Young Markowitz the dancing fool.

The stem of the pipe broke between her fingers. She looked down on the ruined thing, incredulous. She slowly lifted the pieces of it and tried to match the jagged shards of the stem together as though for a moment she believed she could undo the breakage and make it whole again.

Her hands dropped to her lap and the pieces of the pipe rolled out of her grasp and fell soundlessly to the rug. She began to rock slowly from side to side in a cradle motion dredged up from a time beyond her remembering, beyond the existence of hiding and running, stealing food and dodging flying broken bottles and the baby-flesh pimps. She rocked and rocked, deaf to the sound of the doorbell, to the loud banging on the door and the sounds of Robin Duffy turning his years-ago-given key in the lock. And for a time, she was deaf to the sounds of that little bulldog of a man with the frightened eyes who was shaking her by the shoulders and yelling, "Kathy! Kathy!"

A man with a knife appeared in every shadow of leaves playing on the window shade. Margot Siddon pulled the blanket up over her head in the child's conviction that blankets were protection from monsters. She had given up on sleep. She dialed Henry Cathery's number in the dark; her fingers were that practised in this particular order of buttons. He was not happy at being awakened.

"What!" he said loudly in lieu of hello.

"Henry, it's me. Could you loan me twenty dollars?"

"Margot, are you crazy? You're rich. You've got at least a mill after taxes."

"Not yet I don't, and the apartment was sealed up by the police. I can't even get anything to pawn."

"Go to her bank in the morning. Make them give you an advance. I didn't even have to ask for my advance. The bank just sent me a draft of the repayment agreement." There was no "goodbye" before she heard the impersonal click of a broken connection.

She slammed the receiver to the cradle. What a weird bastard he was, or maybe, she thought, just maybe he was onto the rings she had copped from his grandmother's jewel box. He didn't live in Disneyland all the time. He had his moments of clarity, and she found those moments creepy as hell. It was like coming upon someone who had been walking in his sleep and now was awake to the nth degree, awake to the entire universe, plugged in, turned on. And in those moments, he had wired up to her brain and shocked it clean of memory for days at a time, nights in succession without bad dreams. He was the only one she knew who would talk to her about the man with the knife.

She didn't recall one personal conversation with old Cousin Samantha in all the years she'd sucked up to the woman.

At first, she'd been taken to Samantha's apartment as a child. Then later, after her mother remarried and disappeared, she had gone alone. Old Samantha had been good for fifty bucks at a touch, but at the great cost of hours of monotony.

Her mother had once talked about Samantha in the days when the old woman was young and beautiful. It was hard for Margot to imagine that old bag of bones with her hump and her trembles as a beauty. When Margot was little, the old woman had called the whole world Darling, without regard to gender, or to animate or inanimate qualities. Margot was darling and so was the bow in her hair, and each had carried the same weight in the old woman's babbling affectations and affections. Over the passing years Cousin Samantha's babble had become shrill, reaching, at the last, the pitch of a scream of fear.

After the man with the knife had done his work on Margot, the old woman had come to the hospital to visit her, but only the one time. Samantha had begged Margot to cover her face, to hide the scar, it was so upsetting. Then, fear filled them both, and every night. It was their only commonality after the rape. One woke up screaming with the fear of being alone. And twenty blocks south, the other woke with visions of the knife dancing up to her eyes and then down to her cheek, severing the nerve which had previously allowed her to smile on that side of her face.

She stared at the wall until it lightened with the dawn, and then she scooped clothes up from the pile on the floor which was nearest the bed. As she dressed, she missed the match of buttons on her vest and never noticed. There was no food in the house. She would go shopping at the supermarket when they gave her the advance money. She would ask for all of it in cash, small bills. She would buy the whole world and meat, red meat, and a jelly roll.

CHAPTER 6

The banker wished he had an office with a door he could close. The unpartitioned interior of the bank had all the privacy and the proportions of two stacked ballrooms. The expansive balcony, where his desk was situated, was entirely too public today. People were staring at the oddly dressed young woman seated opposite him. She had a disconcerting smirk on her face, and on one cheek was the crescent moon of a fading scar. Her clothes were dirty, and she was nodding off in her chair and catching herself awake.

"Miss Siddon," said the bank officer, "I have to wait on the executor's instructions before releasing any funds. There's no way around that. And as to the advance, you haven't been able to answer a single personal question about your cousin. If you can't even give me her middle name – "

"We didn't talk much."

"Perhaps if you spoke with her law firm."

"They keep saying they'll get back to me. But no one ever calls."

"Have your own attorney look into it."

"I don't have one, and you know it. Look, I need money, and I need it today. What good does a million dollars do me if I starve to death, huh? Can you answer me that?"

It had to be a scam, he knew, and not very original. He'd heard similar requests. This… person must be an avid reader of obituaries. But how embarrassing if she did turn out to be the heir to the Siddon trust. One couldn't be too careful. "Do you have some form of identification? A driver's license?"

"I don't drive."

"What sort of identification do you use when you write checks to merchants?"

"I don't write checks. I don't have a damn checking account."

Now, that had to be a lie. He knew for a fact that everyone on the planet had a checking account. "I can hardly give you money if you can't properly identify yourself. You can see that."

And yes, she could see that apparently, for she was rising out of the chair, dragging her body up to a stand. The long dress hung on her bones. The floppy brocade vest could not hide the thinness of her arms and face. Did she never eat? he wondered.

She was moving slowly towards the grand staircase leading down to the main floor. It had crossed his mind to give the creature some change from his own pocket, but he had thought better of it. Such a gesture might have led to a scene.

While he watched Margot Siddon's slow progress down the wide steps, he had a few spare minutes to remember he had once played lead guitar in a Sixties rock band. In his wife of twenty-five years, he could find traces of the hippy girl who had sung with the band and starved with the band. But who was this unmusical man who had just given the bum's rush to a woman who was certainly hungry?

He toyed with a paper clip as Margot Siddon turned at the base of the marble steps and moved across the wide expanse of gilded, wasted space, heading for the door. When she slipped and fell to the marble floor, he dropped his paper clip and dropped his eyes.

Riker kept a good distance from the glass wall of the office. He checked the exits for a fast retreat should Commissioner Beale look his way and call him in to be shot alongside Coffey. The gray little man was waving a newspaper in Coffey's face. Riker knew the headline by heart: Invisible Man Eludes NYPD.