Thin Air

began to circle the room, running her hands around the black plywood panels that had been nailed in place over the windows. One of the panels was hinged on one side and padlocked on the other. Another had an air conditioner cut into it. All of them were impenetrable. She opened her mouth and worked her jaw a little. Her mouth, which had felt so wet when she was gagged, now felt dry and stiff. She said 'Hello' out loud a couple of times to see if she could speak. The noise was rusty and small in the sealed room. She felt the claustrophobic panic again. She was untied, but she was not free. To the left of the armoire was a bathroom, the door ajar, the light on dimly. The walls were pink plastic tile. There was a pink chenille cover on the toilet seat, and the one-piece fiberglass shower stall had a pink tinted glass door on it. There were flowers in a vase, and a thick pink rug on the floor. There was no window. Behind her she heard the camera sound.

'You should shower, querida. There is French milled soap, and lilac shampoo, and there are fresh clothes for you in the armoire… Do not be shy… I will have everything on tape… we will watch it all together when we are old.'

She stared at him, unmoving. She was wearing the sweat-soaked blouse and jeans that she'd been wearing when he took her.

'Take off your clothes, chiquita, you need to shower and change.'

She continued to stare at him. She had been naked with him before. They had made love often. But now it was as if a stranger had ordered her to disrobe in public. She could think of no words.

'Do it,' he said and his voice was full of hate, 'or I will have it done.'

She stared at him still, and the camera continued to whir. She felt the bottomlessness of herself, the sense of weakness that raced along her arms and clenched in her stomach. It was an old feeling. She'd had it many times. She didn't want to. She couldn't bear to. She was being forced to. There was no way not to. The two of them stood poised like that, in a kind of furious immobility for an infinite time in which all there was was the sound of the camera tape rolling, and of her breath and his, both slightly raspy. Helpless, she thought. I'm helpless again. Then, slowly, she began to unbutton her blouse.

Chapter 4

I sat in a coffee shop on Columbus Avenue with Frank Belson and drank a cup of decaffeinated coffee on an ugly spring day with the sky a hard gray and a spit of rain mixed with snow flakes in the air. He hadn't found his wife yet.

'You meet her before you got divorced from Kitty?' I said, mostly to be saying something.

'No.'

'So she wasn't the reason for the divorce,' I said.

'The divorce was just making it official,' he said. 'The marriage had been fucked for a long time.'

I was on one of my periodic attempts to give up coffee. The previous failures were discouraging, but not final. I stirred more sugar into my decaf to disguise it.

'Kitty was bad,' Belson said, looking at the faintly iridescent surface of his real coffee. 'Hysterical, nervous- thought fucking was only a way to get children. Didn't want children, but didn't want anyone to get ahead of her by having them first. You know?'

'I was never one of Kitty's rooters,' I said.

'Money,' he said. 'I never saw anyone worry about money like her. How to get it, how to save it, why we shouldn't spend it, why I should earn more. How we were going to hold up our head in the neighborhood when Trudy Fitzgerald's husband made twice what I did being an engineer at Sylvania. If I would of paid her to fuck she'd have done it every night.'

'What could be more natural,' I said.

''Course, after the first couple months I would probably have paid her not to. But we had the kid and then we had a couple more. Kitty always knew the correct number of children to have. She had all the damn rules down, you know? Whether you needed a house on the water, whether the girls should go to parochial school, whether you should add salt to the water before you boiled it, what kind of underwear a decent woman wore.'

He stopped talking for a while. He still held the coffee, but he didn't drink it. I waited. A couple of cops came in and sat at the counter. Belson nodded at them without speaking. Both cops ordered coffee, one had a piece of pineapple pie with it.

'But you didn't get a divorce,' I said.

'We were Catholics since twenty fucking thousand years ago. And we had the kids, and, shit, the time went by and we'd been married twenty-three years and barely spoke. I worked a lot of overtime.'

'And then you met Lisa,' I said.

'Yeah. Cambridge had picked up a guy named Wozak on an assault warrant, thought he might be a guy we were looking for; clipped an informant we use, junkie named Eddie Navarrone. Eddie's no loss, but it's a departmental policy to discourage murder when we can, so I went over and talked with Wozak. Might be our guy, I'm not sure. Cambridge has got him cold, so he's not going anywhere. At least until some judge walks him because he was denied health insurance.'

'Or they got no place to put him,' I said.

Belson shrugged, his back still to me, staring out at the grim spring day.

'Oughta put him in the ground,' Belson said.

I ordered another decaf. Belson's coffee must have turned cold in his cup while we talked. He still held it, and he didn't drink it. He glanced out at the early spring snow spatter.

'You seen any robins yet?' Belson said.

'No.'

'Me either.'