The children entered the kitchen then, Keene and Audrey, whining about some toy-related incident. Their voices worked their way inside Joan’s head such that she was seized by a commanding urge to backhand them each hard enough to send them flying halfway across the kitchen. But she managed to do what she always did, channeling her aggression toward her children into false enthusiasm, thrown up like a wall around her angry self. She closed the magazine and raised her voice in order to silence theirs.

“How would you each like a pony, and your very own pond?”

She believed it was her generous bribe that had silenced the children, but it was in fact her smile, gargoylelike and glaring, baring an expression of utter hatred, that frightened them into stillness.

For Joan, the momentary silence was bliss.

The 911 call came in for a naked man at the Queens-Midtown Tunnel exits. The dispatch went out as a 10–50, a low-priority disorderly person call. A unit from the 1–7 arrived within eight minutes, and found a bad jam-up, worse than usual for a Sunday night. A few drivers honked and pointed them uptown. The suspect, they yelled, a fat guy wearing nothing but a red tag on his toe, had already moved on.

“I got kids here!” howled one guy in a dinged-up Dodge Caravan.

Officer Karn, the driver, said to his partner, Officer Lupo, “I’m gonna say Park Avenue type. Sex club regular. Took too much X before his weekend kink session.”

Officer Lupo unbuckled and opened his door. “I’m on traffic duty. Loverboy’s all yours.”

“Thanks a lot,” said Officer Karn to the slamming of the door. He lit up his rack and waited patiently—he wasn’t paid extra to rush—for the traffic snarl to part for him.

He cruised up past Thirty-eighth, eyeballing cross streets. A fat naked guy on the loose shouldn’t be too hard to find. People on the sidewalks seemed okay, not freaked. One helpful citizen smoking outside a bar saw the slow-rolling cruiser and stepped forward, pointing him up the street.

A second and third call came in, both for a naked man marauding outside the United Nations headquarters. Officer Karn hit the gas, looking to end this. He cruised past the lit-up flags of all the member nations flying out front, to the visitors’ entrance at the north end. Blue NYPD sawhorses everywhere, as well as car-bomb deterring cement planters.

Karn rolled up on a detail of bored cops near the sawhorses. “I’m looking for a fat naked man.”

One cop shrugged. “I could give you a few phone numbers.”

Gabriel Bolivar returned by limousine to his new home in Manhattan, two town houses undergoing extensive renovations on Vestry Street, in Tribeca. When finished, the home would encompass thirty-one rooms and fourteen thousand total square feet, including a mosaic-lined swimming pool, servants’ quarters for a staff of sixteen, a basement recording studio, and a twenty-six-seat movie theater.