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.