I thought of Fran Schecter on Morton Street, convinced she and Chance were bound by karmic ties, with innumerable lifetimes ahead of them.

“She was planning on leaving her pimp,” I said.

“For another man?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

She’d never seen Kim with anyone in particular, never paid much attention to the men who visited Kim’s apartment. Such visitors were few at night, anyway, she explained, and she herself was at work during the day.

“I thought she’d bought the fur herself,” she said. “She was so proud of it, as if someone had bought it for her, but I thought she wanted to conceal her shame at having had to buy it for herself. I’ll bet she did have a boyfriend. She showed it off with that air, as if it had been a gift from a man, but she didn’t come out and say so.”

“Because the relationship was a secret.”

“Yes. She was proud of the fur, proud of the jewelry. You said she was leaving her pimp. Is that why she was killed?”

“I don’t know.”

“I try not to think about her having been killed, or how or why it happened. Did you ever read a book called Watership Down?” I hadn’t. “There’s one colony of rabbits in the book, a sort of semidomesticated colony. The food’s in good supply there because human beings leave food for the rabbits. It’s sort of rabbit heaven, except that the men who do this do so in order to set snares and provide themselves with a rabbit dinner from time to time. And the surviving rabbits, they never refer to the snare, they never mention any of their fellows who’ve been killed that way. They have an unspoken agreement to pretend that the snare does not exist, and that their dead companions never existed.” She’d been looking to one side as she spoke. Now her eyes found mine. “Do you know, I think New Yorkers are like those rabbits. We live here for whatever it is that the city provides—the culture, the job opportunities, whatever it is. And we look the other way when the city kills off our friends and neighbors. Oh, we read about it and we talk about it for a day or two days but then we blink it all away. Because otherwise we’d have to do something about it, and we can’t. Or we’d have to move, and we don’t want to move. We’re like those rabbits, aren’t we?”