"It's probably been done."

"Get in touch with each other's feelings by exchanging clothes. I see it becoming big. Huge rallies in ballparks and concert halls. When people join the movement they have to fill in forms telling what size clothes they wear. We need a name for it."

He leaned across the table and poured an inch of bourbon into the glass she held in her lap. Then he filled his own glass and got some cold cuts out of the refrigerator and sat back down.

"Apparel Personality Exchange," she said.

"Some mustard on this?"

"APE."

"You're in the wrong business," he said. "You ought to be promoting, merchandising."

"My father was an advertising immortal."

"It shows."

"You mean the apartment. Really, I'm not all that consumer-oriented or brand-conscious. It's just a phase I went through about a year ago. I bought a lot of shiny stuff and maybe I regret it. But my father, getting back to that, he did the midget campaign for Maytag. It made him an immortal."

"I guess I missed it."

"Wash a midget in your Maytag."

"I did miss it."

"We used to argue all the time. It was awful. I thought he was the absolute lowest form of toad in the whole sick society. I was living with Penner then. And I'd see my father twice a year and we'd have these all-out screaming fights about the consumer society and revolution and all the rest of it. I remember seeing _Zabriskie Point_ about then and that scene at the end when the house blows up and all those brightly colored products go exploding through the air in slow motion. God, that made my whole year. That was the high point of whatever year that was. And I tried to get old Ted Robbins to go see it, just out of spite, out of petty malice, all those packages of detergent and powdered soup and Qtips and eye liner and that whole big house, boom."

"Who's Penner?"

"Remember Gary Penner? The demolitions expert who traveled all over the country blowing up things. Dial-aBomb."

"Yes," Selvy said.

"Feared coast to coast. FBI wanted him badly. He was J. Edgar's secret obsession. I lived with Penner for seven months. _Running Dog_ was in its prime then. We used to run statements from Penner about once a month hinting at what bank or whatever target in what city was due to get it next. I actually wrote the statements. Oh, it was a weird time. Weird times were upon us. Penner was _the_ strangest son of a bitch. I mean he was wrapped up in explosives beyond human comprehension. He was also the meanest bastard you'd ever want to come across."

"But you like mean bastards."

"Fortunately I like mean bastards."

"He got it how?"

"Some woman shot him, finally. Motel in Arizona. About a year after we split up. _Running Dog_ did an obit with a black border."

Feeling a sneeze coming on, Selvy got up, moved away from the food on the table, whipped the towel off his waist and got it up to his nose just in time. Then he tossed the towel in the direction of the open bathroom door. They looked at each other. She downed all but a few drops of bourbon. Then she put her thumb under the elastic band of the long Johns, pulled it away from her belly and poured the last of the liquor down into the opening. She watched Selvy react interestingly and involuntarily. She got up, put the glass on the table and walked toward the bedroom, touching him lightly as she passed.

When Moll woke up later it was early evening. A soft rain was falling. It seemed to hang out there rather than actually descend. She felt a chill and reached down to the floor for the sheets and bedspread. She started to place them carefully over Selvy's body, in order not to wake him, when she realized he was watching her. She bit his shoulder and licked at his nipples. He moved, resettling himself, eyes closed now, as she kissed his lids and brows and moved the tips of her fingers across his chest.

"I know whose limousine that was," she said.

He faced the ceiling, eyes closed.

"Senator Percival, wasn't it?"

With her finger she traced a hank of hair around his left ear.

"I know you work for him, Glen. He's an avid collector of explicit art. You scout for him and do his buying."

Her hand on his chest rose and fell with the beat of his even breathing.

"He can't do it himself, obviously. You do it for him, following his instructions, presumably, and using administrative cover. Look, we may or may not end up using Percival in the series I'm doing but if you can help me get at the collection, great, fantastic. If not, I understand. I may be able to manage it myself."

She watched his eyes come open.

"I even know your first name," she said.

Before she knew what was happening, he was kneeling between her legs and hefting her up toward him, his hands at her hips, making her arch, and then was in her, cleanly, and driving, using his hands to force her body tighter onto his. Her head back on the pillow, pelvis way off the bed and knees up, she watched him grimace and stroke and then had to close her eyes, abandoning the visible world to enter this region of borderline void, his nails burning into her hips.

When she woke this second time it was the middle of the night. She half dreamed various things, a run-on series of images, and slept, and woke again. She kept picturing Selvy in a military setting, a barracks usually. He's standing around in white cotton boxer shorts, a dog tag around his neck. Maybe she was mixing Monty Clift into it, in _From Here to Eternity_. She pictured Selvy doing a hundred pushups in his white shorts. She pictured him sitting on a cot, spit-shining his boots. She pictured him running laps, his rifle at high port, sweat beginning to dampen his combat fatigues.

Without turning his way or reaching an arm across the bed, she knew he was no longer there.

3

People who don't make the trip every day have a tendency to grow silent as the train passes through Harlem. It isn't shock or gloom so much as sheer fascination that brings on the hush. The pleasure of ruins. The eye's delight in finding instructive vistas. It's so interesting to look at, so numbly colorful, especially from this distance, and while moving through.

Selvy got off at the Bronxville station and took a cab along Palmer Road. They turned left across an overpass and into a quiet street in the less expensive section. Kiara Ludecke lived in a small attractive house on this street.

His instructions weren't specific. She'd been traveling in Europe. Why and precisely where. He didn't care to get involved in side issues, such as her husband's murder, being concerned only with the dead man's connection to the Senator and the leverage it provided.

Her face was a near circle, though pretty. She was somewhat broad of figure, maybe thirty years old, and spoke in an accent that was pleasant to hear even in its odder journeys through certain words. She led him to a dark parlor and then sat waiting in a straightbacked chair, hands folded on her knees.

"You've been away, Mrs. Ludecke."

"To Aachen, in West Germany."

"Your husband was born there."

"Yes, in 1944, I believe."

"Why this particular time to travel? Your husband had just been murdered. You spoke once to the police and then disappeared."

"My husband has relatives there, still. I wished to see them. You must understand I needed to be close to people who loved him. I was not capable to deal with things."

"You've come back-why?"

She made a sweeping gesture to indicate the house, possessions, legalities, disengagements.

"You're not staying."

"It would be impossible."

"Are you going back to Germany?"

"I don't know. Perhaps that's what I'll finally do. At least my husband's family is there. His own father died seven months ago but there are brothers and sisters who have been very kind to me, and Christoph's mother as well."