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.