuce or in the Barrio or in Harlem, who do you go and ask? The fuckin' mayor?"

"Oh," I said.

"You see what I sayin'? They hangin' out on the streets of the phone company. You know Ma Bell? The Kongs be lookin' up her skirt."

"Where are we going to find them? The arcade?"

"Told you. They lost interest some time ago. They come by once in a while just to see what's shakin', but they don't hang out there no more. We ain't gonna find them. They gonna find us. I told 'em we'd be here."

"How did you reach them?"

"How you think? Beeped 'em. Kongs ain't never too far from a phone. You know, that hot dog was good. You wouldn't think you'd get anything decent, place like this, but they give you a good hot dog."

"Does that mean you want another?"

"Might as well. Take 'em some time to get here, and then they want to look you over before they come an' meet you. Want to satisfy themselves that you alone and that they can split in a hot second if they scared of you."

"Why would they be scared of me?"

" 'Cause you might be some kind of cop workin' for the phone company. Man, the Kongs is outlaws! Ma Bell ever gets her hands on them, she gone whip their ass."

"THE thing is," Jimmy Hong said, "we have to be careful. People in suits are convinced that hackers are the biggest threat to corporate America since the Yellow Peril. The media is always running stories about what hackers could do to the system if we wanted to."

"Destroying data," David King said. "Altering records. Wiping out circuitry."

"It makes a good story, but they lose sight of the fact that we never pull that shit. They think we're going to put dynamite on the railroad tracks when all we're doing is hitching a free ride."

"Oh, every once in a while some nitwit introduces a virus—"

"But most of that isn't hackers, it's some jerk with a grudge against a company or somebody introducing a glitch into the system by using bootleg software."

"The point is," David said, "Jimmy's too old to take chances."

"Turned eighteen last month," Jimmy Hong said.

"So if they catch us he'll be tried as an adult. That's if they go by chronological age, but if they take emotional maturity into account—"

"Then David would go scot-free," Jimmy said, "because he hasn't reached the age of reason."

"Which came between the Stone Age and the Iron Age."

Once they decided they trusted you, you couldn't get them to shut up. Jimmy Hong was around six-two, long and lean, with straight black hair and a long, saturnine face. He wore aviator sunglasses with amber lenses, and after we'd been sitting together for ten or fifteen minutes he changed them for a pair of horn-rimmed glasses with round untinted lenses, altering his appearance from hip to studious.

David King was no more than five-seven, with a round face and red hair and a lot of freckles. Both of them wore Mets warmup jackets and chinos and Reeboks, but the similarity of dress wasn't enough to make them look like twins.

If you closed your eyes, though, you might have been fooled. Their voices were close and their speech patterns were very similar and they finished each other's sentences a lot.

They liked the idea of playing a role in a murder case— I hadn't gone into a great deal of detail— and they were amused at the response I'd received from various functionaries at the telephone company. "That's beautiful," Jimmy Hong said. "Saying it can't be done. Meaning most likely that he couldn't figure out how to do it."

"It's their system," David King said, "and you'd think they would at least understand it."

"But they don't."

"And they hate us, because we understand it better than they do."

"And they think we'd hurt the system—"

"— when actually we happen to love the system. Because if you're going to do any serious hacking, NYNEX is where it's at."

"It's a beautiful system."

"Unbelievably complex."

"Wheels within wheels."

"Labyrinths within labyrinths."

"The ultimate video game, and the ultimate Dungeons and Dragons, all rolled into one."

"Cosmic."

I said. "But it can be done?"

"What can? Oh, the numbers. Phone calls placed on a specific day to a specific number?"

"Right."

"Be a problem," David King said.

"An interesting problem, he means."

"Right, very interesting. A problem with a solution for sure, a solvable problem."

"But a tricky one."

"Because of the amount of data."

"Tons of data," Jimmy Hong said. "Millions and millions of pieces of data."

"By data he means phone calls."

"Billions of phone calls. Untold billions of phone calls."

"Which you have to process."

"But before you even start to do that—"

"You have to get in."

"Which used to be easy."

"Used to be a cinch."

"They would leave the door open."

"Now they close it."

"Nail it shut, you could say."

I said, "If you need to buy special equipment—"

"Oh, no. Not really."

"We already got everything we need."

"Doesn't take much. Halfway decent laptop, a modem, an acoustic coupler—"

"Whole package won't run more than twelve hundred dollars."

"Unless you went crazy and bought a high-priced laptop, but you don't have to."

"The one we use cost seven-fifty, and it's got everything you need."

"So you could do it?"

They exchanged glances, then looked at me. Jimmy Hong said, "Sure, we could do it."

"Be interesting, actually."

"Have to pull an all-nighter."

"Can't be tonight, either."

"No, tonight's out. How soon would it have to be?"

"Well—"

"Tomorrow's Sunday. Sunday night all right with you, Matt?"

"It's fine with me."

"You, Mr. King?"

"Works for me, Mr. Hong."

"TJ? You figuring to be there?"

"Tomorrow night?" It was the first he'd said anything since introducing me to the Kongs. "Lessee, tomorrow night. What did I have planned for tomorrow night? Was that the press reception at Gracie Mansion or was I supposed to have dinner with Henry Kissinger at Windows on the World?" He mimed paging through a date book, then looked up bright-eyed. "What do you know? I be free."

Jimmy Hong said, "There'll be some expenses, Matt. We'll need a hotel room."

"I have a room."

"You mean where you live?" They grinned at each other, amused at my naïveté. "No, what you want is someplace anonymous. See, we're going to be deep inside NYNEX—"

"Crawling around inside the belly of the beast, you could say—"

"— and we might leave footprints."

"Or fingerprints, if you prefer."

"Even voiceprints, speaking metaphorically, of course."

"So you don't want to do this from a phone that could be traced to anybody. What you want to do is rent a hotel room under a false name and pay cash for it."

"A reasonably decent one."

"It doesn't have to be ritzy."

"Just so it has direct-dial phones."

"Which most of them do nowadays. And push-button, it should be push-button."

"Not the old rotary dial."

"Well, that's easy enough," I said. "Is that what you usually do? Rent a hotel room?"

They exchanged glances again.

"Because if there's a hotel you prefer—"

David said, "The thing is, Matt, when we want to hack we don't generally have a hundred or a hundred and fifty bucks to spend on a decent hotel room."

"Or even seventy-five dollars for a crummy hotel room."

"Or fifty for a disgusting hotel room. So what we'll do—"

"We find a bank of pay phones where there's not much traffic, like in the Grand Central waiting room over by the commuter lines—"

"— because there's not many commuter trains leaving in the middle of the night—"

"— or in an office building, anything like that."

"Or one time we sort of let ourselves into an office—"

"Which was stupid, man, and I never want to do that again."

"We just did it to use the phone."

"And can you feature telling that to the cops? 'It's not burglary, Officer, we just dropped in to use the phones.' "

"Well, it was exciting, but we wouldn't do it again. The thing is, see, we'll probably have to spend hours and hours on this—"

"And you wouldn't want anybody walking in, or having to switch phones when we're all hooked up."

"No problem," I said. "We'll get a decent hotel room. What else?"

"Coke."

"Or Pepsi."

"Coke's better."

"Or Jolt. 'All the sugar and twice the caffeine.' "

"Maybe some junk food. Maybe some Doritos."

"Get the ranch flavor, not the barbecue."

"Potato chips, Cheez Doodles—"

"Oh, man, not Cheez Doodles!"

"I like Cheez Doodles."

"Man, that has got to be the lamest junk food there is. I challenge you to name anything edible that is stupider than Cheez Doodles."

"Pringles."

"No fair! Pringles aren't food. Matt, you got to judge this one. What do you say? Are Pringles food?"

"Well—"

"They're not! Hong, you are so sick. Pringles are tiny Frisbees that warped, that's all they are. They're not food."

WHEN Kenan Khoury didn't answer I tried his brother. Peter's voice was thick with sleep and I apologized for waking him. "I keep doing that," I said. "Sorry."

"My own fault, nodding out in the middle of the afternoon. My sleep schedule got all turned around lately. What's up?"

"Not much. I was trying to reach Kenan."

"Still in Europe. He called me last night."

"Oh."

"Coming back Monday. Why, you got some good news to report?"

"Not yet. I've got some cabs I have to take."

"Huh?"

"Expenses," I said. "I'll have to shell out close to two thousand dollars tomorrow. I wanted to clear it with him."

"Hey, no problem. I'm sure he'll say yes. He said he'd cover your expenses, didn't he?"

"Yes."

"So lay it out. He'll pay you back."

"That's the problem," I said. "My money's in the bank and it's Saturday."

"Can't you use an ATM?"

"Not for a safe-deposit box. I can't get it all out of my checking account because I just paid the bills the other day."

"So write a check and cover it Monday."

"This isn't the kind of expense where the people will take a check."

"Oh, right." There was a pause. "I don't know what to tell you, Matt. I could come up with a couple of hundred, but I haven't got anything like two grand."

"Doesn't Kenan have it in the safe?"

"Probably a lot more than that, but I can't get in there. You don't give a junkie the combination to your safe, not even if he's your brother. Not unless you're crazy."

I didn't say anything.

"I'm not bitter," he said. "I'm just stating a fact. No reason on earth for me to have the combination to the safe. I got to tell you, I'm glad I don't have it. I wouldn't trust myself with it."

"You're clean and sober now, Pete. What's it been, a year and a half?"

"I'm still a drunk and a junkie, man. You know the difference between the two? A drunk will steal your wallet."

"And a junkie?"

"Oh, a junkie'll steal your wallet, too. And then he'll help you look for it."

I ALMOST asked Pete if he wanted to go to that Chelsea meeting again, but something made me let the moment pass. Maybe I remembered that I wasn't his sponsor, and that it was not a position for which I wanted to volunteer.

I called Elaine and asked her how she was fixed for cash. "Come on over," she said. "I've got a house full of money."

She had fifteen hundred in fifties and hundreds and said she could get more from the ATM, but no more than $500 a day. I took twelve hundred so I wouldn't leave her broke. That, added to what I had in my wallet and what I could get from my own ATM, would be plenty.

I told her what I needed the money for and she thought the whole thing was fascinating. "But is it safe?" she wanted to know. "It's obviously illegal, but how illegal is it?"

"It's worse than jaywalking. Computer trespass is a felony, and so is computer tampering, and I have a feeling the Kongs will be committing both of them tomorrow night. I'll be aiding and abetting them, and I've already committed criminal solicitation. I'll tell you, you can't turn around these days without trampling all over the penal law."

"But you think it's worth it?"

"I think so."

"Because they're just kids. You wouldn't want to get them in trouble."

"I wouldn't want to get myself in trouble, either. And they run this particular risk all the time. At least they're getting paid for it."

"How much are you going to give them?"

"Five hundred apiece."

She whistled. "That's not bad for a night's work."

"No, it's not, and if they'd come up with a figure it would probably have been a lot less. They went blank when I asked them how much they wanted, so I suggested five hundred each. That seemed fine to them. They're middle-class kids, I don't think they're hurting for money. I have a feeling I could have talked them into doing the job for free."

"By appealing to their better nature."

"And their desire to be in on something exciting. But I didn't want to do that. Why shouldn't they have the dough? I'd have been willing to pay more than that to some phone-company employee if I could have figured out who to bribe. But I couldn't find anybody who'd admit what I wanted was technologically possible. Why not give it to the Kongs? It's not my money, and Kenan Khoury says you can always afford to be generous."

"And if he decides to bail out?"

"That doesn't seem likely."

"Unless, of course, he gets arrested going through customs wearing a vest full of powder."

"I guess something like that could happen," I said, "but that would just mean I'd be out of pocket to the tune of a little under two grand, and I started out by taking ten thousand dollars from him a couple of weeks ago. That's almost how long it's been. It'll be two weeks Monday."

"What's the matter?"

"Well, I haven't accomplished very much in that amount of time. It seems as though— well, the hell with it, I'm doing what I can. Anyway, the point is that I can afford to take the chance that I won't get reimbursed."

"I suppose so." She frowned. "How do you get two thousand dollars? Say one-fifty for a hotel room, and a thousand for the two Kongs. How much Coca-Cola can two kids drink?"

"I drink Coke, too. And don't forget TJ."

"He drinks a lot of Coke?"

"All he wants. And he gets five hundred dollars."

"For introducing you to the Kongs. I didn't even think of that."

"For introducing me to the Kongs, and for thinking of introducing me to the Kongs. They're the perfect way to spirit information out of the phone company, and I never would have thought of looking for someone like that."

"Well, you hear about computer hackers," she said, "but how would you find one? They don't list them in the Yellow Pages. Matt, how old is TJ?"

"I don't know."

"You never asked him?"

"I never got a straight answer. I'd say fifteen or sixteen, and I don't think I could be off by more than a year either way."

"And he lives on the street? Where does he sleep?"

"He says he's got a place. He's never said where or with whom. One thing you learn on the street, you don't want to be too quick to tell your business to people."

"Or even your name. Does he know how much he's getting?"

I shook my head. "We haven't discussed it."

"He won't be expecting that much, will he?"

"No, but why shouldn't he have it?"

"I'm not disagreeing with you. I just wonder what he's going to do with five hundred dollars."

"Whatever he wants. At a quarter a shot, he could call me up two thousand times."

"I guess," she said. "God, when I think of the different people we know. Danny Boy, Kali. Mick. TJ, the Kongs. Matt? Let's not ever leave New York, okay?"