Then I stopped being a cop, gave up the detective's gold shield about the same time I let go of the house and the wife and the kids. Elaine and I rarely saw anything of each other. We might have lost track of each other altogether if either of us had moved, but we both stayed put. My drinking got worse, and finally after a few trips to detox I began to get the hang of not drinking.

I had been doing that for a couple of years, a day at a time, and then one day some trouble came at Elaine out of the past. It came specifically from a part of the past we had shared, and it wasn't just her trouble, it belonged to both of us. Dealing with it brought us together again, though it was hard to say just what that meant. She was, certainly, a very close friend. She was also the only person I saw with any frequency with whom I had a history, and for that reason alone she was important to me.

She was also the person I was sleeping with two or three nights a week, and just what that meant and just where it was going was beyond me. When I talked about it with Jim Faber, my AA sponsor, he told me to take it a day at a time. If you make it a habit to give advice like that in AA, before you know it you have a reputation as a sage.

THE doorman called upstairs on the intercom, pointed me to the elevator. Elaine was waiting in the doorway, her hair in a ponytail, wearing hot-pink pedal pushers and a lime-green sleeveless blouse with the top buttons unbuttoned. She sported oversized gold hoop earrings and enough makeup to look marginally sluttish, which was an effect she never achieved unintentionally.

I said, "See? Natural beauty."

"So glad you appreciate it, meestair."

"It's that simple unspoiled look that gets me every time."

I followed her inside and she took the cassette from me. "The Dirty Dozen," she read. "This is the movie you absolutely positively have to see tonight?"

"So I'm told."

"Lee Marvin against the Nazis? That Dirty Dozen? You could have told me and I could have run down the whole plot for you over the phone. I saw it when it first came out and I couldn't tell you how many times I've seen it on television. Everybody's in it, Lee Marvin, Telly Savalas, Charles Bronson, Ernest Borgnine, and what's his name, he was in M*A*S*H-"

"Alan Alda?"

"No, the movie M*A*S*H, and not Elliott Gould, the other one. Donald Sutherland."

"Right, and Trini Lopez."

"I forgot about Trini Lopez. He gets killed right away when they parachute in."

"Don't spoil it for me."

"Very funny. Robert Ryan's in it, isn't he? And Robert Webber, he died just recently, he was such a good actor."

"I know Robert Ryan's dead."

"Robert Ryan died years ago. They're both gone, both Roberts. You've seen this movie, haven't you? Of course you have, everybody has."

"Time and time again."

"So why do you have to see it now? Business?"

I wondered myself. Will had made sure I was a detective before handing it to me. "Possibly," I said.

"Some business. I wish I got paid to watch old movies."

"Do you? I wish I got paid to screw."

"Nice, very nice. Be careful what you pray for. You're really gonna watch this or is that a gun in your pocket?"

"Huh?"

"Mae West. Forget it. Can I watch with you, or will that impede your concentration?"

"You're welcome to watch," I said, "but I'm not sure what we're going to be watching."

"The Dirty Dozen, n'est-ce pas? Isn't that what it says on the label?" She slapped herself on the forehead, Peter Falk's Columbo pretending to be struck by the obvious. "Counterfeit labels," she said. "You're doing more trademark-infringement work, right?"

I had been working per diem for a large investigations agency, hassling street vendors for selling Batman knock-offs, T-shirts and visors and such. Decent pay, but it was mean work, rousting new arrivals from Dakar and Karachi who didn't have a clue what they were doing wrong, and I hadn't had the heart for it. "I don't think that's exactly it," I said.

"Copyright, I mean. Somebody knocked off the packaging and stuck it on a bootleg tape. Am I right?"

"I don't think so," I said, "but you can keep right on guessing. The only thing is I'll have to watch the tape to know if you're right or wrong."

"Oh," she said. "Well, what the hell. Let's watch it."

IT started off looking like just what the label promised. The opening credits rolled and Lee Marvin went from cell to cell. We were introduced to the twelve American soldiers who would make up the dirty dozen, killers and rapists and all-around fuck-ups under death sentences for their crimes.

"To my untrained eye," Elaine said, "this looks remarkably like the movie I remember."

It went on looking like it for ten minutes or so, and I was beginning to wonder if Will might have problems beyond mere alcoholism and chemical dependency. Then the screen went abruptly blank right in the middle of a scene and the soundtrack cut out. The screen stayed blank for perhaps ten seconds, and then it showed a slender young man with a boyishly open, midwestern sort of face. He was cleanshaven, and his light brown hair was parted at the side and neatly combed. He was naked except for a canary-yellow towel around his middle.

His wrists and ankles were shackled to an X-shaped metal frame that stood at a 60-degree angle to the floor. In addition to the metal shackles at his wrists and ankles, leather cuffs had been fitted around each leg just above the knee and each arm just above the elbow, and there was a matching leather belt around his waist, part of it obscured by the yellow towel. All of these devices looked to be holding him quite securely in place.

He did not appear to be particularly uncomfortable, and he had a tentative smile on his face. He said, "Is that thing running? Hey, am I supposed to say anything or what?"

A male voice off-camera told him to shut up. The young man's mouth was open and he closed it. I could see now that he was no more than a boy, not so much cleanshaven as beardless. He was tall, but he didn't look to be more than sixteen or so. There was no hair on his chest, although he did have a pale tuft in each armpit.

The camera stayed on the boy, and a woman moved into the frame. She was about as tall as the boy but looked taller because she was standing erect, not spreadeagled and tied to a crossframe. She wore a mask, the sort of device the Lone Ranger wore, but hers looked to be of black leather. That made it a match for the rest of her outfit, skintight black leather pants open at the crotch and black gloves that covered her clear to the elbows. She wore black shoes with three-inch spike heels and silver trim at the toes, and that was all she wore. She was naked above the waist, and the nipples of her small breasts were erect. They were also scarlet, the same shade as her full mouth, and I suspected she'd daubed them with lipstick.

"There's that simple unspoiled look you go for," Elaine said. "This is shaping up to be dirtier than The Dirty Dozen."

"You don't have to watch."

"What did I tell you before? I can stand it if you can. I used to have a client who liked to watch bondage films. They always struck me as pretty silly. Would you ever want me to tie you up?"

"No."

"Or to tie me up?"

"No."

"Maybe we're missing something. Fifty million perverts can't be wrong. Ah, here we go."

The woman unfastened the boy's towel and tossed it aside. Her gloved hand caressed him, and he became aroused at once.

"Ah, youth," Elaine said.

The camera moved in for a close-up of her hand gripping him, manipulating him. Then it pulled back and she released him and tugged at each finger of the glove in turn, finally removing it.