The Empress File

across a radiator to a window. He saw us watching and posed, as cats do, one front foot frozen in midair. Sunlight rippled across his orange coat; there was a potted geranium sitting on a board at the end of the radiator, and the orange fur against the green leaves, all framed by the window, made a nice composition. Beyond the cat, through the window out on the river, a towboat pushed a rust red barge full of coal upstream toward the power plant. Pigeons wheeled overhead, little impressionist smudges against the faultless blue sky. It was quiet and beautiful.
    “I’ll miss the cat,” she said sadly. “And the river.”
    I CARRY a small wooden box from Poland in my overnight bag. On the flight between St. Paul and Memphis, I got it out. Inside, wrapped in a square of rough silk, were seventy-eight cards, the Waite-Rider tarot deck. I did a couple of spreads. The Empress dominated both of them.
    There’s nothing supernatural about the tarot. Not the way I use it, as a gaming system. Formalgame systems, the kind developed by the military, were intended to force planners out of habitual modes of thinking and to test new theories. The tarot is less structured than the formal systems, but it still forces you outside your preconceptions.
    So I had the Empress dominating two separate spreads. In my interpretive system the Empress represents women, new enterprises, new creations, new movements. There’s an overtone of politics and a suggestion of sex. That’s roughly parallel to the “magic” interpretation, but I don’t believe in that superstitious shit.
    I sat back and thought about it as the river unwound two thousand feet below. The Empress.
    Chaminade? Or someone I hadn’t yet met?
    M EMPHIS FROM the air looks like any other city from the air, except greener. Just before we landed, the pilot said the ground temperature was ninety-three and the humidity was 87 percent. A Turkish bath.
    When I came through the gate carrying an overnight bag and a portable computer, a tall, balding black guy, forty or so, was leaning on the railing that separated the passenger and waiting areas. With his round gold-rimmed glasses, thin face, and high cheekbones, he might have looked like Gandhi. He didn’t. He brought to mind a mercenary who had been blinded by a white phosphorus grenade in Biafra, a long time agoand far, far away. This guy wasn’t blind, though. He was looking the passengers over, one by one, and finally picked on me.
    “You Kidd?” he asked. His voice was tough, abrupt.
    “Yeah. Who are you?” He was already walking away, and I trailed behind with my bags.
    “John,” he said over his shoulder. “You got a suitcase? Besides that stuff?”
    “No. John what?”
    He thought it over, but not very hard. “Smith.”
    If he didn’t want to talk, I wasn’t going to worry about it. He led the way to a two-year-old Chevrolet, one of the bigger models in a nondescript green. We were halfway downtown, sitting at a red light, before Smith said another word.
    “I’m not sure we need you.” He was staring straight out over the steering wheel.
    “I don’t know if I want to join up,” I said.
    “Bobby says you’re some kind of complicated computer crook.” He still wouldn’t face me. “You don’t look like a computer crook. You look like a boxer.”
    “I’m a painter,” I said. “I’ve been hit in the nose a couple of times. The docs never got it quite right.”
    Now he turned, vertical lines crinkling the space between his eyebrows. “A painter? That’s not what Bobby said.”
    “I do computer work to make a living. That’s the only way Bobby knows me.”
    “Huh.” The light changed, and we were rolling again. “Can’t make a living at painting?”
    “Not yet. Maybe in five years.”
    “You paint ducks?”
    “No. I don’t paint ducks, barns, sailboats, lighthouses, pheasants, rusty farm machinery, sunsets, jumping fish, birch trees, or any kind of hunting dogs. And I don’t put a little pink glow of the setting sun between groups of warm nineteenth-century farmhouses with hay sticking out of the lofts of the barns in back.”
    “Eakins painted hunters. Homer painted fish.”
    “Damn well, too.”
    “So who do you like? Artists?”
    “Rembrandt. Ingres. Degas. Egon Schiele. Like that. Guys who could draw. People who like color. Gauguin. Living guys, maybe Jim Dine. Wolf Kahn. A couple of personal friends. Why?”
    “I do some… art.” He said it reluctantly, almost as a