Thin Air

"You should shower, querida. There is French milled soap, and lilac shampoo, and there are fresh clothes for you in the armoire… Do not be shy… I will have everything on tape… we will watch it all together when we are old."

She stared at him, unmoving. She was wearing the sweat-soaked blouse and jeans that she'd been wearing when he took her.

"Take off your clothes, chiquita, you need to shower and change."

She continued to stare at him. She had been naked with him before. They had made love often. But now it was as if a stranger had ordered her to disrobe in public. She could think of no words.

"Do it," he said and his voice was full of hate, "or I will have it done."

She stared at him still, and the camera continued to whir. She felt the bottomlessness of herself, the sense of weakness that raced along her arms and clenched in her stomach. It was an old feeling. She'd had it many times. She didn't want to. She couldn't bear to. She was being forced to. There was no way not to. The two of them stood poised like that, in a kind of furious immobility for an infinite time in which all there was was the sound of the camera tape rolling, and of her breath and his, both slightly raspy. Helpless, she thought. I'm helpless again. Then, slowly, she began to unbutton her blouse.

Chapter 4

I sat in a coffee shop on Columbus Avenue with Frank Belson and drank a cup of decaffeinated coffee on an ugly spring day with the sky a hard gray and a spit of rain mixed with snow flakes in the air. He hadn't found his wife yet.

"You meet her before you got divorced from Kitty?" I said, mostly to be saying something.

"No."

"So she wasn't the reason for the divorce," I said.

"The divorce was just making it official," he said. "The marriage had been fucked for a long time."

I was on one of my periodic attempts to give up coffee. The previous failures were discouraging, but not final. I stirred more sugar into my decaf to disguise it.

"Kitty was bad," Belson said, looking at the faintly iridescent surface of his real coffee. "Hysterical, nervous-thought fucking was only a way to get children. Didn't want children, but didn't want anyone to get ahead of her by having them first. You know?"

"I was never one of Kitty's rooters," I said.

"Money," he said. "I never saw anyone worry about money like her. How to get it, how to save it, why we shouldn't spend it, why I should earn more. How we were going to hold up our head in the neighborhood when Trudy Fitzgerald's husband made twice what I did being an engineer at Sylvania. If I would of paid her to fuck she'd have done it every night."

"What could be more natural," I said.

"'Course, after the first couple months I would probably have paid her not to. But we had the kid and then we had a couple more. Kitty always knew the correct number of children to have. She had all the damn rules down, you know? Whether you needed a house on the water, whether the girls should go to parochial school, whether you should add salt to the water before you boiled it, what kind of underwear a decent woman wore."

He stopped talking for a while. He still held the coffee, but he didn't drink it. I waited. A couple of cops came in and sat at the counter. Belson nodded at them without speaking. Both cops ordered coffee, one had a piece of pineapple pie with it.

"But you didn't get a divorce," I said.

"We were Catholics since twenty fucking thousand years ago. And we had the kids, and, shit, the time went by and we'd been married twenty-three years and barely spoke. I worked a lot of overtime."

"And then you met Lisa," I said.

"Yeah. Cambridge had picked up a guy named Wozak on an assault warrant, thought he might be a guy we were looking for; clipped an informant we use, junkie named Eddie Navarrone. Eddie's no loss, but it's a departmental policy to discourage murder when we can, so I went over and talked with Wozak. Might be our guy, I'm not sure. Cambridge has got him cold, so he's not going anywhere. At least until some judge walks him because he was denied health insurance."

"Or they got no place to put him," I said.

Belson shrugged, his back still to me, staring out at the grim spring day.

"Oughta put him in the ground," Belson said.

I ordered another decaf. Belson's coffee must have turned cold in his cup while we talked. He still held it, and he didn't drink it. He glanced out at the early spring snow spatter.

"You seen any robins yet?" Belson said.

"No."

"Me either."

"Did you meet Lisa in Cambridge?" I said.

"Yeah."

"You want to tell me about it or shall I make something up and you tell me if I'm getting warm?"

Belson took a sip of coffee, shook his head and put it down.

"It's about five-thirty. I'm at the bar at the Charles Hotel, having a vodka and tonic. And she's at the bar. It's not a big bar, you ever been there?"

"Yeah."

"She had on a yellow dress, and one of those hats with the brim turned up all around that women wear right down over their eyes, and she's drinking the same thing. And she says to me, `What kind of vodka?' And I say, `Stoli,' and she smiles at me, says, `That's what I used to drink. Great minds, huh?"'

The two cops at the counter finished their coffee, got up, and headed for the door. Belson watched them go. "Area B guys," he said absently.

"So it began," I said.

"Yeah. And she asked me what I did and I told her and she said, `Are you carrying a gun?' and I said, `Yeah, pointing your finger at them doesn't work,' and she laughed and we talked the rest of the night. And I didn't go home with her, but I got her number and I called her the next day."

He paused again, watching the two cops get into a gray Ford sedan and pull away from the hydrant they'd parked on. Then he spoke again, still staring after the departing car.

"She wasn't, isn't, like anyone else. She was all there in the right-now, you know? She was everything she was, all the time. Nothing held back, no games. And the first time we went to bed she said to me, `I'll tell you anything about myself you want to know, but if it's up to me, I'd like to pretend life started the night we met.' And I said, `Sure. No past. No nothing, just you and me.' And that's how it's been. I don't know anything about her except with me."

I waited, sipping my decaf. Belson sat quietly.

"You think Kitty might have anything to do with Lisa going away?"

"No," Belson said slowly. "I've thought about it. And no. Kitty's a bad asshole, but she's not that kind of bad asshole. She's in Florida with her sister, been there since February tenth."

She could have had it done, I thought. But that implied things it would do Belson no good to think about.

"You think you might want to look into Lisa's background a little, now that this has happened?"

"Yeah," Belson said. "I haven't, but I know I have to."

After a while I said, "You'll find her."

"Yeah," he said softly. "I will."

It was a good shower. Lots of hot water. Lots of water pressure. The water washed over her, soaking her hair, sluicing over her body. She scrubbed herself vigorously, lathering her body, shampooing her hair, washing away the grime and sweat of her captivity and, as much as she could, the fear. He was there with his camera, open-shuttered and passive. Could she keep something? Keep some piece of Lisa intact? Nearly immobilized with terror, feeling the hopeless weight of it dragging at her every movement, could there be some part of her that could remain Lisa? She stood fully erect and made no attempt to conceal her nakedness. She couldn't keep him from seeing her. But she could get clean, and goddamn him, she wasn't going to cower. But she was so frightened, so alone, that she knew how thin her resolve was. It would not take much more than this to make her cower. She amended her resolve. I will try not to cower, she thought. When she was through she stepped from the shower and toweled herself dry, making no attempt to hide herself, looking straight at him and his implacable lens. Frank will find me, she thought. She hung the towel on its hook beside the shower and walked straight at the camera lens. He backed away from her as she walked, into the bedroom. Her clothes were gone, and laid out on the bed was fresh lingerie and a costume, a black flapper dress, with beads along the hemline.