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said.
    “Excuse me,” said a shopper trying to get past Leo.
    He twitched his head. “Sorry,” he said, and slowly propelled his cart forward. The Indonesian woman turned and did the same.
    The aisle emptied into the dairy section, where customers inspected the dates on yogurt. Leo maneuvered his cart beside an island of gourmet cheeses and he watched as the woman continued. If he’d kept shopping, he would have remained right behind her, but everything in her body language told him she didn’t want him with her.
    Except her eyes. And the glassiness he’d seen there when she seemed to revel in the sound of her native tongue, even when spoken badly by this tall white man.
    Forget it, he told himself. She’s shy and isn’t used to being spoken to by strange men, and you misinterpreted that as interest. Or she’s an illegal hoping to avoid attention. And the definite and underlying truth: you’re attracted to her and acting out of character.
    The checkout lines were long and he glanced at the strange magazines the upscale grocers sold, as if Time and Newsweek would ruin their organic vibe. Headlines about new uses for soybeans and the benefits of transcendental meditation. Beside them, a few lefty journals warned that citizens’ civil liberties were disappearing in inverse proportion to their fears, that there was a government conspiracy behind the wars, and that the next round of violence would come from places you’d never expect, unless you bought this issue for $5.99. Leo was in more of a National Enquirer mood, would have liked to read about imminent alien invasions or the most recent subway attack by tentacled leviathans—an unreal threat for a change, terror you could laugh at.
    The conveyor belt whisked his baubles to the scanner, and the freckled Ethiopian clerk greeted him curtly before turning to her mindless task. Halfway through, she needed a moment to look up the UPC for jackfruit, and Leo saw the Indonesian woman, who’d made her way to the front of a new line. How old was she, early twenties, maybe younger? That had been one of the hardest things for him about living there, never being sure of people’s ages. The dozens of different ethnicities on that long archipelago, the effects of the sun and the poverty, the litany of life’s impacts so much harder to read.
    With some disappointment he watched as a multicolored array of baby food jars paraded down her conveyor belt. Her stack of wrapped meats confirmed that she was not in the same income bracket as a typical immigrant.
    Leo’s order was finished when her items were still being scanned at the other register. To stall, he entered the wrong password after sliding his bank card, twice. The people behind him were sighing, the aggrieved impatience of urbanites. Finally he entered the correct code. She was pushing her cart out the door now, and he did the same, slowly, allowing another shopper to walk between them.
    He told himself he wasn’t stalking her and was merely practicing surveillance technique. Outside, the beeping of scanners and the printing of receipts were replaced by a distant siren and the incoming sonic boom of a Metrobus racing to catch the yellow on 14th. His path was soon blocked by a series of knee-high metal bollards—rusty iron ones to prevent shopping-cart theft, lesser versions of the steel-and-stone behemoths that had sprouted around federal buildings all over town like some superprotective fungi. And there she was, just a few feet away, loading bags into the trunk of an illegally parked black Lincoln Navigator. Leo saw the reflected neon letters of liquor writ backward across the SUV’s glossy windows.
    The SUV bore diplomatic plates, and the mystery was partly solved. A diplomat’s wife, or an ambassadorial maid, the dissonance between her dress, manner, and language and her expensive purchases finally resolving itself. Still there was the matter of her blue crescent moon. He found himself memorizing her tags—which