“That’s her, the one-eyed finch,” one of the men in a dark, well-cut suit said to the other, pointing out the window of the office building

“Her?” The other man in the suit followed with binoculars. “It’s hard to believe.”

“Yes. It is. But the name suits her, don’t you think?”

The second man fiddled with the focus on the binoculars and the woman on the corner became clearer, closer. She was small. The bones in her face strained against the skin. She moved like a junkie, twitching, hopping this way and that; birdlike he supposed. And then she turned her head so her whole face became visible to him and he saw the little pucker where her eye should have been.

“It does,” he said. “But still, she’s the one?”

“She’s the one,” the first man confirmed. “The one that blew it all wide open.”

The second man lowered the binoculars and looked with his real eyes. The brassy red her fine-spun hair had been had faded to a faint corona around her face. Her one good eye was sunken. Her fingers plucked and danced with only the air, ran up to her face and seemed surprised to find her skin.

“She must be a master.”

Down on the street they followed her.

“Does she know we’re here?” The second man asked.

“She knows everything,” the first man said.

She was about halfway up the block and she stopped, so they stopped as well, pretending to look in the window at men’s fine clothing.

“How did she lose her eye?” the second man asked.

“I’ve heard a couple different stories,” the first man said. “A knife, Isis, Isis with a knife. She was in Afghanistan. She was in Vietnam. No one knows what’s real.”

She began to move again and so did they. She had a group of people around her. The second man thought they looked like monsters, like creatures. Their clothes were damp. Their clothes were filthy. They lurched and stumbled, howled and yelled with laughter.  She took a flask from one of them and drank deeply, wiped her mouth with the back of her skinny wrist. He noticed that she wore only one shoe.

“Will we bring her in, after this?” The second man asked. He was thinking about his mother in Maryland, the way she loved her Keurig machine and her little corgi named George.

“If she’ll come,” the first man said. He was thinking about the woman who was not his wife watching him walk out of the hotel room. “We’ve done it before. Tried to.”

“But if this works, they’ll kill her. Or try to. We’ll need to get to her fast.”

“They say she got out of a gulag in Siberia with a hairpin. Ended up on a beach in Costa Rica. No one has any idea how she did it.”

The second man watched as she plucked a cigarette butt out of the soggy gutter and put it to her lips. It was hard for him to picture her on a beach.

“Hey, come on, stop staring!” The first man grabbed the second man by the arm and swiveled him into a coffee shop as the group of people that surrounded the one-eyed finch exploded into screaming and lunging.

“Sorry,” the second man stammered.

They watched sideways through the front window.

“But shouldn’t we do something?” he asked.

“No,” said the first man. “We should not.”

When the fighting stopped they stepped back out of the coffee shop. A refrigerator of a man lay with his head in the street, bleeding onto the sidewalk. The first man prodded him with the toe of his shoe. His shoes were shiny.

The man lying there looked up at them. “I dreamed of her when I was a little boy,” he said. “I saw this day. I saw her coming.”