'I don't know if I can handle much more.' She nodded.
'I know what you mean. I feel awful about Adam too.'
'Maybe we shouldn't have turned him in, Kim. Oh, I know it might help us marginally. But to turn him over, set him up for slaughter. I put down my chopsticks, shook my head.
'Listen, Geof'-her voice was tender-'you're a sensitive guy and I love you for that. But we're both going to have to toughen up.' She smiled.
'Know what your problem is? I think you give up hatred too easily.' She patted my hand.
'Anyway, there's nothing we can do for Adam now. We can only go forward and hope for the best-do what we have to do.'
After dinner we wandered down to Forty-second Street, merging with the crowds. The neon flashed, the porn stores were open and the hustlers worked the mob. Kim grasped my arm. I looked at her. We listened to their propositions, laughed them away. Then at the apex of Times Square she broke free to face the empty intersection alone. She stood there on the sidewalk, staring at the signs. As she spoke she seemed to glow.
'I love this cesspool. Makes me feel good. Triumphant almost. As if places like this, which people say are so degrading, are the only places I feel I'm really alive. Know what I mean, Geoffrey? It's so damn human down here, like there's nothing phony, no false front. Here you can feel what it means to be a human being. It's the opposite, isn't it, of sitting in a church?'
The moment she said that I felt that she was right. The city swirled with criminality, and we were part of it, part of the great greedy grasping mainstream, competitors in the endless struggle for gain.
She was right about another thing too, the feeling she described of triumph. You could be predatory and sexual and still hold your head high because you weren't pretending nly human, as she said, to be anything else. You were o stripped of all hyp?crisy. There was something wonderful about that, liberating, clean. I began to glow myself.
And so, as I strode with her amid that overheated crowd, my cameras bobbing against my chest, I no longer felt like an observer, a photographer, but like a player in the game.
I woke up in a sweat, disoriented, confused. But when I opened my eyes the room was dark. I reached for Kim. She wasn't there. I called out her name. No answer. I sat up.
She wasn't in the bathroom either. Has she left me? Deserted me aizain? Maybe I was still asleep, trapped in a nightmare. Bl;t of course I wasn't. And her suitcase was still in the room. But not the
set of clothes she'd worn the day before. I looked at my watch. It was 5:35 A.M.
Maybe she's gone down to the lobby, I thought, to buy a newspaper, or get some aspirin, or munch on something in the coffee shop. I picked up the phone, dialed the desk, asked the clerk to page the lobby and restaurant for Mrs. Lynch. He said the restaurant was closed and there wasn't anyone in the lobby, and he'd been on since five and the only person he'd seen go out was a man in logging clothes.
He promised he'd page her anyway and call me back if he saw a woman around. I waited ten minutes by the phone before I realized it wasn't going to ring.
Maybe, I thought, she went out for a walk. She was overexcited and couldn't sleep. I dressed quickly, went downstairs, checked in with the clerk. He told me where to find the all-night eating places in the neighborhood. I thanked him and stepped into the street. it must have There was a slick on Eighth Avenuerained, though I'd had no sense of that inside the hotel. The air was sticky. The autumnal flavor of the day before was gone. The yellow glow of the streetiamps was reflected in the pavement. I could hear the wail of distant sirens downtown.
No whores around. They'd long since gone home, or were out on dates, or wherever they went. The transvestites and pimps and dope dealers were all gone too. Only a few homeless people remained, a man curled in a doorway down the block, another sprawled across a grating in front of a discount movie house across the street.
I made the round of coffee shops, but didn't see her. And then I wandered aimlessly, After a while I found myself beside the river. No trucks around, everything closed, and the damp air stagnant without a trace of Wind. The sirens still shrieked far away. I watched the oily water lapping around the rotting piers. She went somewhere, 'somewhere specific. She had'a destination. The only thing I could think to do was go back to our room and wait.
The sun was well up by the time I returned. There were people on the streets and the traffic had begun to build. A big air-conditioned bus was double-parked in front of the hotel. The lobby was choked with baggage. The desk clerk didn't notice me. A group was in the process of checking out.
As I rode up in the elevator I felt depressed. I told myself she shouldn't have deserted me this way. She should have left me a note, an explanation. But that wasn't her style. I'd learned that before. She came and went as she pleased.
I knew she was back the moment I opened the door. Her clothes were piled in the center of the room. There was an odor in the room too that didn't belong@omething harsh and resinous.
I could hear water running. She was in the bathroom. I moved to the doorway and looked in. She was taking a shower, singing to herself, an old Cole Porter tune:
'It's the wrong game with the wrong chips, Though your lips are tempting, they're the wrong lips,'
I leaned against the doorframe, waiting for her to finish, watching her perfect body in silhouette against the plastic curtain.
'They're not her lips but they're such tempting lips.
She pulled the curtain, saw me, and then, for the briefest instant, she looked scared. A moment later she flung herself upon me, naked and wet.
She hugged me while planting kisses on my face.
'Thank God, you're back, Geoffrey! It was terrible.'
'What happened?'
'I had to take a shower to wash away the smell. My clothes stink of it too. I'm going to throw them out.'
'Stink of what?' She was trembling.
'Varnish remover.'
I stood back from her. That accounted for the resinous odor in the other room.
'Why varnish remover? I don't understand.'
She shook her head.
'That's what I used. Hold me, Geoffrey. Please.' Her eyes were wild.
She had the same on-the-edge took the night she'd come to me after running away from Darling's men. I held her.
'Used for what?'
'to set the fire.'
'Jesus, Kim! What are you talking about?'
'The message-remember?' I shook my head.
'Come on, Geoffrey. Of course you do. Frank told us to send them a message, demonstrate that we were serious. Well, that's what I did. It was a big message too. It said, Don't mess with us, do what we say.'
I could feel her body shaking in my arms.
'My God, what did you do?'
She looked up at me.
'I was so furious about what they did to Adam, I guess I got carried away.' She stood back. Droplets clung to her body. Her hair looked great, wet and tangled. She looked so good I wanted to screw her then and there.
She pushed her mouth against my shirt, spoke against my chest.
'Early this morning I torched Mrs. Z's building. Firebombed it. When I left, it was in flames. The whole rotten place was burning up.' She looked up at my face again.
'God, how I wish you'd been there, Geoffrey! to see the flames! to see them dance!'
4
