He wilts. The little old lady presses her lips tight and closes her eyes.

“Darwin!” Pytka bellows.

“See?” Darwin says to me. “See?”

He waddles toward the director with his hands raised.

“Helena,” I say.

When she sees me, her face lights up. She runs and jumps and wraps her legs around me, kissing my face until I can’t help smiling.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“Shooting a video,” she says, kissing my lips and climbing down.

She takes my hand and squeezes it.

“We’re at number seven.”

“You pulled that gun on Darwin?” I say, making my face stern.

“Oh, he’s an ass,” she says, tugging at me. “Come look at this trailer. It’s a star trailer.”

She’s smiling, but I can see the water in her eyes. I let her pull me outside the studio. Her trailer is around the corner. She’s talking to me fast, telling me about songs and clothes and the people that she’s met. I stop her on the steps.

“Helena?”

Her face crumples up and two tears streak down either cheek. She gives her head a quick shake.

“I’m sorry,” she says, then turns and runs around the back of the trailer.

By the time I get there, the engine of her yellow Boxster is racing and the car takes off with a screech. I run back to the front and jump into my car.

“Follow her,” I tell the driver. My driver is excellent and we keep up. It’s after the rush, so the thick flow of traffic is moving steadily. She’s not trying to lose us, but she’s not stopping to talk either. She takes 134 out to the 405 and all the way down to Manhattan Beach as the sun drops into the Pacific. She parks the car right next to the stairs to the beach, hops out into the hazy dusk, runs out along the wooden walkway, and disappears. My heart hammers inside my chest. A blood-red sun smolders beneath the smoky purple clouds. It’s as if she’s been swallowed up.

I jump out before the car has even stopped. When I reach the stairs, the warm salty smell of ocean laced with dead sea-things hits my face. Helena is halfway to the water, and when I call her name it’s swept away by the breeze. I run through the sand, kicking my shoes off as I go to increase my speed. When Helena reaches the water, she goes straight in.

When she’s ankle deep, she drops to her knees.

She starts to splash water up onto her face. When I reach her, she’s crying hard.

“This shit,” she says, furiously rubbing her cheeks and eyes, smearing the heavy makeup and making a mess of her face.

The surf rolls and crashes, sloshing water up over the waist of her jeans. I kneel beside her and hold her to me, clutching her head to my chest. She shudders and the red is gone from the sky by the time she stops. A star flickers and an airplane blinks, crawling toward Asia.

“Don’t you want this?” I ask after a time.

“I used to come here when I was a girl,” she says in a whisper, looking out at the night. “There was this old whore. I hated her. I think she did it to make me feel how small I was, come here at night and see the stars. The ocean.

“She’d stand there with her arms crossed and I could always smell her cigarette, even though the breeze goes the other way.”

“I told you,” I say. “That’s all gone now.”

“I’m so dirty,” she says.

“You never did anything wrong,” I say.

“I did so much.”

“They did it, not you,” I say. “Stop blaming the victim.”

“I know everyone is trying to help,” she says, “but I can’t stand them telling me what to do. What to wear. My body.”

“It’s an act,” I say. “It won’t change you. Your voice is beautiful. They said it in Rolling Stone, but that’s not enough. It’s a business. Your look. How they sell the act.

“Come on,” I say, lifting her up out of the water.

“You’re wet,” she says, flicking the water off her fingertips into my face and giggling.

“Can you behave yourself?” I say, holding her arms.

A wave crashes.

“Will you still take me out to dinner to celebrate number seven?”

“After we dry off.”

“Okay,” she says. “Then I might.”

BERT CALLS ME from the airport and tells me they’re here. I choose a black suit, white shirt, and burgundy tie from the closet, checking myself in the mirror. My hair is short now, a wild mess of gel and dark blades. The fashion in L.A. My skin is bronzed, the result of mixing my mother’s Mohawk blood with lots of sun. Dark eyes stare back at me, nearly empty except for a distant glimmer. Water at the bottom of a well.

I might be fifty or I might be twenty-five, and since I’m much closer to the former, the corners of my lips curl up into a smile.

In New Orleans, outside the Omni Royal Hotel, I sit with my legs crossed on a cast-iron bench nestled in a bower of red geraniums. It isn’t more than ten minutes before a long black car pulls into the brick-paved circular drive. Out on the river, a freighter blares its horn. Closer by, a carriage horse clops along on the street. The humid Louisiana air is thick with the smells from a nearby bakery tainted by last night’s leavings of garbage, spilled beer, and horse dung.

Two young men get out of the limo. Allen Steffano, Lexis’s boy, is tall and angular with brown eyes and a face that is so similar to his mother’s that my stomach turns cold. His friend Martin Debray is in his mid-twenties. Debray is a friend of the Steffano family and a surrogate older brother to Allen. He is freckle-faced and redheaded. Built lean like Allen, only not as tall or as muscular.

The two stretch and blink up at the bright midday sun, then slap each other high five, excited like the rest of the visitors to be at the Super Bowl. Allen tells the captain that the bags are in the back, then takes out a pair of sunglasses. His black T-shirt is skintight and his jeans are baggy and frayed at the bottoms. His moccasins go for $345 a pair.

The captain takes a twenty and gets back to work, slowly shaking his head.

Allen has wavy dark hair. He’s lean, but with wide shoulders and the thick upper arms of an athlete. Up close I see his eyes are shot through with shards of yellow. As if he senses the intensity of my gaze, they meet mine, and I look away.

While they check in, I cross the lobby toward the elevators. When they get on, so do I.

“Excuse me,” I say, looking at Debray. “Are you with the NFL?”

“Not me,” Debray says, smiling and shaking his head.

“But we’ve met, right?” I say. “Seth Cole.”

“No,” Debray says, shaking my hand. “I don’t think…”

“In London,” I say, cocking my head and snapping my fingers. “That’s it, Debray, right? Martin Debray. At the Dorchester Hotel. Oh, you were pretty messed up, but I’d lost my wallet somewhere in their bar and you paid my bar tab. I was already checked out. Had to catch the first flight out. God. Small world.”

He brightens and says, “That’s where I stay.”

“Well, thanks again,” I say. “Talk about embarrassing.”

“Not a problem,” Debray says. He sees me looking at Allen. “Oh, I’m sorry, this is Allen Steffano.”

I shake Allen’s hand and say, “Listen, I’ve got some passes to the commissioner’s private party tonight at House of Blues. Any interest?”

They look at each other and their mouths drop open.

“The NFL commissioner?” Martin says.

I nod and, taking the tickets out of my suit coat pocket, I say, “Lots of players will be there. A few of the owners. How about if I meet you there at ten and buy you back a couple drinks?”

Martin looks at Allen and smiles. He looks back at me and says, “Great.”

“Sounds good to me,” Allen says.

I make a show of extending my wrist so they can see my gold Cartier watch and say, “Great. Ten, then. I’ll find you.”

That evening, I have dinner with Woody Johnson-the owner of the New York Jets-at Commander’s Palace, where the New York Strip steak is as thick as my fist. The truth is that after the crap I ate for twenty years in jail, I can’t get enough of the taste of rare meat and red wine.