Axel leans in, as if sharing a secret, even though we are alone in the coolly lit conference room at Cable99, the local access channel whose offices are located on Shaker Square. “It’s the fucking politicians that screwed it up for everyone. But what’s new, eh?”

Axel is certainly referring to the fact that political types have a nasty habit of ordering air time, using it, losing the election, then refusing to pay. Nothing of the sort is going to happen here, I assure him. Especially at these prices.

“Cash okay?” I ask.

“Cash is fine,” Axel answers.

“And you say the remote hookup won’t present any problems?”

“None at all,” he replies. “Of course, you realize that the streaming video quality won’t be the greatest. We did a live streaming video with Pere Ubu recently and it was cybercast worldwide on the Net. Our only problem was that sometimes the video lagged slightly behind the audio. Other than that, everything went smoothly.”

“And I’ll be able to feed from two locations?”

“Absolutely. As long as the software is right on your end, whatever comes through will go right on the air.”

“Outstanding,” I say, rising to my feet. “Where do we take care of this nasty money business?”

“Money is never nasty around here,” Axel says with a huge grin.

Ten minutes later I pay for thirty minutes of airtime on Cable99, buying the eleven-thirty-to-midnight slot on New Year’s Eve, paying a substantial premium for the short notice. The audience won’t be that large, of course, but neither are the demands regarding standards and practices. I can safely assume that what I have planned would never be suitable for broadcast on the network affiliates.

Not until it becomes news, that is.

45

At first, he figures it is just an hallucination, just another by-product of middle-aged myopia mixed with extreme sexual deprivation. He had thought about her so much over the past few days that he had begun to berate himself each time she danced across his memory, which seemed to be every forty-five seconds or so. He had even said her name aloud on a few occasions.

Why couldn’t he get her off his mind?

He had no idea. But of all the places he might have expected to run into her, inside Pallucci’s had to be down there near the bottom of the list. Right around monster-truck show.

Had he told her of his nearly twenty-year habit of stopping at Palucci’s on East Sixty-sixth Street every week at this time so he could get the fresh mozzarella with basil? He couldn’t remember. The conversation at Starbucks is a smudge. He may have.

Regardless, this time, it is no hallucination. She is standing at the end of the aisle, posing, her right leg cocked, her dark hair swept back from her face, her lips a damp, glistening scarlet. She begins to walk slowly toward him, her eyes fixed on his. She is wearing a tight black skirt and a black leather jacket, the kind with a million zippers, a cream T-shirt beneath. She looks tough. And cocky. And very sexy.

As she approaches, a tiny smile graces her lips, and Paris suddenly realizes that she is not going to speak to him. He also notices it is not a cream T-shirt at all, but rather creamy skin. The jacket is unzipped halfway. She is wearing nothing beneath.

She walks past him, to the end of the aisle, turns, glances back.

Sea of Love, Paris thinks. The grocery-store scene in Sea of Love. They had talked at length about this scene in the movie.

This can’t be happening.

And being the cynic that nearly twenty years on the force will make anybody, he begins to wonder what is wrong with this picture.

Yet, when he walks down the aisle, turns the corner, and sees Rebecca D’Angelo standing by the small produce rack, when he sees the way the fluorescent light plays off her alabaster skin, something other than logic propels him. He sidles up next to her, giddy with her perfume. She unzips her jacket another inch, leans in front of him, taking a handful of fennel, sniffing it. She runs her other hand slowly up his thigh, back down. Paris can now see inside her jacket, her breasts against the black leather. She holds the pose for a moment, then puts the fennel back, strolls toward the small bakery counter—the sound of her heels clicking on the hard tile, along with Jimmy Roselli’s “Mala Femmena” playing on the store’s speakers, making the perfect surreal backdrop to the moment.

Slowly, Paris follows. When Rebecca reaches the counter, she turns, leans against the glass. When Paris stops in front of her, she grabs the lapels of his coat, pulls him between her legs.

The kiss is long and slow and deep. Paris slides his hands between her short skirt and the warm glass of the bakery display case. She kisses him again, and this time Paris wraps his arms around her, the leather, warm and sensual in his hands; the aroma of freshly baked scallette filling his head. Rebecca runs her tongue gently along the tip of his earlobe, whispers:

“Happy New Year, Jack.”

Paris is speechless.

They kiss one last time, a kiss that delicately, yet unquestionably, conveys the promise that the next time they meet they will make love.

Rebecca slides from his arms, then turns and walks toward the register. She leans over, pecks Carmine Pallucci on his stubbly gray cheek, opens the door and is gone. One moment she is deep in Paris’s arms, and the next moment he is greeted by a cold blast of air and the sloppy sounds of traffic sloshing down East Sixty-sixth Street.

Carmine, who had seen the whole thing from behind the register—who had in fact seen quite a bit from that perch in his seventy-one years—looks at Paris, the shape of Rebecca D’Angelo’s lips a neon sign on his right cheek. Then, with a big grin, and a whopper of a story to tell his grandsons in the morning, Carmine reaches under the counter and pulls out two small glasses and a bottle of his special-occasion grappa de Vin Santo.

Three hours later Paris sits in the backseat of his car, across from La Botanica Macumba, his legs outstretched in front of him, his mind trying to rein in his thoughts about his erotic grocery encounter. He can still smell Rebecca on his hands, his collar.

What was she doing? What was he doing?

It was very clever, very sexy, very mature for someone her age. Maybe she is thirty or so, he rationalizes. Which would give him a little hope. Which is probably what scares him so much. He knows that there is a big sign called Hurt at the end of this. Guaranteed. Perhaps that is why he is starting to feel like Emil Jannings in The Blue Angel, the middle-aged schoolteacher who literally makes a clown, as well as a complete asshole, out of himself for Marlene Dietrich.

Paris looks up at the bay window above La Botanica Macumba, the front window of the Levertov apartment. Shades still down, no lights.

Ivan Kral, the detective in charge of investigating the Isaac Levertov murder, had said that he had not been able to interview Levertov’s wife in person since the old man’s body had been found. He said that he had spoken to her at some length on the phone, and that she had come down to the morgue to make an official ID of the body, but that he has not been able to make contact with her since. It will take a search warrant to enter the premises and there wasn’t nearly enough credible evidence to support probable cause.

Yet.

So they wait.

Paris repositions himself, brings his knees to his chin. He had learned how to wait the summer his father had died. Every morning that summer the sixteen-year-old Jack Paris would sit in the blue recliner at the foot of his father’s bed, cocooned in that thick, closed-window air of infirmity, his lap covered with his many books on magic: Blackstone’s Modern Card Tricks, Keith Clark’s Encyclopedia of Cigarette Tricks, The New Modern Coin Magic.