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PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF CAMPBELL ARMSTRONG

“Campbell Armstrong is thriller writing’s best-kept secret.” —The Sunday Times

“Armstrong is among the most intriguing of blockbuster writers … near to unputdownable.” —GQ

“While touching on suspense with a skill to please hard-core thriller addicts, he manages to please people who … warm to readable novels of substance.” —Daily Mail

“Armstrong’s skill is not just an eye for a criminally good tale but a passion for the people that will populate it.” —The Scotsman

“Subtle and marvelous … This is a dazzling book.” —The Daily Telegraph on Agents of Darkness

“A consummate psychological thriller … Without doubt, Armstrong is now in the front rank of thriller writers.” —Books on Heat

“Armstrong has outdone both Frederick Forsyth and Ken Follett.” —James Patterson on Jig

“A full throttle adventure thriller.” —The Guardian on Mambo

“A wonderful puzzle that keeps us guessing right to the end.” —Publishers Weekly on Mazurka

Mr. Apology

Campbell Armstrong

To the memory of my father, Thomas Black

ONE

1.

Harrison looked at the red light that glowed on his answering machine. Without taking off his wet coat, he sat down on the edge of the bed and, as if hypnotized, gazed at it. The light meant there had been an incoming message, maybe more than one. So soon, he thought. He glanced at Madeleine, who was shaking her damp hair from side to side, drying the strands in the corners of a towel. He wondered why he felt so suddenly nervous, so apprehensive. A message on an answering machine from some anonymous voice out there—wasn’t that what he wanted to hear in any case? Wasn’t that precisely what the whole thing was about? He rubbed his hands together. Then he raised one hand and let it hover above the PLAYBACK button.

“Well?” Madeleine said. She came and sat alongside him on the bed, curling her legs up under her body. The damp towel lay in her lap. She took his hand and squeezed it, as if for encouragement. “Aren’t you going to listen, Harry?”

He smiled. “It’s weird,” he said. “It’s like when you want to start a new canvas, a new painting, and you hold the brush in the air for a long time because you’re not certain you’re going to get it right; you’re conscious of all the things that are going to go wrong—”

“Stage fright,” she said.

“Something like that.” He touched the PLAYBACK button without pressing it. He stared along the floor, looking at the little pile of posters, the ones they hadn’t had time to put up anywhere yet. He remembered going around the streets with Madeleine only a few hours ago, walking in the rain, moving like fugitives through the darkness, sticking the posters up wherever they could. The windows of stores, phone booths, lampposts, the bus terminal, Grand Central Station—anywhere people might find them and read them. He had enjoyed the surreptitiousness of it all, making sure nobody saw them: Secrecy was the most important aspect of everything. Anonymity was the core of it all. On Lexington Avenue he thought somebody had spotted him—a little guy in a store doorway—but then he’d realized the guy was a drunk sleeping off his alcoholic intake. Another time, near Times Square, he was sure a passing patrol car had caught him, but the cops didn’t even stop to ask questions. Now he reached down and picked up one of the posters, which was damp against his fingertips. He looked at the words:

ATTENTION

CRIMINALS

BLUE COLLAR, WHITE COLLAR

YOU HAVE WRONGED PEOPLE. IT IS TO THE PEOPLE YOU MUST APOLOGIZE. NOT TO THE STATE. NOT TO GOD. GET YOUR MISDEEDS OFF YOUR CHEST!

CALL MR. APOLOGY (212)555-2748

THE IDEA OF APOLOGY IS TO PROVIDE A WAY FOR PEOPLE TO APOLOGIZE FOR THEIR WRONGS AGAINST PEOPLE WITHOUT JEOPARDIZING THEMSELVES. MR. APOLOGY WILL AUTOMATICALLY TAPE-RECORD YOUR ANONYMOUS PHONE CALL. DO NOT IDENTIFY YOURSELF. CALL FROM A PAY PHONE TO PREVENT TRACING. DESCRIBE IN DETAIL WHAT YOU HAVE DONE AND HOW YOU FEEL ABOUT IT. WHEN ENOUGH STATEMENTS HAVE BEEN COLLECTED THEY WILL BE PLAYED TO THE PUBLIC AT A TIME AND PLACE TO BE ADVERTISED. THIS IS A PRIVATE EXPERIMENT. ITS SOLE PURPOSE IS TO PROVIDE A NEW AVENUE OF COMMUNICATION. IT IS NOT ASSOCIATED IN ANY WAY WITH ANY POLICE, GOVERNMENTAL, RELIGIOUS, OR OTHER ORGANIZATION.

WHEN YOU CALL YOU WILL BE ALONE WITH A TAPE RECORDER.

Harry let the handbill slide from his fingers.

“I played my part in this too,” Madeleine said. “Speaking as your partner, I’d like to listen to what’s on that tape. I didn’t exactly scurry around the city for nothing. If you won’t press the button, I will. My curiosity is killing me.”

Harrison turned his face to look at her. Nerves, he thought. Simple uncomplicated nerves, like the kind you always felt on a project when you weren’t sure if you’d considered everything, if you’d taken everything into account. You get so wrapped up in the central focus of things you’re not certain you’ve had time to look around the edges. He reached out and touched her wrist. How did she manage to look so good with her hair streaked and wet? “Okay,” he said. “Here goes.” And he pushed the PLAYBACK button.

Nothing.

There was a short silence, then the click of a receiver being put down and the long sound of a dial tone. Nothing else. No voice, no apology.

Madeleine smiled. “I guess somebody out there got cold feet, Harry.”

“You’ve got to expect that kind of thing,” he said. A little disappointment, an unsettled moment. He tried to imagine somebody inside a phone booth, dialing the Apology number, then becoming hesitant and confused and hanging up. Embarrassed, maybe.

Madeleine said, “I wonder what I’d do if I came across your poster and I had something on my mind. I wonder if I’d like the idea of calling a certain number and talking into a tape recorder. I think I’d get the strange feeling that there was really somebody listening to me, somebody sitting there and looking smug.…”

The dial tone stopped. There was another click.

And then:

HI, I SAW YOUR NUMBER SO I THOUGHT I’D CALL.… I GOT SOMETHING THAT BOTHERS ME.… IT’S NO BIG DEAL, YOU UNDERSTAND, IT’S JUST THAT I’VE BEEN STEALING BREAD FROM MY MOTHER AND SHE DOESN’T KNOW ABOUT IT, BUT WHAT REALLY BUGS ME IS THAT SHE KEEPS GIVING ME MONEY. I MEAN SHE’S REALLY GENEROUS, SHE’S KIND, AND SHE THINKS THE WORLD REVOLVES AROUND ME.… I GET GUILTY AS HELL ABOUT IT. I’M SUPPOSED TO BE GOING TO SCHOOL BUT I KEEP CUTTING CLASSES AND SHE HASN’T FOUND OUT ABOUT IT YET AND I GET GUILTY AS HELL ABOUT THAT TOO. THAT’S IT. THANKS FOR LISTENING.

The message ended.

Harrison pressed the STOP button and looked at Madeleine. He had the weird feeling of having eavesdropped on a stranger’s life; it was as if he had stood with his ear pressed to a door and listened to the mumble of voices from the room beyond. Faceless voices. Thanks for listening. He watched Madeleine get up from the bed and walk to the window. Dawn was already in the sky, faint grey lines running like spidery cracks through the dark.

The first Apology message, he thought. A kid who’s cheating on his mother. A kid adored by his mother and who’s feeling bad because he’s a walking disappointment. He stood up and went towards Madeleine, slipping his arm around her waist. He looked at the sky a moment, the makings of a watery morning. Faint rainslicks slid down the pane. The first Apology message—the realization excited him suddenly. The idea that his handbill had inspired somebody to call the number and talk with his answering machine pleased him. Connections, tiny threads: A kid feels depressed, guilty, wants to get something off his chest, comes across the poster, goes inside a phone booth, dials the number, talks.

“I feel a little relieved,” Madeleine said.

“Like how?”

“The message.” She shrugged. “It’s like I expected to hear the voice of a mass murderer or something. Something awful. I don’t really know. And what we get is a poor kid who’s ripping off his mother.”

“He needed to talk to somebody,” Harrison said. “Which is the reason behind Apology. The poor kid needed somebody. Something.”

“Are you going to see if there are any other messages?” she asked.

“Sure.” He turned away from the window and reached out to the answering machine. He pushed the PLAYBACK button again and waited.

I SAW YOUR POSTER.… I WAS OVER IN GRAND CENTRAL AND I JUST HAPPENED TO SEE IT THERE.… I THINK IT’S A TERRIFIC IDEA.… I JUST LEFT HOME. I WALKED OUT. I JUST WALKED OUT ON MY WIFE AND DAUGHTER. I DIDN’T GIVE THEM ANY WARNING OR ANYTHING LIKE THAT; I JUST WOKE UP AND I WAS SICK TO MY HEART WITH EVERYTHING SO I TOOK SOME CASH OUT OF MY SAVINGS ACCOUNT AND I CAUGHT A TRAIN.… I DIDN’T TELL THEM WHERE I WAS GOING. I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHY I’M IN NEW YORK.… I’M SORRY.…

The message ended.

Madeleine said, “Jesus, that’s sad.”

Harrison nodded. He was trying to imagine—not the face of the caller, not the emotions of the man—but the sudden emptiness of the lives of his wife and daughter, how they’d wake up and find the guy gone, how they’d wonder where he was; if he didn’t go back home, if he didn’t contact them, he’d become a statistic in the ledger of Missing Persons, a casualty of the human accounting system. “Yeah, it is sad,” he said.

Madeleine sat down on the edge of the bed again. “Did you expect to get that kind of call, Harry? I mean, what did you really expect?”

Harrison shrugged. He pressed the STOP button; the machine came to a halt. What did you expect, Harry? What kind of voices, what kind of messages? “I’m not sure,” he told her. “I didn’t really figure on domestic crises, I guess. I imagined the callers would be more inclined to criminal acts—and I don’t really count stealing from your mother’s purse a criminal act. I don’t count walking out on your family either. It’s pretty damn sad, but it’s not criminal.”

Madeleine laid her head against his shoulder. For a moment Harrison stared through the open bedroom door across the dark space of the loft; he could see the window that faced the street. A slight dawn wind had sprung up, carrying rain, knocking against the panes of glass.

She said, “It’s like being a fisherman, Harry. I imagine you trawling with this big net and you’re catching all kinds of things inside it and you’re bound to land your criminal types sooner or later.”

Harrison glanced at the answering machine. He was longing to turn it back on again, and at the same time, like some miser counting pennies, he wanted to dole the messages out sparingly to himself. A kid who steals his mother’s money, a guy who just walks away from his family. Other lives, the misdemeanors of strangers, the tiny acts of betrayal and theft that constitute human behavior. He shut his eyes a moment. What he remembered was the vague origins of the Apology Project, the small perceptions that had led to the installation of an answering machine and the printing of handbills. What he remembered was discussing it all with Madeleine weeks and weeks ago, trying to assuage her puzzlement, settle her bewilderment, win her over to the point where she understood what it was he was trying to do.

I know it sounds pretty strange, Maddy, but it begins with graffiti, graffiti I saw one time on the side of these boxcars. Then I saw the same kind of things in the subway or written in the yard of the school where I teach. And the main impression I got was of all this pent-up violence, if that makes sense. So I wondered about that. It was the same kind of criminal violence I felt when I saw a group of bums standing around just savagely kicking this other bum who was bleeding all over the sidewalk. I wondered about that too. Then one day I was walking down near Battery Park and I saw this derelict guy stroking a bird, a pigeon maybe, and he was touching it lovingly like he really cared about it when all of a sudden he bit its goddamn head off. Just like that. Wham. Out of nowhere. All these acts of violence. Then this kid in my class was caught trying to rape a seven-year-old girl and I had him pegged as an okay kind of kid, pretty studious, decent, and he said something to the cops I’ve never quite forgotten—he said, “I wished I’d had somebody who’d listened to me.” And somehow these things came together in my mind, if you can understand that. It was just like all these tiny connections fused together in one bright explosion and I came up with the idea of Mr. Apology. There’s so much shit going on out there and there’s nobody prepared to listen to the people who are doing all this shit, so I thought about Apology, I thought about a kind of confession line where people could call in and get stuff off their minds without having to be afraid of reprisals.

Madeleine had looked at him for a long time after that before she’d asked: Where does it connect with art, Harry? Where does it connect with your art?

He remembered suddenly that they’d been lying in bed during this conversation; they had just made love and she’d had her head cradled against his shoulder and the palm of one hand spread out across his chest. He’d said: It connects at the point where the tapes are made public, Maddy. Don’t you see it? I put the voices together after I’ve edited them and I play them in some public place—

Harry, I need to hear it a little clearer—

Okay, imagine the human voice as art. You’re too stuck on pictures and statues and things like that. Why couldn’t the sounds of people confessing to their crimes be considered art? Music is art; so is drama. Why can’t my assembled confessions be thought of in the same way?

She had shrugged then and rolled over on her side, propping herself up on an elbow and smiling at him. Let me get it straight, Harry. One, you’re offering a kind of human service. You might say it’s a social service of a kind, right? Two, you see this as a kind of art form. Am I on the right beam, Spock?

You’re close enough.

Why criminals?

Why not? It was the idea of violence that sparked the project. It doesn’t have to stop at physical violence, does it? It can go the whole spectrum of crime. Embezzlers, say. Burglars. Confidence tricksters. Anybody with something lying heavy on his mind.

Maybe she’d been convinced. Maybe not. But at least she’d been pleased enough to help him in preparing the handbills and stalking the dark streets to paste them up. At least she was on his side. If she didn’t exactly share his enthusiasm, at least she wasn’t skeptical, scornful, critical of the whole notion. Now, as he looked at her, he was conscious of some distance in her eyes, as if she were still trying to work something out inside.

“What’s on your mind?” he asked.

“I was just thinking. This whole thing’s so different from what you’ve done in the past, that’s all.” She lay flat across the bed. Her hair was beginning to dry, curling as it did so. “It’s pretty far removed from the canvases.”

She was referring to the pile of unfinished canvases that lay stacked against the walls of the loft. His yellow phase. Everything had been yellow back then—skies, suns, oceans, tides, even the whites of the human eye. It had given the world a jaundiced appearance. Who could explain that now? Who could explain why one color had dominated everything else in the past? The answer was lost to him. Old works didn’t interest him in any case—they might have been the creations of a stranger. They might have been done by someone who’d trespassed in the loft more than a year ago and painted all those canvases while Harrison was out teaching high school art history to pay the rent. You couldn’t identify any longer. Besides, the Apology Project was what captivated him now.

He reached out to the answering machine, touching the PLAYBACK button. He gazed at Madeleine’s face as he listened; she had closed her eyes. The eyelids were glossy, frail; under the skin you could see the thinnest network of veins. He lightly touched the lids: Sometimes you had to marvel at the frailty of other lives, the way they appeared, in certain kinds of light, as insubstantial and yet rich.

WHO THE FUCK YOU THINK YOU ARE, ANYHOW? HUH? I MEAN, JUST WHO THE FUCK YOU IMAGINE YOU ARE, MAN? HEY, YOU LISTENING TO ME? YOU LISTENING TO ME RIGHT NOW? I GOT GOD ON MY SIDE. YOU UNNERSTAND ME? I’M ONE OF GODS VIGILANTES. I SAY YOU GOTTA BE IN LEAGUE WITH FUCKING SATAN, MAN.

The voice stopped. The message was over.

Madeleine said, “Now that’s what I call really sad, Harry. That’s worse than the guy walking out on his family.”

Harrison didn’t say anything for a time. One of God’s vigilantes. The sound of the deranged. It was bound to happen. You were sure to drag in some of the crazies in that trawling net Maddy had mentioned. It was unavoidable. He tried to imagine the mind of this caller, the curious disjointed perceptions, the way he must walk the streets with the umbrella of God perched over his shoulders. He would see satanic flames issue from the doorways of bars and poolhalls and movie houses. What the hell, it was out there, it was out there in its endless varieties and intricate patterns. Dark figures in doorways and frightened faces in desolate subways and the incoherent mutterings of panhandlers that suggested private worlds of sheer insanity. And Madeleine had said it was really sad. He pushed the STOP button.

Madeleine said, “When I hear somebody like that, somebody demented, I’m glad there’s no way anybody can associate you with that telephone number, Harry.”

Harrison nodded. It was true, a necessary precaution he’d thought about from the very beginning. The telephone number on the Apology handbill wasn’t listed in any directory. Nobody could trace his name from the number. It gave him a certain immunity, a distance from the callers—Madeleine had once called it a safety factor, but he was more inclined to think of it as a preservation of the idea of anonymity. If he didn’t know the names of the callers, why should they know his identity? It was important to the whole project. He looked at the answering machine for a second. Briefly, it appeared to have a life of its own—an electronic life suggested by the red CALL button and the green READY button, which might have been two small unblinking eyes. He reached out and touched the machine, a squat oblong box with artificial walnut veneer and metal trim. Then he turned towards Madeleine and stroked her hair, which was slightly damp even now. She was still lying with her eyes closed, a faint smile on her lips.

“Did I ever stop to thank you?” he said.

“Thank me?”

“For your help with this project. Your support.”

“Harry,” she said. “It comes easily.”

“Easily? I lay some off-the-wall idea on you and you don’t have any doubts?”

She turned over on her side, facing him. “I didn’t say I didn’t have any doubts exactly.” She paused a moment. “I have times of what you might call quiet misgivings. Little butterflies.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, I’m not sure. Maybe it’s the way I was raised, Harry. Something to do with the commandment thou shalt not eavesdrop.”

“You don’t really think about it that way, do you? I mean, it’s more than just some kinky intrigue about other people’s deep secrets—”

She touched the side of his face. Her hand was warm against his skin. “I know it is. I know it is. And I know you care about what you’re doing here.…”

He rose from the bed. He’d forgotten to take off his wet overcoat. Now he slipped it over the back of a chair, then went to the stereo that was beneath the window and put a record on the turntable. Harry closed his eyes a moment, waiting for the music to touch him. Unashamedly romantic, a Schumann piano quintet. He liked the structure of the piece, the organization, even the lingering sentimentality. Once, he’d thought about playing this music behind the sound of his recorded greeting on the answering machine.

HELLO, THIS IS MR. APOLOGY. APOLOGY IS NOT ASSOCIATED WITH THE POLICE OR WITH ANY OTHER ORGANIZATION. RATHER, IT’S A WAY TO TELL PEOPLE WHAT YOU’VE DONE WRONG AND HOW YOU FEEL ABOUT IT. ALL STATEMENTS RECEIVED BY APOLOGY MAY BE PLAYED BACK TO THE PUBLIC, SO DO NOT IDENTIFY YOURSELF. TALK FOR AS LONG AS YOU WANT. THANK YOU.

In the end he’d decided against the music: If you had just held up a liquor store and shot the proprietor by accident, if you’d just had sex with your own daughter or whatever, did you really need to hear, the music of Schumann or anybody else for that matter?

He went back across the room to the machine, pressed the PLAYBACK button, sat down on the bed again. There was another voice, a monotone rumbling out of the electronic circuits of the device. A wheezy, asthmatic rattle.

SOMETIMES I GET THIS URGE TO GO INSIDE ONE OF THEM BARS WHERE NIGGERS SIT AROUND … AND I WANNA TAKE OUT A MOTHERFUCKIN’ GRENADE, AND I WANNA TOSS IT RIGHT IN THE CENTER OF THIS BAR AND JUST WATCH … WATCH THEM BIG FUCKIN’ BLACK FACES GO UP IN SMOKE … HA HA HA.… I’LL DO IT ONE DAY, FOR SURE. I’LL REALLY DO IT … AND I AIN’T GONNA APOLOGIZE FOR IT NEITHER.

The message ended. Harry pressed the STOP button and looked at Madeleine. “Heavy,” he said.

“Somebody in need of treatment, Harry,” Madeleine said. “Somebody in need of a cushioned room.”

“Your average bigot.” He shrugged.

“You don’t think that guy might be capable of doing what he says he wants to do?”

“If he wanted to do it, would he tell me about it?”

“On the principle that the guy who intends to commit suicide doesn’t sit around calling his pals to tell them about it?”

“The same thing, sure.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Something in that voice gave me the creeps, Harry. The wheeze. The way the guy seemed to be sucking air. Like he was extremely angry—”

“Or extremely emphysematic.”

Madeleine sat up, her back against the wall. She stared at her fingernails a moment. “There’s a flaw in Apology. Right there. You never have any way of knowing if somebody’s lying to you.”

“I don’t think it matters. The imagined act of violence is just as interesting as the realized. I don’t really see any difference—”

“I do. It’s the difference between a bunch of black guys sitting around peacefully drinking their beer and that same bunch lying around with broken heads.”

Harrison put his arm around her shoulder. He tried to imagine the face of the last caller, tried to visualize some brutal face inside a phone booth, shoulders hunched, skin pale, the mouth slack, the eyes mindless. He could see the dim light of a phone booth at the end of some drab street shining grimly in the rain. Maybe a guy like that only flirted around the edges of violence; maybe Apology provided him with an outlet, a source of release, something necessary that prevented him from following through on his threat. He could talk his violence away; he could go home and fall asleep, perhaps pleased he’d managed to tell somebody—even a recording device—about the hatred he felt. True or false? Harry still wasn’t sure if it mattered whether the caller was on the level or otherwise; from the very outset he’d been aware of the fact that he was going to get a high percentage of liars, bluffers, big talkers on the tapes. Maybe it was enough just to hear the inherent violence in the voice. He lay back alongside Madeleine, closing his eyes. He was tired now; he felt cold. He was aware of Madeleine shifting around and he opened his eyes a little way to look at her. She was touching the answering machine, pressing the PLAYBACK button.

“Let’s just check and see if there are any more,” she said.

She’s into this, he thought. She’s getting into this project the way I am. He closed his eyes again, listened to the hum of the tape, waited. He was aware of the Schumann filling the small room. Rising, falling, the hammering of fingers on the keys of a piano. An intricate, lyrical moment: It seemed to reach out and ensnare him. A strange juxtaposition to the threat of violence.

APOLOGY … I’M A COP.… YOU THINK IT’S STRANGE. A COP CALLING YOU LIKE THIS? I DON’T HAVE A WHOLE LOT ON MY MIND EXCEPT FOR THE FACT THAT I’VE BEEN TAKING MONEY FOR THE LAST FEW MONTHS FROM THESE GUYS THAT OPERATE A NUMBERS GAME.… IT’S THE SAME OLD STORY, I GUESS. I GOT DEBTS. I GOT VARIOUS THINGS I NEED. I CAN’T MAKE THE ENDS MEET.… THIS JUST SEEMED LIKE AN EASY WAY TO MAKE SOME EXTRA BREAD … ONLY I DON’T SLEEP NIGHTS, APOLOGY.… I JUST WANTED TO TELL SOMEBODY.… NOW I FEEL GODDAMN EMBARRASSED.…

The line went dead. Madeleine stopped the tape.

“It figures,” she said.

“What does?”

“Cops.”

Harrison smiled. “You don’t like cops, do you?”

“I can’t put them high on my list of favorite civil servants. They always spend too much time dealing out traffic tickets and not enough time doing the real things. Like catching muggers. Rapists. Killers. I always get the impression that they’re writing tickets with one hand and hauling in crumpled bills with the other.”

A cop, he thought. He opened his eyes. “You know what pleases me, Maddy? It’s got nothing to do with the last message in itself. What pleases me is the whole response so far. The Apology thing is really touching people. People are reading the handbills. They’re reacting to them. And I think we’re going to get a broad spectrum of callers before we’re through.” He felt suddenly elated. He slapped the palms of his hands against his knees. It was going to be a success, it was going to work, it was going to work better than he’d ever imagined—the next step was to convince the people on the grants committee that this was a project worth funding. His elation dissolved a little when he thought of going to the interview and selling Apology to a committee of hardassed professors. He’d never exactly been at ease with academic types. It always seemed to him that they occupied a different world, breathed a distilled kind of oxygen.

He said, “The day after tomorrow.”

“What about it?”

“Professor Hutchinson and his gang.”

“I haven’t uncrossed my fingers in days, Harry.”

He looked at her. “I don’t know what I feel about it. Somewhere between optimism and pessimism.”

“You’ll get lucky. You just go in there thinking positive.”

“Pass me my Dale Carnegie.”

“Seriously.” She nudged his shoulder. “Positive thinking is the answer to a bunch of things. Just go in there and pretend you’re not really begging, just tell yourself that you’re doing them a favor by asking for their money.”

“I’ll try. I promise I’ll try.”

“Smile a lot. Look them straight in the eye. Works wonders.”

“Yes, coach. Sure, coach.”

She laughed at him. She lay with her face across his chest, her hands pressed to his sides. He tried to dismiss the idea of the grants committee; you could lose yourself quite easily in Madeleine, he thought, in making love to her. You could slide down into that cool uncomplicated world where you didn’t have to worry about voices on a tape or professors holding pursestrings or teaching high school to make the rent payments on a loft or entertain concerns about where, from the viewpoint of thirty-five, your future was headed. He shut his eyes and buried his face in her hair, placed his hands against the base of her spine, feeling for that strange spot in her back where a single touch upon some sensitive grouping of nerves and muscles made her shiver and laugh. He found it and she moaned, trying at the same time to twist away from him. I can’t explain it, Harry. It’s something like a ticklish feeling and something like a huge turn-on, she’d told him once. The mysterious quality of her body. The delicate smoothness of her skin. The moisture that lay faintly on her lips. She kissed him, then drew her face away. There was a light in her eyes; it was like a certain light he’d seen once underwater when a spike of sun had pierced the surface and illuminated the tiles of the pool in the manner of a revelation. He touched her breasts, moving his fingers slowly between the buttons of her blouse, undoing them, trying not to be clumsy. The breasts were warm, small, tight. He moved the palm of his hand gently against a nipple. And then he could feel her hand move across his stomach; he could hear the faint rattle of his belt buckle as she worked it open. The room was silent now; the music had stopped. She made a strange sound as he entered her—a sound both detached and intimate, as if she had come to exist in a world where opposites might dissolve. Detached, intimate. He moved inside her, knowing he couldn’t hold on, knowing that her excitement was carrying him along, feeling the sensation of orgasm begin somewhere at the base of his spine and flow like a hot tributary to his groin. She held him tightly against her, arching her back upwards in one sudden thrust. He shut his eyes very tight. It wasn’t between his legs now; it hadn’t anything to do with his body—the sensation was rooted in the dark center of his brain, a burning, fiery, tantalizing feeling that rose the way a firework might. And then he was silent, his face pressed to the side of her neck. This silence, this mutual quiet—as if a tent had been erected over them, a soundproofed cocoon—always filled him with a sense of wonder. Was this love? He wasn’t altogether certain how you defined love. What it was you were supposed to feel. Sometimes it seemed to him that love was a boundary you crossed, a frontier you negotiated, then you were lost in strange, imposing vistas. Sometimes, too, it seemed love was learned behavior, a fact of your life you grew to accept as soon as you understood it.

He had gone through his thirty-five years without a special commitment to any one woman. There had been several, of course, but they had come and gone, each one playing a mournful second fiddle to his work. Each of these women had shared one common attribute: He had been able to forget them when it came time to doing his work; he had been able to relegate them from his mind to the point where it always surprised him to find that they still lingered in the loft. He looked at Madeleine now and wondered if this one might turn out to be different: Was she going to slip into his life to the point of necessity? He also wondered why he didn’t find this question laughable. She had qualities he liked—she was truthful, loyal, and yet at the same time she could be critical. She enjoyed being involved in his work—unlike some of the past entries who had obviously resented what he did.

He rolled away from her, one leg still stretched across her body. He ran his index finger down her side, the nail lightly touching her skin. Then he turned over on his back and gazed at the ceiling. There was the sudden sound of the telephone ringing. Once, twice—then the answering machine kicked in. He could hear his own recorded message, then the beep, after which there was a period of quiet.

“The Apology line never closes,” Madeleine said.

I SAW YOUR POSTER DOWN AT THE PORT AUTHORITY BUS TERMINAL, YOU KNOW? WELL, I DON’T KNOW WHY I’M CALLING.… REALLY I SHOULD BE CALLING MY PARENTS.… I JUST RAN AWAY FROM HOME.… HELLO HELLO HELLO. IS ANYBODY THERE?… I JUST WISH MY PARENTS HAD LOVED ME A BIT BETTER.… GOODBYE.

A young girl’s voice. Hard to guess the age. Thirteen, fourteen maybe. Something in the sound of the voice touched Harrison—the desolation, the loneliness. I just wish my parents had loved me a bit better.

“I feel sorry for her,” he said.

“Me too. The poor kid. It makes you wish you could’ve just picked up the telephone and talked to her, doesn’t it?”

“Then it wouldn’t be the Apology line,” Harrison said.

“I guess.” Madeleine took his hand, pressing it between her own. Then she lay back and pulled a sheet up over her body. Harrison took off the rest of his clothes and settled down beside her. Fatigue was a monster. Something black circling his brain. He covered a yawn with his hand.

“Tired?” she asked.

“Pretty beat,” he said. Beat and satisfied; delighted by the fact that the handbills had already prompted a number of calls.

“It’s damned hard to go to sleep when you know you’ve got to get up in a few hours to go to work,” Madeleine said. She looked at her wristwatch and then unstrapped it. “It’s almost time to get up now.”

She put her arms around him. He watched her face; with her eyes shut there was something peaceful, something timeless, in her expression. He reached out and turned the volume control of the answering machine low. He was too tired now to listen to any more incoming calls. He would check the tape again when he woke.

2.

The man in the grey homburg hat and black overcoat passed under the sign carrying his name and stepped inside the gallery. The little bell that rang above the door had a somehow satisfying sound to it—it was like the discreet note of a muted cash register. As he undid the buttons of his coat he gazed at the midmorning traffic stuttering along 57th Street; it was a damp dog of a Manhattan morning, clouds so heavy and low they appeared to engulf the tops of skyscrapers. He rubbed his cold hands together and turned towards his small office at the rear of the gallery. Ah, the obstacle course—if he could make it back there without having to see any of the paintings that hung on the walls it would indeed be a small victory. They made him bilious; they churned his stomach. For a moment he didn’t even want to bring the socalled artist’s name to mind. Something Japanese. Each vast canvas echoed the last one, predicted the next. Each depicted a rainbow—not the kind of rainbow one might encounter in the natural world, but great arcs of somber colors, browns and blacks and purples, joyless things at the end of which you would expect to find a pot, not of gold, but lead. He stepped inside his office. The girl was already there, straightening papers on his desk. He hung his hat and coat on the hat rack and smiled at her. She reminded him of Ingres’s Comtesse d’Hausonville—the same slightly rounded face, the wide eyes, the hair center-parted and held back with a ribbon.

“There were a couple of calls,” she said.

He looked at the slips of paper she’d placed beside the telephone. He observed that his hand trembled a little. It was called “paying the piper,” he thought. It happened when too many last nights caught up with one. There had been a call from Feldman, Angela’s accountant. Damn, Feldman was always calling, always bitching about cash flow; he talked about this mysterious concept in such a way that he might have been marveling at some wonderful waterfall. Cash flow, Bryant. Cash flow. There was another call from a young lady who wanted to bring her portfolio around. She’d been advised to do so by Fotheringay, it seemed, who had a gallery up on East 74th Street. If the work was so commendable, why the hell didn’t Fotheringay want it for his own place? The waters were filled with sharks.

He put the message slips down and looked at the girl.

“Tell me something uplifting,” he said. “Tell me we’ve already had interested customers this morning. Tell me we’ve had a dozen positive inquiries concerning Tahiko’s rainbows.”

The girl smiled and shook her head. “We’ve had zero customers,” she said and leaned against the front of his desk. Pretty, he thought. She had a rather straightforward quality he enjoyed; she always looked you directly in the eyes.

He said, “In times of recession, my dear, nobody wants to buy pictures, especially pictures of such a depressing kind. Can you honestly imagine hanging one in your living room? They rather remind me of the colors you might see behind your eyes when you’re suffering a morning hangover.”

“Without the benefit of the night before.”

“Exactly.” He stared past her and out into the gallery, looking at the huge rainbows. “For me, the last great art was done by the Dutch in the seventeenth century. I look at those wretched rainbows and I cannot help thinking of Frans Hals’s Regentesses of the Old Men’s Almhouse. Those hands, the worn skin, the way you imagine you want to reach out and touch them. Art pulls you into a picture. It draws you beneath the surface. It most certainly shouldn’t repel you.” He paused; it always excited him to think about the Dutch masters. “Or Vermeer’s Kitchen Maid … the high forehead of the girl, the wide hips, the appearance of the water pouring from her jug. Has anybody ever painted water that way?” He shook his head, turned his face away from the sight of Tahiko’s gloomy canvases. She probably thinks I sound quaint, old-fashioned, perhaps even somewhat didactic. He looked at her, but couldn’t tell from her expression what might be on her mind.

“A question, Mr. Berger,” she said. “Why do we have these paintings anyhow? If you can’t stand them, and nobody seems to want to buy them, why do we have them in the gallery at all?”

“A good question, Madeleine,” he said. He stood up, surveyed the surface of his desk, took a nail file from the middle drawer, held it poised over his left hand. “In horse-racing, in any kind of gambling, you experience this strange and mysterious thing called instinct. An intuition that tells you what’s going to win. So what do you do? You put your money on the nose, don’t you? And, for my sins, my instincts told me that Tahiko was about to become fashionable. In this instance, those small secret voices at the back of my head were terrible liars. I placed my wager on quite the wrong horse.”

“Then we should get rid of them,” she said.

Just like that, he thought. Direct and to the point. He smiled at her in an avuncular way. “I wish to God we could, my dear. However, the ink probably hasn’t dried on the contract yet. And the world is filled with those carnivorous creatures called lawyers, who simply love to instigate lawsuits. Does that explain it?”

“I guess.” She looked at him a moment. “How long are we contracted for?”

“Another three weeks—”

“You could go bankrupt in three weeks.”

He came around the front of his desk and patted the back of her hand. “I think we can hold on a little longer,” he said. Thanks to Angela. Courtesy of my dear wife. Courtesy of the woman who sees the Bryant Berger Gallery as something of a tax scam. He didn’t want to think about Angela now, even if it were only a case of delaying the inevitable. He would have to call her sooner or later. There were excuses to be made.

“What are our plans after we’ve gotten rid of Tahiko?” she asked.

“I don’t have anything definite in mind yet,” he answered. “I’m still fishing, as they say.” Still fishing still trudging around those strange stuffy little lofts in the Village and SoHo and Tribeca, still looking at things concocted out of the bones of old birds and pieces of iron and plastic, at canvases which seemed to have been drooled over rather than painted. Still hoping. He drew the nail file across the fingertips of his left hand. The girl, standing in the office doorway, was gazing out thoughtfully at the gallery. She had an expression which he thought of as contemplative, almost as if something had just occurred to her. But she didn’t say anything. He moved out of the office and into the gallery, where he walked to the window; he stared out to 57th Street. A strident nagging voice inside his mind was harping at him: Call Angela, call your wife, you must get in touch with her. On a morning like this one, he thought, it was difficult to avoid facing the fact that you were nothing more than a middle-aged queer called Bryant Berger who operated—at considerable loss—a gallery in the center of Manhattan. A man hopelessly devoted to a certain school of painting, a man trying to stay afloat on those treacherous windblown tides of changing fashions in art. A man in search of a winner. He glanced around at the rainbows, conscious of the girl watching him from across the gallery. She had her arms folded. That look—one would call it purposeful.

“What’s on your mind, Madeleine?” he asked.

“Oh, nothing.”

“Then I wouldn’t like to see your expression when you did have something going on inside that head of yours.”

She laughed and vanished inside the office. After a moment he could hear her flicking through the pages of a ledger. Was she checking, perhaps, to remind herself of the time—the joyous day—when the Bryant Berger Gallery actually sold a painting? Three weeks ago, he remembered. Before Tahiko. Back then he’d had some rather pleasant pastels done by a young Israeli artist whose name escaped him now. He wished he still had them. He moved slowly towards the office. He remembered that tonight there was some opening he was supposed to attend.

“Where am I invited to tonight, Madeleine?” he asked.

“Hirschl and Adler,” she replied. “Figurative paintings done by Fairfield Porter.”

“Ah, yes.” He sat down behind his desk. He continued to file his nails. Little parings of nail clung to the metal—it was like seeing flakes of yourself as you fell apart, particle by particle. He put the file down. Too depressing. Then he looked at the telephone. Call Angela, tell her something. Anything. Felt a little queasy, my dear. Stayed at my club last night. Would she still buy that old melancholy tune? Got my finger stuck in a rainpipe and it took firemen five hours to cut me free.

He gazed at Madeleine a moment, as if he might find an answer to his dilemma in her face. But then she wasn’t the type who would lie unless perhaps it were a matter of life and death. She just didn’t have the face for it. He watched her as she went out to the gallery where the bell above the door had just rung and two people had come in. Definitely hicks, obviously good folks from Polyesterland. They had the stamp of Kansas or Oklahoma on them. Still, they might be looking for rainbows, God knows. He listened as Madeleine greeted them cheerfully. Then he put out his hand to pick up the telephone. Hesitation: He couldn’t think.

You say the guy that did these is a Jap?

I understand he lives in Brooklyn now.

Brooklyn, huh? What do you think of them, Madge?

Berger moaned to himself, then he punched a number into the telephone. After a moment he heard Angela’s voice—hoarse, distant, emerging from the deep dreamless sleep of Placidyl or whatever her current balm might be. She scares me, he thought. Why does she frighten me? Because she could just snap her fingers and take your gallery away from you, Bryant. She could pull the rug from under your feet, deprive you of your plaything.

“Angela,” he said.

She didn’t answer.

“Angela?”

“I’m still here, Bryant. Where are you?” A chill in the larynx. Chips of ice rolling off her tongue.

“About last night, my dear,” he said.

“Of course, last night, when you were conspicuously absent.”

“I had one of those business meetings. Dreadful affair. With an artist and his agent. You know how those things can just drag on and on.…”

“And you missed your train, didn’t you?”

“I had to stay at my club.” An old chestnut. But what if she’d checked? What if she’d called his club? He shut his eyes, wondering what new fabrications might lie ahead of him then.

“It happens too damn often,” she said. Arctic now. He tried to imagine her sitting up in bed, face puffy from pills, cluster of bags beneath the eyes, sagging neck. “I’m left on my own too many times, Bryant.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re always sorry.”

Pause. Silence. He wondered if she believed him. Over his head he pictured the looped shadow of some imaginary noose. A scaffold of his own making. He rubbed his eyelids.

How old is this Jap guy?

He’s quite young. About thirty.

I don’t know.… What do you think, Madge?

“I trust you’ll make your train tonight, Bryant. I hope you’ll be on time. We’re having the Feldmans.”

Dear God, the Feldmans, the accountant and his chintzy little wife and the entire conversation circling such arcane subjects as tax shelters and municipal bonds. “I’ll be there, Angela.”

“Which would indeed be a pleasant change, my dear.”

After he’d hung up he sat back in his chair and looked through the open door to the gallery where Madeleine was showing the hicks out. He rose and, with a sense of some small relief, went inside the gallery.

“They liked the rainbows,” Madeleine said and smiled. “They weren’t happy about having some ‘goddarn’ Jap painting in their house, though.”

“They didn’t buy one, of course.”

She shook her head. “But they said they’d be back. They had some other things to look at first. They come from Nebraska.”

Berger looked out into the street. “Whenever anybody tells me they’ll be back, they invariably never return. I suspect some black hole out there into which potential buyers simply vanish. Besides, can you honestly see one of those paintings adorning the wood panels of a den in some farmhouse out there in the heartland, my dear?”

Madeleine smiled again. “I’ve heard of stranger things.”

Such as? he wondered. He glanced at her. He understood how little he knew about the girl’s personal life. Was there a lover somewhere? He guessed so: Otherwise, how would one explain the kind of cheerful aura she always seemed to emit? Nobody was that happy-looking if they were lonely. He turned his face once more to the street, hands clasped behind his back. Then he realized someone was watching him through the window—

Dear Christ.

Why did he choose to come here, right to the gallery?

Why? It was embarrassing.

He stared at George’s face, the close-cropped red hair, the big grin that suggested all manner of mischief, the yellow windbreaker with the collar turned up under the chin. Was it obvious George was gay? Could somebody look at him and just know?

Berger felt a flush of blood at the back of his neck. He cleared his throat, turned to Madeleine, and said: “I have to go out for a while, my dear. You can handle things here, of course.”

“Of course,” she said.

He moved quickly towards the door and stepped out into the street, thinking of another door he might have to open one day very soon—the door of that strangling claustrophobic space called a closet.

The thought distressed him.

3.

Billy Chapman stared into the window of a store plastered with signs that said FIRE SALE. Handheld calculators and watches that played “Dixie” and video games and miniature cameras no bigger than cigarette lighters. He could see a customer inside, a guy examining an electronic chess game under a fluorescent light strip. He ran a hand through his thick black hair and looked along the sidewalk—but he didn’t really see the Times Square lunchtime crowds just shuffling along; he didn’t see the dopers looking glazed or the pimps scrutinizing their territory like they were lords of everything they surveyed. He turned his face upwards—a couple of gulls flapped towards the clouds. She’s gotta be home, he thought. She’s gotta be home about now. He sniffed a few times, found a crumpled Kleenex inside his jacket, blew his nose. Somebody inside the store, a guy with a salesman’s name-tag, was giving him the old fisheye. What the fuck you looking at, jack? You wanna step out here and say something like get your ass outta my doorway? Go ahead, try it, baby!

Billy stuffed the wet tissue back inside his pocket but he was still sniffing. Cocaine burn. Like they cut the shit with Ajax these days. The salesman turned away and Billy Chapman moved along the sidewalk. The air was filled with the sudden smell of pizza—but he didn’t want to think about food right now. He couldn’t handle the idea.

He turned out of the Square, his eyes watering. He rubbed them with the sleeve of his jacket. Things in front of him—people and traffic and storefronts—every damn thing just seemed to shimmer, like the world was dissolving in front of him. They had a name for this, he thought. They called this being strung-out. Being burned-out. It was like all your nerves were dancing at one time and your body wasn’t working properly and you couldn’t think of a goddamn thing except how the fuck to score.

He stopped on a street corner and looked at the tenement building across the way. Yeah, she was sure to be home now. When he’d called earlier nobody had answered the door. Maybe she’d stayed out all night long, casually screwing somebody, somebody she’d let pick her up and take home—like she was some kinda goddamn takeout order from a deli. He turned up the collar of his jacket and started to move across the street. He thought: People are looking at me. People are kinda looking at me sideways. Maybe because my eyes are watering.

Holy shit, nobody’s looking, Billy.

What the hell would they see anyhow?

Just this guy with long black hair and a pale face and a thin moustache, a guy in an old sportscoat and jeans and scuffed brown leather boots worn outside the pants. Nothing. Just a guy crossing a street.

He went inside the building. It was dark in the lobby. He stepped towards the stairs. He missed his mark as he climbed, stumbling a little, knocking an elbow against the hard edge of a step. Sweet suffering Jesus. You get to the second floor, then the third, then the fourth—and that’s where she lives. Floor number four. A radio was playing. He could hear the voice of that chick who sang up-front for Fleetwood Mac—what the hell was her name? He reached the fourth floor, paused, looked the length of the hall like he was afraid somebody might see him. He leaned against the wall because he felt weirdly weak. Strength just running out of him. Face it, Billy baby, whyn’t you face it? This cunt ain’t gonna give you jack shit.

He moved towards the door of her apartment. He rapped lightly a couple of times. She comes to the peephole, she sees me, she ain’t gonna open the door. Sure she will. Sure she’ll open the door for her own fucking flesh and blood. Waiting, he felt lightheaded, like part of his brain had turned into a bird and was flapping against the bone of the skull. Come on, come on, sister.

He heard a movement from inside the apartment, then the sound of a chain being drawn and the door slipped open. She was standing there in nothing but a slip, a pink slip; she was wearing stockings that were baggy at the knees. What does she look like, Billy? A slut, a goddamn slut. The way she holds her cigarette, like some hardassed hooker you might see strutting her stuff over on Times Square.

“Little brother,” she said. “What brings you here?”

“I gotta talk with you, Camilla.”

She started to shut the door. He forced his knee against it, holding it open. She stared at him, giving him a mean look, then turned away and he stepped inside the apartment. He followed her through the small living room and into the kitchen, where she picked up a knife and began to slice at some vegetables. A dump, he thought. She lives in a fucking dump.

“Only time you come here, little brother, is when you need bread. Well, let me say this straight off, man, I ain’t got any. Dig? I am flat broke.” Chop chop chop—a green pepper was sliced into strips. He stared at her fingers. They were long and pale. Something about the way she held the knife in those fingers made him remember … but the goddamn memory was slippery and elusive and he couldn’t pin it down. He looked past her at the kitchen window—why did it seem so bright outside? Why did there have to be all this light? It pained his eyes.

“Billy, what are you doing to yourself? Look at your condition, man. You are capital w wasted. You are a sad guy.”

“Hey, I didn’t come here to talk about how I appear, Camilla. You ain’t precisely what I’d call a Rembrandt yourself.”

“I had a long night, little brother.”

“In whose bed?”

“Man,” she said. She put the knife down. She shook her head from side to side, as if she were disgusted with him. “Something else, Billy. You smell. You smell of real old sweat. Jesus, when did you last shower? When did you last change your clothes?”

“I don’t know. What difference does it make?”

“Lemme guess, Billy. Lemme see if I can make a guess about what you been doing lately. Hmmmm.” She put a finger up against her lower lip and looked like she was puzzling over something. “It begins with the letter c. It goes up your nose and into your bloodstream. And wait—I’m getting something else. It costs more than a hundred bills a throw. Right?”

Billy Chapman didn’t say anything. The window was still too bright; he had to shut his watery eyes. He felt his sister touch him lightly on the shoulder and when he opened his eyes her face was real close to his and there was a look of sadness in her brown eyes. He couldn’t stand the way she stared at him.

“Billy, listen to me. Listen to your sister. You’re making a fuck-up of everything, you understand me? You’re just throwing your goddamn life away. Okay, so I know I ain’t exactly on the hit parade with my own life—but right now I’m only talking about you. Slow down, Billy. Take it easy. You’re just a bag of nerves, babe. Come on, Billy. Don’t get so strung-out.”

He looked into her eyes. Cow eyes. Dark brown and deep. He remembered. Something about the time when they’d been kids together. What was it?

“I need some money, Camilla,” he said. “That’s what I need. Like a loan.”

“What do you need it for? So you can stuff it up your nose?”

“A loan,” he said again.

“You’re pathetic, babe. Real sad.”

He knocked her hand away from his shoulder. “Where do you keep your bread, sis? Huh? Where do you keep it?” He slammed around the kitchen, knocking against the table, hauling open drawers and rummaging through them. She was moving behind him, clawing at his shoulders, trying to keep him still.

“Billy, come on, kid. This ain’t the way to behave. Sit down, sit down at the table, I’ll get you a beer or something.”

He stopped beside the stove. She had to have money. Tucked away someplace. Hidden. Stuffed inside a canister or stashed under a mattress. Somewhere she had to have some bread. Christ, she got good tips at that restaurant where she worked; she’d said so herself. So what did she do with them? He realized he was trembling, that his eyes were still watering, his nose running. He rubbed the tip of his nose with his sleeve.

“Can’t you see what you’re doing to yourself, Billy? Huh? Can’t you step back and take a long hard look? Come on, Billy. Sit down at the table—”

He knocked her hand away. “I got a meeting soon. I need the bread, you understand that? I got a meeting! I got to have the money!”

What would he do if Sylvester came and he didn’t have the jack? How the fuck could he let Sylvester go and take the merchandise with him? I need the goods, I need Sylvester, I need to make that appointment. He shut his eyes. He leaned against the stove. He realized he was sweating heavily, his shirt sticking to his skin. “Please, Camilla. A loan, that’s all.”

“You never pay back your loans,” she said. “You still owe me three hundred bucks from before, Billy. I don’t have it. And even if I did, you wouldn’t get your hands on a cent of it. I’m not going to see you do this to yourself, Billy.”

Fuck her.

Fuck this bitch.

She don’t understand my needs.

She don’t understand them.

“When did you last sleep, Billy? When did you last lay your head down on a pillow and close your eyes and just sleep?” She put one hand up to the back of his neck and began to stroke his hair quietly. “Sleep, baby brother. That’s what you need. Trust your big sister. Trust me, Billy. Sleep.”

He moved away from her. He saw what she was trying to do. She was trying to hypnotize him. He could see right through that. Don’t touch me again, he thought. Don’t lay your lousy hands on me. He went towards the window, opening the lids of various canisters as he moved. FLOUR. SUGAR. TEA. COFFEE. Nothing. Unless she’d hidden her bread under the surface of the flour or stuffed it down beneath the granules of sugar. “I’ll get the money back to you. I swear I will.”

“Jesus, you need money this bad, Billy, why don’t you go out and rob somebody, huh? Pick any rich-looking old guy walking along some dark street and rob him—why don’t you think about that?”

He closed his eyes. He was shivering. The insides of his head felt like Jell-O that hadn’t set. He heard her feet scuff across the floor and realized he couldn’t take it if she so much as touched him again; he couldn’t stand to feel her hands on his flesh or hair, couldn’t take the hot feel of her breath against his face.

“You know what I think, Billy? Huh?”

“I don’t give a fuck what you think!”

“I’m gonna tell you, little brother. You’re so far gone you need some kinda treatment. A shrink. A doc. You need professional help, man. You’re gonna kill yourself if you go on like this, Billy. I wish you’d listen to me.”

“Look, I only want some bread, cash, that’s all I want. Give me what you got and I’ll get the hell outta here.”

She was shaking her head. She was standing real close to him and shaking her head. “Nada,” she said. “You won’t get anything here.”

It didn’t take long. It took maybe a minute, hardly longer.

It didn’t take much strength either.

He was surprised how little effort he had to give.

He dug the tips of his fingers into her neck and he pressed, watching the way her mouth hung open and the panicky look came into her eyes, feeling her feet slap painlessly against his shins. He just dug and pressed, gripping her neck between the thumbs and fingers, making hooks of the hands, forcing the points of the thumbs hard and tight against the larynx, listening to the weird gurgling noise she kept making the more he pressed. It felt like the skin would break, that his fingertips would just pierce the soft flesh and blood would come through the broken openings of veins, but that didn’t happen. And then she was down on her knees and he was shaking her head back and forward, forward and back, feeling all the life just run out of her, seeing the light fizzle in her eyes, seeing it change from panic and fear to some cold indifference, a matter-of-fact expression, seeing the corners of her mouth twist downwards and her tongue come out from between her teeth. Then she seemed to sigh and her head was loose between his hands, her neck twisted in a strange way to one side, her eyes popping a little. He slackened his grip, held her face against his thigh a moment, then pushed her away from him.

He stepped backwards into the table.

Jesus Christ!

What have you done, Billy?

She lay propped against the wall. Her legs were spread wide apart. He stared at her for a time, conscious of a slight smell in the kitchen. What was it? The stove. Yeah. A pan of oil was sitting on the stove and the burner was on LOW. She’d never eat her lunch now.

He moved towards her, stood over her, looked down at her spread legs, thighs visible where the slip had slid upwards.

Camilla.

A loan, I needed a loan, I asked you, I gave you a chance!

He shut his eyes a second.

Then he opened them, looked at her.

The wide-spread legs.

That was it. That was what it was. He remembered it all now.

Out on the street a trio of fags brushed past him. They left a smell of perfume in their trail. Blowdried hair and thick makeup and clothes you just knew would glow in the dark, for God’s sake. He walked to the corner. He was dizzy. He put a hand inside the pocket of his jeans and felt the wad of bills. Why didn’t they make him feel as good as they should have done? What was this dizziness, this quick pain in his gut? She’d kept her bread in the most obvious of places, the easiest place in the whole goddamn world to find. Inside her purse. Jesus! Easy as that. Inside her fucking purse. He wanted to laugh about that but the stomach pain seized him again and he doubled over, groaning a little. He had to lean against the window of a store. A sex shop. A black dude stepped out, carrying a brown bag under one arm. Billy watched him pass, then found himself looking through the glass. Lubricants. Amyl nitrate sold in little bottles under weird names. Porn movies. Books and magazines. You could go inside and buy vibrators that emitted milk. You could get whips and masks and plastic dolls you blew up with a bicycle pump, then fucked.

You killed her, Billy.

His mouth was filled with sticky saliva. There were spots in front of his eyes.

He moved along the sidewalk again, pausing at a DON’T WALK sign. Somebody had stuck a poster below the sign. It caught his eye and he read a few lines of it before the light flashed WALK. He tore it down and crumpled it inside his pocket and then crossed the street. Maybe he’d read the rest of it later, maybe not.

ATTENTION

CRIMINALS

BLUE COLLAR, WHITE COLLAR

YOU HAVE WRONGED PEOPLE. IT IS TO THE PEOPLE YOU MUST APOLOGIZE. NOT TO THE STATE. NOT TO GOD. GET YOUR MISDEEDS OFF YOUR CHEST!

CALL MR. APOLOGY

He wiped his eyes. It was just another cuckoo, another fucker fallen out of his tree in a city where the sidewalks were already splattered with all kinds of broken eggshells.

4.

When Madeleine left the Bryant Berger Gallery for lunch she went along 57th Street to Fifth Avenue, where she turned north, hurrying through the midday crowds. A great restless river of people; they moved almost as if they were joined together by invisible threads. She was already late, which meant that Jamey would be sitting in the restaurant and becoming more and more fretful with each minute that passed. Impatient girl—there was always a deadline in her life, always some impossible schedule. When Madeleine reached the restaurant she paused outside a moment, wondering about the handbill in her purse, wondering if her idea was right or wrong. It couldn’t hurt Harry, she thought. It could only help him. She went inside the delicatessen and saw Jamey sitting on the far side of the large room. The smell of pickles, dill, smoked sausages, cheeses—a whole rush of scents came in on her at once. She threaded her way through the tables and sat down facing Jamey, who stubbed out her cigarette and smiled and reached out to touch the back of Madeleine’s hand.

“What they say is true,” Jamey said. “Love enhances, makes the eyes bright and the skin clear. I always thought that was an old wives’ tale.”

Madeleine laughed. She gazed at her friend for a moment. The short dark hair, wide cheekbones, an unusual kind of prettiness. “You look good yourself, Jamey.”

“I can’t complain,” Jamey said. “Shit, of course I can. I smoke too much and I cough a lot and Walt has an ulcer, which means we’re suffering through this stupid bland diet together. I give him moral support through the mountains of tapioca and poached eggs.” Jamey opened her purse. It was black and white checks and matched the material of her jacket, the kind of jacket with padded shoulders you sometimes saw in old Joan Crawford movies. Jamey went to great lengths for her clothes, rummaging through thrift stores and garage sales and Salvation Army outlets. Madeleine tried to remember what Walt looked like, couldn’t bring his face to mind; she only knew he worked on the same magazine as Jamey and that they’d been living together for about ten months. She watched her friend slip a cigarette out of her purse and light it. The handbill, she thought. When would she find the chance to bring up the subject of Apology?

“Otherwise, life goes on,” Jamey said. “I just wrote a piece on this former linebacker for the Jets who’s turned to writing poetry. I wouldn’t bother to read it. Besides, his poetry sucks. But I want to know about you, Maddy. I’ve never seen you look quite this—God damn it—vibrant.”

Madeleine glanced at the menu. Corned beef on rye, pickles, cole slaw … vibrant, she thought. Maybe she was. Maybe she did look different these days. It must show on her face, in her eyes, everywhere.

Jamey said, “Sometimes you get this tiny secretive look on your face, Maddy, which absolutely infuriates me. I remember you used to get that same look back at good old Duke when you’d scored perfect on some test and you didn’t want to tell anybody. Well, you’ve got the same damn look now. I’m waiting. Sitting on the edge of my seat even. Tell me all about this wonderful man you mentioned on the telephone. Don’t keep me hanging like this.”

“You mean Harry?”

“Don’t play nonchalant with me and don’t give me that wide-eyed look. I’ve known you too long for that.”

“He’s an artist.”

“What kind of artist?”

“Different things.” Madeleine paused, glancing across the restaurant. A waitress was hovering nearby; she had the vaguely hooded look of an old vulture. “He paints. He does some sculpture in different materials.”

“Would I have seen any of his work?”

Madeleine hesitated. “He isn’t well-known yet, Jamey. But he’s going to be. It’s only a matter of time. I’m sure he’ll be famous one day. He’s got a lot of ability, a lot of talent.”

“What are you, Maddy? His private pompon girl? His personal chamber of commerce?”

Madeleine laughed. “I believe in him, that’s all.”

“All this sounds perilously close to the real thing,” Jamey said. Her face vanished momentarily behind a cloud of smoke.

“I think it is,” Madeleine said. “It depends on how you define the real thing, though.”

“Since you sound like the expert, suppose you tell me.”

“He’s kind. He’s considerate. He enjoys me the way I am. We get along really well together. I keep surprising myself with my own impatience to see him. To be with him.”

“You make him sound like a narcotic, Maddy.”

Madeleine watched the waitress approach. A narcotic, she thought. Maybe it was something like that, but it was a different and better kind of high than any she’d ever had with a drug. The waitress stopped at the table. Madeleine ordered a green salad and Jamey, who gave the menu only a cursory glance, asked for pineapple and cottage cheese.

“He shares his work with me. He makes me happy. I think I make him happy in return.” Madeleine paused. A whole new life, she thought. Harry has given me a whole new life, one filled with color and texture and meaning. “Would you understand it if I told you he lets me breathe? Would that make sense to you?”

“I think so,” Jamey said. “In other words, this isn’t what you’d call a possessive, claustrophobic relationship. The kind that chokes. The kind that strangles.”

“Right,” Madeleine said.

Jamey was silent a moment. “I can’t get over how happy you look. You shine. You shine in this disgusting way.”

Madeleine smiled. She suddenly felt like she was the keeper of some arcane secret, a thing too profound to utter. There was a warmth inside, a glow, the kind of feeling which, only a few months ago, she might have scorned. It happens, she thought. It really happens.

“How did you meet this wonderful man?”

“He came into the gallery where I work,” Madeleine said. “He just started talking to me. I don’t remember what it was—maybe it was something to do with the pictures on display. I don’t recall. Then he went away and I figured, well, that’s that. He was nice, I guess, but I don’t suppose I thought any more about him.” She paused a moment. She could remember the day, the hot weather of the last relics of summer, even the clothes Harry had been wearing—faded brown cord pants, a navy blue shirt, sneakers—but she couldn’t recall anything of their first conversation.

“Then he came back,” Jamey said.

“The next day. He asked me out. We went to an Indian restaurant. Then I went home with him.” She remembered that, the curious nervy sense of sexual tension, the anticipation, a sudden wild desire that had quite astonished her. It was as if in a single moment Harry had made her entirely forget the faces and the names and the performances of any other lovers she might have had in the past. All four of them, she thought.

“Just like that,” Jamey said. She was glancing at her watch now. Why is she always in such a hurry? Madeleine wondered. Always running, jacket flying behind her, purse strung out from her shoulder like a wake she left in her passage.

“It took me by surprise, Jamey. I wasn’t really expecting anything. I wasn’t looking for something hot and heavy. I wasn’t exactly gasping to jump into bed with somebody. But I knew, just as soon as I saw him in the restaurant, I knew we’d become lovers. I don’t quite know how to phrase this. I had this overwhelming desire. It was like a sharp needle inside me. I don’t know if I’m making sense—”

“You were horny,” Jamey said. “You had the hots for him.”

Madeleine smiled. Good old Jamey. She had this way of reducing things, getting back to basic chemistry, stripping things down. “Right. But it was something I’d never felt before. And I keep feeling it, Jamey. It keeps growing. It keeps on getting better.”

“I should have ordered wine and toasted you,” Jamey said. “I’m delighted you’re happy. You need a bridesmaid real soon?”

“A bridesmaid? We haven’t even gotten around to living together yet.”

“You still keep that little apartment of yours?”

“Sure—”

“Why haven’t you moved in with him?”

“It just hasn’t happened. We’ll both know when the time is right for that step. I think there’s this period where people need to adapt to each other, where they need to make adjustments before they plunge into a living situation like that. It’ll come. But not before we’re both really ready.” Madeleine leaned back in her chair a moment, closed her eyes, listened to the din of the restaurant around her. Everything she’d told Jamey was true, everything exactly as it had happened. She hadn’t been looking for anything, hadn’t been living in the unsettling anticipation of love’s landslide, hadn’t been watching the weather for omens of the heart. She had come to New York City from the stultifying safety of Roanoke, Virginia, found a job at the gallery, an apartment in the upper 80s, dated a couple of times in a desultory way—usually with men who’d come into the gallery or someone she’d met at one of those cocktail-drenched openings that were so prevalent in the fixed world of galleries and shows—nothing that was ever serious, ever threatening. It wasn’t such a bad life: She was well paid (a strange miracle, she sometimes thought, considering the amount of business the gallery didn’t do); the apartment was small but pleasant; her social life was under the kind of control she enjoyed. And then Harry … after Harry nothing could ever have been the same; she could never have gone back to a world without him. She even had a hard time remembering life before him, almost as if she were sifting the recollections of somebody unfamiliar. It was like she’d unconsciously erected safety barriers around her existence and Harry had come crashing through.

She opened her eyes. The waitress placed food in front of her. She watched Jamey pick at her cottage cheese. A late-season fly, glossy as a bat, hovered over the piles of cheese and chunks of pale pineapple. Madeleine placed a fragment of limp lettuce inside her mouth.

Jamey said, “What does he feel about you? Has he told you he loves you?”

“He hasn’t said it in so many words.…”

“No?” Jamey raised an eyebrow. “Why not?”

Madeleine didn’t say anything for a moment. Then: “I’m not sure he absolutely realizes it himself yet.”

“Meaning what? He’s in love with you only he doesn’t know it?”

“It’s all a matter of recognition, Jamey. He needs a little time to get used to the idea. Then he’ll tell me.”

“You sound pretty sure.”

“It’s a feeling.”

“Women’s intuition.”

“You’re laughing at me.”

“I’d never laugh at you, Maddy.” Jamey gazed down at her food.

Madeleine said, “He’s too accustomed to his loft. Living alone. The solitary projects. He just needs time to get really accustomed to the fact of what he feels. Then he’ll tell me.”

Jamey was silent for a while, picking at her food. “I’ll have to take your word on that,” she said eventually. “If you can stand a change of subject, how’s the job?”

“It’s just fine. I don’t know how the gallery survives, but it does.” The gallery, she thought. She remembered the idea that had come to her only that morning when she’d been talking with Berger. Maybe. Just maybe it would work. She’d talk to Harry about it later. She nibbled on some more lettuce, then was thinking about the Apology handbill in her purse. It was burning a hole in there. It was all a matter of the right approach now. A matter of getting Jamey’s interest. How could she do that? She opened the purse, then hesitated. There was a roundabout way of doing this—there was also a pretty straightforward manner. But which? Look what I found inside a phone booth today, Jamey. Isn’t that interesting? Wouldn’t that make a terrific story? A small deceit, a trifling mischief. But she’d never been very good at juggling such things.

“What are you working on now, Jamey?” she asked.

“I’m supposed to be finishing up a story about this old longshoreman who’s also a sculptor. He’s an interesting guy. Energetic as hell. He makes his work out of any old material he can find around the docks. I hope I have that kind of energy when I’m his age.” She looked at her watch. “Speaking of work, I don’t exactly have a lot of time. The story’s supposed to be ready this afternoon.”

“What are you writing after that?”

Jamey shrugged. “I’m not sure yet.”

Madeleine hesitated. There was an opening here, a place she could jump into. She took the handbill from her purse and slid it across the table to her friend. Jamey picked it up and read it through.

“What’s this? A joke?”

Madeleine shook her head. “It’s no joke.”

“Why are you showing it to me?”

“I thought it might make an interesting story for you, Jamey. You know, the idea behind it, why it exists, the mysterious identity of the person who runs the Apology line.”

Jamey stared at the handbill again. “Where did you get this?”

Madeleine didn’t say anything.

“You’ve got that secretive look on your face again, Maddy.”

“I do?”

“Sure you do. You want to tell me about this Apology business in a couple of short sentences?”

Madeleine hesitated again. Then she said, “If you decide to write a story, you’d have to keep his identity hidden.”

“You’re getting ahead of me, kid. Whose identity?”

“Harry’s.”

“Harry is behind this?” Jamey stared at her.

“Yes.” A whisper.

Jamey pushed her chair back from the table, lit a cigarette, crossed her legs. “Are you perfectly serious?”

“Perfectly.” Madeleine nodded.

Jamey was silent for a moment. She scanned the handbill a third time, shaking her head from side to side. “Let me get this straight. He’s got this confession line going, right?”

“Look, I was as puzzled as you at the start—”

“People call in and confess things?”

“I’ve heard the tapes, Jamey.”

“Does your boy know what he’s doing?”

“Talk to him. He can explain it far better than me.”

Jamey folded the paper, stuffed it into her purse, looked at her watch again. “It sounds pretty wacky, Maddy.”

“I know how it sounds.”

“It’s out of left field.”

“I know.”

“You feel he needs some publicity?”

“It can’t hurt him, can it?”

Jamey shook her head. “I don’t suppose it can.”

“You sound uncertain, Jamey.”

“If I think there’s a good story behind this and I decide to do it, I have to keep his identity concealed, right?”

“Right.”

“Because there are some real loonies out there running around.”

Madeleine nodded. “And secrecy is part of the whole deal.”

“I can understand that.”

“Will you do it? Will you do it, Jamey?”

Jamey snapped her purse shut. “I can’t promise. I’ll look into it.”

“You wouldn’t print his name?”

“I didn’t say I’d print anything, did I?”

Madeleine smiled at her friend. She watched as Jamey rose from the table and slung her purse over her shoulder. She knew it, she just knew it: Jamey is intrigued—it’s written all over her face—there’s that small concentrated light in her eyes she gets when she’s onto the scent of something good, something she can bite into.

“God, you really are Harry’s private booster, aren’t you? Does he pay you for doing his PR work?”

“I don’t think he even knows what PR stands for.”

“The detached artist, huh? The ivory tower approach.”

Madeleine reached out to touch the back of her friend’s hand. “He deserves some recognition—”

“Even of the anonymous kind?”

“Even that.”

Jamey shook her head. “It’s such a bizarre thing to be doing.”

“It’s not so weird when he explains it.”

“I’m sure,” Jamey said. “Look, kid, I need to rush. I’ll read the paper over again. Then I’ll be in touch. Okay?” She leaned over and kissed Madeleine on the side of her face and then was gone, hurrying across the restaurant, brushing past waitresses, skirting tables, dashing through the front door to the street. Madeleine watched her go, then pushed her salad aside. It was a risk, she thought. Cold print was always a risk, but she knew Jamey and knew that she wouldn’t divulge Harry’s identity. Madeleine knew that much. So the secrecy, the anonymity, of the Apology project would be preserved. And Harry, even if indirectly, would get some decent publicity. How could that fail to help with the members of the grants committee? She sat back in her chair, feeling good, feeling somewhat pleased with herself. She’d just done the kind of thing Harry wouldn’t have done for himself. She’d just helped move him a little closer into the kind of spotlight she thought he deserved. And he does deserve it. He does.

She picked up her purse and rose from the table.

5.

The woman, Camilla Darugna, lay with her head propped up against the kitchen wall and her legs splayed. Her pink slip had risen up her thighs and her arms were spread at her sides. A saucepan filled with oil smoldered on the stove. Black smoke hung heavily in the kitchen; it was drifting slowly towards the window Moody had opened earlier but was still dense and choking. Nightingale watched as the Boy Wonder stepped over the body of the woman and gazed at her upper thighs. You need a gas mask in here, Nightingale thought, something to keep the fumes out of your lungs.

“When did you last see one of them?” Moody asked.

“One of what?”

“A garter belt. A garter belt in the age of panty hose.”

“I thought they were before your time, Doug.”

“I’ve seen movies of the period.” Moody turned his young face away from the remains of Camilla Darugna and smiled at Nightingale; that face, that young face, smooth skin and bright eyes and a baby’s mouth—did Moody shave yet? Going around with Moody made Nightingale feel older than forty-nine. Old, overweight, and looking along the borderline to fifty, the magic five-oh, the mystical number. He wondered why he felt fond of Moody. Maybe it was because they were both, in a sense, victims of their last names. People made jokes, always the same ones. Depressed today, Moody? Or, Hey, Nightingale, whistle something for us. A buck for every one of those he’d heard and he wouldn’t be standing in this smoke-filled kitchen right now—he’d be out in Palm Springs with Bob Hope and Gerald Ford, playing some casual rounds of golf. He coughed into his hand, looked out the window. On the street below he could see the lights of two cop cars flashing and the usual small gathering of those with a morbid interest in the movements of policemen. Did they smell death in the air, those ghouls? He turned away from the window. As if it were a valuable museum piece, the garter belt still held Moody’s attention. Gruesome, Nightingale thought. He stretched out his hand and tugged on the dead woman’s slip, drawing it down to her knees. She deserves something, he thought. A little bit of dignity. He stared at the bruises on her throat. If it hadn’t been for the smoke you could never tell how long she might have lain here, undetected, rotting away, deteriorating. The smell would have brought the neighbors buzzing around finally. The terrible smell.

“Strangulation isn’t as fashionable as it used to be,” Moody said.

“Fashions come and go in murder,” Nightingale said. There was something aloof about Moody, about the way he looked at death. It was like he surveyed the world from behind the safety of a plastic sheet. He should have been an undertaker, maybe, or an embalmer. Something suitably morbid.

Moody looked thoughtful a moment. “We live in times of technology running amok, Frank. We invent new weapons and we make them easy to get. Which means people can distance themselves from their victims when they get into a killing frame of mind. That’s why it’s so unusual to see a victim whose assailant employed such an intimate technique of murder.”

“The laying on of hands,” Nightingale said. Moody was given to such ruminations from time to time. Given to little speeches that tended to ramble. Speculative outbursts. He’ll mellow with time, Nightingale thought. He glanced at the dead woman. Thirty maybe. Black hair held back by a little plastic clasp. Somebody had come in here and strangled her, put his hands up around her neck and squeezed and squeezed until everything was gone out of her—the fight, the struggle, the will to survive. He looked through the open kitchen doorway. A uniformed cop was rummaging around in the living room. A clumsy big guy.

“What do we know about her, Doug?”

“Camilla Darugna. Thirty-one, according to her driver’s license. Lived alone. It seems she was separated from her husband, who had returned to his native Mexico. No offspring. She worked nights as a waitress at a place called Leaves and Shoots, a vegetarian restaurant on Bleecker Street. That’s about it for now. We’re checking for next of kin.”

“Did she have a boyfriend? Anybody special?”

“The neighbors are like brass monkeys, Frank. See nothing, hear nothing, do nothing.”

“It figures.” Nightingale went back to the window. The crowd below had grown; the spoor of a fresh murder had drawn them from the safety of their little locked boxes. “So how do you see it, Boy Wonder?”

Moody shrugged. “Passion. Hatred. No premeditation. A lover maybe. He comes in, jealous, outraged, discovers the evidence of his own cuckoldry and ties his fingers in a knot around the woman’s neck.”

Oil on the stove and a sliced green pepper; she had been about to make herself some lunch. Fried peppers, maybe. A few pieces of sliced onion, a couple of dissected mushrooms. A lunch she never ate. Nightingale wandered around the kitchen. Why hadn’t the killer used the kitchen knife that lay on the counter beside the veggies? Passion, like Moody said. Blind rage, torrent of anger, wham. You don’t think in those situations, do you? You yield to the blood urge. The hunger to hurt. “A lover,” he said, more to himself than to his young partner.

“That’s conjecture,” Moody said.

“She opens the door for him and he comes in.”

“Yeah. She knows him.”

“And we go from there. An argument.”

“Right. He says, ‘What the hell, you’ve been fooling around’ and she denies it and from there it escalates into total war.” Moody stepped over the corpse.

“The knife,” Nightingale said. “Why didn’t he use that?”

“Could be he didn’t think about it. Or, more premeditatively, he didn’t want to get blood all over himself and go walking around this city of ours.”

Premeditatively, Nightingale thought. What a mouthful, what an ugly word. He smiled to himself. He strolled across the kitchen, paused at the refrigerator, stared at the message board held there by a magnet in the shape of a butterfly. The scribblings were mainly connected with the woman’s work, the hours of her shift and her nights off. There was a tiny shopping list: broccoli 3 carrots potatoes milk

He tried to imagine her counting carrots in a supermarket.

Call Alex was written beneath the list.

Just that. No number. Nothing else. Man or woman? he wondered. How could you tell in this age of unisex names?

He twisted his head around quickly when he heard the sound of something breaking in the living room; he saw the uniformed cop standing there looking like a wet St. Bernard that has spotted a leak in its brandy barrel. He held a shattered picture frame in his hand; a print of the Virgin Mary hung halfway out of broken glass.

“Sorry, lieutenant,” the cop said. “I don’t know how it happened. This madonna fell on my head when I was bending over.”

“You a Catholic, Seitzman?”

“No, sir.”

“Then you can bet your ass it wasn’t meant to be an omen.” Nightingale turned away from the cop and looked across the kitchen at Moody, who was sifting through a drawer and making mmmm noises.

“This must have been her all-purpose drawer, Frank. Nails. Coupons. Safety pins. Plastic Baggies. Ah-hah, what have we here? A roach clip that still contains the relic of a joint. Want to light up and get stoned?” Moody was holding the clip in the air.

“I never use the stuff,” Nightingale said.

“Never tried it?”

Nightingale shook his head. “It’s no big deal she smoked dope anyhow. Christ, millions of Americans go around red-eyed all the time. It just never appealed to me.”

Moody put the clip back in the drawer. “I used it at college,” he said. “I had this girl friend who was something of a small-time dealer. She’s an instructor there now. Every so often I get this funny notion.…” Moody laughed to himself. “I get this funny idea I’ll go back to Buffalo and pretend to just bust her. I like the prospect of seeing her expression.”

“Then you say April Fool,” Nightingale said. What was the goddamn point in making an issue out of something like grass, in any case? He saw it in terms of a waste of manpower. You bust some kid for a couple of lids and you only clog up the system and waste a hell of a lot of time. He looked out the window a moment. Then he said, “What was the name of that restaurant?”

“Leaves and Shoots. Bleecker Street.”

“Let’s run over there.”

Nightingale went inside the living room where the big cop was trying to hang the broken picture back on the wall. He stepped out of the apartment and into a long hallway that led to the stairs. Neighbors were standing around, talking in the kinds of whispers people reserved for funerals. There were a couple of uniformed cops relentlessly taking statements. The scene would be photographed, the place dusted for prints, the statements read and weighed and compared, a bunch of people would begin to ask a bunch of questions; none of this activity would restore life to Camilla Darugna. He began to go down the stairs. He thought: Somewhere in this city there’s a guy with the flesh of a dead woman under his fingernails.

In the street the wind was chilly. Frank Nightingale could smell winter on it. The season’s turning, he thought, the coming of snow, the last leaves dying on branches. He turned up the collar of his coat and shivered, then slid onto the passenger seat of the car. Moody could drive. Moody enjoyed the plotting and the scheming that went on against his fellow drivers, that whole struggle for survival in the bedlam and kamikaze assaults of city traffic. The small crowd on the sidewalk was staring at him—it was almost as if he were expected, like some courtly physician, to read a bulletin from a prepared statement. I have to inform you that the condition of Camilla Darugna is now stable. Permanently so.

Moody got in and started the car, moving it away from the sidewalk. When he’d gone a couple of blocks he reached inside the pocket of his coat and fished out a crumpled piece of paper. He passed it to Nightingale. “I’ve been meaning to show you that. You seen it already?”

Nightingale smoothed the paper out against his knee. He read it through. “This city’s filled with jokers, Doug. We got standup comics coming out the kazoo.”

“And you think that’s a joke?”

“Why not?”

“A damn elaborate joke. You go to all the trouble of printing the thing, then you need to run around putting it up on display. I’ve seen it in a few places already.”

Nightingale stared at the sheet again. The tone of the thing—what could you say about it? Shrill? Melodramatic? It sounded crazy to him.

ATTENTION

CRIMINALS

BLUE COLLAR, WHITE COLLAR

YOU HAVE WRONGED PEOPLE. IT IS TO THE PEOPLE YOU MUST APOLOGIZE. NOT TO THE STATE. NOT TO GOD. GET YOUR MISDEEDS OFF YOUR CHEST!

CALL MR. APOLOGY (212)555-2748

Nightingale passed the paper back to Moody. “Maybe you could use it, Doug. You look like a guy with something heavy on his mind.”

“And here I figured I was doing you a favor,” Moody said.

Nightingale stared out the window. Already there were lights in restaurants, glimmering against the oncoming dark. WHEN YOU CALL YOU WILL BE ALONE WITH A TAPE RECORDER. Guaranteed anonymity, the privacy of an electronic confessional. You call the guy’s answering machine and you apologize for something and then you hang up. What was the point behind it all? Maybe the guy got his jollies listening to people saying they were sorry, itemizing their assorted misdeeds. Voyeurism of a kind. Peeping Tom replaced by Telephone Tom.

He watched as they approached Sixth Avenue. ATTENTION CRIMINALS. What kind of calls did the guy get? And what kind of people would call him anyway? He said, “If he’s serious, Doug, I figure he’s asking for trouble. Would you go around giving out your phone number like that?”

“I guess he’s installed a private line or something,” Moody said. He slowed the car at a red light, tapping his fingers on the rim of the wheel. “I don’t see it as a joke. I think he might be offering a genuine service. I could see that. You get your disillusioned, your lonely—”

“‘Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.’”

“Seriously, Frank. Take a guy with something on his conscience, okay? He doesn’t give a monkey’s fuck about church because God hasn’t kept him supplied in the folding green and every priest he ever met was a raging queen, and he doesn’t trust the state because he doesn’t like cops and all the lawyers he ever knew only wanted his bread and all the judges he ever saw had electric chair shining in their eyes. Where does this guy turn when he wants to let some of the pressure out?”

“You’re saying he might turn to a tape recorder?”

“Damn right,” Moody said. “It’s the same distancing I talked about before, Frank. The priest updated. Why not confess to a goddamn machine? Why not say you’re sorry to a recording device?”

Nightingale sat back, closed his eyes. He tried to imagine himself dialing the number of this Apology character. He tried to imagine what he might say. Hi, this is one of New York City’s so-called finest, and what I’d like to do is apologize to my wife Sarah for all the unholy hours of this profession and for all the loneliness she had to put up with, and how sorry I am she walked out. I’d also like to apologize to my mother for slipping a buck out of her purse when I was nine years old.…

Sarah.

Four months ago she’d moved out of their apartment on 72nd Street; she’d gone upstate to the town of Fulton, the original one-horse, tightassed dump which had the balls to bill itself as The City with a Future. It was what lawyers called a trial separation. Twenty-four years of marriage, he thought: There shouldn’t be a trial anything after that length of time. And what was she doing in Fulton? Pursuing this folly of opening a small gift shop that also purveyed health foods and freerange eggs and protein drinks. Tourist items as well. But you couldn’t expect tourists in Fulton unless you had a couple of bewildered Canadians who’d strayed off the interstate. He turned to look at Moody and said, “I went up to see Sarah last weekend.”

“Yeah?”

“Last week her enterprise took in the princely sum of seventy-three bucks. Hardly enough to pay the electric bill.” He sunk down into his seat. Why did he feel this need to talk to Moody about the bruised condition of his marriage? Somebody, Frank, you got to talk to somebody.

“What kind of place is Fulton?” Moody asked.

“Shit. You know the kind of joint. It’s like the whole town’s got lockjaw.”

Moody smiled. “Is she coming back home?”

“She gives me this rap about how she just can’t take the pressures of the city anymore. She can’t put up with my absences. I said it was all I ever knew. Being a cop was the only thing I’d ever done. What else am I supposed to do, Doug?” Nightingale gazed at the storefronts. He felt uncomfortable talking like this.

“Meet her halfway,” Moody said.

“Which would be roughly around Utica.”

“You know what I mean. Get her to come home, start trying to find more free time, take her out to the theater. That kind of thing. Pay more attention to her.”

Nightingale said nothing for a while. He puffed his cheeks and whistled tunelessly a moment. He didn’t want to think about Sarah and the emptiness of the apartment and the ketchup labels he read when he sat down to some half-defrosted meal. “She’s a beautiful woman. She gets better as she gets older, Doug. I never figured it would work like that.”

The car was on Bleecker Street now. Nightingale thought about Camilla Darugna. That’s the place to put your mind, Frank. Turn it in the direction of the victim. Just keep thinking about Camilla lying there in her kitchen.

“Maybe you should call this Apology guy,” Moody said. Nightingale laughed. “Would you call him if you had something on your mind?”

“Why not?” Moody said. “I’ll say one thing, though. It would be damn interesting to listen to his tapes.”

6.

Harrison stepped towards the figure that sat in the chair by the window. The lamp in the corner glowed dimly: You could see the uncombed dark hair, the hands dangling over the side of the chair, the shadows made by the bones of the knuckles. Harrison paused halfway across the floor. In his right hand he held a surgical scalpel. Warm steel, a thin mirror smudged by his fingerprints. It glinted in a pale way. A vehicle passed in the street below; lights flickered quickly across the ceiling. He watched them go. They reminded him of sudden shapeless butterflies. Then he was thinking about the figure in the chair again. Albert. Albert Somebody. He’d never had a last name. What the hell—that didn’t matter anyhow. He turned the blade over in the palm of his hand and wondered why he felt so tense, an electric tension that seemed to start, in a tingling way, in the soles of his feet and then work up his legs, through his arms, fingertips, reaching finally to the middle of his chest, to his heart. Strange, he thought. His mouth was dry and the palms of his hands itched. He moved closer to the chair, closer to Albert. He looked at the top of Albert’s head; this close, you could see the hair was a wig, a thatch of dark matting. Harrison smiled. A cheap wig. Albert, you poor bastard. He stared at the dark hairpiece for a long time. Maybe it feels this way, he thought. Maybe this is how it feels. Could you imagine it, work your way into it, pretend? He passed the surgical scalpel from one hand to the other, then back again. He was conscious of a wind rising outside, the way the whole building seemed to creak. He moved slightly to one side. Albert sat motionless: He was like a man sleeping off a heavy meal. Sleeping it off in complete silence. From this angle he could see the sharp point of Albert’s nose, the thick lower lip, the threadbare elbows of the old denim workshirt. He could see the old grey flannel pants and the tattered sneakers. Then he stepped a little to the side, so that he was directly behind Albert again.

A guy kills somebody. What does he feel at that moment? In that split second of time when you know there’s no going back, when you realize that life has gone out of the victim, what do you feel?

Harrison shut his eyes a moment. Outside, the wind died. There was a silence. He remembered how earlier, when he’d gone out to buy the scalpel, the wind had driven scraps of paper along the street, scraps that flapped madly like tiny ghosts hurrying from an exorcism. He remembered the scent of garbage filling the darkness, a smell rising from trashcans and plastic bags along the sidewalks. He’d been able to smell the river too, the dampness, stumps of mildewed wood, rotted planks. You could imagine skeletal figures trapped in the holds of sunken barges, old bones enclosed in weighted caskets, corpses drifting through the poisonous silt of the riverbed. And then he’d walked back, the scalpel strangely heavy in the pocket of his overcoat. And yet it was light, almost without weight.

He opened his eyes, looked at Albert.

It must feel like this.

Tension, unbearable tension, as if the room were filled with a hundred clocks and every one of them was ticking at variance with every other.

A slick of hot sweat slid over his eyelid and he wiped it away. A muscle moved in his throat. He was conscious of a square of pale light that fell through the open bedroom door behind him.

He raised the blade.

Then he froze. It seemed to him that his muscles atrophied and his body wouldn’t respond to his own messages. Bring the damn thing down quick and hard!

He struck.

The blade entered the side of Albert’s head, tearing at fiber, ripping, creating a gash from ear to neck, neck to jaw, a gash with the appearance of a grotesque second mouth. He pulled the blade free and stepped back. He was breathing quickly, his lungs tight, as if a fine string had been pulled inside his chest.

He stepped around Albert. The eyes were open and glassy. The mouth was hollow, like a small space that might recently have been vacated by a bird. You could see the uneven dentures that had been cemented to pink gums. Harrison stared at the face for a bit, turning the blade over and over in his hand. Then he moved forward quickly, driving the instrument into the center of Albert’s chest, tearing the material of the faded blue shirt, puncturing the surface of the skin. Albert slipped sideways in the chair.

Harrison, drawing the blade free, stepped back towards the window. He watched the dangling hands as they swung slightly from the force of the last blow. Then he shut his eyes and laid his forehead upon the cold surface of the glass. When he opened his eyes again he looked at Albert. He thought how well he knew that face, how long he had dreamed it, how intimately he understood its contours and shadows.

Albert Nobody. A victim.

Something else is needed. Something else.

Something vicious.

He swung his arm in a sudden arc and the blade glinted abruptly between Albert’s legs, searing the old grey flannel pants, severing the buttons, laying the groin bare. The scalpel fell from his fingers and rattled on the bare wood boards. He felt dizzy all at once, lightheaded—it was as if he had a sense of some distant muted exaltation, a freedom. The freedom of the kill, the blood game. Something that rose inside him and spread through him and made his nerves sizzle, his senses reel.

There was a noise from behind.

He swung around.

Madeleine was standing in the bedroom doorway, leaning against the jamb. “Finished?” she asked.

Harrison nodded. He was suddenly tired now.

“What are you going to call it?” she asked.

“I don’t know. ‘A Victim.’ Maybe. How does that sound?”

Madeleine folded her arms under her breasts and came into the loft. She was wearing one of Harrison’s old paint-stained shirts. She approached the chair and walked around the figure a couple of times, frowning slightly.

“What do you think?” he asked. It was always important for him to know what she thought; her approval made him feel as if he were high. He was a little tense as he waited.

“I think you’ve got the right title for it,” she said. “Poor old Albert.”

“Do you like it?”

“I like it,” she said.

“Why are you frowning? Though you look beautiful even when you do frown.”

She smiled at him. “I was watching you. You were really getting into it, weren’t you?”

Harrison bent down and picked up the scalpel, which he weighed in the palm of one hand. She was right. For a moment there, a fraction of time, it had been easy to imagine he was killing a real human being, not some papier-mâché dummy he had spent weeks shaping and molding and getting exactly right. Carried away, transported, drifting over into a world of violence. He put the scalpel down again: He didn’t want to look at it. Some strange strain far inside him, something that had come up suddenly to the surface, a mad thing, a deranged quality. Why had it fascinated him like that? You make believe a papier-mâché thing is solid flesh and blood …

“I guess I was,” he said. “Take some consolation from this fact, my love. I don’t have the nerves to be a killer. Look.” And he spread one hand out: It was trembling. Madeleine caught it, held it against her breasts, a singular fluid movement that touched him inside.

“You were pretty intense,” Madeleine said.

“Well, I’ve been putting it off for weeks. Maybe it just built up inside me to a point where I had to explode, you know? I had an idea in my head, something vague—maybe I didn’t want to let it drift on any longer. Maybe I just wanted to be finished with the whole Albert project.” He put his arm around her shoulder, and drew her near to him. “Chalk it up to art, not the killer instinct.”

“I don’t get the concept, Harry. You spent weeks making the figure. I watched you. I was so impressed with the care you took—then you carve him up. If I came in from a different perspective, love, I could say you’d spoiled your own handiwork.”

Harrison wiped his forehead. Worrisome, unsettling to get carried away, but perhaps there hadn’t been any other way to do it. Perhaps there was only one frame of mind you could work yourself into with a project like Albert. “I built him for this one purpose, Maddy. Even when I was making him I knew he had to be disfigured. A victim of crime. I knew it would have to end up like this. I don’t see it as a waste of my work.”

Madeleine didn’t say anything. She moved away from him and circled Albert again. She paused, chewing on her lower lip.

“What’s on your mind?” Harrison asked.

She shrugged. “You really did a number on him.”

“It has to look convincing.” Then he remembered: There was one last thing left to do. He hurried inside the kitchen and opened the refrigerator and took out two plastic bags filled with chicken blood. He carried them back to the loft, pierced the plastic with the scalpel, then drenched Albert with the blood. Ragged trails slithered across the chair, the floor, the material of his shirt. He let the empty plastic bags fall from his hands. Finished, he thought. Over and done with. It was a project that had occupied him for too long, almost as if he’d been afraid to take the final step, the act of mutilation. Now he felt a sense of relief. A sense of completion. There was nothing between him and the Apology project now. He had tied up a loose end.

Madeleine stood behind him, massaged his shoulders. “You’re very tight. Try and relax. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you so involved in anything, Harry. For a moment there, you even scared me.”

“I think I scared myself,” he said. “Let’s go into the bedroom and lie down. I’m beat.”

They moved towards the bed. Harrison lay flat on his back and stared up at the ceiling. Drained. I think I scared myself. He shut his eyes and imagined people dying from acts of violence—they were happening even now, even as he lay here with his eyes closed and felt Madeleine’s fingers stroke the side of his face; people were being killed in acts of violence. It was more horrifying, more repulsive than the act he’d performed himself on a figure created out of nothing more than paper and paste and old dentures and threadbare clothes. You couldn’t compare Albert with the real thing.

“I like the blood,” Madeleine said. “Pretty authentic. I just wish you weren’t such a slob and dripped the stuff all over the place, Harry.”

“Nag nag nag, it’s all I ever hear.” He raised his face and kissed her, then glanced past her at the light of the answering machine. Red. The CALL light. Tired as he was, he realized he wanted to listen to the tape. He reached out, but before he could press the button Madeleine stopped him.

“I’ve got something to tell you, Harry.”

“Why does that sound ominous?”

She hesitated. “It isn’t really. Do you remember a friend I once mentioned? Jamey Hausermann? She’s a journalist. She writes for New York magazine.”

“Vaguely,” he said.

“I had lunch with her today. I think …” She paused again. “I think I talked her into writing a piece about Apology. I hope you don’t mind.” She was biting her lip, looking worried; the expression made him want to laugh.

“She wants to write about me?”

“Why not? I think Apology would be of interest to a lot of people.”

The notion pleased him. He hadn’t ever imagined anything being written about the project. “What about the identity thing?” he asked.

“She’s an old friend, Harry. We went to school together. She won’t mention you by name. I promise.”

He was quiet a moment. Publicity. He’d never thought about publicity before now; it was as if he’d become totally accustomed to working in obscurity. What was it about the idea of celebrity that appealed to him anyway? A definition of yourself, a projection of your work in front of thousands of people, people reading about you, calling the Apology number in the hundreds, thousands.… Wait, he told himself, don’t get so carried away. It would have to be a weird kind of celebrity anyhow; he might just as well be a masked wrestler, someone whose face is never seen and whose real name has to remain unknown. Still, it excited him. “Sure she won’t mention my name?”

“Positive. Otherwise I wouldn’t have shown her the poster.”

He lay back down and looked at Madeleine. He could tell from her expression that she still had something else to say. What was she up to now? He liked the way she looked, a vague mischievousness on her face—she might have been a little kid caught playing some forbidden game.

“Okay,” he said. “I’m waiting.”

“Am I so transparent?”

“Like clear glass.”

She tucked her legs up under her body, placed the palms of her hands against the sides of her face, smiled at him. “I was talking with Berger this morning and I discovered an astounding thing. He doesn’t have anything planned after those miserable rainbows are removed from the premises. He doesn’t have anything planned next, Harry. Do you know what that means?”

A faint, preposterous light dawning. He shook his head. “You can’t be serious.”

“Why not? It’s a big place. It would be perfect for Apology.”

“Jesus,” he said. “I hadn’t imagined playing the tapes in a place like that.”

“It would be a wonderful spot for them.”

“He’ll never go for it, Maddy. He’s too conservative.”

“Maybe. But he’s also confused. He doesn’t know what’s going to sell, he doesn’t know how the public is going to swing, and he’s in a bad position right now because he needs something terrific after the Tahiko disaster. He needs something that’s going to get public attention, publicity.” She paused. He could see a light in her eyes, a quality that was a mixture of determination and optimism.

“Those gallery owners are pretty damn fickle,” he said.

“You forget, Harry. I work in the place. I know the man. It’s not going to cost me my job just to put a word in for the project, is it?”

“I guess not.” The Bryant Berger Gallery. Midtown Manhattan. A prestigious spot. Critics attended shows there. They wrote about those shows in The New York Times, The Village Voice, The American Art Journal, Arts Magazine. What was this vague thrill he suddenly felt? He imagined the idea of fame thrust upon him, the sight of his face staring out from magazine photographs. He imagined going to parties, opening nights, doing interviews. It was a strange sensation—it was like seeing a shadow of yourself in the future, a faint projection, a different Harry Harrison—someone with some clout in the world of art, someone known as an innovator of some daring, prepared to take risks and chances for the sake of extending the boundaries of his craft. For a moment he allowed himself the luxury of tasting these perceptions, wallowing in them. God, you try for years to hack something out of your perceptions, try to construct links between your imagination and your fingertips, and nothing you create or construct ever satisfies, things hardly ever get finished, you drift into a half-world where you feel overlooked, abandoned, a world wherein younger artists clamber over you and have their works written about. Maybe, just maybe, he thought. Maybe this was an opening into a world he felt had neglected him. He hadn’t become bitter about it, merely a touch disappointed. No, don’t let yourself get too excited, Harry, when you start to think this way you court the specter of further disappointment. The one positive thing you could find to say about obscurity was that you never felt let down, because you had no expectations to start with.

“I’ll talk with Berger when the time is right,” Madeleine said.

“I’m wondering about something,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“I’m wondering how the hell I ever managed without you.”

“Ah, but you didn’t, Harry.”

“I guess I didn’t,” he said. He reached out and hugged her. “I can’t believe the things you do for me.”

He closed his eyes. He felt Madeleine’s lips brush against the side of his face, then she moved away from him. He heard the slight clicking sound as she pushed the button on the answering machine.

“You want to hear from your latest fans?” she asked.

He nodded. “It’s hardly lullaby stuff.”

She lay down beside him as the tape whirred. There were a couple of hang-ups, one heavy breather, then silence for a while. He felt himself drift to the edge of sleep, to the black margin of unconsciousness, but then the sound of a voice jolted him back.

APOLOGY? APOLOGY, YOU LISTENING TO ME, MAN? IF YOU’RE A GODDAMN MAN AND NOT SOME FUCKING MACHINE …

Pause. He opened his eyes. This voice had an edge to it, a sharp quality, something harsh and unpleasant. It disturbed him. He sat upright, staring at the machine.

LISTEN TO ME, MR. APOLOGY. KNOW SOMETHING? I GET THE FEELING YOU’RE THERE, MAN. I GET THIS DISTINCT FEELING YOU’RE JUST SITTING THERE LISTENING.… WHY DON’T YOU PICK UP THE TELEPHONE? OR IS THAT SOMETHING YOU NEVER DO? WE COULD HAVE A NICE LITTLE TALK, YOU AND ME. I’D LIKE THAT. ASSHOLE …

Harrison had an impulse to turn the tape off, but it held him, fascinated him; he had the strange feeling that the caller was inside the bedroom right now, standing just inside the doorway or hiding in the closet. Ridiculous, he thought. But he couldn’t get past this sense of violation, intrusion. This disquieting sense of a presence somewhere in the loft. He held Madeleine’s hand, squeezed it.

HERE’S ALL I GOT TO SAY TO YOU … UNTIL THE NEXT TIME ANYWAY.… I’M GONNA KILL SOMEBODY. I MIGHT USE MY KNIFE, I MIGHT JUST USE MY BARE FUCKING HANDS, BUT IT’S GONNA HAPPEN, APOLOGY, AND YOU KNOW ALL ABOUT IT IN ADVANCE … AND THERE’S NOT A GODDAMN THING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT.…

Harrison raised his hand and let it hover above the machine. It seemed to him he could feel a faint electric current issue from the answering device, almost as if something quite malevolent were trapped within the coils and circuits of the gadget, something that had a faintly pulsing life of its own.

WE’LL BE TALKING AGAIN REAL SOON, MR. APOLOGY.

WE’LL BE TALKING AGAIN REAL SOON.

And there was laughter, cruel, broken, unpleasant.

He reached up and turned the machine off.

TWO

1.

Frank Nightingale could remember the golden age of the American hamburger, a time when they didn’t put soybeans and cereals and sawdust into the meat, when a burger didn’t taste like polyurethane. These days, when you ordered one, you never knew what you were going to get inside your cardboard bun. You could count on pickle chips and scraps of lettuce and little slivers of tomatoes, whether you wanted these extras or not—but you couldn’t just assume the meat had ever wrapped the bones of any living creature. He stuck his finger inside his mouth and removed a thing—a UHO, an unidentified hamburger object. He put his hand outside the car window and flicked the item away, filled all at once with a terrible yearning for a real McCoy burger placed between two bits of bun that actually tasted like bread.

Doug Moody watched him from the driver’s seat. “I was up the whole goddamn night, Frank. It was that Brussels sprout kebab I had at Leaves and Shoots. I had these bad pains in the gut.”

Brussels sprout kebab. Vegetables skewered on sticks. Nightingale thought about the owner of Leaves and Shoots, one Shenandoah Silvertree, a hippie who’d probably been ancient at the time of Woodstock, for Christ’s sake. Silvertree hadn’t been able to tell them much about Camilla. Hard worker, conscientious girl, a little spacy, but so was everybody else these days. A private soul. Someone just digging her own little space, you know? Nightingale narrowed his eyes and looked across the street at a bunch of black kids playing basketball in a dilapidated playground. The walls beyond the court were spray-painted with the mysterious terminology of gangs and clubs. What had happened to good old Kilroy, who used to peer out at you everyplace you went?

“Brussels sprouts on a stick. What kind of meal is that, Doug?”

Moody shrugged. “I blame the marinade. Marinating is a lost art, Frank.”

“Maybe the guy that cooked it should be on the telephone confessing his ass off to your Apology,” Nightingale said. He felt a tiny twinge in his own stomach now. Ever since Sarah had gone off on her bizarre odyssey upstate, ever since she’d resolved, like some pilgrim, to trek north to lovely Fulton, his diet had largely consisted of greasy artifacts devoured in haste. He shut his eyes, felt around inside his mouth again, and remembered, with considerable longing, the meals Sarah had cooked for him. Roast duck with black cherry sauce. Ribs smothered in her own barbecue sauce. Beef Wellington. He opened his eyes and sat upright in the passenger seat. “So what did you think of this Shenandoah Silvertree, anyhow?”

“I looked at him and one of my treasured fantasies dissolved,” Moody said. “I always thought antique hippies had been pensioned off. I always figured they’d been sent to obscure communes to live out their last years in peace. I even imagined some kind of federal office where they applied for permits to be classified as superannuated hippies. Applications in triplicate and an examining body. Now I know they run shitty veggie restaurants, Frank, and I’m disillusioned.”

Nightingale smiled, staring at the basketball players. “Silvertree said something about Camilla having a brother.”

“He didn’t say much else.”

“He said her brother came by the restaurant now and again, maybe a couple of times, and they’d stand whispering in the corner.”

“Family affairs,” Moody said. “According to her marriage license, her unmarried name was Camilla Chapman.”

Nightingale could feel grease begin to dissolve in his stomach. “Maybe we’re dealing with something random here, Doug. You know? A guy gets inside, kills her, the motive being robbery.”

“Robbery? She didn’t look like any high roller. An unlikely candidate for robbery.”

“Okay, she was poor. But there’s always somebody poorer.”

Nightingale looked back at the court. Those black kids had energy to burn. Just looking at them made him feel exhausted. He leaned forward and drummed his fingers on the dash.

“You see any cash lying around her place, Doug?”

Moody shook his head. Nightingale sat back again, stuffing his hands inside the pockets of his coat. Robbery, plain and simple. In this city, people would kill for a safety pin. He remembered when he’d just joined the force, he remembered how back then he’d felt somehow immune to murder, the sight of death, the corpse, almost as if he’d had a youthful talent for tuning the bad things out of his brain. A funny thing, though, but as he got older every new homicide seemed to touch him more deeply than the last one, seemed to kill something far inside himself. Maybe you developed compassion as the years rolled on, maybe you identified more and more with the victim. What was it—some chilling perception of your own mortality?

Moody said, “I’ve got somebody checking records, so we should know more about next of kin pretty soon. We should know something about Camilla’s brother. Hard data.”

Hard data, Nightingale thought. Data was a cold word he associated with computers, with scientists weighing things on their little scales or sociologists compiling their demographic maps. Data wasn’t a word he wanted to associate with Camilla Darugna.

“Lunch’s over,” he said.

“So where to?” Moody asked.

“I’ve heard of some very peaceful retreats in Ceylon, Moody, where the only sound you hear is the quiet chanting of monks and a soft wind whistling through prayer wheels. Whatever the fuck a prayer wheel is.”

“Okay. Ceylon it is.” And Moody started the car, slipping away from the sidewalk. Nightingale watched the basketball players recede in the side mirror. He wished he were young again and hamburgers were real.

2.

Billy Chapman didn’t like the way Sylvester kept staring at him. The guy just sat there in the busted armchair at the window and stared. Billy Chapman got up from the narrow bed and ran cold water into the washbasin and let it slither over his wrists.

“What’s this, man?” Sylvester asked.

Billy Chapman turned. Sylvester was holding the crumpled poster Chapman had brought home yesterday.

“I don’t know what the hell it means,” Billy said.

Sylvester smiled. “Hey, maybe you should be calling this number, Billy. Confessing your sins, my man.”

“What sins? I ain’t got nothing to confess.”

“We all got something to confess, Billy. Ain’t that the truth?”

Chapman didn’t like the way Sylvester was smiling; it was a cutting kind of smile, the kind that seemed to mock you. I see through you, baby. You ain’t putting nothing over on me. He felt irritated but he didn’t need to argue with Sylvester, because you didn’t get into any hassles with your main man, your score. He dried his hands nervously on a used paper towel he found on the floor beneath the sink. He watched Sylvester pick the poster up again and read it. What’s he staring at that thing for? Why doesn’t he get down to biz?

“Anyhow, Billy. You got the bread?”

“I got it.” Chapman put his hand in the pocket of his jeans and took out the wad of notes and flashed it in front of Sylvester’s face.

“Hey hey hey. You rob a bank or what, Billy?”

“Yeah. I robbed a bank.”

“You look like you got enough right there to move out of this pigsty you call home, Billyboy.”

Chapman said nothing. He looked around the room. It was one mother of a mess. But he was used to the peeling wallpaper and the brown blind that hung askew on the window and the newspapers and beer bottles and cigarette butts that lay scattered across the floor. Home was a place where you felt comfortable. He moved towards the table. A jar of peanut butter, a couple of curled slices of old bread, a few dead flies stuck to a slick of spilled grape jelly.

“At least you could buy yourself a pillowcase,” Sylvester said. “Or get a subscription to Better Homes and Gardens.” He rose from the tattered armchair, moved around the narrow room, and looked distastefully at the soiled sheets crumpled on the bed.

“I like it here. Nobody hassles me, man. I got my privacy.”

There was silence for a while, then Sylvester turned on the portable radio. There was an old Eddie Cochran rock hit. “Twenty Flight Rock.” “When I get to the top, I’m too tired to rock …” Sylvester clicked his fingers in time to the music. “You rip this off, Billy? Nice little radio. Halfway decent sound.”

“Yeah. I ripped it off.”

Sylvester looked at Billy and smiled. “You can be honest with me, man. Where the hell did you get the bread?”

“Fuck off.”

“Is that any way to treat your main connecto, Billy?”

Chapman sat down on the edge of the bed and switched off the radio. A cockroach scuttled across the dark stripes of the pillow and was gone before he could slap the damn thing to death. Then he watched Sylvester for a while. The guy played dipshit games all the time, making Billy wait before he condescended to produce the blow from his jacket, like it was all one big sonofabitching tease.

Sylvester returned to the armchair. “This place smells, Billy. You know that? Can’t quite describe it … something like old cauliflower that’s been lying in water for weeks. You got any old cauliflower in here?”

Billy Chapman didn’t speak. This goddamn game—how long could it go on for? Sylvester was staring from the window now, gazing at the brick wall of the next building. Billy Chapman closed his eyes. I came back here last night and I puked and I fell asleep and then the dreams came in and she was just screaming and screaming through the whole thing and when I touched her on the neck her head fell off, just like that, like it wasn’t attached to her body at all.…

“Where’s your paraphernalia, man?” Sylvester asked.

“I got it.” Billy Chapman reached under the bed and pulled out a mirror, on the surface of which lay a razor blade and a straw. He put the stuff on the table, clearing a space by pushing the peanut butter aside. The edge was working inside him now, the sense of anticipation, the greed. He watched Sylvester take a small plastic box from his inside pocket; he opened it and measured out a small amount of cocaine on the mirror. Billy Chapman couldn’t take his eyes from the blow. Sylvester straightened it into a small line with the razor blade.

“Rusty razor. You’ll do yourself an injury, man,” Sylvester said.

Chapman picked up the straw and leaned over the mirror. The stuff burned inside his nose and he made a small gasping sound. “Holy shit.”

“You don’t like the sample, Billy?”

“Burns like a motherfucker.”

“You don’t want to make a buy?”

Billy Chapman rubbed his nose. “Sure. Sure I wanna buy.”

Sylvester glanced at the mirror a moment. “Seductive drug, man. I hear people say it ain’t addictive. They’re full of shit. It’s about as addictive as anything that ever came down the pike. You’re a walking proof of that, Billy.”

Quit with the bullshit. Just knock it off. “What’s the tag?”

“One-forty.”

“One fucking forty?”

“Inflation, Billy.”

One hundred and forty bucks. Shit. He put his hand into his jeans and pulled out the bills. You don’t think about the money, you only know you got to have the blow.

“How much do you want?” Sylvester asked.

“Two.” Chapman began to count the cash. Two hundred and eighty bucks. “Don’t I get a break on two?”

“I don’t give breaks unless you’re looking at three, Billy.”

“Yeah.” He passed the money to Sylvester, then watched as two small packets were laid on the table. Sylvester stuck the cash in his inside pocket.

“Well, Billy. Good to do biz with you. You know where to reach me if you’re looking for another score. Just don’t go robbing any more banks.”

Billy Chapman watched Sylvester go to the door.

“Vaya con dios,” Sylvester said, and then he was gone.

As soon as the door closed, Chapman carefully opened one of the packets. SnoSeal paper. It was always SnoSeal. He examined the white powder inside, then laid a bunch of it on the mirror and began to chop carefully with the razor blade. Chopchopchop: He was always impatient with this part of the ritual. The stuff had a nice sparkle to it. He shaped it into two long lines and placed the straw against one of them. He snorted. Burned like it was going to tear great holes in his mucus membranes. Then he did up the other line. Whoooo. His eyes watered and he sneezed, careful to turn his face away from the mirror. It’s kicking in, he thought, it’s kicking in real mean. You wait for the lift, the quick ride on the old roller coaster, the speedy visit to the Disneyland inside your head. He got up and walked around the table. Faster heartbeats, quicker pulses. The big feeling you could do anything you wanted all of a sudden. He sat on the bed for a moment. He needed another couple of lines. Just another two, then he’d cool it for a while, make it last. He snorted up another two, longer than the first ones. Zapped, filled with energy, pacing the room like a caged creature. He turned the straw over in his fingers. Red and white, a good old McDonald’s straw. It’s never quick enough with a straw, Billy. You get off fast but not fast enough.

He looked beneath the bed and found a plastic bag that contained a packet of hypodermic syringes, the kind people with diabetes use for their insulin shots. He carried it to the table. Then he laid some of the cocaine in a spoon, mixing the powder with a few drops of water. When he’d stirred this mixture around, he filled one of the syringes with it. He stared at the veins in his left arm. Pop one open. Get into the bloodstream and from there you’ve got a fast ride on the freeway to your head. His hand was trembling a little. He made a tight fist and the veins stood out on his arm, then he pushed the needle through his skin. Blood and cocaine, fast, a lightning bolt, a violent rush of pure energy through his whole system, little Christmas lights going on everywhere in his mind, sweet Jesus. He was sweating heavily. He walked around the room. He found the poster Sylvester had dropped and he picked it up and read it and the words were suddenly all bullshit nonsense to him, like they’d been written in another language. He screwed up his eyes and wondered how some nut could set himself up like he was the pope or God almighty, listening to people confessing things over a telephone. GET YOUR MISDEEDS OFF YOUR CHEST! Misdeeds, my ass.

She shouldn’t have struggled, she shouldn’t have made me kill her, how could she have provoked me like that, like she’d forgotten the way it had been when we were kids together—

Cunt.

What the hell, it was all in the past now.

After a few minutes he wandered back to the table, letting the poster slip from his moist trembling fingers to the floor.

3.

Levy’s parrots were loose in the room, three big flashy birds flapping their great wings through the air and colliding with walls and windows. Harrison watched them, ducking occasionally, thinking how the blur of colors—reds and greens and blues—reminded him of acrylics spilled on a palette. Levy stood at the other side of the room, his back to the double glass doors that led to a small walled yard. The yard was overgrown, wild, and weedy, with a fountain covered by the crusted droppings of sparrows and pigeons.

“Maybe you should cage the parrots,” Harrison said.

“And put all heaven in a rage?” Levy asked. He was a small man with a benign face. He wore a beret and a striped sweater, which gave him the appearance of a cartoon Frenchman. At other times he reminded Harrison of a diminutive version of Burl Ives: You wouldn’t have been surprised to hear him suddenly break out into a chorus of “Big Rock Candy Mountain.”

“The birds need periods of freedom, Harry. They’re just like people, you know. They like to spread their wings now and again.”

Harrison ducked once more as a parrot passed overhead. A dangerous place to be, he thought. You risk life and limb in Levy’s house. He moved towards the fireplace, staring out into the yard. A faint mist permeated the afternoon, softening the light. He liked the quality of the light, the way it made the shrubbery outside appear to float in midair.

“Let’s go outside,” Levy said. He opened the glass doors and Harrison followed him out into the yard. A cold afternoon, the smack of dark winter in the air. He shivered a little and rubbed his arms. He watched as Levy took out a pipe, which he lit and puffed on in silence for a few minutes.

“You haven’t been around much, stranger,” Levy said. He took the pipe from his mouth, stared into the bowl as if he were searching for something elusive. “Don’t tell me. I think I know. Pressures of work. Affairs of the heart. Right?”

“Right,” Harrison said.

“And how is Madeleine?”

Harrison leaned against the fountain. Moss grew against the grey stone. “She’s fine.”

“I’m glad to hear that.” Levy knocked his pipe against the sole of his shoe and the air was filled with sparks. “I’ve always thought you needed a good woman, Harry. I’ve always thought you needed someone who could give you a sense of direction.”

Harrison smiled. He stared across the yard. Several sculptures lay against the rear wall. Levy had done them when they’d been students together at New Paltz. They were derivative, influenced by the work of Constantin Brancusi—round, smooth, almost featureless faces. Ghosts from the past, a touch of warm nostalgia. Many long nights had been spent with Levy discussing what constituted art. So much past babble and all of it so very earnest. Levy had long ago given up sculpting even though he retained an interest in what was happening in the world of art. He had inherited a vast sum of money on the death of his father and with it a series of commercial concerns. A factory that made paper goods—plates and napkins and funny hats for parties. A number of commercial office buildings in Manhattan. A printing company in Paterson, New Jersey. And this town house, where he lived alone except for his parrots and his old sculpture. For a moment, Harrison wondered what it would be like to be as rich as Reuben Levy, but it was like trying to get a fix on infinity. He couldn’t grasp it.

“How’s the old world of commerce treating you, Rube?”

Levy adjusted his beret. “It’s a game, Harry. I always think of it like that. I spend hours talking with accountants, lawyers, tax advisers, investment people. I nod my head and pretend I know what the hell they’re talking about. They might as well be talking in Swedish.” Levy paused. “And they all look alike, that’s the weird thing. They all have the same faces, the same glasses, the same three-piece suits. They all wear the same cologne. I suspect it’s Brut. They’re all cleanshaven. And I get this feeling they all drive something sensible like Volvos.” Levy looked up at the house a moment. “It’s a game. I play it without really understanding it. What the hell, Harry. The money just seems to keep rolling in. Do you think I should feel guilty?”

“Why?”

Rube Levy shrugged. “Sometimes I think I should. But I never do. It’s very convenient to have piles of money. You can sleep at night without worrying. And I like having this house. I like that best of all.”

“Do you go to meetings wearing that beret?” Harrison asked.

“Why not? It keeps my head warm.”

“You should learn to play the accordion. You could sit down with your accountants and lawyers and play them a couple of choruses of “Les Chevaliers de la Table Ronde” or something like that.”

“I like the idea. I just don’t happen to know that tune, though.”

Levy was silent for a while. He stuck the pipe back inside his pocket and looked at Harrison, as if he were trying to decide some question inside his head. Then he said, “I wish you’d come by more often, Harry. I miss you. I keep meeting new acquaintances, but never what you’d call friends. And friends are all you’ve really got when you come to the end of the day.”

“You’re getting sentimental in your old age, Rube.”

“You can talk. I wish you could see the look on your face whenever we mention Madeleine.”

“Is it so goddamn obvious?”

“Transparent as hell, friend.”

Transparent, Harrison thought. Exactly what had Madeleine done to him anyhow? His life had seemed a shapeless drift, a random tide of some kind, before she’d come into it. He’d worked, slept, breathed, gone through the assorted motions of existence—but the motions might have been shadows thrown on a wall, nothing of any great substance.

“Did you hear about your grant?” Levy asked.

“I’ve got a meeting with the committee later.”

“Are you optimistic?”

Harrison shrugged. How could he say? He was apprehensive, uneasy, but not optimistic.

“I wish you’d let me help, Harry.”

“I don’t want to go through that again.”

Levy smiled. “I fancy myself as a patron of the arts. I think that role really suits me. Just imagine how good you’d make me feel if you accepted my offer of financial support. You’re depriving me, Harry. You’re tampering with my joy, pal.”

“I hate to do that to you, Rube. It’s just …”

“Just what?”

“I’d like to do this thing alone. If I’m going to get any money for Apology, I’d like it to be on account of the merits of the project.” Did that come off as sounding tightassed? Pompous? He hadn’t meant it like that. He spread his hands and looked at them. “Rube, you’ve been kind to me in the past. You’ve bought canvases of mine I’m sure you didn’t really like—”

“Nonsense. I love them. I don’t understand them but that doesn’t matter these days.” Levy scratched his face and looked thoughtful. “You’re beginning to remind me of Gary Cooper in The Fountainhead, Harry. You know? He’s all pride and righteous solitude and determined to do things his own way or not at all.”

“Give me a break, Rube. I appreciate the offer of money. I really do. But I’d like to get the bread out of the grants committee, not from you.”

“Ah, the artist. God spare me from the artist. Anyway, how is the project coming along?”

“Better than I ever expected. Faster than I’d hoped. Some of the tapes are mind-blowing, Rube. You wouldn’t believe it. Rapists. Pimps. Muggers. I get a lot of calls from gays. I’ve got guys with all kinds of weird secrets. Incest. I’ve got people threatening to kill other people. It’s like there’s a whole horror show out there and it’s just lying under the surface and you only have to scratch that surface for everything to break through.” He stopped. You’re talking too fast, Harry. You’re getting too excited. But ever since the calls had started to come in they’d come in a flood that was beyond anything he could ever have predicted. And from the point of view of response Apology was a total success.

“Shit forms a crust, Harry. You’ve just stood on that crust, that’s all.”

Harrison smiled. “I like your imagery, Rube.”

“I was always good at turning the appropriate phrase,” Levy said, reaching out and letting one hand rest lightly on Harrison’s shoulder. “How do you see this whole thing, Harry? A kind of spiritual opinion poll?”

“If you like.”

Now Levy was poking him in the chest. “In your place, my friend, I would remain as detached from these taped confessions as you can. I would stay objective. Disinterested, that’s the word. Don’t let them get under your skin. A little aloofness never did any permanent damage, after all.”

“That’s terrific in principle. It’s hard to be detached. Some of those messages are so touching. You get drawn into them.”

“A good artist doesn’t become his subject, Harry. And other such platitudes. Remember. You heard it here first. Okay?” Levy turned and moved towards the house. “I still think you should let me give you some money. You’re completely ignoring my sensitivities, pal.” Levy paused a moment, then looked at Harrison. “Of course, it might turn out to be a bad investment for me anyhow.”

“Like how?”

“You’re notorious for leaving projects unfinished, Harry. You’re well known, shall we say, for being carried along on a tidal enthusiasm that somehow never carries you quite as far as the beach. I remember a certain sculpture you were very involved in not so long ago—indeed, it was going to be a series of creations on the theme of victims of our great society, right? You talked it up a storm at the time, didn’t you?”

Harrison nodded. Okay, sometimes the fires went out. Sometimes you realized your ideas were never going to be matched by reality. Could you help it when enthusiasm just dripped away? “I finished one of them.”

“Ah, but you were talking ten, a dozen. I remember that. And before that, old friend, you had plans for certain works that incorporated concepts borrowed from bubble-gum machines and pinballs. There were to be small flashing lights and the spectator would put in a quarter and if he didn’t manage to navigate a moving light along the correct channels and through the exact mazes the machine would administer a small electric shock—”

“I lost interest, Rube. That’s all. You know how damned hard it is at times to keep your interest afloat when your head’s crowded with other ideas.”

“Maybe the same thing will happen with Apology,” Levy said. “Maybe you’ll wake up one day and the old coals won’t be glowing quite so brightly.”

“I don’t think so, Rube,” Harrison said. He recognized that Levy was right—too many past projects had gone under, been abandoned, allowed to just drift away. There were unfinished canvases and half-built machines and various sculptures that had never gone beyond the stage of the drawing board. Crowds of ideas, whole urgent congregations of new notions—he couldn’t possibly get around to them all. But he knew Apology was different; he knew it was going to hold his interest and enthusiasm. Apology was going to be the project that opened all the right doors for him.

Levy was walking back towards the house. Harrison followed him.

The afternoon had turned very cold and there was a slight wind shuffling through the dead leaves in the yard. Levy shut the glass doors. The parrots were still frantically scouring the air. A lamp had been overturned, a newspaper eaten to shreds, and there were scattered turds on the rug and sofa. Harrison thought the sound of the wings suggested the noise of a surreal soft helicopter. A thing made out of stuffed satin. Levy sat on the arm of a sofa. One of the birds came and settled on his shoulder and nibbled the hair on the back of his neck.

“I’ve got buildings,” he said to the parrot. “I’ve got a factory turning out paper party favors twenty-four hours a day. I’ve got a printing press rolling like crazy out in Paterson. But will my oldest friend, my stubborn old pal, allow me to donate a plug nickel to his project? Nooooo.”

Harrison felt one of the birds land on his head; claws pressed into his scalp. “Is this thing going to crap on me?”

“You’ve heard the expression ‘free as a bird,’ Harry? It crappeth where the wind bloweth. But you’ve given me a great idea. Little paper diapers for parrots. I must talk to my people about it.”

Harrison reached up to take the parrot on his hand, but it squawked and fluttered away.

“A question, Harry,” Levy said. He raised one finger in the air in the manner of a man determining the direction of the wind. “How many people know about Mr. Apology?”

“You. Madeleine. The people on the grants committee. Oh, yeah, and a friend of Maddy’s who’s a journalist.”

“A scribbler?”

“She might be interested in doing an article on the project.”

Levy frowned. He said, “The less people who know, the better. Maybe too many know already.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Harry, the streets are filled with the casualties of war, poor people who can’t hack the emotional brutalities of everyday life. Loners. Subversives. People who masturbate on subway platforms. Guys you just know are building elaborate bombs in their cellars. Sweet little old men with grenades in their coat pockets. It wouldn’t be wise to connect with any of them.”

A tone of warning, of concern. Harrison smiled. “Nobody’s going to find out who Apology is, Rube.”

“I hope not,” Levy said. He got up from the arm of the sofa and looked at Harrison; he was no longer frowning. “You can’t be too careful, as Hitler is reputed to have told Goering as he descended into his bunker. You can’t be too careful at all.” Levy put his arm loosely around Harrison’s shoulder. “What you need, before you see the gentlemen of the grants committee, is a glass of good scotch to settle your apprehensions, Harry. And I have the perfect remedy in a bottle of Glenlivet. This way.”

Harrison followed his friend out of the parrot room and into a long narrow room that was Levy’s study—chrome chairs, an unvarnished desk, great leaping ferns that linked floor to ceiling. Apprehensions. Maybe he should just go to his meeting with the committee in the frame of mind Madeleine had suggested. Something positive, something upbeat. Like he was doing them a favor by begging for their money. So why did he suddenly feel like the new kid in town on his first day at a strange school?

He watched Levy pour two small shots from a bottle.

“Good fortune, Harry,” Levy said.

“I’ll drink to that.”

4.

“This knife,” George was saying, “is considered by aficionados to be quite the finest knife ever made. Swiss army. But then the Swiss do so many things well. I’ve often wondered how they manage to get holes into their cheese. Do you think they employ people with pointed sticks, Bryant?”

Bryant Berger sat up in the bed and swung his legs over the side, clutching his skull with a hand. Headache, a bone-dry mouth, a raging sense of panic that wouldn’t be stilled. He hadn’t gone home last night, hadn’t gone to the gallery today, hadn’t called Angela—dear God, there were times when everything seemed, like a fragile construction of dominoes, to be tilting dangerously to one side. He shut his eyes a moment. Pain flashed inside his head. A small fire flaring. What was George muttering about? Swiss army knives. Swiss cheese. All at once he perceived his own hungover brain to have as many airholes as Swiss cheese. He opened his eyes and looked at George, who was standing naked at the window. He had one hand on his hip, his back to the room: twelve floors up in the stark Manhattan night. How do I get out of this one? Bryant wondered. What can I say? What preposterous lies are left to me from an armory of excuses that has run precariously empty? Try amnesia, Bryant. You haven’t used that one before. Angela, love, I lost my memory. I don’t know how it happened, but the police picked me up just wandering through Central Park.

She’d buy that one, wouldn’t she?

For sure.

Yesterday. What had happened to yesterday? Too many scattered little memories. Tiny slicks of glass fallen from a broken kaleidoscope. When had we come here to George’s apartment? Too many highballs, too many bars he and George had crawled into. Berger groaned and reached for his shirt, which lay on the floor beside the bed. His body ached. There were bruises on his thighs. George’s harsh lovemaking—he was like some manic gymnast, a contortionist. And you adore it, Bryant. You love every second of it. Ah, but guilt is the currency with which you pay for your pleasures, Bryant. Deep black guilt. And panic, the rising screaming panic of things, the sense of coming inexorably unglued. Humpty Dumpty and All the King’s Men. He stared at George. The body beautiful. Dear George.

But what was he doing with that knife?

He gazed at the boy’s firm spine, the faint curve of hip, the tight rounded buttocks. “I think I’m on the edge of death, George.”

“I understand that as you get older, Bryant, the body takes longer to recover from a hangover.” George turned, still holding the knife, staring at the various blades.

“You understand correctly.” Berger moaned, gazing at his shirt as if he didn’t understand the purpose of the garment: It might have been something antique unearthed in an archeological dig. “The brain cannot get essential messages through to the body. Simple things, my dear. Like remembering to breathe in. Like blinking your eyes. A man becomes quite scattered. A hangover that used to last one day now drags into a second, sometimes even a third.” He looked at George. So young. Strong. What could he possibly know about physical decay? And he remembered how he had first met the young man, how casual and simple and natural it had all seemed at the time, a random encounter at a cocktail party in an uptown gallery, a meeting that had made him tremble with the tension of sexual anticipation, as though he were a schoolboy slipping his hand under a young girl’s blouse. They had come to this apartment on that first night. And that should have been the end of it: one insane night, nothing more. Why had it become so tangled? Why had the relationship taken a turn that—when he managed to look at it sensibly—seemed dangerous, a flirtation with fire? And when?

George moved across the rug and sat on the edge of the bed, lowering one hand to Berger’s thigh. In the other hand, flat in the palm, was the red-handled knife. “Are you getting dressed, Bryant? Running back to Angela so soon?”

“My life has become a laughable series of excuses. If I could be completely honest with myself, George, I’d come to the sorry conclusion that there’s something pathetic about me. But thank God I don’t have that kind of self-directed ruthlessness.”

George moved his fingers along Berger’s thigh and curled them lightly just under the testicles. “Excuses, Bryant. You think madame believes your little fibs?”

Take your hand away, George. Don’t touch me. He felt desperate all at once. He had to get up, get dressed, get the hell out of this place, catch a train, and make up lies. This is the last time, Bryant. You’ll walk away from here and you’ll never see George again and you’ll be very good to Angela and live out a quiet life of total propriety. And the closet door will be well and truly locked.

“Think how much simpler things would be if you told her the truth, Bryant. You wouldn’t be in such a state now, would you?” George played with all the blades of the knife, opening them out, closing them. Clickclickclick.

Berger shut his eyes. Why didn’t he put that knife away? “It’s very hard, George. It’s extremely difficult. I don’t know how to begin. Do I just say to her, ‘I’m terribly sorry, Angela, but your husband happens to be gay’? Don’t you understand how hard that is?” He listened to the soft sound of George’s fingers stroking the blades. Then he pulled on his shirt and opened his eyes and wished with all his heart that he could stand back from the whole situation and laugh until there were tears in his eyes. He looked at George. A vain young man who was forever putting his head to one side and staring at his own reflection wherever he could find it—in store windows, in those aluminum things that contained napkins in coffee shops, in the side mirrors of cars, anywhere he could see a likeness of himself. Beautiful, a beautiful boy, but the relationship isn’t going anywhere because I don’t want it to, I don’t need it. Are you lying to yourself again, Bryant?

George held the knife beneath the light of the bedside lamp. He flipped the blades back into the handle, weighed the knife in his hand, smiled. “So you’ll stay locked inside your sweaty little closet, Bryant, is that it?”

Berger didn’t speak. He felt panic all over again, a quickening of fear, standing on the blind dark edge of a precipice: Dear God, have I fallen in love with this vain young man? He found himself staring at the knife. “I wish you’d put that thing away, George. It makes me nervous.”

George flipped the knife in the air, caught it deftly. Berger watched it flash in the light. This quality in George he was sometimes aware of—what was it? Something of menace? Something explosive? As if there were a device quietly ticking away in his heart? He stared at his trembling fingers. His whole life suddenly seemed to him filled with indescribable terror: It was as if he were locked in a blank white room without windows. And no door. Neither entrances nor exits. I cannot love this boy. I cannot afford to even think such a thing.

“Are you really going, Bryant?”

“I have to.”

George put his hand between his own legs, touching himself. “Don’t I tempt you? Don’t you find this tempting?”

“You know what I think of it,” Berger said. There was shame now and it seemed to burn through him with the ferocity of acid. He stared down at the floor—his pants, underwear, tumble of socks, twisted necktie. At home he hung these things away fastidiously. But not here—here he couldn’t wait to sling everything aside, couldn’t contain himself.

George laid the knife on the bedside table. “Sometimes, Bryant, I’m very tempted to place a telephone call.”

“Tempted? I don’t think I follow.” But you do, you do follow. You can easily spot the meandering trail of George’s mischief.

“A certain number in Bedford Hills. To a certain woman who waits there, lonely and impatient. I’d say something like …‘Angela, Bryant has a brown mole on his ass, left cheek to be precise.’ I’d say something like that.”

A joke, a mischief. It amounted to nothing more. “I think I know you better than that, George.”

“Of course you do. You know your George very well, don’t you?”

The tone of his voice. Maybe just beneath the veneer of words, hidden under the polish of language, there was a sense of threat. Berger studied the young man’s face. The large open smile, the innocent expression. He reached out and laid a hand on George’s wrist. A wonderful drunken night, George’s body pressed to his, limbs tangled, sweat against sweat, arms pinned against arms, George’s cock in his mouth.

You don’t love him, Bryant.

You can’t.

What does he do when I leave here? Does he go out, cruise the bars, casually pick somebody up and they fuck together?

It hurts. Why does this thought hurt so badly?

I want him now. I want him again.

He reached down for his socks. He rose and put on his pants, buckled the belt. He did up the buttons of his shirt. Trains: Why couldn’t he bring to mind the timetable he knew so well? He glanced at George as he dressed: Could he really imagine George calling Angela?

“What will I do when you go?” George said. “What is a lonely young man supposed to do?”

“You won’t be lonely.” An ache, the whole sentence was a pain. You won’t be lonely, George, you’ll be able to go out and find somebody and—

George smiled. “How do you know what I do when you leave?”

Berger said nothing. A slow train to Bedford Hills would give him enough time in which to concoct a convincing fiction. If there were a train that slow. He moved towards the door, picking up his overcoat as he went.

“Don’t I get a goodbye kiss, Bryant?”

The embrace was warm, smothering. Step away, he told himself. Step back. Break free. Leave this situation.

“One last thing, Bryant. If you had the guts to tell your wife, you wouldn’t have to scurry around like this. Comprendez?”

“Comprehended,” Berger said. He smiled at George, then closed the door behind him. He walked along the corridor to the elevator, pressed the button, waited. This is the last time, he thought.

The very last.

5.

The grubby window of the office faced a brick wall: On a clear day you could see the rainpipes opposite. Nightingale couldn’t take the view, the sense of claustrophobia. He turned from the window and looked down at the papers on his desk, then glanced across the room at Moody, who was flicking the pages of a magazine. Psychology Today. Nightingale sat down behind his desk. In the pit of his stomach, in a place you couldn’t soothe just by rubbing your belly with your fingertips, something was turning over and over. Something unpleasant, bad. How could Moody just sit there going through that magazine? He could be as cold as the kitchens of hell. Nightingale shut his eyes because he couldn’t stand to look at his partner, couldn’t take the sight of the papers on his desk, couldn’t take anything very much right then. Close the eyes, withdraw, a sensory retreat. Trouble was, it didn’t transport you very far from the mundane world—the sound of Moody flipping pages, the rattle of something loose in the radiator system, the persistent buzz of a fly at the light bulb overhead. It didn’t carry you very far from the horrors of things. Camilla Darugna, for instance. He opened his eyes. You learn something about the dead woman and it sickens you and you try not to let certain pictures form inside your head even though images are clamoring for your attention, revolting images, sick things rising from the dark inside your mind. She lies there dead and …

And then.

And then.

He slung his feet up on the desk and tried to think of something real nice. Green fields, rolling hills, wondrous cloud formations. The hills of West Virginia. Shit, the last thing he needed was a John Denver record playing through his brain. Goddamn goddamn goddamn—

“What the fuck are you reading, Doug?”

Moody looked up over the magazine. “It concerns self-confrontation. Interesting.”

Nightingale spread his hands and stared at the cover of Moody’s magazine. CAN YOU INHERIT DEPRESSION? No, he thought—you need to work hard for it. You need to be exposed to the dead. The ghoulish. You couldn’t inherit anything like that. He said, “Don’t get me wrong, Doug. I mean, we get this godawful report and you just sit there calm as hell and read your magazine. Doesn’t it affect you? Doesn’t it touch you somewhere?”

“Sure,” Moody said. “It fascinates me. The intimacy of strangulation followed by—”

“Fascinates? Fascinates? Fascinates? Sometimes you worry me, Doug. Sometimes I catch myself asking the question: Where does Doug Moody really live? Where does he really live?”

Moody put the magazine down and smiled. “Your subjectivity overwhelms me, Frank. That’s your problem. You can’t take a step back and look at things with distance.”

“Don’t lay any shit about distance on me. I’m too tired, Doug. Too weary. Some days my bones feel like those candy sticks you see kids sucking on. Distance! I face a cold fact like this and it turns my stomach!”

Moody stroked his smooth face. “I can’t let it get to me that way. It isn’t constructive. I need to be objective if I’m going to think, Frank.”

Constructive. Objective. Nightingale sighed. These were the words of some freshman essay. What did they have to do with the way Camilla Darugna died? He was sweating, pools of liquid in the lines of his palms, underarms, streaks of perspiration on his forehead. Maybe it was weariness, fatigue, the grinding way the human condition just wore you right down. But there were some things he couldn’t quite grasp. Okay, he could maybe sympathize with some henpecked little guy who, one fine day, out of the old blue, blows his wife away. Maybe the unemployed guy who’s desperate to feed his kids and shoots the liquor store clerk during a robbery. Just maybe he could find an iota of sympathy for the perpetrators in situations like these. But he couldn’t relate to this Darugna affair at all. The guy strangles her and then.

And then.

This is where you hit the brick wall, Frank.

The place where you just can’t cut it.

Where it lies slightly beyond your experience, your understanding, your belief.

He stared at the sheets on his desk. There was a sister out in New Mexico by the name of Carmella. Carmella and Camilla—it had the ring of a vaudeville act, tap-dancing sisters or twin bearded ladies. And there was a brother, the brother Shenandoah Silvertree had mentioned, one William Arthur Chapman, address unknown. Two arrests for narcotics. One back in 1974 for marijuana. The other, in ’76, for possession of cocaine. Lowlife drug user, no big deal. He leaned back in his chair and the images swarmed in on him again.

The kitchen. The dead woman on the floor. Her legs spread.

You can’t get inside this killer’s head no matter how hard you try. You can’t get through all that fog.

This animal looks down at the dead woman and something snaps in his brain and he loses any relic of control he might ever have had and he reaches down and his fingers pull her panties to the side and he lowers himself—

A ghoul. The kind who’d dig up fresh graves.

He lowers himself on to this dead flesh and he sticks his dick inside her and he fucks her after she’s dead and he leaves his sperm for a pathologist to find—

Necrophilia.

Moody’s word.

A monster. You’re looking for a monster.

He rose from his chair and paced the office. He stood at the window and stared at the brick wall opposite. Sarah, he thought. Come home to me. Come back home and we can start all over again and everything will be fresh and good and loving. Don’t stay up there in that frozen wasted town.

Necrophilia.

He turned from the window when he heard somebody step inside the office. He recognized Channing, a tiny bald man from the lab who carried himself as if he were convinced he had just lost out, by one vote, on the Nobel prize. He wasn’t in any mood for Channing and his supercilious manner.

“Prints, prints,” Channing said. He might have been delivering pizza. “I have a make on the prints. Anybody interested? Anybody awake around here?”

Nightingale moved towards his desk. “Tell us about the prints, Channing.”

“They’re all over the place,” Channing said, smirking like a smug elf. “You can’t turn around in that apartment without finding them.”

“Whose prints are they?”

“They are the property of a certain William Arthur Chapman. Brother of the deceased.”

Moody put his magazine down and looked at Channing. “The brother’s prints?”

“Are you sure?” Nightingale asked.

“I’m always sure, lieutenant,” Channing said.

The brother’s prints, Nightingale thought.

Moody was standing up, moving across the room, seizing the envelope from Channing’s hand and shaking it open on the surface of his desk. He moved in an agitated way and there was a tiny nerve of irritation working in the muscles of his jaw. “William Arthur Chapman,” he was saying, repeating the name as if he were speaking the numbers that had just come up on his winning lottery ticket. “Necrophiliac incest. Well, well, well. I know this freak, Frank. I know this Billy Chapman.”

“How come?” Nightingale asked. Necrophiliac incest.

Moody, his moment of excitement having apparently passed, sat down behind his desk and gazed at the prints. “It goes back a couple of years before I went to college, when I was working burglary and I got this call to pick up a guy in a hotel room over on Lexington. He was supposed to have a room filled with hot items. So I trucked on over there—what do I find? This Billy Chapman character completely doped up. I mean, totally fried, Frank. There were no stolen items in the room but a pile of dope and all kinds of paraphernalia. I figured it was a clean collar—I had a guy who was completely stoned, I had about eight pounds of grass, which he was apparently retailing back then, and there were probably four or five grams of coke as well.” Moody paused. He gazed down at the prints again. He had an odd look on his face, one Nightingale hadn’t seen before—some strange mixture of regret and determination. Moody went on: “It was my first collar, Frank, if you don’t count some traffic tickets from way back. This was my first real one. I figured I had it cut and dry. What happens?” Moody sighed, drew one hand over his face. Then he shrugged. “It gets thrown out of court. Billy Chapman walks on a fine technicality, the kind only lawyers and judges understand and cops don’t. You know the score, I’m sure. What I’ll never get out of my mind is the expression on that punk’s face when he walked. He looked at me—you ever seen the kind of look that is really just a silent way of saying fuck you, asshole? That’s how Billy Chapman looked. I’ve never forgotten it.”

Nightingale shook his head. “It happens. It happens all the time, Doug.”

“Now this same punk killed his own sister. Then he fucked her,” Moody said.

Necrophiliac incest. Nightingale turned and looked out the window. There was an empty feeling in the center of his stomach suddenly, a moment of sickness. You get older, he thought. You get older and the world falls apart, things don’t add up anymore, all the old codes and standards and decencies just don’t apply. A guy kills his sister, then he fucks her.

I can’t get inside that kind of mind. I can’t get a fix on that one. A nightmare. Maybe a few years back I might have taken it in my stride, stepped back from it and looked at it the way Moody seemed to—dispassionately. Not now. What kind of madness did it take to do what Chapman had done? What kind of outrageous lunacy? Maybe I should leave this world to the young guys like Moody and let them handle it; they seem better equipped somehow. He passed the palm of his hand across his forehead. The office seemed very warm all at once, the air stuffy and unbreathable. He heard himself sigh.

He stared out the window again. Falling night.

And out there in the dark a monster.

6.

The size of the room overwhelmed Harrison, the way the three members of the grants committee sat behind a long table piled with folders, looking as if they were members of an inquisition. The folders were obviously the applications of other candidates, Harrison’s rivals for the $10,000 awards that were given annually by the committee. He sat down and stared at the three gentlemen and had the unsettling feeling that thumbscrews were about to be produced and applied mercilessly to his fingers.

The man who sat at the middle of the table introduced himself as Professor Hutchinson. He was a slim bald man of about fifty and he wore a tweed suit, which gave him the appearance of someone who took tea on Sunday afternoons at the vicarage and stared out at the damp English countryside through leaded windows. He opened Harrison’s folder, glanced at it, then passed it to the other members. The man on Hutchinson’s right was called Koppel—the trendy one, Harrison thought, complete with leather vest and black polo-necked sweater and a big medallion, suggestive of some Aztec conceit, against his chest. The other guy was called Shultz: He had a red rummy kind of face, his nose covered with small threadlike cracks. A boozer’s face. Hutchinson, Koppel, and Shultz: the three wise men of the arts. Harrison was conscious of sweat in the palms of his hands.

“We’ve read your application,” Hutchinson said. “I think we have some questions for you, Mr. Harrison.”

Harrison fidgeted in his chair and thought, Let’s make a deal, my friends. If you give me your check for the ten grand now, I’ll be happy to answer any questions you might have. He glanced at the windows of the room a moment; he could feel an interrogation coming on and he didn’t much like it.

“What made you think of this idea?” Shultz asked.

“I’ve been interested in the criminal mind for a long time. I’m trying to understand it,” he said. His throat was dry. “I had the idea that Apology would provide an outlet for criminals—”

“But some of the calls you get aren’t necessarily criminal, are they?” Shultz interrupted.

“Well, I get all kinds of messages. I brought a sample tape for you to hear. That should give you some idea of the wide range of calls I’ve received already.” Mr. Apology’s Greatest Hits, he thought.

Koppel said, “You’re basically providing a service, I suppose. We live at a time when people are suspicious of old institutions. Anything associated with big government. They dislike organizations. Whereas they once might have sought out a priest or a counselor, I think nowadays they’re more reluctant to take these steps than they used to be.”

Ah, Harrison thought. My man.

“Even inside a marriage,” Koppel said. “Perhaps one mate doesn’t want to discuss a problem with the other. It could be an attraction to another person, an infidelity, a financial matter. It could be anything. What I’m saying is that the traditional lines of communication are drying up in our society and a service like Mr. Apology can, so to speak, pick up the slack. What could be more comforting than the chance to make an anonymous confession? The same thing holds true in the criminal sphere as well as the domestic.” Koppel paused and rubbed his medallion as if he expected a genie to materialize inside the room. He looked at Harrison and smiled. “I see this project as a kind of useful bridge building. Making a connection between dark, furtive areas of our society and the healthy light of confession.”

Making a connection, Harrison thought. Academics were always so fond of connections.

Shultz cleared his throat and said, “I’m not convinced by it. The trouble lies in the overwhelming difficulty of separating truth from fiction. I understand the principle—but I can only envisage a multitude of calls from cranks and liars and people who’re more interested in mischief than in confession.”

“That kind of risk has to come with the territory,” Koppel said.

Harrison leaned back in his chair a moment. A circus of words all around him; he had the unsettling feeling that he was no longer present. He was being discussed in absentia.

Hutchinson was holding up one of the handbills. “Where did you put these on display, Mr. Harrison?”

“Anywhere I thought they might be read. Subways. Storefronts. Inside phone booths. Wherever people would run across them in the normal course of their lives.”

“Specific geographical locations?”

“Not really. Probably the greatest concentration was around Times Square and Greenwich Village.”

There was a silence in the room. It was followed by the rustling of papers as the three men sifted Harrison’s proposal.

“I see an obvious need for secrecy,” Shultz said. “Did anybody see you post these handbills?”

“I took precautions.”

Shultz tapped his fingers on the table. “What would happen, say, if somebody out there didn’t like you, Mr. Harrison? If somebody—a nut—wished to pursue a vendetta against you?”

“I’d run like hell,” Harrison said. “But then if there were somebody like that, they’d have to find me first.”

“How difficult would that be?” Hutchinson asked.

“I guess if you had enough money for a good private detective you could find me.…”

“Isn’t that somewhat naive?” Shultz asked. “Wouldn’t this hypothetical nut only have to bribe an official of the telephone company to get your name and address?”

Harrison shrugged. “I feel quite safe,” he said.

“I think you overestimate the propriety of telephone company officials, Mr. Harrison,” Shultz said.

Hutchinson interrupted. “I’d like to listen to the tape samples, if you don’t mind.”

Harrison got up, pleased to have the opportunity to put the tape on, to turn the conversation away from problems of security: What kind of person would want to go to the trouble of finding one of Ma Bell’s workers to bribe in any case? And what kind of vendetta would anybody wish to pursue against Apology? It struck him as alarmist, farfetched; it also occurred to him that such speculations hadn’t anything very much to do with the whole point behind Apology. He hadn’t come up with the notion just for the sake of providing himself with shapeless, vicarious thrills and fears. I do feel safe, he thought, even if his personal safety hadn’t exactly been a consideration from the beginning. It obviously only concerned people like Shultz and, to another degree, somebody like Rube Levy with his vague warning: It wouldn’t be wise to connect with any of them. There’s a wall, a good solid wall, Harry thought, between Mr. Apology and his public. A fortress.

He removed his cassette player from his briefcase and plugged it into the wall. Then he placed a tape inside it. This was already the second tape he’d taken from the answering machine. The first was complete, numbered, filed away for future reference.

I SHARE AN OFFICE WITH THIS MAN, A GOOD FRIEND OF MINE, AND WE’RE BOTH PRETTY WELL PAID.… I GUESS YOU’D SAY WE WERE UPPER MIDDLE CLASS IF THAT REALLY MEANS ANYTHING.… I’LL CALL HIM JACKSON.… HE PLAYS GOLF EVERY THURSDAY AFTERNOON … AND EVERY THURSDAY AFTERNOON I GO TO HIS HOUSE AND I SCREW HIS WIFE.… IT’S BEEN GOING ON FOR FIVE YEARS.… WITH FRIENDS LIKE ME YOU DON’T NEED ENEMIES. I HAVE TO LOOK AT HIS FACE EVERYDAY.… IT’S KILLING ME, APOLOGY; IT’S REALLY KILLING ME.…

Shultz said, “If it’s been going on for five years, there’s something wrong with Jackson’s eyesight.” He waved one hand in the air. “I’m not exactly enthralled with that kind of message. I can get soap opera from TV.”

Harrison stared at Shultz a moment. Why this animosity, this obvious dislike of the project?

I WANT TO SAY I’M SORRY I DUG UP THIS GRAVE, MAN. LIKE, I WAS DOING ACID, SOME GOOD OLD SUNSHINE, AND I WAS IN THIS CEMETERY WITH A FRIEND OF MINE AND WE JUST DECIDED TO DIG UP A GRAVE AND THE GUY HADN’T BEEN BURIED LONG AND HE WAS PRETTY BAD TO LOOK AT.… WHAT I’M SAYING IS I HATE MYSELF FOR DOING IT.…

“Fascinating,” Koppel said. “And ghoulish.”

“Distasteful,” Shultz remarked.

Harrison stared at the faces of the two men a moment; it was apparent now that they had a history of mutual disagreement. But why the hell did it have to surface during the presentation of Apology? And what effect would it have on his application for financial assistance? He glanced down at the cassette player.

I MUG PEOPLE. ESPECIALLY GAYS. I LIKE TO GO UP TO SOME OLD FAG ON THE STREET AND FLASH MY KNIFE IN HIS FUCKING FACE AND WATCH HIM SQUIRM.… I GET A KICK OUTTA THAT.… I’M NOT EVEN SORRY, YOU KNOW? YOU GOTTA DO ONE THING IN LIFE REAL WELL, AND MY TALENT’S IN MUGGING HOMOSEXUALS, SO WHY SHOULDN’T I KEEP ON DOING IT?

Silence. Harrison looked at the faces of the three men and wondered what kind of impression these voices were really making on them. At this stage, he figured he could only count on Koppel. He needed to swing Hutchinson around but you couldn’t tell what was on his mind from the blank expression on his face.

I’M GONNA SING YOU A SONG.… OKAY? YOU READY? IF YOU WERE THE ONLY GIRL IN THE WORLD AND I WAS THE ONLY BOY, NOTHING ELSE WOULD MATTER IN THIS WORLD TODAY, WE’D GO ON LOVING IN THE SAME OLD WAY, A GARDEN OF EDEN.…

A pause. the voice was old, wheezy.

I USED TO SING THAT SONG IN THE OLD DAYS WHEN VAUDEVILLE WAS STILL ALIVE. I HAD A FINE BARITONE THEN. I REMEMBER WHAT IT USED TO BE LIKE BACK THEN.…

Harrison pressed the STOP button. “Sometimes I seem to get calls that don’t have any connection with Apology,” he said. “This one’s an exercise in nostalgia. The guy isn’t really apologizing for anything.” Still, he could imagine the old man’s painted face, the brass and glitter of the old music halls; he could see some infirm, smooth-skinned hand clutching a receiver and saliva gathering on the corner of a slack lip. Maybe, just maybe, it was some kind of roundabout expression of sadness about the breaking up, the disintegration, of another world. He pushed the FAST FORWARD button. I liked that old guy, he thought.

PLAY.

APOLOGY, I NEED TO GET SOMETHING OFF MY CHEST.… I’M A MARRIED MAN IN MY MID-THIRTIES.… LAST YEAR, WE HAD A CHILD, A BOY.… I’M SORRY, I CAN’T KEEP FROM CRYING, APOLOGY. FORGIVE ME.… WE REALLY WANTED THIS BABY. YOU HAVE TO BELIEVE THAT. HE WAS A BEAUTIFUL BOY, ONLY HE DIDN’T BEHAVE WELL. HE CRIED AT NIGHT ALL THE TIME; IT DIDN’T MATTER HOW HARD WE TRIED TO MAKE HIM COMFORTABLE.… IT BEGAN TO GET TO ME, APOLOGY. BEGAN TO GET ON MY NERVES … AND … AND ONE NIGHT—OH, GOD, I DON’T KNOW WHAT GOT INTO ME—OH, DEAR GOD … SOMETHING SNAPPED … I PICKED HIM UP AND I SWUNG HIM AROUND AND I SMASHED THIS LOVELY BABY’S HEAD ON THE WALL.… MY WIFE AND ME BURIED THE KID IN THE BACK YARD.… CHRIST, FORGIVE ME.

There was a long sobbing sound, then the message stopped.

“My God,” Hutchinson said. “It’s hard to believe.”

“Do you believe it, Mr. Harrison?” Shultz asked.

“It’s damn difficult not to,” Harrison said.

Koppel coughed a couple of times, rubbed his medallion. “I think the honesty in the voice was obvious. You couldn’t mistake that kind of honesty.”

Shultz lit a cigarette. “Are there any more messages on the tape?”

Harrison nodded, pressing the PLAY button again.

MAN. I’M SO FUCKING BUZZED ON COCAINE AND BOOZE I WON’T REMEMBER CALLING YOU. I’M SO GODDAMN ZAPPED.… LISTEN, I WANTED TO MENTION MY SISTER, SEE, I WANTED TO MENTION THE FACT WE USED TO FUCK WHEN WE WERE KIDS, ONLY SHE FORGOT ALL ABOUT THIS WHEN WE GREW UP; SHE ACTED LIKE NOTHING HAD EVER HAPPENED … I MEAN, THAT’S GODDAMN STRANGE. HOW COULD SHE ACT THAT WAY? ONLY I SETTLED THE ACCOUNT. MAN.… I SETTLED IT FAIR AND SQUARE.… SHE DIDN’T HAVE TO TREAT ME THAT WAY. SHE SURE WON’T BE TREATING ANYBODY LIKE THAT FROM NOW ON.… I FIGURE SHE’S WAY BEYOND ALL THAT NOW.…

There was a pause, a slight laugh, a brittle sound.

Then the message ended. Harrison stopped the tape. He turned to look at the three men. Hutchinson said, “Ominous. It seems pretty clear that this caller has hurt his sister. Perhaps even killed her, if we can believe what he’s saying.”

Harrison nodded. “Yes,” he said.

Shultz crushed his cigarette out. Koppel was waving smoke away from his face in an irritated manner. Shultz said, “It raises moral questions, Mr. Harrison. Why isn’t your first obligation to go to the police with that message?”

Koppel interrupted. “What could Harrison take to the police? A disembodied voice? I don’t need to remind you that there are eight million people in this city—what could the police do with a message like that? Where would they start?”

“I’m actually more interested in what Mr. Harrison thinks of his own moral responsibilities, Koppel.”

Harrison said, “Look, I entered into a commitment with people like that when I first thought this whole thing up. I made a promise. You’ve seen it on the Apology handbill. What do you want me to do? Go back on my word? I can’t do that. I might just as well give the project up.”

“What would you feel if somebody was murdered?”

“What do you think I’d feel?” Patience, Harry. Take it easy. “I’d feel horrible, of course. But there’s nothing I can do about that message. If that guy’s going to kill, he’ll do it with or without Apology.”

“Exactly,” Koppel said. “Apology only records. It doesn’t moralize; it doesn’t intervene. It only takes statements, like a stenographer in a courtroom.”

Harrison nodded. He watched Shultz run his fingers through his hair. “Another question, Mr. Harrison. If you get this grant, do I take it you’ll use the money to give up part-time teaching and devote yourself entirely to collecting and editing the tapes?”

“That’s right.”

“Fine. I don’t have any more questions.” Shultz sat back with his eyes closed.

“I think this project has enormous merits,” Koppel said.

“Thanks,” Harrison said.

Now Professor Hutchinson stood up. “You understand we do have to talk among ourselves before we can reach any decision. And you know how longwinded three professors can be, I’m sure. But I’d like to thank you for your time and for letting us hear those graphic tapes. We’ll be in touch, Mr. Harrison, just as soon as we possibly can.”

Harrison unplugged his cassette player from the wall and stuffed it inside his briefcase. A decision, he thought: He felt somewhat like a criminal awaiting the decision of a jury. For a moment he had the urge to make an impassioned speech on behalf of Apology, something beautifully persuasive—but the inside of his mouth suddenly felt too dry for speech, even if he’d been able to think of the right words. He moved towards the door, anxious to be out of the interrogation room. He glanced back once—the three good men and true of the grants committee were already opening the folders of the other candidates.

My wife and me buried the kid in the back yard.… Harrison tried to see this pathetic little scene, tried to imagine himself observing it from some concealed position, watched the married couple frantically digging a hole in cold hard earth, listened to the stifled sound of their sobs, the noise of a spade striking soil, saw the small wrapped bundle being placed in the shallow grave and covered over with lumps of dirt. And then what? What does this pair do with the rest of their married life? How do they conceal the awful secret that lies between them? He imagined silent rooms, silent suppers, a clock ticking on the sideboard, an empty crib in an upstairs nursery, a vague breeze through an open window shaking some plastic mobile hanging over the crib. Jesus, the sorrow, the guilt. The fact they would never talk to each other about what had happened. The strain on their relationship. The stress that had driven the guy to pick up a telephone and call an answering machine.

He paused on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 12th. The briefcase with the cassette player inside was suddenly heavy. He swung it from his left hand to his right, glanced upwards at the grey afternoon sky. It was going to rain again soon. He looked along the sidewalk. There were two phone booths situated some distance away. He remembered coming here to this exact place with Madeleine and putting Apology handbills inside these booths. He wondered if they were still there or if somebody had yanked them down; he moved slowly forward until he was level with the phone booths, then, with a surreptitious glance that even he found slightly absurd—as if he were a character in some flimsy espionage novel—he looked at the two booths. There they were—two handbills taped to the walls. You shouldn’t be doing this, Harry, he thought, you shouldn’t be coming here like some criminal drawn back to the scene of the crime. Why not? You think somebody’s going to see you and accuse you of being the mysterious Mr. Apology? Hi there, guy, good to meet you, Apology.… He didn’t move. He stood several yards away from the booths and opened his briefcase and pretended to be searching for something inside. A man went inside one of the booths now, a short man with an overcoat of loud plaid, big rings flashing on his fingers. Harrison watched him dial a number, then tried to listen to what the guy was saying, but he couldn’t catch anything even though the door of the booth had been left open. Maybe he’s calling the Apology number, maybe he’s talking about some terrible sin even now.… Ridiculous: Did you imagine the phone booths were exclusively used for calls to Mr. Apology? Harrison smiled, rummaged inside the briefcase, glanced back at the guy, who was already hanging up and turning out of the booth.

You want to go over to him, Harry. You want to stroll across the sidewalk and ask him if he just dialed a certain number on a handbill, don’t you? The guy moved away. Harrison thought: I might use my knife. I might just use my bare fucking hands.… How could you be sure that the short guy in the loud coat wasn’t the so-called killer who had called? He nodded his head. You’re really getting carried away on the wild raft of your own imagination here, Harry. You’re losing yourself in a maze of sheer implausibility. It’s just that you’d like to see the face of at least one person who called the Apology line. That’s all. And one face in particular. He snapped his briefcase shut and moved along the sidewalk a little way. But the idea of the handbills in the booths brought him back again, drew him back despite himself. This is nonsense—what the hell do you think you’re going to see here?

Somebody else had gone inside one of the booths now. A guy of about twenty with the appearance of a failed cat burglar—all nervous movements and tics, as if he were afraid of his own shadow. He shut the door, picked up the receiver, stared briefly at Harrison through the dirty glass. Harrison pretended he wasn’t looking, pursed his lips, and whistled in the manner of a person waiting for somebody else. The guy in the booth dialed a number. He turned his face away from the sidewalk, shielding the mouthpiece of the receiver with his hand. A guy like that, Harrison thought. A guy who looks like that might be calling the Apology number. For a moment he thought: I’m seeing one of my own callers, the face of one of my own clients, somebody in the act of making a call.… Christ: You’re really getting carried away, Harry. A shadowy-looking character uses a public telephone and you assume …

The guy was coming out of the booth. The doors opened. Harrison stared across the sidewalk. He met the other guy’s eyes and even though he knew he shouldn’t be staring like this just the same he didn’t turn away. The guy didn’t move. Say something, Harrison thought. Just tell me you called my number, okay? Just tell me you did that.

Permit me to introduce myself. Harrison a.k.a. Mr. Apology.

Why, it’s a pleasure, sir, to meet you in the flesh. And a damned odd coincidence given the fact that I happened to just call your number to confess to a series of rapes in Westchester County …

The guy shuffled across the sidewalk. He paused a few feet away from Harrison, who immediately opened his briefcase again and rummaged through it clumsily.

“Say, fella, you getting an eyeful?”

“Pardon?” Harrison looked at the guy. He had watery red eyes; his hair, which was long and fell down his back, was bunched in a ponytail created by a red ribbon.

“You were staring at me.”

“I think you’re mistaken.” Harrison felt embarrassed now. How badly had he been staring? It was ridiculous, the whole thing preposterous, standing on a sidewalk and doing surveillance on a couple of public phone booths. Jesus Christ.

“Ever since I went inside the booth,” the guy said. “Some people don’t know the meaning of the word privacy.”

“I’m waiting for somebody.…” Harrison heard his own feeble sentence fade away.

“Yeah, sure.” The guy started to move away. He glanced back once, rolled his eyes, then was gone around the corner of the block. Harrison closed his briefcase. What the hell had possessed him anyhow? Standing here like this, gawking at people in phone booths … innocent people who probably didn’t even notice the handbill in the first place, for God’s sake. What is it, Harry? Do you think the whole world wants to communicate with your answering machine? He shook his head: He wanted to laugh at himself.

He swung the briefcase from one hand to the other, then walked away from the phone booths, looking back one last time at the sight of the two handbills hanging inside.

7.

He lay on the bed, his arms tucked behind his head. He stared at the bedroom window, listening to the sound of a night wind rising outside, hearing it nudge a soft rain, in quick little squalls, against the glass. Madeleine was making something in the kitchen; he could smell onions, garlic, peppers. He twisted his face to the side and looked at the answering device, the bright color of the glowing red light. He saw Madeleine move into the bedroom doorway, carrying a tray with two plates; steam curled upwards from the food.

“I figured you’d want to eat in bed, rather than in the squalid formality of the kitchen,” she said. “I hope you like it. It’s my only culinary invention and the only thing I know how to make without burning entirely.”

Harrison took one of the plates and looked at a pile of rigatoni covered in a buttery sauce laced through with diced vegetables. “What’s it called?”

“I never put a name to it. Lemme think. How about Rigatoni Apologia?”

“It smells terrific.” He plunged a fork into the food; he was hungrier than he’d realized. Nerves, he thought, the unease of having to face the three professors. It tasted good in his mouth. He chewed for a while, watching Madeleine’s face. She nibbled rather than ate, chewing every morsel with lavish care.

“Just like Mother used to make,” he said.

“Is it?”

“No. She never made anything like this. My old man was pretty hung up on meat and potatoes, so everything we ate at home was what you’d call American basic. My father never considered a meal a meal unless it had some dead animal parts, mashed potatoes, gravy, and overcooked peas or something green. You know the kind of guy? Bowling Thursday nights. Football on TV Sundays. He was disappointed I didn’t turn out to be a tight end for the Green Bay Packers.” Harrison put his plate aside for a moment.

“Know something? That’s the first time you’ve ever mentioned your parents, Harry. I was beginning to wonder if you’d ever had any. I started to fantasize that maybe somebody found you wrapped in a newspaper on the steps of a convent.” She looked at him, lightly tapping her lower lip with her fork. “How come you don’t talk about them?”

“It’s nothing deliberate. It’s not a policy decision. They just never seem to come up. I was an only child, a loner, the kind of kid who likes to sit in his room and whittle on wood or make sketches. My mother always supported me. But the old man—you know the kind of guy who equates painting or anything like that with Communism and homosexuality?”

Madeleine nodded. Since her own family had been a close one, and remained that way, she always found it hard to imagine a family being anything else—a close bonding of blood, a skein of mutual interests, a network of protection and honesty. “It sounds troublesome, Harry,” she said.

“There was an ongoing war and a series of brief truces,” he answered. “I don’t think there was much love between them. He retreated into a sullen silence most of the time, surrounded by sixpacks of Bud. And she was always doing laundry or sneaking me a couple of bucks so I could buy paintbrushes or sketchpads.”

“They’re dead?”

“Dad died in 1970. The funny thing is, my mom lost her will to live after that. Strange—I always imagined she’d somehow welcome the freedom of living without him. I miscalculated there.” He picked up his plate and picked at some more food. “Apparently they were bound together by the kind of love that needs constant bickering and resentment to support it. Anyhow, she died a year later. She just seemed to wither away.”

“A waste,” Madeleine said. She dropped her fork into her food. “I can’t eat another thing. You want to finish mine?”

“Harry the disposal unit.” He scraped the remains of her meal onto his own plate. He watched as she reached out and laid one hand flat on his knee.

“Are you going to tell me now, Harry? Or do I have to twist your arm to find out?”

“About what?”

“The goddamn committee, for Christ’s sake! You’ve been keeping me in suspense all night.”

He shrugged. “I’m not sure there’s much to tell, Maddy. I think I can count on one vote. I think there’s another who’s going to go against me. He was an antagonistic shit. And the third guy had the manner of a professional fence squatter. So I wait. What else can I do?”

“You played the tape?”

“Some of it.”

She lay down alongside him, watching him eat. She enjoyed this, enjoyed the idea that he was eating what she’d prepared for him, almost as if the sight were the realization of some romantic ideal. What is this? she wondered. An urge for the bliss of domesticity, for a house and kids and a life of nice security? She closed her eyes, pressed her face against his arm. Harry, she thought. You’re going to succeed. I know you are. She opened her eyes when she heard him put his plate on the bedside table. There was the sound of a book falling to the floor, then the telephone was ringing—it was interrupted by the answering machine kicking on. She watched him reach upwards to adjust the volume. She realized she didn’t want to hear any of the voices right then: She wanted just to be alone with Harry—the voices constituted other presences in the room, uninvited guests. It’s his work, Maddy. It’s what he likes to do.

Nobody spoke. A hang-up. Nothing. He wound the tape back to the very beginning and pressed PLAYBACK. As she watched him she felt a faint sense of uneasiness, a discomfort, almost as if she feared the kinds of messages the voices would bring into the bedroom. But there really hadn’t been anything to fear. Cranks, sad people, sorry cases, a few vague threats—she’d been touched by some of them, moved in certain instances, but there wasn’t anything she’d found directly menacing. Even those voices that did sound dark and mad might have belonged in another world. They might have been patients telephoning from locked rooms in high-security asylums.

Harrison adjusted the volume, listened. The voice he heard seemed oddly familiar.

WHEN I WAS A KID I KILLED MY MOTHER.… I TOOK A HACKSAW AND CUT OFF HER HEAD AND THEN I TOOK THIS SHOTGUN AND I BLEW MY OLD DAD AWAY WHEN HE WAS SLEEPING … OFF WITH HIS FUCKING HEAD, JUST LIKE THAT.…

Sonofabitch, Harrison thought.

You crazy sonofabitch.

SERIOUSLY, HARRY, THIS IS JUST RUBE CHECKING THE APOLOGY LINE, JUST TESTING THE EFFICIENCY OF THE SYSTEM.… SWEET DREAMS, PAL.

Madeleine laughed. Harrison pressed the PAUSE button.

“I owe him one,” he said. “When he least expects it.”

Madeleine shut her eyes. “Why don’t we listen to the rest in the morning, Harry? They’re not going to go away.”

“I’ll just check a few more,” and he pushed the PLAYBACK button again.

HARRY? I HOPE YOU DON’T MIND ME CALLING. YOU DON’T KNOW ME. MY NAME IS JAMEY HAUSERMANN AND I’M A CLOSE FRIEND OF MADDY’S. SHE MIGHT HAVE MENTIONED ME. THE THING IS, I WANT TO WRITE SOMETHING ABOUT YOU AND YOUR PROJECT. I WON’T REVEAL YOUR IDENTITY, OF COURSE. I ALREADY PROMISED MADDY THAT. ANYHOW, I JUST HAD A PIECE KILLED BECAUSE OF SOME STUPID LIBEL BUSINESS, SO I’M LEFT WITH A MURDEROUS DEADLINE.… I’D LIKE FOR US TO GET TOGETHER AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. MAYBE TOMORROW? MADDY HAS MY NUMBER. PLEASE CALL ME. THANKS.

“Good old Jamey. I knew she’d come through,” Madeleine said. “Call her. Call her first thing in the morning.”

Harrison lay back. He wondered what it would be like to give an interview, to talk with a journalist, to read about himself in cold print. Every time he’d ever read an interview with an artist it had always seemed to him that they managed to make themselves sound like a horse’s ass, spouting all kinds of pretentious nonsense. Maybe they didn’t have any control over what was printed, maybe the writers made up a whole bunch of stuff. “You really think I should?” he asked.

“Unless you want me totally pissed-off with you.”

“I think I could take anything but that. I’ll call her at the crack of dawn. I swear.”

“You better.” Madeleine looked at him. “Now can we switch that thing off?”

But another message was already coming in, a voice Harrison recognized.

APOLOGY, IT’S ME AGAIN … YOUR OLD FRIEND, REMEMBER? I GOT TO THINKING, MAN, I GOT TO THINKING YOU MIGHT NOT BE TAKING ME SERIOUSLY, UNNERSTAND?

An edgy little laugh which had the sound of a mynah bird. A small harsh quality to the noise. There was a rumbling sound someplace, as if the caller were standing in a phone booth close to a subway track. A face, Harrison thought. Why couldn’t he imagine a face here? Why couldn’t he see an expression, the light in the eyes, the set of the mouth? He closed his eyes, tried to imagine, tried to wonder why this particular voice so intrigued him—but he couldn’t connect the voice with any picture.

I GOTTA SET YOU STRAIGHT ON A COUPLE THINGS, APOLOGY. SEE, I KILLED BEFORE.… I KILLED SOMEBODY BEFORE. I BET YOU THOUGHT I WAS JUST PLAYING GAMES WITH YOU, HUH? JUST STANDING AROUND MOUTHING OFF, DIDN’T YOU THINK THAT? I WOULDN’T PLAY ASSHOLE GAMES WITH YOU, MAN … KILLING SOMEBODY AIN’T SUCH A BIG GODDAMN DEAL. YOU JUST DON’T THINK MUCH ABOUT IT. YOU JUST GO AHEAD AND DO IT AND YOU DON’T FEEL A WHOLE LOT ABOUT IT.… MAYBE LATER YOU GET A TASTE FOR IT, YOU KNOW? YOU FEEL YOU WANNA DO IT AGAIN.…

Out there in the deep of night somebody stands in a phone booth and talks about the act of killing. Talks about it like he might be discussing a football play. He felt Madeleine’s fingers rub the back of his hand and, for a moment, because of the roaring sound across the line, the voice was lost to him.

MAYBE YOU’RE HAVING A HARD TIME BELIEVING ME, MAN. MAYBE YOU GET A BUNCHA CALLS FROM FRUITCAKES AND YOU DON’T TAKE THEM SERIOUSLY. OKAY. THIS TIME IT’S A LITTLE DIFFERENT, MAN. THIS TIME YOU’RE HEARING FROM THE REAL THING.… YOU WANT SOME HISTORY, APOLOGY? OKAY, I’LL GIVE IT TO YOU.…

Silence. It seemed as if the message had ended abruptly.

Madeleine said, “This one gives me the creeps, Harry. I like to imagine this guy is nicely locked away someplace where he just happens to have access to a phone. I like to think he’s locked up and somebody’s thrown the key away.”

The message wasn’t over. The voice came again, less faint this time, free from the surrounding racket of a passing train.

HISTORY … WHEN I WAS NINE YEARS OLD I WAS OUT WALKING IN THIS FOREST WITH A FRIEND OF MINE … RANDY.… OKAY, SO OUTTA NOWHERE I GOT THIS SUDDEN URGE TO KILL THE KID—DON’T ASK ME WHY. I DIDN’T HEAR ANY LOONY VOICES IN MY HEAD OR ANYTHING LIKE THAT.… I FIGURE I JUST WANTED TO KNOW WHAT IT FELT LIKE. SO I PICKED UP THIS FUCKING BIG BRANCH AND I HIT RANDY MAYBE FIFTEEN, TWENTY TIMES OVER THE HEAD UNTIL THE WHOLE PLACE WAS COVERED WITH BLOOD, BLOOD EVERYWHERE, AND THEN I STUCK ALL THESE LEAVES OVER HIS BODY.… WHAT I REMEMBER MOST IS THE BIG LOOK OF SURPRISE IN HIS EYES … THIS BIG LOOK OF GODDAMN SURPRISE. THE COPS NEVER PINNED IT ON ME. I JUST SAID I WAS SOMEPLACE ELSE AT THE TIME.…

Harrison could see it suddenly. He could feel it.

He could feel the weight of the branch come down across the kid’s skull, could see blood mix with weeds and leaves, could hear the dull thumpthumpthump of hard wood falling against bone. Two kids in a forest. A random act of murderous violence. He opened his eyes, looked at Madeleine, saw how pale she appeared. A random act of murder, a whim, something coming seemingly out of nowhere. The picture inside his head was chillingly real to him suddenly, as if the two small figures had hard dark lines drawn around their shapes.

IT WENT DOWN IN THE COP RECORDS AS ONE OF THE FEW UNSOLVED CRIMES IN THE WHOLE HISTORY OF SHELBYVILLE, OHIO.… JESUS! YOU REALIZE I JUST TOLD YOU SOMETHING ABOUT MYSELF? YOU REALIZE THAT? I JUST GAVE YOU A BIG CLUE.…

Laughter, then silence.

NAW, MAYBE I MADE THE WHOLE THING UP, HUH? MAYBE I’M JUST FUCKING WITH YOUR HEAD, APOLOGY. WHAT DO YOU THINK?… YOU KNOW, I REALLY GET TO WONDERING ABOUT YOU, MAN. I REALLY GET TO WONDERING WHAT YOU LOOK LIKE AND WHERE YOU LIVE AND WHETHER YOU’VE GOT AN OLD LADY.… I KEEP TURNING THIS OVER IN MY MIND, MAN. IT’S NOT EXACTLY AN OBSESSION; IT’S SOMETHING I THINK ABOUT FROM TIME TO TIME.… WHAT THE FUCK, MAN. YOU’LL BE READING ABOUT ME REAL SOON. SLEEP GOOD. SLEEP REAL GOOD.

The message ended.

Harrison lay down beside Madeleine. He stared for a time at the dark window. Then he moved restlessly, reached for the answering machine, pressed the button for REWIND. Then PLAYBACK. He listened to the entire message again, as if what he was seeking were something in the words, in the silences, that would point to truth. Maybe the whole narrative was one long drawn-out lie from start to finish. He listened to the voice: it filled the room like some kind of curious atonal music that had no specific point of origin. It might have issued through the material of the walls, through cracks, slid through the glass of the window. A guy in a heavy blue overcoat, skin white, fingernails bitten … Why would he get a picture like that? Just another turn, another twist of the old imagination, the dynamo inside the head.

I really get to wondering what you look like.…

And I wonder about you too, Harrison thought. I wonder about the color of your eyes, whether you smoke cigarettes, if there are brown tobacco stains circling the edges of chipped fingernails; I wonder about the place where you live, the kind of life you lead. And he felt suddenly unsettled, agitated, as if he were frustrated by having access only to the voice and not the sight of the person himself. You want more, he thought. You want to be able to see as well as hear.

Madeleine said, “Do we have to listen to it all over again, Harry?”

He smiled and reached out, stopping the machine. Then he turned towards Madeleine and stroked her hair, filled with a sudden desire to replay the whole message yet again, but a weariness had settled on him as certain as the night wind that was blowing against the building and making the windows rattle.

THREE

1.

Rain, a dirty rain falling from a cloud cover that was low and dense and mysterious; Madeleine imagined some malignant deity lurking behind those clouds, some god of midtown Manhattan who stirred the weather with a spiteful hand. She looked through the window of the gallery for a while, watching sluggish traffic on 57th Street. Avoiding the sight of the rainbows, she turned and stared in the direction of the office where Berger sat behind his desk—his complexion ashen, his eyes distant, a certain grey aura around him. What was wrong with him these days? Yesterday he hadn’t bothered to come in at all, and today he seemed content just to hide out in his tiny office, as if he were afraid of a sudden congregation of creditors entering the gallery in a rage. Maybe there was something wrong in his personal life (about which, she realized, she knew very little). Or perhaps he was just depressed by the lack of sales.

She went across the gallery and paused outside the door of the office; he looked up and smiled at her in a way she found a little sad. A movement of the lips, that was all. There wasn’t anything in the eyes.

“Mr. Berger …” She hesitated.

He raised one eyebrow questioningly; it made a silvery crescent over his eye.

“Can I get you anything? Coffee?”

“Nothing, thank you.” He waved one hand slowly in the air.

She paused. “Alka Seltzer?”

Berger smiled in a thin-lipped way. “Does my hungover condition seem so obvious, my dear?”

Madeleine nodded. She didn’t like to see him like this. “They say that a hair of the dog is the remedy—”

“I have also heard it said that death is equally beneficial.” He stood up. He had a small nail file in his hand and was sawing gently at his fingertips.

“Death strikes me as more drastic,” she said. “I was thinking along the lines of a Bloody Mary, something like that.”

Berger made a face. “My dear, I appreciate your concern. But the very idea of alcohol makes my stomach play atonal music.”

Madeleine leaned against the jamb of the door. “I wish I could do something.…”

Berger was silent a moment, gazing at her. Then: “You’re from Virginia, aren’t you? I seem to recall you mentioned that to me once. Don’t you Virginians have old family remedies that are passed down secretly from one generation to the next? Isn’t one supposed to drink extract of frog’s bladder to cure everything from warts to hangovers to general states of malaise? Or is it pureed bat’s wing?”

“My grandmother always recommended calf’s liver boiled in milk,” Madeleine said.

“Dear God.” Berger clutched his stomach. He went back to his chair and played with his nail file. “It’s very folksy, I’m sure. It’s also rather too unsettling.”

Madeleine paused a moment: “I wish there was something I could do.”

“It will pass,” he said. “Given a little time. A little time and a little less overindulgence. I yield every so often to some excessive gene that is part of my biological program.”

Madeleine went back into the gallery, where she looked for a while at Tahiko’s paintings. It’s not the time, she thought. It’s just not the time to bring up the subject of Apology. She wandered to the window and looked out into the street. For a moment she considered the message that had come in late last night—the creep with the weird laugh. Somewhere out there, a creep without a face.… There had been so many voices coming in over the answering machine. Even Harry had been surprised by the number of responses. The voices—they came like whispering winds out of the creased seams of the city, shaking free old lint, floss, balls of dust, spiderwebs. Voices of human failure, inadequacy, guilt, statements of sheer pain and loss. She imagined there would be no end to the voices: They would swell and bloat into one agonized chorus. Then she was thinking of the creep again—what if he was really on the level? What if he was going to kill somebody? What if a murder had already taken place? Then she remembered, before she’d left the loft this morning, the way Harry had sat hunched over the answering machine, a look of concentration on his face, listening to the messages as if he were expecting one in particular, something profound and stunning that would forever change his life.

Apology, she thought.

Mr. Apology.

She turned away from the window and moved back in the direction of the office. She stared at her purse, which was hanging by its strap from the hat rack, and opened it. She put her hand inside and took out a folded handbill, which she smoothed between her fingers. She shrugged—what the hell, she’d have to bring the matter up with Berger some time, and maybe now, even if he were in a weakened, low condition, was as good a moment as any. Go for it, Maddy—what have you got to lose, anyhow? She stepped inside the office and watched him as he filed the nails of his left hand. Then she moved towards the desk and dropped the poster in front of him. He didn’t pick it up at once. Instead, he looked at her in a puzzled way.

“What is it? A subpoena? Something awful from the bank?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Nothing like that.”

“Am I supposed to read it?”

“Please.”

“Very well.” He lifted it in a hand she noticed was trembling. He read in silence for a moment, then put the poster down on his desk again. I’ve chosen the wrong time, she thought. I’ve screwed up.

“Can you explain it to me?” he asked.

“It’s really self-explanatory.”

“You mean I should take it at face value?”

She nodded. She watched as he smiled.

“Where did you find this?”

“It’s the work of a friend of mine.”

“Ah,” he said, as if some hollow penny had dropped inside his head. “A special friend?”

“A special friend,” she admitted.

“And he’s established some form of public forum for the uttering of apologies?”

“That’s right.”

Berger stood up, glanced at the handbill again, turned towards the window of his office. “A very odd notion, Madeleine. But why are you showing this to me?”

She paused. A vague apprehension: Is he going to laugh at me?

“I thought it might be of some interest to you, that’s all. I’ve heard the tapes and they’re revealing, they’re sad, they’re pathetic, they’re fascinating—”

Berger held one hand in the air. “I am beginning to smell some kind of odd scent here, my dear. I am beginning to perceive, in a small oblique way, the reason you’ve shown this curious piece of literature to me.”

“Well, you said you didn’t know what you were going to do after Tahiko’s stuff goes out, didn’t you?”

Berger nodded. He pressed the palm of his hand against his forehead in the manner of a stage swami trying to divine the contents of a wallet in the audience. “Are you suggesting I turn my gallery into an auditorium for these tapes?”

“What have you got to lose?” she asked, wondering if suddenly she’d come on too strong, if she sounded brazen. “The tapes would generate a great deal of publicity; they’d draw people in—”

“I daresay.”

“And you could charge admission,” she said.

Berger sat down again, looking at the handbill. “My dear, I display paintings here. I show works of art. That’s what the gallery is all about. That is the function of the gallery.”

“This is art. Okay, it’s a different kind of art, a different kind of form.”

Berger sighed, closing his eyes. “I will not engage you, Madeleine, in a fruitless discussion concerning what passes as art and what does not. I happen to think that a Campbell’s soup can does not constitute art, no matter how well it’s done. How are you going to convince me that the recorded voices of the misfits of our great society amount to artistic expression?” He opened his eyes, looked at her, smiled. “Do you understand my point of view?”

“I understand it, sure. At the same time, I’m trying to tell you that it’s worth a try. Think of the publicity. Think of that.”

Berger came around the front of his desk and took her hand and clasped it between his own. He suddenly reminded her of an uncle attempting to dispel the youthfully foolish notions of a highstrung niece. Don’t elope with Charlie, dear. Think of your parents, their feelings. Besides, you might fall from the ladder and do yourself an injury.…“Madeleine, you have the makings of an entrepreneur, I’m sure. But I have the distinct impression that your apparent adoration for the person behind this Apology project is clouding your judgment somewhat.”

Madeleine sighed. The wrong time, I just chose the wrong time. She refused to be beaten, though. She said, “Please just listen to the tapes. Maybe you can even talk with Harry and he’ll explain it all to you.”

“Harry? Is Harry the genius behind this wild scheme?”

Madeleine nodded. She hadn’t meant to let his name slip like that.

“I admire his nerve,” Berger said. “As for using the gallery …” He walked around the office for a minute, then said: “Let me think about it. Maybe I’ll listen to a tape. But I really must say I am not remotely optimistic about my gallery being the place for such an undertaking. Is that clear?”

Madeleine smiled. It was a start; it was something, a frail thread.

Berger said, “Love is a great clouder of judgment, my dear. Never forget that.”

The bell rang in the gallery. Madeleine turned and looked towards the front door; a man had stepped inside, a man of about sixty who dressed as if he were in contention for the part of Peter Pan. He walked as if he were gliding on a cushion of air, his feel failing to touch the floor. He wore light makeup on his face, faint rouge on his cheeks, and he dangled his wrists in the fashion of an old queen. She was about to go out and help him when Berger moved past her into the gallery; she watched him approach the man. They talked together about something, words she just couldn’t catch. Maybe they were discussing the rainbows. Maybe not. She folded her arms under her breasts. And then she became conscious of something else, someone else, a face pressed to the window of the gallery. A young man with reddish hair. His features were indistinct beyond the glass. She had an odd feeling, something strangely tenuous—as if she perceived a frail connection, a fragile web of some kind, that linked Berger and the customer and the young man in the street together. The sensation passed. The face disappeared from the window. The old guy shook Berger’s hand then went outside. Berger came back to the office. He didn’t mention the customer. Instead he said, “Do not build up any hopes, Madeleine. I will listen to one tape, that’s all. Nothing more than that.”

“You won’t be disappointed.”

“Every time I’ve-tried to catch the elusive tail of some new artistic trend, I’ve always been disappointed,” he said. He went back behind his desk and he sat down. Madeleine stepped back inside the gallery. I will listen to one tape, that’s all. She smiled and looked out into the street. But there wasn’t any sign of the old guy now, and the kid who’d been looking through the window had disappeared as well. Swallowed up, lost in the rain of 57th Street.

2.

Gooch stood at the kitchen sink peeling potatoes. Hacking them, Nightingale thought, watching the guy’s big clumsy hands work with the small peeler, huge chunks of white falling into the sink along with the peelings. The trouble with Gooch was how you kept waiting for him to change back into Bill Bixby: He must have been six-eight in his bare feet. Nightingale glanced at Moody, who was looking at the comic books on the floor beside Gooch’s bed. This joint’s a disaster deserving of federal aid, Nightingale thought. Wallpaper hung from walls, bare wood floors were stuck with old food droppings, gooey things, and comics and newspapers, open at the racing pages, lay spread everywhere.

“Potatoes au gratin?” Moody asked. The Boy Wonder had moved to the sink and was staring up at Gooch now. “Or Parmesan patties? Pommes frites?”

“Hunnh?” Gooch asked.

“Skip it,” Moody said.

Gooch put the potato peeler down and wiped sweat from his huge brow, which overhung a Neanderthal face. You don’t want to go meeting this character on a dark night, Nightingale thought. You’d think something had escaped from the zoo. Gooch snapped a potato in half and placed it between his thick lips and began to chew on it loudly. Nightingale looked at the big guy for a moment and was overcome with an urge to sit down, but one glance around the room told you to forget any ideas you might have about comfort. Two armchairs with springs arising. A dining room chair with its fretwork seat unraveling. A narrow bed that was out of the question.

“Been having any luck with the ponies, Gooch?” he asked.

“Naw. I got on this real bad streak.”

“Tough,” Nightingale said. He nodded his head. He watched Gooch swallow the potato half. The Adam’s apple moved menacingly: He might have had a grenade stuck in his throat.

“Figure my luck might change.” Gooch leaned against the sink and stared at Moody for a moment. “You guys. I don’t like you guys coming into my private room. I get a reputation with the neighbors, they see me talking with the heat. You know?”

“We won’t be here long, Gooch,” Moody said.

“I don’t talk to you, man. I only talk with Nightingale here.”

“He’s okay, Gooch.”

“Yeah, you can say that, Nightingale. But I don’t know him from jack shit.”

“Trust me,” Nightingale said. “He’s called Moody.”

“That’s me,” Moody said.

Gooch sucked in air and looked at the walls of his room. They were covered with pictures of weight lifters, tom badly from the pages of magazines. Nightingale leaned against the table. He folded his arms. The room was stuffy and overheated and the lack of breathable air was hurting him. Billy Chapman’s prints. Three words go off inside your brain like small bombs. Billy Chapman’s prints. His own goddamn sister.

Nightingale rubbed his eyes and tried to open them real wide. Sometimes Gooch had reliable information; other times he just seemed to make up off-the-wall stuff.

“Gooch, you know a guy called Chapman?”

“Chapman who?” Gooch asked. He took his eyes away from Arnold Schwarzenegger for a moment.

“Other way around, Gooch. Billy Chapman. William.”

“Don’t think so.”

“Try real hard,” Moody said. There was a patronizing tone in his voice—he might have been offering a peanut to a large simian creature.

“Hey, Nightingale, you tell this fucker I don’t want to talk with him?”

“I’ll tell him,” Nightingale said. “Doug, don’t talk with Gooch, okay?”

Moody smiled and stepped away. He put his hands inside the pockets of his coat and roamed the room.

“Billy Chapman, Gooch. You ever run into a guy with that name?”

“What’s his business?”

“Drugs.”

“User? Dealer? What?”

“User. Mainly cocaine, as far as we know.”

“Bad stuff,” Gooch said. “You might just as well shoot poison into your bloodstream.”

“Yeah, it’s terrible stuff, but I was asking about Billy Chapman.”

“I never heard of the guy.”

Gooch shifted weight from one leg to the other. Nightingale was reminded of a staunch tree swaying in a high wind. The big guy turned away and peered into the stained porcelain sink, rummaging through peelings as if he were searching for something lost. “What’s he done anyway?”

“We think he killed his sister.”

“Bad,” Gooch said, turning back to look at Nightingale again.

“It gets worse. After he killed her, Gooch, he screwed her.”

“He what?”

“Don’t make me repeat myself.”

“Yeah, right,” Gooch said. “You can get kinda spaced out on cocaine, Nightingale. I seen some guys get in pretty bad shape. They don’t live in the real world no more.”

“Yeah. So. You know this Billy Chapman guy?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You sure?”

“Pretty sure.” Gooch smiled: You could just about see the light bulb pop over his head. “I know some dealers, I guess. I run into them. Now and then. You know how it is.”

“I know what you mean,” Nightingale said. The informer, he thought. A little whisper in this corner of the precinct, a little whisper in that: You added them all up and it created a clamor of half-truths, rumors, innuendos, cold facts, and outright lies. Some people were cop groupies, that was all—they liked to think they had a line on the inside track. Maybe it made them feel secure. Maybe it made them feel like good little citizens.

“You know any talkative dealers, Gooch?”

“Unnh. They don’t say much. They like secrets.”

“They like paranoia,” Moody said.

Gooch glared at the Boy Wonder for a while. Moody picked up a copy of Archie and flipped the pages, mumbling something about Jughead. Nightingale looked as the big guy flexed his huge hands. The chemistry was bad here, he thought, but then Moody sometimes had this strange ability to rub people the wrong way.

“I never use the stuff myself,” Gooch was saying in his halting way. His voice seemed to echo in a deep place inside his chest.

“Yeah, I understand that. I’m only interested in Billy Chapman, Gooch.”

“You want I should maybe ask a few questions?”

“Sure.” Nightingale clapped his hands together—he had to get out of this room and back into the midday rain. “You know what discreet means?”

Gooch said nothing. He stared at Moody, then munched on the other half of his raw potato. The jaws moved like revolving doors. Nightingale glanced at his partner. The Boy Wonder was already opening the door.

“Keep in touch,” Nightingale said.

Gooch was staring at his weight-lifting pictures as Nightingale shut the door. The hallway of the tenement was dark. He stumbled against something—a baby stroller, a garbage can, he couldn’t be sure what in the absence of light. Outside, he stood on the sidewalk and looked at Moody.

“You got to realize, Doug, I’ve been dealing with Gooch a few years now. Sometimes he comes through. Sometimes zip city. I just wanted to toss a ball in the air.”

Moody stared along the sidewalk. “Social sonofabitch. He took to me like a fish to water.”

“Gooch doesn’t like cops, Doug. Also he doesn’t like the fact of what he is—he tells tales on people. He informs. I never met a snitch yet who didn’t have a guilty conscience somewhere.”

Moody said nothing. He turned towards the car; little threads of rain were glistening on his fuzzy cheeks. Nightingale put his hands in his pockets and looked the length of the dark street. There was a phone booth on the corner. Goddamn, I need to talk with her. I need to hear her voice. I need to know she’s alive.

“Doug, I want to make a call, okay? I won’t be long.”

“Who you calling, Frank? Monsigneur Apology?” Moody smiled.

“Yeah, yeah,” Nightingale said. He walked towards the phone booth, fished coins out of his pocket, counted them. You run into the corpse of a dead woman, something you should be immune to, and all of a sudden you’re thinking of Sarah as if you’ve superimposed her face on the poor dead features of Camilla Darugna. He punched coins into the slot, the number rang a few times, then he heard Sarah answer. Fulton Gift and Card Boutique. Boutique, he thought.

“Sarah? It’s Frank.”

“This is a surprise, Frank,” she said.

“Well …” It was such a thrill to hear the sound of her voice. Retarded adolescence, Frank. A throwback. “I was thinking about you. Missing you …” He felt suddenly awkward, words congealing in his mouth like lard.

“I miss you too,” she said. “I mean, all this crisp fresh air is terrific and everything, but I still miss you.”

He tried to picture her standing inside that little shop of hers, tried to see the yellowy hair flecked with grey, the eyes that were a tantalizing mixture of green and blue. I love the hell out of her, he thought. “When do I get to see you?” he asked.

“Now that’s up to you, Frank.”

“Yeah, I know.” He looked at Moody, who was leaning against the car. “I’ve got this homicide right now.”

“It figures,” Sarah said. The line crackled; a serpent might have been hissing somewhere deep within the electronic circuits. “There hasn’t been a homicide in Fulton since Santa Claus was a kid, Frank.”

There hasn’t been anything in Fulton since then, he thought. “Maybe when I’ve got the thing cleared up, Sarah. Maybe then …”

“Damn it, Frank, I miss you!”

Nightingale shut his eyes. He said, “Soon. As soon as I can. I love you.” And he put the receiver down, stepped out into the street, stuck his hands in his pockets. He walked towards the car. Moody was looking at him.

“I figure long distance,” Moody said.

“Yeah.”

“How is she?”

Nightingale shrugged. There was a slight ache around his heart. What if it was too late? What if he had lost her forever? You don’t want to think about that, lieutenant. You don’t want to entertain any such notion. He stared at the barred windows of a pawnshop that looked like it was under seige. Billy Chapman, he thought. Where are you now? And what are you going to do next?

3.

I’M SIXTEEN AND I’M STILL A VIRGIN AND THE OTHER KIDS THINK I’M SO STRAIGHT YOU WOULDN’T BELIEVE IT BECAUSE I DON’T GET LAID AND I DON’T SMOKE DOPE OR ANYTHING.… SO WHY THE HELL DO I WANT TO APOLOGIZE TO THEM FOR WHAT I AM?

Harrison smiled, stopping the machine, then raised his face and looked at the woman who sat in the corner of the bedroom with a notebook open in her lap. Maddy’s friend Jamey Hausermann. She seemed to him an unlikely candidate for friendship with Madeleine somehow—there was something slightly hard-bitten about her, something tight around her mouth, a quality of hardness in the thinness of her lips.

“Is that characteristic of the messages?” she asked. She scribbled something. Harrison thought, Okay, take care you don’t make an idiot of yourself—the idea of print, the black finality of it all, scared him.

“They come in all forms,” he said. And he pressed the PLAY button again, watching the woman’s face as she tilted her chair back and closed her eyes.

THIS MAKES ME PUKE.… I DON’T KNOW WHY THE HELL I DID THIS.… I WENT INSIDE THIS MOVIE THEATER AND THERE WAS THIS OLD GUY KINDA WATCHING ME.… I KNEW WHAT HE WANTED. HE WAS LOOKING FOR A BOY, YOU KNOW? SO I CRAWLED ALONG THE SEATS TOWARDS HIM AND I TOOK OUT HIS COCK AND I SUCKED HIM OFF.… I DIDN’T FEEL VERY MUCH.… THEN LAST NIGHT I WENT TO THIS SPA JOINT AND I DID THE SAME THING FOR THIS GUY IN THE STEAM ROOM.… HE WAS BETTER THAN THE FIRST GUY, BUT I DIDN’T FEEL VERY MUCH EVEN THEN … EXCEPT SICK, BECAUSE I WANTED TO GAG ON THEIR COME, YOU KNOW? THE TROUBLE IS, I DON’T THINK I CAN REALLY STOP NOW.…

Jamey Hausermann opened her eyes and wrote something down. Then she looked across the room at Harrison, as if she were trying to figure something out. “What does that kind of message do to you?” she asked.

Harrison shrugged. “I guess I try to imagine that kid’s life. Maybe I try to get inside the circumstances of his life—why he does what he does, where he comes from, that kind of thing.”

“I got the impression, Harry—you mind me calling you Harry?—that the idea behind this project was a kind of detachment on your part. You know what I mean—the father-confessor who doesn’t express judgments?”

“I don’t make judgments,” Harrison said.

“No, but you get involved, obviously. I mean, you’re interested in the messages, you’re interested in what they have to tell you, right?”

“Yeah.”

“All I’m saying is that you can’t entirely remove your self from the voices. You can’t create distance.” She was smiling: It was the kind of look that suggested insight, the discovery of a revelation.

Harrison turned his hands over, stared at them a moment. Why did he feel so uncomfortable all at once? The woman’s look, the penetration of the eyes—what was it exactly? He tried to imagine her article and what she’d say about him and in his mind’s eye he could read his own name and address in the pages of a magazine. No, she wouldn’t do that. Maddy had said so. He watched her light a cigarette.

“Can I hear more?”

“Sure.” Suddenly he didn’t want to play the tapes for her, didn’t want her to hear them; it was as if the act of sharing them with this stranger was a violation of Apology, of secrecy. You’re being edgy, Harry. Edgy and stupid. He pressed the PLAY button.

MY PROBLEM IS VERY SIMPLE. FOR MANY YEARS NOW. I’VE BEEN SLEEPING WITH MY OWN UNMARRIED SISTER. WE’VE BEEN IN LOVE FOR A VERY LONG TIME.… IT ISN’T AN EASY SITUATION, OBVIOUSLY, BUT AT THE SAME TIME I DON’T WANT TO GET OUT OF IT. FRANKLY, SHE’S A TERRIFIC LAY. NOW SHE’S ASKED ME TO MOVE IN WITH HER, SET UP A LIVING SITUATION TOGETHER. THE BIG PROBLEM IS, MR. APOLOGY, HOW DO WE TELL OUR MOTHER?

Harrison cut the tape. Jamey Hausermann was scribbling something in her notebook. Then she asked, “You get a lot of incest?” she asked.

“Some,” he answered. He looked at her awhile. “What kind of piece are you going to write, Jamey?”

“There’s this terrific catch-all in journalism. We call it human interest. Everything pared down to the bone, all the pain, the blood, the spilling of guts.…” She laughed, wrote something down, puffed on her cigarette. “I also want to include something of your background as well.”

“Something of my background?”

“Don’t look so mortified, Harry. I’m not going to tell my readers your Social Security number or the color of your hair or anything like that. Only a few scant details.” She wrote in her notebook again and he wondered what she was recording there. Apology, a man of about thirty-five, has the pale skin of someone who never ventures forth into the sunlight because he has created his own little world, seemingly self-sufficient, in his loft.

“Can you play me another one?” she asked.

“Sure.” He pressed PLAY again.

I WENT WITH MY BOYFRIEND TO THIS LIQUOR STORE.… THE IDEA WAS TO TAKE SOME CASH OUTTA THE REGISTER, YOU KNOW, A FEW BUCKS, NO BIG DEAL … BUT THE GUY BEHIND THE COUNTER HAD A PIECE. YOU KNOW, AND HE TOOK IT OUTTA THIS DRAWER AND COCKED THE HAMMER, MAN … IT KINDA GETS CONFUSED AFTER THAT BECAUSE MY BOYFRIEND, NICK, HAD HIS OWN GUN, SOMETHING I NEVER KNEW ABOUT, AND HE JUST BLEW THIS POOR GUY AWAY … JUST BLEW HIM AWAY, MAN, AND I KINDA SCREAMED. THE GUY WAS LYING THERE IN HIS OWN BLOOD AND HIS BRAINS WERE SCATTERED ALL OVER THE JOINT AND WHAT I REMEMBER MOST IS ALL THIS GREY STUFF STICKING TO BOTTLES ON THE SHELF.

The message ended.

Jamey Hausermann jotted something down in her notebook. She lit another cigarette. Harrison watched her; she wore pale lipstick and her short hair seemed to have been cut by a butcherous barber. Maybe that was the look these days; he didn’t know. He couldn’t help thinking suddenly about Madeleine, the quietness of her features, the clinging softness of her hair, the gentle quality in her eyes. He was conscious now of a vague perfume inside the bedroom, the kind of scent that lingers long after the wearer has gone.

“An accomplice to murder,” she said. “Don’t you feel like going to the cops with that tape, Harry?”

He shook his head. Shultz had asked almost the same question; it was as if they were trying to pin a badge of responsibility on his chest, make a mark on his forehead, something like that. How many times would he have to tell people that Apology was bound by a certain commitment, tied to an unbreakable bargain, a pact, with all the people who used the line? Without that pact, Apology was worthless. Apology was not meant to judge; he was not meant to interfere. He is—I am—just meant to be there. To listen. To record. There is no responsibility. He rubbed his eyes, suddenly tired.

Jamey looked around the bedroom. Then she got up and wandered into the loft and Harrison followed. Trespasser, he thought. Maybe he should never have agreed to this interview. Too late for that now. He watched the journalist move in the direction of Albert. She frowned at the figure.

“What’s this called?” she asked.

“‘A Victim,’” Harrison said.

“Of what?”

“Criminal assault.”

“What’s this thing you’ve got for the criminal mind, Harry? Can you tell me anything about that? I mean, have you ever done anything criminal yourself?” She was standing at the window, looking at him.

“I used to shoplift when I was about ten, eleven.”

“Doesn’t every kid?”

“I guess so.” Harrison paused, watching the woman move towards his stack of old canvases.

“What did you get out of it?”

“I guess I did it for kicks,” he said. “Cheap thrills.”

“But you never did anything more serious?”

“I never had the courage,” he answered. She was sifting through his canvases now; he wished she wouldn’t touch them like that. They were old and meaningless to him and they looked like the work of an enthusiastic amateur.

“Why don’t you paint anymore?”

“I don’t have the urge for it, the enthusiasm.” He paused. “It’s kinda like coming to the limits of something and you don’t feel you can go any further, you know? The medium just stopped interesting me, that’s all. I felt the need for other directions.”

She turned and looked at him; there was an odd playful smile on her face. “Hence Apology,” she said.

“Hence Apology.”

There was a silence in the large room now. Harrison shifted his feet uncomfortably on the floor. He wished Maddy were here to act as a mediator, to stand between him and this inquisitive journalist. You’re so nervous, Harry. Why? Think of the publicity, think of the way it might influence the jury of the grants committee, think of the momentary fame it might bring you. Fame? Since when did he ever want fame?

“Where were you born and raised?” she asked.

“Brooklyn.”

“You went to college?”

“State University of New York at New Paltz.”

Jamey Hausermann looked at Albert once again. “You don’t like talking about yourself too much, do you, Harry? You’re shy, I guess. Or maybe my way of asking questions just puts you off.” She shut her notebook. “It’s my manner, I guess. Sometimes I just come off as being abrasive. Or too upfront. I’m sorry. I ought to learn more tact somehow. The problem is, I’m up against the old electric fence of a deadline. I’ve got to get this article finished today and it has to be put to bed by seven tonight. Maybe that explains something.”

“I understand,” Harrison said.

“I guess you don’t make much money from your work.”

“I hardly make any.”

“Maddy has every faith in you. Maybe she’s right. She always did have nice instincts. So how do you pay for this loft?”

“I teach high school part-time,” he said. “Art history.”

“You like it?”

“Some days are better than others.”

“How do you get along with the kids?”

“Pretty well,” he said. “I show them slides of Holbein and explain to them how they should look for detail and texture. That kind of thing. Their attention span’s not exactly marathon.” He was suddenly sick of answering questions. Why didn’t the Apology project simply speak for itself? He realized he was resenting this invasion of Apology’s privacy. Of his privacy. He shook his head, disturbed at the realization. He could trust this woman. She was a friend. And what was the big deal, anyway? Why was he so worried about privacy, all of a sudden? It was Apology. Mr. Apology. Maybe he was becoming a little too obsessed with the whole thing. It was just a project, right? A temporary canvas. Instead of paint or clay, he was using human beings, but it was only another project. Wasn’t it, Harry?

He sat down crosslegged on the floor, looking up towards the woman. That scent—it filled the loft now, as if it had been caught and shuttled around by an invisible breeze. “But I like some of the kids even though I know they’re dreaming about how to score dope or get laid while they’re supposed to be looking at something like The Madonna of Burgomeister Meyer or whatever.”

Jamey smiled. She moved around the loft as if she were a prospective tenant intent on checking the plumbing, the wiring, leaks in the ceiling. He found himself following after her in the manner of someone who suspects a theft is about to take place. She paused in the kitchen doorway and turned to face him.

“Can I ask you something that’s got absolutely nothing to do with this interview?”

He nodded. What was coming next?

“You and Maddy. Do you love her?”

The question astonished him. He didn’t answer.

“I ask for the best possible reasons, Harry. She’s a good kid, she’s my oldest friend, and she’s high on you. I like to see myself as her older sister, you know? I wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to her.”

“Bad?”

“You know. Hurt. I’d hate to see her hurt.”

“Hey, I don’t have any intention of hurting her.” A complete change of direction, a sudden detour, a turn he didn’t really like.

Jamey was smiling now. She shut her notebook. “How old are you?”

“Thirty-five,” he said.

“Okay.” She peered inside the kitchen a moment. Then she said, “Well, I guess I’ve got enough material for my purposes. Thanks for seeing me on such short notice.”

“No problem,” he said.

Jamey Hausermann moved towards the door. “I hope you’ll like the piece when you read it.”

I hope so too, he thought. He moved behind her to the door, then reached out and opened it for her.

“Thanks again, Harry. And remember—take good care of Maddy. Or else you’ll have me to answer to.” And she smiled in such a way that he couldn’t tell whether this faint threat was meant to be funny.

He shut the door. He could hear her go down the stairs. Fading footsteps. He went to the window, looked down into the street. The room was still filled with the woman’s pungent perfume. He turned to look at poor Albert.

“Did I make an ass of myself, Al?” he asked.

Then he went inside the bedroom and looked at the answering machine. Why hadn’t he called back again? Why hadn’t the guy from Shelbyville called back since last night? Was he out there now somewhere, stalking his victim? You’ll be reading about me real soon.… I might use my knife. I might just use my bare fucking hands.… Did he already have a victim selected—or was it going to be something whimsical, random?

Harrison put his fingertips on the surface of the machine. He could feel a vague vibration run through him, a tremor transmitted to him from the interior of the machine, as if it were alive under his touch. Alive with messages past, messages that were still to come, still to be absorbed in the intestines of the device, swallowed up and recorded and filed away.

He sat down on the edge of the bed, tapping his fingers against his knees, still looking at the machine.

It was strange how quickly he’d become accustomed to having the thing there in the bedroom; it might have been an old piece of furniture one has become comfortable with, an old acquaintance. He reached out, touched it softly, then dropped his hand in his lap.

You’ll call again, Shelbyville.

I know you’ll call again.

When you’re ready.

But when will that be?

Impatient, Harrison got up and strolled back into the loft, pacing, glancing at his old canvases, the half-formed sculptures unceremoniously piled in a corner, the wires and cogs and wheels that protruded from the guts of old machines he’d once thought of building as a series of devices intended to produce spectator involvement, variations on carnival games where mild electric shocks were delivered instead of cuddly prizes. They’re all dead, he thought. Every one of them is dead. And none of them had ever had the strange quivering sense of life that Apology had.

He went back inside the bedroom. He looked at the machine.

And what he realized was that he was waiting for calls, waiting for one call in particular. Waiting to hear if a killing had taken place.

Call, he thought.

Why don’t you call, whoever you are.

4.

Henry Falcon stood in front of the full-length mirror and gazed at his own reflection for a short time before closing his eyes. The light, he would have to do something to soften the glare of the overhead light, mellow it in such a way that his image would not appear quite so harsh. He reached out and clutched the bars and strained to heave his right leg up behind him. He reminded himself of an old galleon at times: timbers creaking, boards screeching, nails popping loose from planks, bilges filling with rather scummy water. But this person in the mirror wasn’t the real Henry Falcon at all—it was some bizarre travesty of the man who had once been an excellent dancer, the young man with the smoothly muscled body and the tight but tocks, the one whose leaps and twists had assumed a quality akin to the magical, a defiance of Grandfather Gravity himself. He lowered his leg and stepped back from the bars. I danced in front of royalty, he thought. When I spun through the air nobody coughed in the darkened auditorium, nobody rustled a program, scraped their feet; when I rushed through the air, almost as if I might never land again, there was only a hushed and reverential silence. They knew, oh God, how they knew, that they were in the presence of genius.…

He was quite unaware of Mrs. Delahanty watching him. When he turned his face he saw her dragging her old vacuum cleaner out of the bedroom, her hands twisted around with electric cord. She stared at him, her mouth set, lips thin, her dough-colored face disapproving. Suddenly he felt ludicrous about the way he looked. The pale green tights bulged in those places where there had been only flatness before. The pectoral muscles sagged and hung. And the face, even with the help of makeup, was cracked and lined and the neck drooped in scrawny rings of flesh. He had jowls. My God, who ever heard of a dancer with jowls?

“A man your age shouldn’t be prancing around like that,” Mrs. Delahanty said.

Cleaning woman, he thought. Go away. Leave me alone. He watched as she hauled the vacuum over the floor.

“And as for the makeup, well.” She put her hands on her hips. “If the good Lord had wanted men to wear makeup, Mr. Falcon, he’d have made them women.”

How could one argue with this Irish logic?

“America’s gone to pot,” she said. “I never did see so many bloody weird sights in all my born days, to tell you the God’s truth.” She stepped past him, moved across the room, gazed at the various posters on the wall. “And as for these old things, Mr. Falcon, I’d be for making me one big bonfire and setting them ablaze. Where’s the point in living in the past? Where’s the sense in that?”

“Far from putting them into the funeral pyre you suggest, my dear Mrs. D., only this morning I was out making inquiries concerning new frames for my treasures. I have utterly no intention of lighting a match,” he said. The very thought of it! He walked as nimbly as he might in the ballet shoes that were too tight for his feet and he stopped by his old phonograph. Romeo and Juliet—ah, the flash of antique memories, of dancing Prokofiev’s ballet in the Drottningholm Court Theater in Stockholm. In the Royal Opera House in Monte Carlo. A rush of old moments, old smells, sounds—the way they beat their hands together out there in the void beyond the footlights, the ringing of flesh upon flesh.…

“New frames, indeed,” Mrs. Delahanty said. “Those old posters deserve to be sent to the Salvation Army, Mr. Falcon.”

“The Salvation Army! Don’t you realize, my good woman, that some of those playbills are rare? Don’t you understand they’re precious?”

“Aye, precious,” she mumbled. “Old junk if you’re asking me.”

Henry Falcon looked at his beloved playbills. Alicia Markova and Igor Youskevitch in Rouge et Noir. Pillar of Fire with Nora Kaye and Antony Tudor. Ancient sorcerers, old magicians, Merlins of the ballet. How dare this wretched peasant woman bitch about his treasures? The music of Romeo and Juliet filled the room.

“Ach, you look like a proper fool in those tights,” Mrs. Delahanty said.

Henry Falcon ignored the cleaning woman. He listened to her drag her vacuum cleaner to the apartment door. Then, sighing, she was gone. Clump clump clump—he could hear her clumsy noise as she hauled the vacuum down a flight of stairs. He went towards the mirror, took a deep breath, and tried to execute a cabriole—and missed. He stumbled a little and reached out against the bars for support. The failure of muscle, poise, balance, the deterioration of the physical system—it was something more than those factors; it was also the decline of the will. The decline of desire. Gasping for air, he slumped over the bars and his lungs pumped like two dying jellyfish. He pushed himself upright, considered the impossibility of the grand jêté, and walked slowly to the window. Princes and princesses, he thought. Kings and queens. They had all applauded him in his time.

He stared out the window.

A dream of young men, a dream of boys…

He blinked and looked along the sidewalk. The nice man in the Berger Gallery had explained that no, they weren’t in the framing business themselves, but he could recommend somebody whose work was of the highest order. Heavens, the old playbills deserved new frames. They cried out for them.

The sidewalk was empty, but only for a moment. Then a young man appeared, moving very slowly along. Henry Falcon was a little disappointed, because for several weeks now he had been watching someone very pretty who passed beneath his window. Sometimes this particular boy would smile and look up and wave at him and this brief moment of attention would brighten the whole day for him. But the young man who was coming into view now wasn’t the same one at all. Henry Falcon sighed. He sighed, he watched, he waited. Then he was thinking of Carlos, Carlos who had been the great love of his life. He remembered tracking Carlos across a whole continent, from Buenos Aires to Montevideo, Sao Paolo to Belo Horizonte, tracking the elusive love of Carlos, obsessed by a face and the color of eyes and the way certain locks of hair curled in the nape of his neck. He remembered the dark treachery of Carlos and how he had once found his lover in bed with another man in the Hotel Riberalta in La Paz, the sinking of his heart, the sickness in his mind, the sheer horrible betrayal.… Remembering Carlos now made him want to weep. Henry, Henry, you can not carry such luggage across the space of thirty years.

The young man had stopped on the sidewalk and was looking up at the window. Henry Falcon gazed back down. He’s pretty, he thought. He isn’t the usual one who passes by, but he’s pretty anyhow. But all young men remind you of Carlos now, Henry. Every young man sets that memory dancing.

Henry Falcon stared.

This boy. What is he doing?

He is smiling at me.

Romeo and Juliet. The music rose through the room, rolled along the high ceiling, filled all the spaces. The boy is smiling at me. He is raising a hand and waving.

He trembled slightly.

It isn’t possible. It isn’t conceivable.

He is moving towards the entrance of the building.

Moving towards the front door.

Henry Falcon moved away from the window and crossed the room, his heart leaping, his skin suddenly cold and covered with goosebumps, his throat painfully dry. In front of the mirror he paused and shifted his head very slowly, as if he were altogether afraid of his own image in the glass. The pale green tights, the protruding stomach, the pale makeup, the thin hair dyed an unnatural black.

You do not look your best, he thought.

You do not look good enough to receive a visitor.

At the door of the room he switched off the overhead light, seeking the kind of gloom in which his appearance might at least be slightly flattered.

A dream of young men …

He can’t possibly be coming in here to see me. He knows somebody else in the building, someone in another apartment. Why would he want to see poor old me?

Henry Falcon pressed his ear to the door. From below he could hear a sound of footsteps clicking on the tiled entranceway. Then they were moving on the stairs. Clack clack clack. He knows somebody else, he must, he has to.

He stood against the door, gazing at the playbills around the room, words he could barely read in the dim afternoon light. Henry Falcon shut his eyes and listened. (Carlos, Carlos in bed in a room of the Hotel Riberalta with his wretched lover.)

Louder. Louder still.

And then they stopped and there was silence and Henry Falcon held his breath, waiting.

5.

“It’s standard policy. You’ve always known that, man. No fronts. Cash on the nail, savvy?” Sylvester peered at the PacMan screen in front of him. He twisted a handle but the monsters got his man anyway and there was a brief noise of electronic disappointment. “You made me lose my concentration, Billy.”

Billy Chapman blinked. The arcade was too loud, the lights too bright. How could anybody in their right mind stand the constant bleeping bleeping bleeping? He stuck his hands in his pockets. He had about thirty bucks to his name. What would thirty bucks get him out of Sylvester? One or two lines? A couple of spoons? He rubbed his eyes. You go and you keep going, Billy, and you don’t know when to call it quits even as you know the stuff is running out and the big depression, the big sleepless depression, comes bopping in as you push that last thin mixture inside your veins, then you’re squeezing dregs out of SnoSeals and sucking the edges of razor blades. And then, sucker, you’re fucked. He looked around the arcade: Why did he get this weird feeling somebody was following him around? It had been going on for hours. He’d stayed in his room and imagined somebody pacing the hall outside his door or someone peering in through his window even though his room was on the fifth floor, for Christ’s sake. It comes with the territory, Billy; it comes with the blow. White paranoia. Nobody’s looking at you. Nobody’s following you. You dream it up. Your hand shakes like crazy. The arcade—guys hunched over machines, hammering away at contraptions like their lives depended on winning. Stupid games, Donkey Kong and Space Invaders and Asteroids. What did it all mean? He stared at Sylvester. This guy’s holding. He’s got the shit I need in his pocket right now, and he won’t front me.…

“Until tomorrow, that’s all,” Billy Chapman said. “C’mon, man.”

“You guys with a bad, bad habit really crack me up. You keep on until you ain’t got shit left, and then, when you should be sleeping the goddamn thing off, you’re out looking to score more. Go home, Billy. Get some sleep. Do yourself a favor, man. And quit bugging me, okay?” Sylvester stuck another quarter into the PacMan.

“Hey, tomorrow, I swear—”

“Billy, look. I go for all that cash-on-the-barrelhead bullshit. Pay your way or you don’t play. Dig it? You had your fun and now it’s over, understand? If you can happen to pick up some bread along the way then that’s a whole new ballgame. Otherwise—” Sylvester shrugged.

“I don’t feel like sleeping.”

“Do what your body tells you, Billy. You’ve probably been up all night doing lines and drinking and staring at your TV. Maybe you got up every now and then because you needed to pace. Maybe you started to get the heebie-jeebies, huh? So now it’s time to sleep. Time to get some food inside the gut, Billy. Listen to Sylvester. I seen everything twice too often.”

“I ain’t hungry.”

Sylvester laughed. “Hot flash. Billy Chapman ain’t hungry. So what else is new?”

“I need to score. Look. I got thirty bucks.”

“I’d like to help you, Billy. I swear. But thirty bucks ain’t exactly going to do much good.”

Billy Chapman closed his eyes a moment. He leaned against the PacMan machine. He sniffed a couple of times and tried to remember where all the time had gone between seeing Sylvester when he had scored the two grams and coming to this arcade in search for more of the same. Fireworks, the buzz of instant energy, veins flowing with speeded-up blood, popping the tops of beer cans and getting up from the sofa every few minutes to check the window and the door, and then a vague memory of going out and just strolling through Times Square, where the neons were fizzing and the doorways heavy with ripe young girls and madmen going from place to place in some frenzied hunt. Then what? Then what? Somewhere he’d gone into a phone booth.

A phone booth, why?

A dime in the slot.

The Apology voice.

Naw, he’d dreamed that one up. Somewhere in the fast lane of the night he’d gone and imagined that one.

Back to his room. Back to the weird, wired feeling that somebody was lingering outside his door. But then he’d understood it was just the drug, so he’d laughed it off. And then he’d stopped laughing when he realized he’d gone through one of the two grams and the other would have to be used sparingly.

“I don’t hear you, Billy. What’d you say?”

“I didn’t say anything, man.”

“You were mumbling.”

“Yeah?” I wasn’t talking. Who’s off the deep end here, me or Sylvester? “So what about this thirty bucks?”

“What about it, Billy? As it so happens, you catch me at a bad time. I’m out. I’m expecting something good real soon. But right now, nada.” Sylvester shrugged. He tugged at the beret he wore. He looked like some goddamn poster for a South American revolution or something, Billy thought.

“I don’t believe you.”

“Fuck off, then. Go home. I don’t need your crap.”

“Level with me, Sylvester.”

“The truth? One, I ain’t got nothing for you. And two, I’m not sure I’ll ever have anything for you again, Billy. You’re at the edge, and that ain’t a pleasant place for you, man.” Sylvester turned and moved more quickly than Billy could follow. He was gone, gone out into the street, and when Billy hit the sidewalk the guy had lost himself in the throng of people that just shuffled along under the colored neons. Bastard. Lying bastard.

Billy Chapman walked to the edge of the sidewalk. He stuck his hands in the pockets of his jeans. Rain slithered over his eyes, his lips, ran from his thin beard. Another connect, another score, but where? You could hit up some guy on a street corner and he’d sell you thirty bucks’ worth of Mannitol or some kind of powdered caffeine; at least with Sylvester you knew there was some of the real thing in what you bought. He took one hand from his jeans and rubbed the side of his scalp. His head felt numb, detached from the rest of his body. You didn’t make any phone call, Billy. You didn’t do that. Some dream. Something you imagined during the high. Some phantom crawling out of the fusion of cocaine and beer.

He crossed the street, turning his face this way and that, still looking for a sight of Sylvester. The motherfucker. He sat down in the doorway of a metal-grilled store, a place that sold gags—masks, stink bombs, whoopee cushions, trick decks of cards. The pits. This is the pits. Spaced-out and just sitting here like this.

He made to stand up, but he had to use the iron grill attached to the store window to get to his feet. Faint. A flash of blood to the head. Okay, go back to your room. Go home. Maybe you can find an egg in the fridge, just maybe you can sleep.

He shuffled along the sidewalk. And then it occurred to him that there were great gaps in his memory, that he couldn’t recollect how he’d spent the morning, what he’d done with the afternoon, where everything had gone. Last night and all the other hours of darkness—he could make some sense out of that time. But the rest, so what, you don’t care. You don’t give a shit, do you? Time goes, so what? Does it make a goddamn bit of difference if you don’t remember?

“Hey. You. Going someplace?”

Billy Chapman turned around. She was standing in a doorway, wearing black boots that rose above her knees and a pink miniskirt. She was the color of dyes that had run in a laundromat.

“Yeah. Home,” he said.

“You get lonely there?”

“I’m never lonely,” Billy Chapman said and passed the girl by.

6.

Bryant Berger had never liked the bar of the Warwick Hotel immediately after work: It was always too crowded with business types, a sea of charcoal grey and dark blue suits, the air filled with the rolling echo of humdrum business talk. He especially did not like the place at that particular moment, sitting at a table in the center of the floor with George, who seemed to take a great pleasure in flaunting himself openly—constantly reaching out with one hand to stroke the nape of Berger’s neck, dropping his fingers over Berger’s knuckles, pressing knees together in the most obvious fashion. People were looking. Men were looking. God knows, Berger thought, there might be an acquaintance of mine looking at me right now. Or a friend of Angela’s. He shifted his chair away from George a little. And he tried not to look at his young friend quite so directly, as if the failure of direct eye contact might convey, to whosoever was watching, that he was not in the company of George, that George was nothing more than a stranger, a passing irritant. Please, please, George, don’t do this to me.

“So what did your wife say to you, Bryant? Did she chide you?”

“There was a disagreement,” Berger said and reached for his martini.

“Tell me more.” George had some kind of ritzy effeminate drink in front of him, Polynesian, leaves of mint sticking out.

“There’s not much to say,” Berger answered. This is the last time, Bryant, the very last time I intend to tolerate your absences. One more incident like this and you will find yourself with neither home nor business. Do I make myself plain? Do I?

He could still hear an echo of her voice, which had reminded him of the wild screech of a parrot thrown into alarm. With neither home nor business. So loud and clipped and hurt. And she’d do it too—he knew she would—she’d go right ahead and withdraw her support from the gallery and throw him out of the house. He shuddered at the thought of it all.

“Did she lay a heavy trip on you, dear?” And George raised his hand to reach for the back of Berger’s neck.

“Don’t. Not in here. I don’t like it, George. Can’t you see it makes me embarrassed? Isn’t that obvious?”

“Are you ashamed of me, Bryant?”

Berger looked down into his drink a moment, then raised his face to George. He shook his head slowly back and forth. “I’m not ashamed of you, not at all. I’m ashamed of myself.”

“Then you ought to do something about that.”

George sounded so harsh, such an edge to his voice all at once, that Berger had the urge to put his arms around him and soothe him in some way. At the same time he was tugged in quite the opposite direction, towards the doorway, the street, the train station. This way, that way—it was a direct consequence of living a vast lie: Truth would simplify, truth would make it all easier, less fugitive, if only he had the kind of courage to make a decision. Decisions, decisions—he hated the word. He stared at George. Was this boy worth it? Ginger hair, bright yellow windbreaker, an earring dangling from his left ear, a plaid scarf thrown carelessly over one shoulder—why the hell did he have to be this flamboyant? Why couldn’t he manage to look straight, at least? He enjoys it, Berger thought, the tease, the embarrassment, the fact of my infatuation with him. It’s like some big game to him, an amusement.

“You should tell her, Bryant.”

“Please don’t tell me what I should and shouldn’t do.”

“Suit yourself.” George huffily picked up his drink and made a loud slurping noise. Berger squirmed. Now the men at the next table were definitely looking, and they seemed to be smirking. He wanted to stare back at them in defiance; instead, he took refuge in the martini.

“I’d like to get out of here, George. Someplace quieter.”

“Why? I like it here. I like this place.”

The stubbornness of a small child, Berger thought.

“I like sitting in this world of men,” George said. “It’s so goddamn boring it’s almost funny. Look at them. Look at their uniforms, Bryant.”

“Do keep your voice down.”

“I can speak as loudly as I like.”

“But not in my company.”

“Let’s make a scene. Let’s have one loud raucous scene.”

“Please.” Berger wanted to rise and go but it seemed to him he was paralyzed from the waist down. And besides, if he strutted out of here, if George did make an obvious scene, then he was plainly implicating himself. Look, Sam, two queers having a battle. What’s the world coming to, guys like that fighting in public?

“You know what I think, Bryant? I think Angela has you by the balls. I think she’s got you so you don’t know if you’re coming or going. Stress, think of the stress. My God, you’ll be dead in a couple of months at this rate. Think of that. Your funeral. I’ll come and I’ll weep openly. People will say things about you even after you’re buried. They’ll talk. ‘Christ, I never knew old Bryant was gay as they come, did you?’ Think about that, dear.”

Berger looked at his friend. It occurred to him suddenly that perhaps George was on something, some kind of speedy drug, something that had warped his awareness and made him talkative and loud and indiscriminate. He did look a little high, and there was color in his cheeks, a color normally missing.

“I think we should go, George. Find a better place for a drink.”

“I’m really quite comfortable here.”

“But I’m not.”

“Well, out of deference to your age, Bryant.”

Berger smiled. He stood up. “My age and the wisdom that comes with it, right?”

“Something like that.”

A burden-lifted. A weight removed from his shoulders. He looked across the bar towards the door, conscious of George rising also. Don’t let him lean over and kiss me, please, Berger thought. Don’t let him do something crass like link arms. For God’s sake. George swayed slightly. Maybe he was on something after all, a drug that didn’t mix too well with alcohol. Berger moved ahead of him to the doorway. He felt flushed: The way people stared at George made him want to walk a good six paces in front of the boy, blurring the connection between them. A cab, he thought. A cab back to George’s place was the safest thing.

“Don’t I get to walk with you?” George was saying.

“Only if you can keep up.” Berger went to the edge of the sidewalk and stared into the traffic ploughing down through the dark. He heard George come up alongside him.

“Where are we headed?”

“I thought I might take you safely back to your place.”

“And then you run for your train? Is that it?”

“I have to. I have to get home on time tonight.”

No cabs. No welcoming signs drifting down towards him. Bryant glanced at his watch. If he managed to get a cab in the next five minutes, he could still drop George off and make his train as well. He felt George tug at his arm.

“If you’re just going to drop me off, Bryant, then I want to make a phone call before we get a cab.”

“Do you have to?”

“I want to.” George went towards a phone booth. Berger watched him, wondering who the boy needed to call quite so suddenly. A twinge of jealousy went through him—he’s making another date for himself, that’s what he’s doing, he’d rather make some other date than stay home alone, he’d rather go out and have some casual sex somewhere. Berger looked back into the oncoming traffic. Try to ignore the feeling, shove it aside, don’t think about it. But he couldn’t help imagining George with somebody else, lying in someone’s bed, the sight of George’s naked body alongside that of some faceless lover. He couldn’t stand the thought. Your train, Bryant. Remember your train. Remember Angela’s ultimatum. He could feel a light film of sweat under his shirt collar. The goddamn train, the house in Bedford Hills, go home and be the dutiful little husband, the good boy who does whatever he’s told to do, the scared kid who can’t stand the idea of his toy—the gallery—being taken away from him. Go home, Bryant. Leave George alone. He turned to look at the phone booth, George talking into the receiver. Animated, one hand going up and down in the air. I can’t. I can’t leave him for somebody else. I can’t step away from him. The jealousy is a pain.

He moved towards the phone. George was silent, listening to whoever was on the other end of the line. A train sits at a platform. A woman waits in a large house in Bedford Hills. A young man stands in a phone booth. These things converged, as if they were different fuses leading to the same stick of dynamite. Berger looked at George.

“I’m not asking you to believe me. I’m telling you.”

Silence. Berger wondered who it was that George had to be so insistent with. He stared back at the traffic; a vacant cab went whizzing past. I’ll spend the night with George, he thought. No, it was madness, it was the end of things, the noise of a heavy curtain falling over the stupid drama of his life. Walk away, just walk away now.

“I’m only telling you the facts,” George was saying.

It didn’t sound like he was speaking to some sexual prospect. There wasn’t that kind of tone in George’s voice.

“Believe what you like, then. I don’t care.”

Berger shivered. No, George couldn’t be, George wouldn’t, George had promised—

“I really don’t care what you think,” he heard George say.

A falling apart. A noise of far-off thunder. Sweat running from the armpits and over the surface of the torso.

George is capable of anything. Anything at all. Even something as malicious as this. Something as evil.

Berger shut his eyes and the thunder rolled and rolled inside his head.

“And you,” George was saying. “It’s been a lot of fun talking with you, Angela.”

7.

On Sixth Avenue Madeleine turned south. She paused at a DON’T WALK signal and rain slithered over the lids of her eyes. She blinked, rubbed her eyes, then crossed the street when the light changed. Somebody touched her on the elbow and she turned around. A sodden black beret, a plumply pleasant face, a wisp of a beard.

“Is this sheer coincidence, Rube?” she asked.

Reuben Levy inclined his face and kissed her lightly on the cheek. “What do you mean? You think I’ve been following you, Maddy?”

“You never can tell,” she said.

“Okay. Here’s the gospel truth. I was in the vicinity and I was going to drop into the gallery, then lo and behold I saw you leave the Berger emporium. Closing time. So where are you hurrying to, or do I need to ask that question?”

She smiled at him. “I was going to see Harry,” she said.

“Can I interest you in a quick drink?”

“I don’t really have time.”

“Five minutes?”

“Well, five minutes.”

“Excellent. I know a place. Used to be a speakeasy in the days when America was still romantic.” He put his hand on her elbow and steered her along the sidewalk for three blocks. “Here it is.” They went inside a long narrow bar; a sequence of pale lamps was lit along the counter. “I like it here. It’s never crowded. Let’s sit over there.” He drew her towards a table. “What will you have to drink?”

“Scotch and water.”

Levy went to the bar, then returned a moment later with two scotches. He sat down beside her at the small circular table. They clinked glasses and he said, “We should drink to Mr. Apology. Cheers.”

She sipped the scotch: it was hot against the back of her throat. She put her glass down and looked at Rube Levy for a moment. He was taking his pipe from the pocket of his overcoat and kneading the bowl, as if in some form of private ritual, with the tips of his fingers. He reminded her of a night watchman warming his hands around a brazier. A small, funny night watchman. He had the pipe between his lips now and was attacking the tobacco with a sequence of matches.

“So, what did Harry hear from the notorious committee?”

“I gather they’ve put him on hold,” Madeleine said.

“Typical. You know about committees. When they sit down to design a horse they come up with a camel,” Levy said. He was silent for a moment. She realized he was going to say something, something that was transparently on his mind. She sipped her drink and waited. She watched him stroke the thin weblike beard that clung to his chin with the frailty of smoke. “Apology,” he added.

“What about it?” Did she detect something disapproving in the way he said the word? She wasn’t altogether certain. She watched him cup his hands around his glass and remembered when they’d first met—a time when he’d come to Harry’s loft and Harry had introduced Levy as his oldest friend. They went back a long way together, a whole history interwoven, episodes shared, things she herself could never be a part of; yet she hadn’t felt left out in the cold, because Levy had been kind to her, welcoming, as if he were delighted she had entered Harry’s life.

“Tell me, Maddy. Tell me what you really think about Harry’s project.”

She hesitated a moment. Was he fishing for something? She tried to make out the expression in his eyes; he looked serious, intense. “I think it has great possibilities.”

“Like how?”

“I’m sure Harry’s explained all that to you far better than I ever could, Rube.” She swirled her drink around in the glass; little amber slicks clung to the inside like drops of some weird rain on a window.

Levy nodded. “I love our boy dearly, Maddy. You know that.”

She could hear a but coming. She raised her face and looked at him. “And?”

“And I don’t know about this whole Apology deal at all. I don’t know if it makes any goddamn sense.” Madeleine started to say something but Levy went on: “I don’t know if he really understands what he’s getting into.”

“I think he does.”

“Let me finish, sweetheart. Sometimes when I think about all those weird calls he gets I experience what I can only describe as tiny shivers up my backbone. I know, I know, I’m a rotten little coward who just happens to be rich as shit, but I still wouldn’t do what our mutual friend is doing, that’s all. In his shoes, I’d put the whole notion out to pasture, write it off as a mistake, an honest mistake of the concerned, creative heart.”

Madeleine smelled the smoke from Levy’s pipe, something like sweet vanilla. “Harry knows what he’s doing, Rube.”

Levy sighed. His pipe went dead. He raised his glass and drained it. “We live in a city of odd types. We live in this great screaming metropolis that occasionally reminds me of bedlam. Today, for one example, I happened to pass this guy who was dressed in legwarmers, a plaid skirt, and a bra—and this poor, silly fucker was going down Broadway screaming nigger acid, nigger acid. What does that mean, Maddy? Nigger acid! A breakdown of the mind. Some bad trip he never quite returned from. The corruption of language. See, we’re not just discussing the crime rate on subways and muggings on dark streets, sweetheart. We’re talking about one mother of a conceptual breakdown, a disintegration, more than broken pavement on thoroughfares and subways that always run late and too many cockroaches in too many slums. We’re talking about the plunge, the downward plunge, of civilization. And our good friend Harry, your lover, has elected to plug himself into this madness.” Levy stopped; he was breathless. “Go home. Do him a favor. Yank the answering machine out of the wall. Love him, make him marry you, have babies.”

Madeleine smiled. “He’s a big boy.”

“He’s a naive big boy.”

“What would you have him do, Rube? Fix him up with a job in that paper factory of yours where he would sit at a desk and design cardboard kazoos? You know Harry. You know how miserable he’d be.”

Levy shrugged. “I could make him executive in charge of napkins.”

Madeleine shook her head. “He cares about this project. I watch him get into it. I love to see him when he gets involved in something.”

“And it doesn’t matter what it is he’s involved in?”

Madeleine was quiet for a moment. She finished her drink, suddenly conscious of Levy’s knee pressing against her own beneath the table. She edged her chair backwards and the pressure was gone. Is he doing that deliberately? she wondered. Jesus Christ, what am I thinking here? What’s gotten into me? It was nothing, an accident of geography, nothing at all. Levy wouldn’t play kneesies or footsies with her. She set her empty glass down.

Levy said, “Look, my little southern pal. I care about both of you. I really do. I wish you both all the luck in the world. I wish you many years of singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ together. And if I have concerns, I express them as a friend, nothing more.”

“I know,” she said softly. You could see it in his eyes—this tiny look of caring. She patted the back of his hand. “But I think you’re being alarmist, Rube.”

“Alarmist?” Levy smiled. “It’s an occupational pastime of the rich, Maddy, my love. We perceive conspiracies intent on denuding us of our fortunes, you see. I come by my alarmist streak the hard way. I inherited it.”

Madeleine laughed. She started to rise and glanced at her wristwatch. “I liked your message on the tape, by the way.”

“A prank, I confess.” Levy held up his hands. “Wealth doesn’t exclude moments of tedium, does it?”

“I wouldn’t know.” She looked at her watch again. “I’ve got to run along.”

“I’ll walk out with you.” He rose, stuffing his pipe inside his coat pocket.

Outside they moved together along the rainy sidewalk. The wind was harder now, blowing through the arteries of the city. Levy paused in front of a pawnshop. She turned to see what he was looking at. It hung on the iron grill set against the window, limp in the rain, drooping like a half-masted flag.

“Ubiquitous Mr. Apology,” he said.

Madeleine stared at the handbill a moment. Mr. Apology. Here in the Manhattan rain.

“It depresses me,” Levy said. And he shook his head from side to side slowly.

Madeleine didn’t say anything. Ink was running down the handbill in spidery streaks.

“It’s like an invitation to every loony in this whole city. It’s like holding an open house to which only the insane are invited. And I genuinely don’t think Harry sees any danger or any menace in that at all. I only know I wouldn’t do what he’s trying to do—not for all the paper mills in New Jersey, Maddy.”

Levy was still shaking his head, rain dripping from his glistening beret.

8.

They were in a restaurant in Chinatown, not the kind located on the central tourist drag, the kind in which the only faces you saw were Caucasian, but a small place tucked away, as if it were a profound secret, in a narrow sidestreet. They ate lobster with black bean sauce, hot and sour soup, duck. Harrison liked Chinatown: He imagined it to be filled with dark places, dim-lit stairways that rose upwards into cramped attics where men lay around in pursuit of the opium dream. It was a romantic notion, he knew—the cramped attics these days were more likely to be occupied by members of some young Chinese gang. But he enjoyed the streets, the exotic stores, the sight of Chinese newspapers and magazines and cigarettes, even the pagodalike phone booths that had been erected here and there as if in a moment of ethnic weakness by the Bell Telephone Company. He looked across the table at Madeleine and thought: It’s strange how after so short a time a face can begin to seem so completely familiar, like the person has been with you always. Her absence now would create a strange void. Maybe a void he wouldn’t know how to begin to fill. Harry, it’s a stunning realization to suspect you’re starting to fall into that condition people describe as love. He reached over the table and held her hand, conscious of the fact that his fingertips were greasy from the duck. He felt her thumb press against the back of his wrist. She was smiling at him. What did he see in that smile? Something sweet and good, a kindness, a generosity? Whatever, you could just fall right into it and lose yourself there.

“So Berger’s promised to listen to a tape,” he said.

She nodded. “One tape, that’s all.”

“Which is what encyclopedia salesmen call a foot in the door.”

“It’s a start, Harry.” She pushed some food across her plate. “By the way, I ran into Rube on my way here.”

“How is he?”

“You know Rube. He worries.”

“About what?”

“Mr. Apology.”

“Why?”

“He smells danger in the air, Harry. He thinks you could be headed for trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“I can’t remember his exact words. He talked about all the madness around and wondered if you were wise to plug yourself into it, something like that.”

Harrison glanced towards the kitchen, where he could see five or six Chinese cooks squabbling hysterically over something. Maybe they were arguing the merits of mono-sodium glutamate. Why couldn’t he feel this sense of danger himself? Why did it seem so remote from him?

Madeleine said, “I see his point when I think of that creep who called last night. I see what he’s getting at when I remember that madman.”

Harrison watched how Madeleine frowned. He wanted to change the subject.

“Your friend Jamey came by asking her questions and scribbling in her little book.”

“Did she try to seduce you?”

“Oh, yeah. I had to beat her off with tubes of acrylic.”

“What did you think of her?”

Harrison shrugged. He wasn’t sure how to answer the question.

“She’s got a funny straightforward manner,” Madeleine said. “But a heart of gold. Seriously.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“I knew she’d write something. I just knew she’d come through.”

Harrison started to get up. “Let’s go for a walk. I like these streets. I can half imagine I’m in Hong Kong.” He helped her rise, helped her put her coat on, suddenly amazed by his own solicitous manner. Was this love? Was this kind of doting concern the thing called love? This weird urge to please? You’re falling, Harry, he thought. You’re actually beginning to take that tumble and you don’t know where it might end up or even if there was a place where it ended. He walked behind her towards the street; through the pale lamps outside the rain was drizzling softly. He put his arm around her shoulder. They moved slowly together. They went past the brightly lit stores that sold oriental foods, ducks roasting to a deep red in windows, strange fat sea creatures that looked like huge grubs of the deep, windows filled with rolls and rolls of delicate silks, kimonos, fanciful lanterns. He had a sudden feeling of peacefulness and realized it had its source in his contact with her, her physical presence, her nearness. On a street corner he paused, turned her towards him, kissed her on the lips under the faint glow of an overhead lamp.

“What was that for?” she asked.

“I felt like it. Something came over me.”

“Can you define this something?”

He shrugged, smiled. “It’s indefinable but it’s pretty damn good.” Pretty damn good—where were the words? Where was the correct description of the feeling? He couldn’t find one. They walked on a little way, then paused to look in the window of a food store; inside were groups of customers milling around, poking this vegetable, prodding that piece of meat. Then, suddenly, the crowd split open, making a passageway for a kid who was running quickly towards the doorway, something clutched in his hand. Upraised voices, anger, a shopkeeper lunging after the kid and screaming in Chinese. Harrison saw the boy coming straight at him, the small sallow face filled with the concentration of the flight. A shoplifter, he thought. A tiny thief. He glanced past the kid’s head at the shopkeeper, a man in a bloodstained white apron. And even though he didn’t understand any Chinese whatsoever, the words coming from the guy’s lips were unmistakable. Stop that kid! Stop him! For a moment Harrison responded to the shopkeeper’s cry, putting his arm out to catch the running kid, but then he suddenly didn’t want to do it, didn’t want to stop the boy from getting away, didn’t want to come to the assistance of the guy in the store, who was still jabbering, his hands flung in the air, his bloodstained apron billowing as he came quickly forward. The kid ducked beneath Harrison’s outstretched arm and then was gone hurriedly along the sidewalk, little more than a quick shadow vanishing between streetlamps. The grocer came out onto the sidewalk, staring in the direction the kid had gone.

“He was too nimble for me,” Harrison said.

The shopkeeper looked uncomprehending. He made a gesture with his hand bunched, something that seemed rude. Does he intend that gesture for me or for the thief? Harrison wondered. Muttering, the man went back inside the store and the crowd, its momentary entertainment over, returned to sifting meat and vegetables and seafood. Harrison put his arm around Madeleine’s shoulder again and they walked a little way along the sidewalk.

“Okay,” she said. “Why didn’t you just grab him?”

“Like I said, he was too quick.”

“Bull,” she said, smiling. “You could have caught him easily.”

Harrison laughed. Madeleine said, “You deliberately let him go, didn’t you? You’re an accomplice, Harry Harrison. You’re just as guilty as that kid.”

“Maybe if it had been something else, like a kid mugging an old lady, maybe then I’d have done a Galahad act.”

“So why didn’t you stop that kid?”

An old memory, he thought. Something shimmering inside. Something he might have forgotten. The kid reminded me. The kid brought something back, a taste that was sharp, a vision that was keen.

“Well?” Madeleine asked.

“He reminded me of something. When I was a kid—”

“I can’t imagine you as a kid.”

He drew her towards him, hugging her spontaneously. “I used to get up to the same things as that kid. I used to do pretty much the same as he was doing right there.”

“Doesn’t every kid?”

“I guess. Only in my case I used to steal things from stores out of a sense of belonging. At least to begin with—the old peer-pressure thing. The clan, the tribe, the desire to belong to a group. The group I wanted to belong to liked to steal things from stores. It was a conspiracy. It made me feel warm. I don’t know. I didn’t like my home life much, because my old man was always on my case about how I was wasting my time with art. And the kids at school—the real kids, I mean, the rough guys—used to think I was some kind of weirdo. I wanted to show them. I wanted to be part of them.” He paused, looked directly into her eyes. “So I shoplifted. Usually one of the other guys would get the clerk’s attention while I slid around out of sight, stuffing things inside my jacket. Then it was something more than just a sense of belonging after a while.…”

“Like what?”

“The thrill, Maddy. The electricity.”

“Stealing for kicks.”

“Right. It’s damn hard to explain. I’d go inside a store on my own and I’d wait until the clerk wasn’t looking, then I’d steal something useless. For some reason, it had to be something I couldn’t use. A packet of tampons. A huge bottle of vinegar. Useless stuff. Then it got to the point where it had to be big as well as useless, because there wasn’t any fun in stealing small things. Huge boxes of detergent. One time it was a framed print of The Naked Maja. If it wasn’t large, there wasn’t any excitement. I wish I could explain the sheer goddamn thrill of knowing the clerk could turn around at any moment and catch you. You lived on the edge all the time. You expected to get caught. That’s what made it thrilling. I used to leave those stores and my mouth would be bone dry and I’d be sweating and shaking.…” He paused. Why was he telling her all this in any case? What sudden urge to spill his past in front of her? I want her to know me, he thought. I want her to know who I am and what I’ve been. The whole bit. “I never wanted to be a criminal as such. Sometimes I tried to imagine what it might have been like if I’d been a different kind of person, say a guy with a fondness for guns and sticking up liquor stores. Do you know what I mean? But I never had criminal ambitions beyond those good old shoplifting days.”

“So you sympathized with that kid?” she asked.

Harrison nodded.

“Maybe you sympathize with criminals in general, Harry.”

He smiled at her. “I don’t think I’d go that far.”

“You’re selective, huh? Only juvenile shoplifters, right?”

He put his hands flat against the sides of her face. “One time, we were on vacation in Virginia, I think, and I remember seeing these guys working at the side of the road. They were all dressed in these olive outfits and they were chained together. I was pretty young then but I remember looking at their faces and wondering what it was they’d done that would set them apart like that. It was as if they carried some kind of mark, like they all had the same tattoo in the center of their foreheads. And I remember wondering what I’d have to do to end up on a chain gang.… It was how they looked, I guess, that really interested me. Withdrawn, desperate, defeated. Like they belonged to some strange club they never wanted to join in the first place. I wondered what they were thinking. How they spent their time. What kind of people they were. I’ve never quite forgotten those guys. If I close my eyes, I can see them clearly even now. A race apart. A secret society. I remember being puzzled. Drawn towards them. I remember I wanted to talk with them.…” He paused. Another ancient memory. Another floating fragment of the past. The pale young kid seeing his first criminals, looking at them with eyes of wonder. He remembered the dust that rose up from beneath their picks and shovels, the clanking of chains, the brown green color of the grass verge that sloped away beneath them. Why had he suddenly dragged out this dilapidated recollection? The Apology connection, he thought—the criminal minds, dark burdens of guilt, the secret confessions of those who had broken the law. It was all wrapped up inside the notion of Apology, inside the inspiration of the project. Links, correspondences—the kid who shoplifted, the one who’d been fascinated by the faces of criminals on a chain gang, the adult who’d been drawn by the violence of graffiti and an attempted rape by a high school student—all these things were involved in Apology. He thought of poor old Albert slashed in the chair by the window—crimes and victims. The confessions of the guilty. The desire to hear those confessions. Criminals and artists—weren’t they similar anyhow? Weren’t they somehow set apart from a social mainstream, only obliquely attached to society?

They moved along the sidewalk a little way. The rain was falling harder now, turning from gentle drizzle to large splashing drops. He turned up the collar of his coat. A certain fascination with the criminal mind, sure, but it wasn’t an intoxication, a desire to emulate, an urge to become a member of a certain lawless class of people. It was something else: What makes them tick? What kind of clockwork drives them? And how do they feel afterwards? And he thought of the voice that had confessed to killing a kid in some one-horse town in Ohio. He remembered the total lack of remorse in that narrative. I figure I just wanted to know what it felt like.…

He experienced a sudden urge to get back to the loft and see what new messages had come in over the Apology line. He turned to Madeleine and said, “Let’s get a cab. Go back home.”

“Any time you’re ready,” she answered.

He grabbed her by the hand and they ran along the sidewalk in the direction of Canal Street.

I’M A PRIEST. I’VE BEEN A PRIEST IN A CERTAIN PARISH IN LOWER MANHATTAN NOW FOR ALMOST TWENTY YEARS. I CONSIDER MYSELF, IF I MAY SAY SO, AS BEING EXTREMELY GOOD AT MY WORK, LOVED BY MY PARISHIONERS. I AM, IN SHORT, A CONSCIENTIOUS MAN. SOMEONE BROUGHT YOUR POSTER TO MY ATTENTION AND I WOULD LIKE YOU TO KNOW THAT I BELIEVE YOU ARE UNDERMINING MY FUNCTION. I UNDERSTAND NOBODY HAS A MONOPOLY ON CONFESSIONS, BUT AT THE SAME TIME I MUST POINT OUT THAT I SPENT MANY YEARS AT SEMINARY SCHOOL AND I FEEL EQUIPPED TO TAKE CONFESSION. CAN YOU MAKE THAT CLAIM? DO YOU HAVE THAT THEOLOGICAL BACKGROUND? IF NOT, I THINK YOU SHOULD DESIST FROM YOUR PRACTICE. I INTEND TO PREACH AGAINST YOU THIS COMING SUNDAY. GOODBYE.

“Now you’ve gone and offended God,” Madeleine said. “I wouldn’t be surprised, Harry, if you burned in hell.”

Harrison smiled, taking off his clothes, throwing them over the chair by the bed. “I’m harming the priestly business, I guess.”

“It doesn’t surprise me.” Madeleine was under the covers, her knees raised in the air, hands tucked behind her head. She was watching Harrison undress. “You know something, Harry? Your shyness is quite charming.”

“Shyness?”

“Yeah, every time you take your clothes off your turn your back on me. I get this terrific view of your nice little ass, which is fair enough, but how come you never turn around?”

“Coy,” he said. He turned towards her, facing her now. “How’s that?”

“Gasp! Is that all yours? Is it real?”

Harrison smiled and went towards the answering machine, turning the volume low. He felt Madeleine’s hand against his hip as he gazed at the red light; it was odd how it seemed to have this intrinsic hypnotic power. He wanted to reach out and turn the volume up and listen to the incoming message, but he didn’t move.

Madeleine was silent for a moment. He heard her sigh, then say, “I wish you’d come to bed, Harry.”

He didn’t answer. He listened to the sound of Madeleine draw the sheets up over her body, the faint whisper of her hair upon the pillow. He imagined slipping into bed beside her, encircling her body with his arms, the flat of his hand resting against her stomach, his fingers lightly rubbing the surface of her skin. So what are you waiting for, Harry? It’s the red light, he thought. It’s the curiosity of the red light: It might have been a weak signal sent to some distant ship from a stormy shoreline. Ah, shit—he gave in, reached out, adjusted the volume. The voice he heard was muffled, indistinct, as if the caller were talking through a linen handkerchief.

I’M A HOMOSEXUAL.… IT’S AN EXTREMELY DIFFICULT SITUATION FOR ME, BECAUSE I HAVE TO PRETEND TO BE STRAIGHT. MY POSITION IN LIFE DEMANDS IT, YOU UNDERSTAND. I HAVE TO PRETEND. EVERY GODDAMN DAY.… THE PERSON I LOVE, OH, I DON’T QUITE KNOW HOW TO SAY THIS. THE PERSON I LOVE … I’VE BEGUN TO THINK LATELY THAT THE BEST SOLUTION WOULD BE FOR ME TO MURDER HIM. TO KILL HIM. I’VE NEVER CONSCIOUSLY HURT ANYONE IN MY ENTIRE LIFE.… CAN YOU UNDERSTAND MY PREDICAMENT? IF HE WAS OUT OF THE WAY. I WOULDN’T HAVE ANY MORE PROBLEMS.…

The murderous heart.

Madeleine was staring at him; there was a vague look of irritation on her face. She wants me to shut the thing off and go to bed. He stared at the wall above the bed, the assorted posters—a Klee, something by Lichtenstein, another by Hopper. Why were so many of the messages such sad statements of the heart? Such obvious failures of love? He rubbed his hands together. Madeleine had turned on her side, away from the machine. She’d drawn a sheet over her face, as if she didn’t want to hear anything more. Maybe she couldn’t stand the sorrow in some of the statements, or maybe—and he turned this over in his mind briefly—she wanted to impose some kind of curfew on Apology. Don’t listen to any tapes after nine o’clock, Harry.

There was another message now.

Harrison recognized the voice; he felt a thin skein of sweat form on the palms of his hands.

The laugh.

The broken laugh that sounded like walnut shells being cracked open or the grotesque noise of a bird trying to imitate human laughter. He was aware of Madeleine throwing the sheets away from her face, conscious of her sitting up, turning to look at him as if she wanted to say for God’s sake, Harry, enough is enough—

ME AGAIN … REMEMBER, APOLOGY? WELL, I GOT A HOT FLASH FOR YOU, JACK.… I DID WHAT I SAID I WAS GONNA DO. I DID EXACTLY WHAT I TOLD YOU, YEAH.… CAN YOU DIG IT, MAN?

What did you do? Harrison wondered.

Exactly what?

Tell me, he thought.

Come right out and tell me.

“Harry,” Madeleine said.

He held up a hand to silence her. He listened to the maniacal laughter. No, it wasn’t crazy, it wasn’t lunatic—instead, there was something coldly calculating about it. And he had the sensation, as he’d had once before, that the caller was somewhere inside the loft, somewhere in the deep shadows of the place, just waiting … but for what?

YOU’RE GONNA READ ALL ABOUT IT IN THE PAPERS, APOLOGY.… YOU’RE GONNA BE READING ALL ABOUT WHAT I DONE.… I STRANGLED THE FUCKER!

There was a strange sound now, like that of fingers beating against the surface of the telephone receiver. Loud, then louder still. Out there in the dark, Harrison thought, hunched against a phone, maybe watching the street in case somebody saw him. It’s a joke. It can’t be serious. It can’t be serious at all.… He shut his eyes very tight and tried to imagine himself looking inside that phone booth, tried to perceive the face, visualize the expression, tried to imagine himself knocking upon the glass door with a coin, rapping it impatiently, watching as the face turned towards him, seeing—seeing what? I need to see this guy’s face, he thought, and the ferocity of the thought surprised him.

HE HAD ALL THESE GODDAMN PICTURES ON THE WALLS OF THESE DANCERS AND THE WHOLE PLACE STINKED OF SOME KINDA DISGUSTING PERFUME.…

Harrison felt Madeleine’s hand cover his knuckles. “Do we need to listen to any more of this creep, Harry? I don’t like it.”

HEY, APOLOGY, I KINDA LIKE TALKING TO YOU LIKE THIS … I JUST WISH I HAD SOMETHING TO SAY I WAS SORRY FOR, MAN.… OKAY, YEAH, LEMME SEE.… I COULD SAY I WAS SORRY ABOUT THAT OLD FAGGOT … BUT I’M NOT REALLY SORRY.… I’D BE LYING TO YOU, APOLOGY, AND I DON’T WANT TO MAKE A HABIT OF THAT. ESPECIALLY SINCE WE’RE GONNA GET TO KNOW EACH OTHER REAL WELL.…

“What does he mean, Harry? What the hell does he mean when he says that?”

Harrison sat hunched forward now, trying to absorb this voice, the nuances, the accent, the intonation. Real well, he thought.

SAY, DON’T YOU EVER ANSWER THE PHONE YOURSELF, MR. BIGSHOT APOLOGY? YOU TOO GOOD FOR THAT, HUH? TOO REFINED? DON’T WANT TO GET DOWN IN HERE AMONG THE DIRT, HUH? IT DON’T MATTER. YEAH … ANYWAY, I GOT CERTAIN PLANS THAT INVOLVE YOU, MAN, AND THIS TIME YOU CAN’T GO HIDING BEHIND YOUR GODDAMN MACHINE.…

Laughter.

Harrison heard the swift intake of Madeleine’s breath. It’s getting to her, he thought. It’s getting to her.

PLANS, APOLOGY. IF YOU WON’T COME TO THE TELEPHONE, THEN I’M GONNA HAVE TO COME TO YOU, DIG? I’M GONNA HAVE TO GO OUT AND FIND OUT WHO YOU ARE SO YOU WON’T HAVE THE CHANCE TO HIDE BEHIND A MACHINE.… YOU THINK YOU’RE SAFE, HUH? THINK I DON’T KNOW HOW TO FIND YOU, HUH? YEAH, YOU’RE LIVING IN A DREAM IF YOU THINK THAT, MAN.… ONE DAY WE’LL COME FACE TO FACE.… I CAN PROMISE YOU THAT.…

The laughter again.

IT’S KINDA FUN, APOLOGY.… YOU AND ME CAN HAVE SOME REAL FUN TOGETHER.… I REALLY GET OFF ON THE IDEA OF FINDING YOU AND KILLING YOU—BECAUSE THE REAL KICKER IS I CAN APOLOGIZE FOR MURDERING YOU IN ADVANCE.… HOW DOES THAT GRAB YOU, MAN? HOW DOES THAT MAKE YOU FEEL? CAN’T YOU SEE THE BIG MOTHERFUCKING HEADLINES? MR. APOLOGY KILLED BY HIS OWN CLIENT!

The line was suddenly dead.

Madeleine was staring at him. “Tell me it’s not for real, Harry. Tell me.”

“It’s a fantasy,” he said. “The guy just feels liberated from restraint, lets his imagination run wild, that’s all. Don’t you see? He uses the Apology line to let off steam, Maddy. That’s what he’s doing—”

“How the hell do you know that for sure?”

Harrison wandered out into the dark of the loft, staring at the misshapen figure of Albert in the chair. I really get off on the idea of finding you and killing you.… He went to the window, looked down into the dark empty street. Nothing moved save some shapeless items of garbage floating in the night wind. He heard a sound at his back and turned, seeing Madeleine come naked across the floor. She put her arms around him; she was shivering.

“He says he’s going to find you, Harry. He says he’s going to find you and kill you!”

“Relax, relax.” He rubbed her bare shoulders gently for a minute. He could feel her anxiety, her fear, as if these were emotions that lay just beneath the surface of her skin. He kissed her on the side of her face. “You knew we’d get some pretty weird messages, didn’t you?”

“Weird, yeah. I didn’t figure on anything like this guy, though. I can’t get that voice out of my mind.” She was silent, her face pressed against his shoulder. “Can he find out who you are and where you live? Can he do that much, Harry?”

Harrison didn’t answer. He tried to imagine the anonymous caller tracking shadows through the dark, following old scents, sniffing the wind like a hunting animal. Where would he begin to look? How could he possibly get hold of the name and address? I think you overestimate the propriety of telephone company officials, Mr. Harrison, Shultz had said. How easy would it be? And what would be involved? A bribe? A threat of some kind? A shadow passed across his mind a moment—what if it were on the level? What if it were a real threat? How strong is the fortress anyhow? What would it stand up to? No, you can’t afford to take it that seriously, because if you did you’d scrap the Apology project and everything it meant to you—out of sheer cold fear, cowardice. You couldn’t begin to let one maniac out there prevent you from finishing what you’d begun. Couldn’t afford to let one caller erode your enthusiasm for the whole thing.

“He said he killed somebody, Harry.”

“People say all kinds of things on the tape.”

“I know. But why does this one guy keep calling, for Christ’s sake?”

Harrison placed his palms against her breasts.

She said, “What if he’s telling the truth? What do you do then?”

“I told you. Stop worrying. Nothing’s going to happen.”

“I wish I felt that way. But I don’t.”

“Maddy.” He pulled her close to him, putting his arms around her. This fear—how could he soothe it out of her? How could he make it dissolve?

“He said something about pictures of dancers, some old queer—”

“I heard him,” Harrison said.

He took her hand, led her back into the bedroom, drew her body against him, moving the open palms of his hands over her bare breasts. He kissed her, losing himself in that connection of lips, tongues, as if they were building a bridge that linked them inexorably together. He stroked the soft flatness of her stomach, letting his fingers fall between her legs, listening to the quiet sound of her moaning. Forget whatever it is out there, he told himself. Forget the dark streets and the shadows that move between doorways, forget all the madness, the guilt, the wild confessions, forget everything except this woman. He felt her hand against his cock, her gentle touch, her light stroke, and in some profound place at the back of his brain he sensed the slow origins of an explosion.

Later, he turned off the bedside lamp, noticing through half-shut eyes the red glow of light on the answering machine.

Somebody is looking for me, he thought.

Out there, perhaps even now, somebody wants to come face to face with Apology.

I really get off on the idea of finding you and killing you.…

He watched the red light recede as his eyelids became heavier; he watched it float off into darkness like a pale beacon burning against a stormy sea.

Madeleine turned towards him in the dark.

“I thought you were asleep,” he said.

“I’ve been trying,” she answered. “I can’t quite make it.”

Harrison said nothing.

“I’m afraid, Harry. I really think I’m afraid.”

He rolled towards her, putting one arm around her shoulders.

He shut his eyes. Finding you, killing you. It seemed to him he could hear an echo of those words rumble through his head, as if they were being cried aloud by a voice trapped in a canyon. I don’t feel fear, he thought. I don’t feel what Madeleine feels. I feel drawn towards the voice, drawn towards whatever motivates it, whatever lies behind it; when I listen to it it’s almost like some kind of thread attaching me to the caller, a link of some frail, invisible sort. Who are you? he wondered. And what do you look like?

He listened to the sound of Madeleine’s breathing as it become more and more regular, deeper. Then when he was sure she was alseep, he swung around and sat upright on the edge of the bed. He stared at the thin red light for a few seconds before he pressed REWIND. He stopped the tape. Then PLAYBACK. He turned the volume low and sat with his eyes shut, listening to the voice again. It’s kinda fun, Apology.… You and me can have some real fun together.… I really get off on the idea of finding you and killing you—because the real kicker is I can apologize for murdering you in advance.…

Played at a low volume like this, the voice had a whispering quality, a whispering that seemed very close, close to the point where Harrison could imagine he felt hot breath against his ear, where he could imagine he smelled stale scents from a half-open mouth.

A presence in the bedroom.

Throughout the whole loft.

He created a picture for himself—this caller had the kind of face he’d seen so long ago on that chain gang, a pale sunken face, eyes burning, tight lips, a faint nerve working in the hollows of the jaw. Does he look like that? Does he look like one of those convicts?

Somebody else in the loft. Suddenly the idea spooked him.

He switched the machine off, set it back to ANSWER. Then he got back in bed beside Madeleine.

FOUR

1.

Frank Nightingale watched Moody open a carton of yogurt and stir it with a small wooden spoon. Then, when he seemed satisfied with what he saw, the Boy Wonder began to shovel the white stuff up into his mouth, making a funnel of his lips. Tiny drops slipped onto the back of his hand and lay there like cow glue. “Is that your breakfast, Doug?” he asked.

Moody nodded. “It’s good for you. It’s filled with all kinds of B vitamins.”

B vitamins, Nightingale thought. He shook his head and walked slowly to the window of the apartment and looked down into the street below. Sure enough, there they were, the little groups of sightseers, the morbid drawn to the sight of cop cars like suicidal moths to the core of a flame. He had the odd feeling he kept seeing the same faces over and over again, like somebody out there was selling tickets. Why were so many people out so early anyhow? It was hardly dawn. Maybe they were ghouls, the undead; maybe they slept later in the day inside their cozy coffins when the sun came up. He listened to his young partner slurp. Inside his head he could still hear the harsh sound of the telephone that had wakened him about an hour ago. A fresh killing, lieutenant. A brand new homicide.

Moody was looking at the posters on the wall. Nightingale watched him a moment and then glanced at his own reflection in the full-length mirror. A charitable word was portly.… What could you do about your girth in this hectic world of fast-food and bad hours? He went inside the bedroom, where the victim lay. Quite a room—a large four-poster brass bed, tons of dried flowers and pussy willows sticking out of green glass vases, the walls covered with photographs of a young guy, the same young guy in every one. Nightingale stared at the figure on the bed. Then he took a closer look at the photographs. To Henry from Carlos, Buenos Aires, 1945. To Henry from his best friend Carlos, Resistencia, 1946. An old love, an antique obsession, a ghost from the past. He opened a closet. There was a pile of leotards and brightly colored tights, a heap of battered ballet shoes. The last dance, friend. When he turned around to look once more at the victim there was the sudden gaudy flash of a camera and McLaren, the photographer, was moving around the dead man’s bed with all the agility of someone shooting high-fashion models. You put a little too much enthusiasm into your work, he thought, a little too much spirit. It was almost as if McLaren found joy in the act of photographing murder victims. Nightingale had the suspicion that if he were left to his own devices, McLaren would rearrange such things as the position of the victim’s limbs, his clothing, his surroundings, just to add some fine artistic touch of his own.

“You through yet, McLaren?” he asked.

“Just about.”

Pop. Flash. The click of a shutter. And Henry Falcon is immortalized from yet another angle. Nightingale moved to the dresser beside the bed. Baubles. Some jewelry. A flimsy little notebook covered in brown velvet; Nightingale flipped it open. It was a diary of sorts, not the kind that detailed the mundane daily comings and goings of a life—had lunch with M and ate two veal chops—instead it was mainly concerned with Henry Falcon’s inner existence. Nightingale read a few pages. Sorry stuff. Sometimes I wonder now if all human relationships are doomed. If not by the intransigencies of the soul nor the fickle qualities of the heart, then surely by death itself. Laden with a sense of doom. Maybe this guy Carlos had worked his icy hand across old Henry’s life someplace in the past. I have asked myself how long one might be destined to haul around the same emotional cargo, then I imagine it has to be forever because certain emotions are as certain, as persistent, as genes. Nightingale closed the book and put it back down.

McLaren said, “Spicy stuff, lieutenant?”

“Yeah. It would keep you awake all night long, McLaren. Hard-on guaranteed.”

“You don’t say.” McLaren took another of his ghastly photographs; he was practically straddling the corpse now. “I worked some of these fag murders before. Always the same damn motive deep down. Jealousy, lieutenant.”

Nightingale sighed. At the window he paused and drew up the blind. Jealousy, he thought. How could sad little Henry Falcon have inspired jealousy in someone’s heart? He turned his face to the bed; the facial skin was discolored, the eyes staring with the kind of glaze that suggested a glandular malfunction, the thin white legs had all the substance of toothpicks. The naked genitalia were withered, the balls hanging like two dehydrated apricots. A pair of green tights had been used to strangle Henry Falcon; they had been knotted very tightly around his throat.

“I figure that’s plenty,” McLaren said, starting to pack his camera away.

Nightingale watched the photographer go, then gazed around the bedroom. A solitary life—why did it all suggest such loneliness? The scribblings in the notebook, the ancient ballet shoes in the closet, the heavy makeup on the dead man’s face: They indicated a life in which your own only companionship was what you saw in the mirror when you tried to practice your dance steps. He glanced one last time at Henry Falcon, then went inside the front room, where Moody was prowling around.

“Some of these prints must be pretty rare,” Moody said. “Mademoiselle Taglioni in La Sylphide. Saturday, July 28, 1832, Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. I guess that must be worth a few bucks, Frank.”

Nightingale looked at the prints and posters. Dancers, nothing but dancers. Pavlova. Karsavina. Nijinsky. Carlotta Zambelli. On the opposite wall, placed against the mirrors, were dance barres made out of old polished wood. Nightingale thought: You can easily imagine the old guy standing in this room, makeup smeared on, tights pulled over thin legs, paunch hanging out; you can imagine the breakdown of his body and what must have been a wrenching longing for a past shadow of himself.

“And here’s one of Henry Falcon himself,” Moody said. “Romeo and Juliet. Stockholm. April, 1937.”

Nightingale looked at the poster. There was a photograph of the young Henry Falcon dressed for the role of Romeo. It was impossible to relate the face of the young man—handsome, slightly effeminate, deep shadows under the mournful eyes—with the old ruin that lay in the bedroom. Poor Romeo, he thought.

“Well, if the posters are valuable and there’s some jewelry just lying around in the bedroom, then we’re not looking at robbery, are we?”

Moody was silent for a while, then said, “I talked with Mrs. Delahanty. The woman who found the body.”

“How come she found it at this time of day?”

“Falcon paid her a few bucks a week to clean up for him. And he always insisted she get an early start so she’d wake him up. He liked to exercise. I guess he wanted to get up in the dark and put himself through his paces, Frank. Anyhow, Mrs. Delahanty—whose main ambition in life is to save enough money for a ticket back to Belfast because America is going to the dogs—”

“She’s going to be safe in Belfast?”

“I guess. Whatever. She says he never had any company. He lived all alone. Your regular recluse. She’d known him for years and in all that time she never saw anybody in this apartment except for old Henry. Take it from there, Frank—what are we dealing with? What are we looking at here?”

“Maybe he went out and picked somebody up off the street, Doug. A stranger. They make an assignation—”

“There’s a quaint expression.”

Nightingale paused. He stared at a slick of yogurt that hung just under Moody’s lower lip. I won’t tell him about it, he thought. I’ll let it stick there all day long and he won’t know why people are looking at him in a funny way. “Like I was saying, Doug. They come to terms. Sexual favors. An old guy like Henry Falcon would have to pay, yeah? Only he picks up a killer. And, like Camilla Darugna, he gets strangled.”

“Another strangulation,” Moody said, looking suddenly thoughtful.

Don’t tell me anything about the intimacy of murder, Nightingale thought. Don’t talk about the absence of distancing to me, please. He rubbed his hands together, caught a glimpse of himself sideways in the mirror, then turned his face away. Your overcoat could house Barnum & Bailey. Some kind of Ringling Brothers extravaganza. You need the rubber room, the steam bath, somebody with deft fingers to knead your flabby muscles.

“Maybe we’re dealing with some random killing here, Doug, and I don’t know anything more difficult than that. The guy he picks up hates gays, doesn’t want to be one himself; he really has it in for old Henry.”

“Might be,” Moody said.

“Well, there’s no sign of forced entry, is there? He lets the killer come in. Puts out the old welcome mat. There’s some sexual foreplay in the bedroom, then wham. Old Henry shuffles off these mortal coils.”

Moody smiled slightly. He rubbed his chin a second but missed the spot of yogurt. “You notice the pictures in the bedroom?”

“I could hardly miss them,” Nightingale said.

“A shrine, a shrine to a lost love. I could see Henry Falcon sitting in the dark, maybe lighting a few candles while his heart is just withering away over his old love Carlos. You think maybe this Carlos character just somehow strayed back into Henry’s life and offed him?” Moody looked glumly at the posters. “It’s possible.”

“Why, Doug? Why would somebody just come right out of the past and kill like that? You’d need a grudge as long as the interstate.”

Moody shrugged. “Two strangulations in as many days. It makes you think.”

“Think what? No, don’t tell me—”

“Our old pal William Chapman.”

“Come on, Doug.”

“Seriously. Why not? Maybe Billy Chapman’s lost it. Maybe he’s suddenly missing a couple of aces in his deck—all kinds of people just go off on weird killing sprees out of the blue yonder, Frank. It happens. Why couldn’t it have been Chapman? Maybe we’ve got a robbery here after all. I mean, how the hell do we know there’s nothing missing? Old Henry might have had a fortune stuffed under his mattress, right? Billy Chapman could have been enticed up here, seized his opportunity, done away with Falcon.”

Moody paused, shrugged, then went restlessly across the room to an old-fashioned mahogany sideboard. Nightingale watched him: a drawer man, always the first one to rummage among the possessions of the deceased. Hunched over an open drawer, sifting things eagerly, he reminded Nightingale of one of those Hollywood scientists in filmed biographies of the thirties and forties—Pasteur crouched over a bunsen burner, Fleming hunting down the truth about penicillin. Nightingale had never felt very comfortable about the drawer bit; it had always made him feel he was plundering something intensely private. He moved away from the barre and went slowly to the window. Billy Chapman, he thought. The trouble is, Moody seems obsessed with his big rookie failure. He seems to want Billy Chapman to have killed Henry Falcon. The open sore of an old disappointment. An old item of hurt pride. It could easily just stick in your head and stay there with all the force of a conviction. So the Boy Wonder hadn’t forgotten, and now the signs of Billy Chapman’s vicious handiwork were to be seen everywhere.

Nightingale looked down into the street once more, pretending he didn’t see anybody milling around the cop cars. He shut his eyes. It would be a wonderful life if you could find Chapman’s prints beautifully inlaid upon some dusty shelf, if you could somehow find evidence that would tell you that you were looking for one killer and not two. A simple solution. One manhunt, not two.

“Zucchini with orange sauce,” Moody said.

“Say it again.”

“A recipe in this drawer.”

“It sounds disgusting.”

Moody rummaged around again. “Ah-hah. Henry’s passport.” He held it in the air a moment, then flicked through the pages. He laughed briefly.

“What’s so funny?” Nightingale asked.

“It seems our Henry wasn’t born with the name Falcon. It would appear the macho name of Falcon was something he invented for stage purposes.” Moody laughed again.

“What was his real name?”

“You sure you want to hear this, Frank?”

“I’m grown up, I can take most things.”

“He was christened Dick Bird.”

“Dick what?”

“Dick Bird.” Moody covered his mouth with his hand to restrain himself from laughing any further. There was a quiet snickering noise. Nightingale reached over and took the passport from the Boy Wonder’s hands.

“I wonder if he was called Dicky,” Moody said.

“You going to start making bird jokes, Doug? Huh?”

Moody shook his head and tried to look solemn. “I wouldn’t do that to you, Frank, would I?”

“I’m up to here with bird jokes. I know every goddamn bird pun that was ever invented. They make me puke.” Nightingale read the name in the passport, looked at the photograph and wondered how Falcon/Bird had ever managed to clear immigration in any country in the world. The face in the photograph might have been that of a fifteen-year-old kid. Dicky Bird, for Christ’s sake. He snapped the passport shut and handed it back to Moody. “You make one bird joke, friend, and I’ll tell you about the yogurt you got stuck to your chin, okay?”

“What yogurt?”

“Look for yourself.” Nightingale wandered back inside the bedroom, where he stood looking down at the twisted shape of Henry Falcon. He sat at the bottom of the mattress, took in the pictures of Carlos, the jewelry on the dresser, then the corpse once more. Somebody kills this harmless old queen. Somebody comes in here with Henry and strangles the life out of him with his own green tights. A man deserves something in death, he thought. A little respect. Something. He doesn’t deserve to lie here in all his sexual antiquity and look as ludicrous as this, does he?

He stood up and went to the dresser, picked up the little notebook, flicked the pages. A journey into despair, a voyage into sorrow. It was all here, all the sad broken ruminations of Henry’s life. Little phrases of poetry, references to Carlos. He turned the pages. The last few were different: They didn’t mention Carlos and they didn’t speculate about the misery of human relationships. They were more immediate, more specific, mysterious in their fashion. He only looks a little like Carlos. I deceive myself this way. Some days, when he comes down the street, I imagine I see Carlos in the stride, the swagger of his walk, but I realize I’m only replaying an old movie inside my head. He only looks like Carlos. Besides, Carlos was so long ago.… This is a different man, another man. On a good day, he looks up and waves.

Nightingale closed the notebook.

Some days, when he comes down the street …

When who comes down the goddamn street? The killer?

He moved to the door of the bedroom and called out, “Hey, Doug. Come in here and look at this.”

2.

I really get off on the idea of finding you and killing you because the real kicker is I can apologize for murdering you in advance.…

Madeleine went inside a Chock Full o’ Nuts and sat at the counter, ordered a coffee, glanced at her watch. 8:04. She felt sleepy, rubbed her eyes, stared at the headline of the newspaper spread out in front of her. It was another bad day in the Middle East—when was it not? She turned the pages, searching for local news, searching not for the meaningless statements of politicians or which linebacker was a cocaine addict or whether a certain Nazi out on Long Island was going to survive deportation hearings—searching, she realized, for a murder. A killing connected with the message that had come over Harry’s answering machine. She flicked the pages. A charred body had been found inside an old church in the South Bronx. A decomposed figure of uncertain sex had been fished out of the East River. There had been a gunfight in Harlem. Nothing to link anything with the voice on the Apology line. She sipped her coffee, glanced across the smoke-filled restaurant, looked once again at her watch. I really get off on the idea of finding you and killing you. She finished her coffee and slid down from the stool after leaving some coins beside her saucer. She went outside, paused on the street corner, stared at the way a red STOP signal shimmered in the weak rain of early morning. That voice, she thought. That creep out there. She clenched her hands tightly and crossed the street. Harry had been able to make her forget the voice last night; he’d been able to soothe her. The night had finally been restful and dreamless and her sleep easy—but today, today in the thin light of morning, she felt the same uneasiness come back to her. He uses the Apology line to let off steam, Maddy.

Why don’t I feel the way Harry does? she wondered.

Why couldn’t she feel like that?

It was the voice. It was the tone of the voice as much as any words it uttered, the menacing sense of someone out there making calls that didn’t remotely suggest to her somebody just letting off steam. It was more than that: Christ, you only had to listen! She turned up the collar of her coat. The problem with this uneasiness was how it spread, how it grew and spread through everything. Even as she moved along the sidewalk now she had the strange notion somebody was watching her. It was nothing tangible, an instinct picked up like a feeble radio signal. She looked around. The morning crowds, people hurrying toward offices: How could you ever detect one particular face among so many especially when you weren’t even sure that there was anybody looking at you?

8:30. She headed in the direction of the subway.

Then she remembered something else. The way Harry had replayed the message, the way he’d sat hunched forward listening to it as if it were the only thing in the whole world of any importance. The distance in his eyes, the way his whole being seemed concentrated upon the terrible voice coming out of the machine. I might have ceased to exist, she thought. My worries and concerns, my feelings—he might have been the only person in the world left alive, and everything else reduced to electronic echoes whispering through a machine. A distance, a chasm. He thought I was asleep but I wasn’t. I was listening, watching him … and it was just like he had drifted off into some other world, a place where he couldn’t be reached. Maybe that scared her even more than the messages; she didn’t know.

She went down the subway steps. The feeling of being watched had gone, but not the sensation of uneasiness.

He paused on the corner of 57th Street and Fifth Avenue and looked in the direction of the sign that carried his name. It was a brass oval with black lettering, and, smeared by rain, it had a blurry appearance, almost as if the name were beginning to run, to bleed. He walked slowly, wondering if the girl had opened up the gallery yet. Probably she had—she was very efficient. He gazed a moment at his reflection in the window of the gallery, then he went inside. Madeleine was standing in the office doorway, smiling at him. The rainbows that loomed over him looked especially grim today. He wanted to do something to them, something vicious. Destroy them.

“Ah, Madeleine,” he said.

“Good morning, Mr. Berger.”

He took off his coat and hat, hung them up. For a second he didn’t want to look directly into the girl’s eyes because he imagined he would see something knowing there and he felt ridiculous now about having succumbed to the urge to call the number of that silly service her boyfriend provided to make what amounted to a confession. Maybe she hadn’t heard the tape—at best, if she had, perhaps she hadn’t recognized his voice, which he’d felt foolish disguising, talking like a gangster from the corner of his mouth. Why did you do such a thing, Bryant, old man? Are the marbles beginning to slip from the sweaty palms of your hands?

“I was thinking, Madeleine, of a bonfire.”

“A bonfire?”

“Indeed. We take the rainbows from the walls and we drag them out to the sidewalk and we set a light to them. In this fashion, we might provide a useful service to passersby whose hands are cold. What do you think? Art as flame. The canvas as a means of physical rather than spiritual warmth.”

She smiled at him. “I like the idea,” she said.

“No more than I do, I’m sure.” He rubbed his hands together as if he were imagining the act of warming them over hot flames rising from melting paint, scorched canvas, twisted frames. He patted Madeleine gently on the shoulder, then walked inside his office.

“There were two calls,” she said. “One was from Rudolph Vasco, with another of his hot new discoveries.”

“Vasco’s discoveries rank with the realization that Baltimore is somewhat to the north of Atlanta in their dullness.” His throat was raw; he could hear a crack in his voice. “I won’t be returning that call.”

“The other was from a woman. She didn’t leave her name.”

A woman who didn’t leave her name.

He sat down behind his desk. There are those moments in life when one has an encounter session with one’s own dark fears. When the only skeleton rattling in the closet is one’s own. He placed the tips of his fingers squarely on the desk blotter. A woman, no name. He tilted his chair back a little. He shut his eyes. George, George, why did you do what you did? Why did you make that telephone call? What kind of goddamn malicious game was that to play with other lives?

He opened his eyes and realized Madeleine was watching him.

“I brought this for you,” she said.

She was holding something small and black in her hand. For a moment he couldn’t think what it might be.

“It’s one of the tapes you said you’d listen to.”

“Of course, of course.” He watched her place it on his desk and he stared at it.

“You could play it through your dictating machine,” she said.

He lifted the cassette and stuck it in the middle drawer of his desk. “And I will, I promise. But I’d like to listen at my leisure.”

“Oh, sure.”

He smiled at her. “You should be an artist’s agent, Madeleine. I can see you holding a knife at a dealer’s throat. Frankly, my dear, I think you would scare me to death in such a role.” He felt hot suddenly, fevered, flushed. “Do something for me, would you? I’d be grateful for a glass of cold water and a couple of aspirin. My throat’s a little sore today.”

“A pleasure.”

He watched her turn and go in the direction of the bathroom. He coughed a couple of times, got up from behind the desk, moved restlessly around the office. There was a dull pain behind his eyes. George, George. Why? In the name of God, why?

What did you say to her, George?

That’s for me to know and you to find out.

Don’t be so goddamn childish with me! Tell me what you said to her!

Bryant, I hate it when you raise your voice.

(A killing urge, something rising in his blood and surging through him, he remembered this now, the overpowering desire he’d had to pick up something heavy and smash the boy across the skull with it and see him dead, see his blood run over his bare skin and seep into the crumpled white sheets of the bed. I have never had that feeling before in my life. Never. You run into a black aspect of yourself and you feel as mysterious to yourself as the far side of the moon … afraid of yourself, afraid of who you are and what you are capable of doing.…)

Just tell me what you said to her, George.

Well, I told her I was your lover. I told her it was my fault you never got home on time.… Did I say anything wrong, Bryant?

How can you sit there and ask me a thing like that? How can you play this whole terrible game with me, George? You know what you’ve done!

And then George hadn’t said anything after that. He’d risen from the bed and gone inside the bathroom, locking the door after him. The click of that lock turning: Why had it sounded so utterly sickening to Berger? It was almost as if he’d been shut out of George’s life, a perception that caused him panic, a tightness in his chest, a sensation of his heart swelling to a point where it might explode against the ribcage. Hating himself, trembling, he’d stood outside the bathroom door and begged George to come out. Pleading, whining, Angela doesn’t mean anything to me, George, only you. You’re the only person who means a goddamn thing to me in all this world.… Self-pity then, rushing in on him with all the random menace of a swarm of bees. You stand outside this locked bathroom door and you realize you’re nothing but a sad old queer who’d throw everything away for the charms of one boy. I’d like it if George died.

George died.

That thought had come into his mind then like an arrow to the center of a target. A vibrating, dreadful thing to think. An opening in the brain, defenses whittled away, and a certain thought comes flying out of nowhere.

He’d gone back to bed after that, waiting for George to come out of the bathroom. He’d lain awake for hours, turning this way and that, going over his life as if what he was surveying were the debris of some holocaust. What do you do when you look straight into the face of ruin? What do you do to cope after that? There were no quick answers. Somewhere around dawn George had crawled into bed beside him—and for a while after that the questions stopped, the worries ceased, the uncertainties were silenced in his mind.

“Your water.”

He raised his face to see Madeleine put a glass down on his desk blotter. A couple of ice cubes floated on the surface of the liquid, rattling against the side of the glass. When he raised the water to his lips the cubes knocked more loudly. The girl was gazing at him.

“Excuse me for asking—have you been feeling sick lately?”

“Is it so noticeable?”

The girl smiled, shrugged, moved closer to the desk. “I’ve been a bit concerned about you, Mr. Berger.”

“A seasonal cold, I believe. Nothing more. I catch the same virus every year at this time. I imagine it lies in wait for me, Madeleine.”

The little bell in the gallery rang and there was the sound of the outer door closing. He watched Madeleine go out of his office. A customer, he thought. Someone come to look at the rainbows. Someone who will come back later, after he’s had time to check out a few other things. They always say that. He felt tense, rubbing his hands together. He pressed the tips of his fingers against his eyes.

“Mr. Berger.”

He looked at Madeleine. She appeared flustered, off-balance in some way.

“There’s somebody to see you.”

He was cold inside; a chill instinct touched him. He sat down in his chair and nodded his head. The girl was still standing in the doorway.

“She says it’s important,” Madeleine was saying.

Yes yes yes it’s important, he thought.

Important enough for her to come all the way down here.

“I trust I’m not disturbing you, my dear.”

Berger looked past Madeleine. Angela, bless her heart, knew how to dress, knew how to look sharp and fashionable if at the same time a little gaudy: There was a gloss to her, a patina, but it was like the shine of crystal, cold sparkles of light radiating from expensive glass. He was dizzy a moment; he reached for his water, then looked up into Angela’s face.

“It’s fine, Madeleine. Can you close my door, please?”

The girl went out; the door was shut. Angela stepped inside the office. He stared at her for a minute. An expensive red suit, the pants of which were tight at her ankles. A silver and yellow scarf of some material that had all the substance of a spider’s web. A silver blouse, shimmering. And full warpaint—glossy red lipstick that made her mouth seem tiny and vindictive. Berger got up and smiled feebly. I’m sorry, my dear. I failed to catch my train.… I had a brief coronary occlusion… a false alarm, happily.… But there was nothing that would work now. Nothing he could grasp. Anything he said would have to be futile.

Angela sat up on the edge of the desk. She opened her purse, took out a cigarette, lit it from a book of matches: She had always been careless with lighters. “Everything I say to you, Bryant, seems just to go in one ear and straight out the other. I wonder why. You didn’t listen to me the other night, did you? I gave you an ultimatum, as I recall. I told you …” She tilted her face to the side and looked at him curiously. She smiled; she had the kind of smile that suggested the naked point of a knife. “I thought I had made it clear I wouldn’t be put through all this garbage, Bryant. I thought I’d made it perfectly plain that I was sick of your absences. I was tired of being lonely. As for the humiliation you cause me—how would you like to sit around a dinner table with your guests and nobody wants to mention the empty chair? How would that appeal to you?” She looked around the small office with unconcealed disgust.

George, he thought.

Why hasn’t she mentioned talking with George yet?

That should have been the first thing on her mind.

He looked down at his desk; he could see a pale image of himself in the polished wood. A spectral picture. An ultimatum, he thought. Now the curtain was about to come crashing down. The drama was over.

She said, “Why you invest so much of your energy in this ratty concern is beyond me, Bryant. But I was always very happy to humor you. I considered it worthwhile. I ignored the profit-and-loss sheets.” She shrugged, slid off the desk, began to rummage through his IN tray. “You certainly don’t appear to be very busy, Bryant.” And she let a few pieces of paper slip through her fingers.

George, he thought.

She’s working around to the subject of George.

He couldn’t look at her. Presumably she’d already been talking with Duncannon, her lawyer, before she even came here. Presumably, given her predilection for tidying loose ends, she had even worked out details of the divorce with the crow-faced man who advised her on legal matters. An open-and-shut case, he’d say. We can cut Berger off without a penny. Leave it all to me.

He put his hands into the pockets of his jacket.

Angela said, “The funny thing is that I still love you, Bryant. It’s absurd, I know, but I still have feelings for you. I always imagined that between us we could make this marriage work. It was always my hope that eventually you’d be more considerate, less selfish, less …”

Don’t cry, he thought.

Don’t give me your tears, please.

He stood up, looking upwards at the rain falling against the window. He felt miserable: He might have been standing outside unclothed, drenched by the relentless drizzle. He turned around when he heard Angela move, heard her clothes whisper against the wall.

“I know this place is important to you, Bryant. I’ve tried to understand that. I really have. But how long can I go absorbing your kind of behavior? I don’t have the patience for that. I truly don’t.”

She sniffled. Puzzled, he gazed at her. Where was any mention of George? Why hadn’t she raised the most devastating subject of all? Why? Something was shifting inside him, a vague notion turning over and over in his mind, a tiny suspicion. No—it couldn’t be like that. It couldn’t possibly be. He wished it were so—but hadn’t he been there, hadn’t he heard it all, even discussed the whole thing with George?

“You’re not open with me, Bryant. You’re like a closed door at times. You don’t communicate with me. Sometimes I’ve thought you had a mistress tucked away somewhere. All your behavior points in that direction, doesn’t it?” She’d taken a tissue from her purse and was blowing her nose now. A mistress, he thought. What is she talking about?

She dropped the wrinkled tissue in the wastebasket, then smiled at him. “Is there another woman, Bryant? You can tell me. If it’s true, then I’ll have to make certain adjustments.…”

Another woman?

He wanted to laugh. But it would have come out all wrong, twisted, loud, a little crazed. He said, “There isn’t another woman. I swear it.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m very sure.”

She was silent for a while. He reached out and laid his fingers very lightly on the back of her hand. Certain adjustments … He kissed her on the cheek, an abrupt pressing of lips against her skin, his nostrils filled with the perfumes of her makeup. Then he moved his face away.

“The question is, Bryant—do I give you one last chance?”

He looked down at the rug. It had to be true. Why hadn’t she mentioned George?

Because George had never called.

Because it had been a bad, spiteful joke.

One big joke.

“Well?” she asked. “Do I give you one last chance?”

He looked at her. What would one last chance mean? Catching trains, sitting through insufferable dinners, being nice to her, being considerate, making love to her. Making love to her, he thought. He imagined her pale thighs spread for him, her white arms uplifted and waiting, the dough-colored breasts glistening, he imagined the tuft of dark pubic hair about to open and swallow him inside.

“Well, Bryant? One last chance to be good?”

He spread his hands out in front of himself, gazed at them. One last chance to be a good boy, the bought husband, the tax write-off. One last chance for what exactly? Then he was thinking about George again: What kind of person makes a joke like that? What kind of person? Only somebody sick. Sick. Somebody demented. He clenched his hands: Were these hands capable of murdering George? Jesus Christ, what was he thinking?

“I asked a question, Bryant,” Angela said. “One last chance?”

“Yes.” He was hoarse again, the voice rough, like that of someone talking through a faulty microphone.

“I didn’t quite hear you, Bryant.”

“Yes,” he said again. What did she want? Did she want it served up on a silver tray accompanied by tiny bowls of truffles, caviar, goblets of fine wine? “I said yes, Angela.”

He glanced at her. Her smile—God, how he hated the smile, the flinty look of triumph in her eyes. She was playing a game with him, a transparent game that was all part of her exercise of power: the sniffles into the tissue, the declaration of love (he wasn’t loved; he was nothing more than a possession she wanted to keep), the way she pretended she hadn’t heard him. George and Angela and their different games. For a moment he hated them both.

“We stay together, then. We work things out. We arrive at a satisfactory conclusion,” she said. She might have been a company spokesman given to collective pronouns.

“Yes,” he said.

“Is there something wrong with your throat, Bryant? I seem to have trouble hearing you today.”

“A cold.”

“I’ll look after you when you come home tonight. In fact, I’ll pick you up at the station.”

“That would be nice.”

She looked at him in silence for a minute. He was conscious of her presence in the room as one great splash of color; everything else around seemed dreary, bleached. She said, “This, my dear, is the very last chance.”

And then she was gone, leaving the office door wide open. He sat back in his chair and listened to the sound of the bell ring in the gallery.

3.

CAN’T YOU SEE THE BIG MOTHERFUCKING HEADLINES? MR. APOLOGY KILLED BY HIS OWN CLIENT!

Harrison stopped the tape and looked at Levy, who was sitting on the edge of the bed with a bottle of California cabernet clasped between his hands. He was celebrating a business deal, which had something to do with the acquisition of a factory that turned out greeting cards someplace in Mississippi.

“What do you make of it, Rube?”

“It’s like I always tell people, Harry, my man. The Big Apple is a friendly city. I’m very proud of the place.”

“Seriously.”

“Seriously?” Levy took a drink from his bottle of wine.

Harrison pressed the PLAY button and said, “Okay, listen to this part.”

I REALLY GET OFF ON FINDING YOU AND KILLING YOU—BECAUSE THE REAL KICKER IS I CAN APOLOGIZE FOR MURDERING YOU IN ADVANCE.…

Levy looked thoughtful a moment, gazing at the-label of his wine bottle. At certain times he reminded Harrison of a drunken rabbinical student who’d fallen off a bus during a day’s outing to the Jewish Museum up on Fifth Avenue, stricken on the journey by too much Mogen David.

“How does that voice sound to you, Rube?”

“Why do you ask that question, Harry?”

Harrison stared at the red light on the answering machine. “It’s Maddy,” he said. “When that call came in last night, she was upset.”

“Surprise, surprise,” Levy said. “Of course she’d be upset! It wouldn’t exactly fill her with glee, would it?”

Harrison rose from the edge of the bed, moved towards the window; a single leaf, rising as if it might have been stripped from the last branch of the last tree in the whole city, floated upwards against the glass.

“Do you dismiss it as a crank call?” Levy asked.

Harrison paused before he answered. “I get all these people daydreaming under the guise of anonymity, Rube. I had a guy call this morning who says he knows Hitler’s the super of his building. Another guy tells me there’s a race of giants living in the sewers of Manhattan. The steam we see—that’s their breath. This girl tells me she’s made a pact with the devil and now she can’t get out of it.”

Levy got to his feet, staggering a little. “Harry, baby. I could have told you. You should have come and asked me before you went ahead with this project. I could have told you this city’s as stuffed with nuts as a kid’s Christmas stocking. But you didn’t come to your old pal, did you? And now you’re worried about this threatening voice.… Well, I’d say you can expect to meet some guy hanging around the foot of the stairs one dark stormy night—”

“I was being serious, Rube.”

“So, you think I’m third baseman for the Yankees?”

Harrison sighed. The look on Madeleine’s face last night, the expression she’d shown when the call came in, the rising edge of her voice—he didn’t like to see her that way, the alarm in her eyes, the tension of muscles in her neck. He didn’t like to see her so suddenly exposed. He reached for the tape machine. He pushed REWIND, then PLAYBACK. The same voice filled the small bedroom.

THINK I DON’T KNOW HOW TO FIND YOU, HUH? YEAH, YOU’RE LIVING IN A DREAM IF YOU THINK THAT, MAN.… ONE DAY WE’LL COME FACE TO FACE.… I CAN PROMISE YOU THAT.…

He pressed STOP.

Rube Levy said, “I get the distinct impression, Harry, that the voice is disguised. A put-on. I don’t mean he’s not on the level and I don’t mean he’s talking through a handkerchief or anything like that.… It’s more like the accent’s disguised or something.” He shrugged and pressed the palms of his hands against his wine bottle.

“You do think he’s on the level, then?” Harrison turned and looked at his friend.

“I’m hardly an expert on voice patterns. But if I were in your shoes, pal, I think I’d take that tape to the cops. Better still, scrub the whole project.”

“You know I can’t do either of those things,” Harrison said.

“Why not? Where’s it written that you need to go on with a project that seems, on the face of it, to imperil you?”

“No cops. It’s on the handbill. It’s specific. It was built into Apology from the very start, Rube.”

“Okay.” Levy shrugged. “No cops. So go the other way. Kill the project.”

Harrison shook his head. Kill the project. Even as the thought went through his mind he was gazing at the red light on the machine. How could he kill it and leave it unfinished? How could he just haul the machine out of the wall and silence all those voices out there? He moved away from the machine and looked at Levy. “You were the one who accused me of never following through on things, Rube. You were the one who said I didn’t finish things.”

“I confess,” Levy said. “But this is different, Harry. This isn’t exactly what I thought it was going to be when you first mentioned the idea. Loonies, okay. Right-wing nuts and religious fanatics and people obsessed with various demons and weirdos who imagine Adolf Hitler struts among us—okay to all of that. I could have predicted everything like that. But I didn’t exactly expect to hear an off-the-wall voice threatening you.” Levy paused. “What’s the matter with you anyhow? Don’t you hear the force of the threat? Does it escape you? Or is it something else?”

“Like what?”

“Like you enjoy it?”

“Come on, Rube. Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Maybe you get a kick out of it, huh?”

Harrison went to the window. A kick, he thought. How the hell could you get any pleasure out of a voice like that? He turned to look at Levy, who was pacing the room with the wine bottle dripping liquid over his hands.

“Maybe you’ve lost touch a little, Harry. Huh? You’ve gotten too involved in the whole thing to that point where you don’t see what’s right in front of your face. That guy sounds serious to me. He also sounds extremely dangerous. You think you can somehow put on a cloak of invisibility and hide behind your answering machine? He’s wandering the streets, pal. He’s out there and he’s looking for you.”

Harrison sat on the edge of the bed. The project, he thought. The project has to be undertaken. It has to be completed. The voices have to be collected, the tapes edited. He wasn’t going to step away and give up and scrap everything because Rube Levy and Madeleine had succumbed to obvious fears. And he wasn’t going to be dissuaded by any idiot insinuations that he got his thrills through the idea of being threatened.

“Pull the plug, Harry.”

“Fuck you.”

Levy took a slug from his wine, liquid running into his thin beard. He said, “Then beware. Just beware. Just keep your eye on dark doorways, my friend. And when it starts to touch Maddy, when it starts to rub on the edges of her nerves, you ought to think again.” Suddenly Levy laughed; he threw back his head and laughed wildly. “Finished. Lecture over. Portable pulpit dismantled, vestments packed away.” He crossed the room and hugged Harrison. “Don’t pay any attention to Levy when he’s drunk, Harry. When he’s flushed on the success of a recent business acquisition. Just look to yourself. Okay?”

Harrison nodded. It was impossible to be angry at Levy for very long. He stepped back from his friend’s grasp and smiled.

“And look after Madeleine too,” Levy added. “Don’t let anything happen to her.”

“I never would, Rube.”

Levy clapped him on the side of his arm. “The wine’s finished, pressing business matters are rushing in on my head, my throat’s dry, my head’s beginning to ache, and I have an appointment elsewhere in this burg if I could only remember where and with whom.” Levy picked up his overcoat and draped it around his shoulders. He moved towards the bedroom door, where he turned around. “I’ll be seeing you, Harry. If the bogeyman doesn’t get you first.”

Harrison could hear him laughing all the way to the door of the loft.

It was later in the afternoon, sometime after Levy had gone, when the call came in. Harrison had been stacking the cassettes and numbering them in sequence when he heard the familiar voice come across the answering machine.

APOLOGY … I HAD TO CALL YOU. YOU KNOW HOW IT IS WHEN YOU GET SUDDEN URGES TO DO THINGS … YEAH.… ANYHOW, I THOUGHT I’D GET IN TOUCH AND KEEP YOU INFORMED OF MY SCHEMES, BECAUSE EVERY DAY IN EVERY WAY I AM GETTING CLOSER AND CLOSER.…

The laughter.

Harrison realized his hands were shaking. There was something different about the voice this time, a quality he couldn’t altogether place; it was as if the caller were enjoying some huge private joke, waiting for the right moment to share it.

I’M TALKING PLANS. I’M TALKING ABOUT MY PLANS TO GET YOU, MR. APOLOGY.… HEY, HOW COME YOU DON’T EVER PICK UP THE GODDAMN PHONE, MAN? I KNOW YOU CAN JUST PICK UP THE RECEIVER AND BREAK IN ON THESE ANSWERING MACHINES ANYTIME YOU LIKE. CAT GOT YOUR TONGUE? OR ARE YOU JUST TOO FUCKING SCARED? HUH?

Harrison moved his hand slightly.

You want to pick up the receiver, don’t you?

You want to talk to this creep, right?

Tell him what? Tell him to quit making these goddamn calls?

But what would that mean? Censorship imposed on the kinds of calls Apology was supposed to receive? Christ, no, you could never do that. His fingertips touched the receiver lightly. Go ahead. Pick it up. Just pick it up, Harry. Tell this clown what you think of him. Tell him to quit scaring Madeleine. What kind of conversation would that be, for God’s sake? Look here, you’ve given my girl friend a severe attack of the willies.… Big deal.

HERE’S THE DEAL, APOLOGY. I GOT THIS ACQUAINTANCE. SHE DOESN’T KNOW IT YET. I MEAN. SHE DOESN’T KNOW WE’RE ACQUAINTED, BUT PRETTY SOON SHE’LL UNDERSTAND … AND THE BIG THING IS, MAN, THIS CHICK HAS ACCESS TO YOU … ON ACCOUNT OF HER PRIVILEGED POSITION IN LIFE.… YOU THINK I’M BEING MYSTERIOUS, DON’T YOU? YOU THINK I’M PLAYING MIND GAMES WITH YOU, RIGHT? SURE YOU DO.

Access, Harrison thought.

Privileged position.

What did these things mean?

He rose from the bed and walked to the window; the voice, as if it were growing in volume, followed him. He stared out into the afternoon sky. Leaden. Access. What did that mean?

I’M ON THE LEVEL, APOLOGY. I’M GIVING IT TO YOU AS STRAIGHT AS I CAN.… YOU KNOW WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT ALL THIS? IT MAKES ME HAPPY, THAT’S WHAT. IT MAKES ME FEEL GOOD TO BE ABLE TO CALL YOU, APOLOGY.… YOU’RE LIKE THE BROTHER I NEVER HAD. HEY, I LIKE THAT ONE!

Harrison pressed his face to the glass pane.

The brother, he thought.

Bad blood.

He turned and looked at the receiver again; then he went back across the room and suddenly picked the thing up and raised it to his mouth and said, “Listen I don’t need this shit,” but he realized the caller had already hung up and the line was dead and the dial tone as monotonous as a wind blowing on a flat empty landscape.

He put the receiver back in place.

He realized he’d left a faint film of sweat against the gleaming plastic.

4.

Scorpion Scypion claimed he had once single-handedly supplied the city of Fairbanks, Alaska, with amphetamines, real good A-one Black Beauties courtesy of Pennwalt Prescription Products. He also claimed to have shot down a Soviet helicopter outside the town of Nome. He had a tattoo on his chest which depicted a chopper going down in these huge red and yellow flames and he showed this to anyone who asked, as if it were proof of his valor. Gooch wasn’t convinced by any of the Scorpion’s stories, mainly because he made himself the hero of every one. He was the kind of guy who was always talking aloud over everybody else and most of his sentences began with the phrase Hey, that reminds me of the time.…

Gooch put his glass of Tab down on the counter. They were sitting together in the back room of Frazier’s Gymnasium on Broadway and 10th and there was a smell of wintergreen and sweat in the air. Gooch’s muscles were sore because he’d just finished working out; his arms and chest and groin were covered with sweat. He looked at the Scorpion for a while. He wore dense black glasses and a leather vest; his hair was tied back in a ponytail. What he resembled was an old biker. There were bunches of little tattoos all over his arms and the backs of his hands but there wasn’t one as dramatic as the chopper in flames.

“So what’s the scoop, Ace?” the Scorpion asked. He was rolling an empty Coke can along the counter.

Gooch said nothing. He was thinking about Nightingale. For the fuzz, the big fat man wasn’t a bad guy. He could’ve kept himself in shape better, though. You carry around too much blubber and one day, zip, the old pump gives out and they wheel you away in a screaming ambulance. What was the name of the man Nightingale wanted to know about? Billy Chapman? Gooch picked up his Tab and sipped and the stuff tasted like sugary vinegar in his mouth. Billy Chapman. Hell. Maybe the Scorpion knew something—he was always claiming he knew everybody. The problem was how to bring up Chapman’s name in front of Scypion: You needed to work your way around it, be a little subtle, discreet, like Nightingale said. Gooch cleared his throat and put his Tab down. “Scorpion, you know a guy by the name of Billy Chapman?” he asked.

The Scorpion flicked a fly away from a lens of his black glasses. “Billy Chapman Billy Chapman.” He shrugged and scratched his technicolor arms. “What’s the score? Why you asking, Gooch?”

“I just kinda heard his name someplace.…”

“Yeah? Well. I might. I might not. Depends.” The Scorpion stopped scratching. “I knew a Wally Chapman one time. We was running guns across the Mexican border. This was back in sixty-five, sixty-six, sometime like that. We hauled M-16s to the bandits, Gooch. A good scam at the time.”

“This ain’t a Wally Chapman. This is a Billy.”

“A Billy,” the Scorpion said. “He live around here or what?”

“I guess so.”

“So why you want to know?”

“I’m curious,” Gooch said.

“Yeah, I agree with that estimate,” Scypion said and laughed.

Gooch sipped his drink again, wishing he’d gotten Gatorade instead. Another of the Scorpion’s drawbacks was the sneaky way he’d try to bounce snide little remarks off your head, try to run them right past you before you noticed. Gooch sometimes felt a little riled by these comments until he remembered he had something over the Scorpion—the fact that he was one of the few people who knew Scypion’s real first name was Hubert. Now and then, when he wanted to get back at the guy, he’d drag Hubert out and use it and watch with amusement as Scypion got pissed off.

“So do you know this guy or don’t you?” Gooch asked.

“I know lotsa people, Gooch. I go up and down the street, man, and I’m always getting stopped by somebody. You got to figure I know hundreds of guys. And I don’t always put a name to a face, see.”

Gooch nodded his head. “If you can remember, I’d be real pleased.” He was imagining Nightingale smiling and slipping him twenty bucks or so when he told him where to locate this sisterfucker. Mainly he liked to see Nightingale smile, because he felt real good when he was able to please the fat man. He felt like he was an honorary member of the force. It was a secure kind of feeling. He finished his drink and looked at Scypion. “I don’t think you know that many guys,” he said. It was pretty cunning, this approach; now the Scorpion would have to start putting his money where his mouth was.

“Yeah? Sure I do. I just need time to remember, is all.”

“Tell you what. You call me when it comes back to mind, okay, Hubert?” Gooch got down from his stool and picked up his blue Nike bag, which contained his shorts, tanktop, sneakers, and a big bottle of liniment he always got from an athletic supplies store on Lafayette Street.

“I’ll call you, Gooch. You sure it ain’t Wally Chapman, though? Wally Chapman’s out in Amarillo these days herding cattle, from what I hear.”

“It’s Billy. Billy Chapman. Bee aye ell …”

“I know how to spell it.”

Gooch hoisted his bag against his shoulder and went outside, where the afternoon rain began immediately to soak through his navy blue sweatshirt.

5.

Nightingale’s apartment was located on the upper floor of a building on 84th Street, which was a bad pain in the ass because of the climb.

Since Sarah had gone, the place was sloppy, the bed never made; the laundry lay spilled across the bedroom floor and reached, like some tenuous living thing, into the bathroom. The wood floor creaked in such a way that he always imagined the building was sinking into the street. He unlocked the door and stepped inside the apartment, listening to the sound of Moody breathing hard behind him.

“You’ve never been here before,” Nightingale said. “I just realized that. Excuse the … living alone.” He shrugged, closing the door behind his partner. They went inside the living room. “Sit down. Just sling the newspapers off a chair.”

Nightingale lowered himself into the armchair by the unlit fire. Naugahyde stirred beneath his body as though it were a creature rearranging its flesh. The place was a bit bleak, he realized. It lacked her touch, her presence.

Moody said, “If I was training for the Olympics, I’d want to live here, Frank. What a fucking climb.”

Nightingale looked at his watch. 5:35. More than thirteen hours had passed since they’d discovered the corpse of Henry Falcon. Thirteen inconclusive hours. He stared up at the mantelpiece: Sarah’s picture—she always looked so benign in photographs, so beatific; you could see some of that inner serenity he had always loved in her. The calm center of the woman. He realized he was tired and frustrated. A long day of questions. Neighbors. A confusing maze that had no entrance, no exit, nothing in the center. He watched the Boy Wonder rub his jaw, then knead the muscles of his face with his fingertips. He said, “Some days just don’t go anywhere. You get that feeling? Some days are just fucked before they begin, Doug. So let’s have a drink. I think I’ve got some Black Label somewhere.” He rose slowly, moaning at the way his bones ached, then dragged himself into the kitchen and looked inside the liquor cabinet. He poured two glasses of Johnny Walker and carried them back inside the living room, passing one to Moody.

Moody smiled, sipped his drink. “Your wife?” He indicated the photograph on the mantelpiece. “She’s got a good face. Frank. She’s got those really unsettling eyes that just kinda look through you.”

“Tell me about them,” Nightingale said. He sighed, settled back in his chair. From the apartment below was the sound of a stereo being played; the bass notes reverberated along the floor. “There’s a punk rock band living under me, Doug. They call themselves the Welfare State. They dyed their hair yellow and orange and they go around in green coveralls and hiking boots. I talked with one of them one time, a pretty nice kid, a bit weird, and he told me they were protesting supply-side economics. I don’t even know what the fuck that means.”

Moody nodded. “Without being presumptuous, Frank, I could take a minute out and explain it to you.”

I knew you could, Nightingale thought. “I don’t want to know, Doug. I just don’t want to know.”

He went back inside the kitchen and splashed more scotch into his glass. He stared at the stove, the crusts of old food spills on the enamel, then went back to the living room, sat down, tried to ignore the roar of music from downstairs. “Okay, where are we? What have we got?”

Moody looked down into his drink. “A couple of stiffs,” was all he said.

“Number one, we know who killed Camilla Darugna. I gave some thought to letting something slip into the newspapers, something along the usual lines … ‘Police are looking for William Arthur Chapman in connection with the slaying of his sister …’ You know the form.”

“He reads it, of course. Then he splits faster than soft shit through a goose’s ass.”

“Exactly,” Nightingale said. He shrugged. Sarah, don’t gaze at me that way. He stared at a pile of newspapers on the floor. This joint used to be warm and welcoming. They had a word for such a place: home. “Which is why I put the word out the way I did. It’s a crapshoot. Some guy out there turns something up. Who knows? I only know we’ll get him. I wish I knew when.” He rose and strolled to the window and looked down into the street. “Then the strange affair of Henry Falcon. His narcissistic notebook, the man who comes down the street regularly, bringing memories of dear Carlos.”

Moody turned in his chair. “Consider how busy that neighborhood is, Frank. Consider how many guys would have passed under old Henry’s window every day. Any one of them might have gone up there.…” Moody paused, dipped a finger into his scotch, sucked his fingertip.

Nightingale looked at his partner.

Moody said, “Take William Arthur Chapman, Frank. Think about this a moment, that’s all.”

Nightingale spread his hands out, turned them over. Billy Chapman, Moody was always coming back to Billy Chapman. Too much old hurt pride’s a dangerous thing, he thought. You can get swamped with past failures; you can let them devour your brain like so many shuttling worms.

“Now, Chapman uses cocaine, which isn’t the cheapest form of recreation to come down the pike. So maybe he sees old Henry someplace, goes up to his apartment with him, thinks to himself, ‘rich old fag, gotta be big bucks laying around’—the rest is dismal history.” Moody looked intense, leaning forward in his chair, eyes burning.

Give it up, Doug, Nightingale thought. Don’t keep pressing at it. Squeezing it this way. Give it up.

“Simple robbery, Frank. Maybe Billy made off with some item of jewelry, something like that.”

Nightingale returned to his chair, sat down, crossed his weary legs. “On the other hand, maybe we’ve got a sicko, a guy who kills on a whim.” He gazed at his partner. Obsessions made him feel uncomfortable; he’d seen too many cops burned out on obsessions, grudges, irrational determinations to make links and connections. How the fuck did Billy Chapman fit in all this anyhow? He rose from his chair. Christ, why was he so restless? He wandered out of the room, went inside the bedroom. He stared at the large unmade bed. He moved towards the bedside telephone. He picked up the receiver. Lovesick ass, he thought. You’re going to call Sarah again—but then he realized Moody must have been using the extension in the living room because before he could dial, a faintly nasal voice came on the line and said, “Hello, this is Mr. Apology. Apology is not associated with the police or with any other organization. It’s simply a way to tell people what you have done wrong and how you feel about it”—then Moody must have hung up because the voice stopped and there was the click of the receiver going back in place. Christ, what was Moody doing?

He stuck the receiver down and walked back into the living room. Moody was standing at the window now, hands in the pockets of his coat.

“Look, Doug, I wasn’t eavesdropping, but I overheard you call that Apology number,” he said.

Moody turned, smiling. “Sheer curiosity. I’ve been wondering about that guy ever since I found the handbill. Wondering what he would sound like.”

“You got something to confess?” Nightingale asked.

“I cheated on my income tax return in 1976.”

“Did you tell the guy that?”

“Sure … I also told him I had various sexual perversions and a penchant for kicking sick kids.”

Nightingale smiled. Sometimes there was a slight edge to Moody’s sense of humor, as if there were an underlying tone of seriousness. Sometimes the guy was just plain hard to figure. And all this Billy Chapman stuff—it didn’t sit well with Nightingale.

The telephone was ringing. Moody picked it up. There were a series of mmmms and yeahs, then Moody hung up.

He said, “It beats me why they can’t find something useful like a driver’s license or an ID card with a good photograph on it. Why do they always find such small things, Frank?”

“Run that past me again. I don’t get your drift.”

“That was the lab, and I was lamenting the fact, in my inimitable sarcastic way, that they never come up with anything immediately useful.”

“So what did they find?”

“Hairs. Strands of hair that didn’t match Henry Falcon’s.”

“Prints?”

Moody shook his head. “Something else.”

Don’t keep me in suspense, for Christ’s sake. “I’m waiting, Doug.”

“Sperm. Traces of sperm inside old Henry’s mouth.”

Nightingale had a sudden flash—men in white coats picking around inside the mouth of a corpse. Maybe they went to a bar after work for drinks and they sat around saying Hell, it’s a living.

“Traces of sperm,” Moody said again, looking suddenly bright and determined.

Nightingale watched his young partner a moment. There was more; he could sense it coming. He felt tense, suddenly irked by Moody’s way of drawing things out like this.

“Traces of sperm which, according to the guys in the lab”—and here Moody sighed, paused, stared a moment into his hands—“must have been deposited at the point of Henry’s death or …”

“Or?”

“Or immediately after.”

6.

Marybeth Passolini surveyed the shelves of gleaming telephones. There were those that resembled Mickey Mouse and some that looked like they belonged in a French whore’s bedroom. Still others were computerized and could remember a certain amount of regularly used numbers. Some came in wooden boxes that looked like tiny coffins. Hundreds of telephones in a variety of colors, from dark browns to bright yellows. She walked towards the window of the store and looked out into the darkening street. She turned her head when she heard Ruth Gomez come up alongside her. Ruth Gomez was always looking at herself in a tiny compact mirror she kept in the pocket of her skirt; she was young and pretty, dark-haired, full red lips, slim. A small shiver went through Marybeth Passolini as she mentally compared herself with her colleague. You won’t see thirty again, kid, she thought. And you can almost reach out and touch that dark barrier they call forty. And menopause, which had once had all the mystical significance of a holy relic and was therefore incomprehensible, seemed now like a hard brass fact to her.

“That guy still out there?” Ruth asked.

Marybeth shook her head. “He’s gone.”

Ruth Gomez worked a wad of chewing gum around in her mouth. “You ought to have told the supervisor, Marybeth. I told you that already.”

Marybeth looked across the width of the store, past all the telephones, at the frosted glass window of the Princess’s office. Agnes Larue was the supervisor’s name but behind her back she was always called the Princess or Her Highness. You didn’t go to Agnes with just any old thing; she was always too busy, always talking to some executive on her private red telephone. Marybeth looked through the window again. It was almost dark and the traffic that flowed along threw out a sequence of quick bright lights. She raised her hand to the surface of the window, noticing that her amber nail polish had begun to lose its luster. The guy had been standing across the street by the stoplight before lunchtime, then he’d gone for a couple of hours. Sometime in the middle of the afternoon he’d come back. He’d just stood there for ages, staring at the window of the store. Staring and staring, as if he were in a trance or something. Now and again he’d caught Marybeth’s eye, unnerving her, putting her on edge.

Ruth Gomez said, “Nobody just stands around like that, Marybeth. The guy might be dangerous or something. Her Highness would have called the cops.”

“The guy was probably just a doper,” Marybeth said.

“Hey, maybe he took a fancy to you, Marybeth. Maybe he’s hanging around out there waiting to ask you for a date. Maybe he couldn’t get his courage up, huh?” Ruth Gomez was smiling. Marybeth didn’t particularly like the girl’s beautiful smile.

“Oh, yeah. For sure.” A shiver, something cold crossed Marybeth’s heart. Waiting for me, she thought. She didn’t remotely enjoy that notion. She looked at her watch. Five minutes to closing. Usually she looked forward to going home to her small apartment on 76th Street, but tonight—well, tonight she would have liked to find some opportunity to work late. But they’d cut back on overtime recently, so there wasn’t any chance of lingering in the store beyond five-thirty. God damn it! She didn’t have to feel this way. She didn’t have to feel nervous like this. The guy was gone. He was probably only one of those spaced-out drifters you see everywhere, probably lost inside throes of some weird drug trip, digging his own little world.

Ruth Gomez was looking into her little mirror again. Ruth’s nail polish was glossy, catching the overhead fluorescence in bright red flashes. “Buddy’s taking me to see a movie tonight,” she said.

Buddy was one of Ruth’s stable of young men. He’d come to the store a couple of times. Big, built like a linebacker, a face that was square and reliable, like his jaw had been hacked out of concrete. Marybeth found herself wishing she had a Buddy of her own. But all the Buddies in her life had somehow just vanished in recent years and the last date she’d had was with a cable TV salesman who’d only wanted to get into her pants and who had a wife and five kids up in Saratoga Springs anyway. The slob, she thought. She saw the Princess begin to turn the lights out.

“Don’t want to go home tonight, Marybee?” Her Highness asked, her high heels clicking across the tiles. She flashed a glassy smile.

Marybeth went to the closet in the back where she kept her coat and purse. She put the coat on, moved back through the store, waved good night to Ruth Gomez, stepped out on to the sidewalk. Fear. Good Christ, she told herself. You’re behaving like some timid spinster, like some old crone of a librarian who imagines shadows lurking behind the books. She walked quickly along. The after-work crowds offered some kind of security in any case. She paused for a stoplight, then crossed the street. The subway, she thought. The subway would be safe and crowded. She shook her head at her own ridiculous fears, then wondered if perhaps she didn’t get the slightest thrill at the idea of some guy watching her, following her, maybe even admiring her from a distance. She looked at herself in a store window. The red coat wasn’t bad—it nipped her figure nicely at the waist even if Ruth Gomez had once told her there was just something a little old-fashioned about the coat, no offense. Her hair looked pretty good too, braided around the sides of her head and held with two yellow barrettes. She moved on towards the subway entrance. Nobody was near her. Everything was okay. The guy had gone. Vanished into the murky side streets someplace.

A good thing, she thought.

She started down the subway steps. She had to stand all the way to her station, pressed on all sides by guys. Rude guys who hardly gave her any room to breathe. She was glad when she was able to get out and go back up into the street.

She was less pleased when she turned on 76th Street, because that’s when the feeling of uneasiness returned to her. The feeling she was being followed. Grab control of yourself, Marybeth Passolini. Take yourself in hand, for Christ’s sake. She turned around, glanced back along the quiet stretch of street, saw nothing but parked cars and the reflection of streetlamps. It’s this city, she thought. It works like crazy on your nerves sometimes. It’s like some big animal that’s always panting just behind your back. You should be used to it after fifteen years, kid.

She walked on, a little more quickly this time. She paused at a corner, turned—it was funny how she imagined that the sound of footsteps behind her stopped exactly when she did. But she couldn’t see anybody. She continued. Farrago’s Deli was open on the corner, a nice little warm light splashing across the sidewalk. She always liked the smell of things when she passed the deli but tonight, especially, she enjoyed seeing the light in the window. Sausages and hams hung behind the glass. Piles of rolls lay beyond them in great wooden baskets. Maybe she’d go inside the place, buy something. She paused and looked in the window and then she thought: You’ve only got one more block to go before you’re home and dry.

Home and dry, triple-locked in your three-room apartment with the maroon drapes and the blue rugs and the Hitachi TV and cold roast beef in the refrigerator.

One more block.

She walked more quickly still.

Behind.

Someone was walking behind her.

You don’t look back, Marybeth. Just keep right on trucking.

Half a block. She opened her purse and fumbled inside for her keys. Half a block and home. A piece of cake, kid.

She dropped the keys. Goddamn! She heard them clatter to the ground and go skidding away from her on the damp concrete. A time like this …

She bent down, searched around, couldn’t find them.

She half turned, looked back along the street.

Nobody. Nobody at all.

Her fingers encountered the keys. She broke one of her nails and moaned to herself. She stood upright, rattled the keys as if the sound might dissolve her fears, then hurried along. She could still hear the noise from behind, though, the clickclick of heels that seemed to move in time to her own. Don’t stop, Marybeth. Four, five more houses.

She realized she was sweating. That thin lines of perspiration were falling from her hairline and making tiny cracks in her makeup. She hoped she could get inside the house without anybody seeing her, because she knew she looked awful. Mrs. Goodbody, the landlady, usually came out into the hallway when she heard the sound of the front door being unlocked. Not tonight, she thought. I don’t want to run into her tonight.

The steps.

She could see the steps.

She could see the pale light that shone from the doorway.

A few more yards. Only a few more yards.

Then it didn’t make sense, because somebody stepped onto the sidewalk in front of her, a guy suddenly stood there, and for a moment she was confused, because she’d assumed he was behind her, which meant he must have come along the street, masked by the parked cars. She felt herself freeze. She couldn’t see his face. She suddenly remembered some horrifying story about a Puerto Rican girl being stabbed to death on a sidewalk and although the poor kid had cried out and neighbors had heard her screams nobody had come to do a damn thing about it.

She heard herself say something like, “Excuse me, get out of my way.”

The guy had his hands on her shoulders. Strong hands. She couldn’t move.

Please …

When he spoke his voice was gentle, almost soft: “I was watching you.”

She nodded her head, realized she was crying, tears blinding her sight.

“I watched you for a long time. At the telephone store where you work. I’ve been watching you for the last two days. You live alone, don’t you?”

“No,” she said.

“I know you live alone. I took the trouble to find out. You don’t need to lie to me.”

She couldn’t see anything now. She could feel her makeup break and fall down her cheeks, the eye shadow running and running.

“I’m not going to hurt you, you understand.”

“What do you want?”

“A drink. A nice little drink. Just you and me. In your apartment. Understand?”

She nodded. She felt his fingers massage her shoulders.

“I need to ask you a question, that’s all. A simple question. Then I’ll leave. I won’t hurt you. I promise you.”

She felt him take the keys from her trembling hands, then he was ushering her towards the steps, towards the light, then beyond the locked door to the stairs that led up through various strata of darkness to the apartment where she lived. She wanted to scream as she climbed. But she couldn’t, because he had his hand across her mouth.

7.

Harrison opened the pages of the magazine, noticing that smudges of ink came off on his fingertips. He looked over the edges of the pages at Jamey Hausermann, who was sitting at the kitchen table with Maddy.

“Advance copy,” the journalist said. “It hits the world tomorrow.”

Madeleine rose and stood behind Harrison’s shoulder, watching him flip pages.

“Page forty-six,” Jamey said. “I think you’ll like it.”

“Harry, your hand’s shaking,” Madeleine said, and laughed. “You want me to turn the pages for you?”

“He’s just another stranger about to be introduced to a new friend: celebrity,” Jamey said, smoking a cigarette, her elbows propped up on the table.

Harrison turned the pages. He tried to steady his hand. These sudden nerves—was it because he was about to read about himself? Or because of the echo inside his head, the sound that lay trapped and reverberating inside his skull? This chick has access to you.… He smiled palely at Madeleine, feeling a vague sense of guilt that he hadn’t told her yet about the most recent message. What was the point? What was the point in scaring her further anyhow?

“Page forty-six, Harry,” Maddy said. “Let me do it for you.” She reached over. He felt foolish, like a small child being helped. “There, there it is.”

For a moment his eye was drawn to the facing page, where there was an advertisement for Camels. And then he scanned the article and began to read.

SORRY? RIGHT NUMBER

by Jamey Hausermann

Imagine a pale, thin, rather effeminate young man stepping furtively into a small booth dimly lit by a single overhead bulb and pulling the folding door closed behind him. He sits for a moment in silence, then begins to bare his soul. “Please help me,” he says in a whisper, then his voice becomes clearer as he recounts his first homosexual experience. “It felt really good. I don’t know if I did anything wrong. I don’t think I did, but anyway—I’m sorry.”

There’s no penance, no absolution.

In a cluttered loft, which contains all the usual debris you associate with an artist—old canvases, tubes of paint, odds and ends that you figure must have some purpose to them—Apology says, “This is a new way of communication. People just can’t confide in people anymore. They can’t find anybody who’ll listen to their problems. Your friends have their own problems, psychiatrists cost too much, and the local bartender has heard it all before. So people tell the machine truths they normally wouldn’t tell other people.”

He believes in the project wholeheartedly. He went to the trouble of printing more than a thousand handbills, which he posted up all over the city recently. You’ve probably seen one and you’ve probably wondered if you should call. If you need to get something off your mind, go right ahead, because Mr. Apology always listens to his messages.

Even the one from a local priest who berated him by saying he didn’t have the qualifications for this line of work. “He’s going to preach a sermon against me next Sunday,” Apology says. “I wish I could say I was sorry.”

Harrison looked at the last line, smiled, turned to face Madeleine. Across the table Jamey Hausermann was lighting another cigarette.

“I took some liberties with your messages,” Jamey said. “You know what journalists are like.”

“I love it. I love the whole thing,” Madeleine said. “What do you think, Harry?”

Harrison put the magazine down on the table. It was weird to read about yourself: He might have been reading about somebody else, the invention of a reporter, somebody who didn’t exist at all except as a figment. A sink for emotions people find hard to contain. He’d never said anything quite like that to Jamey Hausermann, but he liked it anyhow—it fitted in some way. He picked up the magazine again, stared at it.

“Harry?” Madeleine asked.

“It’s a strange feeling,” he said.

“You’re having the old problem, Harry,” Jamey said. “When you first read about yourself in print you go through a whole identity crisis, right? Can this be me? Can this really be me? It’s okay. The feeling passes. Rest assured.”

Harrison looked at the article again, noticing for the first time that there was a pen-and-ink drawing of a telephone gripped by skeletal knuckles. It looked grim. He sat down at the table and thought: Get this into perspective. Tomorrow’s magazine is next week’s back issue. You’re an item, then you’re not. It comes and goes. “I like it, Jamey.”

“Sure?” she asked.

“Sure.”

“It’s probably going to cause you a whole bunch of trouble.”

“Like how?”

“Your telephone will be ringing off the wall.” Jamey rose, picking up her purse, looking at her watch. “Would you believe I’ve got to meet a guy at nine o’clock who’s just won the state lottery and refuses to move out of the Bronx? If that was me, oh boy, I’d be in the Bahamas on the first plane out.”

She walked out of the kitchen, followed by Madeleine. Harrison watched them cross the loft towards the door. They hugged each other, kissed cheeks, then Madeleine shut the door. She came into the kitchen, hugged him.

“Know something, kid?”

“Tell me.”

“I think I’m proud of you.”

A good feeling. He caught her hand, lightly kissed the back of it.

“You’re news, Harry. News. Remind me to buy up all the copies I can find tomorrow. And remind me to mail one of them to those stooges on the grants committee. No, don’t remind me. I won’t forget.” She sat down facing him. She lightly stroked the surface of the magazine. “By the way, I gave Berger one of the tapes.”

“Did he listen to it?”

“Patience. He will.” She was silent a moment. Staring at him. “I have this terrible urge to fuck your brains out, Harry. What are you going to do about it?”

“Do you have any brains left?”

“Have you ever been struck by a rolled-up magazine containing an article about yourself, my love?”

He leaned across the table and kissed her. I have to tell her about the most recent message, he thought. I have to do that much. He looked at her; she seemed so high, so excited by the article, that he didn’t have the heart to mention the damn thing. Why spoil her mood? Why wreck the moment? She gets off on this whole publicity bit.

Publicity, he thought.

What was there about the word that made him vaguely uneasy?

He had a sudden idea that his privacy would somehow be shattered, that some other journalist, perhaps less discreet than Jamey, would ask for an interview, promise him secrecy, and then go ahead and print his name anyhow.

He shook his head. It wouldn’t happen. There wouldn’t be any more interviews. He wouldn’t give any more, even if somebody did ask. Once was enough. Publicity was a thing to court frugally.

This chick has access to you.…

He closed his eyes, remembering how he had seized the receiver and talked into it, how the line had been dead. It was as if something inside him had broken for a solitary moment and he’d lost the edge of things, he’d given way, breaking in on a call from out there. Breaking in, wanting to tell the caller never to use the number again. It shouldn’t have happened like that. The whole point was that anybody, anybody at all, should have access to the Apology number. You couldn’t pick and choose your callers. They existed and acted independently of your desires and needs. You didn’t have control over them. You couldn’t stop some anonymous stranger from going into a phone booth and punching out the number—unless you did, as Levy had suggested, scratch the project entirely. No, he thought. He would see this thing through. He was going to do that much.

Finish something. Finish this project.

Madeleine had gone inside the bedroom. He could hear her moving around. He got up from the table and went to the doorway. He looked across the loft at the door, then he moved towards it and quietly slid the bolt in place. I’ve never done that before, he thought. It’s getting to me. He’s getting to me.

He went inside the bedroom and lay down beside Madeleine. He glanced at the answering machine. The red light was burning and he wondered what messages had come in during the time Jamey Hausermann had been in the loft.

“Don’t,” Madeleine said.

“Don’t what?”

“I can read you like a book. Right now you’re thinking about a certain device that lies within a few feet of us at this very moment. However, Harry, I have other plans for you.” And she kissed him, her fingers sliding inside his shirt, one hand pressing into the small of his back. He shut his eyes. It was a lazy, wonderful drift, a sweet darkness, a sense of binding to the exclusion of separate identities: Orgasm seemed like some kind of deep rupture, something breaking into tiny, delicious fragments far inside himself. She held him, clasped him in such a way that she might never release him; it was almost as if she were afraid to let go of him, as if she were scared of losing him—losing me to what? he wondered. The tapes, the machine, the project. The message he had seen upset her so much the night before. She’s afraid of losing me to Apology. He shut his eyes, felt her fingertip trace a pattern on his face.

“I love you, Harry,” she said. She propped herself up on one elbow. “I love you very much.”

He pressed his face against her shoulder. Surprised by the force of her love. By its vigor. Surprised by the depths in her voice. Maybe that was the way love operated, a sneakthief of the heart, coming up behind you like a phantom. Catching you when all your guards and all your defenses were absent and all your senses suddenly alert. An awakening. He closed his eyes, enjoying the nearness of her body. It was an odd high to him: She affected him more than any other woman he’d ever known. More than any other he’d ever slept with. And what he realized was how strangely empty, lonely, his existence might be without her. How sad and dark. You’re going to the edge with this girl, Harry. You’re going to the edge of loving her. You’re beginning to fall off into some dizzying space.

“What are you thinking?” she asked.

“About you.”

“And?”

“I hate romantic language,” he said.

“Why?”

“I always feel there should be an alternative language of emotions. Something you could say without feeling so damned coy and embarrassed.” He touched her hair. It was as if, in the touch, he wanted to demonstrate some kind of gratitude. “But there aren’t new words. It’s always the same old language.”

She kissed him. “It works, doesn’t it?”

He didn’t speak. He could feel the strands of her hair brush the side of his face, cover part of his bare shoulder. He could feel her breath in his ears. The warmth of her flesh seemed to enter his own skin and go coursing through his bloodstream.

“Damn,” he said quietly. “I think I love you. I think I’ve loved you since I first knew you.”

He heard her laugh lightly.

“What’s so funny?” he asked.

“I knew that all along, Harry,” she said.

“How?”

She stared at him, palms of her hands pressed to the sides of his face.

“I told you before. I can read you like a book.”

“As transparent as that, huh?”

“Pretty obvious.”

He lay back against the pillow. Obvious. Transparent. He wasn’t altogether sure he cared for these words.

“Let’s make love again,” she said. She rolled towards him and he turned, very slowly, to meet her.

She wasn’t sure what time it was when she woke; it was still dark. She was conscious of Harry sitting up on the edge of the bed, aware of the red light glowing faintly on the answering machine, aware too of a voice coming across the tape. A familiar voice. She sat upright and turned on the bedside lamp and Harry swung around to look at her: There were dark circles under his eyes, a certain sleepless look.

“Harry,” she said.

He reached out and switched the tape off, a movement he made with unexpected haste.

“What is it?” she asked. She rubbed her eyes, looked at her watch on the bedside table. 3:24. Go back to sleep, she told herself. Don’t listen to anything. Pretend this was all a dream. An abrupt pointless dream. She couldn’t. The voice. The same goddamn voice. She’d heard it. And it was too late to go back.

“Harry, for Christ’s sake, say something.”

“It was just another message.”

“No,” she said. She shook her head. “It’s more than that, isn’t it? I can see it on your face. It’s more than just the usual insane message this time, isn’t it?”

“No.” He lay flat on his back, one hand rubbing his forehead.

She crawled across him, reached the tape machine, felt him seize her wrist and hold it tightly in his hand.

“You don’t need to hear it,” he said. “Maddy, you just don’t need to hear it!”

“You’re hurting my wrist, Harry.”

“I’m sorry.” He let his fingers go slack.

“I’ve heard the other ones. I might as well hear this.” You don’t want to, she thought. You don’t need to listen to this. You need to shut your eyes and go back to sleep.

“Why?” he asked.

“Because I hate the idea of you keeping something secret from me.” She pressed the REWIND button, conscious of the way he was watching her, guarded, careful, like a visitor to somebody’s sickbed. The solicitous eye of a nurse.

She stopped the tape. Pressed PLAYBACK. Waited.

She was cold suddenly.

She lowered her head, watched the pattern thrown by the light bulb among the crumpled sheets. You can still stop it, she thought. You can still switch the thing off and ignore it. But as soon as she heard the voice, the awful voice, she realized she wouldn’t turn it off, she would listen, she would go on listening until the caller had finished.

MR. APOLOGY. SIR … I KNOW IT’S LATE. I’M SORRY. HA HA HA. WHY DO I SAY I’M SORRY WHEN YOU KNOW I NEVER AM.…

She saw her hand catch the sheets, bunch them. Her knuckles were white.

THIS WOMAN … I THOUGHT SHE WOULD KNOW.… UNDERSTAND? I THOUGHT SHE WAS SURE TO KNOW HOW I COULD FIND YOU, MAN. I FIGURED SHE WOULD HAVE A WAY TO GET YOU.… WELL, I FIGURED THE WHOLE THING WRONG.… SEE, SHE DIDN’T KNOW SHIT, APOLOGY. SHE DIDN’T EVEN KNOW HOW TO GO LOOKING.… LOOKING.…

Was it the laughter?

Was it the coarse laughter that made her so ill at ease?

That made her blood chill?

SHE WANTED TO FUCK ME, SEE. I KNEW SHE WAS BEGGING FOR THAT. YOU KNOW HOW YOU CAN TELL, MAN? SOMETHING IN THE WAY THEY LOOK, LIKE THEY’RE HUNGRY.… I DUNNO.… BUT I ONLY WANTED TO GET AT YOU, APOLOGY. I THOUGHT SHE WAS LYING. I REALLY FIGURED SHE WAS LYING, TRYING TO PROTECT YOU, UNDERSTAND?

What woman? Madeleine wondered.

Who was he talking about now?

She picked up a pillow, hugged it. Something was coming—she knew it—something terrible was coming.

SHE JUST DIDN’T KNOW SHIT. I FIGURED BECAUSE SHE KNEW TELEPHONES SHE’D KNOW HOW TO GET TO YOU.… SHE SAID SHE ONLY SOLD THE GODDAMN THINGS AND THEN SHE SCREAMED.… I MEAN, SHE REALLY SCREAMED, MAN. SHE JUST OPENED HER MOUTH.…

Harry was watching her.

Concern. Anxiety. Waiting.

What’s coming? she wondered.

This woman, whoever she is, is going to die.

IT WAS PRETTY GODDAMN FUNNY, APOLOGY.… I DRAGGED HER INSIDE THE BATHROOM—SHE HAD ONE OF THESE BATHROOMS THAT’S ALL PINK TILE AND PINK FUCKING TOWELS, MAN. I DRAGGED HER INSIDE THE BATHROOM AND I DROWNED HER. CAN YOU PICTURE THAT, HUH? CAN YOU GET THAT PICTURE CLEAR? I STUFFED HER FUCKING HEAD IN THE SINK AND I FILLED THE THING UP WITH WATER AND I DROWNED HER AND THE FUNNY THING IS I WAS GONNA CHOKE HER, OKAY … BUT THEN I REALIZED I NEVER DROWNED ANYBODY BEFORE.… IT WAS KINDA PEACEFUL.…

Laughing, laughing, laughing.

Madeleine stared at Harry.

How much further could this go? She felt revulsion, a churning in her stomach, the fluttering of something with wings inside her chest.

I DIDN’T LIKE TO LEAVE HER LIKE THAT, BECAUSE IT DIDN’T SEEM DIGNIFIED.… I MEAN, SHE LIVED ALONE. SHE DIDN’T EVEN HAVE A CAT OR ANYTHING … SO I DRAGGED HER INSIDE THE KITCHEN AND I CUT HER.… I TOOK A KNIFE AND I JUST FUCKING HACKED AT HER HEAD, MAN.…

A pause.

A numbing pause.

SAY, APOLOGY. YOU GOT A WOMAN? I BET YOU GOT SOME PIECE OF CUNT, HUH? I BET YOU DO. I’D LIKE TO MEET HER ONE DAY. YEAH, I’D LIKE THAT. MAYBE I’LL SEE YOU TOGETHER, HUH? HOW DOES THAT GRAB YOU? HUH? YEAH, I KNOW YOU DON’T LIKE THE IDEA.… I’D LIKE TO TAKE THIS CUNT OF YOURS AND SCREW HER WITH A FUCKING HACKSAW.…

She put her hand out, touching Harry’s fingers.

She wanted something—consolation, protection, a place to hide. A place where she didn’t have to hear this voice. A big white silent room where this sound would never penetrate.

I DREW A BLIND TONIGHT, APOLOGY.… I CAME UP WITH THE WRONG CARD.… BUT I GOT TIME, MAN. I CAN STILL FIND YOU. I CAN STILL FIND YOU REAL EASY.… I LIKE THE IDEA OF YOU SITTING THERE THINKING YOU’RE SAFE. YOU AIN’T SAFE, MAN. I’M GONNA GET YOU.… I’M GONNA GET YOU SOON. I’M GONNA TAKE SOME REAL PLEASURE IN KILLING YOU … AND KNOW WHAT? JUST BEFORE YOU DIE, I’M GONNA SAY, “HEY, I’M SORRY. I’M REAL SORRY.” THEN I’LL TWIST THE BLADE IN YOUR NECK.…

The voice changed.

It became high-pitched, like the comic whine of some spook in a horror movie.

I’M COMING, APOLOGY. I AM COMING REAL SOON.…

The message ended.

She reached out, her hand shaking, and stopped the tape.

You didn’t hear any of that, did you?

It came out of the long tunnel of some bad dream.

Right. It never happened. It never took place.

She closed her eyes and felt Harry’s arm circle her naked shoulder.

“Tell me it’s just some fantasy, Harry, huh? Tell me it’s just some joker using the line to let off steam. Huh? Can you tell me that? Can you look me straight in the eye and tell me that? Can you?” She heard her own voice rising and rising, vaguely conscious of his fingers gently massaging her skin. “The hell you can! The hell you can!”

He was silent. The sound of his breathing seemed quick, shallow.

“Speak to me, Harry. Say something to me. He killed some poor goddamn woman tonight—”

She stopped. Her throat was suddenly dry, her voice hoarse. She wanted something to drink but she didn’t move.

“He’s not going to harm you, Maddy. I wouldn’t let anybody touch you. You know that, don’t you?”

“Then prove it to me. Pull the plug from the wall. Get rid of the machine. Forget the project. Can you do that for me, Harry? Will you go that far for me?”

She knew the answer even before he spoke. She knew exactly what he was going to say and she felt a darkness rising inside her brain. She knew.

“I have to finish this, Maddy.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“I have to finish it.” He was speaking very slowly in a determined way.

She turned on her side away from him.

“Have you ever looked around this loft, Maddy? Have you ever counted the number of unfinished canvases? Have you ever actually been aware of all the slats of wood and pieces of metal lying around that were supposed to be incorporated into sculptures? Have you ever really looked? Do you know what happened to me with all those unfinished things? I lost interest. I lost enthusiasm. I lost that bright moment when you first get the idea.…” He paused. “I have to finish Apology. I need to finish it.”

“When does it end, for Christ’s sake? When will you have enough tapes, Harry? When you’ve recorded the collected sins of the city of New York?”

“It ends when I think I’ve got enough tapes. That’s when it ends.”

“And how the hell will you know?”

“I’ll know.” His voice was firm. It was the kind of tone that left no space for negotiation, for barter. The thing was fixed in his mind and nothing would shake it loose. She shut her eyes. She didn’t want to but she found herself listening to the voice again, found herself hearing it over and over inside her head.

Then I’ll twist the blade in your neck.…

Then I’ll twist the blade …

Then I’ll twist …

“He’s going to find you, Harry,” she whispered. And me, she thought. Me too.

He had risen from the bed and gone to the window; he was staring out into the darkness as if he might somehow conjure the face of the caller out of the configuration of rooftops and night clouds and faded stars.

Okay, so you lost your enthusiasm for past projects. So you’re surrounded by your past failures, Harry. But your enthusiasm for Apology is going to kill us.

“He’s going to find you,” she said again, still whispering.

She drew the sheets up over her head and slid under them, like a child seeking comfort and security in a cocoon, a fragile tent of cotton. Don’t let anything harm us. Don’t let the darkness outside come in to touch us. Don’t let it slither over telephone wires and skip past electronic circuits and junction boxes to invade our lives like this. Don’t let it all be wrecked.

Don’t let him find us.

FIVE

1.

They were in an Indian restaurant on 29th Street, a dimly lit place that smelled of sandalwood. Harrison put a forkful of a hot lamb vindaloo in his mouth and looked at Madeleine across the table. The curry was making him sweat; he could feel moisture across his forehead and on the palms of his hands. Madeleine looked lovely and curiously insubstantial, as if she were a trick of the smoke that rose from the candle, a shape randomly formed. She was staring down at her food, playing with it, pushing little mounds of saffron rice around her plate. He reached across the table and touched the back of her hand. He knew what she was thinking, why she was distant, why it was he couldn’t get close to her. It was last night’s call: It was still last night’s call. She put her fork down and stared at him, rubbing her brow with her hand. He wanted to think that it wasn’t the tape, that it didn’t have anything to do with Apology, that maybe she’d had a hard day at the gallery, anything at all—but he knew otherwise.

“I don’t feel like eating.” She pushed the plate aside.

“It’s okay,” he said.

She shook her head. “It’s not okay. It’s not okay at all.”

He stared across the restaurant. He didn’t want to think about Apology now; it was as if this restaurant were an oasis of calm away from the babble of the tapes—only it wasn’t working out like that. He stroked her fingers. He hated this distance between them.

“It’s a very scary feeling, Harry. That’s what I’m trying to make you see. It’s a very scary feeling to think of somebody running around out there.…” She waved a hand in the air quickly. “Running around out there and playing some weird game …” She paused, then added: “It’s not a game. It’s more than a game.”

Harrison put his fork down and picked up his glass of beer, sipping it slowly. It tasted heavy to him, clouded. Beyond Madeleine’s face he could see the window that faced the street, dark doorways opposite, dense shadows.

“When I went to the gallery today I couldn’t stop watching the street, Harry. I couldn’t stop imagining that somebody was going to come through the door, the bell would ring, a guy would come in … only he wouldn’t be interested in looking at paintings. When I went to your loft tonight I couldn’t help feeling there were footsteps immediately behind me. I don’t like these feelings. I can live perfectly well without them. I hate tension. I hate nerves. I like my life to be peaceful.” She smiled at him in a weak way. “Maybe it’s this city. Maybe it gets too heavy after a while. Sometimes I think about going someplace where I can breath clean air and close my eyes and listen to noises that aren’t traffic noises and just recharge the old batteries.”

He tightened his fingers around her hand. “I love you,” he said. The perennial balm. The age-old lozenge to soothe pain away. Why did it sound so damn feeble to him just then?

“I love you too, Harry. I just don’t like the idea of either of us getting hurt by this maniac.…” Her voice faded away.

“Nobody’s going to get hurt,” he said. He could hear a slight quiver of doubt in his own words, then he was remembering last night’s call and how it had seemed closer in some way, physically nearer. The message had been more immediate, more menacing, less vague than any of the previous ones. The call had shaken him at the time, shaken him enough for him to want to prevent Maddy from hearing the tape—but in the hours that had passed since then the threat seemed to have diminished, whittled away by the passage of daylight.

“How can you just sit there and say something like that? He talked about killing some poor woman. He described it in detail. He enjoyed talking about it. How could that escape you? How could you fail to notice that this creep means everything he says, Harry?”

She closed her eyes, biting on her lower lip. He hated to see her this unnerved. He set his beer glass down and tilted his chair back against the wall. He said, “Listen, if he killed anybody the way he described, how come we didn’t see it in the papers? And what about this other murder he mentioned? The guy with all the pictures of dancers inside his apartment. Did you see anything like that in the papers, Maddy?”

She shook her head, didn’t open her eyes. “He said something about the woman living alone. Something like that. If she did live on her own, maybe nobody’s found the body.”

“Okay, so what about the dancer business?”

“I don’t know.” She was working her hands together, gazing at him now. “All I know is that you won’t let go of this project. You won’t put it aside. I don’t know what’s happening to you, Harry.”

“Nothing’s happening.”

“I’ve watched you listen to your precious tapes. I’ve seen the expression on your face.”

“What expression?”

“I can’t describe it. It’s like you’re so completely wrapped up in listening you don’t seem to really hear. Those voices aren’t musical notes, and this isn’t some sonata you’re composing. Those voices are saying things, words that have meanings, Harry.”

“I know what they’re saying.”

She dropped her napkin on the table, picked up her fork, set it down again. “You’re lost inside the project. I guess that’s what I’m trying to say. You’re lost inside it and it’s like a maze, Harry. It’s like you’re trapped inside something and you can’t find your way out again.”

“I’m not lost. I’m not trapped,” he said. “The project interests me. It intrigues me. I feel good about it. There’s a whole world of difference.”

She shook her head. “It’s going out of your control. Can’t you see that?”

“It’s not going out of control—”

She held one hand up to stop him. “I’m going to say something you won’t like. I’m going to tell you that you should turn the tapes with his voice over to the police.”

He felt a slight edge of anger, irritation. “I can’t do that.”

“Look, I know what you feel. I understand your commitment. I’ve been with you all the way—but this time I think you’ve got something the cops need to hear.”

“It’s out of the question. I don’t even want to talk about it.”

“It needs to be talked about.”

“Right from the start, you understood the principle behind this thing. You understood the tapes had nothing to do with the cops. You helped me write the handbill. How can you expect me to go back on that?”

“Don’t get angry.”

“I am not getting angry.”

“Harry. I know what you’re thinking. I get these phrases floating into my brain. Betrayal of trust. Treachery. Things like that. But what’s more important to you? Your personal safety? Mine? Or some unlikely bond you think you’ve made with a city full of goddamn strangers? Huh? What’s more important to you, Harry?”

“Look, your safety’s more important than anything else, Maddy. You didn’t even have to ask that question. You knew what my answer would be. And if I thought you were really in any danger, I’d dismantle the whole thing myself and take all the tapes to the nearest cop.”

She stared at him. “Would you? You honestly think you’d do that? I’m not so sure anymore, Harry.”

He shifted uncomfortably in his chair. He reached for his beer, drained it, put the glass down. Last night he told her he loved her. Why weren’t they celebrating this realization, this change in the structure of their lives, instead of arguing about disembodied voices on a tape recorder? He felt suddenly very weary. He looked at her face, the signs of concern, anxiety, the shadows under her eyes. He wished he could just reach out and touch with her some kind of magic that would transform everything. You have that magic potential, Harry, he thought. You only need to pull a certain plug from a certain wall outlet and the whole world will undergo a transformation.

“I can’t get through to you,” she said. “What do I have to do to get my point across?”

“I understand your point—” He stopped. She had risen suddenly and was removing her coat from the back of the chair where she’d draped it. “Where are you going?”

“I need some air,” she said.

He watched her go quickly towards the door.

It was chilly and rainy outside and she walked hurriedly. There was a newsstand just ahead. A long stretch of dark sidewalk, a tiny island of light. She plunged her hands into the pockets of her coat, reached the newsstand, paused. A gust of abrupt wind came along the street; she felt her coat flap against her legs. She looked at the damp covers of magazines. Cavalier. Oui. Screw. The shrill weekly tabloids. “WAS JESUS FROM ANOTHER PLANET?” The foreign papers and magazines. The Guardian. La Monde. Osservatore Romano. She saw a stack of copies of New York and read about Harry on the front cover, small print tucked beneath a slogan that read: “The Survival Skills of Mayor Koch.” She bought six copies of the magazine, then turned away from the vendor, a small man with rheumy eyes; you want to buy a newspaper, she thought. You want to buy a newspaper and go through it page by page until you find what you’re looking for.

She moved to the edge of the sidewalk, stared at the magazine cover, glanced back the way she had come. She could see pale light fall from the window of the Indian restaurant.

A newspaper.

The mention of a killing.

Maybe two killings.

She felt the rain wash across her face. You still want to believe there’s nothing wrong. There’s no substance to the calls. You still want to believe, the way Harry seems to believe, that it’s just some loony out there talking about his murderous fantasies.

She moved back towards the newsstand. She bought a newspaper. She went to the streetlight and stood under it. Drops of dirty rain fell over the headlines, soaked through the paper. I won’t find anything, she thought. Nothing has ever happened. It’s all one bad dream.

Skip the pages quickly.

She heard footsteps along the sidewalk, raised her face, saw Harry come towards her. She looked back at the newspaper again.

Flipping pages. Scanning. Searching.

The headlines raged, screamed, teased. She wasn’t seeing the words, understanding the meanings, she was just turning the pages quickly as if she had been programmed to find only one article, one item of news. Photographs went past like pictures of so many dead people pasted in an album.

She was conscious, without looking, of Harry standing alongside her now.

Then something caught her eye. She read the piece, folded the newspaper over, leaned against the lamppost, and stared upwards into the light and the rain falling through. It was like discovering that what you thought had been a dream was in fact something that had taken place. It was like checking out your dream against reality and finding the experiences matched in every detail.

She felt strangely empty, hollow, as if something essential had collapsed inside her.

“Look.” Her voice was flat.

He took the newspaper from her, read the piece she indicated, then passed it back to her in silence. She slanted it towards the streetlamp and stared at the item again, hoping it might have vanished.

Henry Falcon, a retired ballet dancer, was found strangled yesterday in his apartment. The assailant apparently used a pair of Falcon’s tights to strangle the dancer, 64, who had once danced for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in the United States.

She turned and stared at his face. By the shallow light of the overhead lamp he appeared sunken, his eyes nothing more than hollows filled with darkness, great shadows under his jawbones. He opened his mouth.

“Don’t say anything, Harry,” she said. “I want to go back to the loft. I want to go back there and bolt the door and go to bed.”

He nodded. She felt his hand on her elbow. A man is killed. A former dancer. Strangled. An anonymous voice comes over an answering machine. Two sets of facts inexorably connected, intertwined, cause and effect. Two devastating sets of facts.

“I want to feel safe, Harry,” she said.

Safe.

Safe.

She wondered what that word meant. All at once it had the ring of a word uttered in an obsolete language.

She let the paper slip from her hands, watched it slither towards the gutter, saw the wind tug the pages and scatter them all the way down the rainy street.

2.

Imagine you wake up one morning and the telephone rings and you’re feeling pretty godawful, because it’s a Monday morning and you really don’t feel like going to work at the meat market and it’s one of those miserable rainy days in the Bronx—but this is a whole different morning, because it’s the one when your life changes completely and you go, in one great swoop, from poverty to wealth, because this is the day your number came up on the state lottery.…

Jamey Hausermann switched off her electric typewriter and got up from her desk, wandering to the window of the apartment. She looked down into the street and watched the early-evening traffic flow past. It was almost seven o’clock; she checked the time on her wristwatch and wondered why Walt hadn’t come home yet. Then she remembered he had a meeting to attend downtown someplace and he wouldn’t get back until ten or so. She folded her arms, leaned against the wall, wondered how she’d feel if she woke up, just like old Joe Slattery over in the Bronx, and found out she’d won enough money for the rest of her life. Would some kind of apathy set in? Would you just want to buy yourself a house upstate someplace and raise cattle? She closed her eyes and put her forehead against the glass and thought about Madeleine’s guy, Harry Harrison, and what he might do if he’d been as lucky as Joe Slattery. He’d go out and buy himself a state-of-the-art answering machine, probably, one of those that computed the number of calls as they came in, one that even found time at the end of the day to work out your household expenses and income tax. What a kooky project, she thought. Maybe he had the kind of mentality of a failed priest—no, he’d been likable enough, and it was obvious that Maddy was devoted to him. What was it about that whole project that made her feel kinda shivery? She wandered around the living room, touching objects as she passed them—the long slivers of peacock feathers that rose like elegant flowers from a Chinese vase, the edge of a rattan sofa, the wood margins of a large Chinese screen. These oriental doodads were Walt’s; for herself she preferred a more spartan environment, something more bare—your basic desk, chair, coffeepot, carton of cigarettes.

But Walt liked all the Chinese attachments. He had a set of gold-plated acupuncture needles (a souvenir from some trip he’d made to Peking years ago), a couple of woks, wall fans, chopsticks, and a library of oriental cookbooks. She sat down on the sofa, listening to the creak of wicker, and swung her legs up. It was a pain always working to some goddamn deadline or other. One day she would like the luxury of being able to spend months on a project instead of this constant hurry hurry hurry. Now just how does it feel to win the state lottery? The trouble with Joe Slattery, she thought, is that he isn’t very bright. Maybe they should have IQ tests or something to discern your right to purchase tickets—nobody under 118 IQ need apply. She rubbed her eyelids and rose when she heard the telephone ring. She reached out for it, spoke her name, then found herself listening to silence: no click, no hangup, just a long silence. A breather, she thought. A panter. A creep.

“Hi,hi,hi,” she said. “If you’re listening, and you don’t want to speak, kindly replace the receiver. G’night.”

She hung up. She paced the room again. Since she’d gotten a regular by-line, she’d wanted an unlisted number, but she’d just never gotten around to it. Jamey wandered back to the window again and watched the stream of traffic below the window, the lights carving through dark like little slits of cheap costume jewelry. She’d rather get silent breathers, she thought, than the kinds of calls Apology received. How the hell did Harry manage to put up with them? How did he manage to carry all those separate little burdens? Jesus Christ, some days it’s hard enough to face your own damn problems without taking on hundreds of others, the sorrows of strangers. The telephone was ringing again.

She picked it up and said, “Hello?”

“Jamey. Walt.”

“Did you call a minute ago?”

“No. Why?”

“It’s nothing. So what’s happening?”

“We’re about to approach the negotiating stage with Sharon’s agent, I guess. I just slipped out for a moment.”

“Why the hell does our magazine want to serialize the memoirs of a simpleminded country-western singer? I can’t quite see that, given this sophisticated metropolis we call home.”

“They’re juicy and scandalous and we’ve got great libel lawyers,” he answered.

“What’s she like?”

“Beneath the wig and the makeup, it’s hard to tell.”

“Did she come barefoot?”

“I guess she only sings barefoot,” Walt said. “Anyhow, I thought I’d give you a quick call. I’d better get back. You can expect me around nine-thirty.”

“Which means eleven to midnight,” Jamey said. “You want anything to eat?”

“A leading question,” Walt said.

“You’ve got a vile mind, Walter. A vile mind.”

“I like it that way. See you later.”

When she’d hung up, Jamey went inside the kitchen. She lit a cigarette and flipped a switch for the coffeemaker to come on. She sat down at the table and gazed at the tiled walls, the hanging woks, the stainless-steel attachments of the room. Finicky Walt—his kitchen had to be just so. She longed to whip up some eggs, make a scrambled mess that stuck to his Teflon saucepan, spill slimy whites on the floor, then get the spatula lodged in the garbage disposal. She contented herself with flicking ash that only just missed the clay ashtray. Now, she thought, exactly how would a person feel turning into a millionaire overnight?

Elation.

Bewilderment.

Anxiety.

She sucked the end of her thumb a moment.

Why can’t I pin this sucker down? What is it that’s escaping me anyhow? Why am I distracted?

She got up, walked around the table, poured herself a cup of black coffee—Kona, she drank only that—and carried it to the kitchen window. She stood there, one hand in the pocket of her skirt. She wondered if Joe Slattery felt any anxieties. No way, he was too dumb. Some slight guilt, then? She doubted it. She smiled, imagining old Joe creeping around in the middle of the night to call Mr. Apology. Hey, I just won the state lottery and do I feel bad!

She paused in the kitchen doorway, looking across the expanse of living room to the bedroom. The door there was open, the unmade bed visible. The apartment, which contained so many of Walt’s touches, Walt’s possessions, could be large and lonely without his presence. She moved across the living room, stepped into the bedroom, stared at her own reflection in the mirrors attached to the near wall. This was a blood-red room done in Chinese silks, dragon patterns, wall hangings of bamboo painted with serpents, delicate birds, pagodas. One time, she’d accused Walt of wanting to live in a Shanghai brothel. She sat on the bed, sipped her coffee, turned her face away from her image in the mirrors. Too many pastries lately, Jamey. Too many danishes. They didn’t agree with the figure.

Lonesome. Why did mirror images always increase your sense of loneliness?

She patted her stomach, stood up, moved towards the doorway. She stared across the living room. The keys of her electric typewriter gleamed beneath the desk lamp. Keys at times had the capacity to make you feel guilt. They were like eyes that stared at you—the tiny eyes of judges, interrogators, accusers. Come back to work, Jamey. Come back and write. She leaned against the door-jamb. There was a slight draft from somewhere, a column of sudden cold air that swept around her body, stirring the lightweight material of her shirt. She shivered. Where the hell was that coming from? She went across the living room. The window was shut tight. So was the one in the kitchen. This place with its high ceilings and awful insulation—the wind could slide through almost anywhere. She moved to her desk, sat down, gazed at the paper in the typewriter; as she did so she was conscious of her aloneness in the apartment. She was also conscious of sweat in the spaces between her fingers.

What the fuck is this, Jamey?

She peered past the light, through the murky shadows of the living room. She rubbed her hands together.

A virus?

Some kind of twenty-four-hour shot of a mysterious flu?

You need that like a cavity, kid.

She looked at the sheet of paper in the machine. She read about Joe Slattery but the words didn’t carry any real conviction. She tore the piece out, crumpled it, threw the ball of paper aside. Inspiration. Come to me, muse.

She stood up. As she did so, she was aware of another movement in the room, a small secondary shiver of something, as if she might have set in motion an echo of herself. Two diazepam and a couple of caps of vitamin C and two Excedrin tablets—then off to bed with a glass of hot milk, she thought. By morning you’ll be a new woman.

She looked in the direction of the kitchen.

This is ridiculous, she told herself.

I am here alone.

There’s nobody inside this place except me.

Nobody.

Why am I shaking so?

She slumped down in the chair behind the desk, then fed a clean sheet of paper into the typewriter.

There. Again. This weird sense of something moving just beyond the range of her vision. She turned her face around, saw nothing, nobody.

Call Walt, she thought.

Tell him I’m sick, get his ass out of that stupid meeting, and come home as fast as he can.

You’re being preposterous. What happened to Jamey Hausermann, metropolitan reporter with nerves like the walls of an igloo? What happened to that broad?

Ticktickticktick—

The creaking of a floorboard, pressure on wood that sounded like the quick crazy movements of a surreal clock marking mad time away.

Ticktickticktick

Floorboards do not move by themselves. They tend to lie pretty still. Unless some human agent stands on one, then maybe they yield a little, maybe they creak—

tickticktickticktick

She gazed through the dark, rising as she did so, moving behind her chair as if for protection.

There’s somebody else in this apartment.

Somebody other than me, somebody with no right to be here at all.

She fumbled across the desk, moving her fingers in the search for something heavy. A paperweight. Something like that. You don’t have a goddamn paperweight, Jamey.

She blinked, edged the desk lamp forward to throw a more penetrating light across the room, watched the white swath of electricity cut a narrow path over the floorboards and the Chinese scatter rugs.

Walt?

The drapes at the window shivered, gold-threaded peacocks and parrots danced slightly in the weave of cloth. She moved around the desk, the lamp held high in her hand, and went towards the front door. Then she couldn’t take the lamp any further, because the electric cord snapped tight and because all at once she was aware of somebody moving just behind her, somebody who breathed heavily and wore a peculiar kind of cologne, somebody whose hand was hard and clammy as it slammed over her lips, whose body was taut and stiff against her own. She felt her neck being twisted back, fingers rough beneath her jaw, nails cutting into her lips and bringing a slight smear of blood to the surface.

She shut her eyes and struggled but whoever was holding her was strong, forever drawing her head back to the point where she thought the neckbone would just snap like the dried-out leftovers of a chicken carcass. And the pain, the searing pain, the roughness of it, the hard pressure of a knee thrust into the small of her back. I can’t die like this, I can’t die and not see the face of my killer.

She tried to twist away but the grip was too strong. She might have been held in place by clamps of ancient iron. She felt herself being drawn backwards, her heels scraping over the floorboards.

Die, don’t think of dying, Jamey, any moment you’ll come out of this hallucination and maybe you can sit down behind the typewriter and put it into understandable words.

There was the whir of some electric gadget suddenly. A familiar menacing whir, then she felt something hot blowing between her legs from behind.

a hairdryer

what does he need with

“Tell me,” he said. “Tell me. Tell me what you know.”

3.

Bryant Berger walked across the living room floor, looking at the chrome and smoked-glass lamps that were lit on either side of a brown velvet sofa. On the coffee table were a couple of magazines stacked tidily; Berger glanced at them, at the clean ashtrays, the vase of dried flowers. He moved around the sofa: There was a print on the wall ahead of him—a gift he’d given George once, a print of Goya’s dark work The Witches’ Sabbath. The faces intrigued and horrified him. They were looking at the silhouetted figure of the devil, a horned creature who appeared to have just manifested itself. What did you see on those faces? Fear and awe and surprise. The kind of surprise that comes from the sudden realization that the occult actually works, that you can really invoke a demon. My own demons, he thought, are just as astonishing. My own private devils beat their vast wings darkly. They teach me to miss trains I’ve sworn to catch. They tell me to skate the thin edges of frozen ponds. They congregate and they whisper. Lock up the gallery. Go see George. Don’t listen to Angela. Make an unholy mess of everything, Bryant. You went home to Bedford Hills last night, old man; tonight you owe one to George. Stay, make love.

Make love, he thought.

Mercifully, Angela had drunk too much last night at dinner to want to make love to him; with great relief, he’d helped her upstairs, undressed her, tucked her in bed. But there would be other nights when she wouldn’t be inebriated, when she’d want him to perform for her.

Dear God. How do I get through that predicament?

He stood under the print and looked in the direction of the bedroom door. It was halfway open: He could see a part of George’s large bed, the lavender sheets thrown back, the matching pillows piled up as if in the shape of some squat lavender bonfire. He swayed a little. After leaving the gallery he’d gone to a small bar that had been crowded with office types; he had found some kind of security, a safety, in the density of people. He had drunk too much so that the questions he wanted to ask himself dissolved into nothing. She might have waited at the station, he thought, then when I did not step off the appropriate train she drove home. She drove home and now she sits there fuming, planning my exit from her life. George, George, George—why did you inflict such pain, such anxiety? And where are you now, my love?

Bryant pushed the bedroom door open with his foot. He had the strange clammy feeling that he was stuck inside an apartment with a corpse, a body he expected to stumble over at any moment. But the bedroom was obviously empty. He sat down on the edge of the bed. Where is he? he wondered. Where is George at this very moment? Even if he were here, what do you plan to say to him? What kind of action do you mean to take? Strip off your clothes and get into bed with him even as you suspect he’s come to you straight from another lover, a casual lay?

It was eerie somehow to be alone in this place. It was a spooky feeling. The silence was pressing, tangible, a solid weight. He realized he was sweating—maybe it was the drinks he had consumed, distilled alcohol coming out of his pores. And he realized too that he didn’t know what he might say to George, whether he wanted to scold him with words or go ahead and just murder him. Murder him. What kind of thought is that? You do not have murder in your heart, Bryant. You have always been a cowardly pacifist, a shirker, someone who prefers flight to confrontation.

He stood up from the bed and strolled to the window. The white-walled room had the warmth of a clinical cell. But in this room, Bryant, you have experienced great highs, gone beyond all the boundaries of your expectations. In this room you have lived. He stared out into the darkness—far below he could see the lights of traffic crawling sluggishly along. He pressed the palms of his hands together. He felt sick suddenly, the alcohol in his blood seeming to race, his stomach turning over. He just couldn’t think clearly. He moved towards the bathroom. The shower curtain was drawn back and the tub was starkly white and empty. The whole tiled room was empty. He stepped in front of the mirror. His face had no color. The black hat he wore was absurd, so he took it off.

He moved away from the mirror.

What do you do, Bryant, old man?

Go live the bleak life of the well-married art dealer?

Or tuck yourself away in some faggot underground with your golden boy?

He looked at a glass shelf beneath the mirror. George’s lotions, aftershaves, colognes, sprays, toothpaste—so many aids to hygiene and smelling good that the boy might have had a well-defined mania about cleanliness. He absently flushed the toilet, watched water being sucked out of the bowl. Blue-dyed water that smelled of a hospital.

George, oh George, where are you now?

Bryant Berger returned to the living room, where he sat down on the big velvet sofa and leaned back. Sleep suggested itself, but he couldn’t sleep; he had something to do here, something he wanted to get over. I’ve made up my mind, George. I can’t go on playing your games. I need peace, an end to guilt, freedom from the anxiety of lies.

He heard the sound of the elevator rising inside the building, but it didn’t stop at this floor; it went on whining upwards. No George. Bryant tapped his fingers hurriedly. He opened his eyes and looked at an object on the coffee table, a thing half hidden by the magazines. He reached down and picked it up. It was George’s Swiss army knife. He pulled out a couple of blades, couldn’t decide what they were meant to do, pushed them back in again. What did George want with this weapon anyhow? He dropped it on the table, as if he were appalled by the thing. The fag’s protection, he imagined—if George patronized those lowlife gay bars where he might encounter any kind of trouble. Maybe the knife came in handy then.

He got up from the sofa restlessly, paced the room, stopped under the Goya print. He thought: This has to be your last time here. Your very last time.

The telephone was ringing. It rang several times, then stopped.

He wondered who had been on the end of the line. But what was that kind of wondering except the old familiar twinge of jealousy? A touch of the old green-eyed god?

He looked across the room.

The door of the apartment was opening.

George stood there. Why did the sight of George on his own fill one with such pleasure? The yellow wind-breaker, the straightleg blue jeans, the plaid scarf around the neck, the red hair, the mischievous grin. Look long enough and every resolution would just melt as if it had never existed in the first place.

“Surprise, surprise,” George said, crossing the room, extending his arms.

Berger let himself be embraced. But you have to look cold, act chilly; you have to become like Angela. George dropped his arms at his side. Berger wondered where he had been. Do you never stop that kind of aimless wondering?

“You found me out, Bryant?”

“I found you out.”

“Oh, dear.” George flapped across the room and lay down on the sofa, arms tucked underneath his head.

“I think it was despicable, George. I don’t know why you did it. I can’t understand why you’d play such a miserable joke—”

“It was harmless.”

“It wasn’t harmless at all, George. It was mean. It was vindictive. It caused me …” Berger raised his arms in despair. Blood red anger—it flared in front of his eyes like a cloud, a swarm of molten locusts. He hated the encounter with that kind of rage. He tried to subdue it.

“The point, dear one, is that I didn’t talk with your beloved Angela, did I? I only led you to think I did. So you see, it was harmless after all.”

Berger shook his head back and forth. This childish quality in George distressed him; this inability to see the possibilities of wreckage, of ruin, filled him with dismay. He wanted to say something like grow up, George but he couldn’t stand the thought of George laughing in his face. He couldn’t bring himself to look at the young man now, so he turned and stared up at the Goya.

“Angela is a cunt, Bryant. You don’t realize that. She’s all teeth and she wants you to be bloody. She wants to break you, Bryant. Face it. If she needs her kind of control, let her buy herself a puppy. Maybe you want to be her faithful little dog, my dear? Is that what you want?”

“I want peace, for Christ’s sake,” Berger said. He stared at his hat, which he had left on the coffee table. It seemed like a stupid symbol somehow—the black color, the garb of the so-called businessman.

“Peace peace peace,” George said. His face was flushed and his speech, Berger noticed, quick and abrupt—almost the way it had been the other day in the bar of the Warwick Hotel. The boy got up from the sofa, moving like a spring suddenly freed, and crossed the room. “You want me, Bryant. You don’t want your fucking wife in the fucking suburbs, do you? You want Georgie, your own Georgie.”

Berger stared at the young man’s face. The eyes seemed glazed. Even the red hair appeared darker, more fiery, than ever before. He didn’t want the boy to be right. He could live out some kind of life with Angela, couldn’t he?

“You can’t have peace, Bryant. I could tell you all about peace, you know. It just isn’t out there. It doesn’t exist. You think if you go back to your drab little Angela you’ll live your life in tranquility. Let me tell you, dear one, that if it isn’t me you’ll find yourself attracted to somebody else. Think about it. Well-known art dealer solicits sexual favors from choirboy in local church. Think about it, Bryant.”

Choirboys. The sight of a lithe young man working on a construction site. The pretty face of a teenage boy on a street corner. He couldn’t be correct; he just couldn’t be.

“George, I’m sick to death with the lies, the deceits—”

“You don’t want me, Bryant? Is that what you’re saying?”

“It isn’t that.”

“You’re rejecting me. Is that what you’re doing? Turning me away?” George smiled suddenly. “I only have to crook my little finger and you’ll come running.”

“It won’t work out, George.”

“Why?”

“It just won’t work out, that’s all.”

“I don’t believe you know what you’re saying, Bryant.” George looked angry now. What was it about his mouth? It seemed tight and mean, looking like Berger had never seen it before. A tiny nerve worked in the boy’s jaw, as if he were grinding his back teeth. “Don’t you understand that I love you, Bryant? Don’t you understand that you love me?”

Berger shook his head. “I’m too afraid, George. Too scared. Too tired.”

George put his hand on Berger’s shoulder. He tightened his fingers, squeezing the flesh hard. The pain was terrible. Berger opened his mouth, saw black spots flying in front of his eyes. Then George took his hand away.

“That’s what she wants to do to you, Bryant. She wants to squeeze you dry. Don’t you understand that?”

Berger rubbed his shoulder and gasped. “Jesus Christ.” He stared at George, filled with a sudden longing to strike at him, to hurt him just as he had been hurt himself. Instead he went to the sofa and sat down, trying to ignore the searing pain. He looked at George, who was smiling. Why was he wearing that hideous expression, as if he found pleasure, exultation, in inflicting pain? Berger shut his eyes: The pain was like a hot cinder burning behind his lids. He could see it glow there. Pain, it was always pain. He opened his eyes, saw George go behind the sofa, could feel him standing there as surely as if he were sending out signals. Why is he standing behind me like this? Why do I feel so threatened? Berger turned his head around. George had his hands on the back of the sofa and his eyes were tightly shut and he was rocking his body from side to side.

“You want to leave me, is that it?”

Berger didn’t speak. He kept rubbing his shoulder. His throat was dry and he wished he were suddenly sober but the alcohol continued to churn through him, making him sick, dizzy.

“You want to leave me!” George said.

“George, please …”

“I don’t like it. I don’t like it, Bryant. I don’t like the idea of somebody leaving me.”

Berger rose, looked in the direction of the door. “George, I have to go.…” The room seemed to scream at him. The walls appeared to close in, trapping him with the certainty of a fly captured in a bottle. He could sense it all around him, the scent of danger; he imagined he could hear the soft tearing sounds of George unraveling in front of his eyes. He started to move in the direction of the door. Fear, he thought. You fear this boy, this stranger. Where was the other George, the one you held in your arms and kissed and made love with?

“You fucker,” George said. “You miserable cocksucking fucker.” He moved to the coffee table and picked up the knife. He pulled out a short sharp blade.

“George, put the knife down. Come on, put the knife away.”

“You think I’d waste this on you, Bryant? It’s good steel, you know. It’s real good steel. Everybody enjoys the feel of a Swiss army knife.”

Berger restrained an incongruous impulse to laugh. This was absurd, ridiculous, George standing there with the knife like some apprentice assassin. Himself hovering between the sofa and the door.

“I wouldn’t waste my knife on you.”

“Then put it away.”

George snapped the blade back into the handle. “You’re pitiful, Bryant. You’re an excuse for a human being. You live your life like you’re always looking over your own shoulder.” George paused, then all at once he was smiling, and the expression was sweet and clear and childlike; it was as if some awful shadow had passed across his mind, as if he’d suddenly emerged from a dark tunnel and back into daylight. He dropped the knife on the coffee table.

“Go back to your wife, Bryant. That’s what you ought to do. Go back to her and sleep with her and stick your face between her legs and when you’re laboring through that maybe you can imagine it’s me you’re in bed with.”

Berger said nothing. This vindictive streak in George, this explosive quality he’d felt before, the sharp gleaming edge of violence. He was uneasy, scared, longing to get out of the place and go home.

But he didn’t move. He just stood in the middle of the room and listened to the roaring echoes of George’s words. They rang in his ears with all the resonance of huge bells. He stared at George, then he was absurdly conscious of his hat on the coffee table—but somehow he knew he would have to resist the urge to pick it up in case the act suddenly inflamed George. He realized he couldn’t predict the young man’s actions; he didn’t know what to expect any more than he knew how he was supposed to behave. Leave the silly hat, open the door, go home. And it struck him then with the force of thunder: George could kill me.

He backed towards the door.

He watched George slump on the sofa. A picture of despair.

“George,” Berger whispered.

“Fuck off. Run along home. I don’t care.”

Berger quietly put his hand on the door handle, turned it softly. “George,” he said again, his voice low.

George said nothing.

Berger stepped into the hall, closing the door behind him. He walked down to the elevator and pressed the button. He heard the elevator stir in the shaft and he leaned against the wall—weak, his pulses hammering, a constriction in his throat. What am I stepping away from? What am I leaving? You never know what the right thing is until you do it, do you?

He heard something crash along the hall and he looked in the direction of George’s apartment. George must have thrown something heavy at the inside of his door—a lamp, maybe even the coffee table. The elevator doors slid open and he went hurriedly inside and pressed the button for the ground floor. The swift downward motion of the elevator made him feel sick all over again.

4.

With his plump hands placed together Frank Nightingale sat down behind his desk and looked across the office at the open door leading to the hallway. A sixty-watt light bulb shone weakly outside. He watched a uniformed policewoman walk past. Rita Huddleston—she went with Malarkey in Fraud. She wasn’t at all bad-looking, tall with yellowy hair that came down to her shoulders. He felt a twinge, a pang of loneliness, like a slight hunger he didn’t have the means to assuage. Then he looked over at Moody’s empty desk, wondering where Boy Wonder could be. There had been twenty-four hours of bleak inactivity spiced with the usual insane telephone calls from freaks out there who always had the balls to confess to killings they hadn’t done. Spiced, too, with the usual poring over of statements, looking at the utterances of other people as if you might fortuitously spy something between the lines. Fat chance, he thought. He got up from behind his desk. He stared out the window a moment, turning only when he heard Moody come into the office.

“Sperm prints, Frank.”

“What?”

“Sperm prints,” Moody said. “A whole new ballgame in police science. We devise a method whereby we get prints of guys’ sperm and we store this information away in the big computer, then when we run into something like the Henry Falcon a.k.a. Dicky Bird affair we can match sperm traces with the prints in the computer. You like it?”

“You know what I think of that idea, Doug?”

“Tell me.”

“It sucks.”

“Good one, good one,” Moody said. He came across the office and perched himself up on Nightingale’s desk. “Anyhow, I was being more than a little facetious. I was only making a point. They spend millions of bucks so those Einsteins in forensics can tell us something practically useless like the fact of human sperm being inside a corpse’s mouth. When they’re deciding to throw this bread around, Frank, why don’t they stick it into something useful. What good is sperm to us?”

“Where would you be without it?”

“Seriously. I would have liked it better if they had the means of telling us whose goddamn sperm it was.”

But you know, Boy Wonder, don’t you? You know it’s Billy Chapman’s, right? You’ve convinced yourself of this. You don’t need computers and printouts and all the rest of that crap. William Arthur Chapman is your man. Nightingale placed his hands together, studying the lines in his palms. Which one was the goddamn loveline anyhow?

“They also came up with some hair, Doug. They tell us it was dyed. They haven’t told us the exact kind of dye yet, but they probably will.” A question suddenly nagged him. He gazed at Moody for a second, then said, “Let me ask you something. It kinda troubles me. Why would somebody like Chapman go to all the trouble of changing the color of his hair? It doesn’t fit the picture I’ve got of him—strung-out, a doper. I can’t see him going inside a store and buying a bottle of Grecian Urn.”

Moody said, “You surprise me, Frank. He’s disguised himself. After killing his sister, what else would he do?”

Nightingale nodded. Up to a point, he thought. Up to a certain point it sounded okay—except in his experience of dopers, they weren’t exactly people who cared about appearances. They could camouflage themselves well enough without the aid of something that came in a bottle. He thought about Henry Falcon now, trying to imagine somebody mounting him, coming inside the old guy’s mouth. He wasn’t so good these days at seeing such pictures as he used to be. Time and weariness, he thought. The core of lovesickness.

Moody said, “We need an oracle, Frank. Like the ancient Greeks. We need this ominiscient entity we can just go ask questions. Where is Billy Chapman, O wise one?”

“Who’s gonna win the three-thirty at Aqueduct?”

“Stuff like that,” Moody said. He was strolling around the office. Nightingale noticed how fatigued he looked, his skin somewhat grey, a lack of lustre in his eyes.

Nightingale looked from the window, staring at the wall opposite. It was black out there. You feel like a juggler sometimes, he thought, tossing balls in the air that were labeled Camilla and Henry and Billy. And they were rising faster, spinning harder than you could ever hope to follow. He moved back to his desk and sat down, then tilted his chair back and stared up at the ceiling. Sometimes you forgot the faces of the victims. Sometimes you blocked them out, hid yourself away from how they had looked at the point of their deaths, and you remembered only the incongruous details of murder. A garter belt. A pair of tights. A shopping list stuck to a refrigerator. A notebook bound in velvet. He found his gaze drawn to the open door; Rita Huddleston was going past again. He watched her: There was the soft scent of perfume hanging in the air, tantalizing, blood-warming.

He took a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose, then folded the thing away. He picked up a manila envelope from his desk and tipped it over: Photographs of the late Henry Falcon spilled out. A gallery of horrors. He could hardly stand to look at them. If you could talk, Henry, what could you tell us? You could describe the guy who snuffed you out and an artist would come and make a passable drawing and the picture would be circulated and it would inevitably resemble a whole bunch of people. The telephone would be red-hot with tips, claims, outright falsehoods. If you could talk, Henry. But then you couldn’t have talked with your mouth full, could you? Sick humor—how else did you contrive to get through the days when they seemed endless and there wasn’t a distinction between dawn and twilight and all the noons suggested darkness? He stared at the pictures. Sperm and hair samples. No prints. No apparent theft. Just a brutal sex crime. And what kind of person commits that kind of crime?

Moody said, “Billy Chapman’s last known address was the Hotel Christopher on Thirty-ninth Street. The Doss-house of the August Moon. Cheap rates by the month, guaranteed rodent infestation of every room. Before that, at the time of his first arrest, he was a denizen of the McBurney YMCA on Twenty-third Street. He obviously never put much weight into home living, Frank. You get a pattern. Cheap hotels, institutions, flophouses. He doesn’t seem to know any better. I’d say he’s ensconced in a similar sleazy establishment right now. The kind of place where I first met him.”

Nightingale stuffed Henry’s pictures back inside the envelope; he might have been scooping the ashes of the departed inside a funeral urn. “There’s a whole maze of flophouses out there, Doug. It’s another world. The reason I can’t waste manpower on hitting every flophouse is because one, I just can’t spare it; two, a lot of desk clerks don’t know their ass from their elbow; and three, most of the names in the registers—if there happens to be a register—are probably phony. Last time I looked at a register in a cheap hotel there was one Pearl Harbor, two John Hancocks, a John Smith, a Laurence Olivier, and a couple that called themselves Mr. and Mrs. Bob Dylan. You start in on that kind of maze and pretty soon you’re not going from one lobby to another; you’re going from room to room. You know how many rooms there are?”

Moody dropped the Billy Chapman fact sheet he’d been reading. “In an ideal world we’d have the ideal number of men.”

“In the same world, Doug, we wouldn’t have warrens of flophouses. So we wouldn’t need that many men.”

Moody turned, looking puzzled. Then he appeared to let Nightingale’s remark go, as if the logic of it were too perplexing for him. Nightingale swung his chair around so that he faced the window. He stared out into the dark for a while, then swung back again and looked at Moody.

“Billy Chapman,” he said.

“What about him?”

“Why would a guy like that suddenly go on a killing spree, Doug? I mean, what is it that might snap inside him and turn him from some punk thief and dopehead into a fully fledged monster?”

Moody shrugged. “Sweet mysteries. Maybe the dope gets to him. The paranoid abyss. Maybe the habit’s become enormous. He doesn’t mean to kill, only steal. But he meets resistance.”

Nightingale nodded, looked down at the surface of his desk. “You think he did both these killings.”

“That’s what I think.”

“There’s no sexual crimes on his fact sheet.”

“He’s a late starter, that’s all.”

Nightingale shut his eyes. He wished he were as convinced as his partner. He wished he could pin everything on W. A. Chapman. It made things real easy. One simple target. But what he had a hard time getting around was the fact of Moody’s old grudge. It lay like an obstacle in his path: The Boy Wonder wants Chapman to be the killer. He sighed, got out of his chair, circled the office.

Moody said, “Look, Frank, you got two strangulations. You got the sexual thing in both cases. One definite necrophilia, right? The other a possible—shit, what would the word for that be? Whatever, it’s a real connection. It’s a definite link. You can’t ignore it.”

“I guess,” Nightingale said.

The telephone was ringing.

Moody went to answer it, silent for a long time as he listened to the message from the other end of the line. Then he put the receiver down and stared across the room at Nightingale.

“We’ve got another one, Frank.”

“Shit.”

“A bad one. A real bad one this time.”

Moody was already reaching for his coat. A real bad one this time, Nightingale thought. What had the others been? Good ones? He got up, took his coat from the peg on the wall, struggled into it.

“A woman,” Moody said.

Nightingale made no response, wondering why it was always worse when the victim was a woman. He followed Moody out into the corridor. How bad was bad anyhow?

5.

Madeleine lay in the dark with her eyes open, listening to the sound of Harry’s regular breathing. He’d fallen asleep about an hour ago and now she felt oddly abandoned, shut out from a world she could never enter, a very private place of dreams. She stared at the outline of the window where a thin touch of light fell against the glass from somewhere. There was the sound of night rain—it rattled on the window, stroked the roof, slithered noisily into a rainpipe outside. You could imagine the whole city as an island of rain afloat in the dark, the swollen river knocking against quays, piers, touching the hulls of silent ships.

She sat up and clutched the sheet to her breasts, looked at the shape of Harrison beside her. Their lovemaking had been slow, unhurried, the foreplay more elaborate than any she’d ever encountered—there wasn’t one part of her body he hadn’t explored with fingertips, tongue, the palms of his hands. He might have been trying to memorize the contours of her flesh as if he were planning to make a map.

Reaching out, she let her fingers touch his hair lightly. Then she ran her hand between his shoulder blades a moment. She leaned, kissed the nape of his neck, pushed the sheet back, stepped onto the floor. She stared at the red and green lights of the answering machine. And she remembered how when they’d come back to the loft from the restaurant the first thing he’d done was come inside the bedroom and play back his messages like a kid on Christmas morning who can’t wait to rip the wrapping off his presents. The first thing he’d done, she thought. For a few minutes she might not have existed; he might have been totally alone in the room.

Okay. He gets absorbed. He goes deep.

It’s only fair. Right. It’s his project, his baby, his work.

It’s a big part of him.

And maybe it’s a part you’ve never encountered before. Maybe he travels in some places where you just can’t follow.

It’s no big deal. It’s nothing to mourn over.

He gets involved in his work.

She looked through the open bedroom doorway at the figure of Albert and she recalled how he’d been that night when he’d taken the scalpel to Albert—like a stranger, someone she’d never seen before. Okay. People, even people you love, have sides to them, different aspects, colors, perspectives. You can’t let yourself be surprised by new angles. You can’t let that get you down.

It’s not that, though.

It’s not just that.

It’s what’s out there. In the dark. Talking into the dark. The dim corners. The electronic connections that ferried those voices into this room. Into this private space.

Out there.

She crossed her arms in front of her breasts and shivered.

I’d like to take this cunt of yours and screw her with a fucking hacksaw.… She couldn’t get that voice out of her brain. It had dogged her ever since last night—at first whispering quietly at the back of her mind and then seeming to grow into something resembling a loud cry, a harsh echoing cry of madness. She could feel the menace in the pauses, the intakes of breath, the weird disjointed laughter that made her skin crawl; she thought she could feel it more in these things than in the words themselves. And now she thought about the newspaper item, the death of the ballet dancer, and she understood how it was so murderously associated with the voice on the tapes.

She watched the street.

Across the way, in the doorway of the building opposite, there was the brief flare of a light.

A match. Somebody pausing to light a cigarette.

She stepped to the side of the window.

The door, did we throw the bolt on the door when we came back…?

Another flame, another match, then darkness.

Two matches.

It’s just somebody trying to light a cigarette in the rain. That’s all. Somebody just passing along, pausing. It’s nothing.

A third match flamed, died.

She closed her eyes a second; when she opened them she saw a series of quick flares from below, match struck after match.

But why? For a moment she couldn’t think. Then it was obvious. A pipe. The guy down there was trying to light a pipe.

Somebody stopping to light a pipe.

It wasn’t anything weird.

Then a shadow moved out of the doorway and she saw it drift along the sidewalk and out of her sight. She sighed, leaned against the wall. These nerves.

She glanced at Albert.

She might have been imprisoned, she thought.

She might have been ensnared between the tiny fires of matches struck on a dark street, the sight of a papier-mâché figure covered with blood, and the answering machine in the bedroom. Stuck in a web that had been woven out of strands of violence.

Go to the police, Harry.

Now. Don’t waste any more time.

Go to the cops.

“Maddy?”

She turned quickly. Harry was standing in the bedroom doorway.

“You frightened me,” she said.

He scratched his head. “I woke up. I missed you. Coming back?”

“Sure.” She moved towards him.

She put her arm around his waist and went back inside the bedroom with him. “I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “I don’t know. Maybe something woke me. A dream. I don’t remember.”

They lay down together. She put her head against his shoulder. Then he moved, twisting his arm and reaching up to the answering machine. A low voice was coming over the line; it might have been mumbling several rooms away. He raised the volume. She shut her eyes very tight. Don’t listen, Harry. Please don’t listen.

“I thought so,” he said.

What? What did you think? she wondered. And then she realized the voice was a familiar one. A voice she knew.

I AM VERY DRUNK.… I AM SITUATED SOMEPLACE AT THE END OF THE WORLD, VERY DISAPPOINTED WITH MYSELF.…

“Rube,” she said. “Do we need to listen to this?”

Harry didn’t say anything. He was looking over the top of her head at the machine.

“Why is he calling? Why does he need to call Apology?” she asked. And it suddenly seemed to her that Apology was an entity separate from either of them, something apart, something that didn’t have anything to do with Harry. A third person in the bedroom.

HARRY, DO YOU KNOW WHAT IT’S REALLY LIKE TO MAKE ALL THIS MONEY.… WANT ME TO TELL YOU? IT FUCKING SUCKS. HARRY! DON’T SWITCH ME OFF. I KNOW YOU’RE LYING THERE ALONGSIDE THE FAIR MADELEINE.… SHE’S A LOVELY WOMAN. HARRY … YOU’RE GODDAMN LUCKY THERE.… I AM A WELL OF SELF-PITY RIGHT NOW.… ALL I EVER WANTED TO DO WITH MY LIFE WAS PAINT AND PAINT … AND WHAT AM I DOING? JESUS CHRIST. WHAT AM I DOING? FUCK. THESE ARE GENUINE TEARS RUNNING DOWN MY CHEEKS.…

“Harry,” she said. “Switch it off. Turn the volume down. I don’t want to lie here and listen to Rube snivel. You know he’s not going to remember any of this crap in the morning.” She turned on her side, pulling the pillow over her head. A visual image of Rube drunk out there, tears running over his face—what else? What else about Rube?

A pipe, she thought.

Rube smokes a pipe. Rube lights match after match, doesn’t he?

A stupid thought. Why would Rube be standing in a doorway across the street lighting his pipe? It wasn’t him; it was someone else.

How many people smoke pipes anyhow?

I AM ASHAMED. HARRY.… MY LIFE HASN’T DIRECTION.… I’M ASHAMED AND LONELY AND A PATHETIC WRETCH IMPOSING MYSELF ON YOU LIKE THIS.… FORGET IT. JUST FORGET IT. KISS MADDY FOR ME. THIS TAPE WILL SELF-DESTRUCT IN THIRTY SECONDS.

The message ended.

“Blitzed out of his skull,” Harrison said.

Madeleine was silent, eyes closed. If he wants to get blitzed, if he wants to wallow in drunken self-pity, that’s his goddamn business. Why drag that shit in here? Why? Because you let him, Harry. Because you opened a door that’s wider than you ever thought.

“His drinking worries me sometimes,” he said. “He hides behind it.”

And you, Harry. What do you hide behind? Apology?

Or have you become Apology, one entity, indivisible?

She opened her eyes and looked around the darkness of the room. She felt suddenly lonely, adrift from Harry.

Lonely and afraid.

She reached out and took his hand.

She said, “Harry?”

She felt him turn towards her.

“We should finish the conversation we started in the restaurant.”

He said nothing.

“That tape could provide evidence, valuable evidence.… The cops would want to listen to that voice.…” She felt like she was pulling tiny straws out of the dark around her. Frail, useless straws. Harry, she wanted to say, somebody is trying to find us because he’s insane enough to want to kill us and you are still hung up on some flimsy principle about anonymity and some printed promise you made to people you don’t even know, for Christ’s sake!

He stroked her hair in a gentle way. “Maybe he killed the dancer. Maybe you’re right when you make that connection. But it still doesn’t follow that I’ve got to go to the cops. Without Apology, the guy would have killed in any case, wouldn’t he? And why should Apology be in the business of providing information to the police? It’s a recording machine, an answering device; it’s not some kind of snitch.”

A recording machine. No, she thought. It’s more than that.

When you talk about Apology, Harry, you’re talking about yourself.

“Listen,” she said, trying to sound calm, rational. The sweet voice of reason. “If he killed this dancer, then it’s a pretty fair assumption he also killed the woman he mentioned last night. Right? Didn’t he say something about this woman working with telephones, something like that? Okay, suppose she was an operator, Harry, suppose he assumed she’d be able to tell him your identity—then Apology is directly responsible for a murder. You’re directly responsible, Harry. And if you don’t take steps, if you don’t do something, the killing isn’t going to stop. It isn’t going to come to an end unless you do something.”

“Hey, how can an answering machine be responsible for murder?”

“It’s not the answering machine, and you know it. It’s the idea behind it, Harry. It’s this monstrous thing that you thought up yourself.”

He was silent. She could hear the soft sound of his regular breathing. She slid down the pillow and curled up small. Listen to me, Harry. In the name of God, listen to what I’m telling you.

A hacksaw …

She thought she could feel the awful pain of a serrated blade sliding along her thigh, cutting her, breaking the skin, rupturing the network of frail veins in a crude, agonizing way.

A hacksaw.

I can’t live with this fear anymore, she thought.

I have to do something.

6.

Billy Chapman couldn’t remember where or when he’d picked up the hooker who was sitting on the edge of his bed and blowing on her varnished fingernails like they were tiny apples she was trying to shine. She was young, maybe sixteen, seventeen, and she wore luminous pink pants and a yellow blouse and her pink-dyed hair was piled up on her head. From certain angles she reminded him very vaguely of his sister Camilla. No great resemblance, just a slight thing—enough to make him remember camping one summer a long time ago when he’d started to goof around with Camilla and had stolen her clothes, threatening to throw them into the river unless she kissed him, and that kiss had aroused him strangely, made him feel a tightening in his ass and a hardening of his cock and then he’d come inside his swimming trunks like a fool. Nothing happened for a while after that until one day she took his hand and they went inside the woods together and they fucked and she warned him never to tell a living soul about what they’d done, because incest wasn’t a thing people wanted to hear about. Incest.

He was vaguely aware of darkness someplace behind the drawn drapes of the room, faintly conscious of the clicking sound the girl made when she moved her jaws over her gum. He looked into his teaspoon at the little puddle of liquid, then down at the table where the hypo lay. His set of works. He’d never been fond of freebasing, because you wasted too much when you distilled the blow, but he liked the needle; he liked the rush he got when the shit hit his bloodstream and went like an express train to his head. He stared back at the drapes again. What the fuck, he didn’t know what time it was anyhow. He didn’t know much about anything right now except for the fact that his arm, where he’d punctured it before, was bleeding.

“You could get a job as a butcher,” she said.

“Ha fucking ha.”

“There’s blood all over the floor.”

“You want me to shoot you up?” he asked.

“I’ll take some for my nose, thanks.” She got up from the bed and walked to the table and he pushed the SnoSeal package towards her. He watched her make two lines on the mirror, then she picked up the straw and snorted them.

As he watched her he realized he couldn’t remember scoring the stuff from Sylvester, couldn’t remember where the money had come from, how he’d managed to get the bread together, couldn’t put events of the immediate past together in any way. It was like his mind was a blank, his memory smithereened, lying around in tiny pieces. Shit, he thought. It doesn’t come back to me. I don’t remember a goddamn thing. Maybe I went out, mugged some fucker, something like that. Maybe I got the bread that way.

Drugs and memory, man, they don’t mix.

Oil and goddamn water.

“I don’t understand why I’m here,” the girl said. “I mean, you can’t get it up anyways, so whatcha want me for?”

Billy Chapman ignored the question. He filled his hypo and raised it, looking at his arm. Did I go out and do my thing on some dark street, snatch some old woman’s purse or shove my knife at some guy’s throat? Jesus. It was gone. There was nothing.

“Ain’t you gonna rub your arm with alcohol?” the girl asked.

“Naw.” He searched for a vein, pricked his skin with the needle, pushed and missed. Missed completely.

The hooker blew a bubble that looked like pink latex. “You’re really doing a number on your arm, mister.”

“Yeah, yeah.” He tried again and this time, through a smear of bright red blood, found the vein. He put the syringe down and sat back with his eyes closed and waited for the locomotive to go speeding to his cortex. Then he got up and paced the room. A screaming high. The sound of racing cars in a tunnel. The echoing roar. He parted the curtains a little and peered down into the street, then returned to the table where he sat down, staring at the floor. He shut his eyes again. Sometimes he had the unsettling feeling that They were out there, lingering in doorways, lurking. They were just waiting for him to do something before They pounced. They were forever watching him. He laughed suddenly, throwing his head back, then he picked up the teaspoon and licked it.

“What’s so funny?” the girl asked.

“I don’t remember.”

“Weird.” She moved across the room to the bed where she sat down again. “You shouldn’t be using that needle, mister. The way you use it you’re gonna pop yourself.”

“Bullshit.”

The chick shrugged and looked absently around the room. She was chewing her gum hard, like she wanted to shred it. Then she was looking at something, a piece of paper in her hand. “What’s this?” she asked.

“What?”

She held the paper up. “Weird.”

“I don’t know,” Chapman said. “Some guy that wants you call him.” He looked at a gentle trickle of blood from his flesh.

“Call him? To say you’re sorry about something?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

The girl smiled. “He’s got to be kidding.”

Chapman shook his head. “He ain’t kidding.”

“How would you know? You called him?”

“What would I call him for?” He shut his eyes and listened to the hooker crinkle the paper. Apology, hey man—A slight echo but no hard recall, nothing definite. Maybe you stumbled into a phone booth somewhere during the night and maybe you slipped some coins into the slot and listened to the voice of Apology. But what did you tell him? What exactly did you say?

Severe gaps in the old memory banks, Billy.

Big holes.

What did you tell him? What did you say to him? Did you confess?

He opened his eyes, glanced at the chick, then turned and stared at the dismal remains of the drug in the package. Maybe he had enough for two, three more hits. If the chick didn’t get up and help herself.

“I still don’t know what you need me for,” she was saying.

“I don’t know either.” Earlier, he seemed to have become involved in a certain amount of grappling, fumbling with the kid on the bed, but that was pretty vague to him now. All he could recall was how he couldn’t get it up, how he had shriveled between his legs like he’d just come out of a very long bath. He went to the refrigerator and took out a can of beer, popping the top. The coke made you real thirsty. He leaned against the wall and drank quickly. Did I do something stupid like call this Apology guy and tell him about myself? Was I that wasted? He could feel something cold, a shiver, more like rippling water over the top of his scalp. So what? The guy doesn’t know me anyhow. He doesn’t know where to find me. Ain’t nobody gonna finger me. So what, it didn’t matter. He stared at the hooker. Hell, maybe there wasn’t a guy anyhow, maybe it was like one big joke, and all you ever did was talk to a machine that nobody listened to anyway. He frowned, sipped some more beer, wandered back to the table.

Suppose you did tell that goddamn machine something?

I mean, what if you went and mentioned your name?

What would this Apology character do then?

He looked down at the SnoSeal package. Christ, it was getting to that point where you either had to score again or just give up for a time. But I don’t wanna give up, he thought.

The hooker put down the handbill and said, “You oughta get some air freshener for this room. You ever use one of them lemony things, mister? I got a couple in my own room. They help a lot. Keeps the air clean.”

What the fuck was she talking about?

It was like her words ran together into one thick stream of nonsense. Suddenly her presence just irritated him. He bent down and picked up the Apology poster and looked at it, but his eyes were blurry and he couldn’t read.

Shit, he thought. I wouldn’t have called this guy.

Not in a million years.

I wouldn’t have wasted the change on him.

A loony. Just a loony.

The hooker said, “Or you could use one of them sprays. An air deodorant. Only they don’t have the long-lasting power of the other kind, the kind you open and just let sit.”

Billy Chapman looked at the girl.

He understood he’d have to go out again sometime even if the prospect didn’t remotely appeal to him.

“Lemon Blossom. That’s the name of the stuff.”

7.

The guy in the kitchen was crying hysterically. He sat with his head flat down on the table, his arms spread in front of him, his shoulders heaving up and down with every impossible racking sob he made. Nightingale wanted to punch the kitchen window out, letting in cold night air, the chill blackness out there, letting it rush through this whole apartment, cleansing and cleansing and cleansing. He stood behind the other guy and put his hand lightly on his shoulder. What do you say? What have you ever said in the past? For a moment he massaged the crying guy’s shoulder—it wasn’t much, a small human touch, a connection of flesh and feeling, but it was all he could think to do. You can’t really touch a thing like this, he said to himself. You can’t get near anything like this. He stepped back from the guy and looked around the kitchen. Woks hung on the walls. There were various Chinese scrolls here and there. A glass-plated display cabinet of ornamental chopsticks. Everywhere you went in this apartment you ran into something Chinese. Even the bedroom—but he didn’t want to think about the bedroom right now.

He moved slowly around the kitchen. The place was neat, tidy; nothing had been disturbed here. He stopped in the doorway and glanced across the living room. There they were, the workhorses of death, the guys with their dusting powders, their cameras, the uniformed guys who stood close to the front door as if they were guarding royalty instead of this awful thing. A small desk was overturned, a typewriter upside down, sheets of paper strewn across the floor. And, at his back, the constant sobbing. He’d have to get a doctor here, someone who could administer a shot of some sedative to the guy, whose name was Walt Spencer.

He went inside the living room. Across the room, through the open bedroom door, he could see Moody moving around the bed. He was crouching, examining, taking it in with his eyes. He isn’t as used to death as you, Frank. Give him some time. Let the gloss of brutality wear him down. I am not immune these days, he thought. I used to be. But not now.

He stuck his hands in the pockets of his overcoat. It was hot and stuffy in this place and he wanted to take the coat off, but he didn’t even undo the buttons. He looked at the Chinese screens, the paper lanterns, the oriental rugs. He looked at the hanging silks, faces of dragons, scarlet butterflies, fragile little birds. She died among all this tourist shit that looks like it was bought in some dreary back-street warehouse in Chinatown. The bamboo, the raffia, the silks. He moved towards the overturned desk, avoiding the flash of a camera, and he leaned down—groaning a little—to pick up some of the spilled sheets of paper. He read a moment: They were about some guy in the Bronx who’d won the state lottery. She had been typing this story when she’d been killed. Unfinished business.

Killed, he thought.

Killed was a word that described a bullet through the heart. A knife in the chest. A simple strangulation. Killed was a simple word.

This woman hadn’t been killed in that sense.

What do you have to do to deserve a death like this one?

What do you have to do, Frank?

You’re getting soft. Those days when any kind of killing didn’t matter are in the past. Then he realized the idea of violent death had only begun to touch him after Sarah had gone, almost as if, in her absence, by proxy, he had begun to see the events of the world through her eyes. He had begun to weaken in front of brutal, pointless death. Face it, Frank, the stomach goes first in a homicide cop. The guts yield. Even now, as he walked towards the bedroom, towards Moody, he wanted to turn away. His legs felt weak, the muscles shredded. There was a throbbing pain inside his head. He paused on the threshold of the bedroom and looked at Moody, waiting for the Boy Wonder to come out with something glib, hoping he’d utter something whimsical that might raise his spirits and put everything in an official perspective, reduce death to the absurdity of a police report.

Strangulation, he thought.

Only this time—

Moody stared at him. “She had a hard time, Frank.”

“Well, there’s a guy in the kitchen having a hard time as well.” Nightingale looked at the bed. The body. The blood that soaked the sheets, the Chinese quilt. It was all red, everything red, touched and marked by the same goddamn color. The color of blood.

“He’s alive at least,” Moody said.

“Yeah.” Yeah, so what? That guy couldn’t ever get the memory of this discovery out of his mind, walking into this bedroom and seeing the dead woman—he’d dream about that for the rest of his life. Bad dreams. So he was alive to have bad dreams. It wasn’t so terrific, Nightingale thought. It wasn’t exactly a consolation.

Moody, notebook in hand, said: “Okay, I see it like this. She forgets to lock the door. She’s got journalism on her mind. Whatever. She’s preoccupied, distracted. The guy comes in. Easy. He comes in, hauls her from behind the desk, drags her in here to the bedroom, takes her clothes off. Or makes her take them off. Either way. I don’t think it matters who does what at this point.”

Jesus, a cold recitation, Nightingale thought.

The supposed facts. Just the facts. No shades, no delicate colorings.

Don’t go on, Moody.

“Then, maybe he has a weapon, who knows, forces her to lie down. Ties her to the bed with all those goddamn silk ribbons and scarves. He plugs the fucking hairdryer into the wall. He rapes her with it.” Moody looked up from the bed where the woman was lying, her face discolored, her lips pale, her limbs bound to the mattress by bright ribbons, rainbows of silk. Nightingale forced himself to stare at the woman. The hairdryer was stuck nozzle first into her vagina; the cord of the machine had been knotted around her neck—but that wasn’t what sickened him, that wasn’t what appalled him. It wasn’t the rape with the appliance or the strangulation with the length of cord, it was the gratuitous stuff, the stuff that wasn’t needed, like the killer couldn’t stop once he’d begun, like he had to go on, and, like some insane artist, leave his signature on the woman’s flesh.

The nipples were gone. A razor lay in a puddle of blood on the bedside rug.

A deep terrible line had been carved from navel to pubic hair.

And—

Nightingale turned away from the corpse and wandered around the bedroom. He looked out the window: the same goddamn crazy city, the same lights, the same mother-fucking sickness of violence. He clenched his fists and rapped them against the wall. Maybe Sarah had done the right thing by getting the hell out of this garbage can of madness. Maybe she was right, living upstate in fresh clean air where crimes of violence were presumably rare, where the only altercations that took place every Saturday night concerned who had done the best Hank Williams impersonation, and the local slammer was stuffed with guys in cowboy hats, silk shirts with arrowed pockets, and drunken voices singing “I Can’t Help It if I’m Still in Love with You.”

You wouldn’t miss this city, Frank. Would you?

What would you miss?

He pressed his hands together and looked back towards the bed.

Go ahead. Make something out of it. See if there’s a pattern to madness, to the cruelty and excess of this murder.…

He takes the same razor—whoever he is, whoever this madman is—he takes the same goddamn razor and slices the woman’s tongue out of her mouth and drops it casually on the floor. Casually. The tongue, lying there pink and shriveled like the corpse of some unlikely lizard or some fetal flamingo half born, set against a pretty pattern on a Chinese rug.

“Something wrong?” Moody asked.

You poor kid. You’ve got a ways to go. “It’s stuffy in here,” Nightingale said.

“Yeah.” Moody went to the window and opened it a couple of inches and then looked at Nightingale. “That better?”

The rain. The night air. The smell of winter. Nightingale loosened his tie. “It’s fine.” Murder and heat, violence and scalding warmth—they went together. He could feel enormous drops of sweat slide down the insides of his shirt with all the cognitive alacrity of tadpoles. I need to get out of here. I need to.

“Finally,” Moody said. “This guy is in no mood to fuck around with half-measures, Frank. So finally, like I said, he goes inside the mouth and razors the goddamn tongue out.” Moody looked sad a moment and Nightingale thought, Something is happening inside him, something touching him. But then he smiled suddenly, as if he were an assistant professor addressing a criminology class. “Tongue, nipples, the rape with the hairdryer, which distended her vaginal cavity—notice the blood on the inner thigh, Frank—and the strangulation. Not necessarily in that order. I’d say the tongue was an afterthought. Something this guy just tacked on at the end before he left. Why the tongue, Frank? Why that? Why didn’t he cut an ear off or split a nostril?”

Nightingale felt his stomach turn over like one of those old globes of the world that schoolkids spin with a jerk of a hand. Around and around and around. He faced the window again. Air, he thought. Chill moist rainy air. It doesn’t matter what, something other than the stuffiness of death.

“Maybe the tongue means something,” Moody said. “Maybe it suggests something.”

Like what? Nightingale shut his eyes. He could hear the broken crying of the guy in the kitchen and he wished somebody would close all the goddamn doors. I don’t need to hear that any more than Walt Spencer needs to feel it, he thought. The tongue. What the fuck would a severed tongue mean? What was Moody driving at? His years at university, Nightingale thought, have unhinged his fucking brain. He looks for signs and symbols and relationships as if they were footnotes in a scholastic essay, little numbers he might stick at the bottom of his goddamn pages. A woman is dead. Brutally killed. And you bullshit about the meaning of a goddamn tongue!

“What the hell, Doug. She had the thing cut out. Why don’t you just leave it there and quit playing around with fucking intellectual nonsense!”

“You sound sore, Frank. Have I upset you?”

Nightingale shrugged. “She upsets me. That poor goddamn woman lying there upsets me. I mean, Jesus Christ, what kind of monster, Doug? What kind of monster?” He realized his eyes were watering and he turned his face to the side. There was a pain in the center of his chest, a sudden intense pain. You can detach yourself, Boy Wonder, but I’ve forgotten how. I’m so weary. He rubbed his eyes against the sleeve of his coat and then looked back at Moody. “Don’t talk to me about tongues, Doug. Okay? Don’t talk to me about a severed tongue being goddamn symbolic of something, because that’s an asshole kind of comment! She’s dead. That’s all I need to know.” And he turned away again, opening the window wider, pushing his face out into the dark, feeling the rain fall against his eyelids. It grows too big for you, he thought. The city grows too big, too weird—it isn’t something you understand the way you used to when you first joined the force. It’s tilted, crazy, cruel: It isn’t the place you first knew, first cared about. It doesn’t have the heart anymore.

He glanced back at the dead woman.

A journalist. Jamey Caroline Hausermann. Well respected in her field, it seemed. What killed her? Who killed her? Who killed her like this? He saw, from the side of his eye, the tongue lying on the floor. Then he twisted his face away.

Nobody does this kind of killing, Frank.

Dejected, he stuck his face out of the window again and back into the soft rain.

“The motive,” Moody was saying. “Did she know something, Frank? Did she know something significant? Something she wasn’t supposed to know? Is that what the tongue means? Was it cut out because she told somebody something or because she refused to? Or was there some other reason?”

Questions. Take them to your oracle of madness, Nightingale thought.

Don’t ask me.

Come on, pull your shit together. You’re still being paid to do a job, Frank. You’re being paid to find killers. He moved his head away from the window, wiping a drop of rain from his eye. When he looked at Moody, the Boy Wonder was blurry, smeared, as if his colors had started to run.

“Why was she killed?” Nightingale asked. “Why would somebody come here and kill her?” His questions hung on the air like half-masted flags, feeble. “I need to know what she was working on. What she’d worked on in the past. The kinds of people she might have talked to recently. I need to know what made some motherfucker come in here and do this to her!”

Moody nodded. “I’ll get everything I can,” he said quietly.

Then Moody came across the room, placing one hand on Nightingale’s shoulder. “I see it in your eyes, Frank. I see it in the way you look. I probably shouldn’t say anything—you’re seeing Sarah on that bed, Frank. That’s what you’re looking at. Don’t answer me. It’s not important. It’s just an intuition.”

Nightingale looked at his young partner: Is that what I’m seeing? My wife lying like that, humiliated in murder? He shook his head and clapped Moody on the arm. “They tell me Fulton is a safe place, Doug. They tell me homicides are rare. I hear they had their last murder case back in forty-seven. People up there might hit each other with empty bottles on a Saturday night, but I don’t see the joint having a big homicide department. Seriously.”

“Okay.” Moody talked in a low voice, almost a whisper. “As long as you feel all right, Frank.”

“I feel as fine as I could be. Does that tell you anything?” Nightingale turned around and looked out into the darkness. He was going stale. He didn’t belong in the arena of death anymore. He belonged with Sarah in some idiot one-horse town, selling postcards and souvenirs to tourists who never came. That’s where he belonged. With the woman he loved. Buried and forgotten in an upstate cemetery. He was sick to his heart with death, the madness of the metropolis, the random rages that finished with some tagged corpse lying in a municipal refrigerator. He didn’t think he could take much more of that.

He looked back at the dead woman one last time. He shut his eyes but couldn’t get rid of the afterimage of the blood-streaked torso, the slashed breasts, the incongruous hairdryer shoved between the legs, the cord twisted around the neck, the terrible openness of the eyes which seemed to suggest perception and life and comprehension—a profound puzzle finally worked out and understood. A deep pool into which a pebble is dropped and is heard to hit bottom.

He moved towards the bed. He touched the eyelids gently, pushing them down, closing them. And he wished he could do the same with his own, blinding himself from what he saw.

“I’ll nail this fucker, Doug,” he said, suprised by the strange vehemence in his own voice. “I swear to God I’ll nail him!”

Moody smiled. It was the kind of smile that might have said: You’ve still got some fight left in you, huh? Nightingale clenched his fists and stuck them in the cavernous pockets of his coat and tried to tune out the sound of the bereaved guy moaning in the kitchen.

“Get a physician, Doug,” he said. “Somebody has to sleep tonight.”

And it won’t be you, Frank. It won’t be you.

SIX

1.

Harrison opened his eyes, stared at the ceiling. This feeling, this inner sense of darkness, of clouds rolling across some empty landscape … Something is wrong. Something is very wrong. He raised his face from the pillow and looked across the bed. Madeleine was gone. The bedroom was empty. He pressed the palms of his hands to the sides of his face and sat up, groaning. Something wrong, something more than just the calls, more than the voice, the threats. A dream? Had he dreamed something menacing, the traces of which lay inside his head now like the broken fragments of a hangover? He couldn’t remember a dream. He shivered, set his feet on the floor, walked to the doorway.

A faint noise from the kitchen, a rustling, then water running.

Madeleine?

He rubbed his eyes and moved towards the kitchen door. She was leaning against the sink, fully clothed, her face inclined beneath water running from a faucet, dripping through her hair, splashing against her shoulders. Is she sick? Does she feel ill? It was more than that—he had the feeling that it was more than that. Something else. He stared at her, conscious of the small portable radio playing on the kitchen table. A rock singer’s voice. Dear Christ, you didn’t need that kind of noise so early in the day. He went towards Madeleine and laid one hand softly against her shoulder.

She didn’t raise her face, didn’t look at him. She was making soft whispered noises, as if she were trying to speak words that wouldn’t quite come. He touched the side of her face, which was wet and cold.

“Maddy?” he said. “What’s the matter?” It was strange how alarmed he felt, how attuned to her obvious distress. Was this love too—this weird telepathic link, this curious empathy? “Maddy. Talk to me.”

She turned her face towards him slowly. She was white, white as old bone; water streaked across her forehead and her cheeks, gathered in tiny glistening drops on her upper lip. She opened her mouth to say something. But nothing came.

“Do you want a doctor, Maddy? Do you want me to take you to a doctor?” he asked.

She closed her eyes. She gripped his fingers hard. He moved her away from the sink, made her sit down at the table. He turned the radio off. She was trembling; tiny spasms ran through her, quick little shivers. The light hairs on the backs of her arms seemed to have been brushed backwards—fear, it’s fear, he thought. Your hair stands on end. Talk to me, Maddy. Tell me what has happened this morning to make you look this way.

She stared at him now. She was still silent and her eyes were red. He felt clumsy suddenly, as if he were intruding upon an emotion of hers which he didn’t have the delicacy to handle. He didn’t have the knack. He rubbed her shoulders, massaging them slowly in small circular motions.

“What is it?” he said, his tone one of patience. “You can tell me, Maddy. Is it because of the caller? Is that it?”

She shook her head from side to side. She looked at the silent radio and pointed a finger at it. “I heard it,” she said.

“What did you hear?”

“It was on the news. A few minutes ago.” She turned to look at him again.

He waited. It was going to be unpleasant, whatever it was. It was going to be something awful, something he knew he didn’t want to hear. And he thought: There’s been another death. Somebody else has died. But the thought was too quick for him, a mercurial thing that slipped out of his mind before he could examine it properly. You don’t want to hear about any more deaths, do you, Harry? You want it all to come to an end.

“The announcer said she’d been strangled,” Maddy said. And her voice was flat, without nuance, as if she were reciting a dry old fact, nothing that had any significance.

She’d been strangled. Who was she? His eye caught the little pile of magazines Madeleine had bought last night. They were stacked in a tidy way on the table. He read about himself on the front cover. She. She … he came to a dark dead end.

“Jamey,” Madeleine said. “He said it was Jamey Hausermann, Harry. I just kept thinking it couldn’t be the same one I knew. I wanted to keep thinking that, then he said she was a journalist and mentioned the magazine she worked for, and even then I didn’t want to make the connection. I wanted to pretend …” She was sobbing suddenly, her face flat against the table. He went down on his knees beside her chair and touched her hands, tried to comfort her. Jamey Hausermann, he thought. Somebody had killed her. Strangled her. He felt a cold flash of shock somewhere inside his chest. Ice around the heart. A touch of permafrost. Why her? Why would somebody kill her? You already see it, Harry. You already hear the words forming themselves inside your brain, only you wish you didn’t have to pay attention to them; you wish they’d just go away, but you already hear them rise up and take shape out of the shadows at the back of your head. You know what’s coming now; you know the very next thing. You already know the answer to your own question. He shut his eyes and pressed his face against Maddy’s arm. She was silent now and somehow that was worse than the crying, the sobbing; there had been something healthy about the tears—but this silence, this sudden drawing down of a blind, scared him. He had no way of knowing where she was retreating to.

“You see it, don’t you?” she asked. “I mean, you grasp the connection, don’t you? She was killed for only one reason. She was killed because of you, Harry. Because of you and your stupid project.”

He opened his eyes just as she was rising from her chair. He heard her move out of the kitchen, go inside the bedroom. After a moment he went to her. Because of me, he thought. How could I be responsible for anyone’s death? He was very cold, aware of the chill that permeated the loft. No, he thought. It couldn’t be like that. Apology had nothing to do with death. Face the facts, Harry. A dead dancer strangled. A woman who was somehow connected to a telephone company. And now this poor journalist. Now this. They had their links to Apology. Faint threads might have attached them to the project: It was more—they were as much a part of the project as the answering machine. You created this monster, Harry. You created it and now it’s rising up to turn against you. Would these people have been killed if it hadn’t been for Apology? If Apology had never existed? He stood in the bedroom doorway, watching Madeleine put on her coat.

“Where are you going?”

“Work,” she said. “I’ve got to do something. I’ve got to keep my mind off this.”

There’s no way you can do that, he thought.

“Stay here.”

“No,” she said flatly. “If I stay here I can only mope.”

He realized he didn’t want her to leave. He looked at the palms of his hands as if he might find bloodstains smeared against his skin. “Don’t go,” he said again. He didn’t want to be alone.

“I’m already late, Harry.”

He could see it. She wanted to be all business. She wanted to be aloof. Above everything. Plunge into the lukewarm water of the everyday world, bask in those shallows where the terrible fact of a friend’s death wouldn’t touch you. He watched her: He realized she had judged him already, found him guilty of conspiracy to kill, sentenced him—to what? he wondered. What is my sentence?

She was doing up the buttons of her dark coat. Her white hands were trembling. She looked weak, drawn.

“Stay here,” he said.

She shook her head. “I need to get out of here. I need to get away from this place.…” She glanced at the answering machine. There was a look of hatred on her face. He had never seen that expression before. When she walked past him she didn’t kiss him.

“Maddy, we need to talk about this—”

“There’s nothing to say, Harry.”

She was going to the front door. She slid the bolt back, pulled the door open. Then, saying nothing more, she was gone. He watched the door close behind her and heard the faint sound of her footsteps on the stairs.

He sighed, looked around the empty bedroom.

You don’t feel exactly right when she isn’t here.

Like you’re missing a limb. Something vital gone out of you.

They call it love, Harry. That’s their name for this feeling.

He sat on the edge of the bed with his eyes shut. There was the ghost of a pain inside him now. He opened his eyes, gazed across the bed. Echoes of Madeleine. Tiny traces. A dark comb on a bedside table. A twisted Kleenex. Her wristwatch, which she’d obviously forgotten. (How could she remember anything on such a day as this?) He had the feeling he was trying to assemble a picture of the woman from the artifacts she’d left behind—like some future archaeologist building pictures of long-dead persons from a few broken articles.

You even feel sentimental about noticing her belongings on the bedside table.

Sentimental? You, Harry?

He rose, wandered around the room, glanced at the answering machine. A red light was glowing. Incoming calls. Messages. He sat down again. Now, for the first time, he created a picture of Jamey Hausermann. He made himself look at it, a movie playing in the dark projection room of his head. He could see her as he’d last seen her, right here in this loft, lighting cigarettes, talking in that quick way she had as though words were things to be bitten off. He imagined he could see somebody strangling her, hands clenched tightly around a thin neck, knuckles rigid and white, he could see her eyes open and the gradual change of her expression from fear to resignation—

This one is real, Harry.

This isn’t an old dancer you never saw in your life.

This isn’t the woman he said he’d drowned in the bathroom.

This one was right here. She talked with you, wrote an article about your life—

The bitter connection.

The sad link that led to her death.

She wrote about you. She knew your real identity.

And she was vulnerable because of it.

She was open to death.

Oh, Christ …

And the consequence was—

The consequence was—

He got up, paced the room, walked to the window. Did you try to save your own life by telling your killer what you knew? Did you do that, Jamey? Did you give him a name and address and everything else you knew? These casual connections. A killer picks up a magazine someplace—he picks it up because he sees Apology mentioned on the cover—he opens the magazine, reads the article, sees the name of the journalist—

The rest is easy.

He stared out the window across rooftops. The sun was white, the morning cold. At least it wasn’t raining now. It was the only thing he could find to say about the day.

He turned, went back towards the answering machine, looked at the red light glowing there. He wanted to hear that voice again. He wanted to play the tape and learn if a new message had come in during the hours of darkness. A confession of murder. Jamey Hausermann’s murder. He pressed the REWIND button, listened to the tape whir back to the beginning. I need to hear him, he thought. I need to know beyond all doubt. Beyond all the possible permutations of coincidence, sheer chance.

PLAYBACK.

I GOT A WILL TO WRITE, BECAUSE I’M DYING, MR.APOLOGY. I’M SIXTY-EIGHT AND I SUFFER FROM MELANOMA.…

A breathless old man. Not the voice he needed to hear.

FAST FORWARD.

YOU GOT SUCH A NICE VOICE. I’D LIKE TO COME AND SEE YOU, GET TO KNOW YOU A WHOLE LOT BETTER. I’D LIKE TO GO DOWN ON YOU.

A schoolgirl’s voice. Some kind of prank.

FAST FORWARD.

Somebody sobbing as he talked.

I’M UNEMPLOYED, MR. APOLOGY. MARRIED AND UNEMPLOYED. MY WIFE AND ME—WE HAD TO LIVE WITH MY FATHER. THEN … I WENT OUT THE OTHER DAY TO CHECK ON A JOB AND I WAS GONE MAYBE THREE, FOUR HOURS AND WHEN I GOT BACK I COULDN’T FIND MY WIFE OR MY FATHER ANYWHERE, THEN I HEARD THESE NOISES COMING FROM THE BEDROOM UPSTAIRS. I KNOW I SHOULDN’T HAVE CLIMBED THE STAIRS, I KNOW THAT, BUT I DID ANYWAYS AND I FOUND THEM TOGETHER, BOTH OF THEM NAKED IN BED, FUCKING.… THEY WERE FUCKING, APOLOGY, MY WIFE AND MY OWN FATHER.…

A voice filled with devastation.

He wanted to go on listening to it, he wanted to understand something of this predicament, this domestic horror, but it still wasn’t the voice he wanted, the message he needed to hear.

FAST FORWARD.

I TOOK SOME PILLS. IT’S EIGHT O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING AND I’M IN THIS HOTEL ROOM BECAUSE I WANTED TO TAKE THESE PILLS AND JUST CHECK OUT—THE FINAL CHECKOUT, THAT’S WHAT I MEAN.… I’M JUST SO GODDAMN TIRED AND WEARY.… I HAD AN URGE TO CALL SOMEBODY, BECAUSE THIS IS A HISTORIC OCCASION IN MY LIFE.… JUST THINK, I’LL NEVER MAKE ANOTHER PHONE CALL, NOT EVER.… THERE ARE SO MANY THINGS I’LL NEVER DO AGAIN. THANKS FOR LISTENING, WHOEVER YOU ARE.…

A young female voice.

A suicidal girl in a hotel room somewhere. Eight o’clock in the morning and waiting to die. That was almost two hours ago. She might be dead by this time. So goddamn tired and weary.… A sadness touched him; he felt powerless. He couldn’t call anybody; she hadn’t mentioned the name of the hotel, anything personal like her own name.… Don’t think about this now, Harry. Keep searching through this tape. Keep looking for this one voice.

FAST FORWARD

NOBODY BELIEVES ME WHEN I TELL THEM I WENT FOR A TRIP ON A FLYING SAUCER. THEY WERE VENUSIAN GUYS AND THEIR BOOTS SQUELCHED WHEN THEY WALKED—

FAST FORWARD.

HI. MY NAME IS RICHARD STRYKER. I’M A FREELANCE JOURNALIST AND I READ ABOUT YOU AND I WONDER IF YOU’D LIKE TO GET TOGETHER WITH ME AND TALK ABOUT ME DOING A PIECE ON YOU—

Fame.

What was the price of fame?

FAST FORWARD.

Bits and pieces of garbled messages—the kid blaming himself for his parents’ divorce, a businessman embezzling funds, a guy who knows God’s telephone number—then the tape came to an end. Nothing, nothing from the voice he wanted to hear most of all. He took the cassette from the machine, numbered it, inserted a new one. Why hasn’t he called? Why hasn’t he called to confess? He’s playing a waiting game. He’s working on the ends of my nerves. He knows I’m waiting for him to call.

He took the numbered cassette to the shelf over the bed where he kept the collection of tapes. Tape #13. Thirteen hours of messages already. You could say Apology was a success, Harry. You could say that. He was suddenly angry now—angry at the idea of some crazy person out there killing people on account of his project, his baby, and threatening to bring it down in one great crashing wreck. Who the fuck did he think he was any how? Who the hell did he imagine he was, tearing at the very fabric of this whole project? Call me. Call me, whoever you are. I want to talk to you.…

He clenched his hands.

He looked along the row of numbered cassettes, each neatly marked on the side with a Magic Marker.

Thirteen tapes. Would there be any more? Was this going to be the end of everything? His anger turned to disappointment. He remembered years of things left undone, his unfinished degree at New Paltz, the works that had either died between the drawing board or halfway to completion; he remembered how past enthusiasms had withered and dissipated themselves, how he had always felt doubts about this project or that—and how Apology had excited him, enthused him, intrigued him. Now it was threatened. It was threatened every bit as much as its creator.

He surveyed the stack of cassettes. One two four six. Seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen.

Two were missing.

Tapes three and five.

He counted the cassettes. Eleven tapes in all.

Where were three and five?

Okay. Okay. Remember. Madeleine gave one to Berger. She had taken him tape number three. He remembered this.

But what had happened to five?

He looked along the shelf, pushing books aside, shoving papers out of the way. He checked behind the pillow, behind the bed, under the mattress.

Nothing.

No sign of the missing cassette.

Madeleine, he thought.

She took that tape!

Nobody else could have done it.

She’d taken that tape and—

She’s going to destroy it. That was his first thought.

He knew better than that, though.

He knew what she was going to do with it.

She’d pilfered the tape, walked out of here with it in her purse.

Maddy—

The cops, he thought.

What else? He slammed his fists together and stared out of the window across the rooftops. The cops. It was what he’d been anxious to avoid from the very beginning; it was a promise he’d given to everyone who had used the Apology line. It had been a form of contract, an undertaking, something he had felt solemn about. He’d always thought that people wouldn’t use the number if they even remotely imagined there might be some vague official purpose behind it, if they even faintly dreamed it might be another trick of a government agency, another devious way of gathering information that might later be used against them in some roundabout fashion. How many people didn’t complete official census forms on the grounds that they were suspicious of such data collection? It was the same thing with Apology—it could never have been associated in any way with any kind of bureaucracy. And now—

Now.

He sat down on the bed.

He shut his eyes and imagined he could hear the wreckage of the whole thing all around him; imagined he could hear the splitting of magnetic tapes, the popping of tiny transistors inside the answering device; imagined he could see faceless people go back and forth across the city, tearing down the handbills wherever they encountered them. A whole insane circus of ruin.

He opened his eyes, turned, looked at the answering machine.

Damn it, he wasn’t going to dismantle it now. He wasn’t going to take the plug from the wall.

He was going to wait until he heard the message he needed to hear.

The one he was determined to hear.

He was going to wait for that.

2.

Clear skies, sidewalks damp from the night’s rain; a watery sun struck the windows of high-rises, burst against the towers of midtown. A fine day of late fall, crisp and clear, and yet somehow it was all wrong; there should be rain and clouds and the threat of a storm. Madeleine stepped inside the gallery, looked across the room at the open office doorway, saw Berger sitting motionless behind his desk as if he were a figure carved in wax. The large room, the depressing rainbows, the muted overhead lighting—these elements seemed to converge, to spin and turn in a dizzying way. She paused, trying to keep her balance. Hyperventilation, nerves, shock. Hold on, she told herself. Just hold on and see if you can go through the motions of the day even if you know you’re never going to make it. Even if the same dreadful fact keeps assailing you, forcing itself into your brain. She opened her eyes, continued towards the office.

Jamey. Jamey.

She had to keep it from forming in her mind and welling up there like one huge tear.

She saw, as if in a dream, Berger rise from behind his desk and smile at her and then his expression changed to one of concern, worry.

“My dear, what is it?”

It shows on my face, the way I move. It shows. She went inside his office and slumped in the chair that faced his desk. She felt the need to cry again. She was conscious of him coming around the front of his desk, holding her hands, patting the backs of them lightly.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

His voice echoed, rolled away from her, words turning to meaningless noises she couldn’t interpret. She was aware only of the solicitous way he behaved, his avuncular manner.

“You’re white as the proverbial ghost, dear. Didn’t you sleep? Didn’t you manage to get any sleep?” Then he was talking about how surprising it was anybody ever slept anymore, given the amount of sensory bombardment we all had to endure these days. He’s trying to be kind, she thought. But she felt as if she might have fallen through some flimsy surface and hit a murky, sticky substance someplace below, something viscous. The room swayed. The light from the window shimmered like a pool touched by wind. Don’t keep thinking about Jamey. But how could she not? They had known each other for such a long time; they had been close friends, almost like sisters at times—how could she keep Jamey out of her mind? She stared at her purse: Why was the day so filled with hollows? Why was the quality of light so changeable? Think about the cassette you took from Harry. No, not took. Stole. You stole it from Harry because—

“Maybe you should go home, put your feet up, watch soap operas,” Berger was saying, still patting her hand.

She stared into his face.

Some nasty little virus, perhaps … His voice sounded so soothing. She hoped he wouldn’t stop talking.

A virus of fear, she thought.

A cold aura around the heart.

The death of my friend. Because of something I was involved in. Because of me and Harry, Jamey Hausermann had to die.

Stark details. Name, age, profession. Means of murder: Strangulation. And then nothing more than these bare facts. The essence of Jamey Hausermann distilled into a few sentences from the mouth of a radio announcer.

He’s out there now. He’s out there, getting nearer.

Searching dark corners. Scurrying along dark streets. Foraging for the name and address of Mr. Apology.

Jamey knew it. It was the last thing Jamey knew.

The sickness fevered inside her brain. Hot waves, scalding pulses, tiny fissures crisscrossing her mind and throwing up columns of burning steam. I am sick. I am very sick, she thought. She made to stand up. Berger caught her as she swayed to one side.

Distantly, it seemed, the telephone was ringing.

Berger answered it, then held the receiver towards her.

“It’s for you, Madeleine. Do you want to take it?”

Harry, she thought. It could only be Harry.

She hesitated.

She took the receiver and whispered, “Hello.”

Silence. Nobody.

She heard the click of a dead line.

She dropped the receiver and said, “There wasn’t anybody.”

“He asked for you, my dear.”

“He just hung up,” she said. “What did he sound like?”

“There wasn’t any particular accent.…” Berger shrugged, still watching her with deep concern. “You should go home. Please.”

It couldn’t have been Harry. Harry wouldn’t have hung up.

Then who?

He just hung up.

He he he

She had never felt quite so cold; it seemed she would never be warm again. The cold was inside her bloodstream.

“I’ll get you a cab,” Berger was saying. Then he had gone out of the office and she could hear him crossing the gallery and the sound of the bell ringing above the front door. Faintness, a sense of all her blood having congealed in her legs, a sense of not belonging to this reality, to these perceptions she received—

He he he

Berger was coming back. “The cab’s outside, Madeleine. Go home. Call me later if you feel better.”

She let herself be led through the gallery even as she was thinking, It’s safer here with you, Mr. Berger. This is a safe place for me. Then she was out in the street, stepping inside a yellow vehicle.

“Do take it easy,” Berger said.

She watched as Berger slammed the door shut. She closed her eyes, opening them only when she heard the driver ask for a destination. She didn’t answer him at once—she just looked at how the purse lay in her lap. It had the appearance of an unwanted object lying in a thrift store bin.

3.

“There are eight million stories in the Naked City,” Scorpion Scypion said. “And Billy Chapman’s is only one of them.”

Gooch nodded. In the palm of one hand he crumpled an empty Tab can, enjoying the sensation of aluminum crumpling. Eight million stories. He stared at the Scorpion, who was wearing reflective sunglasses in which Gooch saw a small distorted version of himself in duplicate. They were sitting together at a booth in a diner on Broadway and 11th Street. Scorpion was running pieces of pancake through the ooze of egg yolks. Sometimes when he was chewing he’d talk in such a way that Gooch couldn’t understand what he was saying.

“So what about Chapman?” Gooch asked.

The Scorpion rubbed his bare arm, leaving a trace of yellow egg matter matted in the hairs. “Billy Chapman,” he said. And he winked at Gooch. He had a little smile on his face that bordered on a smirk, a knowing smirk.

“Yeah. What about him, Scorpion?”

The Scorpion hummed a few phrases of a song that Gooch recognized. “Come on, babe, trust in me, I am the Pied Piper.…” He looked away from the reflection of himself in the sunglass lenses and out into the street. Unseasonable weather, for sure. He turned his face and saw a waitress bend over one of the tables to clear dishes away. She was a slim young kid of about seventeen and she had long dark hair and a noticeable moustache. Her name, Gooch remembered, was Ameliorata Gonzalez. He liked the first name a lot because it had the sound of water running over smooth rocks. One time when he’d asked her for a date she’d informed him that her brothers, Roderigo and Hector, would have to come along as chaperones. He hadn’t asked again. He looked back at the Scorpion.

“What’s the word, Scorpion?”

Scypion grinned. “You came up with a real difficult one, Gooch. Real hard.” He shook his head, still grinning.

“Well? Do you know anything?”

“I might. Might not. Hard to say.”

Holy shit. Gooch tapped his fingertips on the table and looked at the crushed Tab can. In the gym this morning he’d lifted three hundred and ninety-four pounds in the clean-and-jerk and now the muscles in the small of his back were aching. “Hey, Scorpion, I ain’t got all day to sit here and wait for you to tell me if you know anything about this Chapman guy or if you don’t. I mean, it was you that said you knew most everybody. It wasn’t me.”

The Scorpion lowered his head and talked out of the side of his mouth. “The word on this dude is baaaad, man. He is one hot motherfucker. Trust me. You don’t want to tangle with this asshole.”

“I only want to know where the guy hangs out,” Gooch said.

Scypion took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Like I said, you don’t want to know.”

“You mean you don’t know.”

“Gooch, my man, would I bullshit you?”

“Yeah.”

Scypion put his glasses on again and grinned. He tapped his tip of his nose with his index finger. “I been hanging around these streets since the biggie at Woodstock, Gooch. Did I ever tell you I did all the sound up there? Worked the speakers. I talked with Joni Mitchell personally. I was as close to her as I am to you right now. Neat chick, Joni. I got her autograph someplace. Know what it says? ‘To My Tattooed Man, Love from Joni.’ Honest.”

“You’re full of shit.”

The Scorpion smiled. Gooch stood up as if to leave, but Scypion tugged at the sleeve of his sweats. “Hey, where are you going?”

“I got to take a hot shower, Hubert.”

“You said you wanted to know about this Chapman character.”

“You don’t exactly seem eager to tell me.”

Scypion said, “Does the Scorpion ever let you down? Does he, Gooch?”

He opened his eyes, turned, looked at the answering machine.

Does he, Gooch?”

“I don’t want to hear about Joni Mitchell and I don’t want to hear about Woodstock or about the time you led the acid revolution in San Francisco, Scorpion—”

“Hey, hey, take it easy.”

Gooch sat down again. Christ, those back muscles.

“Okay. Here’s the pitch. The word on Chapman is hot. I don’t know what he’s supposed to have done, and frankly I ain’t interested, but what I hear doesn’t sit good on me, okay?”

“Okay,” Gooch said.

“He’s a coke freak, this Chapman.”

Gooch nodded his big head.

“A real bad coke freak. He uses the needle. This is what I hear.”

“It don’t tell me where the guy is, Scorpion.”

“What I wonder, Gooch, is why you wanna know.”

“Business,” Gooch said mysteriously.

“What kinda business would you have with a guy like this, man?”

Gooch thought a moment, then said, “It’s personal.”

The Scorpion looked at the crisscrossing tracks of egg yolks on his plate. “I got to confess I don’t know where the dude lives, Gooch. I got to tell you that right off the bat, man.”

Gooch said nothing. He was watching Ameliorata again. Pity about the moustache, he thought. You just knew it was going to thicken with time and then turn grey later on.

“I know who he scores from, though,” Scypion said. “I got that much.”

“Who does he score from then?”

“Well, this is all kinda indirect, you unnerstand? I talked with this guy, who has to remain nameless, see, and this guy says he used to do some minor biz with Billy Chapman, only Chapman started to go off the fucking wall, coked and spacy—you know the score, right? He don’t do business with Billy nowadays. But he tells me”—and here the Scorpion, in a flamboyant gesture of furtiveness, lowered his head across the table—“he tells me that sometimes Billy buys from a source called Sylvester.”

“Sylvester who?”

The Scorpion shrugged. “That’s all she wrote, Gooch.”

“You don’t know this Sylvester?”

Scypion shook his head and looked momentarily miserable. “You reach a point where you’ve used up your quota of questions for a while, unnerstand? You ask too many questions, Gooch, and pretty soon people start asking questions about you. I don’t like the idea much. So I ain’t gonna ask no more questions for a while.”

“Sylvester,” Gooch said.

“That’s the name of that tune, man.”

“And you don’t know where this Sylvester hangs out?”

“Like I said, man, I told you all I know.”

Gooch got up from his seat. The Scorpion asked, “Does it help?”

“Sure it helps.”

“I like to be useful, Gooch.”

4.

There was a smell in the corridor, an overpowering confusion of scents, a congestion of stale city perfumes—disinfectant, human sweat, old tobacco smoke, the acrid quality of spilled milk turned sour. Madeleine felt faint, stood for a moment leaning against the wall. The overhead fluorescent lights buzzed. People went back and forth between desks or sat idly on benches and every so often a uniformed cop would call something out or some guy would be dragged in from the outside world, handcuffed, then disappear into a back room. It was all so confusing—this stream of movement, the ringing of telephones, the sound of voices. What was she doing here? It was a strange realization, but she’d never been inside a police station in her life. She couldn’t imagine the procedure, what it was you were supposed to do. For a moment her mind emptied. How could you possibly begin to make any sense of all this movement, all these smells and sounds?

Then she thought about the cassette in her purse. Jamey. She was here because Jamey had been killed; she was here because of a voice on a tape. A tape she stole. When you took that cassette you might have been subtracting something from the relationship with Harry. Plundering the notion of trust. And something happens to love, an erosive thing, structures alter and substances change. I can’t see him get hurt. I can’t let that happen.

She moved slowly forward, approached a desk where a uniformed man was writing something inside a big logbook. Where to begin, she thought, how to start, how to make it all sound like it wasn’t the product of a diseased imagination. She reached out and laid her hands lightly against the desk. The cop smiled at her in a weary way.

She cleared her throat. This is all a bad dream, one of those violent nightmares that don’t add up, don’t make sense except in terms of a terrible inner logic. Out of the corner of her eye she was aware of a drunk lunging against a bench, then a policeman came and grabbed him by the arm. She said, “I need to talk with somebody.” She hesitated. How did she sound? Was her voice too thin and high? “A man’s been threatening us. My boyfriend, myself. I know it’s the same man who killed Henry Falcon. I believe he also murdered Jamey Hausermann.” She fished the cassette from her purse and laid it on the desk and the cop looked at it as if he suspected a bomb. “I’ve got the man’s voice on this tape. Have you got a cassette player? You could listen to it. It would make more sense if you could listen to it for yourself.” The cop hadn’t said a word. He’d just stood there and let her ramble on. His eyes were flat and unresponsive.

He doesn’t believe me.

I’m just another airhead from the streets.

“Do you have a cassette player?” she asked again.

“You’re going way too fast for me, lady. Suppose you do an about-face and go back to the beginning.” He smiled at her. Now she noticed a nameplate on the desk with STANISLAVSKI written on it. You’re humoring me, Stanislavski. “You’d better let me have some background details. Name, address. Okay?” And he picked up a pen and found a printed form from somewhere.

“Is it really necessary?”

“It’s just procedure.”

Time, she thought. Time passes. All the clocks are ticking down dangerously. Procedure, he was interested in following procedure.

“Madeleine Demarest,” she said.

He wrote very slowly, like a backward pupil in grade school.

“Can’t we hurry this?” she asked.

“You can’t hurry procedures,” Stanislavski said and smiled, as if he had uttered some holy truth. She gazed at his pen. So slow. The way it covered spaces on the form. Please, she thought. Please, faster, faster.

“Address?”

She gave him Harry’s—what was the point in mentioning her own tiny apartment when she rarely ever slept there anymore?

“Okay,” the cop said when he’d finished writing. “What’s the story with this tape?”

Did she have to say it again? “I want you to play it. There’s a certain voice that’s connected with two murders, maybe three.…” Maybe more than that. The cop looked incredulous. “Listen, people have been killed. The killer is going to kill again. Can’t you do something to push this thing along?”

He didn’t answer her question. “How did you get your hands on this tape?”

“It’s a long story.” God, God. How much longer is all this going to take?

“Suppose you tell it to me anyhow?” He sat down with a look on his face that reminded her of childish anticipation. Goody-goody, somebody’s going to tell us a fairy tale.

She hesitated. It wasn’t going to come out right, no matter how she phrased it or shaped her narrative. It was going to sound lunatic. “Do we really need to get into this? Isn’t it enough that I’ve got the tape?”

“I’d like to hear the whole story.” He folded his thick arms across his chest, settling back in his chair.

She took a deep breath and told him. She told him about Harry and his project, told him about the handbills, the recording machine, the kinds of messages he received—and as she spoke she seemed to be hearing herself as if it were quite another person talking. It didn’t sound sane. It was an unbalanced story, a fact she could see reflected in the cop’s expression. When she finished, her throat was dry. She stared at the cop’s face. He stood up, poked at the cassette, then gazed at her a long time.

“Lemme get this straight. Your friend takes calls from strangers, right? He wants to get them to apologize to him, right? I don’t think I get it exactly, Miss Demarest. I don’t think I understand that.” He was shaking his big face from side to side.

“I don’t think it matters if you understand it or not,” she said. “The only damn thing that matters is that you get your ass out of that chair and do something.”

He grinned at her. He enjoys playing with me, she thought. He’s enjoying some kind of smirking game here. Asshole. She looked past him at the other side of the large office. There were two hookers in gaudy clothes talking with a uniformed cop, a black guy sitting strung-out and red-eyed on a bench and mumbling to himself, a broken-down old bag lady sneaking cigarette butts from ashtrays. A sense of incongruity came over her: What the hell am I doing here? You’re bringing a tape to the cops, Madeleine. You’re trying to get them to stop the killings. You’re trying to protect yourself and Harry. Keep that in mind. Don’t lose sight of that.

“Look,” she said. “What do I have to do to get through to you? I don’t think it matters if you consider the Apology idea crazy. The only thing that matters is that you do something! The only thing that matters is you somehow stop this man from killing anybody else—”

Stanislavski stood up now. “You mentioned the Henry Falcon thing.”

“Right.”

He jabbed the cassette, as if he were still convinced it was going to explode in his face. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. Lieutenant Nightingale’s in charge of the case. I’ll turn the tape straight over to him, then I guess he’ll be in touch with you when he’s had a chance to listen to it.”

“I’m not making you understand, am I? There isn’t time for me to hang around waiting for your Lieutenant Nightingale to listen to the tape and then make up his mind about calling me. There just isn’t time for that. Why can’t I get to see him right now?” She was aware of the palm of her hand striking the surface of the desk. Slapslap—a quick impatient gesture.

“He’s not here right now. He went out a while ago.”

“Terrific,” she said. “Is there some way you can get in touch with him?”

Stanislavski shook his head.

He’s lying, she thought. Didn’t they have radios in cop cars? So why is he lying? Because he thinks I’m crazy, my whole story is off the wall. I’m just some demented housewife making up an adventure yarn to pass a boring afternoon. Because he doesn’t take me seriously. “You’ve got to be able to contact him,” she said. “I mean, there’s got to be some way of getting through.”

Stanislavki said, “Look, the best thing is to wait until he gets back. Then I’ll give him this cassette personally.”

“Can’t you radio him or something?”

Stanislavski sighed. He was weighing the cassette in one hand, apparently convinced it contained nothing explosive. She watched his face. She could see in his wearily resigned expression all the madness of his occupation—she could see the crazies and the deluded, the drugged and the freaks, the mad bombers and urban terrorists that must pass in front of his desk on a daily basis. He had to listen to everybody’s story, had to write reports on what was said to him; maybe after a time you gave up, paying only cursory attention to the faces and tales that you saw and heard from behind your desk. And mine, she thought, is just another such item of nonsense.

“Wait here,” he said.

He turned, threading his way between desks, then went through a door at the back of the room. She wondered what he was doing, whether he was actually doing anything, or if he were just lurking out of sight someplace and pretending to make contact with Nightingale, another means of humoring her. She looked around the room. She felt faint again. She had a sense of things around her melting, images running one into another like dripping wax. She covered her eyes with the palm of her hand. Then she heard Stanislavski come back.

“I tried,” he said. “I tried to get him in his car. I guess he wasn’t there.”

“Are you sure you tried?”

“I’m sure.”

She shrugged. “When will he be back?”

“It’s hard to say.” The cop picked up his printed form and looked at it for a moment. “Why don’t you go home? When he gets in I’ll make sure he listens to this tape and then calls you. Okay?”

She sighed now. Weariness—she had to fight against fatigue. She picked up her purse. “Are you sure you really tried to get Nightingale?”

“Lady,” he said. “I told you.”

“Okay, okay.”

She turned away from the desk, moved across the room, down the corridor, and then out into the street. She wondered how long it would take for Nightingale to reach her. Or if he’d ever get in touch at all.

5.

Nightingale stared at the bowling alleys: Big black balls thundered towards the pins, most of them thrown by massive women who had their hair in curlers and scarves over their heads. Maybe it was some kind of afternoon league, Housewives of the Bronx or something like that. Maybe they even had a name—the Deegan Expressway Die-Hards or something along those lines. He lit a cigarette and watched a bowling ball scurry into a gutter and go sliding beyond the pins with the force of a small bomb.

“I never bowled as a kid,” Moody said. “The noise of these joints scared me. Also the fact my father told me they employed evil dwarves to put the pins back in place. You shouldn’t tell kids things like that, Frank.” Moody swung around on his stool at the snackbar counter and sipped from a waxy cardboard cup of Pepsi.

Nightingale listened to the roar of balls as if they were ricocheting back and forth inside his tired mind; it must be bloody and raw in there, he thought. You haven’t slept in hours. You’ve been going on tobacco and black coffee—plugging yourself into those stimulant poisons. You couldn’t sleep anyhow. You shut your eyes and the insides of your brain buzz like a million flies trapped in a jar and all you keep seeing are pictures of the dead. Those brutalized faces. Blood, carnage. The way lives unfinished, cut down abruptly, are ruined like so many condemned buildings. He stared up at the fluorescent lights of the bowling alley; they glimmered in such a way that they made him dizzy. Spaced-out, he thought—tired, disgusted, burned. You reach that point where you know you’ve had enough, more than you need to take—maybe more than any man has to experience. Make this the last one, Frank, he told himself. After this you grab your pension and go off in search of the woman you love—if it’s not too damn late to get it rekindled.

“Why does he want to meet us way out here, Frank?” Moody asked. “The Bronx makes me nervous. I don’t feel good unless I’m sucking on the lead-filled air of good old Manhattan.”

Nightingale said, “Gooch doesn’t like to take chances. He doesn’t want to run the risk of anybody seeing him talk to us.”

“It’s overkill in the precaution department,” Moody said.

“Also he has a sick father out here he likes to visit; Maybe he wants to kill two birds with one stone.”

“Gooch has a father? I’d imagined immaculate conception by way of a faulty assembly line.” Moody crumpled his cardboard cup and stuffed it into an ashtray. He looked across the lanes for a minute, then said, “I know you don’t think I’m right, Frank, but what if Billy Chapman’s responsible for this last one as well, huh?”

“As well as what? The first two? Camilla and Henry?”

Moody nodded. “Yeah. Say he’s developing a pattern of some kind, Frank, some overall plan, a grand design of violence, something so deranged in its intricacy we can’t even begin to see it.”

Nightingale said nothing. What came back to him was the outrage he’d felt in Hausermann’s apartment, the black disgust, the sheer sharp edge of horror. A temporary madness had overwhelmed him. You just upped and lost it there, Frank. You let go for a while. But what you haven’t let go is your determination to nail this sonofabitch. He looked at his partner and said, “I don’t know anything about designs, Doug. I don’t know shit about detective-fiction patterns. I’d like it to be Chapman. I’d love it if it was just this one guy, if one guy had done all three murders. I’d love it on account of the fact that it’s neat and tidy. But you’re going to have to convince me some more. You’re going to have to tell me it’s not related to some old grudge.”

“Grudge?”

“Why sound surprised? Isn’t that a torch you’re carrying for Billy Chapman?”

Moody shook his head. “That what you really think, Frank?”

“I think it’s a strong possibility.” Soft-pedal it—don’t turn on the kid too sharply.

“Okay,” Moody said. “First, we got three strangulations.”

“Yeah, but they were different kinds, Doug.”

“A strangling is a strangling,” Moody said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s done with the bare hands or an electric cord. You don’t expect a crazy fucking killer to follow the same MO every time, do you? What do you think? He’s gonna leave an obvious trademark lying around?”

Nightingale listened to the rumble of bowling balls. “I’m still waiting, Doug. I’m sitting here waiting to be convinced of your case.”

“Okay, in each case you got the sexual thing. Camilla is screwed when she’s dead. Old Henry has his mouth filled with sperm, which they tell us might have been deposited after his death. And Jamey Hausermann gets the works with a hairdryer.”

“They’re all brutal, Doug. But even the Hausermann thing made the others look pale in terms of brutality, right?”

Moody blinked. “He’s building. He’s getting more elaborate. He’s becoming more and more intricate the longer he remains free. Maybe he’s started to think he can get away with anything. Maybe he thinks he’s way above the law.”

“Mmmmm,” Nightingale said. He tapped his fingertips on the counter. What if the Boy Wonder was absolutely correct? What if his scheme was the right one? What if Moody had hit the nail smack on its little head? He found himself thinking: Make me a case, Doug. Make it stick with me. I want to go along with you on this one because I don’t have the guts or the heart to think we might be dealing with three goddamn killers. Make it easy on me, Doug. Do your level best. He studied the curlered, scarved women for a while, as if he might find soothing normality there, a retreat into the mundane. He turned back to Moody. “Look, we got prints at the scene of Camilla’s killing. Why didn’t we get prints in old Henry’s place? Why didn’t we find jack shit at Hausermann’s apartment? Has Billy Chapman taken to wearing gloves or something? All of a sudden taken a shine to handwear?”

Moody shrugged. “Why not? He’s got to protect his ass.”

Nightingale was quiet for a while. Then he said, “I don’t know, Doug. I honest to God don’t know.” And he realized that what was absent was the old feeling in the marrow of the bones, the sense of something like warm steel working in the skeletal tunnels of himself. “Change of subject slightly. Did you talk with Hausermann’s editor?”

“They promised they’d come up with a complete list of her assignments lately.”

“Good. Maybe we’ll find something there. Maybe somebody took severe umbrage at the way she wrote about him, something like that. Who knows? It’s an outside chance anyhow.”

“She must’ve talked with hundreds of people, Frank.”

“Sure.” Hundreds and hundreds of interviewees. The whole methodical ploughing through of the victim’s associations. He thought about Walt for a moment. He’d been sedated—he wasn’t going to be able to tell them anything for a while yet. The problem about being sedated was that the chemical wore off and you had to wake up sooner or later and face the fact that your world had changed inexorably, that nothing was ever going to be the same again no matter how long you lived. He turned towards the entrance.

He saw Gooch come through the glass doors, a canvas bag in one hand, enormous sneakers on his feet. He approached slowly, looking from side to side as he moved. A game, Nightingale thought, the game of snitching. Maybe Gooch liked to imagine he was involved in very important undercover work. He approached the counter and lofted himself up on a stool, trying—with dismal lack of success—to look inconspicuous. For a moment Nightingale was reminded of the Jolly Green Giant. It was as if the big man might have a stash of corn kernels stuffed away in his sweats.

“Nice afternoon,” Nightingale said.

Gooch nodded and looked serious, working his eyebrows. “Beats the rain, lieutenant.”

“Sure does.” Nightingale splayed his hands on the formica counter and stared at the bronze stain of nicotine on his index finger. “So, Gooch. What’s the word? You sounded kinda pleased on the telephone.”

Gooch looked in the direction of Moody; his expression was one of suspicion. Moody smiled over the rim of his Pepsi.

“Did you have to bring that dude?” Gooch asked.

“He’s attached to me, Gooch. It’s called a team. Where I go, he goes. It’s so he can drag me out of gunfire if we should run into some criminals.”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t let him worry you. And don’t piss him off. He’s a mean sonofabitch if you rile him. Black belt. Twenty-seventh Dan or whatever those guys get.”

“A black belt?” Gooch gazed back at Moody.

“He picked up some wicked tricks in Vietnam. He can kill a guy with one hand. It’s not pleasant. I’d advise you to stay clear of him, Gooch.” Nightingale paused. “So, what do you know?”

“I got something for you.”

“Yeah?” Nightingale slipped a ten from his coat and balled it up in his closed fist.

“I been asking a lot of questions concerning the party you mentioned.” Gooch shrugged. He scratched his sneaker; when he rose from his bending position, his big face was blood red.

“You’ve been asking questions,” Nightingale said, tapping his fingers.

“Yeah. You ever hear of a guy called Sylvester?”

“No, I can’t say I ever did.”

“What I hear is this Billy Chapman connects with Sylvester.”

“Sylvester who?” Nightingale asked.

“I don’t know.”

Terrific, Nightingale thought. One name in a city of millions. One name that might be a first name, might be a last. He was suddenly reminded of a sadistic TV game show called The New Treasure Hunt in which participants could choose a box and win either a huge fortune or a plastic dog turd. You could open all the boxes that were labeled Sylvester—and how long would that take? He pushed his face closer to the big man.

“That’s all you know, Gooch?”

“I know this much: Your Billy Chapman gets his shit from this Sylvester.”

“I heard you already. You don’t know where this character hangs out?”

Gooch shook his head. “People don’t wanna talk, lieutenant, and that’s about the size of it.” As if he imagined he were being followed, observed, Gooch swung around in his stool. Nightingale opened the palm of his hand and the bill sprung out. Gooch picked it up by tucking it inside the elastic cuff of his sleeve. The whole CIA thing, Nightingale thought. The entire secret agent trip. Maybe he has a kit at home he plays with, one of those boxes you can buy in a kiddie store complete with invisible ink, mock handcuffs, a book of codes, a magnifying glass—all the paraphernalia of the espionage game reduced to child size. Moody moved down the counter, slurping through his straw.

“You give us Billy’s address, Gooch. Huh? You come up with his address, date of birth, next of kin, regularity of bowel movement, intake of roughage, whether he suffered from vagina envy at some tender age?” Moody said.

“What’s with this guy?” Gooch asked Nightingale.

“He went to college, Gooch.”

“College?”

Moody said, “Yeah. This collection of buildings wherein hamsters are deceived into wandering through tubes and men cut their wrists if they don’t get tenure.”

“Moody,” Nightingale said.

“Well,” Gooch said. “I told you what I got.” He stepped down from his stool.

“Thanks,” Nightingale said.

“Any time,” the big man said.

Nightingale watched him wander towards the exit, where he paused and looked up at the giant plastic bowler as if he were greeting a long-lost brother.

“What’s your problem, Doug?”

“He’s a temptation. You find a guy like that who walks around with space between his temples. I don’t know. Maybe I get off on throwing out little darts and watching him as he tries to catch them sizzling past his head.”

“Okay, you had a superior education to Gooch.”

“And I was fortunate enough to be born with a working brain instead of a sawdust wad beneath the skullbone.”

Nightingale closed his eyes. The smell of burger was stronger than ever. He wondered a moment about all the grease in the world, imagined great Amazons of it, huge tidal waves of polyunsaturated safflower, massive sea creatures carved out of lard. His stomach shifted a little, one degree south. “I don’t need that kind of fucking around, Doug.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“I’m thinking about this Sylvester.”

“A needle in the Manhattanstack.”

“I’m going to call Narcotics. Eddie Fodor. If anybody knows this Sylvester, it’ll be Eddie Fodor. I used to work with him, maybe ten years ago. He’s a character.”

Moody was staring over the lanes now. He appeared deep in thought. After a short silence he said, “Know what would be useful, Frank?”

“Tell me.” Sperm prints. Microchips inserted into the behavioral center of the brain. What new wonder had Moody imagined now?

“An informant bank would be pretty damn useful. You know, guys like Gooch could write their information down on specially coded slips of paper and stick them in night-deposit slots where they’d be decoded and entered in one central computer. That’s the trick, Frank. Centralization. As it stands, this informant business is just a cottage industry.”

Nightingale stepped away from the counter. An informant bank, a big central computer—if Moody had his way, he thought, the element of chance would be removed from all aspects of crime detection and everything stuffed into computer circuitry. Then you wouldn’t need cops—you’d only need technicians, engineers. I’ll be dead and buried before that day, thank Christ.

He moved slowly towards the exit. There was a phone booth just outside. He searched in his coat pockets for a couple of dimes. Eddie Fodor, he thought. Eddie Fodor was a walking encyclopedia of narcotics—he knew the guys who sold it, the middlemen who cut it, the users who bought it on the streets. He knew the names of the South American ships that hauled the cargoes from Peru and Colombia. He hadn’t seen Eddie in a while but he remembered Eddie’s party trick—he’d slip out his upper and lower plates of false teeth and crumple his face up like a catcher’s mitt until his nose disappeared and his jaws sunk to nothing. Eddie didn’t get asked to a lot of parties.

Through his closed lips he found himself humming an old tune, and realized it was the first vaguely happy thing he’d done in a while. An old enthusiasm stirred: warm and getting warmer.

Moody watched him. “What’s the name of that tune, Frank?”

“It’s before your time, friend. An old Johnny Mathis hit called ‘Chances Are.’ The good old days when Ronnie Reagan was still going to bed at night dreaming he was a romantic actor and a guy called Chubby Checker was about to emerge with the Twist and the streets hadn’t really begun to run with blood.”

Moody shrugged.

Nightingale heard a voice on the other end of the line. He said, “Eddie, this is Frank Nightingale. What’s new in the muddy world of narcotics?”

6.

Madeleine went inside a bar on the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue and wondered how far she’d walked since she’d left the police station. Hours ago and many miles of Manhattan sidewalk, it seemed—but she knew very little time had passed, very little distance covered. She was thirsty and weary. She sat down at a table. The bar was dimly lit, stained-glass lanterns hanging low over tables. Ferns, plants in great brassy pots, the kind of place that suggested some Californian idyll.

I don’t feel in the mood for an idyll.

I feel vacant, an absence from myself.

She looked across the room. Why did everyone appear shadowy? The afternoon drinkers might have been shimmering slowly away into some alcoholic dimension, undergoing some spooky chemical transformation. She shut her eyes and listened to a faint pulselike noise beat inside her skull.

A guy calls me at the gallery

then hangs up

asks for me by name, hangs up

why

It rises into one prolonged scream inside the mind, if you let it; it turns into one echoing shriek. She opened her eyes, looked at the waitress standing near her table. She ordered scotch and soda and drank half of it as soon as it came.

She gazed back across the bar.

You couldn’t see faces in here, couldn’t make out expressions. Great shadows fell across features, creating darkness, sculpting charcoal-colored patches out of pale skin.

What if he’s here? What if he’s one of the drinkers at the bar?

What if he’s been following you all afternoon?

How would he know?

Because Jamey, poor goddamn Jamey, told him.…

She tried not to think in this direction.

She stared inside her drink: It had already begun to go to her head. She sipped it, then she thought, You must call Harry. You must call him and tell him what you’ve done with his precious cassette, tell him about the cops. He deserves to know. She didn’t move. She shut her eyes again. Even here, in this place surrounded by people, you don’t feel safe. Vulnerable—that’s what you feel now.

“Madeleine?”

She thought she imagined hearing the sound of her name. She thought it must have come from inside her own head. But when she opened her eyes she saw Rube Levy standing over her, smiling down. She didn’t say anything. Coincidences, she thought. Rube Levy just happens to turn up here.

“Small world,” he said. He sat down alongside her, lightly laying one hand on her arm.

“Very small,” she answered. She moved her arm away and reached for her drink.

He removed his beret and stroked his small beard. “Didn’t you hear me calling you?”

“When?”

“Outside. On the street. You were walking some distance ahead of me. I called your name.”

Why did it suddenly chill her to think this? Somebody following her along the sidewalks. Somebody she didn’t see.

“Then I lost sight of you, so I figured you must have come in here, although I admit I did look inside a couple of stores.” His hand came down and covered her own. This time she didn’t move. He was silent for a moment, then said, “You’re trembling, Madeleine. Is something wrong?”

She didn’t answer. His hand felt like dough against her skin. Why was she having this reaction? Rube was a friend, one of Harry’s oldest, there was nothing to be afraid of, nothing to suspect. A man stands in a doorway across the street from the loft and strikes match after match, trying to light a pipe. No, she thought, it isn’t Rube Levy. It’s got nothing to do with Rube Levy. Just the same, she moved her hand from beneath his.

“Somebody killed my closest friend,” she heard herself say. “Somebody killed Jamey Hausermann.…”

“The woman who wrote the article about Harry?”

She nodded. “Somebody strangled her.”

Dry words. The bare bones. Killed, strangled, murdered. They were electric shocks of language. Suddenly she could see Jamey in her head. She could see the white dead face, the bruise marks on the neck, pictures she just didn’t want or need.

Rube Levy rubbed his jaw for a time. “Jesus,” he said. “What did Harry say?”

She glanced at Levy. She watched him take out his pipe and stuff it with tobacco. She said, “I sometimes get the feeling that he’s begun to slip inside his answering machine, like he’s fallen into a magnetic hole. Harry in Wonderland.”

Rube was quiet a second, then said, “You make a connection between the murder and Mr. Apology?”

“Damn right I do.”

She stared across the bar. The shadowy drinkers hunched on their stools. Somewhere, music was playing—tinny piano music. She listened to Levy suck on his pipe, then she turned to face him and said, “I went to the cops, Rube. I stole one of Harry’s tapes and I took it to the cops. I took one of the cassettes with that guy’s voice on it—”

“What guy? The maniac who calls regularly? The guy with the constant threats?”

She nodded.

Levy looked inside the bowl of his pipe. “I think you’ve gone and done something our boy won’t be very pleased about, Maddy. You’ve broken the law according to Harrison. I think he’s going to be pretty damn pissed. I’m trying to imagine his face when he finds out.” He shook his head from side to side. “I’ve known him for years and one of the things that’s always rubbed him the wrong way is anything he sees as interference in his work. He didn’t like listening to critical suggestions when we went to school together. He didn’t like professors telling him what to do. Interference, Maddy.”

“How can it be interference when all I’m interested in is his safety, Rube?”

“I’m only telling you how Harry is going to see it, that’s all.” He paused. “What did the cops say?”

“They weren’t exactly helpful. They’re going to listen to the tape. I’m pretty damn sure the guy I talked to thought I was just some kind of maniac.”

Levy dumped his pipe in the ashtray. “You’ve got to tell Harry, of course.”

“Of course.” She felt them suddenly just behind her eyes—tears, the pricking of moisture. She was thinking about Jamey again. She struggled against the thought.

“I don’t know what he’s going to say. I can only imagine.”

She finished her drink. Rube Levy was looking at his watch. He said, “I’ve got a business appointment nearby. It’s going to be one of those interminable things where executives open glossy folders and mutter about presentations and present me with what they call facts. I’ve got these people who do nothing more than look around like scouts for likely acquisitions, which my tax people tell me are necessary. But …” He paused, then smiled at her and put his hand against her shoulder. “I can cancel it if you need me … I mean, if you need some basic human company, a little sympathy. You don’t look as if you should be left on your own, Maddy. Like you need a friend.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “I’ve got to see Harry. I’ve got to talk with him. But thanks, Rube. Thanks for the offer.”

He was standing up now, obviously reluctant to go. “I’m really sorry about your friend, Madeleine. I’m not very good at knowing what to say at times like this.… Look, if you need me, if I can be of any help at all, call me. I’ll be home all evening. Okay? Don’t forget.”

“Thanks again.” She watched him go towards the door, where he turned, raised his hand in a limp way, then left. Alone, she picked up her glass and listened to the ice shift and creak inside. A flying visit from the ubiquitous Levy. Rube on his way to the towers of high finance. She shut her eyes. She felt suddenly squeamish, as if the scotch had bruised her insides. There was sticky saliva in her mouth all at once and she knew she was going to throw up if she didn’t make it to the rest room and run her face under cold water. She rose quickly, knocking her glass over, creating lines of melting ice, and went to look for the john, which she located at the end of a long corridor beyond the telephones and the cigarette machine. She found a door marked GALS and went inside a large white-tiled room, and walked to the sink, where she let cold water flow over her wrists. Sweat on her forehead, prickly heat behind her eyes. She splashed water across her face, dried herself with a paper towel. But she still felt nauseous. She walked to the nearest cubicle and opened it, stepped inside, locked the door behind her.

Safe. A world of locks. A world of locks and a woman’s toilet—how inviolate could you feel? Maybe Jamey Hausermann had locked the door of her apartment and somebody had forced it open. Maybe Jamey had felt safe like this too. There wasn’t any safety, she thought. There wasn’t any to be had.

She inclined her head and looked down into the bowl. Still blue water. I don’t want to have to stick my finger down my throat and throw up here.

She shut her eyes.

She heard footsteps. She heard footsteps click across the tiles. Silence, then the noise of a lock turning in the adjoining cubicle.

Somebody is next to me.

Somebody separated from me by this thin wood.

She turned her face slowly to the side.

Old graffiti.

Sarah loves Timmy Madigan

Captain Kirk lives

Denise Stroud gives good head

What had Harry once said about graffiti, about how he’d seen it on the sides of boxcars and in the subway and how it suggested some violence lying temporarily dormant?

Violence—

She sucked her breath in tightly.

There was a peephole cut in the wood just a few inches above her head, an oval opening about two inches wide.

A peephole.

A small oval slit in which something moved

something dark

moved

Someone is watching me through the wood.

She fumbled for the lock, which slipped between her moist fingers.

“Madeleine, Madeleine …”

No, no, no, I imagined the sound of a man’s voice calling my name, I dream it out of my panic and fear—

“Madeleine, Madeleine…”

The door was open. She moved out, running across the tiles.

She saw her own white reflection in the mirror as she raced towards the front door, the safety of the corridor, the security of the bar, the street beyond—

Nobody came after her.

The cubicle remained shut.

It remained as tightly shut as the locked lid of some impenetrable puzzle.

She went hurriedly back towards the bar, pushing her way through to the street. She rushed through the swinging glass door, unconscious of upraised voices behind her—and then she was running along the sidewalk, running blindly, missing some pedestrians, colliding with others, then making it finally to the next block, where she turned away from Fifth Avenue and along a quiet side street where she stopped running, out of breath, a pain in her chest.

She leaned against the window of a restaurant, oblivious to the curious stares of people passing.

You imagined it, Maddy. A man’s voice saying your name. You imagined the eye pressed against the hole in the wood—you invented it all somewhere in the troubled recesses of your brain, manufactured it out of your fear.

No.

No, you didn’t dream it.

She shut her eyes. She wanted never to move from this spot, to remain here forever in the safety of the darkness behind her closed eyelids.

Madeleine, Madeleine…

She gazed along the street. Businessmen. Women coming from the great stores of Fifth Avenue, hauling their purchases in large bags with famous names on them. Everyday things. So ordinary, so banal. How come it looked different to her suddenly, as if she were perceiving the world through faintly stained glass? As if she’d just lost a very important angle of perspective and things were tilting away from her?

Dear Christ.

There had to be an end to all this. There had to be an end to the bad dream her life had become.

7.

Bryant Berger hung the CLOSED sign on the door of the gallery, then walked in the direction of his office, where the desk lamp threw a feeble little glow. A white nimbus of light. He stared at his desk, ran the tip of his finger over old wood, saw how white his hand looked in the lamplight. He sat down, picked up Madeleine’s cassette, and placed it carefully inside his dictating machine—but he didn’t press the PLAYBACK button immediately. The voices—he didn’t want to listen to anybody’s confession, remembering how embarrassed, how humiliated, he himself had felt when he had talked to the infernal answering machine. He pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes. He remembered last night after he’d gone from George’s apartment, caught a cab that rushed him to the railroad station, made it to a late train to Bedford Hills, called Angela from the station with a sincere apology for his lateness, believing his own words, swallowing his own sad lies, waiting for Angela to come pick him up. How pleased she’d seemed to see him—she’d even forgiven him his tardiness. It was almost as if she hadn’t expected to see him at all, thankful for small mercies. Walking to the car she’d even held his hand and squeezed it and he had thought of invisible leashes, something intangible but very tightly strung around his neck. You wanted to step back then and get away and catch the next train that would carry you to the city and out of this suburb, this marriage, this gallery.… He opened his eyes. He got up, walked around his desk, stared at the failing sun through the window.

The pièce de résistance, of course.

One does not forget that, does one?

She had nibbled on his neck in bed, her hand sliding over his stomach, fingertips scraping the inside of his thighs. And, dear Christ, he had been aroused in a perverse way, almost as if he were pleased to fuck her. As if the act of sex constituted some meager form of vengeance for him. She had sucked his nipples, her heavy breasts slapping against his skin, her breath hot and moist on his throat. The slapping of the breasts—he was reminded of sodden paper bags bobbing on a tide against a seawall. Or shapeless jellyfish. And he had died then, the swelling went away, the feeling left him. When she’d put her hand between his legs there was nothing, nothing, nothing for her to hold, no erection for her to shove between her thighs and into the damp hairy center of herself. He felt something turn over inside him; she rolled away, lit a cigarette, smoothed his hair across his skull. Kindness. Why did she have to be so damnably kind then? You’re tense, Bry, you’re tense. It’s going to be okay, sweet baby. A little time, that’s all we need.

Bry. Sweet baby.

Cringing.

It might have worked if only I had imagined George in bed beside me, George’s body; it might have worked then and I could have pretended my beautiful boy was next to me.…

He reached out and touched the pane of glass, which was surprisingly warm. I couldn’t have imagined George. George no longer exists. And he remembered the young man’s violent anger, the verbal assaults, the outbreak of rage. He walks an edge, Berger thought. George walks some savage edge and is close to slipping.

He glanced at his wristwatch. Tonight there were to be visitors, dinner guests, dreary people who basked in Angela’s multicolored glow at the table. She would be more sparkling than the silver, the wine in the decanter, the little vases of flowers. She would shine.… It had the texture of a very bad dream.

He went back to his desk, sat down. The train he had to catch … but he didn’t want to think about it now. He pressed the PLAYBACK button of his dictaphone, leaned back in his chair, shut his eyes. There were squeaks and whirs, clicks, dial tones, and then he heard the sound of a voice that was almost inaudible. It was a kid muttering something about having taken acid in a graveyard and then digging up a fresh grave. Berger squirmed. He put out his hand and stopped the machine. Were all the calls like this one? Sickening and ghoulish? Did Madeleine truly imagine he’d want to play such monstrous things here in his gallery? He pressed PLAYBACK again.

I’M RESPONSIBLE FOR MY PARENTS’ BREAKING UP, MAN. I MEAN I THINK THEY WOULD HAVE STAYED TOGETHER IF I HADN’T CAUSED THEM SUCH HASSLES ALL THE TIME, YOU KNOW.…

How dreary, Berger thought. The adolescent who blames himself for his parents’ divorce. It had to be so commonplace it was barely of any interest. He raised his face from the dictaphone and gazed across the darkened gallery.

There was a shadow pressed against the front door.

The sound of something metallic being rapped against glass.

He knew. The palms of his hands started to sweat; there was a circle of warmth beneath his collar. His heart seemed to stretch, pressing against ribs. A pulse inside the brain, rooted in the dead center.

Dear God, I need him.

He walked slowly to the door, unlocked it, watched George step inside. He was holding a brown paper bag. Bryant Berger put out his hand, curled the palm against the side of George’s face, then he was kissing the boy, the tongue drawn lavishly along the hard edges of teeth, touching the soft gums, the roof of the mouth. He stepped back. His lips were wet. George was smiling; in the dark of the gallery his red hair seemed black, his eyes unlit and mysterious. There was tension, a tight thing strung across the air.

“A present, dear,” George said.

Berger took the brown bag and looked inside.

“You should never be without your hat, Bryant. It’s part of your mystique.”

The bag slipped from his fingers. His mind was running; he was astonished at his own display of passion—just seizing the boy as he came in and assaulting him with your mouth and lips and tongue. The need was bewildering, the hunger crazy, a terrifying pounding that involved all his nerve endings, all his senses. He could smell George, the skin, the cologne, the hair.

“George said some terrible things to Bryant last night, didn’t he?” George asked. “And George has come in all humility to beg for forgiveness.”

The boy went down on his knees and pressed his face into Berger’s groin. The excitement, the intensity, the rising of blood. Berger clutched the young man’s head and forced the face deeper into his body. The erection seemed to scald him. He dropped his hand and fumbled with his zipper, fingers clumsy, uncoordinated, flying in their haste.

George, George.

He glanced down at the top of the boy’s head. I need you. I need this. I don’t have the words for this kind of need.…

George’s cold palm was smooth against his penis. He moved it slowly up and down, caressing, tasting, his tongue wet and warm. Berger shut his eyes. They shouldn’t do this here so close to the window, the street. They should go inside the office and shut the door. He stroked George’s hair. But he couldn’t stop; he couldn’t make himself break away from George, couldn’t stop the mouth, the slow killing movement of the hand, the sweetness of the fingertips. He unbuckled his belt and let his pants slip to his ankles and he placed both hands against the back of George’s neck, pushing slightly, making tiny movements of his hips. This is all there is, this is all there has to be. This love. This agonizing hurtful terrible love.

George looked up at him and smiled. “You missed me, didn’t you? Tell me how much you missed me, Bryant.”

“It’s like dying, George.”

“Tell me more.”

“I don’t know how I could cope without you.” There, out in the open, revealed: a stark confession.

“Did Angela try to fuck you, Bryant?”

“No,” he said.

“Are you lying?”

“George, there’s only you.” He felt very tired as he said it. It was as if such an encounter with truth made him weary, the weariness of stepping out of an automobile after a long journey, when you shut your eyes and the white lines still streak through your head.

“There’s only me,” George said. He took Berger’s hand and stood up. “Why don’t we go in your office, Bryant?”

“Yes.” Berger hitched up his pants, conscious now of how ungainly quick passion could make you look—ridiculous, a clown figure, something stuffed and absurd. He followed George into the office and watched the boy take his jeans off. He stood there in blue bikinis. He removed his windbreaker and shirt and dropped them on the floor. He put his hand inside the elastic of his underwear and touched himself. Berger was only barely conscious of the voice issuing from the dictaphone.

“What are you listening to, Bryant?”

“A tape somebody gave me. It’s boring.”

“Who gave it to you?”

“My assistant, Madeleine.”

“Of course,” George said.

I don’t want to talk about it now. I don’t want to listen to it. It doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters now is you, George.

… SO WE WORKED OUT THIS ELABORATE SYSTEM OF CHEATING DURING THE FINAL EXAMS WITH THE RESULT THAT WE BOTH GOT A’ S, AND NOW I FEEL LIKE A TOTAL FRAUD.…

“Sounds fascinating, Bryant.”

“George, please, I want you.” He covered George’s hand with his own, watching his fingers slip inside the briefs. The tip of George’s penis was moist, sticky.

George …

HERE’S ALL I GOT TO SAY TO YOU … UNTIL THE NEXT TIME ANYWAY.… I’M GONNA KILL SOMEBODY. I MIGHT USE MY KNIFE, I MIGHT JUST USE MY BARE FUCKING HANDS, BUT IT’S GONNA HAPPEN, APOLOGY.…

“George.” Berger slowly slid the shorts down, revealing the glassy sheen of the hip, the amazing curvature, the fine yellowy hairs that were almost imperceptible. He got down on his knees and took George in his mouth and moved his head back and forth. He shut his eyes. His pleasure seemed a thing apart from himself, something that filled the room, warmed it, a thing that existed independently. He clutched George’s balls in his hands, feeling them brush the side of his face, touch his lips. The swelling, the tightening, the head of the penis slipping against his teeth and gums. Come for me, George, come inside my mouth, come for me. He heard George moan, felt the sharp nails of the boy’s hands dig into his neck. So hard, there had to be blood, the skin had to be broken, punctured. And then George groaned and pressed himself deeper, reaching for the throat, the roof of the mouth. His body shook violently several times and then he slumped against Berger, still moaning. Berger pulled his face back. He wanted to rise and hug George, wrap his arms around him as if he might permanently bind the boy to his body.

…AND THERE’S NOT A GODDAMN THING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT.…

“What a horrible voice,” George said. “Don’t you think it’s horrible, Bryant?”

“I wasn’t really listening.”

“I could tell that.” George was looking at the dictaphone on the desk, his eyes bright, lit. Berger didn’t speak. The voice was horrible. It filled the room with a sense of distilled madness. A crazy deranged voice.

WE’LL BE TALKING AGAIN REAL SOON, MR. APOLOGY.

WE’LL BE TALKING AGAIN REAL SOON.

“I’ll turn the thing off.”

“Wait,” George said. “Let me listen to it.”

“It’s so depressing.”

“Wait, I said!”

“Of course. Whatever you say.” There—that old harsh edge in the young man’s voice. He watched George move towards the dictaphone and press the REWIND button.

APOLOGY? APOLOGY, YOU LISTENING TO ME, MAN? IF YOU’RE A GODDAMN MAN AND NOT SOME FUCKING MACHINE.…

Berger thought: Something about that voice … whatever—it eluded him, a very distant awareness of familiarity. But voices on telephones always seemed nasal, distorted. I’ve never heard it before.

“George, we don’t need to listen to this, do we?”

“I want to. I want to listen to it!”

“Sure.” Berger felt lost all at once—George had become distant, absorbed in these crazy ramblings.

KNOW SOMETHING? I GET THE FEELING YOU’RE THERE, MAN. I GET THIS DISTINCT FEELING YOU’RE JUST SITTING THERE LISTENING.… WHY DON’T YOU PICK UP THE TELEPHONE? OR IS THAT SOMETHING YOU NEVER DO?

George stopped the machine. What is it? What the hell is it that so interests him about this nonsense? Berger wondered. And what is this other thing you feel—that the voice is somehow familiar to you, like the distorted version of a voice you know, someone you’ve listened to, someone you’ve heard in the past? What is this uneasy feeling?

George turned and, with a small smile, a tiny cold expression, said, “I have to make a phone call, Bryant. A very private one. Do you mind?”

“Who are you going to call?”

“It isn’t dear Angela. Don’t worry.”

“I know that.…” The question. The unease. It was a matter of destiny, he thought—you are fated never to overcome the seizures of jealousy. He is calling somebody, somebody he’s going to go see now, a meeting, an assignation. Berger stepped out of his office, closing the door. He felt miserable, wretched, diminished. He just erases me from his mind. He forgets me. How can it be that goddamn easy for him? He paced outside the closed door. The anguish of this. Was anything worth that? He clenched his hands. He went close to the door, listening to the low mumble of George’s voice. A tone, a monotone—there were no words he could distinguish. And then he heard the sound of George laughing. There, he thought, he makes a connection over a telephone and it pleases him, and perhaps it pleases him even more when he knows how badly it affects me. Twist, turn, the passages of a maze. Don’t hurt me, George. I can take anything but that.

He pushed the door open and looked in.

George was hanging up the receiver.

He had a strange look on his face. Berger was reminded of the expression George’d had when he’d been playing with his revolting Swiss army knife. A mean aspect of George, as if whatever generosity and whatever compassion he possessed had suddenly deserted him—and you could see something dark just under the surface of skin.

“Who did you call, George?” Hating himself, loathing himself for this weakness.

“You wouldn’t know the person.”

“Is it a date?”

“You might say that, Bryant.”

“Who? Is it someone you’re attracted to?”

“In a sense.”

“Why are you being so damned evasive?”

George was smiling now. He tipped his face back, looked upwards at the ceiling, appeared lost in contemplation. Berger watched him: By lamplight, encircled by the pale splash of white, he seemed bigger somehow, dominating the room. He went across the floor and put his hands on George’s shoulders.

“Is there somebody else?”

“Not really.”

“I know I can’t expect you to be loyal, George.” Pathetic, groveling, as if he were very small and looking up at the young man.

George kept smiling. Why did it suddenly seem so infuriating? The smile, the parted lips, the white teeth.

“I know I can’t expect it. I know there are attractive young people out there, people with whom you must have more in common than me.…” He faltered. The begging heart. “It’s just very hard for me to accept the idea that you must know other people.”

“Do you think I do?”

“I don’t think about it, George. I try to keep it away. It hurts.”

“I wouldn’t want to hurt you, Bryant. Would George want to hurt his very dear friend?”

Berger laid his face against the young man’s shoulder. “When you were making that phone call, when you insisted on privacy, I felt … I don’t know, a kind of hopelessness. Despair.”

“You want to know who I called, don’t you?”

Berger nodded. Yes, no, he wasn’t sure.

“Just an acquaintance, Bryant.”

“Someone you go to bed with?”

“Really, Bryant, you think the most awful things about me, don’t you?”

George pressed the PLAYBACK button on the dictaphone. He turned back to Berger and lightly touched his neck, running his fingertips smoothly over the flesh. Berger pressed his mouth against George’s lips. This is it. This is the place where passion comes back and the senses leave you like summer moths on their haphazard flight into death. Down and down and down in the taste of George, drawn under, blinded.

HERE’S ALL I GOT TO SAY TO YOU, UNTIL THE NEXT TIME ANYWAY …

Why was it so loud now, filling the whole space of the office? Why? Berger felt George draw him down to the floor; he felt the young man’s legs wrapped around his own …

I MIGHT USE A KNIFE. I MIGHT JUST USE MY BARE FUCKING HANDS …

… and for a short time, a very short time, he entered a world that was without shadow, jealousy, a word with a certain future.

And then he realized where he had heard the voice before.

8.

When he heard the sound of the loft door being quietly opened, Harrison stepped out of the bedroom and looked at Madeleine—the pale face, the deep shadows under the eyes, her mouth a single tired line. He moved across the floor and held her hands, saying nothing, leading her into the bedroom, making her sit down. Her shoes were scuffed and her coat hung open and her blue silk scarf dangled precariously around her neck. He put his arms around her, feeling neither anger nor disappointment but a sense of relief—because all day long he had been wondering if she’d ever come back, if the theft of the tape meant the end of their relationship. He had called her number at the apartment; he had tried the gallery, only to learn that she’d been sent home. Now she was here, silent, distant, but here at last. He listened to her sigh.

“You know what I’ve done, Harry?”

“You don’t have to say anything now,” he said, touching the side of her face and finding her skin cold.

“I took one of your tapes. I went to the cops with it. I gave it to a cop called Stanislavski, who said he’d pass it along to somebody called Nightingale, the guy in charge of the murder investigations.…” She recited these words in a flat way, her face expressionless. She might have been communicating out of a trance.

“There’s something else, Harry.”

He didn’t speak. He was thinking about the cops listening to one of the tapes. What could they do about a voice on a cassette? How could it help them catch a killer unless they bugged every goddamn phone booth in the city?

“Somebody followed me today.” She licked her lips, hesitated.

“Who?”

“I don’t know who. I was in a bar. I went inside the john and somebody came into the next cubicle and looked at me through a hole in the wood and whispered my name.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sitting here making it up, Harry. God damn it, of course I’m sure!”

“Did you see the person?”

She shook her head.

“Maybe it was somebody playing a practical joke.”

“Harry, something bad is going on! Something you’ve created and released. And it’s happening to us. It’s not happening to the guy next door; it’s happening to you and me!”

He heard her words ring in his ears. He got up from the bed and strolled towards the window, where he looked out at the darkening sky. Was she right? he wondered. Was she absolutely correct, beyond all possible doubt? Are you too blind, Harry, too engrossed, to see what Madeleine observes? Is that what it is? He shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans, making tight fists of them. You just can’t face the sight of your little world of Apology coming apart like fragments of some torn map. You can’t bear the sound of it being unraveled. He turned around to look at Madeleine. Something you’ve created and released. Your own private monster, constructed out of a demented blueprint. Madeleine had risen from the bed and was standing over the answering machine, just staring at it. Then she raised her eyes and looked at the shelf of cassettes.

Something you’ve created.

And released.

And it was killing Madeleine too.

He moved towards her and put his arms around her shoulders, linking his hands over her breasts. She moved away from him, turned to the window, walked there slowly. Cold, unresponsive. He watched her for a while, saying nothing. Somebody had followed her inside a ladies’ room, uttered her name—was she totally sure? Or was it something she had constructed out of her own fears, out of the terrible shock of her friend dying?

The telephone rang. He heard the answering machine click on, the sound of his own recorded message. Madeleine swung around, her face filled with pain.

“No more, Harry. Please. No more of it.”

He didn’t move.

The call, he thought.

The one he wanted to hear.

He heard his message end, saw Madeleine turn back and stare out of the window.

The voice filled the room.

The voice …

APOLOGY, HOW COME YOU NEVER CHANGE YOUR MESSAGE, MAN? I’M GETTING KINDA SICK OF ALWAYS HEARING THE SAME WORDS WHENEVER I CALL.… HOW COME YOU NEVER PICK UP THE TELEPHONE EITHER? HUH?

And the laughter.

Derisive.

Harrison felt every nerve in his body stiffen, ligaments and muscles tense. He covered the receiver with the palm of his hand. Madeleine was moving back towards the bed. She sat down, hands covering her ears.

I GOT ANOTHER LITTLE CONFESSION FOR YOU. MAN. I KILLED SOMEBODY LAST NIGHT. I KILLED SOMEBODY BECAUSE SHE WASN’T GOING TO TELL ME WHAT I WANTED TO KNOW, APOLOGY.… I CUT HER TITS. I WENT INSIDE HER MOUTH WITH A RAZOR BLADE AND I CUT HER TONGUE OUT.…

“Shut it off, Harry!” Madeleine put her face down on the pillow, sobbing.

I STRANGLED HER WITH A HAIRDRYER. MAN, AND THEN I STUCK THE THING INSIDE HER CUNT.… WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THAT? SHE WAS AN OLD PAL OF YOURS, APOLOGY … AN OLD PAL.… YOU FUCKER, WHY DON’T YOU PICK UP YOUR GODDAMN PHONE? MAYBE YOU READ ABOUT HER IN THE NEWSPAPERS, YEAH? THEY DON’T GO IN TO THE REAL DETAILS, NOT THE KIND I’M TELLING YOU NOW.…

“Oh, Jesus, Jesus,” Madeleine was saying, her words broken by tears. Harrison reached across the bed and touched her. Jamey Hausermann… It was more than he could imagine, more than he could envisage. The whole picture was too terrible for him to contemplate. He gazed at the red light on the answering machine. Why did it suddenly seem to flicker, almost as if power were being drained out of the device by the weight of the incoming message? Almost as if this message were too much for the cassette to carry. He shut his eyes, curled his fingers around the receiver. You get an idea, you get a notion, it excites you, it draws you to it, you suddenly think you’ve discovered a new form of artistic expression, those sad messages that come from out there, you see it all as a kind of breakthrough for you, something that might liberate you from past failures and break new ground, you imagine all this—then it turns around against you, it rears up and strikes out and it strangles you in miles of magnetic tape, it changes from dream to nightmare, from expressions of sorrow and regret to outrages, monstrosities—and none of it would have happened if you hadn’t had your crazy vision in the first place.… And you didn’t want to see it, didn’t want to look at it, made yourself blind to what was falling apart all around you.

I’VE SEEN YOUR LITTLE FRIEND, APOLOGY. I’VE SEEN YOUR LITTLE PAL, YOU KNOW, AND SHE AIN’T BAD-LOOKING.… SHE AIN’T BAD-LOOKING AT ALL.… WHAT’S SHE LIKE IN THE SACK, HUH? HOT AND STEAMY?

The laughter.

Harrison looked down at his white knuckles. There was an anger running through him now, a deep dark anger that coursed through the networks of his body.

HEY, LISTEN … I GOT TO GO NOW, BECAUSE THERE’S THIS GUY WHO’S GETTING ON MY NERVES AND WHINES A LOT AND I FIGURE I CAN DO HIM SOME GOOD BY JUST PUTTING HIM OUT OF HIS MISERY.… KNOW WHAT I MEAN? HIS LIFE AIN’T WORTH THE HASSLE.… I’LL DO HIM A FAVOR … BUT I’LL BE SEEING YOU AND YOUR LITTLE PAL REAL SOON, BECAUSE YOUR OTHER FRIEND JAMEY … WELL, JUST LET ME SAY, SOME PEOPLE WILL BECOME PRETTY GODDAMN TALKATIVE WHEN YOU’RE FLASHING A RAZOR IN THEIR FACE.…

Again, the laughter.

IT WON’T BE TOO LONG BEFORE I SEE YOU, HARRISON. HARRY HARRISON.

Harrison…

Madeleine raised her face and stared at him with red eyes.

Harrison…

He knows who I am.

He knows.

He fumbled the receiver to his mouth but the line was already dead.

SEVEN

1.

Nightingale rubbed his eyelids and looked across the office at Moody. The Boy Wonder was going through a folder of papers. He raised his face, pursed his lips, and made a humming sound. Then he said, “Jamey Hausermann must have talked with everybody in this whole metroplis, Frank. Listen to some of this stuff she wrote about. An article on the New York Knicks. Another on some PLO hitman living in Brooklyn. A guy trying to raise money for Northern Irish rebels. Mayor Koch. A lottery winner. Norman Mailer. The future of rapid transit. There’s a whole bunch of stuff here, Frank.”

“Lemme see it,” Nightingale said. Moody crossed the room, dropped the folder on Nightingale’s desk. Nightingale picked it up, flipped the pages. She’d covered a really broad spectrum of New York people and events and issues. There didn’t seem to be anything she hadn’t touched. The paperback revolution. Richard Nixon, lawyer. The Mr. Apology line. “Hey, Doug, here’s your old pal. Mr. Apology.”

“Yeah, I noticed it.”

“Maybe we should start there.” He scratched his nose and shrugged.

“Nah. Start with Norman Mailer. Maybe he got violent or something.”

Nightingale smiled. He was about to start making little tickmarks beside the list of names and subjects, on the grounds that perhaps something she’d written about might provide a clue to the killer, when he heard the office door open. He looked up to see Eddie Fodor come in. Eddie wore a three-piece pinstriped suit, the kind of suit Nightingale thought he hadn’t seen since the middle of the 1940s.

“Eddie, how are you?”

“Doing just dandy, Frank. You?” They shook hands.

“I’ve had better days.”

“I heard you got something pretty bad down here. Some stranglings.”

“Yeah, with bells on,” Nightingale said. “Double-breasted, huh? You don’t see that a whole lot these days. Pretty smooth, Eddie. They must pay real well in Narcotics.”

Moody was sitting on the other side of the room. “What it is, Frank, a whole lot of contraband never makes it to trial. It has a way of mysteriously disappearing. Six pounds of heroin just seems to evaporate until there’s only three left. Where does it go? you ask yourself. Now take another look at Eddie’s suit and maybe you start to have this feeling just kind of dawn on you.”

Eddie Fodor, who wore his slicked-down hair center-parted, laughed. “I like your partner’s style, Frank. He’s a laugh a minute.”

Nightingale nodded sourly. Why did Moody have this unfortunate knack of saying things out of turn every so often? Maybe it was his strange sense of humor or something. He glared at Moody and then turned back to look at his old partner, Eddie Fodor.

“You haven’t changed much, Eddie. I’ll say that.”

Eddie Fodor said, “I keep myself trim, you know? I work out. I get some jogging in.” He winked at Nightingale, then nudged him. Eddie had always been a terrific nudger. “Nookie helps as well, Frank. Remember nookie?”

Nightingale tried to suck in his paunch.

There was a silence in the room for a moment, then Eddie Fodor slid down from the edge of the desk and paced towards the window. He had a jaunty way of walking, a feisty manner, as if he were trying to keep his balance on a storm-struck boat. He stared out, hands tucked inside the pockets of his vest. “This place sucks, Frank. It’s crummy. You should see the office they gave me. I got chrome chairs and a decent desk. Scandinavian style. Plain wood, very fashionable.”

“Well,” Moody said. “All the glamour’s in drugs nowadays. All that undercover posturing. TV glorifies the narc because he’s always coming on like Serpico or something. It’s a bunch of bullshit.”

Eddie Fodor looked at Nightingale. “He’s like sour milk, Frank. What’s his beef?”

“My beef is I’m tired of a killer running loose out there,” Moody said. He picked up a file, flipped it open, and lapsed into a dark silence.

Fodor took a cigarette case from his pocket and removed a cigarette, which he lit with a flashy lighter. Nightingale watched this shimmery display of silver: It was like a conjuror’s sleight-of-hand, gone before he could register what he’d seen. Then he remembered that Eddie Fodor wasn’t married—he was one of those stonewall bachelors who see women in terms of their uses, particularly the employment that necessitates the parting of their legs. Chattels. The liberation movement had passed Eddie by.

“When you called me you mentioned a guy called Sylvester, Frank.”

“Right. We got this weak tip—it’s a vague shot, Eddie. He might be able to help us in a homicide inquiry.”

“Is he a suspect?”

“He might know the killer.”

Eddie Fodor opened his briefcase. Good leather, Nightingale noticed. He wondered briefly if there was a lot of bonus money, danger money, in working Narcotics. Eddie probably didn’t spend very much on anything except his appearance. Flash Eddie Fodor.

Fodor took a file out of his briefcase and threw it down on Nightingale’s desk. A couple of blurry photographs slid out—they were obviously the kind of pictures taken long-distance, the kind shot through the back windows of a florist’s van or a laundry truck that in reality contained narcs with cameras. Nightingale picked them up. One showed a bunch of people walking along a street; a red circle had been crudely drawn around one particular face. It was too indistinct to make the features out. A young guy, beared. But that was about it. The other showed a ghostly apparition stepping out of a subway exit.

“I admit they aren’t exactly Ansel Adams,” Fodor said. “But the guy’s Sylvester Garincha, who’s a pretty smalltime dealer. A half-ounce of coke here, a half-ounce there. I haven’t had much time to bother with him, Frank. I get more interested in where these piddling half-ounces are coming from. A guy like Sylvester—he’s hardly worth hauling in. He’s the only Sylvester I know. So I figure it’s worth showing you.”

Nightingale passed the pictures across to Moody, who looked at them and laughed. “Your guy must have Vaseline on his lens, Eddie. Either that or it was a real foggy day.”

“Who gives a shit about their artistic value?” Eddie Fodor said. “You want to know about this Sylvester or don’t you?”

“We want to know,” Nightingale said.

“Okay, I’ll tell you,” Eddie Fodor said. “I know his turf. I know where he makes his connections. I don’t want him hauled in, Frank. I prefer him on the street, because I got something coming up where I think I can lean on him a little bit—you know the score.”

Nightingale nodded. He took the pictures back from Moody. How was he going to identify Sylvester from these crummy snapshots? He’d seen clearer images on imported 8-mm massage-parlor movies.

“I don’t know how you’re going to work it, Frank. I don’t want to be involved, you understand? It’s your business. I got things I don’t need to blow right now.” Fodor paused. He smoked the last of his cigarettes and dropped it on the floor. “I don’t know the guy’s hours, Frank. Like everybody else in his line of country, they’re highly flexible. Times Square …”

“It figures,” Moody said. “We need pith helmets and survival rations, Frank, if we’re going into that jungle.”

“You want this Sylvester or don’t you?” Fodor said.

“Yeah,” Nightingale said. “What about Times Square?”

“Okay. He sometimes hangs out in an arcade called Butch’s. Like I said, he doesn’t keep regular hours.”

“Why doesn’t he have a home address?” Moody asked.

“Kid, what the fuck do you want? You want to know he’s got a three-bedroom tract house out in Merrick, Long Island; he’s got two point five kids, a wife who bakes cookies for Thanksgiving, and the name of the company that holds the paper on his home? You’ve done nothing but bitch since I came in.” Fodor looked at Moody. “A home address. Jesus!”

“I think he got the message, Eddie,” Nightingale said. He glanced at his former partner; he was a little red in the face all at once, fumbling for his cigarette case again, extracting a smoke, lighting it. “Say, Eddie, while we’re on the subject of Sylvester, did you ever run into a customer of his, a guy called Billy Chapman?”

“William Arthur Chapman?” Fodor asked.

“The very same,” Nightingale said. Moody had looked up now, all interest, eyes sparkling.

“I know the guy. What’ve you got on him?”

“Suspicion of homicide, Eddie.”

Eddie Fodor drew on his cigarette for a long time. “I busted him—oh, Christ, a few years back. Small-fry user. He rubbed me the wrong way, that guy.”

“Like how?” Moody asked.

“Bad chemistry,” Fodor said. “I don’t like space cadets like him. I don’t like drugs. I don’t like drug users. I don’t like the attitudes of druggies—”

Nightingale held up a hand to stop this diatribe. Who needed to hear a catalogue of Eddie Fodor’s prejudices anyhow? “Yeah, sure, I understand—but what about Chapman? What do you remember?”

“It doesn’t surprise me a bit, Frank, that you’re thinking homicide.”

“Why?” Nightingale looked at Moody again; the young guy’s face was alight again.

“Cocaine, right? You go at it for years the way Billy Chapman was doing, you’re gonna come up with your head pretty well fucked over. You’re gonna turn into a zombie that don’t know left from right. You’re gonna snap, Frank, like a fucking rubber band. If it ain’t imaginary insects eating your cheeks out, then it’s all kinds of weird imaginings that would make the lost weekend look like a Muppet show. Sure, homicide doesn’t surprise me, not for a moment.”

Nightingale said nothing. He moved around his office for a while, thinking about that look on Moody’s face, as if the Boy Wonder had just been vindicated by the pope himself. Okay, one homicide, Nightingale thought—we all knew that much. But three? Three? “How far could he go, Eddie?”

“Meaning?”

“Would he be capable of more than one murder?”

“Hey, Frank, you can’t tell with that kind of jerk. He could be capable of just about anything. Never underestimate the cocaine habit. Never make that mistake. You hear all this bullshit about how harmless it is—trust me. Trust me when I tell you I’ve seen it turn more lives inside out than junk.”

Moody was on his feet now, flushed. He looked at Nightingale as if to say I told you so.

Eddie Fodor turned towards the door. “Butch’s, Times Square. You’ll find Sylvester there. Just send the file back when you’re through. Don’t let it get lost in the paper shuffle.”

“Thanks. Eddie.”

“You owe me one.”

Nightingale shook hands with Eddie Fodor. He watched him walk to the door. Then he remembered something and said, “Eddie, how about showing Doug your old party trick?”

“Hey, you remember that?”

“Who could forget it, Eddie?”

Fodor approached Moody’s desk. Huge false teeth disappeared, first into the palm of his hand, then quickly into a navy-blue silk handkerchief he slipped out of his pocket. His face imploded like a squeezed sponge, the lips bent inwards, the cheeks sunk into great hollows and the tip of the nose sagged weirdly. Then he rolled his eyes and made funny noises. Nightingale laughed; it was a disgusting sight. Moody’s expression didn’t change. The teeth went back into place and suddenly the face was human again.

“I used to do that at all the parties,” Fodor said.

“It’s impressive,” Moody said. “I was spellbound.”

“Where’s your sense of humor?” Fodor asked. He turned towards Nightingale. “Brings back all the old memories, doesn’t it?”

“For sure,” Nightingale said.

“Be seeing you.” And Fodor was gone.

Moody looked across the room at Nightingale. “My stomach turned over, Frank. Did you find that funny?”

“More nostalgic,” Nightingale said.

Moody was getting up from behind his desk.

“Well, Frank, what do you think?”

“About what Eddie said?”

Moody nodded. “What he said about Chapman.”

“Yeah.” Nightingale looked thoughtful. “He could be right. You could be right.” I’m beginning to feel like Thomas looking at the wounds in Christ’s hands, he thought. He stared at Moody a moment. “Okay, I’ll go along with you for the time being, Doug. I’ll climb down off my fence and tell you that I think there’s an outside chance—outside, mind you—that Billy’s our man.” Why did it hurt to come out with it just like that? At least it brought a smile to Boy Wonder’s face.

“We’re getting warmer,” Moody said.

“Sure,” Nightingale said. He reached for his overcoat and struggled into it. “Times Square, then. Lovely Times Square on a beautiful night in late fall.” He sighed. Sighing’s what I do best these days, he thought.

Moody was pulling on his own overcoat. Nightingale stepped out into the corridor. Stanislavski appeared in a doorway, holding something in his hand. He stepped forward clumsily, like a huge disjointed string puppet. He held a bulky manila folder.

“Lieutenant?”

“It’s going to have to wait, Stan.”

“Lieutenant, this woman came in—”

“Put it on my desk. I’ll get to it when I come back, Stan.”

“But lieutenant—”

Nightingale reached the front door and turned to Moody, saying, “I hope you’re right, Doug. I really hope you are. It saves on the midnight oil. Three birds for the price of one, so to speak. Three eggs in one nifty basket.”

Moody held the front door open for him and he stepped out into the night, pausing on the sidewalk, staring up at the dark sky, beating his palms together for warmth.

“This way, if you’re correct, we can all get some sleep, Doug.”

“I remember sleep,” Moody said.

“I don’t,” Nightingale answered.

2.

The telephone. The telephone that brought so much misery into this room might now turn out to be the device that saves your life, saves Maddy’s too. It was an unpleasant irony. Harrison stood at the bedroom window, arms folded. Harrison. Harry Harrison. The voice came back to him with sharp clarity. What in the name of God have I done? What have I been a party to? Worse than a party, worse than some witless bystander, you didn’t stop when all the warning signs were plainly written in front of your face, you didn’t stop even then, when with only a slight amount of insight and less attachment to your beloved project you should have been able to read the violent graffiti on the wall. There was a dull pain lying in the center of his head. At least you feel pain, Harry; at least you’re alive to do that. Jamey doesn’t. Henry Falcon doesn’t. The nameless woman who was drowned in her own apartment—she certainly doesn’t.

He turned to stare at the telephone on the bedside table.

“What did the police say, Harry?” Madeleine asked. “I mean, did they give you a time when Nightingale would reach you or what?”

“The guy I talked with said Lieutenant Nightingale would get back to me as soon as he could be located.”

“Located? What the hell does that mean?”

“Friday night in Manhattan—who knows how many goddamn strange messages they get or how many calls they have to answer that just turn out to be wild?” He went towards Madeleine, put his arms around her, tried to calm her. It was another unpleasant irony, but all he really wanted to say to her were two simple words: I’m sorry. What good would an apology be now? He gazed at the answering machine. He’d pulled the plug from the wall and now the device was unlit, dead. It hadn’t been the easiest thing to do even now, even after so much catastrophe, but he felt a singular sense of relief mingled with his disappointment. It was as if these two sensations lay in some uneasy balance. You kill the project that might kill you. Something else will come along; something new will occur to you—it’s bound to.

“Harry, I can’t just sit here like this. I just can’t sit here and wait for the police to arrive. We have to get out of here.”

“Where would we go?”

“It doesn’t matter. Anything would be better than waiting. My apartment.”

“Maddy, if he knows our names then he knows our addresses too.”

“Then what should we do?”

Harrison didn’t answer. He looked out the window at the night sky. You feel it out there, throbbing through the darkness. You feel this unavoidable sense of someone stalking the streets, someone moving with the night winds, scurrying through alleys, skirting the backs of buildings, passing the dimly lit windows of the city. Someone who wants you and Madeleine.

“Harry, we can’t just sit here. I’ll go crazy.”

The telephone interrupted her.

The cops. The cops.

He picked up the receiver. It wasn’t the police.

“Mr. Apology?”

The voice. Harrison momentarily couldn’t think of anything to say.

“You’ve answered yourself. I can’t believe it, man. I’ve been longing to hear you in person. This is great.”

Harrison felt a dryness at the back of his throat. You’ve got the killer on the line and you don’t know what to say. Suddenly you’re struck dumb, silent.

“Is it the police, Harry?” Madeleine asked.

He shook his head.

“Hey, man, what’s the matter? Can’t talk? Something bothering you?”

“Listen—”

“Go right ahead. I’m all ears, man.”

“You sonofabitch—” He heard his own angry voice, his own failure to be reasonable, rational, to say anything that might mean something to this madman. What could he hope to say that was meaningful anyway with a guy like this? You couldn’t get through. He fell into silence, listening to the sound of the caller breathing.

“Hey, I didn’t exactly expect this kind of welcome, Apology. I feel we’ve known each other for such a long time that we’re real close friends.”

“Look,” he said. “You’re making a mistake if you think you’re scaring me. You’re making one big error. For a start, the cops are on to you. They’ll be here in a matter of seconds.”

“Yeah? I got news for you, Harry, old pal. I can get to you faster than any cop can. I can be there in a few seconds.”

Nearby. A phone booth nearby. He tried to remember where the nearest one was but he couldn’t bring it to mind. He felt a sudden touch of fear, the cold breath of something nameless and faceless on the back of his neck, a shiver going up his backbone like a series of tiny iron filings rushing to the heart of a magnet. Then he thought: Wait, pretty soon this Nightingale will call and then the streets will be alive with the noise of sirens, lights flashing, tires screaming, footsteps rushing through the building. Why did he suddenly wish he could run the movie of his recent life backwards to that point where he’d talked Madeleine into helping him put up the handbills, back to that point where he might have raised his hand like a traffic cop and said, No, this is pointless, this project doesn’t make any goddamn sense?

“You still there, Mr. Apology?”

“I’m still here.”

“How does it feel, Harry? How does it feel to know that this is the last night of your life?”

Harrison said nothing.

The caller went on, “I’ll miss you, you know that? I’ll miss our relationship. I think you’ve really been good for me, Harry. You gave me an outlet, somebody to talk to even if it was only a machine. But I’ve got to save myself, understand? I’ve got to look out for my own interests, and the more I keep talking to you, the more I start to feel real vulnerable.… You’re learning too much about the things I’ve done and I don’t think I care for that feeling. I’m sorry, Harry. I’m really sorry.…” Sudden laughter. Then a quick intake of breath. “No hard feelings, huh?”

No hard feelings. Harrison said, “It’s up to you. But like I said, the cops are going to be here in a minute—”

Click. Nothing. He was talking now to a dead line.

He slammed the receiver down. He moved towards Madeleine.

“It was him, wasn’t it?”

Harrison nodded.

“What did he say?”

“Nothing much.”

“What did he say, Harry?”

“He’s in the neighborhood somewhere.”

“And he’s coming here?”

“I guess that’s his intention.”

She turned her face this way and that, panicked, seeming to search for something that she could reach which would bring about a solution. Then she stopped and pressed her face against his shoulder. He wondered how he could even begin to console her. What was he supposed to say—that there was a good bolt on the front door? God damn it, he thought. It has to start here, right now; it has to begin with taking some kind of positive action, something that might lead them back to normality, back to the kind of life they’d been living before any of this started happening.

She drew her face away from his body. She was listening to something, her head tilted slightly to one side.

“Did you hear that?” she asked.

He shook his head. “I didn’t hear anything. What is it?”

“Just listen. Did you hear that?”

He shook his head. He hadn’t heard a thing.

“There’s somebody out there. I heard somebody move on the stairs, Harry.”

He turned his face towards the bedroom door. Waited. She was very tense against him, her breathing stilted, quick, as if her lungs were beginning to fail inside her.

“There,” she whispered.

He listened—what was it? Some strange scuffling sound, a foot scraping across a floor.

“You must hear that,” she said.

He nodded. He went out of the bedroom and across the floor of the loft and he searched around for something he knew he’d dropped several days ago—but where was he supposed to find it among all the junk that lay scattered underfoot? The noise came again, closer this time. He bent down, searched the debris, his fingers finally encountering the cold metallic feel of the object he wanted. It was the surgical scalpel he’d used on Albert—which seemed a long time back now, when he’d been somebody different. He stood upright and stared towards the door.

Again. The sound of somebody moving. Something, maybe the edge of a garment, touching a wall.

He glanced across the room at Madeleine. She was standing white-faced and silent, her eyes closed. Something tapped the door. Tapped.

He thought, I must open the door, get this over with—

But he didn’t move.

The tapping came again.

Open the door, Harry. Get it over with.

Then he heard a voice, a familiar voice. “Harry? You awake?”

Levy. What the hell was Levy doing here now?

He opened the door and Rube Levy, drunk, red-faced, beret askew, stumbled inside the room. “I was passing through the neighborhood, my friend—slumming, so to speak—and I thought ah-hah, let’s see if good old Harry is still awake. So here I am. What have you got to drink? And what’s the next episode in the ongoing saga of Apology?”

Harrison shut the door, bolted it. You could have chosen a better time, Rube, he thought. But timing was never exactly your strong point, was it?

“Madeleine too,” Levy said. He crossed the room like a doped tightrope walker and planted a wet kiss on Madeleine’s cheek, a noisy thing. “Did I miss the kiss-and-make-up episode? I wanted to see that one. Are we all pals again?”

“Yeah,” Harrison said.

“And the voice on the tape? Has it ceased?”

“No, Rube, it hasn’t ceased.”

“Thrilling,” Levy said. “What happens next?”

“For Christ’s sake, Rube. Sober up.” Madeleine moved away from him slightly.

“I’ll have you know it was pretty damn costly to attain this heightened consciousness.”

“Did you see anybody when you were coming in?” Harrison asked.

“Not a soul. The street’s empty. The building is moribund. Why? Was I supposed to see somebody?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Harrison said. It would be a monumental task to get any sense out of Levy.

“Ah,” Levy said. “Our homicidal caller, right? He has tracked you to your lair, Harry. Is that why there is so much tension here? We’ve gone beyond a game, Harry. Is that the situation?”

I don’t need this, Harrison thought. I don’t need a drunken Rube Levy on my hands.

“If he has your name and address, Harry, you aren’t safe here. And you won’t be safe at Madeleine’s place either.”

“We’ve already covered that, Rube.”

“Where’s the gendarmerie?”

“They’re coming.”

Levy tiptoed around Albert. His movements suggested some ludicrous dance. You expected him to be sowing a field, tossing seeds from a basket, first to the left and then to the right.

“My place,” Levy said. “Why didn’t you think of my place?”

“It didn’t occur to me.”

“You’d be safe there, at least until this thing blows over.”

Blows over, Harrison thought. And when will that be?

“How do we get there?” Madeleine asked.

“Let me devise a plan,” Levy said. “Permit me to offer you a course of salvation.”

“You’re slurring your words, Rube,” Madeleine said.

“Saviors do not have to be perfect,” Levy said. “I’ll go out and get a cab. I’ll have it stop straight outside the front door. You, Harry, will be strategically positioned in the window to see the cab.… When it gets here, you come down those stairs as fast as you can. Into the cah—zoom!”

Harrison looked at Madeleine; her expression was one of uncertainty.

“What do you think, Maddy?”

“I don’t know.”

“What the hell are friends for?” Levy asked. “I am not Apology. I am perfectly safe.”

Harrison didn’t like it: Levy was too drunk to understand any danger. He watched Rube stumble across the room. He clutched a wall for support, then smiled in an embarrassed way.

“Motor functions operating below normal,” he said. “The brain, however, is still alert. There are some communications difficulties, in the sense that certain messages relayed from head to limbs seem to go through channels that are off the air. I’m okay. Generally speaking.” And he went to the door, trying to walk upright, his expression concentrated. He stopped and looked at Harrison. “I like this, Harry. Don’t you understand I like it? I didn’t expect to be cast in the role of hero, and now that I am—shit, I really like it.”

“Rube, I’m not sure …”

“I’ll go get us a cab.” Levy turned and stared across the room at Madeleine. “Do you like parrots, Maddy? I’ve got three of them. You’ll find them cute.”

Madeleine smiled weakly.

Levy straightened his beret and went out. Harrison locked the door. There was an awful silence in the loft, a stillness, deep and dry and tense. Harrison looked at Madeleine. She was staring at the locked door.

“We shouldn’t have let him do this.”

“How could I have stopped him?” Harrison sat down on the floor, cross-legged. “I make things. That’s all I do. I paint canvases sometimes. I make figures like Albert there. It’s all I know, Madeleine. Then something else enters your life, something that involves the world out there, and you realize, Jesus Christ, you’re not very well equipped to deal with it. I’m used to peace.” He shut his eyes. He heard Madeleine come across the floor, felt her hand touch the top of his head; he reached up and put his hands around her waist and laid his head against her thighs. You could forget everything this way.

“I love you, Harry,” she said, her voice a whisper.

He raised his face, looking up at her. He was thinking about love—was that what it came down to in the end? Was love the collective label for anxiety, concern, caring, for the capacity to find in someone else the cool calm center of the hurricane? If that were the case, then he loved her profoundly. He stood up, held Madeleine close, kissed her forehead, ran the tips of his fingers over her body, and he thought: You want her. At the most impossible time you want her. He turned away, dropping his hands, and went to the window. He looked down into the street. Nothing. Nobody moving. Levy must have already left the building. He stared for a moment.

“Do you see him?” Madeleine asked.

“Not yet.”

“Maybe he’s having trouble finding a cab.”

“Maybe.” Something wrong, something out of place, but what?

“I don’t like it, Harry. I don’t like the idea of going out there.”

“It doesn’t exactly thrill me either.”

“Do you think you should call the police again?”

Just as she said this the telephone was ringing. Out of habit, Harrison waited for the answering machine to come on and take the call, but when the phone kept ringing he remembered he’d jerked the plug out of the wall.

“Maybe that’s Nightingale now,” Madeleine said.

“I hope.” Harrison went into the bedroom. He stared at the telephone. This reluctance to pick it up—what was it? What the hell did he expect to hear? He reached out, raised the receiver, didn’t lift it to his face immediately. I don’t want to hear, he thought.

He put it to his ear, but didn’t say anything.

Harrison sat down on the edge of the bed. Madeleine was watching him from the doorway of the bedroom.

“I just wanted to leave a message, man.…”

Silence.

Harrison looked at Madeleine. Something terrible was coming. He could feel it; he could feel the air of the bedroom become hot, humid, stuffy, as if the atmosphere were suddenly charged with particles of electricity. He couldn’t take the voice, he couldn’t stand to hear it anymore.

“Who’s that breathing? I know it can’t be you, Apology.… You just tried to leave the building, didn’t you? This message is for the lovely lady anyhow.… I want her next, that’s all.”

Just tried to leave the building.

What what—what did that mean—

“This is what you call my last message and I’m just sorry you won’t be around to hear it, man … but that’s what your life was all about, right? Being sorry? So I’m saying I’m sorry. Sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry—

The line was dead.

Harrison thought quickly. Levy was the one who had tried to leave the building, Levy was the one who’d been mistaken for me—

Jesus Christ.

No, it couldn’t happen that way. Nothing could happen like that—

Nothing could have happened to Rube—

It did, whatever it was, it did and it was intended to be you and some terrible mistake had been made—

Think quickly, keep thinking.

The guy had been calling from outside, where was the nearest phone booth, where exactly, why can’t I remember it, why does it escape me, I saw one one time—what, a block away, two blocks, it doesn’t come back clearly now, it was pretty damn close, but maybe there was time to get out of here before the guy could make it back—

He grabbed Madeleine quickly by the wrist and, saying nothing, pulled her towards the door, unlocked it, drew her hastily down the dark stairs, fast, faster, trying hard to avoid what he knew he was going to find on the way out.

Madeleine screamed. A short piercing sound. Then she was slumping against Harrison.

I could have stopped him.

I could have said no to his plan of salvation—

Why did I let him step out into the dark like that?

Rube lay facedown. His beret was missing, his jacket was slashed and slashed again; there were black bloodstains all over him, his hair, his twisted hands, his pants; dark bloodstains all over the cracked tiles.

It was supposed to be me. It was meant to be me lying there.

He dragged Madeleine towards the doorway.

A chance. If the lunatic was in the nearest phone booth, then there were some precious seconds left to them. A thin tightrope chance. A balancing act. He moaned, thinking of Levy, kicked the front door open with his foot, and then they were moving fast along the empty sidewalk.

3.

It was another world, a galaxy alien to him, a large long room that might have been slotted into place, just as it was, by hovering starship from quite another planet. Lights flashed, machines whined, beeped, talked back at you; kids stood hunched and transfigured over control panels and viewing screens. Even Moody hadn’t been able to resist an urge to shove a quarter inside something called Centipede, which apparently involved the endless massacre of a chain of electronic bugs. Nightingale felt a pressure inside his head, something pushing against the bones of his skull. He stared at his partner. He realized he had never quite felt so old before, so out of touch. These games, he thought, what the fuck do they mean? He stood close to Moody, who was zapping centipedes out of existence; other shapes appeared, spiders, things resembling mushrooms. The Boy Wonder was adept obviously, an initiate who understood the mechanics of what he was doing. Hundreds of crawling bugs slid down the screen. I don’t know where I am, Nightingale thought. It doesn’t make sense. A whole other culture had sprung up seemingly overnight, an awesome revolution had taken place without him understanding what was going on. He had a vision of an America whose dream was that of acquiring sufficient quantities of quarters so that electronic centipedes, alien spaceships, and great meteors might be blitzed forever out of existence. There were mazes, robots, electronic firebirds, the gunsights of tanks, racing cars—all accompanied by robotic sound effects that suggested a discordant symphony rattled off on a Moog by a madman. The atmosphere, the frenzy, the strangeness of it, all made him feel lightheaded. He looked the length of the arcade. One time, when he’d been a kid, this might have been the kind of shooting gallery where passing macho types tried to impress their girl friends. What the hell is it now—hundreds of kids forever stuffing coins into slots and manipulating weird controls. The place was dense with smoke, more tobacco than reefer; the air was heavy with scents, sweat, colognes, the sounds of kids groaning when their PacMan figure got himself haplessly trapped in a corner and was munched into nothing. Nightingale moved closer to Moody, in the manner of someone who doesn’t want to stray too far from his guide in totally foreign territory. I don’t speak this language, he thought.

Moody had given up his struggle against the bugs. He slapped the side of the machine in a gesture of defeat. Nightingale glanced at his partner’s score: It was astronomical.

“I remember pinball, Doug. I remember the time when pinball was like a goddamn fever.”

“The same difference,” Moody said.

“Yeah? I don’t get that feeling.”

“You get used to it, Frank,” Moody said. “Little kids do best on these machines. They’re used to it. A pinball machine’s a fossil to them. They wouldn’t be seen dead working the flippers.”

Nightingale moved away from the centipedes. Somehow it didn’t matter that Moody’s game was over, because the screen was still alive with the critters. He looked across the faces of the kids. How would you ever find anybody in this maze?

“You see anybody who looks like our man?” he asked.

Moody seemed embarrassed by something. He said, “I’ve never felt so much like a cop in my life, Frank. It’s as if these kids can smell you out. You know what I mean?”

Nightingale nodded. So many faces. So many different faces. He pushed through the throng to the back, where there was a snackbar. Sweating, he asked the acne’d girl behind the counter for a Coke. She moved around as if she had just been lobotomized.

“Want something to drink, Doug?”

Moody shook his head. He slipped up onto a stool and swiveled around so he could watch the entrance. Nightingale popped the top of his Coke can and poured it into a paper cup. It was sweet and dreadful. But it was cold and wet. He turned around, half leaning against the counter, and looked along the lines of machines. BATTLE STAR. SPACE CASTLE. GALAXIA. MS. PACMAN. SPIDER LADY. A whole exotic compendium.

“You see anybody like Sylvester?” he asked.

“Not yet,” Moody said. He was gazing at one of Eddie Fodor’s photographs, which he held concealed in his hand like a magician’s card. “I’m not sure I’d know anyhow.”

Nightingale smoked a cigarette and coughed. You need a mask in here, he thought. You need something to keep the electronic virus at bay. You catch the space-age disease and it gets out of control and you stand drooling at those machines that make change for a buck. Moody moved away from the counter and vanished in the thicket of devices. Alone, Nightingale felt a slight panic. What if Moody disappeared off the face of the earth, sucked into one of those machines? Could you ever find your way out of here again? Moody emerged again, approaching Nightingale sideways as he brushed through the throng of bodies.

“Well?” Nightingale asked.

“It’s hard to say, Frank. But there’s a guy over there who might be the guy in this photograph. You want to take a look?”

“Sure.” Nightingale crumpled his paper cup and followed his partner into the madness.

“I’m not saying it’s the same one. It could be, that’s all. Those peasants in Narcotics ought to invest in some good new camera equipment. What do they use, Frank? Box Brownies?”

Nightingale pushed through. Obstinate kids, he thought. They wouldn’t budge for you. They just wouldn’t step aside, they were so goddamn hypnotized by their games. Moody stopped somewhere ahead, nodding slightly. Nightingale looked in the direction of his partner’s gesture—a slim young guy with a full-length black overcoat, boots with furry tops, a heavy beard, a beret with some kind of badge pinned on it. The photograph, he thought. How could you be sure of this guy? He went closer while Moody moved around the side of the Space Invaders game the guy was playing. It was always an edgy moment coming up on somebody like this, because if there was cocaine involved then there was a pretty fair chance the guy was paranoid or leaning in that direction—which meant he’d want to split before you had a chance to ask him questions. The casual approach, Nightingale thought. Hey, I was just passing, thought I’d drop in and ask you about one of your acquaintances, what do you think? He stopped just behind the guy. He put out his hand and laid it flat against the screen of the game, just as Moody’s face appeared around the side of the machine. The guy stopped playing at once and stepped back as if he expected to be frisked. He isn’t worried about losing his quarter, Nightingale thought.

“My friend,” Nightingale said.

The guy stroked his beard, looked as if he were considering the chances of slipping away quickly, then became aware of Moody.

“I don’t know you,” he said to Nightingale.

“You’re about to.”

“What’s this anyhow? Like a police state, man? Hey, I got rights and one of them rights says it’s a free country and a guy can go around playing Space Invaders if he likes.”

“I read that in the Constitution,” Moody said. “The Space Invaders Amendment, right?”

“Funny mother,” the guy said.

Nightingale put one hand on the young man’s shoulder. “Listen, this is going to be painless, my friend. If you want to cooperate with me and my partner here, you can go home smiling at your good luck. You understand me? I don’t want a scene and I don’t want to drag you down for interrogation, okay? A nice little talk is all.”

“Is this a bust?”

“Now why would we be busting you, Sylvester?”

“How do you know my name?”

“Sylvester Garincha,” Moody said. “How’s business these days?”

“What business, man?”

“The deviated septum scam,” Moody said.

“That’s double dutch, guy.”

“What goes up your nose and clogs your mucous membranes?” Nightingale said.

“Is this like a fucking riddle?”

“Look, Sylvester, there’s a whole lot of people in here and I want to play this all as quiet as I can, okay?” Nightingale tightened his grip on the guy’s shoulder. It was like turning a screw ever so slightly. “Now we’ll all take a walk outside, okay. You, me, and my friend here. We’ll go out quietly. No guns, nothing stupid like that. We’ll hit the sidewalk and we’ll talk a few minutes, then when I’m happy with what you’ve got to say, and Moody here is happy with it too, well, shit, you’re as free as the Constitution says you got a right to be. Do we understand each other, Sylvester?”

“I dig, but I still don’t get this.”

“Just walk outside. We’re right behind you.”

“Listen, I’m clean, man—”

“Keep going, Sylvester.”

And then they were outside, standing at the edge of the sidewalk. Nightingale looked at the young man’s face: it was always the same expression, it never changed, and it looked as if he’d never been able to feel easy with it somehow. The sudden tightening of skin, the draining of blood, the adrenalinized light of fear in the eyes.

“Okay, Sylvester. You probably think I’m going to ask you what you got in your pockets, right?”

“I told you, man, I am A-one clean. I am cleaner than a nun’s twat. I swear to God.”

Moody said, “The deal is, we ask you a question. You answer it. If you answer it right, we don’t look in your pockets. Think of it like a TV game show. The big prize for you is no hassle.”

“You don’t search me?” Sylvester looked perplexed. “Shit, I don’t know why you’d want to search me anyhow.”

“Don’t push your already feeble luck, Sylvester,” Moody said.

“Yeah. You said something about a question. So what is it?”

“We badly need to know about a guy called Chapman,” Nightingale said. “Billy Chapman.”

Sylvester was silent. You could see it just beneath his eyes, lurking just below his expression—the momentary confusion, the dilemma, the struggle inside himself that could only be resolved in one way: He’d sign Billy Chapman over and all the code of the street could go fuck itself and he’d go home and sleep easy. It was fragile, but Nightingale knew what the outcome of this would be.

The first predictable parry. Sylvester said, “I don’t know anybody with that name.”

Nightingale looked at Moody. “Okay, Doug. Frisk this fucker.”

“Frisk me?”

“Yeah, frisk,” Moody said. “This is the best part of my job, Sylvester. I go through guys’ pockets and I find all kinds of weird things, and sometimes what I find is enough to send some poor reprobate up the river for years and years and years.” Moody stuck his hand inside Sylvester’s coat pocket.

“Hey, hold it, hold it, man. I didn’t quite catch the guy’s name. What was it?”

Moody’s hand paused in the pocket for dramatic effect.

“Billy Chapman.”

“Yeah, I think something’s coming across, man. Billy Chapman, that’s what you said?”

“Frisk him, Doug—”

“Wait, I think I know where he lives. I think I remember. Yeah, it’s coming back to me.” Sylvester’s voice rose. He fell silent only when Moody took his hand out of his coat pocket.

“Is it far?” Nightingale asked.

“Uh-uh.”

“Why don’t you earn your good citizenship badge and walk us there, Sylvester?”

“Sure thing.”

“And relax, huh? Take it easy.”

Sylvester started to move, like he was very anxious to get the thing over with and even more concerned about being seen in the company of the heat.

Nightingale said, “You know, Doug, it’s good to see an upright young man like Sylvester going out of his way like this to help the police. It warms my heart.”

“Astounding,” Moody said. “You read so many bad things about the civic responsibility of today’s youth, and now somebody like Sylvester comes along and he’s only too happy to help.”

“My faith is uplifted,” Nightingale said. “I won’t forget you for this, Sylvester.”

Sylvester looked at Nightingale. “Do me a favor and try real hard, will you?”

4.

Billy Chapman was dreaming. In this dream he could see himself suspended inside a big vat of clear liquid, a preservative of some kind. At first the sensation was pleasant but then it dawned on him that he was there to be sold, like a piece of pickled meat. It wouldn’t have been so bad except for the fact that he wasn’t going to be sold in one chunk, but in little hacked-off pieces. Some guy in a white uniform was sharpening a knife. Billy forced himself awake at that point and sat up in bed, rubbing his eyes and looking around his room, trying to remember where the hooker had gone, trying to remember if there had ever been a hooker there in the first place.… Get it straight, Billy, he told himself. You remember a chick sitting on the bed, then you remember running out of blow, the little SnoSeal package being empty—then you had this urge to go find Sylvester, so you went out into the streets when it was still light but you couldn’t find your man at his usual haunt. You came back here and the chick was gone and something happened to you then: You just collapsed inwards, your eyelids became heavy, you went out like the proverbial light. He put his bare feet on the floor. He yawned and stretched his arms, then walked over to the refrigerator and pulled it open. There was one can of beer, which he took out and opened and slugged quickly. It tasted good, cold, clear. What time of day was it anyhow? What day was it, period? He went to the window and opened the drape a little way. It was dark outside. Dark and depressing. He searched his pockets. He found a couple of bucks but not enough for what he needed to pull him nicely through the night ahead. You got to go out there again, Billyboy. A dim prospect. He moved to the table and looked at the SnoSeal paper, which he picked up and licked, but then recalled he’d done that before, maybe even while the chick was still here.

How much did I pay her? he wondered.

Why did I pay her anyhow, when she hadn’t done anything?

He slumped into a chair at the table and lowered his head. There wasn’t even a hint of residue lying around. The package was empty, the mirror unclouded, the syringes all used up.

He rose, walked back to the window. He heard slight noises, but then he was always hearing them. He poked a finger inside his ear and jiggled it around. You’re always imagining someone outside the door, Billy. Always dreaming that somebody is going to be peering at you through slight cracks and openings and holes in the wood. He laughed.

There it was again.

It was a definite sound from the hall.

He couldn’t identify it, though. A kind of shuffling. In this pit, though, all kinds of creeps came and went at all kinds of hours.

He slipped his switchblade knife from his pocket just the same. He moved it from one hand to the other, then sat on the bed, crouching like he was ready to leap if anything should happen. He stared hard at the door. He heard something light brush against it from the outside. I’m ready, fucker, he thought. Come in here for the surprise of your life.

Then he thought maybe it was Sylvester come to do business. For a moment there was a warm glow inside his head like that created by a feeble light bulb. Wouldn’t that be just wonderful? Then he knew he was fooling himself. Sylvester knew he didn’t have any cash. Those fuckers could always smell money when you had it. He stared at the door. It wasn’t Sylvester, for sure.

The handle turned, then moved slowly back in place.

He got up from the bed. There was a clicking noise as the blade of his knife sprung from the handle. With this little knife, he thought, you could just disembowel anybody who happened in through the door. A drunken thief, or some guy getting his room confused.

The handle twisted again.

Then, before it could really register, before he could clear his senses, the door swung wildly back on its hinges and fell crashing into the room. It shouldn’t be doing that, he thought. It shouldn’t be toppling back like that and there shouldn’t be two guys coming inside the room and one of them shouldn’t be carrying no gun.

Billy Chapman turned and headed for the window, then remembered there was a killing drop to the street below. So he swung around and held his knife out and stared at the two guys. One was big and plump, the other—the one with the pistol—was young and pretty determined-looking.

“Billy, you ought to put the knife down,” the fat one said.

“Make me,” Billy Chapman said. He swung the knife in an arc and the guy with the gun backed up a little. Why doesn’t he shoot me?

“Give me the knife and keep cool, Billy. We only want to ask you some questions. No big deal.”

Billy Chapman lunged again. This time the blade sliced through the material of the fat guy’s coat and he clutched his arm, moaned, plopped down on the bed as if he couldn’t believe he’d been cut. There was a big patch of blood spreading through the coat.

Before Billy Chapman could think about what he’d done, the gun in the young guy’s hand went off. The roar filled the room like there was an electric storm slashing across the ceiling. At first there wasn’t any pain but then he felt a sharp twinge at a point in his body he couldn’t quite locate. He slumped to the floor, holding himself like he was trying to find the wound and seal it with the palms of his hands.

In a dreamy way he heard the fat guy say, “Holy fuck.”

Then he was sliding across the floor, crawling, leaving stains of blood in his trail. He felt like a fat snail suddenly. Now he knew the pain was located in his shoulder, someplace near his neck.

“You fucking shot me,” he said. “You fucking shot me, you bastard.”

The young guy was bending over him now, helping him to sit up. He was saying something about how it was only a flesh wound. A flesh wound didn’t have the goddamn right to hurt this bad.

“I’m dying,” Billy said.

“You can’t die before we’ve asked you some simple questions, Billy,” the young guy said. “Linger awhile.”

5.

The city went past in an unreal way, a light show suspended in darkness, a display of laser beams cutting through the night, electrified castles vanishing into the sky. Harrison shut his eyes but that didn’t help dispel his sense of unreality—what he saw trapped under his lids was Reuben Levy lying in the hallway, Reuben’s blood making spiraling stains on chipped tiles. He held Madeleine’s hand; she’d gone into silence, retreated, shocked. He stroked her knuckles, touched her hair back from her face, put his arm around her shoulder. There were tears on her cheeks and her lips trembled; all the blood had gone from her face. He felt helpless, guilty, feeble. Levy is dead, that poor sad bastard is dead, and because of what? Because of my stupid endeavor, my absurd notions? For something so senseless he walked down a flight of stairs and took his last drunken steps towards a door, a street, the idea of a cab, a trip to safety. He laid his head against Madeleine’s shoulder. She might have been carved out of clay—there was no response, nothing. A trip to safety.

Harrison turned his face and watched the street go past in its own blurry slipstream from the window of the cab. I can’t tell her, he thought. I can’t tell her I looked back when we got inside this cab and I saw someone moving along the sidewalk towards us quickly, a man, perhaps the man who killed Levy, perhaps the same one. A thin figure in a windbreaker and jeans and a cropped hairstyle. I can’t tell her anything now. He unfolded his hands and looked into the palms as if he expected to see blood there. Levy’s blood. The blood of all the others. Okay—maybe there had been times when Rube had been ridiculous and somehow sad, as if despite his wealth he couldn’t ever erect a barrier against his own basic sense of futility, but nobody deserved to die like that. He’d been your oldest friend, Harry. Your oldest, most loyal friend.

He glanced through the window again; his heart was beating rapidly. The night was filled with a sense of loss. It hung out there in the lights, lay in the dark hollows, muffled, shadowy, but always present.

40th Street went past.

“Where is the police station, Maddy?” he asked.

Maddy stared through the window. When she spoke she did so quickly, as if her words were forming faster than her brain could dictate. “I don’t remember.… It was 40th Street and Sixth Avenue.… No, it was Forty-second Street.… Christ, I don’t remember, Harry.”

Harrison leaned forward and touched the cabbie on the shoulder. His ID card said his name was Salvatore Jimenez. “Say, where’s the police station? There’s one pretty close to here, but I don’t remember the exact street.” It seemed the obvious place to go now, the only place, the only possible sanctuary.

The cabbie stopped the vehicle, drawing onto the sidewalk. He turned around and looked puzzled. “Please stay-shun?”

Oh, Christ, terrific—a guy who can hardly talk English. Harrison repeated himself slowly. “Po-lice station.”

“Ah,” the cabbie said. He was a small man with a thick moustache that overhung his upper lip like the fringe of some old-fashioned lampshade. Pancho Villa on four wheels. He slipped the cab away from the sidewalk and turned it down a side street. Harrison tried to read the street numbers. Where were they going now? 39th Street. 38th.

He turned to Madeleine. “Does any of this look familiar?”

“I … I’m not sure.… I can’t remember except it was Fortieth Street.… Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe I’m mistaken. It might have been Fiftieth.… Harry, I don’t remember now.”

Harrison tapped the cabbie again. “Listen, I think you need to head uptown. Savvy? You turn around and go back. Okay?” He made a gesture with his hand. Salvatore Jimenez stopped the cab again and all around there was the noise of traffic slamming to sudden halts, then the air was filled with the hysteria of horns.

“Go back?” the cabbie asked. But it was clear he wasn’t sure what Harrison intended.

“Yeah. See how I point my finger? That way. Okay? You get it?”

“Ahhhh. Sure zing.” Oblivious of traffic, the cabbie swung the vehicle in an arc. 40th Street went past again. 42nd. 44th.

“Maddy, look, does any of this seem familiar?”

She turned her face and looked out. “I don’t know.”

Harrison sat back a moment. The cab driver was muttering in Spanish. What the hell was the guy going on about? He sounded like he was irritated by the fact that neither of his passengers could give him directions. Harrison looked through the window. 50th Street. 51st. 52nd.

“Maddy, is it around here somewhere?”

She didn’t even look this time. It was as if she were resigned to being lost, directionless. He took her hand in his own, rubbed the knuckles gently; her flesh was ice. Then he gazed back into the streets. Storefronts, the lights of restaurants, bars, art galleries. The cab turned now, headed right. Far ahead, beyond the glare of lights, was a vast pitch of black sky over Central Park. It looked dismal.

And then suddenly Maddy was animated, leaning forward, telling the driver to stop. Harrison wondered why, wondered where they were—then when he looked out he realized where she’d wanted the cab to stop.

“Maddy, why here?”

“Because we’ll be safe! We’ll be safe here. And there’s a telephone.”

It made sense, Harrison thought. The cab driver was still talking rapidly to himself, like a man whose demons always presented themselves in the form of ignorant Caucasians. Harrison looked at the meter, found some crumpled bills, shoved them into the cabbie’s hand, and then he opened the door and helped Madeleine onto the sidewalk. He stared at the overhead sign, the oval with the letters BRYANT BERGER GALLERY. Sure, why not? They could call the cops from here. Madeleine was rushing ahead of him, afraid of the streets and the dark, fumbling in her pockets for a keychain. He looked at the black windows, the shapes beyond which were mere shadowy outlines. Then he heard Madeleine turn the key in the lock and there was the sound of a small bell ringing overhead. They stepped inside and Harrison shut the door, seeing the cab slip away.

“Nobody’s going to look for us here,” Maddy said. “There’s a telephone in the office.”

He heard her stumble against something and she cursed quietly. The office, where was the office, how could you find it without switching on lights? He followed her footsteps across the gallery; there was the sound of a door squeaking open and then he saw her switch on a pale lamp, which illuminated a desk, a tiny room. A telephone gleamed beneath the lamp. There were a few prints on the walls, mostly the work of the Dutch masters. He stepped towards the desk, picked up the receiver, and was about to dial when he noticed something in the rug—something that was incongruous in this place: a single black leather shoe with laces. An expensive lightweight shoe. He picked it up and turned it over in his hand.

“It’s Berger’s,” she said. “I recognize it.”

“You suppose he was dressing in a hurry or something?” One shoe. When things came in pairs it was always odd to see them singly—as if they had shed their purpose or assumed a new and surreal one.

Madeleine ignored the question. “Make the call, Harry.”

He dropped the shoe back on the rug, dialed the operator, asked to be connected to the police. There were clicks and buzzes, mysterious sounds like electronic birds panicked inside an electronic jungle; he wondered if he could ever feel the same way about telephones, if he could ever come to think of them again as simple utilitarian objects. A man’s voice came on the line. Harry asked to talk with Lieutenant Nightingale. He was told—after a lengthy pause—that the lieutenant was out. Out again, he thought. Was the guy ever in his office?

“My name is Harrison,” he said. “It’s very important he get in touch with me. I’m at the Bryant Berger Gallery at Forty-nine West Fifty-seventh Street with Madeleine Demarest. Have you got that? Tell him I want to report a murder, okay? It’s urgent.” He put the receiver down, drew a hand across his face, then looked at Madeleine who was leaning against the wall, her body limp, arms hanging.

He said, “It shouldn’t take long. They should get here pretty soon.” He looked past her a moment at the small window set in the wall. A shadow moved there, then swung out of sight as if it were the limb of a tree or a passing cat or maybe a bum scrounging through trash. It didn’t matter. He moved towards Madeleine and embraced her, tried to relax her tight muscles with his fingertips. She seemed to be made out of marble, cold stone. He looked beyond her shoulder at the shoe lying on the rug. Why did it bother him? You just don’t kick off one shoe if you’re changing your clothes, do you? It didn’t make any sense. What the hell.

He kissed Madeleine lightly on the cheek.

You don’t know how yet, Harry, but you’ll find a way to go back to the beginning, to turn back clocks, and start things all over again with her. Restore her, soothe her memory, love her. Make love heal the wounds. Make it work.

He closed his eyes briefly, opened them, gazed through the office door at the dark gallery beyond. The rainbow canvases appeared, in shadow, to have been gouged out of the walls. Sinister in some way, like a huge destructive hand had just scoured the surfaces of the walls, breaking, tearing.

A spooky dark gallery.

A vast expanse of unlit space.

He drew Madeleine towards him again. “I love you, Maddy,” he said.

She nodded her head slightly.

“Trust me,” he said. Start trusting me all over again. “It’s going to be okay.”

You don’t know that.

You can’t say something like that.

But you have to.

6.

It was close to midnight. The interview room smelled bad, like a hundred drunks had inhaled and exhaled there overnight, overwhelming the smell of disinfectant. Nightingale looked at the big white bandage on his arm, remembering the handsome nurse who’d applied it. Jean Maxymuk, her little ID badge had said. What the hell kind of name was Maxymuk? For a time, bewildered by the pain, he’d tried to work up the guts to ask her for a date, but he’d been embarrassed by the shape of his body as he’d sat on the bench and watched her clean the wound and apply the bandage. She wouldn’t accept, he’d told himself, but now he felt the abyss of a missed opportunity. He admired the bandage, which was neat and wholesome. But there was a dull throbbing pain just under it. Presumably it was nothing to what Billy Chapman felt, a small consolation. He looked across the interview room at Moody. Quick-draw Doug, he thought. How could he have fired off a shot like that? He wasn’t exactly a trigger-happy kind of guy. Call it nerves, inexperience. Put it down to that. Or something else, Nightingale thought—a hatred rooted in the same old grudge, the same old past humiliation. It could go that deep. It could quite easily go very deep, and over the years it would produce, by a process of mental chemistry, a cesspool of loathing. He wondered if Moody dreamed about Chapman, if William A. Chapman sauntered into his nightmares, smirking, flipping the finger, accusing Moody of being a failure. And now Billy Chapman sat at the head of the table with a bandage visible beneath the shoulder of his shirt. He had this habit of scraping his feet on the floor, around and around in a grating manner.

Moody said, “We’ve got you dead to rights, Billy. We’ve got your prints all over your sister’s apartment. How can you sit there and tell us they aren’t your prints, huh? No two people, Billy, in all this wide world, are known to have the same prints. Do you understand that?”

There was an expression on Moody’s face that Nightingale didn’t like to see. The jaw was very tight, the eyes filled with contempt, the mouth narrow, as if the lips had disappeared from the face entirely. Oh, boy, it goes real deep inside you, doesn’t it? Nightingale felt a twinge of pain.

“It’s a coincidence,” Chapman said.

Moody snickered. “Some coincidence, Billy. Why did you kill her?”

“Who says I killed her?”

“The hard evidence, Billy. You can’t just slide under the hard facts, okay? You could go hire F. Lee Bailey and maybe he’d manage manslaughter. That’s how fucked your situation is, understand?”

A space baby, Nightingale thought. A severe case of being out of touch with the concept known commonly as reality. Where does he hang his brain at night? he wondered. He studied Chapman’s ferrety face for a while, trying to ignore the pain in his arm. It was cocaine; it was the drug that had raddled his thought processes. Nightingale had seen hardcore coke freaks in his time and they had this in common: They were not entirely of this world. They were out there like so much hardware from Houston.

Chapman said, “I haven’t seen my sister in a long time.”

Moody glanced at Nightingale, raising his eyebrows. “The last time you saw your sister, Billy, was the day you killed her.” Moody got up and, like a courtroom shyster, paced around, his shoulders slightly hunched. “I mean killing your sister is a pretty bad thing to do, Billy. There are laws against the taking of life, okay? There isn’t a state in the Union where murder is acceptable. So killing Camilla wasn’t the wisest thing you could come up with. But fucking her as she lay dead? Really, Billy. A taboo situation.”

Nightingale felt uncomfortable. This was the bit he couldn’t take. He squirmed in his chair. He felt content to let Moody do all the talking because somewhere inside he knew there was a slow-burning anger he didn’t want to let out.

“I never killed her. I never fucked her.”

“What is it with you, Billy? You’re flying in the face of the evidence. Let me see if I can remind you of certain events. First you strangle her. Bare hands no less. Then she falls down in a total state of death and you whip down your pants. You don’t take them off entirely, just enough to get your pecker out, which is a hard mother by this time, because you’re all hot and bothered by your sister’s thighs, so you slide out your piece and you stick it inside her. Murder, necrophilia. I’d like to make more of the incest factor, but the truth is, Billy, I am pretty damn disgusted with you.”

Nightingale lit a cigarette. He noticed Chapman’s hands shaking.

“Say, is there a cold beer around here?” Chapman asked.

Nightingale leaned forward. “Room service is out for the night. What do you think this is, the fucking Hilton?”

Chapman scraped his feet around. Moody stood directly behind his chair, his hands on Chapman’s shoulders. A cold beer, Nightingale thought. Jesus Christ, some guys had gall. Maybe it hadn’t registered with Billy, maybe he didn’t think this was a cop shop and he was in hot water up to his buttocks. He shut his eyes: Moody’s graphic description had made his stomach turn.

Now Moody was pacing again. He looked over at Nightingale a moment, then stopped right in front of Billy Chapman. He was holding a photograph up in Chapman’s face.

“You know this face, Billy?”

“I ain’t seen him before in my life, man.”

“Look close,” Moody said. “This guy was found strangled too, Billy. Henry Falcon a.k.a. Dick Bird. You ever see him? You know anything about him?”

“I told you, man.”

Nightingale looked at his younger partner. Maybe Billy Chapman did kill Henry Falcon—maybe he killed hundreds of people all over the country—just the same, the venom in Moody’s attitude showed a marked lack of control and discipline. It was like young Moody was walking a razor’s edge, something in his mind breaking. You knock on too many doors and climb too many flights of stairs and keep hours that would jaundice almost anybody in the world, you drag your ass along too many grubby back alleys, inhale too much stale smoke, it’s bound to catch up to you, break out someplace, manifest itself in your language and the way you behaved—but this wasn’t any excuse for the way Moody looked, the unadulterated hatred on his face.

Billy Chapman said, “I don’t know no Henry Falcon, Christ.”

Nightingale got up. He took Moody aside. “You really think so, Doug? You really think you can get him to break on this Falcon thing?”

“It’s worth a shot.”

“You really think so, huh?” Nightingale sighed. He wished it could be done, wished Billy Chapman could be handed the blame for Falcon. What a nifty symmetrical world.

“Look, we got two stranglings. We got the sex act, the perverted sex thing.” The Boy Wonder looked adamant, stern. Nightingale felt weak and had to sit down again. He watched Moody saunter back towards Billy Chapman.

Then it happened. It happened so suddenly that Nightingale barely had time to see it and for a moment he wondered if he had misinterpreted the situation, been deceived by the bad light and the quick movement of Moody’s body—but then he noticed Billy Chapman was bleeding from the side of his head, doubled over, moaning, racked with pain. Holy shit, holy shit, Billy kept saying over and over. Nightingale rose, saw the gun in Moody’s hand, saw that Moody held it by the barrel. Jesus, he’d just pistol-whipped Chapman. Just like that. Out of nowhere. What the hell was it? Did he want Billy Chapman dead?

“Doug, for fuck’s sake! What are you trying to do?”

Moody ran one hand over his forehead. He looked dismayed, as if he were bothered by his own abrupt act, couldn’t explain it. “I don’t know. I don’t know what got into me. I guess I just looked at his fucking face and I saw him leering at me—I let go, Frank. I just lost it. I’m sorry.”

“Take it easy, will you? You want to take a break?”

Moody shook his head. “I’m okay.”

Billy Chapman was still moaning. Nightingale handed him a handkerchief, which he held to his wound. “Hey, you know they call this police brutality. Wait until my lawyer hears.… Jeez, what is it with you guys?”

“Shut up, Billy,” Moody said. “It was an accident. My hand slipped.”

“Yeah, sure,” Chapman said.

Moody circled Chapman’s chair. Nightingale sat down again. He was shaking. It had gone deeper inside Moody than he’d ever suspected. The guy needs a vacation. He needs to get away from the city, the job. A blow like that could kill a guy. Nightingale lit a cigarette and coughed as if his lungs were two burnt-out salmon fidgeting in his chest. He started to think about Sarah, about Fulton, about retiring and going up there and getting the cracks in his life Scotch-taped. Just to hold her, just to sleep with her again—maybe you could even get used to the bluster of violent winds huffing up from the Oswego River, the endless winters up there, the small-town mentality that considered even a day’s outing to Syracuse a trip to Mecca. Who needs all this death, this stench of brutality?

“Okay, Billy. We’ll talk about Henry Falcon when you’ve had time to remember.” Moody paused. Sweat was running down his face. “Let’s talk about something else. Let’s talk about Jamey Hausermann, okay? Let’s talk about the brutal way you killed her, huh?”

Nightingale shut his eyes. He thought he could hear a wind scavenge inside his head. I am going to sit here and say nothing and let the Boy Wonder pull stuff out of his magic hat, let him forge the links of his own zigzagging chain. I am too old to compete, to cope. I am too tired. Jamey Hausermann. More symmetry: The press liked words such as “spree”—as in “mass murder spree”—and everybody cheered when such a monster was brought to justice even if his ultimate sentence might be life in Bellevue and seventy-five milligrams of Valium per diem forever. Symmetry, that was the thing. Put everything in one box and if it doesn’t quite fit, then stuff the fucking things down as hard as you can. I don’t belong in this world.

Maybe I’ve lost the edge of instinct. Maybe young Moody is the cop of the future.

A sharper instinct.

Finely honed skills.

I have grown out of touch.

A dinosaur, a fucking dinosaur that lost the battle in the stakes for survival of the fittest.

“Hey, man,” Chapman said, rubbed his face. “I never heard of anybody like that.”

“Tell me how you got inside her apartment, Billy,” Moody said. “Tell me why you killed her the way you did, why you cut her tits off with a razor. I’m interested. I want to know.”

“I keep saying,” Chapman complained.

“I want to hear the truth, Billy. I want the straight, unvarnished truth, okay? We’ve got you for one murder. I think we can get you for a second. If you confess to a third, we can always say something about how you co-operated.” Moody was drumming his fingers on the table.

“Listen,” Chapman said. “I don’t even know what the hell you’re talking about.”

“Liar, liar,” Moody said. “Lies are a waste of my time, Billy. Think again.”

“What’s to think about?”

Nightingale opened his eyes. He felt sleepy in this stuffy room. He stared at the door. Through the opaque glass he could see the outline of a figure in the corridor. He got up and moved towards the door. He needed to get out of this place, leave Billy Chapman to the devices of Moody; what the hell, Moody had all the answers. Let Moody make all the accusations stick. Let him grind out the confession. He opened the door, stepped into the corridor, found Stanislavski there.

“Lieutenant, you’ve got to read this.” The uniformed cop handed him a thick manila folder. “I tried to give it to you before.”

“What is it?” Nightingale asked.

“This broad came in and made a statement.”

Nightingale opened the folder. “And what’s this?”

“A cassette.”

“About what?”

“I think you should listen to it, lieutenant. It seems this chick’s boyfriend is in the Apology business. It also seems we got a killer’s voice on that tape.”

Nightingale turned the tape over in his hand.

“The voice of the guy—according to this chick—is who killed Henry Falcon and Jamey Hausermann.”

“Is that right?” Nightingale felt a pulse of intrigue.

He glanced at the notes inside the folder and went back to his office. He wondered when, if ever, he was going to get any sleep tonight.

7.

“What’s keeping them, Harry? They should have been here by now.”

Harrison sat up on the edge of the desk. There was a dictaphone, a blotter, a couple of wood trays. He reached out, holding Madeleine’s hands.

“They won’t be much longer,” he said.

Her hands trembled. The fingertips were chilly. She’d retreated, gone back inside herself to a place he couldn’t touch. He wanted to hold her harder. Over her shoulder, across the dark gallery floor, he could see the front door. Someone passed in the street outside. Nothing, he thought. Somebody just drifting along the sidewalk, that was all.

These nerves.

It was like every part of your body was working against every other part, creating incoherence, confusion, jumpiness.

You can’t think straight. Can’t see straight.

Fear made you live in an endless present tense.

He couldn’t take his eyes from the front door, the pale light out there pressing against the glass.

What is it, Harry?

You don’t remember.

Don’t remember what?

Did you lock the door behind you when you came in?

He wasn’t sure—he wanted to go and check it—but he didn’t want to take his arms away from Madeleine. Didn’t want to leave her here in this office.

That shoe. That stupid shoe. What was it about that goddamn thing?

It lay there alone. That was it. Where was its companion?

He stared at the front door again. Madeleine shivered.

“What’s keeping them, for God’s sake?”

He didn’t say anything. He could feel night press all around this building; he could sense it seeping through tiny cracks and small fissures, a spreading darkness that you couldn’t keep at bay no matter what.

“Maybe you should call again,” she said.

The door. You can’t take your eyes off the goddamn door.

Harry, maybe you should call again—

Go check the door. Check it.

He shut his eyes a moment, drew Madeleine nearer to him.

Love love love—

There was a faint sound from the gallery.

That sound.

A small bell ringing over the doorway.

He took his hands from Madeleine and opened his eyes, listening to the echo of the bell as it faded, chimes growing feebler and feebler until there was nothing.

Harry—

It’s still ringing, he thought, still ringing inside my head.

A shadow passed across the gallery floor.

8.

It definitely contained the remains of a dead animal but there were other less subtle flavors. Soy, breadcrumbs, MSG. Nightingale put the half-eaten hamburger down and belched into his fist. “Where the fuck did this come from?” he asked.

“Tully’s,” Moody said. “I sent Stanislavski.”

“He knows I don’t patronize that scummy joint.” He pushed the offensive thing away. Why did his life seem like a fruitless search for the perfect burger? In Tully’s, where the grease was so thick even the cutlery stuck together, the burgers were cooked by a Sardinian who didn’t have his green card. One day, Nightingale thought, I’ll make a phone call on the sly to Immigration unless his cooking improves. He poked a finger inside his mouth and came out with what looked like a sliver of wood. “America is going down the tubes, Moody. It’s going to the dogs.”

He stared across the office. He picked up his Coke and sipped it. The wax container had sprung a slight leak and there were little brown fizzy drips on his desk. He looked at his wristwatch. 2:04. What time was it in Shelbyville anyhow, and why hadn’t he been called back by that hoarse-voiced hick who might have been an imposter passing himself off as a local sheriff? He tried to imagine the great middle of America, wondering if perhaps out there was the last bastion of the hamburger. He gazed at the cassette player. Since they’d listened to the tape, Moody had become strangely silent, withdrawn: The Boy Wonder sees his theory shot down in flames and he sulks. Oh, Jesus, it was going to be neat and tidy, it was going to be Agatha Christie, brilliant young detective, graduate of Buffalo, was going to pin three deaths on one man, to wit, Billy Chapman. Close the file, send it to the DA, go home, get some sleep, have sweet dreams, come back the next day with your newspaper clippings, instant promotion, take six weeks off, you brilliant young man. Poor Moody. There were two distinct voices on that tape, one of them obviously Billy Chapman’s, an apparent reference to having killed his sister. The other belonged to a person unknown, who had talked openly about killing somebody called Randy in a place known as Shelbyville, Ohio. And, according to Stanislavski’s report, the woman called Madeleine Demarest claimed that this same voice had confessed to the killing of Henry Falcon—if not by name, exactly. Madeleine Demarest also claimed that the person whose voice was on the tape had killed Jamey Hausermann—all because of a project entitled Mr. Apology. It had a bunch of vague things in there, a bunch of vague claims, but the voice of Billy Chapman didn’t match that of the caller who was supposed to have killed Henry Falcon. Nightingale massaged his eyelids. 2:05. What kind of hours were these anyhow? He stared at Stanislavski’s report. Mr. Apology was the pseudonym of a certain Harry Harrison. Jesus Christ, you could lose your screws dickering with all these goddamn names, trying to keep them straight. Madeleine Demarest. Billy Chapman. Henry Falcon. Harry Harrison. Mr. Apology. Shelbyville. Randy. A thicket of names.

“Two voices, Doug,” he said.

“Yeah, sure, but how do we know this Demarest person isn’t some kind of nut? How do we know she isn’t making it up about Henry Falcon and the Hausermann woman? And how do we know that the other voice, the one that doesn’t belong to Chapman, is on the level? We don’t, do we?”

“Still defending your ideas about Chapman, huh?”

“Sure.”

“You’re frayed, Doug. Frayed and beat. If Madeleine Demarest is right, your theory’s fucked.”

Moody shrugged. “I don’t know, Frank. I just don’t know.”

“Listen, say you had pushed Billy into three confessions, you think the DA wouldn’t have laughed you out of his office?”

“I’m not so sure.”

Nightingale was silent a moment. “Didn’t that voice give you the creeps? Could you imagine he wasn’t tell the truth?”

“Yeah, I could imagine that.”

Yeah, Nightingale thought.

You still want Billy Chapman.

You still want that.

He glanced at his watch. “Well, we’ll soon know, won’t we? We’ll soon know if somebody called Randy was killed in Shelbyville, Ohio, won’t we? Then we can check out this Demarest woman—apparently there are even more tapes.”

Moody didn’t speak.

He appeared to sulk, like a man who has been carried along on a raft of convictions that has turned out to be a featherbed of delusions—and the waters underneath were treacherous. Poor Moody, if all this information turns out to be right. Nightingale felt a touch of sympathy for his partner. You’ll learn, kid. It’ll take time, but you’ll learn.

The telephone was ringing. Nightingale picked it up. It was the hick from Shelbyville, Sheriff Hercules Vansittart. Nightingale imagined good old boys sitting out in front of a gas station chewing tobacco and spitting juice, holding daily contests to see who could spit the furthest. He imagined one street of frame houses, a funeral parlor, and one local industry. The Shelbyville Peapod Company. Or the Shelbyville Lens Grinding Corporation. And everybody in the whole town would be employed by it, except for Herc and maybe his deputy, who was called Clarence. Herc and Clar, the tin-badged wonders.

“Is that New York City?” the hoarse voice asked.

“This is Lieutenant Nightingale.”

“Herc Vansittart getting back to you,” the voice said. “Hey, did you say Nightingale?”

Nightingale held his breath. Waited.

“Hey-hey, I bet criminals just sing all day long for you, huh?” Chortle, chortle.

Nightingale still didn’t speak. He looked at Moody and rolled his eyes. It was easy to imagine Herc, squat and plump, a beer can in his big paw, suspenders outside his shirt.

“Good one, huh?” Here asked.

“Best I ever heard,” Nightingale said. “What have you got for me there?”

The line was terrible. Every so often he could hear snatches of country music, as if a radio were somehow connected to the wires. “But the doggone river was dry …” I need yodeling right now, he thought. It was one thing he just couldn’t stand.

“You got a radio on there, Here?”

“No, sir.”

“I keep hearing this tune.”

“With a name like yours, I ain’t surprised.” Chortle chortle. I walked straight into that one. Like a goddamn fool I walked right into that wall.

“Yeah, good one, Here. So what can you tell me?”

“If this is the same case we’re talking, lieutenant, you got a lulu, a goddamn lulu.”

“Like how?” Nightingale picked up a pencil, found a sheet of paper.

“You mentioned some kid called Randy. I had to go back twelve years, lieutenant. Twelve years.”

“I’m grateful.”

“This kid called Randy Carmichael was found dead in the woods ’round here. His head had been pretty badly stoved in. It caused quite a ruckus ’round these parts, let me tell you. I wasn’t the sheriff then. That was old Matt Rawlings back then. He’s been dead and buried these past six years.”

Christ, give me the history of law enforcement in southern Ohio—please, I’ve been waiting for years to hear it.

“I’ve only been in this office two years. But I remember Randy Carmichael pretty well, because of the stir it caused. So I went back through the files for you. It seems Randy had this buddy called Adam Hawley. And these two boys went walking in the woods. Only Adam came back with some story about how he and his buddy had split up. Well, there was some splitting up going on, for sure. Only it was Randy’s head, lieutenant. There wasn’t no motive. Adam Hawley was obviously a suspect, see. The kids might have argued, had a fight, then it got right outta hand. Adam denied it all. He didn’t have nothing to do with his pal’s death. Oh, no, he wouldn’t have done a thing like that.” Pause. More country music. “I got a feeling called the blues …” “Anyway, about three weeks later the kid finally cracked. Said he didn’t remember anything except voices in his head and they was telling him what to do and he couldn’t resist. Voices in his head, lieutenant, you got that? Anyhow, he was a juvenile and you know what that means, so he gets all kinds of psychiatric tests. Batteries they call them. Batteries of tests. It turns out the kid is highly unhinged. A regular lulu.”

“Like how?”

Vansittart seemed to ignore the question. “He gets himself locked away for a few years in the county asylum at the age of sixteen he breaks out. We got him back from Chicago that time. It seems he’d jumped into the sack with this old queer and strangled him. So he goes back inside the asylum.”

Pause. Nightingale waited.

“Here’s your bad news, lieutenant. Adam Hawley escaped from County again about nine months ago. We’ve never been able to find him. To be honest, we gave up. We figured he’d turn up sooner or later. Now I got some highfalutin shrink report right here in front of me.”

“What does it say?”

“It’s a real jewel, lieutenant. I don’t know how much faith you put in shrinks, but the gist of this is that Adam Hawley likes to kill. The act of murder makes him feel good. It makes him feel good to take another human life. He sees it as his special talent in life. He doesn’t have any goddarn motive or anything like that. I mean you don’t need to cross him if you want to be his victim—he just has this basic pleasure in killing. What do you think of that? Killing is his thing in life.”

A chill crossed Nightingale’s heart. A talent for murder, he thought. A guy who just likes to kill. A monster. Someone monstrous enough to have murdered Henry Falcon and butchered Jamey Hausermann and God knows who else since his escape.

“You want I should send these reports to you?”

“I’d appreciate that, Sheriff.”

“No problem. You think Adam Hawley’s in New York City?”

“I think so.”

“Good luck, but don’t be sending him back out here, huh?”

“I’ll try not to.”

“One other thing.”

“Go ahead.”

“When he was picked up in Chicago, it seems he wasn’t calling himself Adam no more.”

“Yeah?” Nightingale poised his pencil over his paper.

“Called himself George. No second name. Just plain George. I figure he might be using the same alias. Or maybe some other one. I thought I’d pass it along.”

“Thanks again,” Nightingale said. He put the receiver down and looked at Moody, who had been listening on the extension. He wanted to say something to his young partner, but didn’t. Moody’s expression was dark: brow lined, mouth distended. What’s he thinking now? What’s ticking inside the Boy Wonder right now? Maybe he sees his mistakes. Maybe he understands the way old poisons distort everything. And you were on the edge of going along with him, Frank. You’d let yourself get carried that far.

You were on the edge of abdicating, passing the crown to younger blood.

Stanislavski was standing in the doorway, looking exhausted. He also looked sheepish. He had a piece of paper in his hand. He said, “I don’t know why this took so goddamn long, lieutenant. Barrows took the message and somehow it got stuck on my desk when I was out at Tully’s, then when I came back Barrows had gone off-duty and somehow this got caught in the old paper shuffle. Jeez, what can I say?”

Nightingale took the message from Stanislavski’s unsteady hand. “What the fuck kind of place are we running around here? Jesus, Jesus Christ!” Enraged, Nightingale picked up the telephone. He looked at the name on the piece of paper. She was at a place called the Bryant Berger Gallery on 57th Street with Harry Harrison. What were they doing up there anyhow? He got the number from the operator and listened as it rang several times. If they’re up there, why don’t they answer, for Christ’s sake?

Why don’t they just pick up the telephone and say something?

Because they can’t.

For some reason, they can’t—and that reason is Adam or George or whatever the hell this maniac calls himself.

Nightingale stood up and reached for his coat. “Okay, Doug. Let’s get moving. I think we’ve got ourselves a crisis.” And then he was huffing and puffing along the corridor, his lungs feeling like two rusted Brillo pads scouring his chest, his bandaged arm—despite the treatment of Nurse Maxymuk—hurting like all hell.

9.

The first thing she thought was: He looks familiar. He looks very familiar, that red hair, the jacket, the way he grins. Maybe he’d come into the gallery once. But it wasn’t that kind of memory. It was more like a face she’d glimpsed through a window, an unusual kind of face. Square, as if it had been sculpted. Good-looking in its own odd pretty way. And the red hair was memorable, like the barber had taken a course in punk styling. Then he didn’t look so familiar after all and she couldn’t remember if she’d ever seen him. Probably not. He moved into shadow again and something glinted, then was extinguished, in his right hand. And then she heard it—the laughter, the same sound she’d heard on the tape, the sound she knew she’d dream about for as long as she might live. She stepped back, skirting the desk.

Fear congeals, lies inside your chest like a lump of something insoluble.

And it stays there as if it might never go away.

The telephone was ringing suddenly. A savage metallic sound.

After several rings it stopped dead.

She looked at Harry; he was standing near the office door with his hands at his sides. She backed further away.

She was on the other side of the desk.

Mr. Berger.

Mr. Berger, she thought.

He lay propped against the wall behind the desk and there was a necktie knotted around his neck and his eyes stared unseeingly. Mr. Berger, half dressed, shirt buttons open, fly unzipped, a single shoe on one foot. She heard a pounding rushing noise inside her head, a noise that went cutting through her like the sound you might imagine a million locusts might make with their wings. Is there no end to it? No end to the dying? It’s all around you, encircling you, touching you with its scents and odors and broken appearances. It begins with a telephone call and it escalates from there as if one single voice at the end of a line had risen and risen until there was utter babble, total incomprehensible babble.…

Mr. Berger.

She became conscious of footsteps just beyond the office door.

He had moved out of the shadows again. He stood there grinning.

She watched Harry take a step back from the doorway.

She clutched the edge of the desk. She thought she could hear herself moaning, but the sound didn’t seem like any part of her.

Then she was conscious of Harry’s tense breathing.

She stared at the knife in the young man’s hand. It had a red handle. She wondered idly why he didn’t speak, why he didn’t say anything, why he stood there just holding the knife out in front of his body as if he were mesmerized by it.

He uttered a single word: “Apology?”

Harry didn’t say anything. What’s he thinking? What’s going through his mind right now?

“Apology?”

“Yes,” Harrison said.

“I thought I’d killed you.…” The grin again, the weird laughter. “I guess I made a mistake.”

He’s looking at me now, she thought.

Straight at me.

“I’ve seen you before, Madeleine. I’ve seen you here in the gallery. I saw you in a bar.” He paused. She tried to imagine this boy killing Levy, stabbing him; tried to grasp the frenzy—wondered what poor Rube had thought about at the very end. Pain. The suddenness of things. Her mind went blank. He was looking at Harry again.

“I figured you’d look different, Apology. I don’t know. I just figured you’d be a different kind of guy.” He moved forward a little way with the knife. Those eyes—they were cold and chilly and empty, as if what they reflected far within was an absence of compassion, humanity, vitality.

Why doesn’t Harry say something? Do something?

“Swiss army knife,” the boy was saying. “About the best ever made.… Did you see poor old Berger back there? I had to do it, you understand? Once you start killing it’s so hard to stop. Then you enjoy it and you don’t even ask questions about it; it just comes naturally—” He moved forward again. “Apology, huh? Christ. What was the big idea, advertising yourself like that?”

The big idea, she thought.

She couldn’t remember now.

Whatever it had once meant, it was lost. Lost and gone.

“It wasn’t a very good idea, was it, Apology? I can think of a thousand better ones … like the one I’m thinking about now. You and her. Both of you.” He laughed aloud. “I’ve never worked on a pair before.”

He might have been talking about two playing cards, nothing that had anything to do with human life. She realized she’d never encountered anybody like this before; it was beyond her memories, her experiences. He whispered my name in the bar, she thought. This monster said my name.…

“Killing,” he said. “I like it. I don’t know how to do anything else as well as that.”

She stared at the knife. She watched him flash it in a tiny arc, a gesture that was only meant to frighten. And then the laughter came again, filling the small office.

“Why don’t you take the knife away, Apology? Impress your old lady. Come and get it.”

Harry didn’t move. Madeleine put her hands over her ears.

But she couldn’t take her eyes from the sight of the knife.

Am I going to die here like a rat? Is this the way it’s all going to end?

God damn it, no.

It can’t just end like this.

There has to be more to live for, much more.

Suddenly she picked up the desklamp and hurled it, hoping it would strike the kid, watching it flash past his head and hit the wall instead, then drop to the floor.

He was laughing.

Feeble, a feeble effort, she thought.

It comes to nothing.

“Your old lady’s got more guts than you, Apology. Come on, take the knife. Take it, guy.”

Harry—why doesn’t he move? Why doesn’t he do something?

The knife sliced through the air; Harrison stepped quickly back and away from it. It came again and she heard him moan. He was clutching his arm; blood was coming through his shirt, through his fingers. She moved towards him to help but he gestured her away. It’s not just your fight, Harry. It’s mine as well.

“Take the motherfucking knife.”

He swung again, missing, laughing as he missed.

She saw Harry go down on one knee.

When he started to rise, the knife came again and made a terrible whining sound above his head, as if the air itself were torn apart by the blade. Harry staggered to his feet. He was leaning against the desk, breathing very hard. He glanced at her, a fragment of time—and what she saw in his eyes was a confusion of despair and desperation and regret.

And then she noticed he had something small and bright in his hand, an object she didn’t recognize at first but one that was somehow familiar—

Albert, she thought.

It was the surgical tool he’d used on Albert.

It was the same small cutting scalpel.

10.

Nightingale got out of the car and touched the shoulder holster beneath his coat. He didn’t like guns. He didn’t like to touch them, didn’t enjoy the way they felt—not like some of the guys who talked endlessly about them, this model and that, velocity, trajectory, caliber, arguing the merits of one pistol over another. It made him sick to think of guns. He hated how they kicked, how they bucked in the palm of your hand. He looked along the sidewalk. He could hardly make out the sign over the gallery. He turned to Moody, indicating the place with a gesture of his head. “The call came from here,” he said.

“I know the joint,” Moody said. “I browsed in there about two months ago. They had these really painful oriental things on the walls.”

“Well, this is where our lady is supposed to be,” Nightingale said. He moved along the sidewalk. Moody was at his side. “We’d better go get her.”

He stared up at the classy sign. The Bryant Berger Gallery. Art had always been a closed world to him. He knew a guy called Sparrow—of all names, why the hell was it another bird?—who worked the art frauds, and Sparrow was always talking about Rembrandt and Van Gogh and Andy Warhol, like he had just come from some cocktail party with those guys. He stopped outside the gallery. The place was in darkness—there was only a slight band of light from far inside, as if there might be another room in there and the door was almost shut. No vital signs. But he did get a slightly choked feeling in his chest. What instinct is this now? he wondered. He stifled a yawn and lowered his head to peer through the glass door, cupping his hand over his eyes. If you could smother your instincts, then they wouldn’t be instincts, he thought. He tried the door. It was locked.

“Maybe she shut herself in there for safety,” Moody said. “You better knock.”

Nightingale did so. Nothing. Nobody came.

“Funny,” he said.

“I’ve always liked kicking doors down ever since I saw my first Untouchables,” Moody said. “I always thought Robert Stack should have won an Emmy.”

Nightingale tried to peer inside again.

Damn darkness.

He tried the door again. He leaned against it.

It didn’t budge.

He turned to look at Moody. “It looks like you’re going to get your chance, Doug.”

And he touched his holster nervously.

11.

I shouldn’t do it, shouldn’t put my hand out and try to take the knife away from him. I shouldn’t fall for this kind of thing. The pain in his arm was intense, awful, blood seeping through his shirt, the material of his shirt sticking to his skin. I shouldn’t listen to his taunts, his dares. It’s a game for him, one big motherfucking game and nothing else.

Harrison turned to look at Madeleine.

It’s her I want to protect. Nothing else. Only Maddy.

He felt the sharp edge of the surgical scalpel dig into the palm of his own hand, where he was trying—like some artless conjurer—to conceal it. He backed against the desk and thought: This is the face you wanted to see, this is the person you wanted to meet, but it doesn’t match anything in your imagination. You thought maybe something sleazy and shadowy in a dreary phone booth; you didn’t see this good-looking red-haired boy. How could it be this one who’d made all the calls? Done all the killings? How could it be somebody who looked like this?

You’re going to have to kill him, Harry.

Him or you.

This time it isn’t Albert.

He’s crazy and real and he has a knife and he wants to kill Maddy—

He kept his eye on the knife. It swung again and he stepped back from it like a bullfighter avoiding the horns of an enraged animal. Wait, wait for your chance to move with the scalpel, wait for that opening, that moment. He hasn’t seen it.

“Cocksucker, come and take the fucking knife.…”

No, he thought.

Just keep coming forward to me. Keep coming. You think you’ve got it made here. You think it’s just a pushover, don’t you?

The eyes.

Dead eyes.

They would kill and never blink.

You killed Rube with that knife. That’s the blade that went through his flesh again and again—

Keep coming.

Don’t stop now.

The knife flashed, flickered. Harrison felt another pain in his body—something that carved through his chest, laying bare the material of his shirt just as so long ago he’d carved Albert in some insane kind of game he’d invented.

No game now

The real thing

Again, the knife came. It struck the back of his hand. Covered in blood. He slipped to the floor, blinded by pain, trying to see the figure looming over him, trying to guess where the knife might be coming from next. How could you ever tell?

Wait for your chance. You’re no goddamn hero.

He watched the kid’s legs move forward and he heard Maddy scream something and in shadow, falling like the silhouette of a maddened blacksmith’s tool, he saw the knife cleave the air and come winging down towards him—

Roll, you roll, you turn over and over on your side—

You hear the vicious sound of steel tear apart the fibers of wood, blade slashing desk—

Then you see it, a chance, a moment, something given to you like a gift of sheer survival, you raise your foot and hammer it into the shin and you watch as the kid steps back and you rise, driven by a weary strength, by the need to save Maddy, you get up and slash this fucker’s wrist with the scalpel and you see his knife, his beloved knife, go flying across the room—

Then you’re forcing your weight on his body, bringing him to the floor, dragging him down—

You want to kill him, Harry.

With the scalpel at his throat, you want to kill him.

You dig a little, skin breaks, flesh punctures, a slither of blood goes down from the larynx to the collar of the shirt—

Kill him.

He pressed hard, harder, wondering what was restraining him from pushing the scalpel deep into the neck, pushing it one final time—you’re looking right into his eyes now and suddenly they’re not empty, they’re not cold, chilly, distant, they’re just the eyes of a very scared kid—

Kill him, Harry.

You’ve got your chance now. Kill this monster.

Kill him.

He doesn’t deserve to live; he needs to die. He needs to be finished right here, under your scalpel—

God damn it, so easy—

Harry—

You can’t do it—

It’s not Albert. It’s not something you made for the purpose of violating; it’s a very scared kid lying here waiting to die—

You can’t kill this person, monster, whatever—

You don’t have the heart—

Kill him, Harry—

Is that your inner voice or is it Madeleine shouting at you?

I can’t kill I can’t go the last step I can’t kill anybody or anything.…

What did he hear in the distance?

What?

The breaking of glass, the sound of voices, movement.

A certain voice. “Okay, okay, let’s put this fucking show to rest. Let’s stop it once and for all. Put the weapon away.…”

I have to kill him, Harrison thought.

I have—

He looked up. He saw a fat man with a gun.

Then he was conscious of his blood dripping on the kid’s face, aware at the same time of a sense of slippage, giving way to the dark, an abrupt yielding—

He felt the scalpel slip from his fingers to the floor.

“Harry.”

It was Madeleine’s voice. He heard it only distantly.

The fat man was leaning over him, smiling. “Take it easy, fellah. Just take it easy.”

“Apology.”

Apology, he thought. It was a tidal sound from an old season. He turned painfully on his side, looking up into Maddy’s face. She was lightly stroking his hair. For a long time she said nothing and he realized there wasn’t anything to say anyway. All the possible conversations, all the likely exchanges of language, had slipped into the resounding silence associated with the dead. He thought: You could tell me everything is going to be okay, Maddy, everything is going to be fine from now on. You could tell me everything’s over and the menace is gone, wiped as cleanly away as some chalked obscenity on a blackboard obliterated by a sponge. You could tell me consoling things and uplifting sentiments and try to make me believe that our life together can be retraced, that we can backtrack our emotions to that point where nothing had ever arisen to threaten them—where nothing had ever surged through our blood with the reckless speed of a pollutant.

You can stroke my hair and look at me with love in your eyes and be glad I am still alive.

But we have a distance to travel now.

He smiled at her weakly. “We made it,” he said.

Madeleine didn’t answer.

EPILOGUE

There was the sound of the sea, the last late moment of the season changing into winter from the vague twilight time it had been before. There was the sun turning to white ice and the ocean flecking the beaches with frosted tides. Boardwalk, surf, kids with cotton candy, machines that might conceivably guess your weight and issue your fortune on tiny cards with ambiguous messages. On the boardwalk was a telephone booth, a glass-plated obelisk around which Harrison kept walking, as if within the booth there might exist a secret too profound to fathom. Also, he kept wondering if the rattling rumbling of the Atlantic would obscure the sound of any phone call.

One day Madeleine said, “Do it, Harry. Get it out of your system.”

Do it, he thought, and put his arm around her shoulder and pulled her towards him as if he might save her from the wicked skin-chapping bluster of the ocean.

“Go ahead,” she said, nudging him. “One last call. That’s why you left it, isn’t it?”

Why? he wondered. What good would it do to make one last call? Just the same, he went inside the phone booth and picked up the receiver and thrust a bunch of coins into the slot. When he heard the voice answering him, his own taped message, his own alien sound, he remembered how they’d taken the rest of the tapes here, to Ocean City, and burned them on the beach and watched flimsy cinders get tugged away by Atlantic winds, like ashes of the dead scattered across beaches and set to drift on white tides.

I’m sorry.

I’m sorry about everything.

Plain sorry, like a heart breaking against his rib bones. He watched Maddy through the glass panes of the phone booth and he thought how beautiful she looked and marveled at the way the wind-tossed spray pushed through her hair. I love her, he thought.

I’m sorry the project died. I’m sorry about whoever I might have wronged and hurt and I’m sorry about Levy and sorry about Jamey Hausermann and sorry for

everything

anything

just sorry

He hung the receiver up and went outside and put his arm around Maddy’s shoulder.

She kissed the side of his face. A wigwam, an igloo, a small private sanctuary: that’s where they belonged together. A safe place that could never be touched. They went out along the boardwalk where acrobatic gulls squawked and ploughed the air in a defiance of gravity. The wind was springing higher, rattling wood planks, shaking the lines of the fishermen who sat with stoic patience at the end of the pier.

Harrison smiled. It was perfect here in its own tidal way.

It was both random and exact.

He looked out towards the ocean. Something came floating through the air towards him, a scrap of paper which sunk and curled itself around his ankle. He reached down to untangle it when he realized what it was that had blown out of nowhere and become attached to his leg.

He realized only too well what it was. Out here, he thought. Carried out here by somebody the way birds carry seeds and drop them. He handed it to Madeleine, who regarded it briefly.

It was an Apology handbill.

He watched her fold it over, tear it through; saw her reach over the railing and let it go flying out towards the sea. The scraps reminded Harrison of fledgling gulls committed to a path of certain doom.

“We didn’t need it, did we, Harry?” Madeleine asked.

He smiled, shook his head, and gazed out over the grey sullen ocean.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I owe a deep debt of gratitude to my editor, Peter Gethers, who underwent this book with me.

About the Author

Campbell Armstrong (1944–2013) was an international bestselling author best known for his thriller series featuring British counterterrorism agent Frank Pagan, and his quartet of Glasgow Novels, featuring detective Lou Perlman. Two of these, White Rage and Butcher, were nominated for France’s Prix du Polar. Armstrong’s novels Assassins & Victims and The Punctual Rape won Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Awards.

Born in Glasgow and educated at the University of Sussex, Armstrong worked as a book editor in London and taught creative writing at universities in the United States.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1984 by Ink Creations, Inc.

Cover design by Angela Goddard

ISBN: 978-1-5040-0421-3

This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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Table of Contents

Cover Page

Praise for the Writing of Campbell Armstrong

Title Page

Dedication

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Epilogue

Acknowledgment

About the Author

Copyright Page