Her handshake was like her voice, firm, and neither cold nor warm, but he detected a slight tremble. Then, her identity dawning, Bech’s heart surged forward in his chest and he, the professional spielmeister, felt his mouth open and nothing come out. Her blue eyes, with their uncanny silvery backing, clung to his attentively while his brain groped. He would not have recognized her at all. She seemed too young to be his Alice. Though his blood had bounded toward her, he was ashamed to have become, since they had last been together, an old man. “Oh my God,” he brought out at last. “You. Of course I remember. The Twentieth Century Limited.”

“Just as far as Chicago,” she corrected him. “After that, it was the Santa Fe Super Chief.”

His left hand, holding the book that he was to read from tonight, clumsily tried to caress the hand, the precious piece of her, that he was holding in his right. “How are you?” he asked. “Where are you? What happened next?”

Bech’s confusion gratified her, and calmed her. She withdrew her hand, with its tremble. Her eyes did not leave his, but her mouth, tense at first, settled into a smile. She had been recognized. “I’m here,” she answered. “Or, rather, in Bloomington. I’m well. Still married. I got over it.”

She had oddly little aged, just broadened a bit. Her hair was the same light-brunette shade, too nondescript to be a tint—“dishwater blond” was the phrase his mother used to use—and her wool suit was scarcely saved by its bold magenta from verging on dowdy. Her disguise as an ordinary, respectable woman was intact.