SEVEN

1.

Nightingale rubbed his eyelids and looked across the office at Moody. The Boy Wonder was going through a folder of papers. He raised his face, pursed his lips, and made a humming sound. Then he said, “Jamey Hausermann must have talked with everybody in this whole metroplis, Frank. Listen to some of this stuff she wrote about. An article on the New York Knicks. Another on some PLO hitman living in Brooklyn. A guy trying to raise money for Northern Irish rebels. Mayor Koch. A lottery winner. Norman Mailer. The future of rapid transit. There’s a whole bunch of stuff here, Frank.”

“Lemme see it,” Nightingale said. Moody crossed the room, dropped the folder on Nightingale’s desk. Nightingale picked it up, flipped the pages. She’d covered a really broad spectrum of New York people and events and issues. There didn’t seem to be anything she hadn’t touched. The paperback revolution. Richard Nixon, lawyer. The Mr. Apology line. “Hey, Doug, here’s your old pal. Mr. Apology.”

“Yeah, I noticed it.”

“Maybe we should start there.” He scratched his nose and shrugged.

“Nah. Start with Norman Mailer. Maybe he got violent or something.”

Nightingale smiled. He was about to start making little tickmarks beside the list of names and subjects, on the grounds that perhaps something she’d written about might provide a clue to the killer, when he heard the office door open. He looked up to see Eddie Fodor come in. Eddie wore a three-piece pinstriped suit, the kind of suit Nightingale thought he hadn’t seen since the middle of the 1940s.

“Eddie, how are you?”

“Doing just dandy, Frank. You?” They shook hands.

“I’ve had better days.”

“I heard you got something pretty bad down here. Some stranglings.”

“Yeah, with bells on,” Nightingale said. “Double-breasted, huh? You don’t see that a whole lot these days. Pretty smooth, Eddie. They must pay real well in Narcotics.”

Moody was sitting on the other side of the room. “What it is, Frank, a whole lot of contraband never makes it to trial. It has a way of mysteriously disappearing. Six pounds of heroin just seems to evaporate until there’s only three left. Where does it go? you ask yourself. Now take another look at Eddie’s suit and maybe you start to have this feeling just kind of dawn on you.”

Eddie Fodor, who wore his slicked-down hair center-parted, laughed. “I like your partner’s style, Frank. He’s a laugh a minute.”

Nightingale nodded sourly. Why did Moody have this unfortunate knack of saying things out of turn every so often? Maybe it was his strange sense of humor or something. He glared at Moody and then turned back to look at his old partner, Eddie Fodor.

“You haven’t changed much, Eddie. I’ll say that.”

Eddie Fodor said, “I keep myself trim, you know? I work out. I get some jogging in.” He winked at Nightingale, then nudged him. Eddie had always been a terrific nudger. “Nookie helps as well, Frank. Remember nookie?”

Nightingale tried to suck in his paunch.

There was a silence in the room for a moment, then Eddie Fodor slid down from the edge of the desk and paced towards the window. He had a jaunty way of walking, a feisty manner, as if he were trying to keep his balance on a storm-struck boat. He stared out, hands tucked inside the pockets of his vest. “This place sucks, Frank. It’s crummy. You should see the office they gave me. I got chrome chairs and a decent desk. Scandinavian style. Plain wood, very fashionable.”

“Well,” Moody said. “All the glamour’s in drugs nowadays. All that undercover posturing. TV glorifies the narc because he’s always coming on like Serpico or something. It’s a bunch of bullshit.”

Eddie Fodor looked at Nightingale. “He’s like sour milk, Frank. What’s his beef?”

“My beef is I’m tired of a killer running loose out there,” Moody said. He picked up a file, flipped it open, and lapsed into a dark silence.

Fodor took a cigarette case from his pocket and removed a cigarette, which he lit with a flashy lighter. Nightingale watched this shimmery display of silver: It was like a conjuror’s sleight-of-hand, gone before he could register what he’d seen. Then he remembered that Eddie Fodor wasn’t married—he was one of those stonewall bachelors who see women in terms of their uses, particularly the employment that necessitates the parting of their legs. Chattels. The liberation movement had passed Eddie by.

“When you called me you mentioned a guy called Sylvester, Frank.”

“Right. We got this weak tip—it’s a vague shot, Eddie. He might be able to help us in a homicide inquiry.”

“Is he a suspect?”

“He might know the killer.”

Eddie Fodor opened his briefcase. Good leather, Nightingale noticed. He wondered briefly if there was a lot of bonus money, danger money, in working Narcotics. Eddie probably didn’t spend very much on anything except his appearance. Flash Eddie Fodor.

Fodor took a file out of his briefcase and threw it down on Nightingale’s desk. A couple of blurry photographs slid out—they were obviously the kind of pictures taken long-distance, the kind shot through the back windows of a florist’s van or a laundry truck that in reality contained narcs with cameras. Nightingale picked them up. One showed a bunch of people walking along a street; a red circle had been crudely drawn around one particular face. It was too indistinct to make the features out. A young guy, beared. But that was about it. The other showed a ghostly apparition stepping out of a subway exit.

“I admit they aren’t exactly Ansel Adams,” Fodor said. “But the guy’s Sylvester Garincha, who’s a pretty smalltime dealer. A half-ounce of coke here, a half-ounce there. I haven’t had much time to bother with him, Frank. I get more interested in where these piddling half-ounces are coming from. A guy like Sylvester—he’s hardly worth hauling in. He’s the only Sylvester I know. So I figure it’s worth showing you.”

Nightingale passed the pictures across to Moody, who looked at them and laughed. “Your guy must have Vaseline on his lens, Eddie. Either that or it was a real foggy day.”

“Who gives a shit about their artistic value?” Eddie Fodor said. “You want to know about this Sylvester or don’t you?”

“We want to know,” Nightingale said.

“Okay, I’ll tell you,” Eddie Fodor said. “I know his turf. I know where he makes his connections. I don’t want him hauled in, Frank. I prefer him on the street, because I got something coming up where I think I can lean on him a little bit—you know the score.”

Nightingale nodded. He took the pictures back from Moody. How was he going to identify Sylvester from these crummy snapshots? He’d seen clearer images on imported 8-mm massage-parlor movies.

“I don’t know how you’re going to work it, Frank. I don’t want to be involved, you understand? It’s your business. I got things I don’t need to blow right now.” Fodor paused. He smoked the last of his cigarettes and dropped it on the floor. “I don’t know the guy’s hours, Frank. Like everybody else in his line of country, they’re highly flexible. Times Square …”

“It figures,” Moody said. “We need pith helmets and survival rations, Frank, if we’re going into that jungle.”

“You want this Sylvester or don’t you?” Fodor said.

“Yeah,” Nightingale said. “What about Times Square?”

“Okay. He sometimes hangs out in an arcade called Butch’s. Like I said, he doesn’t keep regular hours.”

“Why doesn’t he have a home address?” Moody asked.

“Kid, what the fuck do you want? You want to know he’s got a three-bedroom tract house out in Merrick, Long Island; he’s got two point five kids, a wife who bakes cookies for Thanksgiving, and the name of the company that holds the paper on his home? You’ve done nothing but bitch since I came in.” Fodor looked at Moody. “A home address. Jesus!”

“I think he got the message, Eddie,” Nightingale said. He glanced at his former partner; he was a little red in the face all at once, fumbling for his cigarette case again, extracting a smoke, lighting it. “Say, Eddie, while we’re on the subject of Sylvester, did you ever run into a customer of his, a guy called Billy Chapman?”

“William Arthur Chapman?” Fodor asked.

“The very same,” Nightingale said. Moody had looked up now, all interest, eyes sparkling.

“I know the guy. What’ve you got on him?”

“Suspicion of homicide, Eddie.”

Eddie Fodor drew on his cigarette for a long time. “I busted him—oh, Christ, a few years back. Small-fry user. He rubbed me the wrong way, that guy.”

“Like how?” Moody asked.

“Bad chemistry,” Fodor said. “I don’t like space cadets like him. I don’t like drugs. I don’t like drug users. I don’t like the attitudes of druggies—”

Nightingale held up a hand to stop this diatribe. Who needed to hear a catalogue of Eddie Fodor’s prejudices anyhow? “Yeah, sure, I understand—but what about Chapman? What do you remember?”

“It doesn’t surprise me a bit, Frank, that you’re thinking homicide.”

“Why?” Nightingale looked at Moody again; the young guy’s face was alight again.

“Cocaine, right? You go at it for years the way Billy Chapman was doing, you’re gonna come up with your head pretty well fucked over. You’re gonna turn into a zombie that don’t know left from right. You’re gonna snap, Frank, like a fucking rubber band. If it ain’t imaginary insects eating your cheeks out, then it’s all kinds of weird imaginings that would make the lost weekend look like a Muppet show. Sure, homicide doesn’t surprise me, not for a moment.”

Nightingale said nothing. He moved around his office for a while, thinking about that look on Moody’s face, as if the Boy Wonder had just been vindicated by the pope himself. Okay, one homicide, Nightingale thought—we all knew that much. But three? Three? “How far could he go, Eddie?”

“Meaning?”

“Would he be capable of more than one murder?”

“Hey, Frank, you can’t tell with that kind of jerk. He could be capable of just about anything. Never underestimate the cocaine habit. Never make that mistake. You hear all this bullshit about how harmless it is—trust me. Trust me when I tell you I’ve seen it turn more lives inside out than junk.”

Moody was on his feet now, flushed. He looked at Nightingale as if to say I told you so.

Eddie Fodor turned towards the door. “Butch’s, Times Square. You’ll find Sylvester there. Just send the file back when you’re through. Don’t let it get lost in the paper shuffle.”

“Thanks. Eddie.”

“You owe me one.”

Nightingale shook hands with Eddie Fodor. He watched him walk to the door. Then he remembered something and said, “Eddie, how about showing Doug your old party trick?”

“Hey, you remember that?”

“Who could forget it, Eddie?”

Fodor approached Moody’s desk. Huge false teeth disappeared, first into the palm of his hand, then quickly into a navy-blue silk handkerchief he slipped out of his pocket. His face imploded like a squeezed sponge, the lips bent inwards, the cheeks sunk into great hollows and the tip of the nose sagged weirdly. Then he rolled his eyes and made funny noises. Nightingale laughed; it was a disgusting sight. Moody’s expression didn’t change. The teeth went back into place and suddenly the face was human again.

“I used to do that at all the parties,” Fodor said.

“It’s impressive,” Moody said. “I was spellbound.”

“Where’s your sense of humor?” Fodor asked. He turned towards Nightingale. “Brings back all the old memories, doesn’t it?”

“For sure,” Nightingale said.

“Be seeing you.” And Fodor was gone.

Moody looked across the room at Nightingale. “My stomach turned over, Frank. Did you find that funny?”

“More nostalgic,” Nightingale said.

Moody was getting up from behind his desk.

“Well, Frank, what do you think?”

“About what Eddie said?”

Moody nodded. “What he said about Chapman.”

“Yeah.” Nightingale looked thoughtful. “He could be right. You could be right.” I’m beginning to feel like Thomas looking at the wounds in Christ’s hands, he thought. He stared at Moody a moment. “Okay, I’ll go along with you for the time being, Doug. I’ll climb down off my fence and tell you that I think there’s an outside chance—outside, mind you—that Billy’s our man.” Why did it hurt to come out with it just like that? At least it brought a smile to Boy Wonder’s face.

“We’re getting warmer,” Moody said.

“Sure,” Nightingale said. He reached for his overcoat and struggled into it. “Times Square, then. Lovely Times Square on a beautiful night in late fall.” He sighed. Sighing’s what I do best these days, he thought.

Moody was pulling on his own overcoat. Nightingale stepped out into the corridor. Stanislavski appeared in a doorway, holding something in his hand. He stepped forward clumsily, like a huge disjointed string puppet. He held a bulky manila folder.

“Lieutenant?”

“It’s going to have to wait, Stan.”

“Lieutenant, this woman came in—”

“Put it on my desk. I’ll get to it when I come back, Stan.”

“But lieutenant—”

Nightingale reached the front door and turned to Moody, saying, “I hope you’re right, Doug. I really hope you are. It saves on the midnight oil. Three birds for the price of one, so to speak. Three eggs in one nifty basket.”

Moody held the front door open for him and he stepped out into the night, pausing on the sidewalk, staring up at the dark sky, beating his palms together for warmth.

“This way, if you’re correct, we can all get some sleep, Doug.”

“I remember sleep,” Moody said.

“I don’t,” Nightingale answered.

2.

The telephone. The telephone that brought so much misery into this room might now turn out to be the device that saves your life, saves Maddy’s too. It was an unpleasant irony. Harrison stood at the bedroom window, arms folded. Harrison. Harry Harrison. The voice came back to him with sharp clarity. What in the name of God have I done? What have I been a party to? Worse than a party, worse than some witless bystander, you didn’t stop when all the warning signs were plainly written in front of your face, you didn’t stop even then, when with only a slight amount of insight and less attachment to your beloved project you should have been able to read the violent graffiti on the wall. There was a dull pain lying in the center of his head. At least you feel pain, Harry; at least you’re alive to do that. Jamey doesn’t. Henry Falcon doesn’t. The nameless woman who was drowned in her own apartment—she certainly doesn’t.

He turned to stare at the telephone on the bedside table.

“What did the police say, Harry?” Madeleine asked. “I mean, did they give you a time when Nightingale would reach you or what?”

“The guy I talked with said Lieutenant Nightingale would get back to me as soon as he could be located.”

“Located? What the hell does that mean?”

“Friday night in Manhattan—who knows how many goddamn strange messages they get or how many calls they have to answer that just turn out to be wild?” He went towards Madeleine, put his arms around her, tried to calm her. It was another unpleasant irony, but all he really wanted to say to her were two simple words: I’m sorry. What good would an apology be now? He gazed at the answering machine. He’d pulled the plug from the wall and now the device was unlit, dead. It hadn’t been the easiest thing to do even now, even after so much catastrophe, but he felt a singular sense of relief mingled with his disappointment. It was as if these two sensations lay in some uneasy balance. You kill the project that might kill you. Something else will come along; something new will occur to you—it’s bound to.

“Harry, I can’t just sit here like this. I just can’t sit here and wait for the police to arrive. We have to get out of here.”

“Where would we go?”

“It doesn’t matter. Anything would be better than waiting. My apartment.”

“Maddy, if he knows our names then he knows our addresses too.”

“Then what should we do?”

Harrison didn’t answer. He looked out the window at the night sky. You feel it out there, throbbing through the darkness. You feel this unavoidable sense of someone stalking the streets, someone moving with the night winds, scurrying through alleys, skirting the backs of buildings, passing the dimly lit windows of the city. Someone who wants you and Madeleine.

“Harry, we can’t just sit here. I’ll go crazy.”

The telephone interrupted her.

The cops. The cops.

He picked up the receiver. It wasn’t the police.

“Mr. Apology?”

The voice. Harrison momentarily couldn’t think of anything to say.

“You’ve answered yourself. I can’t believe it, man. I’ve been longing to hear you in person. This is great.”

Harrison felt a dryness at the back of his throat. You’ve got the killer on the line and you don’t know what to say. Suddenly you’re struck dumb, silent.

“Is it the police, Harry?” Madeleine asked.

He shook his head.

“Hey, man, what’s the matter? Can’t talk? Something bothering you?”

“Listen—”

“Go right ahead. I’m all ears, man.”

“You sonofabitch—” He heard his own angry voice, his own failure to be reasonable, rational, to say anything that might mean something to this madman. What could he hope to say that was meaningful anyway with a guy like this? You couldn’t get through. He fell into silence, listening to the sound of the caller breathing.

“Hey, I didn’t exactly expect this kind of welcome, Apology. I feel we’ve known each other for such a long time that we’re real close friends.”

“Look,” he said. “You’re making a mistake if you think you’re scaring me. You’re making one big error. For a start, the cops are on to you. They’ll be here in a matter of seconds.”

“Yeah? I got news for you, Harry, old pal. I can get to you faster than any cop can. I can be there in a few seconds.”

Nearby. A phone booth nearby. He tried to remember where the nearest one was but he couldn’t bring it to mind. He felt a sudden touch of fear, the cold breath of something nameless and faceless on the back of his neck, a shiver going up his backbone like a series of tiny iron filings rushing to the heart of a magnet. Then he thought: Wait, pretty soon this Nightingale will call and then the streets will be alive with the noise of sirens, lights flashing, tires screaming, footsteps rushing through the building. Why did he suddenly wish he could run the movie of his recent life backwards to that point where he’d talked Madeleine into helping him put up the handbills, back to that point where he might have raised his hand like a traffic cop and said, No, this is pointless, this project doesn’t make any goddamn sense?

“You still there, Mr. Apology?”

“I’m still here.”

“How does it feel, Harry? How does it feel to know that this is the last night of your life?”

Harrison said nothing.

The caller went on, “I’ll miss you, you know that? I’ll miss our relationship. I think you’ve really been good for me, Harry. You gave me an outlet, somebody to talk to even if it was only a machine. But I’ve got to save myself, understand? I’ve got to look out for my own interests, and the more I keep talking to you, the more I start to feel real vulnerable.… You’re learning too much about the things I’ve done and I don’t think I care for that feeling. I’m sorry, Harry. I’m really sorry.…” Sudden laughter. Then a quick intake of breath. “No hard feelings, huh?”

No hard feelings. Harrison said, “It’s up to you. But like I said, the cops are going to be here in a minute—”

Click. Nothing. He was talking now to a dead line.

He slammed the receiver down. He moved towards Madeleine.

“It was him, wasn’t it?”

Harrison nodded.

“What did he say?”

“Nothing much.”

“What did he say, Harry?”

“He’s in the neighborhood somewhere.”

“And he’s coming here?”

“I guess that’s his intention.”

She turned her face this way and that, panicked, seeming to search for something that she could reach which would bring about a solution. Then she stopped and pressed her face against his shoulder. He wondered how he could even begin to console her. What was he supposed to say—that there was a good bolt on the front door? God damn it, he thought. It has to start here, right now; it has to begin with taking some kind of positive action, something that might lead them back to normality, back to the kind of life they’d been living before any of this started happening.

She drew her face away from his body. She was listening to something, her head tilted slightly to one side.

“Did you hear that?” she asked.

He shook his head. “I didn’t hear anything. What is it?”

“Just listen. Did you hear that?”

He shook his head. He hadn’t heard a thing.

“There’s somebody out there. I heard somebody move on the stairs, Harry.”

He turned his face towards the bedroom door. Waited. She was very tense against him, her breathing stilted, quick, as if her lungs were beginning to fail inside her.

“There,” she whispered.

He listened—what was it? Some strange scuffling sound, a foot scraping across a floor.

“You must hear that,” she said.

He nodded. He went out of the bedroom and across the floor of the loft and he searched around for something he knew he’d dropped several days ago—but where was he supposed to find it among all the junk that lay scattered underfoot? The noise came again, closer this time. He bent down, searched the debris, his fingers finally encountering the cold metallic feel of the object he wanted. It was the surgical scalpel he’d used on Albert—which seemed a long time back now, when he’d been somebody different. He stood upright and stared towards the door.

Again. The sound of somebody moving. Something, maybe the edge of a garment, touching a wall.

He glanced across the room at Madeleine. She was standing white-faced and silent, her eyes closed. Something tapped the door. Tapped.

He thought, I must open the door, get this over with—

But he didn’t move.

The tapping came again.

Open the door, Harry. Get it over with.

Then he heard a voice, a familiar voice. “Harry? You awake?”

Levy. What the hell was Levy doing here now?

He opened the door and Rube Levy, drunk, red-faced, beret askew, stumbled inside the room. “I was passing through the neighborhood, my friend—slumming, so to speak—and I thought ah-hah, let’s see if good old Harry is still awake. So here I am. What have you got to drink? And what’s the next episode in the ongoing saga of Apology?”

Harrison shut the door, bolted it. You could have chosen a better time, Rube, he thought. But timing was never exactly your strong point, was it?

“Madeleine too,” Levy said. He crossed the room like a doped tightrope walker and planted a wet kiss on Madeleine’s cheek, a noisy thing. “Did I miss the kiss-and-make-up episode? I wanted to see that one. Are we all pals again?”

“Yeah,” Harrison said.

“And the voice on the tape? Has it ceased?”

“No, Rube, it hasn’t ceased.”

“Thrilling,” Levy said. “What happens next?”

“For Christ’s sake, Rube. Sober up.” Madeleine moved away from him slightly.

“I’ll have you know it was pretty damn costly to attain this heightened consciousness.”

“Did you see anybody when you were coming in?” Harrison asked.

“Not a soul. The street’s empty. The building is moribund. Why? Was I supposed to see somebody?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Harrison said. It would be a monumental task to get any sense out of Levy.

“Ah,” Levy said. “Our homicidal caller, right? He has tracked you to your lair, Harry. Is that why there is so much tension here? We’ve gone beyond a game, Harry. Is that the situation?”

I don’t need this, Harrison thought. I don’t need a drunken Rube Levy on my hands.

“If he has your name and address, Harry, you aren’t safe here. And you won’t be safe at Madeleine’s place either.”

“We’ve already covered that, Rube.”

“Where’s the gendarmerie?”

“They’re coming.”

Levy tiptoed around Albert. His movements suggested some ludicrous dance. You expected him to be sowing a field, tossing seeds from a basket, first to the left and then to the right.

“My place,” Levy said. “Why didn’t you think of my place?”

“It didn’t occur to me.”

“You’d be safe there, at least until this thing blows over.”

Blows over, Harrison thought. And when will that be?

“How do we get there?” Madeleine asked.

“Let me devise a plan,” Levy said. “Permit me to offer you a course of salvation.”

“You’re slurring your words, Rube,” Madeleine said.

“Saviors do not have to be perfect,” Levy said. “I’ll go out and get a cab. I’ll have it stop straight outside the front door. You, Harry, will be strategically positioned in the window to see the cab.… When it gets here, you come down those stairs as fast as you can. Into the cah—zoom!”

Harrison looked at Madeleine; her expression was one of uncertainty.

“What do you think, Maddy?”

“I don’t know.”

“What the hell are friends for?” Levy asked. “I am not Apology. I am perfectly safe.”

Harrison didn’t like it: Levy was too drunk to understand any danger. He watched Rube stumble across the room. He clutched a wall for support, then smiled in an embarrassed way.

“Motor functions operating below normal,” he said. “The brain, however, is still alert. There are some communications difficulties, in the sense that certain messages relayed from head to limbs seem to go through channels that are off the air. I’m okay. Generally speaking.” And he went to the door, trying to walk upright, his expression concentrated. He stopped and looked at Harrison. “I like this, Harry. Don’t you understand I like it? I didn’t expect to be cast in the role of hero, and now that I am—shit, I really like it.”

“Rube, I’m not sure …”

“I’ll go get us a cab.” Levy turned and stared across the room at Madeleine. “Do you like parrots, Maddy? I’ve got three of them. You’ll find them cute.”

Madeleine smiled weakly.

Levy straightened his beret and went out. Harrison locked the door. There was an awful silence in the loft, a stillness, deep and dry and tense. Harrison looked at Madeleine. She was staring at the locked door.

“We shouldn’t have let him do this.”

“How could I have stopped him?” Harrison sat down on the floor, cross-legged. “I make things. That’s all I do. I paint canvases sometimes. I make figures like Albert there. It’s all I know, Madeleine. Then something else enters your life, something that involves the world out there, and you realize, Jesus Christ, you’re not very well equipped to deal with it. I’m used to peace.” He shut his eyes. He heard Madeleine come across the floor, felt her hand touch the top of his head; he reached up and put his hands around her waist and laid his head against her thighs. You could forget everything this way.

“I love you, Harry,” she said, her voice a whisper.

He raised his face, looking up at her. He was thinking about love—was that what it came down to in the end? Was love the collective label for anxiety, concern, caring, for the capacity to find in someone else the cool calm center of the hurricane? If that were the case, then he loved her profoundly. He stood up, held Madeleine close, kissed her forehead, ran the tips of his fingers over her body, and he thought: You want her. At the most impossible time you want her. He turned away, dropping his hands, and went to the window. He looked down into the street. Nothing. Nobody moving. Levy must have already left the building. He stared for a moment.

“Do you see him?” Madeleine asked.

“Not yet.”

“Maybe he’s having trouble finding a cab.”

“Maybe.” Something wrong, something out of place, but what?

“I don’t like it, Harry. I don’t like the idea of going out there.”

“It doesn’t exactly thrill me either.”

“Do you think you should call the police again?”

Just as she said this the telephone was ringing. Out of habit, Harrison waited for the answering machine to come on and take the call, but when the phone kept ringing he remembered he’d jerked the plug out of the wall.

“Maybe that’s Nightingale now,” Madeleine said.

“I hope.” Harrison went into the bedroom. He stared at the telephone. This reluctance to pick it up—what was it? What the hell did he expect to hear? He reached out, raised the receiver, didn’t lift it to his face immediately. I don’t want to hear, he thought.

He put it to his ear, but didn’t say anything.

Harrison sat down on the edge of the bed. Madeleine was watching him from the doorway of the bedroom.

“I just wanted to leave a message, man.…”

Silence.

Harrison looked at Madeleine. Something terrible was coming. He could feel it; he could feel the air of the bedroom become hot, humid, stuffy, as if the atmosphere were suddenly charged with particles of electricity. He couldn’t take the voice, he couldn’t stand to hear it anymore.

“Who’s that breathing? I know it can’t be you, Apology.… You just tried to leave the building, didn’t you? This message is for the lovely lady anyhow.… I want her next, that’s all.”

Just tried to leave the building.

What what—what did that mean—

“This is what you call my last message and I’m just sorry you won’t be around to hear it, man … but that’s what your life was all about, right? Being sorry? So I’m saying I’m sorry. Sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry—

The line was dead.

Harrison thought quickly. Levy was the one who had tried to leave the building, Levy was the one who’d been mistaken for me—

Jesus Christ.

No, it couldn’t happen that way. Nothing could happen like that—

Nothing could have happened to Rube—

It did, whatever it was, it did and it was intended to be you and some terrible mistake had been made—

Think quickly, keep thinking.

The guy had been calling from outside, where was the nearest phone booth, where exactly, why can’t I remember it, why does it escape me, I saw one one time—what, a block away, two blocks, it doesn’t come back clearly now, it was pretty damn close, but maybe there was time to get out of here before the guy could make it back—

He grabbed Madeleine quickly by the wrist and, saying nothing, pulled her towards the door, unlocked it, drew her hastily down the dark stairs, fast, faster, trying hard to avoid what he knew he was going to find on the way out.

Madeleine screamed. A short piercing sound. Then she was slumping against Harrison.

I could have stopped him.

I could have said no to his plan of salvation—

Why did I let him step out into the dark like that?

Rube lay facedown. His beret was missing, his jacket was slashed and slashed again; there were black bloodstains all over him, his hair, his twisted hands, his pants; dark bloodstains all over the cracked tiles.

It was supposed to be me. It was meant to be me lying there.

He dragged Madeleine towards the doorway.

A chance. If the lunatic was in the nearest phone booth, then there were some precious seconds left to them. A thin tightrope chance. A balancing act. He moaned, thinking of Levy, kicked the front door open with his foot, and then they were moving fast along the empty sidewalk.

3.

It was another world, a galaxy alien to him, a large long room that might have been slotted into place, just as it was, by hovering starship from quite another planet. Lights flashed, machines whined, beeped, talked back at you; kids stood hunched and transfigured over control panels and viewing screens. Even Moody hadn’t been able to resist an urge to shove a quarter inside something called Centipede, which apparently involved the endless massacre of a chain of electronic bugs. Nightingale felt a pressure inside his head, something pushing against the bones of his skull. He stared at his partner. He realized he had never quite felt so old before, so out of touch. These games, he thought, what the fuck do they mean? He stood close to Moody, who was zapping centipedes out of existence; other shapes appeared, spiders, things resembling mushrooms. The Boy Wonder was adept obviously, an initiate who understood the mechanics of what he was doing. Hundreds of crawling bugs slid down the screen. I don’t know where I am, Nightingale thought. It doesn’t make sense. A whole other culture had sprung up seemingly overnight, an awesome revolution had taken place without him understanding what was going on. He had a vision of an America whose dream was that of acquiring sufficient quantities of quarters so that electronic centipedes, alien spaceships, and great meteors might be blitzed forever out of existence. There were mazes, robots, electronic firebirds, the gunsights of tanks, racing cars—all accompanied by robotic sound effects that suggested a discordant symphony rattled off on a Moog by a madman. The atmosphere, the frenzy, the strangeness of it, all made him feel lightheaded. He looked the length of the arcade. One time, when he’d been a kid, this might have been the kind of shooting gallery where passing macho types tried to impress their girl friends. What the hell is it now—hundreds of kids forever stuffing coins into slots and manipulating weird controls. The place was dense with smoke, more tobacco than reefer; the air was heavy with scents, sweat, colognes, the sounds of kids groaning when their PacMan figure got himself haplessly trapped in a corner and was munched into nothing. Nightingale moved closer to Moody, in the manner of someone who doesn’t want to stray too far from his guide in totally foreign territory. I don’t speak this language, he thought.

Moody had given up his struggle against the bugs. He slapped the side of the machine in a gesture of defeat. Nightingale glanced at his partner’s score: It was astronomical.

“I remember pinball, Doug. I remember the time when pinball was like a goddamn fever.”

“The same difference,” Moody said.

“Yeah? I don’t get that feeling.”

“You get used to it, Frank,” Moody said. “Little kids do best on these machines. They’re used to it. A pinball machine’s a fossil to them. They wouldn’t be seen dead working the flippers.”

Nightingale moved away from the centipedes. Somehow it didn’t matter that Moody’s game was over, because the screen was still alive with the critters. He looked across the faces of the kids. How would you ever find anybody in this maze?

“You see anybody who looks like our man?” he asked.

Moody seemed embarrassed by something. He said, “I’ve never felt so much like a cop in my life, Frank. It’s as if these kids can smell you out. You know what I mean?”

Nightingale nodded. So many faces. So many different faces. He pushed through the throng to the back, where there was a snackbar. Sweating, he asked the acne’d girl behind the counter for a Coke. She moved around as if she had just been lobotomized.

“Want something to drink, Doug?”

Moody shook his head. He slipped up onto a stool and swiveled around so he could watch the entrance. Nightingale popped the top of his Coke can and poured it into a paper cup. It was sweet and dreadful. But it was cold and wet. He turned around, half leaning against the counter, and looked along the lines of machines. BATTLE STAR. SPACE CASTLE. GALAXIA. MS. PACMAN. SPIDER LADY. A whole exotic compendium.

“You see anybody like Sylvester?” he asked.

“Not yet,” Moody said. He was gazing at one of Eddie Fodor’s photographs, which he held concealed in his hand like a magician’s card. “I’m not sure I’d know anyhow.”

Nightingale smoked a cigarette and coughed. You need a mask in here, he thought. You need something to keep the electronic virus at bay. You catch the space-age disease and it gets out of control and you stand drooling at those machines that make change for a buck. Moody moved away from the counter and vanished in the thicket of devices. Alone, Nightingale felt a slight panic. What if Moody disappeared off the face of the earth, sucked into one of those machines? Could you ever find your way out of here again? Moody emerged again, approaching Nightingale sideways as he brushed through the throng of bodies.

“Well?” Nightingale asked.

“It’s hard to say, Frank. But there’s a guy over there who might be the guy in this photograph. You want to take a look?”

“Sure.” Nightingale crumpled his paper cup and followed his partner into the madness.

“I’m not saying it’s the same one. It could be, that’s all. Those peasants in Narcotics ought to invest in some good new camera equipment. What do they use, Frank? Box Brownies?”

Nightingale pushed through. Obstinate kids, he thought. They wouldn’t budge for you. They just wouldn’t step aside, they were so goddamn hypnotized by their games. Moody stopped somewhere ahead, nodding slightly. Nightingale looked in the direction of his partner’s gesture—a slim young guy with a full-length black overcoat, boots with furry tops, a heavy beard, a beret with some kind of badge pinned on it. The photograph, he thought. How could you be sure of this guy? He went closer while Moody moved around the side of the Space Invaders game the guy was playing. It was always an edgy moment coming up on somebody like this, because if there was cocaine involved then there was a pretty fair chance the guy was paranoid or leaning in that direction—which meant he’d want to split before you had a chance to ask him questions. The casual approach, Nightingale thought. Hey, I was just passing, thought I’d drop in and ask you about one of your acquaintances, what do you think? He stopped just behind the guy. He put out his hand and laid it flat against the screen of the game, just as Moody’s face appeared around the side of the machine. The guy stopped playing at once and stepped back as if he expected to be frisked. He isn’t worried about losing his quarter, Nightingale thought.

“My friend,” Nightingale said.

The guy stroked his beard, looked as if he were considering the chances of slipping away quickly, then became aware of Moody.

“I don’t know you,” he said to Nightingale.

“You’re about to.”

“What’s this anyhow? Like a police state, man? Hey, I got rights and one of them rights says it’s a free country and a guy can go around playing Space Invaders if he likes.”

“I read that in the Constitution,” Moody said. “The Space Invaders Amendment, right?”

“Funny mother,” the guy said.

Nightingale put one hand on the young man’s shoulder. “Listen, this is going to be painless, my friend. If you want to cooperate with me and my partner here, you can go home smiling at your good luck. You understand me? I don’t want a scene and I don’t want to drag you down for interrogation, okay? A nice little talk is all.”

“Is this a bust?”

“Now why would we be busting you, Sylvester?”

“How do you know my name?”

“Sylvester Garincha,” Moody said. “How’s business these days?”

“What business, man?”

“The deviated septum scam,” Moody said.

“That’s double dutch, guy.”

“What goes up your nose and clogs your mucous membranes?” Nightingale said.

“Is this like a fucking riddle?”

“Look, Sylvester, there’s a whole lot of people in here and I want to play this all as quiet as I can, okay?” Nightingale tightened his grip on the guy’s shoulder. It was like turning a screw ever so slightly. “Now we’ll all take a walk outside, okay. You, me, and my friend here. We’ll go out quietly. No guns, nothing stupid like that. We’ll hit the sidewalk and we’ll talk a few minutes, then when I’m happy with what you’ve got to say, and Moody here is happy with it too, well, shit, you’re as free as the Constitution says you got a right to be. Do we understand each other, Sylvester?”

“I dig, but I still don’t get this.”

“Just walk outside. We’re right behind you.”

“Listen, I’m clean, man—”

“Keep going, Sylvester.”

And then they were outside, standing at the edge of the sidewalk. Nightingale looked at the young man’s face: it was always the same expression, it never changed, and it looked as if he’d never been able to feel easy with it somehow. The sudden tightening of skin, the draining of blood, the adrenalinized light of fear in the eyes.

“Okay, Sylvester. You probably think I’m going to ask you what you got in your pockets, right?”

“I told you, man, I am A-one clean. I am cleaner than a nun’s twat. I swear to God.”

Moody said, “The deal is, we ask you a question. You answer it. If you answer it right, we don’t look in your pockets. Think of it like a TV game show. The big prize for you is no hassle.”

“You don’t search me?” Sylvester looked perplexed. “Shit, I don’t know why you’d want to search me anyhow.”

“Don’t push your already feeble luck, Sylvester,” Moody said.

“Yeah. You said something about a question. So what is it?”

“We badly need to know about a guy called Chapman,” Nightingale said. “Billy Chapman.”

Sylvester was silent. You could see it just beneath his eyes, lurking just below his expression—the momentary confusion, the dilemma, the struggle inside himself that could only be resolved in one way: He’d sign Billy Chapman over and all the code of the street could go fuck itself and he’d go home and sleep easy. It was fragile, but Nightingale knew what the outcome of this would be.

The first predictable parry. Sylvester said, “I don’t know anybody with that name.”

Nightingale looked at Moody. “Okay, Doug. Frisk this fucker.”

“Frisk me?”

“Yeah, frisk,” Moody said. “This is the best part of my job, Sylvester. I go through guys’ pockets and I find all kinds of weird things, and sometimes what I find is enough to send some poor reprobate up the river for years and years and years.” Moody stuck his hand inside Sylvester’s coat pocket.

“Hey, hold it, hold it, man. I didn’t quite catch the guy’s name. What was it?”

Moody’s hand paused in the pocket for dramatic effect.

“Billy Chapman.”

“Yeah, I think something’s coming across, man. Billy Chapman, that’s what you said?”

“Frisk him, Doug—”

“Wait, I think I know where he lives. I think I remember. Yeah, it’s coming back to me.” Sylvester’s voice rose. He fell silent only when Moody took his hand out of his coat pocket.

“Is it far?” Nightingale asked.

“Uh-uh.”

“Why don’t you earn your good citizenship badge and walk us there, Sylvester?”

“Sure thing.”

“And relax, huh? Take it easy.”

Sylvester started to move, like he was very anxious to get the thing over with and even more concerned about being seen in the company of the heat.

Nightingale said, “You know, Doug, it’s good to see an upright young man like Sylvester going out of his way like this to help the police. It warms my heart.”

“Astounding,” Moody said. “You read so many bad things about the civic responsibility of today’s youth, and now somebody like Sylvester comes along and he’s only too happy to help.”

“My faith is uplifted,” Nightingale said. “I won’t forget you for this, Sylvester.”

Sylvester looked at Nightingale. “Do me a favor and try real hard, will you?”

4.

Billy Chapman was dreaming. In this dream he could see himself suspended inside a big vat of clear liquid, a preservative of some kind. At first the sensation was pleasant but then it dawned on him that he was there to be sold, like a piece of pickled meat. It wouldn’t have been so bad except for the fact that he wasn’t going to be sold in one chunk, but in little hacked-off pieces. Some guy in a white uniform was sharpening a knife. Billy forced himself awake at that point and sat up in bed, rubbing his eyes and looking around his room, trying to remember where the hooker had gone, trying to remember if there had ever been a hooker there in the first place.… Get it straight, Billy, he told himself. You remember a chick sitting on the bed, then you remember running out of blow, the little SnoSeal package being empty—then you had this urge to go find Sylvester, so you went out into the streets when it was still light but you couldn’t find your man at his usual haunt. You came back here and the chick was gone and something happened to you then: You just collapsed inwards, your eyelids became heavy, you went out like the proverbial light. He put his bare feet on the floor. He yawned and stretched his arms, then walked over to the refrigerator and pulled it open. There was one can of beer, which he took out and opened and slugged quickly. It tasted good, cold, clear. What time of day was it anyhow? What day was it, period? He went to the window and opened the drape a little way. It was dark outside. Dark and depressing. He searched his pockets. He found a couple of bucks but not enough for what he needed to pull him nicely through the night ahead. You got to go out there again, Billyboy. A dim prospect. He moved to the table and looked at the SnoSeal paper, which he picked up and licked, but then recalled he’d done that before, maybe even while the chick was still here.

How much did I pay her? he wondered.

Why did I pay her anyhow, when she hadn’t done anything?

He slumped into a chair at the table and lowered his head. There wasn’t even a hint of residue lying around. The package was empty, the mirror unclouded, the syringes all used up.

He rose, walked back to the window. He heard slight noises, but then he was always hearing them. He poked a finger inside his ear and jiggled it around. You’re always imagining someone outside the door, Billy. Always dreaming that somebody is going to be peering at you through slight cracks and openings and holes in the wood. He laughed.

There it was again.

It was a definite sound from the hall.

He couldn’t identify it, though. A kind of shuffling. In this pit, though, all kinds of creeps came and went at all kinds of hours.

He slipped his switchblade knife from his pocket just the same. He moved it from one hand to the other, then sat on the bed, crouching like he was ready to leap if anything should happen. He stared hard at the door. He heard something light brush against it from the outside. I’m ready, fucker, he thought. Come in here for the surprise of your life.

Then he thought maybe it was Sylvester come to do business. For a moment there was a warm glow inside his head like that created by a feeble light bulb. Wouldn’t that be just wonderful? Then he knew he was fooling himself. Sylvester knew he didn’t have any cash. Those fuckers could always smell money when you had it. He stared at the door. It wasn’t Sylvester, for sure.

The handle turned, then moved slowly back in place.

He got up from the bed. There was a clicking noise as the blade of his knife sprung from the handle. With this little knife, he thought, you could just disembowel anybody who happened in through the door. A drunken thief, or some guy getting his room confused.

The handle twisted again.

Then, before it could really register, before he could clear his senses, the door swung wildly back on its hinges and fell crashing into the room. It shouldn’t be doing that, he thought. It shouldn’t be toppling back like that and there shouldn’t be two guys coming inside the room and one of them shouldn’t be carrying no gun.

Billy Chapman turned and headed for the window, then remembered there was a killing drop to the street below. So he swung around and held his knife out and stared at the two guys. One was big and plump, the other—the one with the pistol—was young and pretty determined-looking.

“Billy, you ought to put the knife down,” the fat one said.

“Make me,” Billy Chapman said. He swung the knife in an arc and the guy with the gun backed up a little. Why doesn’t he shoot me?

“Give me the knife and keep cool, Billy. We only want to ask you some questions. No big deal.”

Billy Chapman lunged again. This time the blade sliced through the material of the fat guy’s coat and he clutched his arm, moaned, plopped down on the bed as if he couldn’t believe he’d been cut. There was a big patch of blood spreading through the coat.

Before Billy Chapman could think about what he’d done, the gun in the young guy’s hand went off. The roar filled the room like there was an electric storm slashing across the ceiling. At first there wasn’t any pain but then he felt a sharp twinge at a point in his body he couldn’t quite locate. He slumped to the floor, holding himself like he was trying to find the wound and seal it with the palms of his hands.

In a dreamy way he heard the fat guy say, “Holy fuck.”

Then he was sliding across the floor, crawling, leaving stains of blood in his trail. He felt like a fat snail suddenly. Now he knew the pain was located in his shoulder, someplace near his neck.

“You fucking shot me,” he said. “You fucking shot me, you bastard.”

The young guy was bending over him now, helping him to sit up. He was saying something about how it was only a flesh wound. A flesh wound didn’t have the goddamn right to hurt this bad.

“I’m dying,” Billy said.

“You can’t die before we’ve asked you some simple questions, Billy,” the young guy said. “Linger awhile.”

5.

The city went past in an unreal way, a light show suspended in darkness, a display of laser beams cutting through the night, electrified castles vanishing into the sky. Harrison shut his eyes but that didn’t help dispel his sense of unreality—what he saw trapped under his lids was Reuben Levy lying in the hallway, Reuben’s blood making spiraling stains on chipped tiles. He held Madeleine’s hand; she’d gone into silence, retreated, shocked. He stroked her knuckles, touched her hair back from her face, put his arm around her shoulder. There were tears on her cheeks and her lips trembled; all the blood had gone from her face. He felt helpless, guilty, feeble. Levy is dead, that poor sad bastard is dead, and because of what? Because of my stupid endeavor, my absurd notions? For something so senseless he walked down a flight of stairs and took his last drunken steps towards a door, a street, the idea of a cab, a trip to safety. He laid his head against Madeleine’s shoulder. She might have been carved out of clay—there was no response, nothing. A trip to safety.

Harrison turned his face and watched the street go past in its own blurry slipstream from the window of the cab. I can’t tell her, he thought. I can’t tell her I looked back when we got inside this cab and I saw someone moving along the sidewalk towards us quickly, a man, perhaps the man who killed Levy, perhaps the same one. A thin figure in a windbreaker and jeans and a cropped hairstyle. I can’t tell her anything now. He unfolded his hands and looked into the palms as if he expected to see blood there. Levy’s blood. The blood of all the others. Okay—maybe there had been times when Rube had been ridiculous and somehow sad, as if despite his wealth he couldn’t ever erect a barrier against his own basic sense of futility, but nobody deserved to die like that. He’d been your oldest friend, Harry. Your oldest, most loyal friend.

He glanced through the window again; his heart was beating rapidly. The night was filled with a sense of loss. It hung out there in the lights, lay in the dark hollows, muffled, shadowy, but always present.

40th Street went past.

“Where is the police station, Maddy?” he asked.

Maddy stared through the window. When she spoke she did so quickly, as if her words were forming faster than her brain could dictate. “I don’t remember.… It was 40th Street and Sixth Avenue.… No, it was Forty-second Street.… Christ, I don’t remember, Harry.”

Harrison leaned forward and touched the cabbie on the shoulder. His ID card said his name was Salvatore Jimenez. “Say, where’s the police station? There’s one pretty close to here, but I don’t remember the exact street.” It seemed the obvious place to go now, the only place, the only possible sanctuary.

The cabbie stopped the vehicle, drawing onto the sidewalk. He turned around and looked puzzled. “Please stay-shun?”

Oh, Christ, terrific—a guy who can hardly talk English. Harrison repeated himself slowly. “Po-lice station.”

“Ah,” the cabbie said. He was a small man with a thick moustache that overhung his upper lip like the fringe of some old-fashioned lampshade. Pancho Villa on four wheels. He slipped the cab away from the sidewalk and turned it down a side street. Harrison tried to read the street numbers. Where were they going now? 39th Street. 38th.

He turned to Madeleine. “Does any of this look familiar?”

“I … I’m not sure.… I can’t remember except it was Fortieth Street.… Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe I’m mistaken. It might have been Fiftieth.… Harry, I don’t remember now.”

Harrison tapped the cabbie again. “Listen, I think you need to head uptown. Savvy? You turn around and go back. Okay?” He made a gesture with his hand. Salvatore Jimenez stopped the cab again and all around there was the noise of traffic slamming to sudden halts, then the air was filled with the hysteria of horns.

“Go back?” the cabbie asked. But it was clear he wasn’t sure what Harrison intended.

“Yeah. See how I point my finger? That way. Okay? You get it?”

“Ahhhh. Sure zing.” Oblivious of traffic, the cabbie swung the vehicle in an arc. 40th Street went past again. 42nd. 44th.

“Maddy, look, does any of this seem familiar?”

She turned her face and looked out. “I don’t know.”

Harrison sat back a moment. The cab driver was muttering in Spanish. What the hell was the guy going on about? He sounded like he was irritated by the fact that neither of his passengers could give him directions. Harrison looked through the window. 50th Street. 51st. 52nd.

“Maddy, is it around here somewhere?”

She didn’t even look this time. It was as if she were resigned to being lost, directionless. He took her hand in his own, rubbed the knuckles gently; her flesh was ice. Then he gazed back into the streets. Storefronts, the lights of restaurants, bars, art galleries. The cab turned now, headed right. Far ahead, beyond the glare of lights, was a vast pitch of black sky over Central Park. It looked dismal.

And then suddenly Maddy was animated, leaning forward, telling the driver to stop. Harrison wondered why, wondered where they were—then when he looked out he realized where she’d wanted the cab to stop.

“Maddy, why here?”

“Because we’ll be safe! We’ll be safe here. And there’s a telephone.”

It made sense, Harrison thought. The cab driver was still talking rapidly to himself, like a man whose demons always presented themselves in the form of ignorant Caucasians. Harrison looked at the meter, found some crumpled bills, shoved them into the cabbie’s hand, and then he opened the door and helped Madeleine onto the sidewalk. He stared at the overhead sign, the oval with the letters BRYANT BERGER GALLERY. Sure, why not? They could call the cops from here. Madeleine was rushing ahead of him, afraid of the streets and the dark, fumbling in her pockets for a keychain. He looked at the black windows, the shapes beyond which were mere shadowy outlines. Then he heard Madeleine turn the key in the lock and there was the sound of a small bell ringing overhead. They stepped inside and Harrison shut the door, seeing the cab slip away.

“Nobody’s going to look for us here,” Maddy said. “There’s a telephone in the office.”

He heard her stumble against something and she cursed quietly. The office, where was the office, how could you find it without switching on lights? He followed her footsteps across the gallery; there was the sound of a door squeaking open and then he saw her switch on a pale lamp, which illuminated a desk, a tiny room. A telephone gleamed beneath the lamp. There were a few prints on the walls, mostly the work of the Dutch masters. He stepped towards the desk, picked up the receiver, and was about to dial when he noticed something in the rug—something that was incongruous in this place: a single black leather shoe with laces. An expensive lightweight shoe. He picked it up and turned it over in his hand.

“It’s Berger’s,” she said. “I recognize it.”

“You suppose he was dressing in a hurry or something?” One shoe. When things came in pairs it was always odd to see them singly—as if they had shed their purpose or assumed a new and surreal one.

Madeleine ignored the question. “Make the call, Harry.”

He dropped the shoe back on the rug, dialed the operator, asked to be connected to the police. There were clicks and buzzes, mysterious sounds like electronic birds panicked inside an electronic jungle; he wondered if he could ever feel the same way about telephones, if he could ever come to think of them again as simple utilitarian objects. A man’s voice came on the line. Harry asked to talk with Lieutenant Nightingale. He was told—after a lengthy pause—that the lieutenant was out. Out again, he thought. Was the guy ever in his office?

“My name is Harrison,” he said. “It’s very important he get in touch with me. I’m at the Bryant Berger Gallery at Forty-nine West Fifty-seventh Street with Madeleine Demarest. Have you got that? Tell him I want to report a murder, okay? It’s urgent.” He put the receiver down, drew a hand across his face, then looked at Madeleine who was leaning against the wall, her body limp, arms hanging.

He said, “It shouldn’t take long. They should get here pretty soon.” He looked past her a moment at the small window set in the wall. A shadow moved there, then swung out of sight as if it were the limb of a tree or a passing cat or maybe a bum scrounging through trash. It didn’t matter. He moved towards Madeleine and embraced her, tried to relax her tight muscles with his fingertips. She seemed to be made out of marble, cold stone. He looked beyond her shoulder at the shoe lying on the rug. Why did it bother him? You just don’t kick off one shoe if you’re changing your clothes, do you? It didn’t make any sense. What the hell.

He kissed Madeleine lightly on the cheek.

You don’t know how yet, Harry, but you’ll find a way to go back to the beginning, to turn back clocks, and start things all over again with her. Restore her, soothe her memory, love her. Make love heal the wounds. Make it work.

He closed his eyes briefly, opened them, gazed through the office door at the dark gallery beyond. The rainbow canvases appeared, in shadow, to have been gouged out of the walls. Sinister in some way, like a huge destructive hand had just scoured the surfaces of the walls, breaking, tearing.

A spooky dark gallery.

A vast expanse of unlit space.

He drew Madeleine towards him again. “I love you, Maddy,” he said.

She nodded her head slightly.

“Trust me,” he said. Start trusting me all over again. “It’s going to be okay.”

You don’t know that.

You can’t say something like that.

But you have to.

6.

It was close to midnight. The interview room smelled bad, like a hundred drunks had inhaled and exhaled there overnight, overwhelming the smell of disinfectant. Nightingale looked at the big white bandage on his arm, remembering the handsome nurse who’d applied it. Jean Maxymuk, her little ID badge had said. What the hell kind of name was Maxymuk? For a time, bewildered by the pain, he’d tried to work up the guts to ask her for a date, but he’d been embarrassed by the shape of his body as he’d sat on the bench and watched her clean the wound and apply the bandage. She wouldn’t accept, he’d told himself, but now he felt the abyss of a missed opportunity. He admired the bandage, which was neat and wholesome. But there was a dull throbbing pain just under it. Presumably it was nothing to what Billy Chapman felt, a small consolation. He looked across the interview room at Moody. Quick-draw Doug, he thought. How could he have fired off a shot like that? He wasn’t exactly a trigger-happy kind of guy. Call it nerves, inexperience. Put it down to that. Or something else, Nightingale thought—a hatred rooted in the same old grudge, the same old past humiliation. It could go that deep. It could quite easily go very deep, and over the years it would produce, by a process of mental chemistry, a cesspool of loathing. He wondered if Moody dreamed about Chapman, if William A. Chapman sauntered into his nightmares, smirking, flipping the finger, accusing Moody of being a failure. And now Billy Chapman sat at the head of the table with a bandage visible beneath the shoulder of his shirt. He had this habit of scraping his feet on the floor, around and around in a grating manner.

Moody said, “We’ve got you dead to rights, Billy. We’ve got your prints all over your sister’s apartment. How can you sit there and tell us they aren’t your prints, huh? No two people, Billy, in all this wide world, are known to have the same prints. Do you understand that?”

There was an expression on Moody’s face that Nightingale didn’t like to see. The jaw was very tight, the eyes filled with contempt, the mouth narrow, as if the lips had disappeared from the face entirely. Oh, boy, it goes real deep inside you, doesn’t it? Nightingale felt a twinge of pain.

“It’s a coincidence,” Chapman said.

Moody snickered. “Some coincidence, Billy. Why did you kill her?”

“Who says I killed her?”

“The hard evidence, Billy. You can’t just slide under the hard facts, okay? You could go hire F. Lee Bailey and maybe he’d manage manslaughter. That’s how fucked your situation is, understand?”

A space baby, Nightingale thought. A severe case of being out of touch with the concept known commonly as reality. Where does he hang his brain at night? he wondered. He studied Chapman’s ferrety face for a while, trying to ignore the pain in his arm. It was cocaine; it was the drug that had raddled his thought processes. Nightingale had seen hardcore coke freaks in his time and they had this in common: They were not entirely of this world. They were out there like so much hardware from Houston.

Chapman said, “I haven’t seen my sister in a long time.”

Moody glanced at Nightingale, raising his eyebrows. “The last time you saw your sister, Billy, was the day you killed her.” Moody got up and, like a courtroom shyster, paced around, his shoulders slightly hunched. “I mean killing your sister is a pretty bad thing to do, Billy. There are laws against the taking of life, okay? There isn’t a state in the Union where murder is acceptable. So killing Camilla wasn’t the wisest thing you could come up with. But fucking her as she lay dead? Really, Billy. A taboo situation.”

Nightingale felt uncomfortable. This was the bit he couldn’t take. He squirmed in his chair. He felt content to let Moody do all the talking because somewhere inside he knew there was a slow-burning anger he didn’t want to let out.

“I never killed her. I never fucked her.”

“What is it with you, Billy? You’re flying in the face of the evidence. Let me see if I can remind you of certain events. First you strangle her. Bare hands no less. Then she falls down in a total state of death and you whip down your pants. You don’t take them off entirely, just enough to get your pecker out, which is a hard mother by this time, because you’re all hot and bothered by your sister’s thighs, so you slide out your piece and you stick it inside her. Murder, necrophilia. I’d like to make more of the incest factor, but the truth is, Billy, I am pretty damn disgusted with you.”

Nightingale lit a cigarette. He noticed Chapman’s hands shaking.

“Say, is there a cold beer around here?” Chapman asked.

Nightingale leaned forward. “Room service is out for the night. What do you think this is, the fucking Hilton?”

Chapman scraped his feet around. Moody stood directly behind his chair, his hands on Chapman’s shoulders. A cold beer, Nightingale thought. Jesus Christ, some guys had gall. Maybe it hadn’t registered with Billy, maybe he didn’t think this was a cop shop and he was in hot water up to his buttocks. He shut his eyes: Moody’s graphic description had made his stomach turn.

Now Moody was pacing again. He looked over at Nightingale a moment, then stopped right in front of Billy Chapman. He was holding a photograph up in Chapman’s face.

“You know this face, Billy?”

“I ain’t seen him before in my life, man.”

“Look close,” Moody said. “This guy was found strangled too, Billy. Henry Falcon a.k.a. Dick Bird. You ever see him? You know anything about him?”

“I told you, man.”

Nightingale looked at his younger partner. Maybe Billy Chapman did kill Henry Falcon—maybe he killed hundreds of people all over the country—just the same, the venom in Moody’s attitude showed a marked lack of control and discipline. It was like young Moody was walking a razor’s edge, something in his mind breaking. You knock on too many doors and climb too many flights of stairs and keep hours that would jaundice almost anybody in the world, you drag your ass along too many grubby back alleys, inhale too much stale smoke, it’s bound to catch up to you, break out someplace, manifest itself in your language and the way you behaved—but this wasn’t any excuse for the way Moody looked, the unadulterated hatred on his face.

Billy Chapman said, “I don’t know no Henry Falcon, Christ.”

Nightingale got up. He took Moody aside. “You really think so, Doug? You really think you can get him to break on this Falcon thing?”

“It’s worth a shot.”

“You really think so, huh?” Nightingale sighed. He wished it could be done, wished Billy Chapman could be handed the blame for Falcon. What a nifty symmetrical world.

“Look, we got two stranglings. We got the sex act, the perverted sex thing.” The Boy Wonder looked adamant, stern. Nightingale felt weak and had to sit down again. He watched Moody saunter back towards Billy Chapman.

Then it happened. It happened so suddenly that Nightingale barely had time to see it and for a moment he wondered if he had misinterpreted the situation, been deceived by the bad light and the quick movement of Moody’s body—but then he noticed Billy Chapman was bleeding from the side of his head, doubled over, moaning, racked with pain. Holy shit, holy shit, Billy kept saying over and over. Nightingale rose, saw the gun in Moody’s hand, saw that Moody held it by the barrel. Jesus, he’d just pistol-whipped Chapman. Just like that. Out of nowhere. What the hell was it? Did he want Billy Chapman dead?

“Doug, for fuck’s sake! What are you trying to do?”

Moody ran one hand over his forehead. He looked dismayed, as if he were bothered by his own abrupt act, couldn’t explain it. “I don’t know. I don’t know what got into me. I guess I just looked at his fucking face and I saw him leering at me—I let go, Frank. I just lost it. I’m sorry.”

“Take it easy, will you? You want to take a break?”

Moody shook his head. “I’m okay.”

Billy Chapman was still moaning. Nightingale handed him a handkerchief, which he held to his wound. “Hey, you know they call this police brutality. Wait until my lawyer hears.… Jeez, what is it with you guys?”

“Shut up, Billy,” Moody said. “It was an accident. My hand slipped.”

“Yeah, sure,” Chapman said.

Moody circled Chapman’s chair. Nightingale sat down again. He was shaking. It had gone deeper inside Moody than he’d ever suspected. The guy needs a vacation. He needs to get away from the city, the job. A blow like that could kill a guy. Nightingale lit a cigarette and coughed as if his lungs were two burnt-out salmon fidgeting in his chest. He started to think about Sarah, about Fulton, about retiring and going up there and getting the cracks in his life Scotch-taped. Just to hold her, just to sleep with her again—maybe you could even get used to the bluster of violent winds huffing up from the Oswego River, the endless winters up there, the small-town mentality that considered even a day’s outing to Syracuse a trip to Mecca. Who needs all this death, this stench of brutality?

“Okay, Billy. We’ll talk about Henry Falcon when you’ve had time to remember.” Moody paused. Sweat was running down his face. “Let’s talk about something else. Let’s talk about Jamey Hausermann, okay? Let’s talk about the brutal way you killed her, huh?”

Nightingale shut his eyes. He thought he could hear a wind scavenge inside his head. I am going to sit here and say nothing and let the Boy Wonder pull stuff out of his magic hat, let him forge the links of his own zigzagging chain. I am too old to compete, to cope. I am too tired. Jamey Hausermann. More symmetry: The press liked words such as “spree”—as in “mass murder spree”—and everybody cheered when such a monster was brought to justice even if his ultimate sentence might be life in Bellevue and seventy-five milligrams of Valium per diem forever. Symmetry, that was the thing. Put everything in one box and if it doesn’t quite fit, then stuff the fucking things down as hard as you can. I don’t belong in this world.

Maybe I’ve lost the edge of instinct. Maybe young Moody is the cop of the future.

A sharper instinct.

Finely honed skills.

I have grown out of touch.

A dinosaur, a fucking dinosaur that lost the battle in the stakes for survival of the fittest.

“Hey, man,” Chapman said, rubbed his face. “I never heard of anybody like that.”

“Tell me how you got inside her apartment, Billy,” Moody said. “Tell me why you killed her the way you did, why you cut her tits off with a razor. I’m interested. I want to know.”

“I keep saying,” Chapman complained.

“I want to hear the truth, Billy. I want the straight, unvarnished truth, okay? We’ve got you for one murder. I think we can get you for a second. If you confess to a third, we can always say something about how you co-operated.” Moody was drumming his fingers on the table.

“Listen,” Chapman said. “I don’t even know what the hell you’re talking about.”

“Liar, liar,” Moody said. “Lies are a waste of my time, Billy. Think again.”

“What’s to think about?”

Nightingale opened his eyes. He felt sleepy in this stuffy room. He stared at the door. Through the opaque glass he could see the outline of a figure in the corridor. He got up and moved towards the door. He needed to get out of this place, leave Billy Chapman to the devices of Moody; what the hell, Moody had all the answers. Let Moody make all the accusations stick. Let him grind out the confession. He opened the door, stepped into the corridor, found Stanislavski there.

“Lieutenant, you’ve got to read this.” The uniformed cop handed him a thick manila folder. “I tried to give it to you before.”

“What is it?” Nightingale asked.

“This broad came in and made a statement.”

Nightingale opened the folder. “And what’s this?”

“A cassette.”

“About what?”

“I think you should listen to it, lieutenant. It seems this chick’s boyfriend is in the Apology business. It also seems we got a killer’s voice on that tape.”

Nightingale turned the tape over in his hand.

“The voice of the guy—according to this chick—is who killed Henry Falcon and Jamey Hausermann.”

“Is that right?” Nightingale felt a pulse of intrigue.

He glanced at the notes inside the folder and went back to his office. He wondered when, if ever, he was going to get any sleep tonight.

7.

“What’s keeping them, Harry? They should have been here by now.”

Harrison sat up on the edge of the desk. There was a dictaphone, a blotter, a couple of wood trays. He reached out, holding Madeleine’s hands.

“They won’t be much longer,” he said.

Her hands trembled. The fingertips were chilly. She’d retreated, gone back inside herself to a place he couldn’t touch. He wanted to hold her harder. Over her shoulder, across the dark gallery floor, he could see the front door. Someone passed in the street outside. Nothing, he thought. Somebody just drifting along the sidewalk, that was all.

These nerves.

It was like every part of your body was working against every other part, creating incoherence, confusion, jumpiness.

You can’t think straight. Can’t see straight.

Fear made you live in an endless present tense.

He couldn’t take his eyes from the front door, the pale light out there pressing against the glass.

What is it, Harry?

You don’t remember.

Don’t remember what?

Did you lock the door behind you when you came in?

He wasn’t sure—he wanted to go and check it—but he didn’t want to take his arms away from Madeleine. Didn’t want to leave her here in this office.

That shoe. That stupid shoe. What was it about that goddamn thing?

It lay there alone. That was it. Where was its companion?

He stared at the front door again. Madeleine shivered.

“What’s keeping them, for God’s sake?”

He didn’t say anything. He could feel night press all around this building; he could sense it seeping through tiny cracks and small fissures, a spreading darkness that you couldn’t keep at bay no matter what.

“Maybe you should call again,” she said.

The door. You can’t take your eyes off the goddamn door.

Harry, maybe you should call again—

Go check the door. Check it.

He shut his eyes a moment, drew Madeleine nearer to him.

Love love love—

There was a faint sound from the gallery.

That sound.

A small bell ringing over the doorway.

He took his hands from Madeleine and opened his eyes, listening to the echo of the bell as it faded, chimes growing feebler and feebler until there was nothing.

Harry—

It’s still ringing, he thought, still ringing inside my head.

A shadow passed across the gallery floor.

8.

It definitely contained the remains of a dead animal but there were other less subtle flavors. Soy, breadcrumbs, MSG. Nightingale put the half-eaten hamburger down and belched into his fist. “Where the fuck did this come from?” he asked.

“Tully’s,” Moody said. “I sent Stanislavski.”

“He knows I don’t patronize that scummy joint.” He pushed the offensive thing away. Why did his life seem like a fruitless search for the perfect burger? In Tully’s, where the grease was so thick even the cutlery stuck together, the burgers were cooked by a Sardinian who didn’t have his green card. One day, Nightingale thought, I’ll make a phone call on the sly to Immigration unless his cooking improves. He poked a finger inside his mouth and came out with what looked like a sliver of wood. “America is going down the tubes, Moody. It’s going to the dogs.”

He stared across the office. He picked up his Coke and sipped it. The wax container had sprung a slight leak and there were little brown fizzy drips on his desk. He looked at his wristwatch. 2:04. What time was it in Shelbyville anyhow, and why hadn’t he been called back by that hoarse-voiced hick who might have been an imposter passing himself off as a local sheriff? He tried to imagine the great middle of America, wondering if perhaps out there was the last bastion of the hamburger. He gazed at the cassette player. Since they’d listened to the tape, Moody had become strangely silent, withdrawn: The Boy Wonder sees his theory shot down in flames and he sulks. Oh, Jesus, it was going to be neat and tidy, it was going to be Agatha Christie, brilliant young detective, graduate of Buffalo, was going to pin three deaths on one man, to wit, Billy Chapman. Close the file, send it to the DA, go home, get some sleep, have sweet dreams, come back the next day with your newspaper clippings, instant promotion, take six weeks off, you brilliant young man. Poor Moody. There were two distinct voices on that tape, one of them obviously Billy Chapman’s, an apparent reference to having killed his sister. The other belonged to a person unknown, who had talked openly about killing somebody called Randy in a place known as Shelbyville, Ohio. And, according to Stanislavski’s report, the woman called Madeleine Demarest claimed that this same voice had confessed to the killing of Henry Falcon—if not by name, exactly. Madeleine Demarest also claimed that the person whose voice was on the tape had killed Jamey Hausermann—all because of a project entitled Mr. Apology. It had a bunch of vague things in there, a bunch of vague claims, but the voice of Billy Chapman didn’t match that of the caller who was supposed to have killed Henry Falcon. Nightingale massaged his eyelids. 2:05. What kind of hours were these anyhow? He stared at Stanislavski’s report. Mr. Apology was the pseudonym of a certain Harry Harrison. Jesus Christ, you could lose your screws dickering with all these goddamn names, trying to keep them straight. Madeleine Demarest. Billy Chapman. Henry Falcon. Harry Harrison. Mr. Apology. Shelbyville. Randy. A thicket of names.

“Two voices, Doug,” he said.

“Yeah, sure, but how do we know this Demarest person isn’t some kind of nut? How do we know she isn’t making it up about Henry Falcon and the Hausermann woman? And how do we know that the other voice, the one that doesn’t belong to Chapman, is on the level? We don’t, do we?”

“Still defending your ideas about Chapman, huh?”

“Sure.”

“You’re frayed, Doug. Frayed and beat. If Madeleine Demarest is right, your theory’s fucked.”

Moody shrugged. “I don’t know, Frank. I just don’t know.”

“Listen, say you had pushed Billy into three confessions, you think the DA wouldn’t have laughed you out of his office?”

“I’m not so sure.”

Nightingale was silent a moment. “Didn’t that voice give you the creeps? Could you imagine he wasn’t tell the truth?”

“Yeah, I could imagine that.”

Yeah, Nightingale thought.

You still want Billy Chapman.

You still want that.

He glanced at his watch. “Well, we’ll soon know, won’t we? We’ll soon know if somebody called Randy was killed in Shelbyville, Ohio, won’t we? Then we can check out this Demarest woman—apparently there are even more tapes.”

Moody didn’t speak.

He appeared to sulk, like a man who has been carried along on a raft of convictions that has turned out to be a featherbed of delusions—and the waters underneath were treacherous. Poor Moody, if all this information turns out to be right. Nightingale felt a touch of sympathy for his partner. You’ll learn, kid. It’ll take time, but you’ll learn.

The telephone was ringing. Nightingale picked it up. It was the hick from Shelbyville, Sheriff Hercules Vansittart. Nightingale imagined good old boys sitting out in front of a gas station chewing tobacco and spitting juice, holding daily contests to see who could spit the furthest. He imagined one street of frame houses, a funeral parlor, and one local industry. The Shelbyville Peapod Company. Or the Shelbyville Lens Grinding Corporation. And everybody in the whole town would be employed by it, except for Herc and maybe his deputy, who was called Clarence. Herc and Clar, the tin-badged wonders.

“Is that New York City?” the hoarse voice asked.

“This is Lieutenant Nightingale.”

“Herc Vansittart getting back to you,” the voice said. “Hey, did you say Nightingale?”

Nightingale held his breath. Waited.

“Hey-hey, I bet criminals just sing all day long for you, huh?” Chortle, chortle.

Nightingale still didn’t speak. He looked at Moody and rolled his eyes. It was easy to imagine Herc, squat and plump, a beer can in his big paw, suspenders outside his shirt.

“Good one, huh?” Here asked.

“Best I ever heard,” Nightingale said. “What have you got for me there?”

The line was terrible. Every so often he could hear snatches of country music, as if a radio were somehow connected to the wires. “But the doggone river was dry …” I need yodeling right now, he thought. It was one thing he just couldn’t stand.

“You got a radio on there, Here?”

“No, sir.”

“I keep hearing this tune.”

“With a name like yours, I ain’t surprised.” Chortle chortle. I walked straight into that one. Like a goddamn fool I walked right into that wall.

“Yeah, good one, Here. So what can you tell me?”

“If this is the same case we’re talking, lieutenant, you got a lulu, a goddamn lulu.”

“Like how?” Nightingale picked up a pencil, found a sheet of paper.

“You mentioned some kid called Randy. I had to go back twelve years, lieutenant. Twelve years.”

“I’m grateful.”

“This kid called Randy Carmichael was found dead in the woods ’round here. His head had been pretty badly stoved in. It caused quite a ruckus ’round these parts, let me tell you. I wasn’t the sheriff then. That was old Matt Rawlings back then. He’s been dead and buried these past six years.”

Christ, give me the history of law enforcement in southern Ohio—please, I’ve been waiting for years to hear it.

“I’ve only been in this office two years. But I remember Randy Carmichael pretty well, because of the stir it caused. So I went back through the files for you. It seems Randy had this buddy called Adam Hawley. And these two boys went walking in the woods. Only Adam came back with some story about how he and his buddy had split up. Well, there was some splitting up going on, for sure. Only it was Randy’s head, lieutenant. There wasn’t no motive. Adam Hawley was obviously a suspect, see. The kids might have argued, had a fight, then it got right outta hand. Adam denied it all. He didn’t have nothing to do with his pal’s death. Oh, no, he wouldn’t have done a thing like that.” Pause. More country music. “I got a feeling called the blues …” “Anyway, about three weeks later the kid finally cracked. Said he didn’t remember anything except voices in his head and they was telling him what to do and he couldn’t resist. Voices in his head, lieutenant, you got that? Anyhow, he was a juvenile and you know what that means, so he gets all kinds of psychiatric tests. Batteries they call them. Batteries of tests. It turns out the kid is highly unhinged. A regular lulu.”

“Like how?”

Vansittart seemed to ignore the question. “He gets himself locked away for a few years in the county asylum at the age of sixteen he breaks out. We got him back from Chicago that time. It seems he’d jumped into the sack with this old queer and strangled him. So he goes back inside the asylum.”

Pause. Nightingale waited.

“Here’s your bad news, lieutenant. Adam Hawley escaped from County again about nine months ago. We’ve never been able to find him. To be honest, we gave up. We figured he’d turn up sooner or later. Now I got some highfalutin shrink report right here in front of me.”

“What does it say?”

“It’s a real jewel, lieutenant. I don’t know how much faith you put in shrinks, but the gist of this is that Adam Hawley likes to kill. The act of murder makes him feel good. It makes him feel good to take another human life. He sees it as his special talent in life. He doesn’t have any goddarn motive or anything like that. I mean you don’t need to cross him if you want to be his victim—he just has this basic pleasure in killing. What do you think of that? Killing is his thing in life.”

A chill crossed Nightingale’s heart. A talent for murder, he thought. A guy who just likes to kill. A monster. Someone monstrous enough to have murdered Henry Falcon and butchered Jamey Hausermann and God knows who else since his escape.

“You want I should send these reports to you?”

“I’d appreciate that, Sheriff.”

“No problem. You think Adam Hawley’s in New York City?”

“I think so.”

“Good luck, but don’t be sending him back out here, huh?”

“I’ll try not to.”

“One other thing.”

“Go ahead.”

“When he was picked up in Chicago, it seems he wasn’t calling himself Adam no more.”

“Yeah?” Nightingale poised his pencil over his paper.

“Called himself George. No second name. Just plain George. I figure he might be using the same alias. Or maybe some other one. I thought I’d pass it along.”

“Thanks again,” Nightingale said. He put the receiver down and looked at Moody, who had been listening on the extension. He wanted to say something to his young partner, but didn’t. Moody’s expression was dark: brow lined, mouth distended. What’s he thinking now? What’s ticking inside the Boy Wonder right now? Maybe he sees his mistakes. Maybe he understands the way old poisons distort everything. And you were on the edge of going along with him, Frank. You’d let yourself get carried that far.

You were on the edge of abdicating, passing the crown to younger blood.

Stanislavski was standing in the doorway, looking exhausted. He also looked sheepish. He had a piece of paper in his hand. He said, “I don’t know why this took so goddamn long, lieutenant. Barrows took the message and somehow it got stuck on my desk when I was out at Tully’s, then when I came back Barrows had gone off-duty and somehow this got caught in the old paper shuffle. Jeez, what can I say?”

Nightingale took the message from Stanislavski’s unsteady hand. “What the fuck kind of place are we running around here? Jesus, Jesus Christ!” Enraged, Nightingale picked up the telephone. He looked at the name on the piece of paper. She was at a place called the Bryant Berger Gallery on 57th Street with Harry Harrison. What were they doing up there anyhow? He got the number from the operator and listened as it rang several times. If they’re up there, why don’t they answer, for Christ’s sake?

Why don’t they just pick up the telephone and say something?

Because they can’t.

For some reason, they can’t—and that reason is Adam or George or whatever the hell this maniac calls himself.

Nightingale stood up and reached for his coat. “Okay, Doug. Let’s get moving. I think we’ve got ourselves a crisis.” And then he was huffing and puffing along the corridor, his lungs feeling like two rusted Brillo pads scouring his chest, his bandaged arm—despite the treatment of Nurse Maxymuk—hurting like all hell.

9.

The first thing she thought was: He looks familiar. He looks very familiar, that red hair, the jacket, the way he grins. Maybe he’d come into the gallery once. But it wasn’t that kind of memory. It was more like a face she’d glimpsed through a window, an unusual kind of face. Square, as if it had been sculpted. Good-looking in its own odd pretty way. And the red hair was memorable, like the barber had taken a course in punk styling. Then he didn’t look so familiar after all and she couldn’t remember if she’d ever seen him. Probably not. He moved into shadow again and something glinted, then was extinguished, in his right hand. And then she heard it—the laughter, the same sound she’d heard on the tape, the sound she knew she’d dream about for as long as she might live. She stepped back, skirting the desk.

Fear congeals, lies inside your chest like a lump of something insoluble.

And it stays there as if it might never go away.

The telephone was ringing suddenly. A savage metallic sound.

After several rings it stopped dead.

She looked at Harry; he was standing near the office door with his hands at his sides. She backed further away.

She was on the other side of the desk.

Mr. Berger.

Mr. Berger, she thought.

He lay propped against the wall behind the desk and there was a necktie knotted around his neck and his eyes stared unseeingly. Mr. Berger, half dressed, shirt buttons open, fly unzipped, a single shoe on one foot. She heard a pounding rushing noise inside her head, a noise that went cutting through her like the sound you might imagine a million locusts might make with their wings. Is there no end to it? No end to the dying? It’s all around you, encircling you, touching you with its scents and odors and broken appearances. It begins with a telephone call and it escalates from there as if one single voice at the end of a line had risen and risen until there was utter babble, total incomprehensible babble.…

Mr. Berger.

She became conscious of footsteps just beyond the office door.

He had moved out of the shadows again. He stood there grinning.

She watched Harry take a step back from the doorway.

She clutched the edge of the desk. She thought she could hear herself moaning, but the sound didn’t seem like any part of her.

Then she was conscious of Harry’s tense breathing.

She stared at the knife in the young man’s hand. It had a red handle. She wondered idly why he didn’t speak, why he didn’t say anything, why he stood there just holding the knife out in front of his body as if he were mesmerized by it.

He uttered a single word: “Apology?”

Harry didn’t say anything. What’s he thinking? What’s going through his mind right now?

“Apology?”

“Yes,” Harrison said.

“I thought I’d killed you.…” The grin again, the weird laughter. “I guess I made a mistake.”

He’s looking at me now, she thought.

Straight at me.

“I’ve seen you before, Madeleine. I’ve seen you here in the gallery. I saw you in a bar.” He paused. She tried to imagine this boy killing Levy, stabbing him; tried to grasp the frenzy—wondered what poor Rube had thought about at the very end. Pain. The suddenness of things. Her mind went blank. He was looking at Harry again.

“I figured you’d look different, Apology. I don’t know. I just figured you’d be a different kind of guy.” He moved forward a little way with the knife. Those eyes—they were cold and chilly and empty, as if what they reflected far within was an absence of compassion, humanity, vitality.

Why doesn’t Harry say something? Do something?

“Swiss army knife,” the boy was saying. “About the best ever made.… Did you see poor old Berger back there? I had to do it, you understand? Once you start killing it’s so hard to stop. Then you enjoy it and you don’t even ask questions about it; it just comes naturally—” He moved forward again. “Apology, huh? Christ. What was the big idea, advertising yourself like that?”

The big idea, she thought.

She couldn’t remember now.

Whatever it had once meant, it was lost. Lost and gone.

“It wasn’t a very good idea, was it, Apology? I can think of a thousand better ones … like the one I’m thinking about now. You and her. Both of you.” He laughed aloud. “I’ve never worked on a pair before.”

He might have been talking about two playing cards, nothing that had anything to do with human life. She realized she’d never encountered anybody like this before; it was beyond her memories, her experiences. He whispered my name in the bar, she thought. This monster said my name.…

“Killing,” he said. “I like it. I don’t know how to do anything else as well as that.”

She stared at the knife. She watched him flash it in a tiny arc, a gesture that was only meant to frighten. And then the laughter came again, filling the small office.

“Why don’t you take the knife away, Apology? Impress your old lady. Come and get it.”

Harry didn’t move. Madeleine put her hands over her ears.

But she couldn’t take her eyes from the sight of the knife.

Am I going to die here like a rat? Is this the way it’s all going to end?

God damn it, no.

It can’t just end like this.

There has to be more to live for, much more.

Suddenly she picked up the desklamp and hurled it, hoping it would strike the kid, watching it flash past his head and hit the wall instead, then drop to the floor.

He was laughing.

Feeble, a feeble effort, she thought.

It comes to nothing.

“Your old lady’s got more guts than you, Apology. Come on, take the knife. Take it, guy.”

Harry—why doesn’t he move? Why doesn’t he do something?

The knife sliced through the air; Harrison stepped quickly back and away from it. It came again and she heard him moan. He was clutching his arm; blood was coming through his shirt, through his fingers. She moved towards him to help but he gestured her away. It’s not just your fight, Harry. It’s mine as well.

“Take the motherfucking knife.”

He swung again, missing, laughing as he missed.

She saw Harry go down on one knee.

When he started to rise, the knife came again and made a terrible whining sound above his head, as if the air itself were torn apart by the blade. Harry staggered to his feet. He was leaning against the desk, breathing very hard. He glanced at her, a fragment of time—and what she saw in his eyes was a confusion of despair and desperation and regret.

And then she noticed he had something small and bright in his hand, an object she didn’t recognize at first but one that was somehow familiar—

Albert, she thought.

It was the surgical tool he’d used on Albert.

It was the same small cutting scalpel.

10.

Nightingale got out of the car and touched the shoulder holster beneath his coat. He didn’t like guns. He didn’t like to touch them, didn’t enjoy the way they felt—not like some of the guys who talked endlessly about them, this model and that, velocity, trajectory, caliber, arguing the merits of one pistol over another. It made him sick to think of guns. He hated how they kicked, how they bucked in the palm of your hand. He looked along the sidewalk. He could hardly make out the sign over the gallery. He turned to Moody, indicating the place with a gesture of his head. “The call came from here,” he said.

“I know the joint,” Moody said. “I browsed in there about two months ago. They had these really painful oriental things on the walls.”

“Well, this is where our lady is supposed to be,” Nightingale said. He moved along the sidewalk. Moody was at his side. “We’d better go get her.”

He stared up at the classy sign. The Bryant Berger Gallery. Art had always been a closed world to him. He knew a guy called Sparrow—of all names, why the hell was it another bird?—who worked the art frauds, and Sparrow was always talking about Rembrandt and Van Gogh and Andy Warhol, like he had just come from some cocktail party with those guys. He stopped outside the gallery. The place was in darkness—there was only a slight band of light from far inside, as if there might be another room in there and the door was almost shut. No vital signs. But he did get a slightly choked feeling in his chest. What instinct is this now? he wondered. He stifled a yawn and lowered his head to peer through the glass door, cupping his hand over his eyes. If you could smother your instincts, then they wouldn’t be instincts, he thought. He tried the door. It was locked.

“Maybe she shut herself in there for safety,” Moody said. “You better knock.”

Nightingale did so. Nothing. Nobody came.

“Funny,” he said.

“I’ve always liked kicking doors down ever since I saw my first Untouchables,” Moody said. “I always thought Robert Stack should have won an Emmy.”

Nightingale tried to peer inside again.

Damn darkness.

He tried the door again. He leaned against it.

It didn’t budge.

He turned to look at Moody. “It looks like you’re going to get your chance, Doug.”

And he touched his holster nervously.

11.

I shouldn’t do it, shouldn’t put my hand out and try to take the knife away from him. I shouldn’t fall for this kind of thing. The pain in his arm was intense, awful, blood seeping through his shirt, the material of his shirt sticking to his skin. I shouldn’t listen to his taunts, his dares. It’s a game for him, one big motherfucking game and nothing else.

Harrison turned to look at Madeleine.

It’s her I want to protect. Nothing else. Only Maddy.

He felt the sharp edge of the surgical scalpel dig into the palm of his own hand, where he was trying—like some artless conjurer—to conceal it. He backed against the desk and thought: This is the face you wanted to see, this is the person you wanted to meet, but it doesn’t match anything in your imagination. You thought maybe something sleazy and shadowy in a dreary phone booth; you didn’t see this good-looking red-haired boy. How could it be this one who’d made all the calls? Done all the killings? How could it be somebody who looked like this?

You’re going to have to kill him, Harry.

Him or you.

This time it isn’t Albert.

He’s crazy and real and he has a knife and he wants to kill Maddy—

He kept his eye on the knife. It swung again and he stepped back from it like a bullfighter avoiding the horns of an enraged animal. Wait, wait for your chance to move with the scalpel, wait for that opening, that moment. He hasn’t seen it.

“Cocksucker, come and take the fucking knife.…”

No, he thought.

Just keep coming forward to me. Keep coming. You think you’ve got it made here. You think it’s just a pushover, don’t you?

The eyes.

Dead eyes.

They would kill and never blink.

You killed Rube with that knife. That’s the blade that went through his flesh again and again—

Keep coming.

Don’t stop now.

The knife flashed, flickered. Harrison felt another pain in his body—something that carved through his chest, laying bare the material of his shirt just as so long ago he’d carved Albert in some insane kind of game he’d invented.

No game now

The real thing

Again, the knife came. It struck the back of his hand. Covered in blood. He slipped to the floor, blinded by pain, trying to see the figure looming over him, trying to guess where the knife might be coming from next. How could you ever tell?

Wait for your chance. You’re no goddamn hero.

He watched the kid’s legs move forward and he heard Maddy scream something and in shadow, falling like the silhouette of a maddened blacksmith’s tool, he saw the knife cleave the air and come winging down towards him—

Roll, you roll, you turn over and over on your side—

You hear the vicious sound of steel tear apart the fibers of wood, blade slashing desk—

Then you see it, a chance, a moment, something given to you like a gift of sheer survival, you raise your foot and hammer it into the shin and you watch as the kid steps back and you rise, driven by a weary strength, by the need to save Maddy, you get up and slash this fucker’s wrist with the scalpel and you see his knife, his beloved knife, go flying across the room—

Then you’re forcing your weight on his body, bringing him to the floor, dragging him down—

You want to kill him, Harry.

With the scalpel at his throat, you want to kill him.

You dig a little, skin breaks, flesh punctures, a slither of blood goes down from the larynx to the collar of the shirt—

Kill him.

He pressed hard, harder, wondering what was restraining him from pushing the scalpel deep into the neck, pushing it one final time—you’re looking right into his eyes now and suddenly they’re not empty, they’re not cold, chilly, distant, they’re just the eyes of a very scared kid—

Kill him, Harry.

You’ve got your chance now. Kill this monster.

Kill him.

He doesn’t deserve to live; he needs to die. He needs to be finished right here, under your scalpel—

God damn it, so easy—

Harry—

You can’t do it—

It’s not Albert. It’s not something you made for the purpose of violating; it’s a very scared kid lying here waiting to die—

You can’t kill this person, monster, whatever—

You don’t have the heart—

Kill him, Harry—

Is that your inner voice or is it Madeleine shouting at you?

I can’t kill I can’t go the last step I can’t kill anybody or anything.…

What did he hear in the distance?

What?

The breaking of glass, the sound of voices, movement.

A certain voice. “Okay, okay, let’s put this fucking show to rest. Let’s stop it once and for all. Put the weapon away.…”

I have to kill him, Harrison thought.

I have—

He looked up. He saw a fat man with a gun.

Then he was conscious of his blood dripping on the kid’s face, aware at the same time of a sense of slippage, giving way to the dark, an abrupt yielding—

He felt the scalpel slip from his fingers to the floor.

“Harry.”

It was Madeleine’s voice. He heard it only distantly.

The fat man was leaning over him, smiling. “Take it easy, fellah. Just take it easy.”

“Apology.”

Apology, he thought. It was a tidal sound from an old season. He turned painfully on his side, looking up into Maddy’s face. She was lightly stroking his hair. For a long time she said nothing and he realized there wasn’t anything to say anyway. All the possible conversations, all the likely exchanges of language, had slipped into the resounding silence associated with the dead. He thought: You could tell me everything is going to be okay, Maddy, everything is going to be fine from now on. You could tell me everything’s over and the menace is gone, wiped as cleanly away as some chalked obscenity on a blackboard obliterated by a sponge. You could tell me consoling things and uplifting sentiments and try to make me believe that our life together can be retraced, that we can backtrack our emotions to that point where nothing had ever arisen to threaten them—where nothing had ever surged through our blood with the reckless speed of a pollutant.

You can stroke my hair and look at me with love in your eyes and be glad I am still alive.

But we have a distance to travel now.

He smiled at her weakly. “We made it,” he said.

Madeleine didn’t answer.