SIX

1.

Harrison opened his eyes, stared at the ceiling. This feeling, this inner sense of darkness, of clouds rolling across some empty landscape … Something is wrong. Something is very wrong. He raised his face from the pillow and looked across the bed. Madeleine was gone. The bedroom was empty. He pressed the palms of his hands to the sides of his face and sat up, groaning. Something wrong, something more than just the calls, more than the voice, the threats. A dream? Had he dreamed something menacing, the traces of which lay inside his head now like the broken fragments of a hangover? He couldn’t remember a dream. He shivered, set his feet on the floor, walked to the doorway.

A faint noise from the kitchen, a rustling, then water running.

Madeleine?

He rubbed his eyes and moved towards the kitchen door. She was leaning against the sink, fully clothed, her face inclined beneath water running from a faucet, dripping through her hair, splashing against her shoulders. Is she sick? Does she feel ill? It was more than that—he had the feeling that it was more than that. Something else. He stared at her, conscious of the small portable radio playing on the kitchen table. A rock singer’s voice. Dear Christ, you didn’t need that kind of noise so early in the day. He went towards Madeleine and laid one hand softly against her shoulder.

She didn’t raise her face, didn’t look at him. She was making soft whispered noises, as if she were trying to speak words that wouldn’t quite come. He touched the side of her face, which was wet and cold.

“Maddy?” he said. “What’s the matter?” It was strange how alarmed he felt, how attuned to her obvious distress. Was this love too—this weird telepathic link, this curious empathy? “Maddy. Talk to me.”

She turned her face towards him slowly. She was white, white as old bone; water streaked across her forehead and her cheeks, gathered in tiny glistening drops on her upper lip. She opened her mouth to say something. But nothing came.

“Do you want a doctor, Maddy? Do you want me to take you to a doctor?” he asked.

She closed her eyes. She gripped his fingers hard. He moved her away from the sink, made her sit down at the table. He turned the radio off. She was trembling; tiny spasms ran through her, quick little shivers. The light hairs on the backs of her arms seemed to have been brushed backwards—fear, it’s fear, he thought. Your hair stands on end. Talk to me, Maddy. Tell me what has happened this morning to make you look this way.

She stared at him now. She was still silent and her eyes were red. He felt clumsy suddenly, as if he were intruding upon an emotion of hers which he didn’t have the delicacy to handle. He didn’t have the knack. He rubbed her shoulders, massaging them slowly in small circular motions.

“What is it?” he said, his tone one of patience. “You can tell me, Maddy. Is it because of the caller? Is that it?”

She shook her head from side to side. She looked at the silent radio and pointed a finger at it. “I heard it,” she said.

“What did you hear?”

“It was on the news. A few minutes ago.” She turned to look at him again.

He waited. It was going to be unpleasant, whatever it was. It was going to be something awful, something he knew he didn’t want to hear. And he thought: There’s been another death. Somebody else has died. But the thought was too quick for him, a mercurial thing that slipped out of his mind before he could examine it properly. You don’t want to hear about any more deaths, do you, Harry? You want it all to come to an end.

“The announcer said she’d been strangled,” Maddy said. And her voice was flat, without nuance, as if she were reciting a dry old fact, nothing that had any significance.

She’d been strangled. Who was she? His eye caught the little pile of magazines Madeleine had bought last night. They were stacked in a tidy way on the table. He read about himself on the front cover. She. She … he came to a dark dead end.

“Jamey,” Madeleine said. “He said it was Jamey Hausermann, Harry. I just kept thinking it couldn’t be the same one I knew. I wanted to keep thinking that, then he said she was a journalist and mentioned the magazine she worked for, and even then I didn’t want to make the connection. I wanted to pretend …” She was sobbing suddenly, her face flat against the table. He went down on his knees beside her chair and touched her hands, tried to comfort her. Jamey Hausermann, he thought. Somebody had killed her. Strangled her. He felt a cold flash of shock somewhere inside his chest. Ice around the heart. A touch of permafrost. Why her? Why would somebody kill her? You already see it, Harry. You already hear the words forming themselves inside your brain, only you wish you didn’t have to pay attention to them; you wish they’d just go away, but you already hear them rise up and take shape out of the shadows at the back of your head. You know what’s coming now; you know the very next thing. You already know the answer to your own question. He shut his eyes and pressed his face against Maddy’s arm. She was silent now and somehow that was worse than the crying, the sobbing; there had been something healthy about the tears—but this silence, this sudden drawing down of a blind, scared him. He had no way of knowing where she was retreating to.

“You see it, don’t you?” she asked. “I mean, you grasp the connection, don’t you? She was killed for only one reason. She was killed because of you, Harry. Because of you and your stupid project.”

He opened his eyes just as she was rising from her chair. He heard her move out of the kitchen, go inside the bedroom. After a moment he went to her. Because of me, he thought. How could I be responsible for anyone’s death? He was very cold, aware of the chill that permeated the loft. No, he thought. It couldn’t be like that. Apology had nothing to do with death. Face the facts, Harry. A dead dancer strangled. A woman who was somehow connected to a telephone company. And now this poor journalist. Now this. They had their links to Apology. Faint threads might have attached them to the project: It was more—they were as much a part of the project as the answering machine. You created this monster, Harry. You created it and now it’s rising up to turn against you. Would these people have been killed if it hadn’t been for Apology? If Apology had never existed? He stood in the bedroom doorway, watching Madeleine put on her coat.

“Where are you going?”

“Work,” she said. “I’ve got to do something. I’ve got to keep my mind off this.”

There’s no way you can do that, he thought.

“Stay here.”

“No,” she said flatly. “If I stay here I can only mope.”

He realized he didn’t want her to leave. He looked at the palms of his hands as if he might find bloodstains smeared against his skin. “Don’t go,” he said again. He didn’t want to be alone.

“I’m already late, Harry.”

He could see it. She wanted to be all business. She wanted to be aloof. Above everything. Plunge into the lukewarm water of the everyday world, bask in those shallows where the terrible fact of a friend’s death wouldn’t touch you. He watched her: He realized she had judged him already, found him guilty of conspiracy to kill, sentenced him—to what? he wondered. What is my sentence?

She was doing up the buttons of her dark coat. Her white hands were trembling. She looked weak, drawn.

“Stay here,” he said.

She shook her head. “I need to get out of here. I need to get away from this place.…” She glanced at the answering machine. There was a look of hatred on her face. He had never seen that expression before. When she walked past him she didn’t kiss him.

“Maddy, we need to talk about this—”

“There’s nothing to say, Harry.”

She was going to the front door. She slid the bolt back, pulled the door open. Then, saying nothing more, she was gone. He watched the door close behind her and heard the faint sound of her footsteps on the stairs.

He sighed, looked around the empty bedroom.

You don’t feel exactly right when she isn’t here.

Like you’re missing a limb. Something vital gone out of you.

They call it love, Harry. That’s their name for this feeling.

He sat on the edge of the bed with his eyes shut. There was the ghost of a pain inside him now. He opened his eyes, gazed across the bed. Echoes of Madeleine. Tiny traces. A dark comb on a bedside table. A twisted Kleenex. Her wristwatch, which she’d obviously forgotten. (How could she remember anything on such a day as this?) He had the feeling he was trying to assemble a picture of the woman from the artifacts she’d left behind—like some future archaeologist building pictures of long-dead persons from a few broken articles.

You even feel sentimental about noticing her belongings on the bedside table.

Sentimental? You, Harry?

He rose, wandered around the room, glanced at the answering machine. A red light was glowing. Incoming calls. Messages. He sat down again. Now, for the first time, he created a picture of Jamey Hausermann. He made himself look at it, a movie playing in the dark projection room of his head. He could see her as he’d last seen her, right here in this loft, lighting cigarettes, talking in that quick way she had as though words were things to be bitten off. He imagined he could see somebody strangling her, hands clenched tightly around a thin neck, knuckles rigid and white, he could see her eyes open and the gradual change of her expression from fear to resignation—

This one is real, Harry.

This isn’t an old dancer you never saw in your life.

This isn’t the woman he said he’d drowned in the bathroom.

This one was right here. She talked with you, wrote an article about your life—

The bitter connection.

The sad link that led to her death.

She wrote about you. She knew your real identity.

And she was vulnerable because of it.

She was open to death.

Oh, Christ …

And the consequence was—

The consequence was—

He got up, paced the room, walked to the window. Did you try to save your own life by telling your killer what you knew? Did you do that, Jamey? Did you give him a name and address and everything else you knew? These casual connections. A killer picks up a magazine someplace—he picks it up because he sees Apology mentioned on the cover—he opens the magazine, reads the article, sees the name of the journalist—

The rest is easy.

He stared out the window across rooftops. The sun was white, the morning cold. At least it wasn’t raining now. It was the only thing he could find to say about the day.

He turned, went back towards the answering machine, looked at the red light glowing there. He wanted to hear that voice again. He wanted to play the tape and learn if a new message had come in during the hours of darkness. A confession of murder. Jamey Hausermann’s murder. He pressed the REWIND button, listened to the tape whir back to the beginning. I need to hear him, he thought. I need to know beyond all doubt. Beyond all the possible permutations of coincidence, sheer chance.

PLAYBACK.

I GOT A WILL TO WRITE, BECAUSE I’M DYING, MR.APOLOGY. I’M SIXTY-EIGHT AND I SUFFER FROM MELANOMA.…

A breathless old man. Not the voice he needed to hear.

FAST FORWARD.

YOU GOT SUCH A NICE VOICE. I’D LIKE TO COME AND SEE YOU, GET TO KNOW YOU A WHOLE LOT BETTER. I’D LIKE TO GO DOWN ON YOU.

A schoolgirl’s voice. Some kind of prank.

FAST FORWARD.

Somebody sobbing as he talked.

I’M UNEMPLOYED, MR. APOLOGY. MARRIED AND UNEMPLOYED. MY WIFE AND ME—WE HAD TO LIVE WITH MY FATHER. THEN … I WENT OUT THE OTHER DAY TO CHECK ON A JOB AND I WAS GONE MAYBE THREE, FOUR HOURS AND WHEN I GOT BACK I COULDN’T FIND MY WIFE OR MY FATHER ANYWHERE, THEN I HEARD THESE NOISES COMING FROM THE BEDROOM UPSTAIRS. I KNOW I SHOULDN’T HAVE CLIMBED THE STAIRS, I KNOW THAT, BUT I DID ANYWAYS AND I FOUND THEM TOGETHER, BOTH OF THEM NAKED IN BED, FUCKING.… THEY WERE FUCKING, APOLOGY, MY WIFE AND MY OWN FATHER.…

A voice filled with devastation.

He wanted to go on listening to it, he wanted to understand something of this predicament, this domestic horror, but it still wasn’t the voice he wanted, the message he needed to hear.

FAST FORWARD.

I TOOK SOME PILLS. IT’S EIGHT O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING AND I’M IN THIS HOTEL ROOM BECAUSE I WANTED TO TAKE THESE PILLS AND JUST CHECK OUT—THE FINAL CHECKOUT, THAT’S WHAT I MEAN.… I’M JUST SO GODDAMN TIRED AND WEARY.… I HAD AN URGE TO CALL SOMEBODY, BECAUSE THIS IS A HISTORIC OCCASION IN MY LIFE.… JUST THINK, I’LL NEVER MAKE ANOTHER PHONE CALL, NOT EVER.… THERE ARE SO MANY THINGS I’LL NEVER DO AGAIN. THANKS FOR LISTENING, WHOEVER YOU ARE.…

A young female voice.

A suicidal girl in a hotel room somewhere. Eight o’clock in the morning and waiting to die. That was almost two hours ago. She might be dead by this time. So goddamn tired and weary.… A sadness touched him; he felt powerless. He couldn’t call anybody; she hadn’t mentioned the name of the hotel, anything personal like her own name.… Don’t think about this now, Harry. Keep searching through this tape. Keep looking for this one voice.

FAST FORWARD

NOBODY BELIEVES ME WHEN I TELL THEM I WENT FOR A TRIP ON A FLYING SAUCER. THEY WERE VENUSIAN GUYS AND THEIR BOOTS SQUELCHED WHEN THEY WALKED—

FAST FORWARD.

HI. MY NAME IS RICHARD STRYKER. I’M A FREELANCE JOURNALIST AND I READ ABOUT YOU AND I WONDER IF YOU’D LIKE TO GET TOGETHER WITH ME AND TALK ABOUT ME DOING A PIECE ON YOU—

Fame.

What was the price of fame?

FAST FORWARD.

Bits and pieces of garbled messages—the kid blaming himself for his parents’ divorce, a businessman embezzling funds, a guy who knows God’s telephone number—then the tape came to an end. Nothing, nothing from the voice he wanted to hear most of all. He took the cassette from the machine, numbered it, inserted a new one. Why hasn’t he called? Why hasn’t he called to confess? He’s playing a waiting game. He’s working on the ends of my nerves. He knows I’m waiting for him to call.

He took the numbered cassette to the shelf over the bed where he kept the collection of tapes. Tape #13. Thirteen hours of messages already. You could say Apology was a success, Harry. You could say that. He was suddenly angry now—angry at the idea of some crazy person out there killing people on account of his project, his baby, and threatening to bring it down in one great crashing wreck. Who the fuck did he think he was any how? Who the hell did he imagine he was, tearing at the very fabric of this whole project? Call me. Call me, whoever you are. I want to talk to you.…

He clenched his hands.

He looked along the row of numbered cassettes, each neatly marked on the side with a Magic Marker.

Thirteen tapes. Would there be any more? Was this going to be the end of everything? His anger turned to disappointment. He remembered years of things left undone, his unfinished degree at New Paltz, the works that had either died between the drawing board or halfway to completion; he remembered how past enthusiasms had withered and dissipated themselves, how he had always felt doubts about this project or that—and how Apology had excited him, enthused him, intrigued him. Now it was threatened. It was threatened every bit as much as its creator.

He surveyed the stack of cassettes. One two four six. Seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen.

Two were missing.

Tapes three and five.

He counted the cassettes. Eleven tapes in all.

Where were three and five?

Okay. Okay. Remember. Madeleine gave one to Berger. She had taken him tape number three. He remembered this.

But what had happened to five?

He looked along the shelf, pushing books aside, shoving papers out of the way. He checked behind the pillow, behind the bed, under the mattress.

Nothing.

No sign of the missing cassette.

Madeleine, he thought.

She took that tape!

Nobody else could have done it.

She’d taken that tape and—

She’s going to destroy it. That was his first thought.

He knew better than that, though.

He knew what she was going to do with it.

She’d pilfered the tape, walked out of here with it in her purse.

Maddy—

The cops, he thought.

What else? He slammed his fists together and stared out of the window across the rooftops. The cops. It was what he’d been anxious to avoid from the very beginning; it was a promise he’d given to everyone who had used the Apology line. It had been a form of contract, an undertaking, something he had felt solemn about. He’d always thought that people wouldn’t use the number if they even remotely imagined there might be some vague official purpose behind it, if they even faintly dreamed it might be another trick of a government agency, another devious way of gathering information that might later be used against them in some roundabout fashion. How many people didn’t complete official census forms on the grounds that they were suspicious of such data collection? It was the same thing with Apology—it could never have been associated in any way with any kind of bureaucracy. And now—

Now.

He sat down on the bed.

He shut his eyes and imagined he could hear the wreckage of the whole thing all around him; imagined he could hear the splitting of magnetic tapes, the popping of tiny transistors inside the answering device; imagined he could see faceless people go back and forth across the city, tearing down the handbills wherever they encountered them. A whole insane circus of ruin.

He opened his eyes, turned, looked at the answering machine.

Damn it, he wasn’t going to dismantle it now. He wasn’t going to take the plug from the wall.

He was going to wait until he heard the message he needed to hear.

The one he was determined to hear.

He was going to wait for that.

2.

Clear skies, sidewalks damp from the night’s rain; a watery sun struck the windows of high-rises, burst against the towers of midtown. A fine day of late fall, crisp and clear, and yet somehow it was all wrong; there should be rain and clouds and the threat of a storm. Madeleine stepped inside the gallery, looked across the room at the open office doorway, saw Berger sitting motionless behind his desk as if he were a figure carved in wax. The large room, the depressing rainbows, the muted overhead lighting—these elements seemed to converge, to spin and turn in a dizzying way. She paused, trying to keep her balance. Hyperventilation, nerves, shock. Hold on, she told herself. Just hold on and see if you can go through the motions of the day even if you know you’re never going to make it. Even if the same dreadful fact keeps assailing you, forcing itself into your brain. She opened her eyes, continued towards the office.

Jamey. Jamey.

She had to keep it from forming in her mind and welling up there like one huge tear.

She saw, as if in a dream, Berger rise from behind his desk and smile at her and then his expression changed to one of concern, worry.

“My dear, what is it?”

It shows on my face, the way I move. It shows. She went inside his office and slumped in the chair that faced his desk. She felt the need to cry again. She was conscious of him coming around the front of his desk, holding her hands, patting the backs of them lightly.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

His voice echoed, rolled away from her, words turning to meaningless noises she couldn’t interpret. She was aware only of the solicitous way he behaved, his avuncular manner.

“You’re white as the proverbial ghost, dear. Didn’t you sleep? Didn’t you manage to get any sleep?” Then he was talking about how surprising it was anybody ever slept anymore, given the amount of sensory bombardment we all had to endure these days. He’s trying to be kind, she thought. But she felt as if she might have fallen through some flimsy surface and hit a murky, sticky substance someplace below, something viscous. The room swayed. The light from the window shimmered like a pool touched by wind. Don’t keep thinking about Jamey. But how could she not? They had known each other for such a long time; they had been close friends, almost like sisters at times—how could she keep Jamey out of her mind? She stared at her purse: Why was the day so filled with hollows? Why was the quality of light so changeable? Think about the cassette you took from Harry. No, not took. Stole. You stole it from Harry because—

“Maybe you should go home, put your feet up, watch soap operas,” Berger was saying, still patting her hand.

She stared into his face.

Some nasty little virus, perhaps … His voice sounded so soothing. She hoped he wouldn’t stop talking.

A virus of fear, she thought.

A cold aura around the heart.

The death of my friend. Because of something I was involved in. Because of me and Harry, Jamey Hausermann had to die.

Stark details. Name, age, profession. Means of murder: Strangulation. And then nothing more than these bare facts. The essence of Jamey Hausermann distilled into a few sentences from the mouth of a radio announcer.

He’s out there now. He’s out there, getting nearer.

Searching dark corners. Scurrying along dark streets. Foraging for the name and address of Mr. Apology.

Jamey knew it. It was the last thing Jamey knew.

The sickness fevered inside her brain. Hot waves, scalding pulses, tiny fissures crisscrossing her mind and throwing up columns of burning steam. I am sick. I am very sick, she thought. She made to stand up. Berger caught her as she swayed to one side.

Distantly, it seemed, the telephone was ringing.

Berger answered it, then held the receiver towards her.

“It’s for you, Madeleine. Do you want to take it?”

Harry, she thought. It could only be Harry.

She hesitated.

She took the receiver and whispered, “Hello.”

Silence. Nobody.

She heard the click of a dead line.

She dropped the receiver and said, “There wasn’t anybody.”

“He asked for you, my dear.”

“He just hung up,” she said. “What did he sound like?”

“There wasn’t any particular accent.…” Berger shrugged, still watching her with deep concern. “You should go home. Please.”

It couldn’t have been Harry. Harry wouldn’t have hung up.

Then who?

He just hung up.

He he he

She had never felt quite so cold; it seemed she would never be warm again. The cold was inside her bloodstream.

“I’ll get you a cab,” Berger was saying. Then he had gone out of the office and she could hear him crossing the gallery and the sound of the bell ringing above the front door. Faintness, a sense of all her blood having congealed in her legs, a sense of not belonging to this reality, to these perceptions she received—

He he he

Berger was coming back. “The cab’s outside, Madeleine. Go home. Call me later if you feel better.”

She let herself be led through the gallery even as she was thinking, It’s safer here with you, Mr. Berger. This is a safe place for me. Then she was out in the street, stepping inside a yellow vehicle.

“Do take it easy,” Berger said.

She watched as Berger slammed the door shut. She closed her eyes, opening them only when she heard the driver ask for a destination. She didn’t answer him at once—she just looked at how the purse lay in her lap. It had the appearance of an unwanted object lying in a thrift store bin.

3.

“There are eight million stories in the Naked City,” Scorpion Scypion said. “And Billy Chapman’s is only one of them.”

Gooch nodded. In the palm of one hand he crumpled an empty Tab can, enjoying the sensation of aluminum crumpling. Eight million stories. He stared at the Scorpion, who was wearing reflective sunglasses in which Gooch saw a small distorted version of himself in duplicate. They were sitting together at a booth in a diner on Broadway and 11th Street. Scorpion was running pieces of pancake through the ooze of egg yolks. Sometimes when he was chewing he’d talk in such a way that Gooch couldn’t understand what he was saying.

“So what about Chapman?” Gooch asked.

The Scorpion rubbed his bare arm, leaving a trace of yellow egg matter matted in the hairs. “Billy Chapman,” he said. And he winked at Gooch. He had a little smile on his face that bordered on a smirk, a knowing smirk.

“Yeah. What about him, Scorpion?”

The Scorpion hummed a few phrases of a song that Gooch recognized. “Come on, babe, trust in me, I am the Pied Piper.…” He looked away from the reflection of himself in the sunglass lenses and out into the street. Unseasonable weather, for sure. He turned his face and saw a waitress bend over one of the tables to clear dishes away. She was a slim young kid of about seventeen and she had long dark hair and a noticeable moustache. Her name, Gooch remembered, was Ameliorata Gonzalez. He liked the first name a lot because it had the sound of water running over smooth rocks. One time when he’d asked her for a date she’d informed him that her brothers, Roderigo and Hector, would have to come along as chaperones. He hadn’t asked again. He looked back at the Scorpion.

“What’s the word, Scorpion?”

Scypion grinned. “You came up with a real difficult one, Gooch. Real hard.” He shook his head, still grinning.

“Well? Do you know anything?”

“I might. Might not. Hard to say.”

Holy shit. Gooch tapped his fingertips on the table and looked at the crushed Tab can. In the gym this morning he’d lifted three hundred and ninety-four pounds in the clean-and-jerk and now the muscles in the small of his back were aching. “Hey, Scorpion, I ain’t got all day to sit here and wait for you to tell me if you know anything about this Chapman guy or if you don’t. I mean, it was you that said you knew most everybody. It wasn’t me.”

The Scorpion lowered his head and talked out of the side of his mouth. “The word on this dude is baaaad, man. He is one hot motherfucker. Trust me. You don’t want to tangle with this asshole.”

“I only want to know where the guy hangs out,” Gooch said.

Scypion took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Like I said, you don’t want to know.”

“You mean you don’t know.”

“Gooch, my man, would I bullshit you?”

“Yeah.”

Scypion put his glasses on again and grinned. He tapped his tip of his nose with his index finger. “I been hanging around these streets since the biggie at Woodstock, Gooch. Did I ever tell you I did all the sound up there? Worked the speakers. I talked with Joni Mitchell personally. I was as close to her as I am to you right now. Neat chick, Joni. I got her autograph someplace. Know what it says? ‘To My Tattooed Man, Love from Joni.’ Honest.”

“You’re full of shit.”

The Scorpion smiled. Gooch stood up as if to leave, but Scypion tugged at the sleeve of his sweats. “Hey, where are you going?”

“I got to take a hot shower, Hubert.”

“You said you wanted to know about this Chapman character.”

“You don’t exactly seem eager to tell me.”

Scypion said, “Does the Scorpion ever let you down? Does he, Gooch?”

He opened his eyes, turned, looked at the answering machine.

Does he, Gooch?”

“I don’t want to hear about Joni Mitchell and I don’t want to hear about Woodstock or about the time you led the acid revolution in San Francisco, Scorpion—”

“Hey, hey, take it easy.”

Gooch sat down again. Christ, those back muscles.

“Okay. Here’s the pitch. The word on Chapman is hot. I don’t know what he’s supposed to have done, and frankly I ain’t interested, but what I hear doesn’t sit good on me, okay?”

“Okay,” Gooch said.

“He’s a coke freak, this Chapman.”

Gooch nodded his big head.

“A real bad coke freak. He uses the needle. This is what I hear.”

“It don’t tell me where the guy is, Scorpion.”

“What I wonder, Gooch, is why you wanna know.”

“Business,” Gooch said mysteriously.

“What kinda business would you have with a guy like this, man?”

Gooch thought a moment, then said, “It’s personal.”

The Scorpion looked at the crisscrossing tracks of egg yolks on his plate. “I got to confess I don’t know where the dude lives, Gooch. I got to tell you that right off the bat, man.”

Gooch said nothing. He was watching Ameliorata again. Pity about the moustache, he thought. You just knew it was going to thicken with time and then turn grey later on.

“I know who he scores from, though,” Scypion said. “I got that much.”

“Who does he score from then?”

“Well, this is all kinda indirect, you unnerstand? I talked with this guy, who has to remain nameless, see, and this guy says he used to do some minor biz with Billy Chapman, only Chapman started to go off the fucking wall, coked and spacy—you know the score, right? He don’t do business with Billy nowadays. But he tells me”—and here the Scorpion, in a flamboyant gesture of furtiveness, lowered his head across the table—“he tells me that sometimes Billy buys from a source called Sylvester.”

“Sylvester who?”

The Scorpion shrugged. “That’s all she wrote, Gooch.”

“You don’t know this Sylvester?”

Scypion shook his head and looked momentarily miserable. “You reach a point where you’ve used up your quota of questions for a while, unnerstand? You ask too many questions, Gooch, and pretty soon people start asking questions about you. I don’t like the idea much. So I ain’t gonna ask no more questions for a while.”

“Sylvester,” Gooch said.

“That’s the name of that tune, man.”

“And you don’t know where this Sylvester hangs out?”

“Like I said, man, I told you all I know.”

Gooch got up from his seat. The Scorpion asked, “Does it help?”

“Sure it helps.”

“I like to be useful, Gooch.”

4.

There was a smell in the corridor, an overpowering confusion of scents, a congestion of stale city perfumes—disinfectant, human sweat, old tobacco smoke, the acrid quality of spilled milk turned sour. Madeleine felt faint, stood for a moment leaning against the wall. The overhead fluorescent lights buzzed. People went back and forth between desks or sat idly on benches and every so often a uniformed cop would call something out or some guy would be dragged in from the outside world, handcuffed, then disappear into a back room. It was all so confusing—this stream of movement, the ringing of telephones, the sound of voices. What was she doing here? It was a strange realization, but she’d never been inside a police station in her life. She couldn’t imagine the procedure, what it was you were supposed to do. For a moment her mind emptied. How could you possibly begin to make any sense of all this movement, all these smells and sounds?

Then she thought about the cassette in her purse. Jamey. She was here because Jamey had been killed; she was here because of a voice on a tape. A tape she stole. When you took that cassette you might have been subtracting something from the relationship with Harry. Plundering the notion of trust. And something happens to love, an erosive thing, structures alter and substances change. I can’t see him get hurt. I can’t let that happen.

She moved slowly forward, approached a desk where a uniformed man was writing something inside a big logbook. Where to begin, she thought, how to start, how to make it all sound like it wasn’t the product of a diseased imagination. She reached out and laid her hands lightly against the desk. The cop smiled at her in a weary way.

She cleared her throat. This is all a bad dream, one of those violent nightmares that don’t add up, don’t make sense except in terms of a terrible inner logic. Out of the corner of her eye she was aware of a drunk lunging against a bench, then a policeman came and grabbed him by the arm. She said, “I need to talk with somebody.” She hesitated. How did she sound? Was her voice too thin and high? “A man’s been threatening us. My boyfriend, myself. I know it’s the same man who killed Henry Falcon. I believe he also murdered Jamey Hausermann.” She fished the cassette from her purse and laid it on the desk and the cop looked at it as if he suspected a bomb. “I’ve got the man’s voice on this tape. Have you got a cassette player? You could listen to it. It would make more sense if you could listen to it for yourself.” The cop hadn’t said a word. He’d just stood there and let her ramble on. His eyes were flat and unresponsive.

He doesn’t believe me.

I’m just another airhead from the streets.

“Do you have a cassette player?” she asked again.

“You’re going way too fast for me, lady. Suppose you do an about-face and go back to the beginning.” He smiled at her. Now she noticed a nameplate on the desk with STANISLAVSKI written on it. You’re humoring me, Stanislavski. “You’d better let me have some background details. Name, address. Okay?” And he picked up a pen and found a printed form from somewhere.

“Is it really necessary?”

“It’s just procedure.”

Time, she thought. Time passes. All the clocks are ticking down dangerously. Procedure, he was interested in following procedure.

“Madeleine Demarest,” she said.

He wrote very slowly, like a backward pupil in grade school.

“Can’t we hurry this?” she asked.

“You can’t hurry procedures,” Stanislavski said and smiled, as if he had uttered some holy truth. She gazed at his pen. So slow. The way it covered spaces on the form. Please, she thought. Please, faster, faster.

“Address?”

She gave him Harry’s—what was the point in mentioning her own tiny apartment when she rarely ever slept there anymore?

“Okay,” the cop said when he’d finished writing. “What’s the story with this tape?”

Did she have to say it again? “I want you to play it. There’s a certain voice that’s connected with two murders, maybe three.…” Maybe more than that. The cop looked incredulous. “Listen, people have been killed. The killer is going to kill again. Can’t you do something to push this thing along?”

He didn’t answer her question. “How did you get your hands on this tape?”

“It’s a long story.” God, God. How much longer is all this going to take?

“Suppose you tell it to me anyhow?” He sat down with a look on his face that reminded her of childish anticipation. Goody-goody, somebody’s going to tell us a fairy tale.

She hesitated. It wasn’t going to come out right, no matter how she phrased it or shaped her narrative. It was going to sound lunatic. “Do we really need to get into this? Isn’t it enough that I’ve got the tape?”

“I’d like to hear the whole story.” He folded his thick arms across his chest, settling back in his chair.

She took a deep breath and told him. She told him about Harry and his project, told him about the handbills, the recording machine, the kinds of messages he received—and as she spoke she seemed to be hearing herself as if it were quite another person talking. It didn’t sound sane. It was an unbalanced story, a fact she could see reflected in the cop’s expression. When she finished, her throat was dry. She stared at the cop’s face. He stood up, poked at the cassette, then gazed at her a long time.

“Lemme get this straight. Your friend takes calls from strangers, right? He wants to get them to apologize to him, right? I don’t think I get it exactly, Miss Demarest. I don’t think I understand that.” He was shaking his big face from side to side.

“I don’t think it matters if you understand it or not,” she said. “The only damn thing that matters is that you get your ass out of that chair and do something.”

He grinned at her. He enjoys playing with me, she thought. He’s enjoying some kind of smirking game here. Asshole. She looked past him at the other side of the large office. There were two hookers in gaudy clothes talking with a uniformed cop, a black guy sitting strung-out and red-eyed on a bench and mumbling to himself, a broken-down old bag lady sneaking cigarette butts from ashtrays. A sense of incongruity came over her: What the hell am I doing here? You’re bringing a tape to the cops, Madeleine. You’re trying to get them to stop the killings. You’re trying to protect yourself and Harry. Keep that in mind. Don’t lose sight of that.

“Look,” she said. “What do I have to do to get through to you? I don’t think it matters if you consider the Apology idea crazy. The only thing that matters is that you do something! The only thing that matters is you somehow stop this man from killing anybody else—”

Stanislavski stood up now. “You mentioned the Henry Falcon thing.”

“Right.”

He jabbed the cassette, as if he were still convinced it was going to explode in his face. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. Lieutenant Nightingale’s in charge of the case. I’ll turn the tape straight over to him, then I guess he’ll be in touch with you when he’s had a chance to listen to it.”

“I’m not making you understand, am I? There isn’t time for me to hang around waiting for your Lieutenant Nightingale to listen to the tape and then make up his mind about calling me. There just isn’t time for that. Why can’t I get to see him right now?” She was aware of the palm of her hand striking the surface of the desk. Slapslap—a quick impatient gesture.

“He’s not here right now. He went out a while ago.”

“Terrific,” she said. “Is there some way you can get in touch with him?”

Stanislavski shook his head.

He’s lying, she thought. Didn’t they have radios in cop cars? So why is he lying? Because he thinks I’m crazy, my whole story is off the wall. I’m just some demented housewife making up an adventure yarn to pass a boring afternoon. Because he doesn’t take me seriously. “You’ve got to be able to contact him,” she said. “I mean, there’s got to be some way of getting through.”

Stanislavki said, “Look, the best thing is to wait until he gets back. Then I’ll give him this cassette personally.”

“Can’t you radio him or something?”

Stanislavski sighed. He was weighing the cassette in one hand, apparently convinced it contained nothing explosive. She watched his face. She could see in his wearily resigned expression all the madness of his occupation—she could see the crazies and the deluded, the drugged and the freaks, the mad bombers and urban terrorists that must pass in front of his desk on a daily basis. He had to listen to everybody’s story, had to write reports on what was said to him; maybe after a time you gave up, paying only cursory attention to the faces and tales that you saw and heard from behind your desk. And mine, she thought, is just another such item of nonsense.

“Wait here,” he said.

He turned, threading his way between desks, then went through a door at the back of the room. She wondered what he was doing, whether he was actually doing anything, or if he were just lurking out of sight someplace and pretending to make contact with Nightingale, another means of humoring her. She looked around the room. She felt faint again. She had a sense of things around her melting, images running one into another like dripping wax. She covered her eyes with the palm of her hand. Then she heard Stanislavski come back.

“I tried,” he said. “I tried to get him in his car. I guess he wasn’t there.”

“Are you sure you tried?”

“I’m sure.”

She shrugged. “When will he be back?”

“It’s hard to say.” The cop picked up his printed form and looked at it for a moment. “Why don’t you go home? When he gets in I’ll make sure he listens to this tape and then calls you. Okay?”

She sighed now. Weariness—she had to fight against fatigue. She picked up her purse. “Are you sure you really tried to get Nightingale?”

“Lady,” he said. “I told you.”

“Okay, okay.”

She turned away from the desk, moved across the room, down the corridor, and then out into the street. She wondered how long it would take for Nightingale to reach her. Or if he’d ever get in touch at all.

5.

Nightingale stared at the bowling alleys: Big black balls thundered towards the pins, most of them thrown by massive women who had their hair in curlers and scarves over their heads. Maybe it was some kind of afternoon league, Housewives of the Bronx or something like that. Maybe they even had a name—the Deegan Expressway Die-Hards or something along those lines. He lit a cigarette and watched a bowling ball scurry into a gutter and go sliding beyond the pins with the force of a small bomb.

“I never bowled as a kid,” Moody said. “The noise of these joints scared me. Also the fact my father told me they employed evil dwarves to put the pins back in place. You shouldn’t tell kids things like that, Frank.” Moody swung around on his stool at the snackbar counter and sipped from a waxy cardboard cup of Pepsi.

Nightingale listened to the roar of balls as if they were ricocheting back and forth inside his tired mind; it must be bloody and raw in there, he thought. You haven’t slept in hours. You’ve been going on tobacco and black coffee—plugging yourself into those stimulant poisons. You couldn’t sleep anyhow. You shut your eyes and the insides of your brain buzz like a million flies trapped in a jar and all you keep seeing are pictures of the dead. Those brutalized faces. Blood, carnage. The way lives unfinished, cut down abruptly, are ruined like so many condemned buildings. He stared up at the fluorescent lights of the bowling alley; they glimmered in such a way that they made him dizzy. Spaced-out, he thought—tired, disgusted, burned. You reach that point where you know you’ve had enough, more than you need to take—maybe more than any man has to experience. Make this the last one, Frank, he told himself. After this you grab your pension and go off in search of the woman you love—if it’s not too damn late to get it rekindled.

“Why does he want to meet us way out here, Frank?” Moody asked. “The Bronx makes me nervous. I don’t feel good unless I’m sucking on the lead-filled air of good old Manhattan.”

Nightingale said, “Gooch doesn’t like to take chances. He doesn’t want to run the risk of anybody seeing him talk to us.”

“It’s overkill in the precaution department,” Moody said.

“Also he has a sick father out here he likes to visit; Maybe he wants to kill two birds with one stone.”

“Gooch has a father? I’d imagined immaculate conception by way of a faulty assembly line.” Moody crumpled his cardboard cup and stuffed it into an ashtray. He looked across the lanes for a minute, then said, “I know you don’t think I’m right, Frank, but what if Billy Chapman’s responsible for this last one as well, huh?”

“As well as what? The first two? Camilla and Henry?”

Moody nodded. “Yeah. Say he’s developing a pattern of some kind, Frank, some overall plan, a grand design of violence, something so deranged in its intricacy we can’t even begin to see it.”

Nightingale said nothing. What came back to him was the outrage he’d felt in Hausermann’s apartment, the black disgust, the sheer sharp edge of horror. A temporary madness had overwhelmed him. You just upped and lost it there, Frank. You let go for a while. But what you haven’t let go is your determination to nail this sonofabitch. He looked at his partner and said, “I don’t know anything about designs, Doug. I don’t know shit about detective-fiction patterns. I’d like it to be Chapman. I’d love it if it was just this one guy, if one guy had done all three murders. I’d love it on account of the fact that it’s neat and tidy. But you’re going to have to convince me some more. You’re going to have to tell me it’s not related to some old grudge.”

“Grudge?”

“Why sound surprised? Isn’t that a torch you’re carrying for Billy Chapman?”

Moody shook his head. “That what you really think, Frank?”

“I think it’s a strong possibility.” Soft-pedal it—don’t turn on the kid too sharply.

“Okay,” Moody said. “First, we got three strangulations.”

“Yeah, but they were different kinds, Doug.”

“A strangling is a strangling,” Moody said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s done with the bare hands or an electric cord. You don’t expect a crazy fucking killer to follow the same MO every time, do you? What do you think? He’s gonna leave an obvious trademark lying around?”

Nightingale listened to the rumble of bowling balls. “I’m still waiting, Doug. I’m sitting here waiting to be convinced of your case.”

“Okay, in each case you got the sexual thing. Camilla is screwed when she’s dead. Old Henry has his mouth filled with sperm, which they tell us might have been deposited after his death. And Jamey Hausermann gets the works with a hairdryer.”

“They’re all brutal, Doug. But even the Hausermann thing made the others look pale in terms of brutality, right?”

Moody blinked. “He’s building. He’s getting more elaborate. He’s becoming more and more intricate the longer he remains free. Maybe he’s started to think he can get away with anything. Maybe he thinks he’s way above the law.”

“Mmmmm,” Nightingale said. He tapped his fingertips on the counter. What if the Boy Wonder was absolutely correct? What if his scheme was the right one? What if Moody had hit the nail smack on its little head? He found himself thinking: Make me a case, Doug. Make it stick with me. I want to go along with you on this one because I don’t have the guts or the heart to think we might be dealing with three goddamn killers. Make it easy on me, Doug. Do your level best. He studied the curlered, scarved women for a while, as if he might find soothing normality there, a retreat into the mundane. He turned back to Moody. “Look, we got prints at the scene of Camilla’s killing. Why didn’t we get prints in old Henry’s place? Why didn’t we find jack shit at Hausermann’s apartment? Has Billy Chapman taken to wearing gloves or something? All of a sudden taken a shine to handwear?”

Moody shrugged. “Why not? He’s got to protect his ass.”

Nightingale was quiet for a while. Then he said, “I don’t know, Doug. I honest to God don’t know.” And he realized that what was absent was the old feeling in the marrow of the bones, the sense of something like warm steel working in the skeletal tunnels of himself. “Change of subject slightly. Did you talk with Hausermann’s editor?”

“They promised they’d come up with a complete list of her assignments lately.”

“Good. Maybe we’ll find something there. Maybe somebody took severe umbrage at the way she wrote about him, something like that. Who knows? It’s an outside chance anyhow.”

“She must’ve talked with hundreds of people, Frank.”

“Sure.” Hundreds and hundreds of interviewees. The whole methodical ploughing through of the victim’s associations. He thought about Walt for a moment. He’d been sedated—he wasn’t going to be able to tell them anything for a while yet. The problem about being sedated was that the chemical wore off and you had to wake up sooner or later and face the fact that your world had changed inexorably, that nothing was ever going to be the same again no matter how long you lived. He turned towards the entrance.

He saw Gooch come through the glass doors, a canvas bag in one hand, enormous sneakers on his feet. He approached slowly, looking from side to side as he moved. A game, Nightingale thought, the game of snitching. Maybe Gooch liked to imagine he was involved in very important undercover work. He approached the counter and lofted himself up on a stool, trying—with dismal lack of success—to look inconspicuous. For a moment Nightingale was reminded of the Jolly Green Giant. It was as if the big man might have a stash of corn kernels stuffed away in his sweats.

“Nice afternoon,” Nightingale said.

Gooch nodded and looked serious, working his eyebrows. “Beats the rain, lieutenant.”

“Sure does.” Nightingale splayed his hands on the formica counter and stared at the bronze stain of nicotine on his index finger. “So, Gooch. What’s the word? You sounded kinda pleased on the telephone.”

Gooch looked in the direction of Moody; his expression was one of suspicion. Moody smiled over the rim of his Pepsi.

“Did you have to bring that dude?” Gooch asked.

“He’s attached to me, Gooch. It’s called a team. Where I go, he goes. It’s so he can drag me out of gunfire if we should run into some criminals.”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t let him worry you. And don’t piss him off. He’s a mean sonofabitch if you rile him. Black belt. Twenty-seventh Dan or whatever those guys get.”

“A black belt?” Gooch gazed back at Moody.

“He picked up some wicked tricks in Vietnam. He can kill a guy with one hand. It’s not pleasant. I’d advise you to stay clear of him, Gooch.” Nightingale paused. “So, what do you know?”

“I got something for you.”

“Yeah?” Nightingale slipped a ten from his coat and balled it up in his closed fist.

“I been asking a lot of questions concerning the party you mentioned.” Gooch shrugged. He scratched his sneaker; when he rose from his bending position, his big face was blood red.

“You’ve been asking questions,” Nightingale said, tapping his fingers.

“Yeah. You ever hear of a guy called Sylvester?”

“No, I can’t say I ever did.”

“What I hear is this Billy Chapman connects with Sylvester.”

“Sylvester who?” Nightingale asked.

“I don’t know.”

Terrific, Nightingale thought. One name in a city of millions. One name that might be a first name, might be a last. He was suddenly reminded of a sadistic TV game show called The New Treasure Hunt in which participants could choose a box and win either a huge fortune or a plastic dog turd. You could open all the boxes that were labeled Sylvester—and how long would that take? He pushed his face closer to the big man.

“That’s all you know, Gooch?”

“I know this much: Your Billy Chapman gets his shit from this Sylvester.”

“I heard you already. You don’t know where this character hangs out?”

Gooch shook his head. “People don’t wanna talk, lieutenant, and that’s about the size of it.” As if he imagined he were being followed, observed, Gooch swung around in his stool. Nightingale opened the palm of his hand and the bill sprung out. Gooch picked it up by tucking it inside the elastic cuff of his sleeve. The whole CIA thing, Nightingale thought. The entire secret agent trip. Maybe he has a kit at home he plays with, one of those boxes you can buy in a kiddie store complete with invisible ink, mock handcuffs, a book of codes, a magnifying glass—all the paraphernalia of the espionage game reduced to child size. Moody moved down the counter, slurping through his straw.

“You give us Billy’s address, Gooch. Huh? You come up with his address, date of birth, next of kin, regularity of bowel movement, intake of roughage, whether he suffered from vagina envy at some tender age?” Moody said.

“What’s with this guy?” Gooch asked Nightingale.

“He went to college, Gooch.”

“College?”

Moody said, “Yeah. This collection of buildings wherein hamsters are deceived into wandering through tubes and men cut their wrists if they don’t get tenure.”

“Moody,” Nightingale said.

“Well,” Gooch said. “I told you what I got.” He stepped down from his stool.

“Thanks,” Nightingale said.

“Any time,” the big man said.

Nightingale watched him wander towards the exit, where he paused and looked up at the giant plastic bowler as if he were greeting a long-lost brother.

“What’s your problem, Doug?”

“He’s a temptation. You find a guy like that who walks around with space between his temples. I don’t know. Maybe I get off on throwing out little darts and watching him as he tries to catch them sizzling past his head.”

“Okay, you had a superior education to Gooch.”

“And I was fortunate enough to be born with a working brain instead of a sawdust wad beneath the skullbone.”

Nightingale closed his eyes. The smell of burger was stronger than ever. He wondered a moment about all the grease in the world, imagined great Amazons of it, huge tidal waves of polyunsaturated safflower, massive sea creatures carved out of lard. His stomach shifted a little, one degree south. “I don’t need that kind of fucking around, Doug.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“I’m thinking about this Sylvester.”

“A needle in the Manhattanstack.”

“I’m going to call Narcotics. Eddie Fodor. If anybody knows this Sylvester, it’ll be Eddie Fodor. I used to work with him, maybe ten years ago. He’s a character.”

Moody was staring over the lanes now. He appeared deep in thought. After a short silence he said, “Know what would be useful, Frank?”

“Tell me.” Sperm prints. Microchips inserted into the behavioral center of the brain. What new wonder had Moody imagined now?

“An informant bank would be pretty damn useful. You know, guys like Gooch could write their information down on specially coded slips of paper and stick them in night-deposit slots where they’d be decoded and entered in one central computer. That’s the trick, Frank. Centralization. As it stands, this informant business is just a cottage industry.”

Nightingale stepped away from the counter. An informant bank, a big central computer—if Moody had his way, he thought, the element of chance would be removed from all aspects of crime detection and everything stuffed into computer circuitry. Then you wouldn’t need cops—you’d only need technicians, engineers. I’ll be dead and buried before that day, thank Christ.

He moved slowly towards the exit. There was a phone booth just outside. He searched in his coat pockets for a couple of dimes. Eddie Fodor, he thought. Eddie Fodor was a walking encyclopedia of narcotics—he knew the guys who sold it, the middlemen who cut it, the users who bought it on the streets. He knew the names of the South American ships that hauled the cargoes from Peru and Colombia. He hadn’t seen Eddie in a while but he remembered Eddie’s party trick—he’d slip out his upper and lower plates of false teeth and crumple his face up like a catcher’s mitt until his nose disappeared and his jaws sunk to nothing. Eddie didn’t get asked to a lot of parties.

Through his closed lips he found himself humming an old tune, and realized it was the first vaguely happy thing he’d done in a while. An old enthusiasm stirred: warm and getting warmer.

Moody watched him. “What’s the name of that tune, Frank?”

“It’s before your time, friend. An old Johnny Mathis hit called ‘Chances Are.’ The good old days when Ronnie Reagan was still going to bed at night dreaming he was a romantic actor and a guy called Chubby Checker was about to emerge with the Twist and the streets hadn’t really begun to run with blood.”

Moody shrugged.

Nightingale heard a voice on the other end of the line. He said, “Eddie, this is Frank Nightingale. What’s new in the muddy world of narcotics?”

6.

Madeleine went inside a bar on the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue and wondered how far she’d walked since she’d left the police station. Hours ago and many miles of Manhattan sidewalk, it seemed—but she knew very little time had passed, very little distance covered. She was thirsty and weary. She sat down at a table. The bar was dimly lit, stained-glass lanterns hanging low over tables. Ferns, plants in great brassy pots, the kind of place that suggested some Californian idyll.

I don’t feel in the mood for an idyll.

I feel vacant, an absence from myself.

She looked across the room. Why did everyone appear shadowy? The afternoon drinkers might have been shimmering slowly away into some alcoholic dimension, undergoing some spooky chemical transformation. She shut her eyes and listened to a faint pulselike noise beat inside her skull.

A guy calls me at the gallery

then hangs up

asks for me by name, hangs up

why

It rises into one prolonged scream inside the mind, if you let it; it turns into one echoing shriek. She opened her eyes, looked at the waitress standing near her table. She ordered scotch and soda and drank half of it as soon as it came.

She gazed back across the bar.

You couldn’t see faces in here, couldn’t make out expressions. Great shadows fell across features, creating darkness, sculpting charcoal-colored patches out of pale skin.

What if he’s here? What if he’s one of the drinkers at the bar?

What if he’s been following you all afternoon?

How would he know?

Because Jamey, poor goddamn Jamey, told him.…

She tried not to think in this direction.

She stared inside her drink: It had already begun to go to her head. She sipped it, then she thought, You must call Harry. You must call him and tell him what you’ve done with his precious cassette, tell him about the cops. He deserves to know. She didn’t move. She shut her eyes again. Even here, in this place surrounded by people, you don’t feel safe. Vulnerable—that’s what you feel now.

“Madeleine?”

She thought she imagined hearing the sound of her name. She thought it must have come from inside her own head. But when she opened her eyes she saw Rube Levy standing over her, smiling down. She didn’t say anything. Coincidences, she thought. Rube Levy just happens to turn up here.

“Small world,” he said. He sat down alongside her, lightly laying one hand on her arm.

“Very small,” she answered. She moved her arm away and reached for her drink.

He removed his beret and stroked his small beard. “Didn’t you hear me calling you?”

“When?”

“Outside. On the street. You were walking some distance ahead of me. I called your name.”

Why did it suddenly chill her to think this? Somebody following her along the sidewalks. Somebody she didn’t see.

“Then I lost sight of you, so I figured you must have come in here, although I admit I did look inside a couple of stores.” His hand came down and covered her own. This time she didn’t move. He was silent for a moment, then said, “You’re trembling, Madeleine. Is something wrong?”

She didn’t answer. His hand felt like dough against her skin. Why was she having this reaction? Rube was a friend, one of Harry’s oldest, there was nothing to be afraid of, nothing to suspect. A man stands in a doorway across the street from the loft and strikes match after match, trying to light a pipe. No, she thought, it isn’t Rube Levy. It’s got nothing to do with Rube Levy. Just the same, she moved her hand from beneath his.

“Somebody killed my closest friend,” she heard herself say. “Somebody killed Jamey Hausermann.…”

“The woman who wrote the article about Harry?”

She nodded. “Somebody strangled her.”

Dry words. The bare bones. Killed, strangled, murdered. They were electric shocks of language. Suddenly she could see Jamey in her head. She could see the white dead face, the bruise marks on the neck, pictures she just didn’t want or need.

Rube Levy rubbed his jaw for a time. “Jesus,” he said. “What did Harry say?”

She glanced at Levy. She watched him take out his pipe and stuff it with tobacco. She said, “I sometimes get the feeling that he’s begun to slip inside his answering machine, like he’s fallen into a magnetic hole. Harry in Wonderland.”

Rube was quiet a second, then said, “You make a connection between the murder and Mr. Apology?”

“Damn right I do.”

She stared across the bar. The shadowy drinkers hunched on their stools. Somewhere, music was playing—tinny piano music. She listened to Levy suck on his pipe, then she turned to face him and said, “I went to the cops, Rube. I stole one of Harry’s tapes and I took it to the cops. I took one of the cassettes with that guy’s voice on it—”

“What guy? The maniac who calls regularly? The guy with the constant threats?”

She nodded.

Levy looked inside the bowl of his pipe. “I think you’ve gone and done something our boy won’t be very pleased about, Maddy. You’ve broken the law according to Harrison. I think he’s going to be pretty damn pissed. I’m trying to imagine his face when he finds out.” He shook his head from side to side. “I’ve known him for years and one of the things that’s always rubbed him the wrong way is anything he sees as interference in his work. He didn’t like listening to critical suggestions when we went to school together. He didn’t like professors telling him what to do. Interference, Maddy.”

“How can it be interference when all I’m interested in is his safety, Rube?”

“I’m only telling you how Harry is going to see it, that’s all.” He paused. “What did the cops say?”

“They weren’t exactly helpful. They’re going to listen to the tape. I’m pretty damn sure the guy I talked to thought I was just some kind of maniac.”

Levy dumped his pipe in the ashtray. “You’ve got to tell Harry, of course.”

“Of course.” She felt them suddenly just behind her eyes—tears, the pricking of moisture. She was thinking about Jamey again. She struggled against the thought.

“I don’t know what he’s going to say. I can only imagine.”

She finished her drink. Rube Levy was looking at his watch. He said, “I’ve got a business appointment nearby. It’s going to be one of those interminable things where executives open glossy folders and mutter about presentations and present me with what they call facts. I’ve got these people who do nothing more than look around like scouts for likely acquisitions, which my tax people tell me are necessary. But …” He paused, then smiled at her and put his hand against her shoulder. “I can cancel it if you need me … I mean, if you need some basic human company, a little sympathy. You don’t look as if you should be left on your own, Maddy. Like you need a friend.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “I’ve got to see Harry. I’ve got to talk with him. But thanks, Rube. Thanks for the offer.”

He was standing up now, obviously reluctant to go. “I’m really sorry about your friend, Madeleine. I’m not very good at knowing what to say at times like this.… Look, if you need me, if I can be of any help at all, call me. I’ll be home all evening. Okay? Don’t forget.”

“Thanks again.” She watched him go towards the door, where he turned, raised his hand in a limp way, then left. Alone, she picked up her glass and listened to the ice shift and creak inside. A flying visit from the ubiquitous Levy. Rube on his way to the towers of high finance. She shut her eyes. She felt suddenly squeamish, as if the scotch had bruised her insides. There was sticky saliva in her mouth all at once and she knew she was going to throw up if she didn’t make it to the rest room and run her face under cold water. She rose quickly, knocking her glass over, creating lines of melting ice, and went to look for the john, which she located at the end of a long corridor beyond the telephones and the cigarette machine. She found a door marked GALS and went inside a large white-tiled room, and walked to the sink, where she let cold water flow over her wrists. Sweat on her forehead, prickly heat behind her eyes. She splashed water across her face, dried herself with a paper towel. But she still felt nauseous. She walked to the nearest cubicle and opened it, stepped inside, locked the door behind her.

Safe. A world of locks. A world of locks and a woman’s toilet—how inviolate could you feel? Maybe Jamey Hausermann had locked the door of her apartment and somebody had forced it open. Maybe Jamey had felt safe like this too. There wasn’t any safety, she thought. There wasn’t any to be had.

She inclined her head and looked down into the bowl. Still blue water. I don’t want to have to stick my finger down my throat and throw up here.

She shut her eyes.

She heard footsteps. She heard footsteps click across the tiles. Silence, then the noise of a lock turning in the adjoining cubicle.

Somebody is next to me.

Somebody separated from me by this thin wood.

She turned her face slowly to the side.

Old graffiti.

Sarah loves Timmy Madigan

Captain Kirk lives

Denise Stroud gives good head

What had Harry once said about graffiti, about how he’d seen it on the sides of boxcars and in the subway and how it suggested some violence lying temporarily dormant?

Violence—

She sucked her breath in tightly.

There was a peephole cut in the wood just a few inches above her head, an oval opening about two inches wide.

A peephole.

A small oval slit in which something moved

something dark

moved

Someone is watching me through the wood.

She fumbled for the lock, which slipped between her moist fingers.

“Madeleine, Madeleine …”

No, no, no, I imagined the sound of a man’s voice calling my name, I dream it out of my panic and fear—

“Madeleine, Madeleine…”

The door was open. She moved out, running across the tiles.

She saw her own white reflection in the mirror as she raced towards the front door, the safety of the corridor, the security of the bar, the street beyond—

Nobody came after her.

The cubicle remained shut.

It remained as tightly shut as the locked lid of some impenetrable puzzle.

She went hurriedly back towards the bar, pushing her way through to the street. She rushed through the swinging glass door, unconscious of upraised voices behind her—and then she was running along the sidewalk, running blindly, missing some pedestrians, colliding with others, then making it finally to the next block, where she turned away from Fifth Avenue and along a quiet side street where she stopped running, out of breath, a pain in her chest.

She leaned against the window of a restaurant, oblivious to the curious stares of people passing.

You imagined it, Maddy. A man’s voice saying your name. You imagined the eye pressed against the hole in the wood—you invented it all somewhere in the troubled recesses of your brain, manufactured it out of your fear.

No.

No, you didn’t dream it.

She shut her eyes. She wanted never to move from this spot, to remain here forever in the safety of the darkness behind her closed eyelids.

Madeleine, Madeleine…

She gazed along the street. Businessmen. Women coming from the great stores of Fifth Avenue, hauling their purchases in large bags with famous names on them. Everyday things. So ordinary, so banal. How come it looked different to her suddenly, as if she were perceiving the world through faintly stained glass? As if she’d just lost a very important angle of perspective and things were tilting away from her?

Dear Christ.

There had to be an end to all this. There had to be an end to the bad dream her life had become.

7.

Bryant Berger hung the CLOSED sign on the door of the gallery, then walked in the direction of his office, where the desk lamp threw a feeble little glow. A white nimbus of light. He stared at his desk, ran the tip of his finger over old wood, saw how white his hand looked in the lamplight. He sat down, picked up Madeleine’s cassette, and placed it carefully inside his dictating machine—but he didn’t press the PLAYBACK button immediately. The voices—he didn’t want to listen to anybody’s confession, remembering how embarrassed, how humiliated, he himself had felt when he had talked to the infernal answering machine. He pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes. He remembered last night after he’d gone from George’s apartment, caught a cab that rushed him to the railroad station, made it to a late train to Bedford Hills, called Angela from the station with a sincere apology for his lateness, believing his own words, swallowing his own sad lies, waiting for Angela to come pick him up. How pleased she’d seemed to see him—she’d even forgiven him his tardiness. It was almost as if she hadn’t expected to see him at all, thankful for small mercies. Walking to the car she’d even held his hand and squeezed it and he had thought of invisible leashes, something intangible but very tightly strung around his neck. You wanted to step back then and get away and catch the next train that would carry you to the city and out of this suburb, this marriage, this gallery.… He opened his eyes. He got up, walked around his desk, stared at the failing sun through the window.

The pièce de résistance, of course.

One does not forget that, does one?

She had nibbled on his neck in bed, her hand sliding over his stomach, fingertips scraping the inside of his thighs. And, dear Christ, he had been aroused in a perverse way, almost as if he were pleased to fuck her. As if the act of sex constituted some meager form of vengeance for him. She had sucked his nipples, her heavy breasts slapping against his skin, her breath hot and moist on his throat. The slapping of the breasts—he was reminded of sodden paper bags bobbing on a tide against a seawall. Or shapeless jellyfish. And he had died then, the swelling went away, the feeling left him. When she’d put her hand between his legs there was nothing, nothing, nothing for her to hold, no erection for her to shove between her thighs and into the damp hairy center of herself. He felt something turn over inside him; she rolled away, lit a cigarette, smoothed his hair across his skull. Kindness. Why did she have to be so damnably kind then? You’re tense, Bry, you’re tense. It’s going to be okay, sweet baby. A little time, that’s all we need.

Bry. Sweet baby.

Cringing.

It might have worked if only I had imagined George in bed beside me, George’s body; it might have worked then and I could have pretended my beautiful boy was next to me.…

He reached out and touched the pane of glass, which was surprisingly warm. I couldn’t have imagined George. George no longer exists. And he remembered the young man’s violent anger, the verbal assaults, the outbreak of rage. He walks an edge, Berger thought. George walks some savage edge and is close to slipping.

He glanced at his wristwatch. Tonight there were to be visitors, dinner guests, dreary people who basked in Angela’s multicolored glow at the table. She would be more sparkling than the silver, the wine in the decanter, the little vases of flowers. She would shine.… It had the texture of a very bad dream.

He went back to his desk, sat down. The train he had to catch … but he didn’t want to think about it now. He pressed the PLAYBACK button of his dictaphone, leaned back in his chair, shut his eyes. There were squeaks and whirs, clicks, dial tones, and then he heard the sound of a voice that was almost inaudible. It was a kid muttering something about having taken acid in a graveyard and then digging up a fresh grave. Berger squirmed. He put out his hand and stopped the machine. Were all the calls like this one? Sickening and ghoulish? Did Madeleine truly imagine he’d want to play such monstrous things here in his gallery? He pressed PLAYBACK again.

I’M RESPONSIBLE FOR MY PARENTS’ BREAKING UP, MAN. I MEAN I THINK THEY WOULD HAVE STAYED TOGETHER IF I HADN’T CAUSED THEM SUCH HASSLES ALL THE TIME, YOU KNOW.…

How dreary, Berger thought. The adolescent who blames himself for his parents’ divorce. It had to be so commonplace it was barely of any interest. He raised his face from the dictaphone and gazed across the darkened gallery.

There was a shadow pressed against the front door.

The sound of something metallic being rapped against glass.

He knew. The palms of his hands started to sweat; there was a circle of warmth beneath his collar. His heart seemed to stretch, pressing against ribs. A pulse inside the brain, rooted in the dead center.

Dear God, I need him.

He walked slowly to the door, unlocked it, watched George step inside. He was holding a brown paper bag. Bryant Berger put out his hand, curled the palm against the side of George’s face, then he was kissing the boy, the tongue drawn lavishly along the hard edges of teeth, touching the soft gums, the roof of the mouth. He stepped back. His lips were wet. George was smiling; in the dark of the gallery his red hair seemed black, his eyes unlit and mysterious. There was tension, a tight thing strung across the air.

“A present, dear,” George said.

Berger took the brown bag and looked inside.

“You should never be without your hat, Bryant. It’s part of your mystique.”

The bag slipped from his fingers. His mind was running; he was astonished at his own display of passion—just seizing the boy as he came in and assaulting him with your mouth and lips and tongue. The need was bewildering, the hunger crazy, a terrifying pounding that involved all his nerve endings, all his senses. He could smell George, the skin, the cologne, the hair.

“George said some terrible things to Bryant last night, didn’t he?” George asked. “And George has come in all humility to beg for forgiveness.”

The boy went down on his knees and pressed his face into Berger’s groin. The excitement, the intensity, the rising of blood. Berger clutched the young man’s head and forced the face deeper into his body. The erection seemed to scald him. He dropped his hand and fumbled with his zipper, fingers clumsy, uncoordinated, flying in their haste.

George, George.

He glanced down at the top of the boy’s head. I need you. I need this. I don’t have the words for this kind of need.…

George’s cold palm was smooth against his penis. He moved it slowly up and down, caressing, tasting, his tongue wet and warm. Berger shut his eyes. They shouldn’t do this here so close to the window, the street. They should go inside the office and shut the door. He stroked George’s hair. But he couldn’t stop; he couldn’t make himself break away from George, couldn’t stop the mouth, the slow killing movement of the hand, the sweetness of the fingertips. He unbuckled his belt and let his pants slip to his ankles and he placed both hands against the back of George’s neck, pushing slightly, making tiny movements of his hips. This is all there is, this is all there has to be. This love. This agonizing hurtful terrible love.

George looked up at him and smiled. “You missed me, didn’t you? Tell me how much you missed me, Bryant.”

“It’s like dying, George.”

“Tell me more.”

“I don’t know how I could cope without you.” There, out in the open, revealed: a stark confession.

“Did Angela try to fuck you, Bryant?”

“No,” he said.

“Are you lying?”

“George, there’s only you.” He felt very tired as he said it. It was as if such an encounter with truth made him weary, the weariness of stepping out of an automobile after a long journey, when you shut your eyes and the white lines still streak through your head.

“There’s only me,” George said. He took Berger’s hand and stood up. “Why don’t we go in your office, Bryant?”

“Yes.” Berger hitched up his pants, conscious now of how ungainly quick passion could make you look—ridiculous, a clown figure, something stuffed and absurd. He followed George into the office and watched the boy take his jeans off. He stood there in blue bikinis. He removed his windbreaker and shirt and dropped them on the floor. He put his hand inside the elastic of his underwear and touched himself. Berger was only barely conscious of the voice issuing from the dictaphone.

“What are you listening to, Bryant?”

“A tape somebody gave me. It’s boring.”

“Who gave it to you?”

“My assistant, Madeleine.”

“Of course,” George said.

I don’t want to talk about it now. I don’t want to listen to it. It doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters now is you, George.

… SO WE WORKED OUT THIS ELABORATE SYSTEM OF CHEATING DURING THE FINAL EXAMS WITH THE RESULT THAT WE BOTH GOT A’ S, AND NOW I FEEL LIKE A TOTAL FRAUD.…

“Sounds fascinating, Bryant.”

“George, please, I want you.” He covered George’s hand with his own, watching his fingers slip inside the briefs. The tip of George’s penis was moist, sticky.

George …

HERE’S ALL I GOT TO SAY TO YOU … UNTIL THE NEXT TIME ANYWAY.… I’M GONNA KILL SOMEBODY. I MIGHT USE MY KNIFE, I MIGHT JUST USE MY BARE FUCKING HANDS, BUT IT’S GONNA HAPPEN, APOLOGY.…

“George.” Berger slowly slid the shorts down, revealing the glassy sheen of the hip, the amazing curvature, the fine yellowy hairs that were almost imperceptible. He got down on his knees and took George in his mouth and moved his head back and forth. He shut his eyes. His pleasure seemed a thing apart from himself, something that filled the room, warmed it, a thing that existed independently. He clutched George’s balls in his hands, feeling them brush the side of his face, touch his lips. The swelling, the tightening, the head of the penis slipping against his teeth and gums. Come for me, George, come inside my mouth, come for me. He heard George moan, felt the sharp nails of the boy’s hands dig into his neck. So hard, there had to be blood, the skin had to be broken, punctured. And then George groaned and pressed himself deeper, reaching for the throat, the roof of the mouth. His body shook violently several times and then he slumped against Berger, still moaning. Berger pulled his face back. He wanted to rise and hug George, wrap his arms around him as if he might permanently bind the boy to his body.

…AND THERE’S NOT A GODDAMN THING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT.…

“What a horrible voice,” George said. “Don’t you think it’s horrible, Bryant?”

“I wasn’t really listening.”

“I could tell that.” George was looking at the dictaphone on the desk, his eyes bright, lit. Berger didn’t speak. The voice was horrible. It filled the room with a sense of distilled madness. A crazy deranged voice.

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

WE’LL BE TALKING AGAIN REAL SOON.

“I’ll turn the thing off.”

“Wait,” George said. “Let me listen to it.”

“It’s so depressing.”

“Wait, I said!”

“Of course. Whatever you say.” There—that old harsh edge in the young man’s voice. He watched George move towards the dictaphone and press the REWIND button.

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

Berger thought: Something about that voice … whatever—it eluded him, a very distant awareness of familiarity. But voices on telephones always seemed nasal, distorted. I’ve never heard it before.

“George, we don’t need to listen to this, do we?”

“I want to. I want to listen to it!”

“Sure.” Berger felt lost all at once—George had become distant, absorbed in these crazy ramblings.

KNOW SOMETHING? I GET THE FEELING YOU’RE THERE, MAN. I GET THIS DISTINCT FEELING YOU’RE JUST SITTING THERE LISTENING.… WHY DON’T YOU PICK UP THE TELEPHONE? OR IS THAT SOMETHING YOU NEVER DO?

George stopped the machine. What is it? What the hell is it that so interests him about this nonsense? Berger wondered. And what is this other thing you feel—that the voice is somehow familiar to you, like the distorted version of a voice you know, someone you’ve listened to, someone you’ve heard in the past? What is this uneasy feeling?

George turned and, with a small smile, a tiny cold expression, said, “I have to make a phone call, Bryant. A very private one. Do you mind?”

“Who are you going to call?”

“It isn’t dear Angela. Don’t worry.”

“I know that.…” The question. The unease. It was a matter of destiny, he thought—you are fated never to overcome the seizures of jealousy. He is calling somebody, somebody he’s going to go see now, a meeting, an assignation. Berger stepped out of his office, closing the door. He felt miserable, wretched, diminished. He just erases me from his mind. He forgets me. How can it be that goddamn easy for him? He paced outside the closed door. The anguish of this. Was anything worth that? He clenched his hands. He went close to the door, listening to the low mumble of George’s voice. A tone, a monotone—there were no words he could distinguish. And then he heard the sound of George laughing. There, he thought, he makes a connection over a telephone and it pleases him, and perhaps it pleases him even more when he knows how badly it affects me. Twist, turn, the passages of a maze. Don’t hurt me, George. I can take anything but that.

He pushed the door open and looked in.

George was hanging up the receiver.

He had a strange look on his face. Berger was reminded of the expression George’d had when he’d been playing with his revolting Swiss army knife. A mean aspect of George, as if whatever generosity and whatever compassion he possessed had suddenly deserted him—and you could see something dark just under the surface of skin.

“Who did you call, George?” Hating himself, loathing himself for this weakness.

“You wouldn’t know the person.”

“Is it a date?”

“You might say that, Bryant.”

“Who? Is it someone you’re attracted to?”

“In a sense.”

“Why are you being so damned evasive?”

George was smiling now. He tipped his face back, looked upwards at the ceiling, appeared lost in contemplation. Berger watched him: By lamplight, encircled by the pale splash of white, he seemed bigger somehow, dominating the room. He went across the floor and put his hands on George’s shoulders.

“Is there somebody else?”

“Not really.”

“I know I can’t expect you to be loyal, George.” Pathetic, groveling, as if he were very small and looking up at the young man.

George kept smiling. Why did it suddenly seem so infuriating? The smile, the parted lips, the white teeth.

“I know I can’t expect it. I know there are attractive young people out there, people with whom you must have more in common than me.…” He faltered. The begging heart. “It’s just very hard for me to accept the idea that you must know other people.”

“Do you think I do?”

“I don’t think about it, George. I try to keep it away. It hurts.”

“I wouldn’t want to hurt you, Bryant. Would George want to hurt his very dear friend?”

Berger laid his face against the young man’s shoulder. “When you were making that phone call, when you insisted on privacy, I felt … I don’t know, a kind of hopelessness. Despair.”

“You want to know who I called, don’t you?”

Berger nodded. Yes, no, he wasn’t sure.

“Just an acquaintance, Bryant.”

“Someone you go to bed with?”

“Really, Bryant, you think the most awful things about me, don’t you?”

George pressed the PLAYBACK button on the dictaphone. He turned back to Berger and lightly touched his neck, running his fingertips smoothly over the flesh. Berger pressed his mouth against George’s lips. This is it. This is the place where passion comes back and the senses leave you like summer moths on their haphazard flight into death. Down and down and down in the taste of George, drawn under, blinded.

HERE’S ALL I GOT TO SAY TO YOU, UNTIL THE NEXT TIME ANYWAY …

Why was it so loud now, filling the whole space of the office? Why? Berger felt George draw him down to the floor; he felt the young man’s legs wrapped around his own …

I MIGHT USE A KNIFE. I MIGHT JUST USE MY BARE FUCKING HANDS …

… and for a short time, a very short time, he entered a world that was without shadow, jealousy, a word with a certain future.

And then he realized where he had heard the voice before.

8.

When he heard the sound of the loft door being quietly opened, Harrison stepped out of the bedroom and looked at Madeleine—the pale face, the deep shadows under the eyes, her mouth a single tired line. He moved across the floor and held her hands, saying nothing, leading her into the bedroom, making her sit down. Her shoes were scuffed and her coat hung open and her blue silk scarf dangled precariously around her neck. He put his arms around her, feeling neither anger nor disappointment but a sense of relief—because all day long he had been wondering if she’d ever come back, if the theft of the tape meant the end of their relationship. He had called her number at the apartment; he had tried the gallery, only to learn that she’d been sent home. Now she was here, silent, distant, but here at last. He listened to her sigh.

“You know what I’ve done, Harry?”

“You don’t have to say anything now,” he said, touching the side of her face and finding her skin cold.

“I took one of your tapes. I went to the cops with it. I gave it to a cop called Stanislavski, who said he’d pass it along to somebody called Nightingale, the guy in charge of the murder investigations.…” She recited these words in a flat way, her face expressionless. She might have been communicating out of a trance.

“There’s something else, Harry.”

He didn’t speak. He was thinking about the cops listening to one of the tapes. What could they do about a voice on a cassette? How could it help them catch a killer unless they bugged every goddamn phone booth in the city?

“Somebody followed me today.” She licked her lips, hesitated.

“Who?”

“I don’t know who. I was in a bar. I went inside the john and somebody came into the next cubicle and looked at me through a hole in the wood and whispered my name.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sitting here making it up, Harry. God damn it, of course I’m sure!”

“Did you see the person?”

She shook her head.

“Maybe it was somebody playing a practical joke.”

“Harry, something bad is going on! Something you’ve created and released. And it’s happening to us. It’s not happening to the guy next door; it’s happening to you and me!”

He heard her words ring in his ears. He got up from the bed and strolled towards the window, where he looked out at the darkening sky. Was she right? he wondered. Was she absolutely correct, beyond all possible doubt? Are you too blind, Harry, too engrossed, to see what Madeleine observes? Is that what it is? He shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans, making tight fists of them. You just can’t face the sight of your little world of Apology coming apart like fragments of some torn map. You can’t bear the sound of it being unraveled. He turned around to look at Madeleine. Something you’ve created and released. Your own private monster, constructed out of a demented blueprint. Madeleine had risen from the bed and was standing over the answering machine, just staring at it. Then she raised her eyes and looked at the shelf of cassettes.

Something you’ve created.

And released.

And it was killing Madeleine too.

He moved towards her and put his arms around her shoulders, linking his hands over her breasts. She moved away from him, turned to the window, walked there slowly. Cold, unresponsive. He watched her for a while, saying nothing. Somebody had followed her inside a ladies’ room, uttered her name—was she totally sure? Or was it something she had constructed out of her own fears, out of the terrible shock of her friend dying?

The telephone rang. He heard the answering machine click on, the sound of his own recorded message. Madeleine swung around, her face filled with pain.

“No more, Harry. Please. No more of it.”

He didn’t move.

The call, he thought.

The one he wanted to hear.

He heard his message end, saw Madeleine turn back and stare out of the window.

The voice filled the room.

The voice …

APOLOGY, HOW COME YOU NEVER CHANGE YOUR MESSAGE, MAN? I’M GETTING KINDA SICK OF ALWAYS HEARING THE SAME WORDS WHENEVER I CALL.… HOW COME YOU NEVER PICK UP THE TELEPHONE EITHER? HUH?

And the laughter.

Derisive.

Harrison felt every nerve in his body stiffen, ligaments and muscles tense. He covered the receiver with the palm of his hand. Madeleine was moving back towards the bed. She sat down, hands covering her ears.

I GOT ANOTHER LITTLE CONFESSION FOR YOU. MAN. I KILLED SOMEBODY LAST NIGHT. I KILLED SOMEBODY BECAUSE SHE WASN’T GOING TO TELL ME WHAT I WANTED TO KNOW, APOLOGY.… I CUT HER TITS. I WENT INSIDE HER MOUTH WITH A RAZOR BLADE AND I CUT HER TONGUE OUT.…

“Shut it off, Harry!” Madeleine put her face down on the pillow, sobbing.

I STRANGLED HER WITH A HAIRDRYER. MAN, AND THEN I STUCK THE THING INSIDE HER CUNT.… WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THAT? SHE WAS AN OLD PAL OF YOURS, APOLOGY … AN OLD PAL.… YOU FUCKER, WHY DON’T YOU PICK UP YOUR GODDAMN PHONE? MAYBE YOU READ ABOUT HER IN THE NEWSPAPERS, YEAH? THEY DON’T GO IN TO THE REAL DETAILS, NOT THE KIND I’M TELLING YOU NOW.…

“Oh, Jesus, Jesus,” Madeleine was saying, her words broken by tears. Harrison reached across the bed and touched her. Jamey Hausermann… It was more than he could imagine, more than he could envisage. The whole picture was too terrible for him to contemplate. He gazed at the red light on the answering machine. Why did it suddenly seem to flicker, almost as if power were being drained out of the device by the weight of the incoming message? Almost as if this message were too much for the cassette to carry. He shut his eyes, curled his fingers around the receiver. You get an idea, you get a notion, it excites you, it draws you to it, you suddenly think you’ve discovered a new form of artistic expression, those sad messages that come from out there, you see it all as a kind of breakthrough for you, something that might liberate you from past failures and break new ground, you imagine all this—then it turns around against you, it rears up and strikes out and it strangles you in miles of magnetic tape, it changes from dream to nightmare, from expressions of sorrow and regret to outrages, monstrosities—and none of it would have happened if you hadn’t had your crazy vision in the first place.… And you didn’t want to see it, didn’t want to look at it, made yourself blind to what was falling apart all around you.

I’VE SEEN YOUR LITTLE FRIEND, APOLOGY. I’VE SEEN YOUR LITTLE PAL, YOU KNOW, AND SHE AIN’T BAD-LOOKING.… SHE AIN’T BAD-LOOKING AT ALL.… WHAT’S SHE LIKE IN THE SACK, HUH? HOT AND STEAMY?

The laughter.

Harrison looked down at his white knuckles. There was an anger running through him now, a deep dark anger that coursed through the networks of his body.

HEY, LISTEN … I GOT TO GO NOW, BECAUSE THERE’S THIS GUY WHO’S GETTING ON MY NERVES AND WHINES A LOT AND I FIGURE I CAN DO HIM SOME GOOD BY JUST PUTTING HIM OUT OF HIS MISERY.… KNOW WHAT I MEAN? HIS LIFE AIN’T WORTH THE HASSLE.… I’LL DO HIM A FAVOR … BUT I’LL BE SEEING YOU AND YOUR LITTLE PAL REAL SOON, BECAUSE YOUR OTHER FRIEND JAMEY … WELL, JUST LET ME SAY, SOME PEOPLE WILL BECOME PRETTY GODDAMN TALKATIVE WHEN YOU’RE FLASHING A RAZOR IN THEIR FACE.…

Again, the laughter.

IT WON’T BE TOO LONG BEFORE I SEE YOU, HARRISON. HARRY HARRISON.

Harrison…

Madeleine raised her face and stared at him with red eyes.

Harrison…

He knows who I am.

He knows.

He fumbled the receiver to his mouth but the line was already dead.