“And,” Kathy said, “you’re a six.”

She had not forgotten his slip. Of course not. He could tell her a million things, and all would be forgotten ten minutes later, except the one real slip. Well, such was the way of the world. He had become used to it in his time; that was part of being his age and not hers.

“What does Domenico mean to you?” Jason said, changing the subject. Crudely, he realized, but he went ahead. “What do you get from him that you don’t get from human beings?”

She frowned, looked thoughtful. “He’s always busy. He always has some project going. Like following a bug. He’s very good with flies; he’s learned how to eat them without their flying away.” She smiled engagingly. “And I don’t have to ask myself about him, Should I turn him in to Mr. McNulty? Mr. McNulty is my pol contact. I give him the analog receivers for the microtransmitters, the dots I showed you—”

“And he pays you.”

She nodded.

“And yet you live like this.”

“I—” she struggled to answer—“I don’t get many customers.”

“Nonsense. You’re good; I watched you work. You’re experienced.”

“A talent.”

“But a trained talent.”

“Okay; it all goes into the apartment uptown. My Major Apartment.” She gritted her teeth, not enjoying being badgered.

“No.” He didn’t believe it.

Kathy said, after a pause, “My husband’s alive. He’s in a forced-labor camp in Alaska. I’m trying to buy his way out by giving information to Mr. McNulty. In another year”—she shrugged, her expression moody now, introverted—“he says Jack can come out. And come back here.”

So you send other people into the camps, he thought, to get your husband out. It sounds like a typical police deal. It’s probably the truth.

“It’s a terrific deal for the police,” he said. “They lose one man and get—how many would you say you’ve bugged for them? Scores? Hundreds?”

Pondering, she said at last, “Maybe a hundred and fifty.”

“It’s evil,” he said.

“Is it?” She glanced at him nervously, clutching Domenico to her flat chest. Then, by degrees, she became angry; it showed on her face and in the way she crushed the cat against her rib cage. “The hell it is,” she said fiercely, shaking her head no. “I love Jack and he loves me. He writes to me all the time.”

Cruelly, he said, “Forged. By some pol employee.”

Tears spilled from her eyes in an amazing quantity; they dimmed her gaze. “You think so? Sometimes I think they are, too. Do you want to look at them? Could you tell?”

“They’re probably not forged. It’s cheaper and simpler to keep him alive and let him write his own letters.” He hoped that would make her feel better, and evidently it did; the tears stopped coming.

“I hadn’t thought of that,” she said, nodding, but still not smiling; she gazed off into the distance, reflexively still rocking the small black and white cat.

“If your husband’s alive,” he said, cautiously this time, “do you believe it to be all right for you to go to bed with other men, such as me?”

“Oh, sure. Jack never objected to that. Even before they got him. And I’m sure he doesn’t object now. As a matter of fact, he wrote me about that. Let’s see; it was maybe six months ago. I think I could find the letter; I have them all on microfilm. Over in the shop.”

“Why?”

Kathy said, “I sometimes lens-screen them for customers. So that later on they’ll understand why I do what I did.”

At this point he frankly did not know what emotion he felt toward her, nor what he ought to feel. She had become, by degrees, over the years, involved in a situation from which she could not now extricate herself. And he saw no way out for her now; it had gone on too long. The formula had become fixed. The seeds of evil had been allowed to grow.

“There’s no turning back for you,” he said, knowing it, knowing that she knew it. “Listen,” he said to her in a gentle voice. He put his hand on her shoulder, but as before she at once shrank away. “Tell them you want him out right now, and you’re not turning in any more people.”

“Would they release him, then, if I said that?”

“Try it.” Certainly it wouldn’t do any harm. But—he could imagine Mr. McNulty and how he looked to the girl. She could never confront him; the McNultys of the world did not get confronted by anyone. Except when something went strangely wrong.

“Do you know what you are?” Kathy said. “You’re a very good person. Do you understand that?”

He shrugged. Like most truths it was a matter of opinion. Perhaps he was. In this situation, anyhow. Not so in others. But Kathy didn’t know about that.

“Sit down,” he said, “pet your cat, drink your screwdriver. Don’t think about anything; just be. Can you do that? Empty your mind for a little while? Try it.” He brought her a chair; she dutifully seated herself on it.

“I do it all the time,” she said emptily, dully.

Jason said, “But not negatively. Do it positively.”

“How? What do you mean?”

“Do it for a real purpose, not just to avoid facing unfortunate verities. Do it because you love your husband and you want him back. You want everything to be as it was before.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “But now I’ve met you.”

“Meaning what?” He proceeded cautiously; her response puzzled him.

Kathy said, “You’re more magnetic than Jack. He’s magnetic, but you’re so much, much more. Maybe after meeting you I couldn’t really love him again. Or do you think a person can love two people equally, but in different ways? My therapy group says no, that I have to choose. They say that’s one of the basic aspects of life. See, this has come up before; I’ve met several men more magnetic than Jack … but none of them as magnetic as you. Now I really don’t know what to do. It’s very difficult to decide such things because there’s no one you can talk to: no one understands. You have to go through it alone, and sometimes you choose wrong. Like, what if I choose you over Jack and then he comes back and I don’t give a shit about him; what then? How is he going to feel? That’s important, but it’s also important how I feel. If I like you or someone like you better than him, then I have to act it out, as our therapy group puts it. Did you know I was in a psychiatric hospital for eight weeks? Morningside Mental Hygiene Relations in Atherton. My folks paid for it. It cost a fortune because for some reason we weren’t eligible for community or federal aid. Anyhow, I learned a lot about myself and I made a whole lot of friends, there. Most of the people I truly know I met at Morningside. Of course, when I originally met them back then I had the delusion that they were famous people like Mickey Quinn and Arlene Howe. You know—celebrities. Like you.”

He said, “I know both Quinn and Howe, and you haven’t missed anything.”

Scrutinizing him, she said, “Maybe you’re not a celebrity; maybe I’ve reverted back to my delusional period. They said I probably would, sometime. Sooner or later. Maybe it’s later now.”

“That,” he pointed out, “would make me a hallucination of yours. Try harder; I don’t feel completely real.”

She laughed. But her mood remained somber. “Wouldn’t that be strange if I made you up, like you just said? That if I fully recovered you’d disappear?”

“I wouldn’t disappear. But I’d cease to be a celebrity.”

“You already have.” She raised her head, confronted him steadily. “Maybe that’s it. Why you’re a celebrity that no one’s ever heard of. I made you up, you’re a product of my delusional mind, and now I’m becoming sane again.”

“A solipsistic view of the universe—”

“Don’t do that. You know I haven’t any idea what words like that mean. What kind of person do you think I am? I’m not famous and powerful like you; I’m just a person doing a terrible, awful job that puts people in prison, because I love Jack more than all the rest of humanity. Listen.” Her tone became firm and crisp. “The only thing that got me back to sanity was that I loved Jack more than Mickey Quinn. See, I thought this boy named David was really Mickey Quinn, and it was a big secret that Mickey Quinn had lost his mind and he had gone to this mental hospital to get himself back in shape, and no one was supposed to know about it because it would ruin his image. So he pretended his name was David. But I knew. Or rather, I thought I knew. And Dr. Scott said I had to chose between Jack and David, or Jack and Mickey Quinn, which I thought it was. And I chose Jack. So I came out of it. Maybe”—she wavered, her chin trembling—“maybe now you can see why I have to believe Jack is more important than anything or anybody, or a lot of anybodys, else. See?”