A woman standing in the hallway waiting for the ladies room saw me emerge from the closet and screamed.

“Funny,” I said with a shrug. “I thought it was the men’s room.” And then, with all the dignity I could muster, I walked past her back into the bar.

So, for safety’s sake, we didn’t meet in bars or restaurants anymore. When she called for me I came running to her apartment, straight as if on a string, and the night I was bang banging on my walls in frustration was no different from any other night. She called, I ran, and we rolled around her bed like cats, sometimes playful, sometimes lupine, always carnal, and it was worth everything.

And when it was over it was always the same.

“You have to go,” she said.

“Why?” It came out in a half-moan, dragged from the recesses of my sleep, a sleep that was eluding me in my own apartment but that attacked me as I lay in the warm muskiness of her bed.

“Because you do,” she said.

“Let me stay. Let me sleep just a little bit more.”

She pushed me hard, rolling me over toward the end of the bed, and I jerked awake in a panic of falling. “What?”

“You have to go,” she said,

“Just one night,” I begged. “Let me spend just one night over.”

“Absolutely not.” She rose from the bed and put on a heavy terry cloth robe. She took a cigarette from the pack on her bedside table and lit it, inhaling deeply, and then leaned against a wall with her arms crossed. Smoke leaked out of her mouth, covering her face like a veil. “Your clothes are scattered here or there. Pick them up on your way out.”

Generally, I had always believed there was no greater luxury after sex than to be alone. It is something about men, about the way our bodies work, about the physiological effects of orgasms in our brains. The neurotransmitters that are released by sex trigger those neurons that say turn over, pretend to sleep, maybe she’ll just go away. Give us a beer afterwards and a remote control and an empty bedroom and we’re halfway to heaven. Which is why men have invented the great after-sex lies: “I have to be at work early,” or, “I’m allergic to your cat,” or “I have to pick up my laundry before the dry cleaner closes.” The problem had always been getting away. Now I was desperately disappointed that she wouldn’t let me stay.

The reason for the desperation was clear to me that night, and it was more than just that nugget of love in my chest. Nothing existed in my life that I could yet be proud of and nothing ever had. Who I was just then, Prescott’s cabana boy, was no one I ever thought I’d ever want to be. But in her touch, her warmth, in her wet embrace, with Veronica I could lose myself. Her apartment had become a magic wonderland of sensuality and vice, a place separate from the rest of the world, which had suddenly turned even uglier for me. With her I was not Victor Carl, the shady lawyer who had been passed over by the profession, first duped and then bought by those he would have had as peers, instead I was part of something wild and lost and satisfyingly perverse. With her I metamorphosed into a piece of a puzzle that promised so much and that only the two of us could possibly solve. With her I… let’s just say with her I was someone else and someone else was very much what I wanted then to be. To force me to leave was to force me to become myself again. She didn’t know how cruel she was being.

“Don’t do this to me,” I pleaded.

“I’m doing.”

“You can’t just use me and then toss me out. I’m not a tampon.”

“No, you’re not as useful.”

“Why do you make me leave each night?”

She sucked smoke. “I like to wake up alone.”

“Well, tonight I’m staying.” I lay back in the bed, my arms crossed beneath my head.

“Then tonight’s your last night.”

I sat up. “You’re not serious.”

“I’m as serious as celibacy.”

“I bet Jimmy stays over.”

“Never,” she said.

“Really? What’s he like in bed?”

“The thing about men,” she said, holding the cigarette in her lips while she stooped to pick up my T-shirt and then tossed it into my face, “is that they see sex as a competitive sport. They want scores from the judges, a set for technical merit and a set for artistic impression.”

“I’m just curious,” I said, starting to dress.

“Well, how do you think he is?”

“Passionate. He’s a very passionate man.”

“He is.”

“Yes?”

“So are you, Victor.” With one of her bare feet she nudged a sneaker toward me. “Now put on your shoes and go.”

“When will I see you again?”

“When I call,” she said.

“I’ll be waiting.”

“Surprise me sometime, Victor,” she said dryly, holding the cigarette in front of her face. “Let the phone ring more than once before you answer it.”

Ever since the incident with the hatchback I had developed a small ritual upon leaving Veronica’s apartment. There were no windows in the hallway, but the elevator had a scuffed Plexiglas side from which the residents could see out as they descended to the cobblestone plaza. When the elevator opened for me I slipped in and searched through the Plexiglas to see if anyone was waiting for me outside. My plan, if I saw anything suspicious, was to get off at a lower floor and cower, but that night, as best as I could see in the uneven light, the plaza was deserted. When the elevator reached the ground floor I looked carefully out the front glass door before I opened it. Again there was nothing.

Slowly I slid out the door and walked along the shadowy edge of the plaza to Church Street, the little cobble-stoned street on which Veronica’s building sat. Like a little boy I looked both ways. Nothing, no car idling malevolently, no shadowy pedestrians lurking, no stray raccoons. Relieved, I walked down Church Street to 3rd, where my car was parked. I was leaning over, my key in the driver’s door, when I felt the hand clamp onto my shoulder.

I jumped, or I tried to jump, but the hand kept me pressed down on the ground like the gravity of some giant planet. I turned to see who was there. It was a tall bruiser, an older man with sallow yellow skin, a tan fedora, a loud plaid jacket, yellow pants, white shoes, a nose that had been run over by a forklift. He looked like an aging heavyweight retired to Miami Beach.

“You’re Victor Carl,” the man said in a ragged, nasal voice carved by one too many shots to the schnozzola.

“No,” I said. “You got the wrong fellow.”

Without taking his hand off my shoulder, the man reached into his plaid jacket and pulled out a piece of newspaper that he showed to me. It was a picture of Jimmy Moore and William Prescott talking to the press outside the courthouse, and there, behind Moore’s shoulder, inside an ominous circle drawn with black, was me. Not a bad likeness, I thought as I stared at it. The paper made me look heavier and more handsome.

“No, that’s some other guy.”

“It sort of looks like youse.”

“I got that kind of face,” I said, and it would have been a pretty brave line if my voice hadn’t cracked in the middle of it.

“Maybe it’s not youse after all,” said the bruiser. “Maybe not, you know, because the guy here in the picture, this guy looks like a handsome guy and you, you look like a punk. But there’s a man wants to see youse. If it turns out youse ain’t you then I’m sure he won’t want to see youse no more.”

“Huh?”

“Whatever. He’s waiting up the block, here.”

He squeezed the hand on my shoulder, yanking me away from my car and toward Arch Street.

“What about my keys? I left them in the car door.”

“From what I hear,” said the bruiser without slowing down, “this here’s become a very safe neighborhood.”

That was the sum of our conversation as he led me to Arch Street. The front, squared-off nose of some big white American car parked on Arch jutted out from behind a brick wall. I didn’t know whose car it was, I couldn’t tell if it was a limousine from what I could see. I expected it was Norvel Goodwin inside, or maybe Jimmy, but no matter who it was there waiting for me I knew it wasn’t a good thing to be snagged by a bruiser outside Veronica’s apartment after sticking my thing in her thang. I thought about running, but the hand was tight on my collarbone, squeezing so hard my shoulder rose as we walked. When we were closer to the car more of it came into view. It wasn’t a limousine, it was a Cadillac, long, shiny, dangerous with chrome. Its windows were up and tinted black so that it was impossible to see inside.