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Title Page

Devlin

A Novel

Roderick Thorp

Dedication

For

Michele

with love

NEW YORK CITY MONDAY, JUNE 30, 1986

NEW YORK CITY MONDAY, JUNE 30, 1986

4:22 P.M. …

4:22 P.M. …

As usual, the young woman reserved the room and arrived a few minutes early. She stripped to her panties and bra, then put her shoes on again before she lit a joint.

The shoes were the idea of the man she was waiting for. She was growing increasingly uneasy with this business, and so having to keep the shoes on, at least for the preliminaries, was more than a little annoying. What really bothered her was the increased riskiness of these meetings. Because of his prominence, the man was being absolutely reckless, choosing hotels for these special sessions. They had a perfectly safe way of meeting at her apartment uptown, but this was something he needed. He was fixated. They had a game in which the impersonality of the hotel room was a part, a little ritual he had to go through, step-by-step, touching a dozen ever more desperate grace notes until he was ready for the jackpot.

The man’s peculiarities were nothing new to the young woman, or terribly unpleasant. She had had affairs with an actor, a congressman, and a black football player—in that order, a bisexual, a sadist, and a searcher for the perfect fellatrix. The current festivities always began exactly as the man had written in a letter that had arrived unexpectedly at her apartment this past spring. The story of his sex life, all his damned excuses and justifications, including who was doing what to whom among his big deal friends. Now that you have read this, destroy it—stuff like that, describing what he wanted her to do.…

Their drama began when he asked her if she had destroyed the letter. “Did you destroy the letter?” Now she had to hear the question only once to be driven completely nuts. He wanted her angry, wanted to feel her rage. And rage was all right with her. She didn’t lie to herself about her negative feelings about men, and she had more than enough experience to draw on to go thermonuclear, if that was what he wanted. Her father was an alcoholic suburban squire whose beatings had made a crippled, dependent old woman of her mother. Sometimes just recalling her father’s smoothly shaven, booze-bloated puss was enough to propel the young woman to violence.…

“Did you destroy the letter?”

“Yes, I told you.”