Quickly Hannah protests: “Nothing is wrong. No.”

  “The way you behaved yesterday, in a panic over nothing …”

  Y.K. is waiting for her to apologize, Hannah realizes. But she cannot summon the words.

  I am sorry.

  I am not sorry.

  I could not help myself, I would do it again.

  I must protect my children from you.

  Y.K. is saying he wants to see her, he has missed her. He has begun to repeat himself, he is sounding distracted. Very angry with Hannah but determined not to betray his anger.

  Telling her again that he’d had a “bad night.” Expecting her to apologize for the “bad night.”

  Hannah says yes, she’d had a “bad night,” too.

  He loves her, he insists. He doesn’t want to lose her.

  Why had she behaved as she had, pulling Conor from him?—he demands to know.

  Hannah cannot answer. Seeing the fury in her lover’s eyes. Heavy-lidded predator eyes, livid with appetite.

  “You know I love you, Hannah. You have entered my heart, you have saved my life …”

  These words! Hypnotic. Hannah wipes tears from her eyes, she cannot but believe.

  If he touches her … No.

  He persists, they must see each other soon. If not today, tomorrow. If she can’t come to the hotel in Detroit he will come to Far Hills. Or they might meet somewhere in between, a private place. He can arrange.

  No!—Hannah is panicked. Cannot.

  Not today, not tomorrow. Not possible.

  Her mouth is so dry, her voice is barely audible. Feeling his fingers tighten around her throat.

  “Hannah? What are you saying?”—Y.K. is baffled, balked.

  “I—I—I think that I can’t … This week.”

  “But why not?” Then: “Didn’t the children like their presents? I thought they did.”

  “They did,” Hannah admits. “Yes. Thank you.”

  “Such beautiful children.” Y.K. pauses, then says, as Hannah expects: “But that isn’t surprising, considering that their mother is a beautiful woman.”

  Beautiful woman. Hannah imagines Y.K.’s mouth twisting in derision.

  But thanking him, weakly. How like coercion flattery is, always demanding a meek thank you.

  Y.K. repeats, he’s at the hotel. A business lunch soon but after three he could see her.

  “I told you, I can’t!”—Hannah pleads. “I have appointments through the afternoon.”

  Y.K. is beginning to be stymied, a master chess player outmatched by an amateur. He is uncertain how to proceed, he must be very careful. Keeping his voice pleasant, in no way reproachful or accusatory. Quietly he says, “Well. Call me, Hannah. When you are feeling more like yourself.”

  Hannah murmurs yes.

  “Because I love you, you know that. And I want to make love to you.”

  Hannah murmurs yes. She is feeling faint, uncertain.

  Then, suddenly vehement: “If you loved me you would want me to tell Wes about us. You would want our relationship to be open, honest.”

  Suddenly, these trite words which Hannah has no intention of saying. Her voice is wounded, childlike. He has harmed her, the blame is his.

  “I thought I’d explained that, darling. We can’t—yet.”

  “Yes, you’ve said. But you didn’t really explain.”

  “Hannah, I did.”

  Like a stone placed in the palm of Hannah’s hand, something tangible, something to grip, with which to blame him.

  “No. I can’t do this any longer. It’s dishonest, it’s exhausting. Goodbye!”

  Hannah hangs up the phone.

  Unbelievably, Hannah has hung up on him.

  Close to fainting with her own audacity. But she is elated. She has broken the connection, she will not speak with him again.

  Thinking—He’s too proud to call me. This will end it.

  The Lover. The Stalker.

  But he does call. The phone will ring, ring. And each ring an accusation.

  You don’t want to do this, Hannah.

  This is a mistake, Hannah.

  You know I love you, Hannah.

  You know you love me, Hannah.

  We need to talk, Hannah.

  We need to save you from a very bad mistake, Hannah.

  • • •

  Instructing Ismelda not to answer the phone, just let it ring. And leave the voicemail off.

  Chagrined that Ismelda so readily assents—“Yes, Mrs. Jarrett.” The (discreet) way in which the employee does not ask her employer what is wrong.

  Nor does Hannah offer any explanation.

  She knows! Of course, how could she not know.

  She has cleaned up after me. She has smelled him on me.

  But has Ismelda overheard Hannah calling her lover late at night, not so long ago?—this is a possibility Hannah doesn’t wish to consider.

  She’d always been so careful. Wes asleep, all of the house asleep. She was sure.

  What madness! Hannah is mesmerized by her own recklessness, she cannot comprehend how she’d behaved as she had.

  In desperation staying away from the house during those hours of the day when he is likely to call. She would arrange to have the telephone number changed but how to explain to Wes? She cannot.

  No words. No words she can imagine.

  In a haze of self-recrimination. Self-loathing. Unable to concentrate during the day and unable to sleep at night composing messages, pleas, she might leave for Y.K. at the Renaissance Grand Hotel for she is too cowardly to speak to him, frightened to hear his voice in her ears.

  Please forgive me! I am sorry …

  I made a mistake. I am begging you to leave me alone.

  No words will placate an offended lover, Hannah thinks. She cannot tell him that yes, she is still in love with him but no, she can’t see him again.

  She scarcely comprehends, why she can’t see him again.

  Seeming to know that Y.K. will not be a gentle lover from now on. Seeing again his aggrieved face, heavy-lidded eyes brimming with the fury of one betrayed when she’d dared to pull Conor from him.

  Even his limp had vanished, in Lone Lake Park. The shrapnel in his leg—had that ever been real?

  She’d imagined taking care of him as he recovered from knee surgery. How he would need her, what pleasure this would give her.

  How helpless she’d felt in his presence. A compass with a spinning needle. At a loss, unmoored. His hand on hers, his touch. His mouth on hers sucking oxygen from her lungs.

  I don’t love you, I am terrified of you.

  Let me go! Please.

  Driving into town in a haze of anxiety seeing, or thinking she sees, a vehicle following hers by approximately half a block.

  Not (of course) the gleaming red Ferrari but a less striking American car, dark gray sedan with tinted windows so that the driver’s face is obscured.

  If Hannah accelerates, this vehicle accelerates; if Hannah slows her speed, the vehicle drops back. If Hannah impulsively turns a corner, without signaling, the vehicle may continue through the intersection but rejoin Hannah in another block or two.

  Driving the children to school, picking the children up after school. Hannah is determined to be remembered as a good mother.

  “Mom-my?”—Conor is annoyed, Hannah doesn’t seem to be paying attention to him.

  No idea what Conor has been asking her. Or what Katya has been chattering about.

  For in the rearview mirror Hannah has been observing the phantom sedan following behind; though, when she peers into the side mirror, she can’t see it.

  Her heart beats calmly, she reasons that if she is with the children, if she is not alone, he will not approach her to cut her off, force her out of the car. He will keep his distance.

  When Hannah turns into the school grounds the sedan does not follow. But when Hannah returns to the road the sedan is waiting not far away to follow her back home as slow and unerring as a great sleek predator fish.

  Know you love me, Hannah.

  Need to talk.

  Need to save you from a bad mistake, darling.

  And so if Hannah says I want to report that a man is following me, he has called the house many times and he follows me in my car they will ask Do you know the identity of this man, Mrs. Jarrett?

  No words. She cannot.

  If she says, pleads I am afraid of him, I want him to stop and leave me alone, I am afraid that he will hurt my children or me, they will say But has he threatened you, Mrs. Jarrett? How exactly has he threatened you?

  A gag shoved into Hannah’s mouth, it will suffocate her.

  Didn’t the children like their presents? I thought they did.

  These plaintive words Hannah hears, rehears. Almost, she’d weakened.

  Katya adores her soft white-furred bunny Snowball who sleeps with her every night, cuddles close beside her as Mommy reads her to sleep from a favorite book; Conor plays with his miniature Vought F-8 Crusader, making dive-bomber and demolition noises with his mouth, which Hannah can hear rooms away.

  Her solace is: Katya has many stuffed animals, Conor has many expensive toys—automotive, aerial, interplanetary.

  Her fear is that the children will call their daddy’s attention to their new gifts, or, less likely, that Daddy will notice the gifts … But no, Wes has no more than a polite feigned interest in the children’s toys, even those he is supposed to have helped Hannah select for birthdays or Christmas.

  Only once, Katya asks if “that nice man who gave me Snowball” is going to visit them, and Hannah says no, probably not, he lives in another city.

  Careful not to speak of Y.K. by any name for the children have no doubt forgotten his name.

  Hannah has steeled herself for queries from Conor but oddly there are none.

  To recall Y.K. would be, for Conor, to recall the shameful way his mother had behaved at the entrance to the men’s room at Lone Lake Park. She’d frightened him, she’d hurt him dragging him away as she had in both arms.

  Mom-my! I hate you.

  Though it’s clear that of all his expensive toys Conor particularly prizes the miniature bomber, which (possibly) he doesn’t consider a mere toy, exactly.

  A talisman, perhaps? A promise?

  “Mikhail”

  Fuck, yes! Never say no to Hawkeye.

  He calls you, you go. Whatever it is to be expedited, you don’t say no.

  Putting a bullet into a man’s brain, he’s wishing he had said no.

  Like crossing over to some new place but you can never go back to where you were.

  But: kind of proud of himself, he’d been scared shitless but he hadn’t fucked up.

  What’s it feel like to kill somebody?

  Is it—like, weird?

  Like your jaw is numbed at the dentist, that sensation—some kind of nothing.

  You know there’s pain inside but you can’t feel it.

  Okay it’s sexy-cool. Rock-star cool like Sid Vicious.

  Why his new street name is Mikhail. Speaks with an accent like there’s pebbles in his mouth. In a coke haze hacked off most of his hair so he couldn’t be identified.

  High on coke twelve days/nights after the expediting. Alert and bloodshot-eyed trying to “sleep” sitting up in a chair in a barricaded room on West Warren. No more he’d lie on his back like a turtle on its back out of its shell. Or shut his eyes.

  Waiting for cops to bang on his door. Or, fire through the door.

  Paid a friend to bleach his hair platinum-blond like a hooker. Inch-high stiff spikes sprouting from his head like little horns.

  Whatever he’d looked like before with the (shit-brown) ponytail straggling down his back, that look is gone.

  He’s cool with punk rock. Sex Pistols punk rock. Anyone who knew Ponytail wouldn’t recognize Mikhail, he’s thinking. Hoping.

  Though punk music is mostly heroin, he’s always been afraid of.

  But a cool way to die: heroin. Just—shut your eyes, nod off, never wake up: OD.

  Coke won’t let you sleep. Coke is a buzz saw in a glaring white-walled room and you’re ricocheting from wall to wall.

  Coke might burst your brain, your heart, but you’re flying high like an eagle not crawling like a broke-back snake.

  Jesus!—Hawkeye whistled through his teeth at the sight.

  (And the bastard is never surprised.)

  And changing his street name to “Mikhail”—what the fuck, Mikey Kushel has been dead a long time.

  Mikey Kushel? Wasn’t he the kid who died?

  Babysitter’s first victim?

  … his eyelids start to close, can’t sleep but can’t stay awake either, not fully awake. Twelve days/nights after Hawkeye sent him out to Bloomfield for the second time, expediting a task involving Hawkeye’s old buddy they’d known as Mister R__. And the heavy Glock revolver is back in his hand, finger at the trigger.

  Don’t do it. You can stop now.

  Like time has stopped, like you’d stop with your finger the second hand on a clock. That kind of numb.

  But Ponytail has nothing to do with the decision. In fact there is no decision but the finger on the trigger twitches, the Glock is discharged. Only a second while Rusch stoops to pick up the envelope that has fallen to the floor, grunting a little, breathy, smelling of whiskey but also of something talcumy overlaid on the stink of unwashed armpits, obviously trusting Ponytail, in fact relieved to see Ponytail at the door and not a stranger, he’s in this fragile emotional state, orphaned—(a “mob hit” the deaths of the elder Rusches is beginning to be called)—trusting Ponytail he’d used to know as Mikey Kushel he’d never gotten around to fucking because there were always better-looking boys at the Mission, boys with smoother skin, smoother asses, who wouldn’t cause trouble like coarse-skinned Mikey Kushel might’ve done.

  So as Rusch stoops to retrieve the hefty manila envelope he believes to contain the final installment of negatives and prints linking him to certain underaged boys, including one or two no longer living, the gun discharges, a single bullet slams into his head, splintering the bone at his right temple; in spite of the silencer affixed to the weapon the sound is deafening and Ponytail feels a kick, a nudge, recoils with a whimper like a frightened girl (but no one to witness) remembering to release the heavy gun which drops, Goddamn, onto Ponytail’s right foot protected by a clumsy rubber boot but still hurting like hell.

  Falling to the floor more swiftly than the (dead) man falls.

  Dead because no way he wasn’t dying. But not instantaneously as you’d think from a bullet point-blank in the brain and the sharp smell of gunpowder.

  • • •

  This time Hawkeye calls him it’s expediting a simple task that needs to be done exactly right.

  Delivering a “floral display” to “Mrs. Jarrett” out in Far Hills.

  Mikhail listens not sure what he’s hearing. Hawkeye who, last time, sent him out to the suburbs to put a bullet in a man’s brain, and before that to bear away a child bound, blindfolded, and gagged from that same pervert, is sending him out now to deliver flowers?

  When stunned Mikhail doesn’t reply at once Hawkeye says sharply, Remember her?—the blond woman you had to drive, she was too wasted to drive herself home.

  Her. Mikhail is feeling panic.

  Heart quickening like a key is being jammed into an ignition, the motor alert and aroused but going nowhere, not yet.

  High on coke he’s been losing track of time. Mixing up time(s). Weird anguish dreams of his mother lost long ago but then Mrs. J__ holding him in her arms, why were the two of them sobbing together, Christ knows.

  Carrying the poor kid tied in wire, blindfolded, gagged, in some kind of blanket—Christ!

  But that finger on the trigger, weird to think it is his finger.

  Of all of the universe—his!

  Day/night/day distinguishable if you listen to traffic out on West Warren beyond the solitary window over which he’d nailed a strip of tarpaulin. Mornings and late afternoons the rush of traffic is like a waterfall, nights it’s as subdued as a pounding of blood in the ears. So he’d realized what time is: a stream of water passing over you as you lie motionless on your back in a creek bed, sometimes a swift current, sometimes much slower, trickling over stones, passing over you on the way to somewhere else.

  This somewhere else you can’t see, have no idea of any more than you know where the stream began.

  Feeling a hand—light, but with a promise of firmness, force—on his shoulder, sliding to the nape of his neck. Son? Open your eyes.

  Eyes snap open. Father McKenzie? Here?

  You listening?—Hawkeye is sounding impatient.

  Yeh!—sure.

  Pressing the receiver against his ear as Hawkeye continues. Like bits of information might be spilling out between the receiver and his ear, he’s getting panicked he’ll lose.

  Hawkeye’s instructions: In the morning at nine-thirty drive the Firebird to the parking-garage entrance to the Renaissance Grand Hotel, Hawkeye will be waiting at the curb to give him a message, a note in a sealed envelope, he is not to open the envelope, he is to drive north on Woodward to Shamrock Florist at Six Mile Road, pick up a “floral display” (which Hawkeye has purchased) he will load in the trunk of the Firebird making sure it doesn’t tip over (there will be water in the vase), he will insert the envelope inside the cellophane wrapper, then drive to Far Hills on the Lodge Expressway, exit at Far Hills, and drive to 96 Cradle Rock Road where he will ring the doorbell and wait for the door to be answered.

  If a housekeeper answers the door tell her it’s a special delivery, “Mrs. Jarrett” has to sign for it.

  If the housekeeper tries to say that “Mrs. Jarrett” isn’t home just insist that you can’t leave the flowers without the signature.

  Mikhail listens, doubtful. This is all?

  Half expecting Hawkeye to tell him to expedite the woman. But no, evidently not: just deliver flowers.

  Mikhail wonders if Hawkeye knows he’d gone to the woman’s house on that day he’d sent him out to Rusch. He doubts that the woman would have confessed to Hawkeye what happened between them but if she had, Jesus!—Ponytail might’ve been killed …