"I know more than I did last night."

"And you knew more then than you let on."

"Maybe you'd better just tell me what's bothering you."

He thought about it, then nodded shortly. He patted his pockets and found the sketch I'd given him the night before. He unfolded it and looked from it to me. He asked if I knew who it was.

"Why don't you tell me?"

"His name is Bergen Stettner."

Good, I thought.

"I'm afraid he's going to kill me."

"Why? Has he ever killed anyone before?"

"God," he said. "I don't know where to start."

HE said, "I never met anyone like Bergen before. He started to come around after the buy-in and we hit it off right away. I thought he was fantastic. Very strong, very sure of himself, and when you're with him it's very easy to believe that the ordinary rules don't apply. The first time I met him he took me back to his apartment. We drank champagne on the terrace with all of Central Park spread out below us like our private backyard.

"The next time I was over there I met his wife. Olga. Beautiful woman, and there was so much sexual energy around her it was dizzying. He went to the bathroom and she sat down next to me and put her hand in my lap and started stroking me through my pants. 'I want to suck your cock,' she said. 'I want you to fuck me in the ass. I want to sit on your face.' I couldn't believe what was happening. I was sure he'd walk in and catch us like that, but by the time he came back she was sitting in a chair on the other side of the room, talking about one of the paintings.

"The next day he kept telling me how much Olga liked me, how she said they should see more of me. A few days later we went out to dinner with them, my wife and I. It was awkward, because there was this whole thing going on between me and Olga. At the end of the evening Bergen kissed Amanda's hand, very Continental, but with a self-mocking quality to it at the same time. And Olga gave me her hand to kiss, and it smelled of, well, it smelled of pussy. She must have touched herself. And I looked up at her, you know, and there was this expression on her face, it got to me as much as the smell did.

"Of course he knew everything that was going on, they planned it together, I know all that now. The next time I was over at their apartment he said he had something to show me, it wasn't something I'd be likely to see on cable but he thought it would interest me. He put on a videocassette, and it was porno, an amateur video. Two men sharing a woman. Halfway through Olga came in and sat down next to me. I hadn't even known she was in the apartment, I'd thought Bergen and I were there alone.

"When the cassette ended Bergen took it off and put on another one. This one featured two women, one black and one white. The black woman was a slave. It took me a minute to realize that the white woman was Olga. I couldn't take my eyes off the screen.

"After it ended I looked around and Bergen had left the room. Olga and I tore our clothes off and got on the couch. At some point I realized Bergen was in the room, watching us. Then we all got up and went into the bedroom together."

ALONG with the sex Stettner fed him a steady diet of philosophy. Rules were for those who lacked the imagination to break them. Superior men and women made their own rules, or lived with none at all. He quoted Nietzsche often, and Olga put a New Age gloss on the old German. There were truly no victims when you claimed your power, because their fate was just a manifestation of their own desire for subjugation. They created their destiny even as you created yours.

One day Stettner called him at the office. "Stop what you're doing," he said. "Go downstairs, wait on the corner, I'll pick you up in fifteen minutes." Stettner took him for a long drive, telling him only that he had a gift for him. He parked in an unfamiliar neighborhood and led Thurman down a flight of stairs into a basement chamber. There he beheld a naked woman manacled to a metal frame, her mouth stopped with a gag. "She's yours," Stettner told him. "Do whatever you want with her."

He had sex with the woman. It would have been discourteous to refuse, like turning down a drink or a meal or any other offer of hospitality. Besides, the woman's utter helplessness was fiercely exciting to him. When he had finished having intercourse with her Stettner asked him if there was anything else he wanted to do to the woman. He said there wasn't.

They left the building and got back into Stettner's car. The older man told him to wait a minute, that there was something he had forgotten to do. He was back shortly and began driving. He asked Thurman if he'd ever been a woman's first lover. Thurman said that he had.

"But not your wife."

No, Thurman acknowledged. Amanda had not been a virgin when they met.

"Well, I have given you a gift," Stettner said. "You have already been a woman's first lover, and now you have been this one's last. That girl you were just with, no one will ever have her again, no one but the worms. Do you know what I did when I went back? I killed her for you. I took the gag out of her mouth, and I said, 'Goodbye, darling,' and I cut her throat."

Thurman didn't know what to say.

"You don't know if you should believe me. Maybe I just went back to take a piss, or to cut her loose. Do you want to go back and see for yourself?"

"No."

"Good. Because you know I always tell the truth. You're confused, you don't know how to feel about this. Relax. You didn't do anything. I did it. And she would have died anyway. No one lives forever." He reached over and took Thurman's hand in his. "We are closer than close, you and I. We are brothers in blood and semen."

IT had taken him a long time to pour the beer and now it was taking him longer to drink it. He would pick up the glass and have it halfway to his lips and set it down and resume talking. He didn't really care about the beer. He wanted to talk.

He said, "I don't know if he killed that woman. She could have been some whore hired for the occasion and he went back to pay her and let her free. Or he could have cut her throat the way he said. There's no way to know."

From that point on he was leading two lives. On the surface he was a young executive on the way up. He had a great apartment and a rich wife and a rosy future. At the same time he was living a secret life with Bergen and Olga Stettner.

"I learned to turn it on and off," he said. "Like you leave your job at the office, I left that whole side of myself for when I was with them. I saw them once, twice a week. We didn't always do anything. Sometimes we would just sit around and talk. But there was always that edge, that current flowing among us. And then I'd shut it off and go home and be a husband."

After he'd known the two of them for several months, Stettner needed his help.

"He was being blackmailed. There was a tape they had made. I don't know what was on it but it must have been bad because the cameraman kept a copy and he wanted fifty thousand dollars for it."

"Arnold Leveque," I said.

His eyes widened. "How did you know that? How much do you know?"

"I know what happened to Leveque. Did you help kill him?"

This time he got the glass to his lips. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said, "I swear I didn't know that was how it was going to go. He said he would pay the fifty thousand but he couldn't meet with Leveque, the man was afraid of him. It's not hard to guess why. He said it would be one payment and that would be the end of it, because the man would not be fool enough to try the same stunt twice.

"There's a Thai restaurant on the corner of Tenth Avenue and Forty-ninth Street. I met Leveque there. He was this comical fat man who waddled like a windup toy. He kept telling me that he was sorry to be doing this but he really needed the money. The more he said it the more despicable he seemed.