According to Captain Marlowe, Mr. Carrasquillo started carrying the kitchen knife with him only three days ago. “He said he’d decided to do it after hearing about the vigilante,” Captain Marlowe said.

18

ASPIRAL of potato skin hung from the paring knife. She sat on a straight chair and her feet barely touched the floor. “I warn you right now. I always have been, am, and probably will continue to be a lousy cook.”

Paul manhandled the cork out of the bottle. “Glasses?”

“Up there.” She stabbed the knife toward the cabinet. “No, the next one. I think that’s why he divorced me. Too many burnt hamburgers while I was working on a brief instead of inventing five-course feasts. But I got my revenge. He’s gained twenty pounds since the divorce. I, on the other hand, remain as you see—malnourished or svelte, it depends on your point of view.”

“You look damn good to me.”

“Well thank you kind sir. My goodness this is nice wine. At least two dollars a bottle, what?”

“At least,” he said gravely. He held his glass up to the light. “My friend Sam Kreutzer used to go on for hours about the nose, the hue, the tongue, the palate. I never knew what the hell he was talking about.”

“Neither did he. Blindfold those guys and they can’t tell red wine from ketchup.” She dropped the potatoes into the miniature cauldron. “You’ve got a surprising little sense of humor, Paul.”

“Standard survival equipment for CPAs.”

She opened the oven and looked at the meat thermometer and picked up her glass. “Let us retire to the drawing room, sir.”

The apartment was tidy and small: it was three paces from the kitchenette to the couch. Bookcases hung cantilever from the walls; evidently she was a voracious and catholic reader—only one section contained law books.

She waved him away when he fumbled for matches; lit her cigarette with a table lighter and sat back peering at him through a smoke-induced squint.

He said, “Do you ever play poker?”

“No. Why?”

“You’d be a killer at it.”

“Am I so inscrutable? I don’t mean to be.”

“I keep wondering what you’re seeing when you look at me like that.”

“A rather sweet guy who’s still trying to get himself sorted out after the world fell down around his ankles. And, I might add, probably a pretty good poker player himself. Are you?”

“I haven’t played in months.”

“But you used to.”

“Every Thursday. I held my own but I’m no Cincinnati Kid. It was just a social game—the same friends every week.”

“Do you miss them? Your New York friends.”

“Some of them. Sam Kreutzer. The office wit—sort of a fledgling Childress. But I’ve never been much of a social animal, I guess.”

The cat leaped to a bookshelf and began to clean a paw. It was a grey and white tiger—inobtrusive, vigilant. Paul said, “I like people, in small doses, but I don’t need to have them around me night and day. I don’t really know what it means to have the kind of close binding friendship people talk about. Well, Sam was damned kind to me when my wife died—he stayed close by, helped me keep things together. But that’s courtesy, isn’t it. I mean it didn’t bother me that I’d be leaving those people behind by moving to Chicago.”

“What about your daughter?”

“We were fairly close. At least I think we were. But we weren’t friends, really. Parent and child—I was very protective, maybe too much so. Maybe possessive. It’s hard to know.”

“I’m the same way,” she said. “I was an only child. Actually I feel privileged. Liking people, but not needing them desperately. It makes you much freer, don’t you think?” She left the burning cigarette on the rim of the ash tray and picked up her wine; she said in a different voice, “But still it seems worth a lot more if you have a little love along the way.”

19

THE WIND had blown the snow off the trees but it lay deep in Washington Park coated with a frozen crust. The roadways and sidewalks had been cleared after a fashion but the night’s hard cold had left glazings of ice and two black women walked with slow care balancing their supermarket bags in their arms. On the bench Paul watched them from the edge of his vision, propping the newspaper against the wooden rail. Wind fluttered the corners of the newspaper and he could see the black women’s breath. Beyond them, beyond the trees and the end of the park he could see the slum houses: porches rotting off, cardboard in the windows. Two young men near the edge of the park were throwing snowballs at passing cars.

The two women approached the sidewalk and prepared to cross the road but one of them slipped on the ice. Paul saw the parcels fall. Groceries from the split bags sprayed across the snow, sliding on the glaze. The woman got to her feet with her friend’s help.

The two youths went toward them, tossing snowballs aside.

Paul folded his newspaper and slipped the glove off his right hand and gripped the gun in his pocket. He got to his feet and moved toward them.

The youths reached the women, who watched without expression—expecting anything. Paul moved from tree to tree, unnoticed, fifty feet away from them.

He saw one of the young men speak; the wind was wrong, Paul couldn’t hear the words. The woman who had fallen nodded bleakly.

But her friend smiled a little and then the two youths began gathering the scattered groceries.

A taxi went by, tire chains jingling. The paper bags were beyond use, broken in shreds; the woman stuffed things in the pockets of her threadbare coat and the two youths gathered armloads: a box of soap powder, a chicken wrapped in transparent plastic. The four of them waited for a truck to pass and then went slowly across the road.

Paul watched, moving forward without hurry. They might be Good Samaritans. Then again they might be going along until they had the women in a more private place. The woman who still had her packages had a handbag slung from her shoulder and women who did that much shopping at one time probably had cash in their purses.

Cut-Rate Liquors. First Baptist Church. The four pedestrians turned off into a dismal street of attached tenements.

From the corner Paul watched them climb the porch. But then the two youths emptied tins and jars from their pockets, stacked everything neatly on the porch and went back down to the street. He heard one of the women call her thanks across the snow.

He turned away and walked back toward the park.

20

THE HOUSING on Cottage Grove Avenue was urban redevelopment, squat three-story boxes, shabby and hideous. He walked slowly, crunching snow—a lone white man in a good middle-class overcoat: an invitation to thievery. He kept looking up at house numbers—a bill collector looking for an address?

In his hand the pocketed revolver sweated cold against his skin.

Kids were building a snowman. They watched him walk by.

A snowball hurtled from behind, went over his shoulder and crashed beyond. He wheeled. His fist tensed on the gun.

He said aloud, “For Christ’s sake.” He got down on one knee and scraped a snowball together and threw it at the kids, not hard. It fell short and the kids laughed. He managed a smile, turned away and walked on. For Christ’s sake take it easy. But it was an unnerving place. The cheap modern boxes were so inhuman: there was less dignity in them than in any tenement; no possibility of any sense of belonging, community, home. An awesome architectural confirmation of human rootlessness. No one could have identity in a place like this.