Three-thirty on a grey Friday afternoon in March. The East River was the colour of puddled iron. Since midday, westbound traffic had been backing up from Honaluchi Bridge. Chinese Ed stuck his head out the side window of his ramrod Dodge, into the smell of burned diesel and lead, and tried to get a look at what was ahead. Nothing. Something was broken up there, the lights were out, someone had melted down; the people up there were on overload—office overload, 2.4 kids overload, shitcan overload—and had left their cars and were dully beating on one another to no good purpose. Who knew what had happened? It was the same old life. Ed shook his head at the futility of mankind, turned off the Capital traffic report and turned instead to Rita Robinson.

“Hey, Rita,” he said.

Two or three minutes later her peppermint and white candy-stripe skirt was up around her waist.

“Steady, Ed,” advised Rita. “We could be here some time.”

Ed laughed. “Steady Eddy,” he said. “That’s me.”

Rita laughed too. “I’m ready,” she said. “I’m ready, ready Eddy.”

It turned out Rita was right.

Two hours later they were still there.

“Doesn’t this just suck?” said the woman from the pink Mustang parked a couple of cars in front of Ed’s Dodge.

She looked in at Rita—who had pulled down her skirt and adjusted her garter belt and was now examining herself with a kind of morose professional intensity in the pull-down vanity mirror—and seemed to lose interest. “Oh hi, honey,” she said. “Just freshening up there?” Everyone had turned their engines off. People were stretching their legs up and down the pavement. A hot dog guy was working the queue, moving west ten or a dozen vehicles at a time. “I never knew it this bad,” said the woman from the Mustang. She laughed, picked a shred of tobacco from her lower lip, examined it. “Maybe the Russians landed.”

“You got a point there,” Ed told her. She smiled at him, stepped on the butt of her cigarette, and went back to her car. Ed turned on the radio. The Russians hadn’t landed. The Martians hadn’t landed. There was no news at all.

“So. This Brady thing,” he said to Rita. “What are they saying in the DA’s office?”

“Hey, Eddy,” Rita said. She looked at him for a moment or two, then shook her head and turned back to the mirror. She had her lipstick out now. “I thought you’d never ask,” she said in a matter-of-fact voice. The lipstick didn’t seem to suit her, because she put it away with an irritable gesture and looked out the window at the river running by.

“I thought you’d never ask,” she repeated bitterly.

That was when the big yellow duck started to push its head into the car through Ed’s open side-window. This time, Rita didn’t seem to notice it, even though it was speaking.

“Come in, Number Seven,” it was saying. “Your time is up.”