situation coolly. I couldn’t do much of anything.
“Okay, now I’ll let you in on how I found you. Tough luck for you, it was me you were dealing with-I was a cop for six years.”
He let go of my hair to light a cigarette. He’s going to put it out in my ear, I thought. He blew a few smoke rings at me. He looked like he’d just won the lottery, his eyes in the air.
“First, I asked myself why you went out the back way, and why nobody heard the car start. It bugged me. I said to myself, that bitch couldn’t have come here on foot, she must have parked her car far away to keep it from being spotted. You dig how the Wonderboy’s mind works…?”
I nodded. I didn’t want to piss him off. I wanted him to forget about the cigarette. I bitterly regretted having done that to his foot. I regretted that all this had to happen to me on the night I was about to dig into a bowl of chili-a night when life seemed almost gentle. He was not the kind of person I could have asked to let me finish my novel.
“So I took a stroll out in back,” he went on. “Running it through my brain, I climbed up onto the railroad track. And what do you think I saw, buddy boy? THE SUPERMARKET PARKING LOT! Yeah, you got it. And I got to tell you something that was pretty clever. I walked down there tipping my hat to you. My foot hurt, but I had to give you the parking lot!”
He flicked his cigarette butt out the open window, then bent over me, sporting a horrible, sexual grimace. I didn’t deserve a death whose face was so hideous. I was a writer, interested only in Beauty. Henry shook his head slowly.
“I can’t tell you the feeling I had when I came across your little Kleenex tissues. They were all in a bright little pile, calling out to me. I picked them up, but I’d already figured it out. I said to myself, for a broad, he sure has some balls…”
I wished he would talk about something else, that he wouldn’t all of a sudden get obsessed with that part of my anatomy-you never know what goes through the mind of someone like him. I heard the other one pulling drawers out in the apartment. It had taken me a long time to rebuild the pieces of my life-but I’d been sent these two to remind me of the fragility of all things. Did I need to be reminded?
Henry mopped his brow, never taking his eyes off me. The grease came back almost immediately, shining like a quartz field in the moonlight.
“You know what I did next? Well, tough luck again, the supermarket manager is my wife’s cousin, and I never let him forget it-he can’t refuse me anything. So I got the names and addresses of everyone who’d paid by check that day, then went to see them all, one by one, asking if they hadn’t noticed anything fishy in the parking lot the day in question. You bastard, I almost lost you there…Just then we were even-steven… I thrived on it, you know… the chase…”
He turned around and took the wine off the table. What I wouldn’t have given for a big glass of water and a handful of sleeping pills. I wasn’t particularly interested in how he’d found me-I’m not a detective-story freak. But what else could I do, except listen? I breathed out of my mouth-my nose was plugged with blood. He drained the last drop of wine, then stood up. One of his hands plunged into my hair.
“Come over here,” he said. “I can’t see you where you are.”
He dragged me over to the table and sat me down on a chair under the lamp. Three drops of blood plopped into my bowl of chili. He walked around the table and sat down in front of me-he pulled out his gun. He aimed it at my head, leaning both hands on the table for stability. His fingers were knitted around the butt, except for his index lingers, which were wound around the trigger. They didn’t have much room to move-I hoped he wouldn’t sneeze. Each second that passed made me happy to be alive. He smiled.
“So, to finish the story,” he went on. “I came across this woman who had written a check for her ironing board, and she told me: ‘Oh yes, Sir, I did see this blonde woman, loitering in a yellow car. I even noticed that it was a yellow Mercedes, with a local license plate, and even that she was wearing sunglasses.’ Well, I can tell you… it was a Sunday afternoon, not too late, and I went and sat down at a sidewalk cafe, thinking of you- thanking you very much for the help. I’m the grateful type, see. Cars like yours… there aren’t a whole lot of them in these parts-in fact, there’s only one.”
I jolted ridiculously-the kind of jolt I’d tile under Taking a Kick at the Great Wall of China. I tried to play coy. I shook my head.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “I’ve had that car stolen from me twenty times…”
Henry got a big kick out of this. He grabbed me by the T-shirt and yanked me onto the table. I felt the tip of the silencer against my throat. I was putty in his hands. It might have made a difference if I had tried to defend myself, who knows-he was older than me and was starting to get pretty drunk. Maybe if I’d really gone nuts I could have turned things around-it’s not impossible. But I knew that I didn’t have it in me. I couldn’t have gotten my motor to turn over. Try as I might, I couldn’t get mad, I just couldn’t. I was too tired-more tired than I’d ever been. I would have been right at home on the side of the road somewhere, a small lukewarm sunset for my nightlight, a few blades of grass, and
The young one came back just as Henry was starting to say something. He threw me back in my chair so hard that I tipped over backward and sprawled out on the tile. I was like a bump on a log with my dead arm. I went down hard, like at the end of a fifteen-rounder. I decided to stay down for the count. Nowhere was it written that I had to stand up and go calmly toward the torture chamber. I didn’t budge, I didn’t even move my leg, which remained twisted in midair, my heel coming to perch on a leg of the overturned chair.
I asked myself if the light bulb that hung from the ceiling wasn’t a 200-watter-if that wasn’t why I found myself blinking, or was it perhaps the satchel that the young one was holding in his hands. He looked rather pale. He lifted it up slowly, though it wasn’t very heavy. It took quite a while for him to maneuver it onto the corner of the table. We wondered what the hell was wrong with him, Henry and I.
“I found this,” he murmured.
Suddenly I felt sorry for him-he seemed to have lost his faith in everything. He seemed sad. Henry didn’t try to console him: he grabbed the sack of bills and opened it up wide.
“Oh, Jesus…!” he said.
He shoved his hands into it. I heard the crinkling of bills, but what he took out were my falsies and my wig. He held them up to the light, like a river of diamonds.
“Oh my God in Heaven!” he wheezed.
I couldn’t tell you why I’d kept those old things, or why I’d decided to put them back in the satchel. I assume I’m not the only one who does things he doesn’t understand, for whom things seem to organize themselves to their own ends, dizzying him, pulling him by the hand and God knows what else. Had I been able to dig myself a hole in the kitchen linoleum, I certainly would have.
“It’s Josephine…” the unhappy fellow sighed.
“No shit, Sherlock!” said Henry.
All at once the kitchen changed color-it turned all white. My ears started ringing at full speed. Before I could get my leg out of the way, Henry took aim at my big toe and fired. The pain went up to my shoulder-I saw blood spurting from my shoe like a poison fountain. Oddly enough, it was then that the feeling came back into my arm. I grabbed the chair leg with both hands, pushing my forehead into the floor. Henry jumped on me and turned me back over. He was breathing heavily, sweat beading in his eyebrows and dripping onto my face. His eyes were two baby vultures with their beaks open wide. He grabbed my T-shirt.
“Come here, pretty boy, come here, baby… I’m not finished with you yet!”
He picked me up and threw me onto a chair. He was smiling and grimacing at the same time. He was really into it, running his tongue over his lips and talking to the young man:
“Okay, now we’re going to take him for a ride. Find me something to tie him up with…”
The young one shoved his hands in his pockets, looking like a beaten dog.
“Listen, Henry, I think this has gone far enough. Let’s just call the police…”
Henry made an obscene noise with his mouth. I was looking at my foot-the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
“You poor kid,” he said. “You’re really a little jerk. You don’t know me very well…”
“But Henry…”
“God damn it, you asked to come with me, now do what I say! I’m not about to give him over to the cops, so he’ll be out in three months. Jesus Christ, after what he did to me… Jesus Christ! You must be kidding!”
“Yeah, but Henry, we’re not authorized to…”
