Who are you looking for?

The voice did not emerge from the girl. It seemed to be coming to me both from some distant, shadowy place and also from close by, whispering coldly in my ear.

They are back. I want them to go. I want them to let me be.

Answer me.

Not you. I loved you, and I will always love you, but you are gone.

No. We are here. Wherever you are, so will we be too.

Please, I need to put you to rest at last. Everything is coming to pieces. You are tearing me apart.

She will not stay. She will leave you.

I love her. I love her as I once loved you.

No! Don’t say that. Soon she will be gone, and when she leaves we will still be here. We will stay with you, and we will lie by you in the darkness.

A crack appeared in the wall to my right, and a fissure opened in the floor. The window shattered and fragments of glass exploded inward, each shard reflecting trees and stars and moonlight, as though the whole world were disintegrating around me.

I heard my daughter upstairs, and I ran, taking the stairs two at a time. I opened the bedroom door and Rachel was standing by the crib, Sam in her arms.

“Where were you?” I asked. “I woke up, and you weren’t there.”

She looked at me. She was tired, and there were stains on her nightshirt.

“I had to change her. I took her into the bathroom so she wouldn’t wake you.”

Rachel laid Sam in her cot. Once she was happy that our daughter was comfortable and settled, she prepared to return to bed. I stood over Sam, then leaned down and kissed her lightly on the forehead.

A small drop of blood fell upon her face. I dabbed it away with my thumb, then walked to the mirror in the corner. There was a small cut below my left eye. When I touched it, it stung me sharply. I stretched the abrasion with my fingers, and explored it until I had removed the tiny fragment of glass from within. A single tear of blood wept down my cheek.

“Are you okay?” asked Rachel.

“I cut myself.”

“Is it bad?”

I wiped my arm across my face, smearing the blood.

“No,” I lied. “No, it’s not bad at all.”

I left for New York early the next morning. Rachel was sitting at the kitchen table, in the seat where the night before a young girl had sat, blood slowly pooling on the plate before her. Sam had been awake for two hours, and was now crying furiously. Usually, once she was awake and fed, she was content simply to watch the world go by. Walter was a source of particular fascination for her, his presence causing Sam’s face to light up whenever he appeared. In his turn, the dog always remained close to the child. I knew that dogs sometimes became disconcerted by the arrival of a new child in a house, confused by how this might affect the pecking order. Some became actively hostile as a result, but not Walter. Although he was a young dog, he seemed to recognize some duty of protection toward the little being that had entered his territory. Even the day before, during the fuss following the christening, it had taken him time to separate himself from Sam. It was only when he was assured of the presence of Rachel’s mother close by that he appeared to relax and attached himself instead to Angel and Louis.

Rachel’s mother was not yet awake. While Frank had returned to work that morning, managing to avoid me entirely before leaving, Joan had offered to stay with Rachel while I was gone. Rachel had accepted the offer without question, and I was grateful to her for that. The house was well protected: prompted by events in the recent past, we had installed a system of motion sensors that alerted us to the presence of anything larger than a fox on our property, and cameras kept vigil both on the main gate and the yard, and on the marshland behind, feeding images to twin monitors in my office. The investment was considerable, but it was worth it for peace of mind.

I kissed Rachel good-bye.

“It’s just for a couple of days,” I said.

“I know. I understand.”

“I’ll call you.”

“Okay.”

She was holding Sam against her shoulder, trying to comfort her, but she would not be comforted. I kissed Sam too, and I felt Rachel’s warmth, her breast pressed against my arm. I recalled that we had not made love since Sam was born, and the distance between us seemed even greater as a result.

Then I left them and drove away in silence.

The pimp named G-Mack sat in the darkened apartment on Coney Island Avenue that he shared with some of his women. He had a place in the Bronx, closer to the Point, but he had been using it less and less frequently of late, ever since the men came looking for his two whores. The arrival of the old black woman had spooked him even more, and so he had retreated to his private crib, venturing out to the Point only at night and keeping a distance from the main streets whenever possible.

G-Mack wasn’t too sure about the wisdom of living on Coney Island Avenue. It was once a dangerous stretch of road, even back in the nineteenth century, when gang members preyed on the tourists returning from the beaches. In the 1980s, hookers and pushers colonized the area around Foster Avenue, their presence made clearer by the bright lights of the nearby gas station. Now there were still whores and dealers, but they were a little less obvious, and they fought for sidewalk space alongside Jews and Pakistanis and Russians and people from countries of which G-Mack had never even heard. The Pakistanis had been having a hard time of it in the aftermath of 9/11, and G-Mack had heard that a lot of them were arrested by the Feds, while others had left for Canada or gone back home entirely. Some of them had even changed their names, so it sometimes seemed like there had been a sudden influx of Pakistanis named Eddie and Steve into G-Mack’s world, like the plumber he’d been forced to call a week or two back after one of the bitches managed to clog up the bowl by flushing something down there about which G-Mack didn’t even want to know. The plumber used to be called Amir. That was what it said on his old card, the one G-Mack had pinned to the refrigerator door with a Sinbad magnet, but on his new card he was now Frank. Frank Shah, like that was going to fool anyone. Even the three numerals, the 786 that Amir once told him stood for “In the name of Allah,” were now gone from beside his address. G-Mack didn’t much care either way. Amir was a good plumber, as far as he could tell, and he wasn’t about to hold a grudge against a man who could do his job, especially since he might need his services again sometime. But G-Mack didn’t like the smell of the Pakistani stores, or the food that they sold in their restaurants, or the way that they dressed, either too neat or too casual. He distrusted their ambition, and their manic insistence that their kids better themselves. G-Mack suspected that good old Frank-Who-Was-Really-Amir bored the ass off his kids with his sermons on the American dream, maybe pointing to black people like G-Mack as a negative example, even if G-Mack was a better businessman than Amir would ever be and even if G-Mack’s people weren’t the ones who steered two jets into New York’s tallest buildings. G-Mack had no personal beef with the Pakistanis who lived around him, food and clothing aside, but shit like 9/11 was everybody’s business, and Frankie-Amir and his people needed to make it clear just whose side they were on.

G-Mack’s place was on the top floor of a three-story brownstone with brightly painted cornices, between Avenues R and S, close to the Thayba Islamic Center. The Thayba was separated from the Keshet Jewish day-care center by a kids’ play group, which some people might have called progress but which bothered the hell out of G-Mack, these two opposing sides being so close to each other, although maybe not as much as the fucking Hasidim farther down the avenue in their threadbare black coats, their kids all pale with their fag curls. It didn’t surprise G-Mack that they always hung around in groups, because there wasn’t one of them strange Jews could handle himself if it came to a fight.