He looked at her, eyes stricken. “Where does it end?”

This was the hardest part. How do you face it, the fact that the seed of death, hidden deep in the body, has started to grow? She could not speak. Overcoming her revulsion, she stroked his head, held his hand. There was a low, awful sound from his throat. “I loved you,” he whispered. “I trusted you so.”

It hurt most terribly.

3

3

JOHN RUSHED BLINDLY down Eighth Avenue, heading toward Forty-second Street. It was four the next morning. He wore an overcoat, a wide-brimmed hat to shadow his face and carried a Samsonite briefcase. Energy was leaving him like light from the sky. He kept the hatbrim snapped low over his face. Occasionally, he attracted some interest from a dark doorway. A boy woke up long enough to make a few disinterested sucking noises, a thin girl muttered again and again, “wanna bj, wanna bj,” like a grotesque machine, stopping the instant he had passed her doorway.

He was here because he was desperate and this was fast. The people on the streets now were more ruined than he was, too damaged to compete with the dirty glittering mob of the early night—or, perhaps, with him.

Then he saw what he was looking for, sitting in the window of the Mayfair Pancake House. The Mayfair was the hub of the neighborhood and John knew it well. In times past it had been a nickelodeon. A man would buy a paper flower and hold it in his lap while the latest epics from Union City jittered across the screen. When a girl took the flower he had a date.

His victim came out, having been summoned by his tap on the glass. She sidled to him like a dog, her face looking upward and to the right. “Ain’t I great,” she said. “Twenty bucks. You don’t see the bad side.” Her good profile was pure Cincinnati. But she had only half a dream—acid had melted the rest of her face into a glaring scar.

“Five bucks all the way,” John said.

“Hand job money if you come fast.”

“Ten bucks, that’s my offer.”

“Mister, you don’t look at the goddamn scar. I got my moves down. You never see it.”

“Ten.” They had to be bargained with; he would end up getting attacked in a dark hall if he bore the scent of the victim.

She grabbed his groin. “Fifteen.”

He pulled away.

“Anything for fifteen,” she hissed. “You can do anything.”

He hesitated. They stood as still as cats.

“SM,” she said, “beat shit outa me.”

“I don’t like that.”

“Man, you don’t want extras?” She came close again, her half-face smiling. “I thought you wanted extras. I’ll go ten, just a fuck.”