#17 · Imitation Vanilla
November 5, 2026
At ten in the morning the sun over Riverside was a thin November gold, the kind that looks warm through a window and is not, and Alfonz was cranking his tinny "Entertainer" with his collar turned up.
Emma Rodriguez was first at the window, the way she was always first, zipped to the chin in a puffy purple coat.
"Two scoops of mint chip," she announced, "and a cocoa."
"Both?" Alfonz built the cone anyway, the second scoop wobbling just so, and filled a paper cup from the cocoa urn he had added to the truck in October. It had been properly inspected. He had learned. "It is 34°F, chérie. Mint chip is a summer decision."
"Mrs. Fenwick says ice cream can't melt in the cold, so it's actually the best time."
"Mrs. Fenwick," said Alfonz, "is never wrong about anything, and it is exhausting."
She took the cone in one mitten and the cocoa in the other and crossed the frosted grass very carefully. Alfonz flexed his fingers inside his gloves. There had been ice on the pond that morning, a thin gray skin of it along the reeds, and he had stood on his own cottage step and felt the old slow honey reach for him. Budapest had been a place he flew to. This was home deciding to be cold. He did not care for it at all.
His earpiece came alive.
"Ribbit-7." Handler. "Your town has a visitor."
"My town is right here," Alfonz said. "I am looking at it."
"Not this one. The other one. The one you made up in Norfolk." A pause. "I put a watch on it the day you put it on paper. A retired deputy and a motel clerk who call me when anyone interesting checks in. This morning someone interesting checked in. Silver hair. A beautiful coat. Paid cash for a week."
Alfonz set the scoop down.
"He came himself."
"First time he's set foot in this country, as far as I can tell. He's in Riverside, Pennsylvania. Your Riverside, the one you invented." Her voice was dry, but not unkind. "There's nothing there for him. Let him look. Let him eat the pie and go home."
"There is something there," Alfonz said slowly. "There are people there."
"There are people everywhere."
"I know. That is the part I forgot." He watched Emma reach her mother and hand up the cocoa for safekeeping. "When I chose that town, I told a frightened clerk that nothing in it mattered to anyone. I said it to make him feel better. It was not true. Everything in it matters to someone, and I have sent a man who collects people to stand in the middle of it." He began to untie his apron. "I am going to go and stand over it."
"If he sees you there, he knows the town is a lie."
"Then he will not see me."
"In November," Handler said. "In Pennsylvania. You."
"I will dress warm," said Alfonz.
Riverside, Pennsylvania, sat three hundred kilometers from the town the real manifest had named, and that distance was the reason Alfonz had chosen it. It had a river, which seemed only fair. It had a brick school at one end of Main Street and a white church at the other, and in between them a diner called Marjorie's with a hand-lettered sign that promised PIE ALL DAY.
It also had a cold that came down off the ridges at night and lay in the streets until noon. The bank clock read −3°C when Alfonz came into town before dawn, and he felt every degree of it.
At four in the morning he let himself into Marjorie's through the kitchen door and left a listening device the size of a shirt button inside the napkin dispenser of the corner booth. He chose that booth because it had its back to the wall and a clear view of the door, and because it was the seat that men like him and Vane always took. Then he climbed the church belfry, which faced the diner across the street, and settled in among the pigeons with three layers of Agency thermals under his coat and a thermos of Agency "soup" between his knees.
At seven, Auguste Vane came walking down Main Street.
He walked like a man on holiday. He stopped to read the notices taped in the hardware store window. He wished a woman good morning and meant it. He went into Marjorie's, and he sat in the corner booth, and Alfonz, high in the cold above him, heard him ask for coffee and the pie of the day in a voice like warm bread.
He did his work the way Alfonz had known he would, slowly and kindly and without ever seeming to work at all.
On the first day he walked to the county records office and spent the afternoon there. On the second he sat at the diner counter with the old men who came in after the hardware store opened, and he asked them, as a curiosity, whether a pink-and-turquoise ice cream truck had ever worked this town, years back. He told them he was writing a little history of American roadside trades. They loved him for it. None of them remembered any such truck, but they remembered everything else, and they told him all of it.
On the third day, he met Walt.
Walt was the crossing guard at the brick school. He came into Marjorie's every morning at nine, when his shift was done, and had come in every morning for eleven years, ever since his wife died. He ordered two eggs over easy and a slice of cherry pie, because, he said, there was no one left to tell him he couldn't have pie for breakfast. The only open seat was across from Vane. Vane offered it with a small courtly gesture, and Walt took it.
Alfonz listened to the whole hour through his earpiece, and it was the longest hour he had spent in a long time.
Vane did not ask Walt about trucks. He asked about the wife. Her name was June. She had kept bees, and she had once driven to Ohio in a snowstorm to win a pie contest, and lost, and laughed about it for thirty years. Vane asked one small good question and then another, and he listened to the answers with his whole attention. Alfonz knew that listening. It was the same listening that had bought four hundred euros of pastry in Lyon and an old man's whole proud history along with it. It was the same listening that had found a word like Pink in a garage in Prague.
None of what Walt told him was any use to Vane. Vane kept asking anyway.
Up in the belfry, Alfonz pressed his gloved hands together and could not feel the tips of his fingers. On the ladder that morning his foot had missed a rung, a thing his feet did not do, and he had caught himself by one hand with nothing beneath him but cold air. He had blamed the frost on the rung. He knew better. The cold was in him now, and it would stay until he went home.
But it was not the cold that kept him awake that night.
In Norfolk he had wondered aloud what it would cost him to become a little bit of a forger. Here was the first invoice, and it had Walt's name on it. He had built this town a lie to stand inside, and then he had sent a man who collected people to collect it.
On the fourth day, Vane came back from the county office a little after three, sat down in the corner booth, and asked Marjorie a question.
"In all your years here," he said, "did a pink-and-turquoise ice cream truck ever work this town?"
"Honey, I've been pouring coffee on this street for forty-one years," said Marjorie. "Never once."
There was a long silence on the line. Alfonz leaned out as far as he dared and saw, through the diner's front window, Vane looking down at the phone in his hand. Then Vane began to laugh. It was not a cruel laugh. It was quiet and delighted, the laugh of a man who has just been shown a very good card trick.
"Marjorie," Vane said, "may I buy the last hour of your evening? I'm expecting a friend, and I'd like the room."
"An old flame?"
"Something like that. And do you keep vanilla ice cream?"
"Only the cheap kind."
"Perfect," said Vane.
At six o'clock Marjorie turned the sign to CLOSED, left the coffee on, and went home. Vane sat alone in the warm yellow light of the empty diner. Then he leaned toward the napkin dispenser and spoke to it directly.
"I imagine you can hear me," he said. "You'd have put it in this booth. I'd have put it in this booth." He folded his hands. "Come down out of the cold, Mr. Alfonz. Marjorie left the coffee on."
The diner was so warm that it hurt.
Alfonz slid into the booth across from Vane, and before he had quite decided to, he had a cup of coffee between both hands and was holding it the way a man holds a small fire. Vane's eyes went to his hands and stayed there a moment. Then they moved on, politely, to the window. Alfonz did not like how politely they moved on.
Between them on the table sat a bowl of vanilla ice cream.
"It's the imitation kind," Vane said. "I asked."
"You have been busy."
"I have had the loveliest week." He meant it. That was the trouble with him; he always meant it. "It's a good town. I've enjoyed it more than anywhere in years. And it isn't yours."
"How?"
"No truck like yours was ever registered in this county. No one here remembers one. By itself that's only a gap, and gaps are common. Old records burn. Old men forget." Vane turned his phone face down on the table. "What gave it away was the name. Your manifest sent me to Riverside. I've known that name since my cold little room. You were standing right in front of me when I said it. And then, after months of patient work, a frightened clerk photographs an old document for me, and it hands me exactly the word I was hoping to see." He smiled. "Nobody is ever handed exactly what he hoped for, Mr. Alfonz. Not by the world. Only by someone who knew what he was hoping for."
He touched the edge of the bowl with one finger.
"Imitation vanilla. The flavor is right and the source is wrong. And it is always just a little too sweet."
"Gustave," said Alfonz, "would say I used too much."
"Gustave would be proud of you, and that should worry you more than it does." Vane studied him across the table. "Someone trained in Lyon made that document. It was very good work. The frog forges now. I'll write that down tonight. It may be the most useful thing you've ever taught me."
Alfonz looked out at the dark street, at the brick school and the white church and the river beyond them.
"And Walt?" he said. "Marjorie? The men at the counter?"
"Are of no use to me whatsoever." Vane paused, and something moved across his face that was not quite patience. "Which I find I don't mind. Walt told me about his wife for an hour yesterday, and he didn't want a single thing from me. I had forgotten what it is like to sit in a warm room where nobody wants anything." He let that go as quickly as he had picked it up. "I won't be back here. You may tell your conscience so."
"Then where?"
"Home first. Then I buy an atlas." Vane rose and began to button his coat. "There are, I'm told, a great many Riversides in America. Dozens of them. I'm sitting in one right now." He looked down at the small green figure in the booth. "You've cost me a month, and I think it was a fair price for what I learned. You came three hundred kilometers into the cold to stand over a town you invented. That tells me two things. The real one matters more to you than anything. And you can't stop caring about the ones that don't. Those are both very useful things to know about a man."
He went to the door. With his hand on it, he looked back once.
"Finish your coffee, Mr. Alfonz," he said. "You look as though you need it."
The bell over the door rang, small and cheerful, and he was gone into the November dark.
Alfonz sat a while longer with both hands around the cup. Then he picked up the spoon and tried the vanilla.
It was, he had to admit, a little too sweet.
"You won the town," Handler said, somewhere over the dark fields on the way home.
"I won Walt's town," said Alfonz. "And I lost a secret. He knows I forge now."
"He knows the name, too."
"He has known the name since the cold room. I heard him say it. I thought giving it back to him would help."
"It did help. It bought you a month."
"A month," Alfonz said, "is the thing he has the most of."
Handler was quiet for a while. He listened to the engines and waited for the feeling to come back into his fingers.
"There's more than one way to make a place hard to find, Ribbit-7," she said at last.
"What does that mean?"
"It means go home and get warm."
At ten the next morning the sun over Riverside was thin and pale, and the frost on the grass had not yet decided to leave. Emma was first at the window anyway, in the purple coat, with her mittens on a string.
"Cocoa," she said. "And one scoop, because it's cold. Mrs. Fenwick says that's a compromise."
"Mrs. Fenwick should work for the government." He built the scoop, and it wobbled just so, and he handed it down.
Emma squinted at his knuckles, which were chapped raw and cracked across the tops from four days of a Pennsylvania belfry.
"Did you slip on the sprinkles again?"
"In the cold, chérie," Alfonz said gravely, "the sprinkles freeze. They become tiny marbles. A man has no chance."
"That's not real."
"You try walking on frozen sprinkles," said Alfonz, "and then tell me what is real."
She giggled and went off across the white grass with her cocoa held out in front of her like a lantern. Alfonz watched her go. He counted the cars on the block, as he did now. Then he looked a while longer at the frost, which was new, and which would not be the last of it.
That evening, in a small warm kitchen three streets from the route, Mrs. Chen set the kettle on and took a photograph out of her handbag. She had brought it home from the bank on Tuesday.
It was old, and the corners had gone soft. It showed a pink-and-turquoise ice cream truck parked beside a river, on a street that Alfonz had never once driven down.
On the counter, the little radio was warning of a hard freeze across the region overnight.
Mrs. Chen looked at the photograph for a long time.
"Not yet," she told it, and put it back in her handbag, and poured her tea.
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