She closed her eyes, kissed him back. Then said suddenly, "Let's eat."

The cutting board in the shape of a pig was her kitchen table. She cut open a round loaf of rye bread, spread mayonnaise on both sides. She noticed him watching her. "Watch closely. I told you I could cook."

"That's cooking?"

"I think I can really cook. I just haven't done it much. I have a bunch of cookbooks." She pointed to the bookcases again. "My mother gave them to me when I left home. I think she wanted to give me a diaphragm but lost her nerve at the last minute, so she gave me Fannie Farmer and Craig Claiborne instead. I can't use them much. Most recipes you need a stove for."

She poured cold Chinese food from the carton onto the sliced loaf and cut it in half. The cold pork poured out the sides when she sawed the dull knife through the bread, and she scooped up the food with her hands and spread it back between the domes of rye.

"Okay," he said dubiously. "Well. That's interesting."

But when she handed him the sandwich he ate enthusiastically. For a skinny boy he had quite an appetite. He looked so French. He really had to be Francois.

"So," he asked, "you going with anybody?"

"Not at the moment."

Or for any moments in the last four months three weeks.

"Half my friends are getting married," he said. He went through his beer-can ritual again, his long fingers beating out a hesitant rhythm on the top of the can, then opening it and pouring the beer while he held the glass at an angle.

"Marriage, hmm," she said noncomrmttally.

Where was all this headed?

But he was on to a new subject. "So what're your goals?"

She took a big bite of rye bread. "To eat dinner, I guess."

"I mean your life goals."

Rune blinked and looked away from him. She believed she'd never asked herself that question. "I don't know. Eat dinner." She laughed. "Eat breakfast. Dance. Work. Hang out… Have adventures!"

He leaned forward and kissed her on the mouth. "You taste like Hunan mayonnaise. Let's make love." His arms encircled her.

"No." Rune drained her second beer.

"You sure?"

No…

Yes…

She felt herself pulled forward, toward him, and she wasn't sure whether he was actually pulling her or she was moving by herself. Like a Ouija board pointer. He rolled on top of her. They kissed for five minutes. Growing aroused, that warm water sensation flowing up her calves into her thighs.

No… yes… no.

But she was saved from the debate by a voice shouting, "Home!" A woman's head appeared up the stairway. "Zip it up!"

A woman in her late twenties, wearing a black minidress and red stockings, climbed up the stairs. High heels. Her hair was cut short in a 1950s style and teased up. The hair was black and purple.

So the roomie's date hadn't turned out the way she'd hoped.

Rune muttered, "Sandra, Richard, Richard, Sandra."

Sandra examined him. She said nothing to him but to Rune: "You did okay." Then turned toward her half of the room, unzipping her dress as she walked, revealing a thick white strap of bra.

Rune whispered. "She's a jewelry designer. Or that's what she wants to do. Days, she's a paralegal. But her hobby is collecting men. She's slept with fifty-eight of them so far. She has the score written down. Of course she's only come twenty-two times so there's some debate on what she can count. There's no Robert's Rules of Order for this sort of thing."

"I suppose not."

Richard's eyes followed a vague reflection of Sandra in the window. She was on the far side of the cloud wall, stripping slowly. She knew she was being watched. The bra came off last.

Rune laughed and took his chin in her hand. Kissed him. "Darling, don't even think about it. That woman is a time bomb. You get into bed with her, it's like a group grope with a hundred people you don't know where they've been. Christ…" Rune's voice grew soft. "I worry about her. I don't like her but she's on some kind of weird suicide thing, you ask me. A guy looks at her, and bang, it's in the sack."

Richard said, "There're ways to be safe…"

Rune shook her head. "I knew a guy, a friend used to work at one of the restaurants I tended bar at. I watched his boyfriend get sick and die. Then I saw my friend get sick and die. I was at the hospital. I saw the tubes, the monitors, the needles. The color of his skin. Everything. I saw his eyes. I was there when he died."

An image of Robert Kelly's face came back to her, sitting in the chair in his apartment.

An image of her father's face…

Richard was silent and Rune knew she'd committed the New York City crime: being too emotional. She cleaned up the remnants of dinner, kissed Richard's ear, and said, "Let's watch a movie."

"A movie? Why?"

"Because I have to catch a killer."

She'd already seen Manhattan Is My Beat once but watching it this time was different.

Not because she was on a quote date unquote with Richard, not because they were lying side by side in the loft, with hazy stars visible overhead through the peaks of glass.

But because when she'd watched it before, it had just been a movie that a nice, quirky old man had rented. Now it was the rabbit hole-a doorway to an adventure.

The film was hokey, sure. Filled with those classic images from that whole cumbersome era she'd told Frankie Greek about-the baggy suits, stiff hair, the formalities of the dialogue. The young cop, twirling his billy club, would say, "Well, now, Mrs. McGrath, how are the Mister's corns this morning?"

But she paid little attention to the period costumes and the words. Mostly what she noticed, watching it this time, was the grit. The film left a sandy uneasiness in her heart. Shadows everywhere, the contrasty black and white, the unanticipated violence. The shootings-where the robber winged one of the hero's fellow cops and a bystander, for instance, or the scene where the cop died in front of the hotel-were very disturbing, even though there was no Sam Peckinpah slow-motion blood splattering, no special effects. It was like that great old Alan Ladd movie Shane-unlike modern thrillers, there'd been only a half dozen gunshots in the entire film but they were loud and shocking and you felt each one of them in your gut.

Manhattan Is My Beat also seemed pretty G-rated. But Rune felt the studio pulling a fast one in its portrayal of the cop's virginal girlfriend, played by-what a name- Ruby Dahl. It was so clear to Rune that the poor thing was lusting. You'd never know it from her lines ("Oh, I can't explain my feelings, Roy. I just worry about you so. There's so much… evil out there.") But if her dresses and sweaters were high-necked, Ruby's bosom was sharp and beneath the tame dialogue you knew she had the hots for Roy. She was the character that got the long camera shot when the judge announced that her fiance was going to prison. She was the one Rune cried for.

At two a.m. Sandra threw a shoe at them and Rune shut off the VCR and the TV.

"Not bad once," Richard said. "Why'd we have to sit through it twice?" He himself had given up his own quest for the evening and had kept his hands off her for the past several hours.

"Because I didn't take notes the first time." She rewound the tape, the bootleg copy she'd made for Robert Kelly. She looked at the scrawl of notes she'd written on the back of a flier for a health club.

Richard stretched and went into some weird yoga position, like a push-up with his pelvis pressed into the floor, his head back at a crazy angle, staring at the stars above them. "Okay, I slept through most of it the second time, I have to be honest. Were you joking about the killer?"

"The movie is why that customer I told you about is dead."