Is it possible to feel ecstasy and agony, triumph and defeat at the same time? I stared at them, trying to be objective, she in her anguish, he with a fat lip and festooned in gore. Still, I had to admit, they made a plummy couple. Was it possible that they fueled each other, that he was indeed more to her than a sport-fucking hobby? Or was it that this simpleton, this petty, posturing, mirror-loving blowout patch had the skill to abandon her at precisely the right moment and because of it was once again her desire? Had his suspension of caresses revitalized her love?

So I stood there, sapped of strength, watching their ardor unfold. Abdul had disappeared; some innate good sense had told him they should be left alone. And I too realized that anything I might do or say was best stifled. I hated the idea of her casting me out of her life like yesterday’s tabloid, forsaking me thoroughly, but my love for her wasn’t going anywhere and it never would. If I had the nine lives of an alley cat I might have considered devoting two or three of them to Valerie, but no, not this way, not even when her shadow arched over the one life I had. I had to get away from her, from Chatterton, from the blight of that wretched house. Maybe time, that sweet restorative, might induce forgetfulness. Maybe I’d leave a note to be forwarded to her after I left.

Dear Val,

Yours to command, perhaps

someday.

Your worshipful

Judd

I tore it up in my head, then and there.

EIGHTEEN
KEEPER OF THE FLAME

“It’s an outrage,” Phillips Chatterton proclaims, shuffling into my cell.

As if I didn’t know.

Chatterton is followed by his adjutant Gorelik, who hands me a carton of Sherman’s cigarettes. He knows I don’t smoke, but he also knows that people of the most uncompromising disciplines are apt to disregard them under stress. Perhaps, his reason dictates, I might find solace in the weed.

As if to win me to its magic, he tears open the carton, lifts out a pack, breaks the seal, and sticks a butt in his mouth, lights up and inhales with deep pleasure.

“Terrible!” Chatterton rages.

“This place,” Gorelik observes “iss enough to puke a pig.”

Chatterton shakes his shaggy mane. “Who would have thought…?” He makes a few damnatory noises. “Why I don’t understand—why did you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Behave so abominably.”

Slowly perception dawns: the outrage he refers to is not my confinement but some heinous crime of my own making.

“What did I do? I’d like to know.”

“Espionage,” he says. “I have it on good authority.”

“Abdul? Abdul’s a fucking liar. Why don’t you ask your daughter?”

“I have. She of course denies it. But I’m trying to maintain a certain objectivity.”

“How could I be a spy?”