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By Root 12287 0

—maybe cocaine too, I don’t know what exactly. Then he went out the door with this enormous slam. He shouted that he was never coming back. I lay there in the dark, I couldn’t sleep for a long time, I was so worried and scared. I thought of calling you but it was terribly late by then. Finally I couldn’t stay awake any more and went to sleep. I don’t know how long I slept, but when he come back it was dawn. He come in the room like an explosion. Raving, shouting. He woke up the whole house again. He dragged me out of bed and throwed me on the floor and shouted at me. About me having sex with—well, this man, and how he would kill me and this man and himself. Oh mon Dieu, Stingo, never, never was Nathan in such a state, never! He kicked me hard finally—hard, on the arm here, and then he left. And later I left. And that was all.” Sophie fell silent.

I put my face down slowly and gently on the mahogany surface of the bar with its damp patina of cigarette ash and water rings, wanting desperately to be overtaken by coma or some other form of beneficent unconsciousness. Then I raised my head and looked at Sophie, saying, “Sophie, I don’t want to say this. But Nathan simply must be put away. He’s dangerous. He has to be confined.” I heard gurgle up in my voice a sob, vaguely ludicrous. “Forever.”

With a trembling hand she signaled to the bartender and asked for a double whiskey on ice. I felt I could not dissuade her, even though her speech already had a glutinous, slurred quality. After the drink came she took a hefty gulp and then, turning to me, said, “There is something else I didn’t tell you. About when he come back at dawn.”

“What?” I said.

“He had a gun. A pistol.”

“Oh shit,” I said. “Shit, shit, shit,” I heard myself murmur, a cracked record. “Shit, shit, shit, shit...”

“He said he was going to use it. He pointed it at my head. But he didn’t use it.”

I made a whispered, not entirely blasphemous invocation, “Jesus Christ, have mercy.”

But we could not just sit there bleeding to death with these gaping wounds. After a long silence I decided on a course of action. I would go with Sophie to the Pink Palace and help her pack up. She would leave the house immediately, taking a room for that night, at least, in the St. George Hotel, which was not far away from her office. Meanwhile, throughout all this, I would somehow find the means to get in touch with Larry in Toronto, telling him of the extreme danger of the situation and urging him to come back at all costs. Then, with Sophie safely in her temporary seclusion, I would do my damnedest to find Nathan and somehow deal with him—though this prospect filled my stomach with dread like a huge, sick football. I was so unstrung that even as I sat there I came close to regurgitating my single beer. “Let’s go,” I said. “Now.”

At Mrs. Zimmerman’s I paid that faithful mole Morris Fink fifty cents to help us cope with Sophie’s baggage. She was sobbing and, I could see, rather drunk as she tramped about her room stuffing clothes and cosmetics and jewelry into a large suitcase.

“My beautiful suits from Saks,” she mumbled. “Oh, what should I do with them?”

“Take them with you, for Christ’s sake,” I said impatiently, heaving her many pairs of shoes into another bag. “Forget protocol at a time like this. You’ve got to hurry. Nathan might be coming back.”

“And my lovely wedding dress? What shall I do with it?”

“Take it, too! If you can’t wear it, maybe you can hock it.”

“Hock?” she said.

“Pawn.”

I had not meant to be cruel, but my words caused Sophie to drop a silk slip to the floor and then raise her hands to her face, and bawl loudly, and shed helpless, glistening tears. Morris looked on morosely as I held her for a moment and uttered futile soothing sounds. It was dark outside and the roar of a truck horn along a nearby street made me jump, shredding my nerve endings like some evil hacksaw. To the general hubbub was added now the monstrous jangle of the telephone in the hallway, and I think I must have stifled a groan, or perhaps a scream. I became even further unstrung when