“You would?”

She brightened. The delicious lips trembled ever so slightly.

“Word of honor.”

The tears stopped. The great eyes glowed.

“Who would you murder?” she whispered. “Anybody I know?”

I thought desperately of the soonest victim.

“An old pawnbroker,” I said. “With an axe.”

“Really?”

“Cross my heart.”

“And then you’d come and trust me with your secret?”

“Yes.”

She sank back into the warm upholstery of the theatre seat. She huddled happily into her fur coat. She seemed immensely satisfied. She looked up at the screen where police cars wailed along the quais of the Seine and a fictional murderer was being brought to bay by a triumphant fictional detective. Then once again, fractionally, her head moved. She whispered sepulchrally:

“Asher?”

“Yes, dear?”

“May I have some popcorn?” Aurora said.

22

She was delightful. I had been married twice, and each time for a considerable length of time. Worms, of one sort or another, had always eaten at the hearts of the women I’d known. I could remember the dissatisfied faces; the ill-temper; the quarrel that had no beginning and no end. I had quarreled, and reconciled, and the reconciliations were perhaps the bitterest thing of all. It was impossible to trace the course by which love, or what had seemed to be love, had soured and gone wrong. But it had always soured and it had always gone wrong.

The years after my divorce from my first wife were the years that were identifiable I suppose as my successful years. They were the years of the big, or at least large, money. It is astonishing how much more easily the large money comes to you in that time than the small money did in the other years. I could remember how, somewhat clownishly, I had celebrated the occasion of my first big paycheck by having it split into ten-dollar bills and covering the top of an office desk from corner to corner. Money made a marvelous blotter.