“Is it wet one’s whistle or whet one’s whistle?” I asked.

“What?”

“Wet is the one that makes sense.”

“Shut up.”

“You know, when we handle propositional attitudes with intensional abstraction, as we are sort of doing here, their opacity becomes, shall we say, localized in that of intensional abstraction.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I told you, nothing. Now where is my dog? His name is Trigo. He’s remarkably resilient and if you just bring him to me we can be done with this little episode in a, as you might say, jiffy.”

“Mitchell.” Clinton stepped away and spoke to a man who stepped forward. “He’s crazy,” he said. “I can’t get anywhere with him. You try.”

Into my view stepped Mitchell, who, except for the fact that he was Black like me, looked alarmingly, terrifyingly, like Clinton.

“How’re you doing?”

“Well, and you? Where’s my dog?”

“You see we have a bit of a problem with such large deposits from individuals that our government considers possible terrorists. That always sends up a red flag. Now if you could only tell us what that payment was for?”

“I can tell you, nothing. Why a red flag?”

“Is my partner right? Are you crazy?”

“Once more propositional abstraction proves opaque.”

“What?”

“If you won’t tell me where my dog is, his name is Trigo, then tell me where you’ve taken my student.”

“She’s fine.”

“He.”

“He?”

“Or she. They.”

“We let your student go. We scared the hell out of her, him, them, and then he, her, them was sent home.”

“My dog? Did you scare the hell out of him?”

“What is Sill up to?”

“You realize I’m just a math professor. I don’t even use a computer.”

“Yeah, and Lee Harvey Oswald was just a, just a … Clinton, what was Lee Harvey Oswald?”

“An assassin.”

“Before that?”

“A pinko.”

Mitchell’s mobile phone rang and he answered it, listened intently, nodded, then put it away. “Professor Kitu, you can go.”

Clinton stepped forward.

“Director said to let him go,” Mitchell said.

“Just cut him loose?”

“Unhook him.”

Clinton talked while he unlocked my cuffs and ankle shackles. He smelled like hairdressing cream. “Just know that we’ll be watching you. We’re going to be on you like a cheap suit.”

“My dog?”

“Give him his damn dog!”

6

Someone who might have been standing behind me the entire time put a scratchy cloth sack over my head. I was roughly walked out of that room into a corridor. I could tell by the hollow sound of our footsteps. It became clear to me in short order that they were walking me in a circle through the same hallways. Even a mathematics professor knows that four equidistant right turns land you where you began. I felt the cool outside air on my hands and neck and the cover was snatched from my head. It was dark out, but I could see that I was in Fox Point, the Seekonk River in front me. My favorite Portuguese bakery was just a block away and I would have stepped inside had it been open. It took me only thirty-seven minutes to walk home and there I found a confused, perhaps angry, certainly terrified, Sam sitting on my stoop with Trigo aboard lap.