closure.
They drank in silence, matching one another sip for sip. When, finally, he had drained his glass, she excused herself 'Don't get up,' she said.
'I'll find it on my own.'
As she passed him she studied his eyes. They were beginning to glaze.
Unaware of just how tired he was, he broke his yawn with another grin.
She paused behind him, turned, placed her hands on his shoulders, then bent her head down to his ear:
'I think it's getting time to take off those pants,' she whispered. Then she patted his head and retired to the bathroom.
She spent three minutes staring into her dream-sister's eyes in the cabinet mirror, then flushed the toilet and wandered back to the living room. She found him dozing, pants down, caught around his ankles. She knelt, placed a hand beneath his chin, carefully raised his head.
'Roger?'
He opened his eyes. 'Sorry.' He stared at her. 'Maybe too much to drink.' He gestured toward his glass on the cocktail table. 'What did you-?'
She gazed at him. Her voice turned stern. 'What did I what?'
'I dunno… ' He slurred his words.
'You lied to me at the bar.'
'Hub?' He blinked.
'That little story about sexual harassment at the office that never happened. Did it?'
He blinked again. 'Whassa problem? I don get-' 'Get what, Roger?' she asked kindly.
He glanced at his glass again. 'You put something-?'
'In your drink? Yes, as a matter of fact, I did.' She nodded sweetly, then watched as the realization struck and the terror filled his eyes.
'Why? What're-?'
'Don't panic. Just go to sleep.' She cooed at him like a pigeon from the park: 'Sleep, sleep, sleep. Let yourself go. It'll make it so much easier… '
He tried to strike out at her. She pulled back, but even if he had connected, his fist was too feeble to have hurt. After that he drooped; the effort had wasted the last of his energy. She watched as he tried to fight off his exhaustion the way they always did, shaking his head, fluttering his eyes. She peered at him closely. He was terrified. He knew he was defenseless. He was probably wondering whether she had poisoned him, whether he would ever wake up.
'Please… ' he begged.
She waited until he closed his eyes and his heavy rhythmic breathing told her he was out. 'Good night, sweet prince,' she whispered as she rose, then hurried to the kitchen where she had left her purse.
The first thing, always, was to put on a fresh pair of surgical gloves, thoroughly wash the highball glasses, then clean every spot she had touched with her fingertips. There weren't many such places: a few in the kitchen- the refrigerator and freezer doors-the bathroom doorknob, the edge of the medicine cabinet. When she finished with her chores she checked again on Roger. He was snoring deeply, lost in sleep. She nodded and began her search.
She removed his wallet from his fallen pants and emptied out all his pockets. She took the cash (more than four hundred dollars.
Surprise!), but left the credit cards and IDs arranged neatly on the cocktail table. The point, as Diana had always taught, was to rob the mark, not enrage him. She also removed his watch. It wasn't anything special, but it was part of the game that he be deprived of his way of marking time. Then, when she had finished searching his person, she began a methodical search of the apartment.
It took her five minutes to discover that everything of interest was concentrated in the bedroom. The front closets and drawers were virtually empty. The bedroom, however, offered all sorts of treasures: a pair of gold Cartier cuff links, a Krugerrand, a gold pocket watch (probably his grandfather's) and, in the bottom of a drawer filled with hand-ironed shirts, a worn air-mail envelope containing various denominations of foreign currency and five one-hundred-dollar bills.
All of this she took. She discovered and rapidly rearranged a good deal more. There was a trove of personal letters which she laid out, like cards dealt for solitaire, neatly on the living-room floor. And a collection of photographs which she separated and then propped up in various places around the apartment-on top of the bureau, on the bedside tables and along the windowsills.
She uncovered a small cache of ho-hum sex toys-a pack of condoms, a vibrator with attachments and a pair of domino masks. She partially superimposed the masks in the middle of the bed, to suggest classic symbols of comedy and tragedy, then unraveled the condoms and arranged them symmetrically so that they radiated from the masks like rays of the sun. Finally, she completed the work by circling the masks and condoms with the vibrator cord. Then she stepped back and squinted at her design.
It was fine as far as it went, she thought, but not, she decided, sufficiently bizarre. Feeling it could use a little more embellishment, she looked around the room and then, recalling a tangle of jockstraps she'd seen in one of the drawers, thought of a way to have some fun. She withdrew a pair of surgical scissors from her purse, retrieved the jocks, snipped off the fronts of the pouches, then added them to the bed display.
Pausing, she thought of inflicting similar damage on all his trousers and undershorts. But that, she decided, would take too much time and demonstrate too much hostility. She felt that in Roger's case she would make a deeper impression if she showed a certain elegant restraint.
But there was one final assault upon his dignity that she would not resist. The 'inscribing,' Diana called it. All of Diana's girls were instructed to do it and were tutored in its importance. Yet Gelsey's particular manner of inscription was unique. She employed it always.
It sent a message to the mark, and, at the same time, doubled as her signature.
She hurried back to the living room. Roger was still snoring. She knew from her experience with various dosages that he would remain unconscious for at least ten hours. Now it was necessary to place him on his back. She lifted his legs, still bound by his dropped pants, pulled them around ninety degrees, then laid him out full-length on the couch.
Then she bent down, unbuttoned his shirt and pulled it open so that his upper chest was exposed.
Indelible black marker in hand, she straddled him like an equestrienne and began to write in script upon his flesh. When she was finished she smiled at her handiwork. To an ordinary viewer it would appear an incoherent scrawl. But she could read it easily. And so would Roger, when, awakening, he stumbled into his bathroom and examined his groggy features in the mirror. Then the message she had written on his chest would leap out at him with diabolic force. And the fact that she had inscribed it as one long word in mirror-reverse would haunt him far longer than her robbery:
Down in the apartment-house lobby, she paused before the mirror between the elevators. Pretending to smooth her hair, she willed herself egress from the glass. Her dream sister stared back at her, and then, in an instant, disappeared. Now she was once again herself.
Smiling sweetly at the doorman, she strode out into the open air. It was two A.m. The rain had stopped. The sidewalk was still wet. The air smelled faintly of iron.
She walked the four blocks to her car, got in, then drove leisurely along the empty avenue. At an intersection, when she stopped for a red light, a homeless man approached with a squeegee. She nodded encouragement when he began to wash her windshield; before the light changed, she handed him a twenty-dollar bill.
As she entered the tunnel she did not think about what she had done.
Rather, she reveled in feelings of purification and release. The events of the evening seemed like a dream, not surprising since it was her dream-sister who had engaged in them. Still, the gratification engendered by the acts of violation now belonged to her.
Forty minutes later, approaching Richmond Park, she pulled off her blond wig and glanced at herself in her rearview mirror. This time it was her true image that stared back.
A Small House in Queens Not much of a place, Janek thought as he pulled in front of the house and parked. It was just an ordinary little house on a modest residential street that ran parallel to the Van Wyck Expressway, one of a thousand 'starter houses' he'd passed countless times on his way out to Kennedy Airport from
