“Tomorrow night?” he said. “And the next day?”

“Well, sure. As long as it's at night. I'm shooting in the day. Where's your studio?”

“I don't rent studios. It's all location. We can do it right here. You've got a great kitchen.” He looked at Rune. “Come on, can't we talk you into it?”

“Some other time.”

“All right... See you then,” he said to Nicole and kissed her on the cheek. He waved to Rune and let himself out.

Rune said, “He's cute. He's available. He cooks. That's a combination you can't beat.”

But Nicole was looking off.

Rune said, “What's the matter?”

“Nothing.”

“What?”

She hesitated. Then said, “This job. The one Tommy's doing?”

“Yeah?”

“I hope it works out. I hope I don't blow it.”

“You'll do fine.”

“I'd give anything to get out of the business.”

“I thought you liked it.”

Nicole walked to the couch and sat down. “Did you watch Current Events last night? That TV program? There were these women protesting porn theaters, picketing some of the theaters. They said some terrible things. My name was on the marquee. I mean, they didn't say anything about me specifically but you could see my name. And this lady is like, all this porn makes women get raped and children get molested. And this other woman goes, They've set back the women's movement twenty years.' Yada, yada, yada... I felt so guilty.”

Suddenly she was crying.

Rune debated for a second or two. Her hand slipped to the trigger of the video camera. The lens was pointed directly at Nicole.

Looking off, Nicole said, “I don't mean to do anything bad. I don't want to hurt people. But, I mean, people came to see me and got killed in that theater. And maybe after one of my films some guy goes out and picks up a hooker and gets AIDS. That's terrible.”

She looked at Rune, and the tears were coming steadily now. “These movies, the thing is, it's all I can do. I make love good. But I'm such a failure at anything else. I've tried. It doesn't work... It's such a hard feeling, to hate the one thing you're good at.”

Rune touched Nicole's arm, but she did so carefully. She wanted to make sure her own hand didn't slip into the field of view of the whirring Sony.

The owner of the theater on Forty-seventh Street between Broadway and Eighth was a fifty-two-year-old Indian immigrant from Bombay who had come to this country twelve years earlier.