Watchers

efficient, smart, as well-meaning as he was well-groomed. “I wanted to talk to you because I want to know who’s spreading these falsehoods about me.”
    Travis said, “We need new ID—driver’s licenses, social security cards, the whole works. First-rate, with full backup, not junk.”
    “That’s what I’m talking about,” Van Dyne said. He raised his eyebrows quizzically. “Where on earth did you get the idea that I’m in that sort of business? I’m afraid you’ve been misinformed.”
    “We need first-rate paper with full backup,” Travis repeated.
    Van Dyne stared at him, at Nora. “Let me see your wallet. And your purse, miss.”
    Putting his wallet on the desk, Travis told Nora, “It’s okay.”
    Reluctantly, she put her purse beside the wallet.
    “Please stand and let Caesar search you,” Van Dyne said.
    Travis stood and motioned for Nora to get up as well.
    Caesar, the cement-faced hulk, searched Travis with embarrassing thoroughness, found the .357 Magnum, put it on the desk. He was even more thorough with Nora, unbuttoning her blouse and boldly feeling the cups of her bra for a miniature microphone, battery, and recorder. She blushed and would not have permitted these intimacies if Travis had not explained to her what Caesar was looking for, Besides, Caesar remained expressionless throughout, as if he were a machine without the potential for erotic response.
    When Caesar was finished with them, they sat down while Van Dyne went through Travis’s wallet and then through Nora’s purse. She was afraid he was going to take their money without giving them anything in return, but he appeared to be interested in only their ID and the butcher’s knife that Nora Still carried.
    To Travis, Van Dyne said, “Okay. If you were a cop, you wouldn’t be allowed to carry a Magnum”—he swung out the cylinder and looked at the
    ammunition—loaded with magnums. The ACLU would have your ass.” He smiled at Nora. “No policewoman carries a butcher’s knife.”
    Suddenly she understood what Travis meant when he’d said he was carrying the revolver not for protection but for its value as ID.
    Van Dyne and Travis haggled a bit, finally settling on sixty-five hundred as the price for two sets of ID with “full backup.”
    Their belongings, including the butcher’s knife and revolver, were returned to them.
    From the gray office, they followed Van Dyne into the narrow hall, where he dismissed Caesar, then to a set of dimly lit concrete stairs leading to a basement beneath Hot Tips, where the rock music was further filtered by the intervening concrete floor.
    Nora was not sure what she expected to find in the basement: maybe men who all looked like Edward 0. Robinson and wore green eye shades on elastic bands and labored over antique printing presses, producing not just false identification papers but stacks of phony currency. What she found, instead, surprised her.
    The steps ended in a stone-walled storage room about forty by thirty feet. Bar supplies were stacked to shoulder height. They walked along a narrow aisle formed by cartons of whiskey, beer, and cocktail napkins, to a steel fire door in the rear wall. Van Dyne pushed a button in the door frame, and a closed-circuit security camera made a purring sound as it panned them.
    The door was opened from inside, and they went through into a smaller room with subdued lighting, where two young bearded guys were working at two of seven computers lined up on work tables along one wall. The first guy was wearing soft Rockport shoes, safari pants, a web belt, and a cotton safari shirt. The other wore Reeboks, jeans, and a sweatshirt that featured the Three Stooges. They looked almost like twins, and both resembled young versions of Steven Spielberg. They were so intensely involved with their computer work that they did not look up at Nora and Travis and Van Dyne, but they were having fun, too, talking exuberantly to themselves, to their machines, and to each other in high-tech language that made no sense whatsoever to Nora.
    A woman in her early twenties was also at work in the room. She had short blond hair and oddly beautiful eyes the color of pennies. While Van Dyne spoke with the two guys at the computers, the woman took Travis and Nora to the far end of the room, put them in front of a white screen, and photographed them for the phony driver’s licenses.
    When the blonde disappeared into a darkroom to develop the film, Travis and Nora rejoined Van