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Friday he was back at London Towers. This time she hooded him immediately, pinned him on his back on the bed, and kept him on the edge of climax for an eternity. Finally she told him she was going to apply heat, that he might think it was going to burn him, but that it would not do him any damage. Then he felt something red-hot pressed against the base of his scrotum, then jabbed into his rectum. He smelled burning hair and thought he was going to die.
After a long moment the sensation changed, and he realized it wasn’t hot at all, it was cold, and that she’d rubbed him with an ice cube that even now was melting inside him. He lay there while his breathing returned to normal and she gentled him with a hand on his chest and abdomen, stroking him lightly, calming him down.
What he’d smelled, she told him, was a feather from her pillow, held in the flame of a candle. For verisimilitude, she said. Her lips touched the base of his scrotum, where she’d first touched him with the ice cube.
Next time, she said softly, you’ll be expecting ice. And you’ll get fire.
T H E F O L L O W I N G A F T E R N O O N , S A T U R D A Y, he looked up a number and called a woman he hadn’t seen in several months. Her name was Arlene Szigeti, and she worked at Carnegie Hall, in the Planned Giving division. Her job was to convince rich people of the value of making substantial bequests to the organization in their wills. She would take prospects to dinner and a concert, making them feel like members of an exclusive club. “I go out several nights a week with people a great deal more well off than you,” she’d told him once, “but you’re different. You pick up the check. ”
“Fran,” she said. “Well, it’s been a while. ”
“Too long,” he said. “Are you free for dinner Wednesday?” She had plans Wednesday, but Tuesday was open. Maybe a show first, he suggested, and dinner afterward. They agreed on a couple of plays neither of them had seen, and he got good orchestra seats to their first choice. She met him at the theater, looking even lovelier than he remembered. She was in her midforties, with fine-spun blond hair and elegant features. Her father, a Hungarian with ties to the Esterhazy family, had come over after the 1956
revolution, her mother’s parents were Jewish refugees who got out of Germany just in time.
After the play they had a light supper down the street at Joe Allen’s, then walked to her apartment on Fifty-fifth Street, five minutes away from her office. It was a foregone conclusion that they would go to bed—they always did—and that the relationship would not lead to anything. They enjoyed each other’s company, in and out of bed, but the emotional chemistry wasn’t there.
In her apartment she offered drinks and he said he was fine, and she came into his arms and they kissed.
He still hadn’t kissed Susan.
In bed, his passion for her was stronger than it had ever been, and she was an apt and eager partner. At the end she lay with her head in the crook of his arm and her hand cupping his groin.
“Whew,” she said. “If I knew you were that hot, we could have skipped dinner. ”
“Just so we had our dessert at home. ”
F R I D A Y N I G H T H E W A S at Susan’s again, naked, bound. “Now,” she said, “tell me all about your date. ”
The previous week, just before he left, she’d asked him if he was sleeping with anyone else besides her. He said, “Sleeping? When did we ever sleep together?” Fucking, she said. Was he fucking anybody?
Not lately, he’d said, and she said that was no good. She was fucking other people, and he should do the same. During the coming week, she said, she wanted him to call some woman and go to bed with her. She expected a full report on Friday.
“But not on Thursday,” she’d told him at the door. “I want you fully recovered. ”
Recounting the evening with Arlene, he realized that part of the excitement he’d felt with her came from knowing he’d be reporting in detail to Susan.
She listened intently and asked questions throughout. She wanted a full description of Arlene’s body, wanted to know just what he’d done and how he felt. When he was done she told him he deserved a reward, and she got out her kit of wax and cheese-cloth. She trimmed his hair with a scissors, waxed his chest and underarms and groin, then rolled him over and did his backside.
The wax was hot, but not too hot to bear. The removal of the hair was painful, but also bearable. When she’d finished she made him touch himself and sat cross-legged while he stroked himself.
When he was close to climax she moved his hands away and took him in her mouth, then climbed onto him and kissed him full on the mouth, giving him his seed, commanding him to swallow it.
“Oh, Franny,” she said. “Our first kiss. Isn’t it romantic?” H E W O U L D S E E H E R again this Friday, and every Friday. He no longer entertained the notion of giving her up. He was, he supposed, enslaved, and it might be said that their relationship gave new meaning to the term pussy-whipped. He didn’t care. It didn’t seem to matter.
Once she’d asked him if it was true that he’d never been with a whore. Not until this summer, he said.
I’m not a whore, she said, and he said he hadn’t meant it as an insult. She said she hadn’t taken it for an insult, but that it was inaccurate. He said he knew that, that she didn’t take money, that he hadn’t meant it that way, but she cut off his explanation. She wasn’t talking about money, she said. Money aside, didn’t he know what a whore was?
A whore, she told him, would do anything he liked. She was entirely different. She would do things he didn’t like, and make him like them.
H E D I D N ’ T C A L L A R L E N E again, or any of several other women who might have been available to play a similar role. Even if he’d been interested, the thought of trying to explain his sudden lack of body hair was daunting.
When he went to the gym, he skipped the steam and sauna, waited until he got home to take his shower. He didn’t like the idea of anyone seeing him like this, and yet he was not entirely sorry she’d done it. He liked the smoothness of his skin, its sensitivity.
And, while he didn’t want to expose his hairlessness, when he walked about with clothes on he felt like a man with a delicious secret.
It was strange, all of this, and he didn’t know what to make of it.
He’d always taken it for granted that he knew who he was, and she kept showing him a side of himself the existence of which he hadn’t even suspected. She couldn’t have created this dark side, it would have to have been there all along, and he supposed it was better to know about it than not.
Or was it? William Boyce Harbinger (did his wife call him Bill?
had his mother called him Billy?) must have had an unsuspected dark side of his own, forever hidden from view until the towers fell and shined an awful light on it. Harbinger, reborn as the Carpenter, must have been astonished by the acts he was capable of performing. Could anyone argue he was better off for it?
He kept coming back to the man, because he could think of nothing else besides his weekly descent into—into what? Depravity? Madness? His own unplumbed depths?
Better to think about the Carpenter. Maybe, somehow, he’d come up with a way to catch him.
twenty-four
THE CARPENTER SATonabenchinRiversidePark,notfar from the Rotunda, and the Boat Basin Café. It was getting on for midnight. The café was closed, and a light rain an hour earlier had cleared the park of the few walkers and sitters who’d shared it with him. The Carpenter didn’t mind the rain. He scarcely noticed it.
From where he sat, he could keep an eye on one of his city’s greatest anomalies, the Seventy-ninth Street Boat Basin. This little complex of docks and piers at the Hudson’s edge allowed a favored few New Yorkers the privilege of mooring their boats there for an essentially negligible annual fee. Anyone who had a slip at the Boat Basin clung to it as if it were a rent-controlled apartment, and in fact it was that and more. If you were a boater, it afforded you economical dockage far m
ore convenient than marinas like the one at City Island, way up in the remote north-eastern region of the Bronx. But most of the boats moored at Seventy-ninth Street never left their slips, and many of them didn’t even have working engines, running their lights and appli-ances off propane generators. They were houseboats, with the stress very much on the first syllable, and their lucky occupants were able to live a raffish Bohemian life in wave-rocked comfort for considerably less than it would have cost them to park a car anywhere in Manhattan.
The great wonder in the Carpenter’s mind was that it had taken him this long to think of it. What better place to pass unnoticed than in a derelict boat on the Hudson? His own apartment was ten minutes away, and he knew the Boat Basin well enough. Once, when his children were young, he’d had fantasies of keeping a boat there. It would have been pleasant to take them all boating on a summer afternoon, then walk on home through the twilight . . .
He’d been coming to the park now for several nights, keeping out of the way of the occasional cop on patrol, always choosing a bench out of the reach of the streetlights. Now and then, in the hours between midnight and dawn, he’d go for a closer look at the dark and silent vessels.
The Basin dwellers, he knew, were a close-knit group, in the manner of a gathering of outcasts. They respected one another’s privacy but stood united against a common enemy—i. e. , the real estate interests and municipal authorities who periodically con-spired to get rid of them. It wouldn’t do, he knew, to take over the home of some gregarious houseboater, some pillar of the floating community.
Better to supplant a part-time resident, to slip like a hermit crab into the empty shell of a pleasure boater with an apartment somewhere else. And that way he’d be assured of a seaworthy vessel, one he could take out onto the water if he wished.
So he waited, looking for an opportunity. And he was watching patiently that evening when a boat pulled in and docked. It was a nice-looking one; he’d seen it the night before, noticed earlier this evening that it was not at its slip. He’d seen fishing poles on hooks above the cabin, and supposed the fellow had gone out for a night’s fishing, or just to get out on the water and look up at the stars.
The lights went out, the engines ceased to throb. A man, wearing a brass-buttoned blazer and a Greek fisherman’s cap, walked from the pier and headed east through the park.
The Carpenter followed him.
O V E R T H E N E X T T H R E E days the Carpenter learned that the man’s name was Peter Shevlin and that he lived in one of the fine prewar apartment buildings on West Eighty-sixth Street between Columbus and Amsterdam. The lobby was attended around the clock, and the Carpenter never even considered entering it.
Shevlin worked in a high-rise office building on Sixth Avenue in the Fifties, and rode to and from his office on the subway. He seemed to live alone, and to spend much of his time alone. One evening he stopped on his walk from the subway to pick up dinner for one at a taco stand on Broadway, and that reinforced the Carpenter’s conviction that he did not share his apartment with a wife or lover.
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