everal things happened over the course of the next week or so.

I made three trips to Sunset Park, two of them alone, the third in the company of TJ. At loose ends one afternoon, I beeped him and got a call back almost immediately. We met in the Times Square subway station and rode out to Brooklyn together. We had lunch at a deli and café con leche at the Cuban place and walked around some. We talked a lot, and while I didn't learn a great deal about him, he learned a few things about me, assuming he was listening.

While we waited for our train back to the city he said, "Say, you don't have to pay me nothin' for today. On account of we didn't do nothin'."

"Your time has to be worth something."

"If I be workin', but all I was doin' was hangin' around. Man, I been doin' that for free all my life."

Another night I was just about to leave the house and head for a meeting when a call from Danny Boy sent me chasing out to an Italian restaurant in Corona, where three small-time louts had recently blossomed as big spenders. It seemed unlikely— Corona is in northern Queens, and light-years from Sunset Park— but I went anyway and drank San Pellegrino water at the bar and waited for three guys in silk suits to come in and throw their money around.

The TV was on, and at ten o'clock the Channel 5 newscast included a shot of three men who'd just been arrested for the recent robbing and pistol-whipping of a Forty-seventh Street diamond merchant. The bartender said, "Hey, would you look at that! Those assholes were in here the past three nights, spending money like they couldn't get rid of it fast enough. I had a kind of a feeling where it came from."

"They made it the old-fashioned way," the man next to me said. "They stole it."

I was only a few blocks from Shea Stadium, but that still left me hundreds of miles from the Mets, who had lost a close one to the Cubs that afternoon at Wrigley. The Yankees were at home against the Indians. I walked to the subway and went home.

ANOTHER time I got a call from Drew Kaplan, who said that Kelly and his colleagues at Brooklyn Homicide wanted Pam to go down to Washington and pay a call at the FBI's National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime at Quantico. I asked when she was going.

"She's not," he said.

"She refused?"

"At her attorney's suggestion."

"I don't know about that," I said. "The public-relations department was always where the Feebies were strongest, but what I've heard about their division that profiles serial killers is fairly impressive. I think she should go."

"Well," he said, "it's too bad you're not her lawyer. It's her interests I've been engaged to protect, my friend. Anyway, the mountain's coming to Mohammed. They're sending a guy up tomorrow."

"Let me know how it goes," I said, "insofar as that coincides with what you deem to be the best interests of your client."

He laughed. "Don't get hinky, Matt. Why should she have to schlep down to DC? Let him come here."

After the meeting with the profiler he called again to say he was not blown away by the session. "He seemed a little nonchalant to me," Drew said. "Like someone who's only killed two women and slashed a third isn't worth his time. I gather the more of a string a killer puts together, the more it gives them to work with."

"That figures."

"Yeah, but it's small consolation to the people at the end of the string. They'd probably just as soon the cops caught the guy early on instead of letting him provide such interesting items for their data base. He was telling Kelly they've put together a really solid profile of some yutz out on the West Coast. They could tell you he collected stamps as a boy and how old he was when he got his first tattoo. But they still haven't apprehended the son of a bitch and I think he said the current count is forty-two, with four more probables."

"I can see why Ray and his friend seem small-time."

"He wasn't wild about the frequency, either. He said serial killers generally manifest a higher level of activity. That means they don't wait months between crimes. He said either they hadn't hit their stride yet or they were infrequent visitors to New York and did the bulk of their killing elsewhere."

"No," I said. "They know the city too well for that."

"Why do you say that?"

"Huh?"

"How do you know how well they knew the city?"

Because they had sent the Khourys chasing all over Brooklyn, but I couldn't mention that. "They used two different outer-borough cemeteries for dumping grounds," I said, "and Forest Park. Who did you ever hear of from out of town who could pick up a girl on Lexington Avenue and wind up in a cemetery in Queens?"

"Anybody could," he said, "if he picked up the wrong girl. Let me think what else he said. He said they were probably in their early thirties, probably abused as children. He came up with a lot of very general stuff. There was one other thing he said that gave me a chill."

"What's that?"

"Well, this particular guy's been with the division twenty years, just about since they started it up. He's coming up on retirement pretty soon and he said he's just as glad."

"Because he's burned out?"

"More than that. He said the rate at which these incidents are occurring has been increasing all along in a really nasty way. But the way the curve's shaping up now, they think these cases are really going to spike between now and the end of the century. Sport-killing, he called it. Says they're looking for it to be the leisure craze of the nineties."

THEY didn't do this when I first came around, but these days at AA meetings they generally invite newcomers with less than ninety days of sobriety to introduce themselves and give their day count. At most meetings each of these announcements gets a round of applause. Not at St. Paul's, though, because of a former member who came every night for two months and said before each meeting, "My name is Kevin and I'm an alcoholic and I've got one day back. I drank last night but I'm sober today!" People got sick of applauding this statement, and at the next business meeting we voted, after much debate, to drop the applause altogether. "My name is Al," someone will say, "and I've got eleven days." "Hi, Al," we say.

It was a Wednesday when I walked from Brooklyn Heights clear out to Bay Ridge and collected my expense money from Kenan Khoury, and it was the following Tuesday at the eight-thirty meeting when a familiar voice at the back of the room said, "My name is Peter and I'm an alcoholic and a drug addict and I've got two days back."

"Hi, Peter," everybody said.

I had planned to catch up with him during the break but I got caught up in a conversation with the woman sitting next to me, and when I turned to look for him he was gone. I called him from the hotel afterward but he didn't answer. I called his brother's house.

"Peter's sober," I said. "At least he was an hour ago. I saw him at a meeting."

"I spoke to him earlier today. He said he had most of my money left and nothing bad happened to the car. I told him I didn't give a shit about the money or the car, I cared about him, and he said he was all right. How'd he look to you?"

"I didn't see him. I just heard him speak up, and when I went to look for him he was gone. I just called to let you know he was alive."

He said he appreciated it. Two nights later Kenan called and said he was downstairs in the lobby. "I'm double-parked out front," he said. "You had dinner yet? C'mon downstairs, meet me outside."

In the car he said, "You know Manhattan better than I do. Where do you want to go? Pick a place."

We went to Paris Green on Ninth Avenue. Bryce greeted me by name and gave us a window table, and Gary waved theatrically from the bar. Kenan ordered a glass of wine and I asked for a Perrier.

"Nice place," he said.

After we'd ordered dinner he said, "I don't know, man. I got no reason to be in the city. I just got in the car and drove around and I couldn't think of a single place to go. I used to do that all the time, just drive around, do my part for the oil shortage and the air pollution. You ever do that? Oh, how could you, you don't have a car. Suppose you want to get away for a weekend? What do you do?"

"Rent one."

"Yeah, sure," he said. "I didn't think of that. You do that much?"

"Fairly often when the weather's decent. My girlfriend and I go upstate, or over to Pennsylvania."

"Oh, you got a girlfriend, huh? I was wondering. Two of you been keeping company for a long time?"

"Not too long."

"What's she do, if you don't mind my asking."

"She's an art historian."

"Very good," he said. "Must be interesting."

"She seems to find it interesting."

"I mean she must be interesting. An interesting person."

"Very," I said.

He was looking better this evening, his hair barbered and his face shaved, but there was still an air of weariness about him, with a current of restlessness moving beneath it.

He said, "I don't know what to do with myself. I sit around the house and it just makes me nuts. My wife's dead, my brother's doing God knows what, my business is going to hell, and I don't know what to do."

"What's the matter with your business?"

"Maybe nothing, maybe everything. I set up something on this trip I just made. I got a shipment due sometime next week."

"Maybe you shouldn't tell me about it."

"You ever have opiated hash? If you were strictly a boozer you probably didn't."

"No."

"That's what I got coming in. Grown in eastern Turkey and coming our way via Cyprus, or so they tell me."

"What's the problem?"

"The problem is I should have walked away from the deal. There are people in it I got no reason to trust, and I went in on it for the worst possible reason. I did it to have something to do."

I said, "I can work for you in the matter of your wife's death. I can do that irrespective of how you make your living, and I can even break a few laws on your behalf. But I can't work for you or with you as far as your profession is concerned."

"Petey told me that working for me would lead him back to using. Is that a factor for you?"

"No."

"It's just something you wouldn't touch."

"I guess so, yes."

He thought for a moment, then nodded. "I can appreciate that," he said. "I can respect it. On the one hand, I'd like to have you with me because I'd be confident with you backing my play. And it's very lucrative. You know that."

"Of course."

"But it's dirty, isn't it? I'm aware of it. How could I not be? It's a dirty business."

"So get out of it."

"I'm thinking about it. I never figured to make it my life's work. I always figured another couple of years, a few more deals, a little more money in the offshore account. Familiar story, right? I wish they'd just legalize it, make it simple for everybody."

"A cop said the same thing just the other day."

"Never happen. Or maybe it will. I'll tell you, I'd welcome it."

"Then what would you do?"

"Sell something else." He laughed. "Guy I met this past trip, Lebanese like me, I hung out with him and his wife in Paris. 'Kenan,' he says, 'you got to get out of this business, it deadens your soul.' He wants me to throw in with him. You know what he does? He's an arms dealer, for Christ's sake, he sells weapons. 'Man,' I said, 'my customers just kill themselves with the product. Your customers kill other people.' 'Not the same,' he insisted. 'I deal with nice people, respectable people.' And he tells me all these important people he knows, CIA, secret services of other countries. So maybe I'll get out of the dope business and become a big-time merchant of death. You like that better?"

"Is that your only choice?"

"Serious? No, of course not. I could buy and sell anything. I don't know, my old man may have been slightly full of shit with the Phoenician business, but there's no question our people are traders all over the world. When I dropped out of college, first thing I did was travel. I went visiting relatives. The Lebanese are scattered all over the planet, man. I got an aunt and uncle in Yucatán, I got cousins all through Central and South America. I went over to Africa, some relatives on my mother's side are in a country called Togo. I never heard of it until I went there. My relatives operate the black market for currency in Lomé, that's the capital of Togo. They've got this suite of offices in a building in downtown Lomé. No sign in the lobby and you got to walk up a flight of stairs, but it's pretty much out in the open. All day long people are coming in with money to change, dollars, pounds, francs, traveler's checks. Gold, they buy and sell gold, weigh it and figure the price.

"All day long the money goes back and forth over the long table they got there. I couldn't believe how much money they handled. I was a kid, I never saw a lot of cash, and I'm looking at tons of money. See, they only make like one or two percent on a transaction, but the volume is enormous.

"They lived in this walled compound on the edge of town. It had to be huge to accommodate all the servants. I'm a kid from Bergen Street, I grew up sharing a room with my brother, and here are these cousins of mine and they've got something like five servants for each member of the family. That's including children. No exaggeration. I was uncomfortable at first, I thought it was wasteful, but it was explained to me. If you were rich you had an obligation to employ a lot of people. You were creating jobs, you were doing something for the people.

" 'Stay,' they told me. They wanted to take me into the business. If I didn't like Togo, they had in-laws with the same kind of operation in Mali. 'But Togo's nicer,' they said."

"Could you still go?"

"That's the sort of thing you do when you're twenty years old, start a new life in a new country."

"What are you, thirty-two?"

"Thirty-three. That's a little old for an entry-level slot."

"You might not have to start in the mailroom."

He shrugged. "Funny thing is Francine and I discussed it. She had a problem with it because she was afraid of blacks. The idea of being one of a handful of white people in a black nation was frightening to her. She said, like, suppose they decide to take over? I said, honey, what's to take over? It's their country. They already own it. But she was not completely rational on the subject." His voice hardened. "And look who she got in a truck with, look who killed her. White guys. All your life you fear one thing and something else sneaks up on you." His eyes locked with mine. "It's like they didn't just kill her, they obliterated her. She ceased to exist. I didn't even see a body, I saw parts, chunks. I went to my cousin's clinic in the middle of the night and turned the chunks into ashes. She's gone and there's this hole in my life and I don't know what to put in it."

"They say time takes time," I said.

"It can take some of mine. I got time I don't know what to do with. I'm alone in the house all day and I find myself talking to myself. Out loud, I mean."

"People do that when they're used to having somebody around. You'll get over it."

"Well, if I don't, so what? If I'm talking to myself who's gonna hear me, right?" He sipped from his water glass. "Then there's sex," he said. "I don't know what the hell to do about sex. I have the desire, you know? I'm a young guy, it's natural."

"A minute ago you were too old to start a new life in Africa."

"You know what I mean. I have desires and I not only don't know what to do about them, I don't feel right about having them. It feels disloyal to want to go to bed with a woman whether I actually do it or not. And who would I go to bed with if I wanted to? What am I gonna do, sweet-talk some woman in a bar? Go to a massage parlor, pay some cross-eyed Korean girl to get me off? Go out on fucking dates, take some woman to a movie, make conversation with her? I try to picture myself doing that and I figure I'd rather stay home and jerk off, only I won't do that either because even that seems like it would be disloyal." He sat back abruptly, embarrassed. "I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't mean to spout all this crap at you. I hadn't planned on saying any of that. I don't know where it came from."

I CALLED my art historian when I got back to the hotel. She'd had her class that night and wasn't back yet. I left a message on her machine and wondered if she would call.

We'd had a bad time of it a few nights before. After dinner we'd rented a movie that she wanted to see and I didn't, and maybe I was bitter about that, I don't know. Whatever it was, there was something wrong between us. After the movie ended she made an off-color remark and I suggested she might make an effort to sound a little less like a whore. That would have been an acceptable rejoinder under ordinary circumstances, but I said it like I meant it and she said something suitably stinging in return.

I apologized and so did she and we agreed it was nothing, but it didn't feel that way, and when it got to be time to go to bed we did so on opposite sides of town. When we spoke the next day we didn't say anything about it, and we still hadn't, and it hung in the air between us whenever we talked, and even when we didn't.

She called me back around eleven-thirty. "I just got in," she said. "A couple of us went out for a drink after class. How was your day?"

"All right," I said, and we talked about it for a few minutes. Then I asked if it was too late for me to drop over.

"Oh, gee," she said. "I'd like to see you, too."

"But it's too late."

"I think so, hon. I'm wiped out and I just want to take a quick shower and pass out. Is that okay?"

"Sure."

"Talk to you tomorrow?"

"Uh-huh. Sleep well."

I hung up and said, "I love you," speaking to the empty room, hearing the words bounce off the walls. We had become quite adept at purging the phrase from our speech when we were together, and I listened to myself saying it now and wondered if it was true.

I felt something but couldn't work out what it was. I took a shower and got out and dried off, and standing there looking at my face in the mirror over the bathroom sink I realized what it was I felt.

There are two midnight meetings every night. The closest one was on West Forty-sixth Street and I got there just as they were beginning the meeting. I helped myself to a cup of coffee and sat down, and minutes later I was hearing a voice I recognized say, "My name is Peter and I'm an alcoholic and a drug addict." Good, I thought. "And I have one day back," he said.

Not so good. Tuesday he'd had two days, today he had one. I thought about how difficult it must be, trying to get back in the lifeboat and not being able to get a grip on it. And then I stopped thinking about Peter Khoury because I was there for my own benefit, not for his.

I listened intently to the qualification, although I couldn't tell you what I heard, and when the speaker finished up and opened the meeting I got my hand up right away. I got called on and said, "My name's Matt and I'm an alcoholic. I've been sober a couple of years and I've come a long way since I walked in the door and sometimes I forget that I'm still pretty fucked up. I'm going through a difficult phase in my relationship and I didn't even realize it until a little while ago. Before I came over here I felt uncomfortable and I had to stand under a shower for five minutes to dope out what it was I felt. And then I saw that it was fear, that I was afraid.

"I don't even know what I'm afraid of. I have a feeling if I let myself go I'll find out I'm afraid of every goddamned thing in the world. I'm afraid to be in a relationship and I'm afraid to be out of it. I'm afraid I'll wake up one of these days and look in the mirror and see an old man staring back at me. That I'll die alone in that room some day and nobody'll find me until the smell starts coming through the walls.

"So I got dressed and came over here because I don't want to drink and I don't want to feel like this, and after all these years I still don't know why it helps to run off at the mouth like this, but it does. Thank you."

I figured I probably sounded like an emotional basket case, but you learn not to give a rat's ass what you sound like, and I didn't. It was particularly easy to spew it all in that room because I didn't know anybody there other than Peter Khoury, and if he only had a day he probably couldn't track complete sentences yet, let alone remember them five minutes later.

And maybe I didn't sound that bad after all. At the end we stood and said the Serenity Prayer, and afterward a man two rows in front of me came up to me and asked for my phone number. I gave him one of my cards. "I'm out a lot," I said, "but you can leave a message."

We chatted for a minute, and then I went looking for Peter Khoury, but he was gone. I didn't know if he'd left before the meeting ended or ducked out immediately after, but either way he was gone.

I had a hunch he didn't want to see me, and I could understand that. I remembered the difficulties I'd had at the beginning, putting a few days together, then drinking, then starting all over again. He had the added disadvantage of having been sober for a stretch, and the humiliation of having lost what he'd had. With all of that going for him, it would probably take a while before he could work his way up to low self-esteem.

In the meantime he was sober. He only had a day, but in a sense that's all you've ever got.

oOo

SATURDAY afternoon I took a break from TV sports and called a telephone operator. I told her I'd lost the card telling me how to engage and disengage Call Forwarding. I envisioned her checking the records, determining that I'd never signed up for the service, and calling 911 to order the hotel ringed by squad cars. "Put that phone down, Scudder, and come out with your hands up!"

Before I could even finish the thought she had cued a recording, and a computer-generated voice was explaining what I had to do. I couldn't write it all down as fast as it came at me, so I had to call a second time and repeat the procedure.

Just before I left the house to go over to Elaine's, I followed the directions, arranging things so that any calls to my phone would be automatically transferred to her line. Or at least that was the theory. I didn't have a great deal of faith in the process.

She'd bought tickets to a play at the Manhattan Theatre Club, a murky and moody play by a Yugoslavian playwright. I had the feeling that some of it was lost in translation, but what came over the footlights still retained a lot of brooding intensity. It took me through dark passages in the self without troubling to turn the lights on.

The experience was even more of an ordeal than it might otherwise have been because they staged it without an intermission. That got us out of there by a quarter of ten, which was not a moment too soon, but it put us through the wringer in the process. The actors took their curtain calls, the house lights came up, and we shuffled out of there like zombies.

"Strong medicine," I said.

"Or strong poison. I'm sorry, I've been picking a lot of winners lately, haven't I? That movie that you hated and now this."

"I didn't hate this," I said. "I just feel as though I went ten rounds with it, and I got hit in the face a lot."

"What do you figure the message was?"

"It probably comes through best in Serbo-Croatian. The message? I don't know. That the world's a rotten place, I guess."

"You don't need to go to a play for that," she said. "You can just read the paper."

"Ah," I said. "Maybe it's different in Yugoslavia."

We had dinner near the theater, and the mood of the play cloaked us. Halfway through I said, "I want to say something. I want to apologize for the other night."

"That's over, honey."

"I don't know if it is. I've been in a strange mood lately. Some of it has to be this case. We had a couple breaks, I felt as though I was making progress, and now everything's stuck again and I feel stuck myself. But I don't want it to affect us. You're important to me, our relationship is important to me."

"To me, too."

We talked a little and things seemed to lighten up, although the play's mood was not easily set aside. Then we went back to her place and she checked her messages while I used the bathroom. When I came out she had a curious expression on her face.

She said, "Who's Walter?"

"Walter."

"Just calling to say hello, nothing important, wanted to let you know he was alive, and he'll probably give you a call later."

"Oh," I said. "Fellow I met at a meeting the night before last. He's fairly newly sober."

"And you gave him this number?"

"No," I said. "Why would I do that?"

"That's what I was wondering."

"Oh," I said, as it dawned on me. "Well, I guess it works."

"You guess what works?"

"Call Forwarding. I told you the Kongs gave me Call Forwarding when they were playing games with the phone company. I put it on this afternoon."

"So your calls would come here."

"That's right. I didn't have a lot of faith that it would work, but evidently it does. What's the matter?"

"Nothing."

"Are you sure?"

"Of course. Do you want to hear the message? I can play it back again."

"Not if that's all it said."

"It's all right to erase it, then?"

"Go ahead."

She did, then said, "I wonder what he thought when he dialed your number and there was an answering machine with a woman's voice."

"Well, he evidently didn't think he had the wrong number, or he wouldn't have left a message."

"I wonder who he thinks I am."

"A mysterious woman with a sexy voice."

"He probably thinks we're living together. Unless he knows you live alone."

"All he knows about me is I'm sober and crazy."

"Why crazy?"

"Because I was dumping a lot of garbage at the meeting I met him at. For all he knows I'm a priest and you're the housekeeper at the rectory."

"That's a game we haven't tried. Priest and housekeeper. 'Bless me, Father, for I have been a very naughty girl and I probably need a good spanking.' "

"I wouldn't be surprised."

She grinned, and I reached for her, and the phone picked that moment to ring. "You answer it," she said. "It's probably Walter."

I picked up the phone and a man with a deep voice asked to speak to Miss Mardell. I handed her the receiver without a word and walked into the other room. I stood at the window and looked at the lights on the other side of the East River. After a couple of minutes she came and stood beside me. She didn't allude to the call, nor did I. Then ten minutes later the phone rang again and she answered it and it was for me. It was Walter, just using the phone a lot the way they encourage newcomers to do. I didn't stay on with him long, and when I got off I said, "I'm sorry. It was a bad idea."

"Well, you're here a lot. People ought to be able to reach you." A few minutes later she said, "Take it off the hook. Nobody has to reach either of us tonight."

IN the morning I dropped in on Joe Durkin and wound up going out for lunch with him and two friends of his from the Major Crimes Squad. I went back to my hotel and stopped at the desk for my messages, but there weren't any. I went upstairs and picked up a book, and at twenty after three the phone rang.

Elaine said, "You forgot to take off Call Forwarding."

"Oh, for Christ's sake," I said. "No wonder there weren't any messages. I just got home, I was out all morning, it slipped my mind completely. I was going to come straight home and fix it and I forgot. It must have been driving you crazy all day."

"No, but—"

"But how did you get through? Wouldn't it just bounce your call back and give you a busy signal if you called here?"

"It did the first time I tried. I called the desk downstairs and they patched the call through."

"Oh."

"Evidently it doesn't forward calls through the switchboard downstairs."

"Evidently not."

"TJ called earlier. But that's not important. Matt, Kenan Khoury just called. You have to call him right away. He said it's really urgent."

"He did?"

"He said life or death, and probably death. I don't know what that means, but he sounded serious."

I called right away, and Kenan said, "Matt, thank God. Don't go nowhere, I got my brother on the other line. You're at home, right? Okay, stay on the line, I'll be with you in a second." There was a click, and then a minute or so later there was another click and he was back. "He's on his way," he said. "He's coming over to your hotel, he'll be right out in front."

"What's the matter with him?"

"With Petey? Nothing, he's fine. He's gonna bring you out to Brighton Beach. Nobody's got time to dick around with the subway today."

"What's in Brighton Beach?"

"A whole lot of Russians," he said. "How do I put this? One of 'em just called to say he's going through business difficulties similar to what I went through."

That could only mean one thing, but I wanted to make sure.

"His wife?"

"Worse. I gotta go, I'll meet you there."