Mac, holding the umbrella down over his head, went back to his car, got in, and closed the door after him. Then I saw Murray gesturing to the blond guy, and I could hear a few words he was saying. “Wait a minute. I’ll get it for you.”

Murray came back to the car and said in a loud voice, “I’m going to give him his goddamned four thousand and get your pictures back.”

Like a little idiot I said, “But, Murray, I don’t have four thousand dollars.”

In a rasping whisper he said, “Shut up.” And he reached in and took out a brown bag that looked like it was stuffed with something. He straightened up and gestured to the blond guy to go and stand inside the covered-over dead-end alley where he could count the money out of the rain and see that it was right.

I watched as Murray walked toward the alley, his back to me. The other guy stood with his face turned toward me, and I could see him through the rain, somewhat blurred. Then I saw Murray reaching into the bag as though to start giving the money to the young guy. Next thing I knew there were three very soft pops, and the young guy collapsed on the ground. Nobody but me could see into the alley, and then Murray walked back to the car at normal speed and shoved something into his pocket. He got into the car and we drove away. I was still sitting in the back seat.

“My God, Murray, what did you do?” I asked.

As usual, he just said, “Don’t worry.”

“But how can I help worrying?” I said. “Murray, you just shot a man, three times. I heard you shoot him with a silencer on your gun. Was that what you had in the bag?” I kept asking questions as we drove back toward New York.

Finally Murray said, “Kid, we don’t take halfway measures with bastards like these. What right do they have to blackmail a hard-working girl like you?”

“But, Murray, you still don’t have the pictures,” I pointed out.

All the way back to New York Murray didn’t say anything except, “Don’t worry, I’ll deliver the pictures tomorrow:” But in my mind I kept seeing this young boy slowly collapse and fall in the alley.

Okay, he was a head, a junkie. But I saw him lying there. It was horrible to me. He was killed to get three lousy pictures back. So I kept insisting, “Murray, please tell me what happened so far.”

Finally he said, “That jerk in the front seat didn’t see or hear me shoot the kid because I had a silencer on my gun. There’s a lot of work yet to do tonight. I’ve got to get rid of the gun.”

“But what about the guy in the front seat?” I asked. I was still worrying about getting my pictures back.

“He’ll be taken care of, too,” Murray said, staring out the windshield at the wet street.

“He’s going to he killed, too?” I tried to keep my voice low.

“That’s about it,” Murray said. “Two of my boys were hiding behind the cemetery walls.”

He laughed harshly. “Those finks couldn’t pick a sweeter place – for me. In about ten or fifteen minutes that slughead in the front seat will wonder where his hopped-up friend is, and when he goes to look for him…” Murray laughed again.

“When he sees his buddy lying in the alley, my two guys will grab him. And what happens after that, I’ll tell you tomorrow.”

At five minutes to nine Murray left me off in front of my apartment and said he would see me tomorrow. I went up to my apartment just in time to answer the bell, when this straight lawyer I had a date with came around. Here I had been going through the most scary hours of my life, and this lawyer comes in fresh and peppy and says, Hi, how are you? Nice to meet you. Regards to the stockbroker and this and that.

I could hardly talk. We went down to Chinatown to a restaurant. I dropped two plates on the floor be fore I got down half a spoon of wonton soup.

Finally I told the guy, “Listen, I’m so shook up about something I can’t tell you. Take me to a hotel. Fuck me. Do whatever you want, but don’t take me home. I don’t want to go home. I’m not even going to work tomorrow.”

I told him the story about halfway, not everything, of course. He was nice, and he took me to his room and fucked me all night and gave me a hundred dollars in the morning even though I, for the first time in my life, just lay there like an Egyptian mummy.

The next morning at eleven o’clock the lawyer dropped me off in front of my house and I was just about to walk up to my apartment building when I saw Murray in his moving van. There was a big smile on his face, and an envelope in his hands. I went over to him, and he took the pictures out, and there were all the pictures Mac had stolen that night.

“Murray,” I said, “come up and tell me what happened.” So Murray came up, and we had some coffee and he told me everything.

Right after he left me off, he had to dispose of the gun. Meanwhile the two Mafia guys at the cemetery grabbed Mac as he was leaning over the young blond guy, who was dead with three bullets from Murray’s gun with the silencer.

“Listen, buddy,” they said, “if you don’t show us the place where the pictures of the girl are, then you’ll end up like your pal here, dead. Right?”

Mac got in their car and took them to some crumby apartment in Queens. Murray’s guys found thousands of pictures of girls, different girls they had been blackmailing for the last year or two.

Murray’s guys knew what I looked like, and Mac was so scared from seeing his dopehead friend dead that he gave them my pictures immediately.

But Murray and his Mafia guys weren’t content just to get my pictures back. These blackmailers were working without what you might call a franchise from the Mafia godfather or whatever in Queens.

They made Mac tell them who was behind this whole blackmail syndicate, and he was so scared he said, “Okay, it’s a lawyer in Brooklyn.”

Mac took them to this lawyer, and then Murray’s hoods grabbed him, too, and three people were taken care of in total.

The two Mafia guys and Murray had to dispose of three bodies that same night.

This is what Murray told me, and obviously I realized that I had to compensate these guys for their services. At least it wouldn’t be $5,000.

But in the meantime, I was being so stupid and such an idiot that after Murray told me all this and showed me he had my pictures back, I said, “Murray, I don’t want those pictures in the house anymore. I don’t want them. You get rid of them for me.” So far he hadn’t asked for any money. But eventually Murray charged me two thousand dollars for services rendered.

And, of course, this morning was not the last time I was to see Murray. Just a few weeks later he came back to see me and suggested I ought to invest my money with him. By lending it, I would get back more in a couple of months.

I could see he wasn’t asking me if I wanted to make an investment, he was telling me I had to. I was making money by then, having left the UN job to go full-time into the business, so I gave Murray $2,000. He said he would put it in the street for me, shylock it. And for me, he explained, it would mean making five to ten percent interest on the money each week and of course getting it back in a short time. Naturally I let myself forget I was dealing with somebody who was involved with very many bad people and who was, even though he helped me, a pretty bad character himself.

After I gave the money to Murray I waited each week for some payment on interest, but nothing happened except that Murray kept coming around for freebies and gave me excuses why he didn’t have my money. Finally, when I started to be insistent with Murray, he said, “Look, Xaviera, don’t worry. You’ll get your money. just don’t bug me. Remember what happened to those jerks that bugged you?”

The message was very clear. Now the problem was how to stop Murray from coming around. I would gladly have given him another thousand if I never had to see him again. I was almost as worried about getting involved with Murray and his people as I was about the pictures. He even was sending friends to me and telling me to be nice to them. I would almost get sick every time he called.