Nothing made sense. Jack’s body had been found in the Spassky Grain Building, a Tribeca construction site on the corner of Greenwich and N Moore whose developers had recently come under union fire for employing scab labor. It was a fifteen-minute walk from Jack’s Hudson Street apartment, and he had apparently strolled here with a loaded shotgun in his hand, crossed Canal-still busily crowded in spite of the late hour-without attracting attention, then broken into his chosen location, taken an elevator to the fourth floor, positioned himself by a west-facing window with a good view of the moonlit river, placed the snout of the gun in his mouth, pulled the trigger, and fallen to the rough, unfinished floor, dropping the weapon but somehow holding on to the suicide note. He had been drinking heavily: Jack Daniel’s and Coke, an absurd drink for an oenophile like Rhinehart. When he was discovered, his suit and shirt were folded neatly on the floor, and he was wearing only his socks and underpants, which, for some reason, or perhaps by chance, were on back to front. He had recently cleaned his teeth.

Neela decided to make a clean breast of it and told the detectives everything she knew-the fancy-dress costumes in Jack’s closet, her suspicions, everything. She could have been in trouble, withholding information being a serious offense, but the police had bigger fish to fry, and, besides, the two officers who came to her Bedford Street apartment to interview her and Malik Solanka were having troubles of their own in her presence. They kept breaking pencils and stepping on each other’s feet and knocking over ornaments and bursting into simultaneous speech and then falling blushingly silent, to none of which Neela paid the slightest attention. “The point is,” she concluded as the two detectives bumped heads in eager agreement, “this so-called suicide smells strongly of fish.”

Malik and Neela had known that Jack owned a gun, though they had never seen it. It dated from the black-Hemingway hunting-and-fishing period that had preceded his Tiger Woods phase. Now, like poor Ernest, most feminine of great male American writers, destroyed by his failure to be the phony, macho Papa-self he had chosen to inhabit, Jack had gone hunting for himself, the biggest game of all. That, at least, was what they were being invited to believe. On closer examination, however, this version of events became less and less convincing. Jack’s building had a doorman, who had seen him leave the premises alone at around seven P.m., carrying no bags and dressed for an evening on the town. A second witness, a plump young woman wearing a beret who had been waiting on the sidewalk for a taxi, came forward in response to a police appeal to say that she had seen a man answering to Jack’s description getting into a large black sports utility vehicle with smoked windows; through the open door, she had briefly glimpsed at least two other men, with, and she was quite clear on this point, large cigars in their mouths. An identical SUV was seen driving away along Greenwich Street soon after the established time of death. A couple of days later, analysis of the technical data from what was already provisionally being called the crime scene revealed that the damage to the Spassky Grain Building’s temporary access door had not been inflicted

by Rhinehart’s shotgun. No other instrument capable of breaking down the very solid door-wooden, with a reinforcing metal frame-was found on or near his body. Moreover, it was strongly suspected that the damage to the door had not been the means of gaining entry to the premises. Somebody had had a key.

The suicide note itself was instrumental in establishing Jack’s innocence. Rhinehart was famous for the polished precision of his prose. He rarely made an error of syntax, and never, never made a spelling mistake. Yet here among his last words were solecisms of the worst kind. “Ever since my war correspondent days,” the note read, “I have had a violent streak. Sometimes in the middle of the nite I smash up the phone. Horse, Club and Stash are innocent. I killed their girls bee they would not fuck me, probably bee I was of Color.” And, finally, heartbreakingly, “Tell Nila I love her. I know I fucked up but I love her true.” Malik Solanka, when his turn came to be interviewed by the police, told them emphatically that even though the note was in Jack’s strong, unmistakable hand, it could not have been his freely written work. “Either it has been dictated by somebody with a far lower level of language skills than Jack or else he has deliberately dumbed down his style to send us a message. Don’t you see? He has even told us his three murderers’ names.”

When it was established that Keith “Club” Medford, last lover of the late Lauren Klein, was the son of the wealthy developer and unionized workers’ bete noire Michael Medford, one of whose companies was handling the conversion of the Spassky Grain Building into a mixture of high-end lofts and townhouse-style residences, and that Keith, who had been asked to plan the project’s opening-night party, possessed a set of keys, it became clear that the killers had made an irretrievable mistake. Most murderers were stupid, and a life of privilege was no defense against folly. Even the most expensive schools turned out badly educated dolts, and Marsalis, Andriessen, and Medford were semi-literate, arrogant young fools. And murderers, too. Club, faced with the accumulating facts, was the first to confess. His buddies’ defenses collapsed a few hours later.

Jack Rhinehart was buried in the depths of Queens, thirty-five minutes’ drive from the bungalow he’d bought his mother and still unmarried sister in Douglaston. “A house with a view,” he’d joked. “If you go to the end of the yard and lean all the way over to your left, you can just catch a what?, call it a whisper, of the Sound.” Now his own view would forever be of urban blight. Neela and Solanka got a car to drive them out. The cemetery was cramped, treeless, comfortless, damp. Photographers moved around the small group of mourners like pollution floating at the edges of a dark pond. Solanka had somehow forgotten that there would be media interest in Jack’s funeral. The moment the confessions had been made and the story of the S & M Club became the society scandal of the summer, Professor Solanka lost interest in the event’s public dimension. He was mourning his friend Jack Rhinehart, the great, brave journalist, who had been sucked down by glamour and wealth. To be seduced by what one loathed was a hard destiny. To lose the woman you loved to your best friend was perhaps even harder. Solanka had been a bad friend to Jack, but then it had been Jack’s fate to be betrayed. His secret sexual preferences, which he had never inflicted on Neela Mahendra, but which meant that not even Neela would finally have been enough for him, had led him into bad company. He had been loyal to men who did not merit his loyalty, had persuaded himself of their innocence-and what an effort that must have been for a natural finder-out and muckraker, what delusionary brilliance he must have employed!-and consequently had helped to shield them from the law, and his reward was to be killed by them in a clumsy attempt at scapegoating: to be sacrificed on the altar of their invincible, egomaniacal pride.

A gospel singer had been hired to sing a farewell medley of spirituals and more contemporary material: “Fix Me, Jesus” was followed by Puff Daddy’s tribute to Notorious B.I.G., “Every Breath You Take (I’ll Be Missing You)”; then came “Rock My Soul (In the Bosom of Abraham).” Rain looked imminent but was holding off. The air was moist, as if full of tears. Here were Jack’s mother and sister; also Bronislawa Rhinehart, the ex-wife, looking simultaneously devastated and sexy in a short black dress and high-fashion veil. Solanka nodded at Bronnie, to whom he’d never found anything to say, and muttered empty words at the bereaved. The Rhinehart women didn’t look sad; they looked angry. “Jack I know,” Jack’s mother said briefly, “would’ve seen through those white boys in nine seconds flat.” “Jack I know,” his sister added, “didn’t need no whips or chains to have himself some fun.” They were mad at the man they loved for the scandal but even madder at him for having put himself in harm’s way, as if he had done it to hurt them, to leave them with the lifelong pain of their bereavement. “The Jack I know,” Solanka said, “was a pretty good man, and if he’s anywhere at all right now, I’d say he’s happy to be set free from his mistakes.” Jack was right there with them, of course. Jack in the box from which he would never rise up. Solanka felt a hand tighten around his heart.

In his grief’s eye Solanka pictured Jack stretched out in an upscale loft conversion while the whole world gossiped over his corpse and photographers frothed about. Next to Jack lay the three dead girls. Released from the fear of his own involvement in their deaths, Solanka mourned them too. Here lay Lauren, who had become afraid of what she was capable of doing to others and allowing others to do to her. Bindy and Sky had tried and failed to keep her inside their charmed circle of pleasure and pain, but she had sealed her fate by threatening the club’s members with the shame of a public expose. Here lay Bindy, the first to comprehend that her friend’s death had been no random killing but a cold-blooded execution: which comprehension was her own death warrant. And here lay Uptown Sky, game-for-anything sexual athlete Sky, the wildest of the doomed three and the most sexually uninhibited, her masochistic excesses-now meticulously detailed in the delighted press-sometimes alarming even her sadistic lover, Brad the Horse. Sky, who believed herself immortal, who never thought they would come for her, because she was the empress of their world, they followed where she led, and her levels of tolerance, her thresholds, were the highest any of them had ever known. She knew about the murders and was crazily aroused by them, murmured in Marsalis’s ears that she had no intention of blowing the whistle on so much man, and whispered to both Stash and Club in turn that she would be happy to stand in for her dead friends in any way they wanted, just name it, baby, it’s yours. She also explained to all three men, in separate, luridly retold encounters, that the killings bound them together for life; they had passed the point of no return, and the contract of their love had been signed in her friends’ lifeblood. Sky, the vampire queen. She died because her killers were too scared of her sexual fury to let her live.

Three scalped girls. The public talk was of voodoo and fetishism, and above all of the icy ruthlessness of the crimes, but Solanka preferred to ponder the death of the heart. These young girls, so desperately desirous of desire, had only been able to find it at the outside extremes of human sexual behavior. And these three young men, for whom love had become a question of violence and possession, of doing and being done to, had gone to the frontier between love and death, and their fury had worn it away, the fury they could not articulate, born of what they, who had so much, had never been able to acquire: lessness, ordinariness. Real life.

In a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand horrified conversations buzzing over the dead like stench-seeking flies, the city discussed the murders’ most minute details. They killed one another’s girls! Lauren Klein had been taken out by Medford for one last grand night on the town. She sent him home, as he had planned, because of a quarrel he’d deliberately provoked near the evening’s end. A few moments later he phoned her, pretending to have had a car accident just around the corner. She ran out to help him, found his vintage Bentley unmarked and waiting with its door open. Poor babe. She thought be wanted to apologize. Annoyed at the deception but not alarmed, she climbed in, and was hit repeatedly on the head by Andriessen and Marsalis, while Medford drank margaritas in a nearby bar, announcing loudly that he was drowning his sorrows because his bitch wouldn’t put out, obliging the bartender to ask him to shut up or leave, and making sure his presence would be remembered. And then the scalping. They must’ve put down plastic sheeting to make sure the car wasn’t stained. And the body thrown like garbage in the street. The same technique worked on Belinda Candell.

Sky, however, was different. As was her way, she took the initiative, whispering her plans for the night to Bradley Marsalis over their last supper. Not tonight, he said, and she shrugged. “Okay. I’ll call Stash or Club and see if they’re up for some fun.” Furious, insulted, but obliged to stick to the game plan, Brad said good night at her lobby door, and phoned her a few minutes later, saying, “Okay, you win, but not here. Meet me at the room.” (The room was the soundproofed five-star hotel suite booked year-round by the S&M Club for the use of its noisier members. Bradley Marsalis, it was revealed, had made the booking several days in advance, which went to prove premeditation.) Sky never reached the room. A large black sports utility vehicle pulled up beside her and a voice she recognized said, “Hi, princess. Climb aboard. Horse asked us to give you a little ride.”

Twenty, nineteen, nineteen, Solanka counted. Their combined age had been just three years more than his.

And what of Jack Rhinehart, who lived through a dozen wars only to die miserably in Tribeca, who wrote so well on much that mattered and so stylishly on much that didn’t, and whose last words were, deliberately or by necessity, both poignant and inane? Jack’s story was all out in the open, too. The theft of the shotgun by Horse Marsalis. Jack’s invitation to his S&NI Club induction ceremony. You made it, man. You’re in. Even when they arrived at the Spassky Grain Building, Rhinehart had no idea he was close to death. He was probably thinking of the orgy scene in Eyes Wide Shut, imagining masked girls naked on podiums, waiting for the sting of his sweet lash. Solanka was weeping now. He heard the killers insist that, as part of the ritual, Rhinehart needed to drink a brimming jug of Jack and Coke, the spoiled kids’ tipple, at high speed. He heard them order Jack to strip and reverse his underpants, in the name of club tradition. As if it were being tied around his own eyes, Solanka felt the blindfold they had used on Jack (and afterward removed). His tears soaked through the imagined silk. Okay, Jack, are you ready, this’ll blow you away.-What’s happening, guys, what’s the deal? Just open your mouth, Jack. Did you clean your teeth like we said? Good Job. Say aah, Jack. This’ll kill you, doll. How pathetically easy it had been to lure this good, weak man to his death. How willingly-giving five high, getting five low-he stepped into his own hearse and took his brief last ride. Lord, rock my soul, the singer cried. Good-bye, Jack, Solanka said silently to his friend. Go on home. I’ll be calling you.

Neela took Malik back to Bedford Street, opened a bottle of red wine, drew the curtains, lit many scented candles, and disrespectfully selected a CD of Bollywood song classics from the fifties and early sixties music from his forbidden past. This was an aspect of her profound emotional wisdom. In all things pertaining to feeling, Neela Mahendra knew what worked. Kabhi meri gali aaya kard. The teasingly romantic song lilted across the darkened room. Come up and see me sometime. They hadn’t spoken since they left the graveside. She drew him down onto a cushion-strewn rug and laid his head between her breasts, wordlessly reminding him of the continued existence of happiness, even in the midst of grief.

She spoke of her beauty as something a little separate from herself. It had simply “showed up.” It wasn’t the result of anything she’d done. She took no credit for it, was grateful for the gift she’d been given, took great care of it, but mostly thought of herself as a disembodied entity living behind the eyes of this extraordinary alien, her body: looking out through its large eyes, manipulating its long limbs, not quite able to believe her luck. Her impact on her surroundings-the fallen window cleaners sitting splay-legged on various sidewalks with buckets on their heads, the skidding cars, the danger to cleaver-wielding butchers when she stopped by for meat-was a phenomenon of whose results, for all her apparent unconcern, she was sharply, precisely aware. She could control “the effect” to some degree. “Doesn’t know how to switch it off,” Jack had said, and that was true, but she could play it down with the help of loose-fitting clothes (which she detested) and wide-brimmed hats (which, as a sun hater, she adored). More impressively, she could intensify the world’s response to her by making fine-tuning adjustments to her stride length, the tilt of her chin, her mouth, her voice. At maximum intensity she threatened to reduce entire precincts to disaster areas, and Solanka had to ask her to stop, not least because of the effect she was having on his own state of body and mind. She liked compliments, described herself as a “high-maintenance girl,” and at times was prepared to concede that this compartmentalization of herself into “form” and “content” was a useful fiction. Her description of her sexual being as “the other one” who periodically came out to hunt and would not be denied was a clever ruse, a shy person’s way of tricking herself into extroversion. It allowed her to reap the rewards of her exceptional erotic presence without being troubled by the paralyzing social awkwardness that had plagued her as a stammering young girl. Too astute to speak directly of the strong sense of right and wrong that quietly informed all her actions, she preferred to quote the cartoon sex bomb Jessica Rabbit. “I’m not bad,” she liked demurely to purr. “I’m just drawn that way.”

She held him close. The contrast with the Mila liaison was very striking. With Mila, Solanka had allowed himself to sink toward the sickly allure of the unmentionable, the unallowed, whereas when Neela wrapped herself around him the opposite was true, everything became mentionable and was mentioned, everything was allowable and allowed. This was no child-woman, and what he was discovering with her was the adult joy of unforbidden love. He had thought of his addiction to Mila as a weakness; this new bond felt like strength. Mila had accused him of optimism, and she was right. Neela was optimism’s justification. And, yes, he was grateful to Mila for finding the key to the doors of his imagination. But if Mila Milo had unlocked the floodgate, Neela Mahendra was the flood.

In Neela’s arms Solanka felt himself begin to change, felt the inner demons he feared so much growing weaker by the day, felt unpredictable rage give way to the miraculous predictability of this new love. Pack your bags, Furies, he thought, you no longer reside at this address. If he was right, and the origin of fury lay in life’s accumulating disappointments, then he had found the antidote that transformed the poison into its opposite. For furia could be ecstasy, too, and Neela’s love was the philosopher’s stone that made possible the transmuting alchemy. Rage grew out of despair: but Neela was hope fulfilled.

The door to his past remained closed, and she had the grace not to push against it just yet. Her need for a degree of personal and psychological privacy was considerable. After their initial night in a hotel room, she had insisted on using her own bed for their encounters, but made it clear that he wasn’t welcome to spend the night. Her sleep was filled with nightmares, yet she didn’t want the comfort of his presence. She preferred to battle her dream-figments alone and, at the end of each night’s wars, to wake up slowly, and definitely by herself. Having no alternative, Solanka accepted her terms, and began to grow accustomed to fighting off the waves of sleep that habitually rolled over him at lovemaking’s end. He told himself that it was better for him this way as well. He was, after all, suddenly a very busy man.

He was learning her better every day, exploring her as if she were a new city in which he had sublet space and where he hoped one day to buy. She wasn’t completely at ease with that idea. Like him, she was a creature of moods, and he was becoming her personal meteorologist, predicting her weather, studying the duration of her internal gales and their sideswipe effects, in the form of crashing storms, on the golden beaches of their love. Sometimes she liked being seen in such microscopic detail, loved being understood without speaking, having her needs catered to without having to express them. On other occasions it annoyed her. He would see a cloud on her brow and ask, “What’s the matter?” In response shed look exasperated and say, “Oh, nothing. For Pete’s sake! You think you can read my mind, but you’re so often so wrong. If there’s something to be said, I’ll say it. Don’t meet trouble halfway.” She had invested a great deal of effort in building an image of strength and didn’t want the man she loved to see her weaknesses.

Medication, he soon discovered, was an issue for Neela, too, and this was another thing they had in common: that they were determined to beat their demons without entering the valley of the dolls. So when she felt low, when she needed to wrestle with herself, she would retreat from him, wouldn’t want to see him or explain why, and he was expected to understand, to be grown-up enough to allow her to be what she needed to be; in short, for perhaps the first time in his life he was being required to act his age. She was a highly strung woman, and sometimes admitted that she must be a nightmare to be around, to which he replied, “Yes, but there are compensations.” “I hope they’re big,” she said, looking genuinely worried. “If they weren’t, I d be pretty stupid, wouldn’t I?” He grinned, and she relaxed and moved in close. “That’s right,” she comforted herself. “And you’re not.”

She possessed immense physical ease, and was actually happier naked than clothed. More than once he had to remind her to dress when there was a knock at her door. But she wanted to guard some secrets, to protect her mystery. Her frequent withdrawals into herself, her habit of recoiling from being too acutely seen, had to do with this very un-American-this positively English-awareness of the value of reserve. She insisted that it had nothing to do with whether she loved him or not, which she deeply and bewilderingly did. “Look, it’s obvious,” she replied when he asked why. “You may be very creative with your dolls and websites and all, but as far as I’m concerned, your only function is to get into my bed whenever I tell you and fulfill my every whim.” At which imperious dictum Professor Majik Solanka, who had wanted to be a sex object all his life, felt quite absurdly pleased.

After making love, she lit a cigarette and went to sit naked by the window to smoke it, knowing his hatred of tobacco smoke. Lucky neighbors, he thought, but she dismissed such considerations as bourgeois and far beneath her. She returned with a straight face to the question he had asked. “The thing about you,” she offered, “is that you’ve got a heart. This is a rare quality in the contemporary guy. Take Babur: an amazing man, brilliant, really, but totally in love with the revolution. Real people are just counters in his game. With most other guys it’s status, money, power, golf, ego. Jack, for example.” Solanka hated the laudatory reference to the smooth-bodied flag-bearer of Washington Square, felt a sharp twinge of guilt at being favorably compared to his dead friend, and said so. “You see,” she marveled, “you don’t just feel, you can actually talk about it. Wow. Finally, a man worth staying with.” Solanka had the feeling that he was being obscurely sent up, but couldn’t quite identify the joke. Feeling foolish, he settled for the affection in her voice. Love Potion Number Nine. That was the healing balm.

India was insisted upon everywhere in the Bedford Street apartment, in the overemphasized manner of the diaspora: the filmi music, the candles and incense, the Krishna-and-milkmaids calendar, the dhurries on the floor, the Company School painting, the hookah coiled atop a bookcase like a stuffed green snake. Neela’s Bombay alter ego, Solanka mused, pulling on his clothes, would probably have gone for a heavily Westernized, Californian-minimalist simplicity ... but never mind about Bombay. Neela was getting dressed as well, pulling on her most “aerodynamically” body-hugging black outfit, made in some nameless space-age fabric. She needed to go to the office in spite of the late hour. The pre-production period on the Lilliput documentary was almost over, and she would be leaving for the antipodes soon. There was still much to do. Get used to this, Solanka thought. Her need for absence is professional as well as personal. To be with this woman is also to learn to be without her. She tied the laces on her white street flyers-sneakers with flip-out wheels built into the soles-and took off at speed, her long black ponytail flying out behind her as she raced away. Solanka stood on the sidewalk and watched her go. The “effect,” he noted as the usual mayhem began, worked almost as well in the dark.

He went to FAO Schwarz and sent Asmaan an elephant by mail. Soon the last vestiges of old fury would have been dispelled by new happiness and he would feel confident enough to re-enter his son’s life. To do so, however, he would have to face Eleanor and confront her with the fact she still refused to accept. He would have to bury finality like a knife in her good and loving heart.

He telephoned to tell Asmaan to expect a surprise. Great excitement. “What’s inside it? What’s it saying? What would Morgen say?” Eleanor and Asmaan had been holidaying in Florence with the Franzes. “There’s no beach here. No. There’s a river, but I douldn’t swim in it. Maybe when I’m bigger I’ll come back and swim in it. I wasn’t stared, Daddy. That’s why Morgen and Lin were shouting.” Scared. “Mummy wasn’t. Mummy wasn’t shouting. She said don’t be stary, Morgen. Lin’s so nice. Mummy’s so nice too. That’s what I think, anyway. He was being a bit stary. Morgen was. A tiny bit. Was he trying to make me laugh? Probably. Do you know, Daddy? What was he saying? We went to look at statues, but Lin douldn’t come. That’s why she was trying. She stayed at home. Not our home, but. Ai caramba.” This, Solanka understood after a moment, was I can’t remember. “We stayed there. Yes. It was very good. I had my own room. I like that. I’ve got a bow and arrow. I like you, Daddy, are you coming home today? Saturday Tuesday? You should. ‘Bye.”

Eleanor took over. “Yes, it was difficult.” But Florence was lovely. How are you?” He thought for a minute. “Fine,” he said. “I’m fine.” She thought for a minute. “You shouldn’t promise him you’re coming back if you aren’t,” she said, angling for information. “What’s the matter?” he asked, changing the subject. “What’s the matter with you?” she replied.

That was all it took. He had already heard the telltale wrongness in her voice and she in his. Thrown off balance by what he had just understood, Solanka made the mistake of retreating into Neela’s dialogue: “Oh, for Pete’s sake! You think you can read my mind, but you’re so often so wrong. If there’s something to be said, I’ll say it. Don’t meet trouble halfway.” Coming from Neela this had sounded genuine enough, but in his mouth it came across as mere bluster. Eleanor was scornfully amused. “For Pete’s sake?” she wanted to know. “As in ‘Jeepers creepers,” Jiminy Cricket,’ or’ What the heck? “When did you start using Ronald Reagan’s lines?” Her manner was sharper, more irritable, non-placatory. Morgen and Lin, Solanka thought. Morgen, who had taken the trouble to ring him up to scold him for abandoning his wife, and whose own wife had informed Solanka that his behavior had brought her and her husband closer together than ever before. Mm-hm. Morgen and Eleanor and Lin in Florence. That’s why she was trying. Asmaan’s evidence left no doubt. Because she was crying. Why was she crying, Morgen? Eleanor? Would you care to fill me in on that? Would you care to explain, Eleanor, why your new lover and his wife were quarreling in the presence of my son?

The fury was passing from him, but everyone else seemed to be in exceedingly poor humor. Mila was moving. Eddie had hired a van from a company called Van-Go and was uncomplainingly hauling her possessions down from the fourth floor while she stayed in the street smoking a cigarette, drinking Irish whiskey from the bottle, and bitching. Her hair was red now, and spikier than ever: even her head looked angry. “What do you think you’re looking at?” she yelled up at Solanka when she spotted him watching her from his second-floor workroom window. “Whatever you want from me, Professor, it’s unavailable. Got it? I’m a person engaged to be married and believe me you don’t want my fiand to get mad.” Against his better judgment-for she had worked her way through most of the fifth of Jameson’s-he went down to the street to

talk to her. She was moving to Brooklyn, moving in with Eddie in a small place in Park Slope, and the webspyders had opened up an office there. The Puppet Kings site was fast approaching its launch date, and things were looking good. “Don’t worry, Professor,” Mila said blurrily. “Business is great. It’s just you I can’t stand.”

Eddie Ford came down the front stairs carrying a computer monitor. When he saw Solanka, he scowled theatrically. This was a scene he had been wanting to play for a long time. “She doesn’t want to talk to you, man,” he said, setting the monitor down. “Do I make myself plain? Ms. Milo has no fuckin’ desire to fuckin’ converse. You apprehend? You want to see her, call the office and seek a fuckin’ business appointment. Send us e-mail. You show up at her fuckin place of residence, you’ll be answerin’ to me. You and the lady got no personal relationship no more. You’re fuckin’ estranged. If you ask me, she’s a fuckin’ saint to want to do business with you at all. Me, I’m not the saintly type. Me, I just want five minutes. Three hundred seconds alone with you would suffice for my fuckin’ needs. Yes, sir. You follow me, Professor? Am I on your frequency? Am I comin’ through?” Solanka bowed his head quietly and turned to go. “She told me what you tried on her,” Eddie shouted after him. “You’re one fuckin’ sad and sick old man.” And what did she tell you, Eddie, about what she tried on me? Oh, never mind.

Ah, Professor.” In the corridor outside his front door he ran into the plumber, Schlink, or, rather, Schlink was waiting for him, waving a document and bursting with words. “All is good in ze apartment? No toilet problem? So, so. What Schlink fixes stays gefixt.” He nodded and smiled furiously. “Maybe you don’t remember,” he continued. “I vos frank viz you, eh?, my life story I shared viz you for nossink. From zis you made a cruel choke. Maybe a movie, you said, could come from my poor tale. Zis you did not mean. You spoke, I am sure of it, in chest. So grand, Professor, so patronizing, you piece of shit.” Solanka was greatly taken aback. “Yes,” Schlink emphasized. “I make free to say so. I came here particular to tell you. You see, Professor, I haff followed your advice, zis advice vot to you vos chust a schoopit gag, and sanks Gott,

success has blessed my effort. A film deal! See for yourself, here it is in black and white. See here, ze studio name. See here, ze financial aspect. Yes, a comedy, chust imagine. After a lifetime vizout humor I vill be played for laughs. Billy Crystal in the title role, he’s on board already, he’s crazy for it. A surefire hit, eh? Lensing soon. Opens next spring. Lotsa buzz. Goes boffo right off. Big opening veekend. Vait and see. Okay, so long, Professor Asshole, and sank you for ze title. jewboat. HA, ha, ha, HA.”