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“I was afraid for a moment you might have got it on my account. Thanks. What’s in the other bag, an enema bottle for our anniversary?”

Ab showed her the wig he’d bought for Beth. It was a silly, four-times-removed imitation of the Egyptian style made popular by a now-defunct TV series. To Leda it looked like something you’d find at the bottom of a box of Xmas wrapping, and she was certain it would look the same way to her daughter.

“My God,” she said.

“Well, it’s what the kids are wearing now” Ab said doubtfully. It no longer looked the same to him. He brought it over to the wedge of sunlight by the bedroom’s open window and tried to shake a bit more glitter into it. The metallic strings, rubbed against each other, made soft squeaking sounds.

“My God,” she said again. Her annoyance had almost betrayed her into asking him what he’d paid for it. Since the epochal argument beneath the plane tree she never discussed money matters with Ab. She didn’t want to hear how he spent his money or how he earned it. She especially didn’t want to know how he earned it, since she had, anyhow, a fair idea.

She contented herself with an insult. “You’ve got the discrimination of a garbage truck, and if you think Beth will let herself be seen in that ridiculous, obscene piece of junk, well… !” She pushed at the mattress until she was sitting almost upright. Both Leda and the bed breathed heavily.

“How would you know what people are wearing outside this apartment? There were hundreds of these fucking things all over the playground. It’s what the kids are wearing now. What the fuck.”

“It’s ugly. You bought your daughter an ugly wig. You have every right to, I suppose.”

“Ugly—isn’t that what you used to say about everything Milly wore? All those things with buttons. And the hats! It’s a stage they go through. You were probably just the same, if you could remember that long ago.”

“Oh, Milly! You’re always holding Milly up as though she were some kind of example! Milly never had any idea how—” Leda gave a gasp. Her pain. She pressed her hand flat against the roll of flesh to the side of her right breast, where she thought her liver might be. She closed her eyes trying to locate the pain, which had vanished.

Ab waited till Leda was paying attention to him again. Then, very deliberately, he threw the tinselly wig out the open window. Thirty dollars, he thought, just like that.

The manufacturer’s tag fluttered to the floor. A pink oval with italic letters: Nephertiti Creations.

With an inarticulate cry Leda swiveled sideways in bed till she’d made both feet touch the floor. She stood up. She took two steps and reached out for the window frame to steady herself.

The wig lay in the middle of the street eighteen floors below. Against the gray concrete it looked dazzlingly bright. A Tastee Bread truck backed up over it.

Since there was no reproach she might have made that didn’t boil down to a charge of his throwing away money, she said nothing. The unspoken words whirled round inside her, a plague-bearing wind that ruffled the wasted muscles of her legs and back like so many tattered flags. The wind died and the flags went limp.

Ab was ready behind her. He caught her as she fell and laid her back on the bed, wasting not a motion, smooth as a tango dip. It seemed almost accidental that his hands should be under her breasts. Her mouth opened and he put his own mouth across it, sucking the breath from her lungs.

Anger was their aphrodisiac. Over the years the interval between fighting and fucking had grown shorter and shorter. They scarcely bothered any longer to differentiate the two processes. Already his cock was stiff. Already she’d begun to moan her rhythmic protest against the pleasure or the pain, whichever it was. As his left hand kneaded the warm dough of her breasts, his right hand pulled off his shoes and pants. The years of invalidism had given her lax flesh a peculiar virginal quality, as though each time he went into her he was awakening her from an enchanted, innocent sleep. There was a kind of sourness about her too, a smell that seeped from her pores only at these times, the way maples yield sap only at the depth of the winter. Eventually he’d learned to like it.

A good sweat built up on the interface of their bodies, and his movements produced a steady salvo of smacking and slapping and farting sounds. This, to Leda, was the worst part of their sexual assaults, especially when she knew the children were at home. She imagined Beno, her youngest, her favorite, standing on the other side of the door, unable to keep from thinking of what was happening to her despite the horror it must have caused him. Sometimes it was only by concentrating on the thought of Beno that she could keep from crying out.

Ab’s body began to move faster. Leda’s, crossing the threshold between self-control and automatism, struggled upward away from the thrusts of his cock. His hands grabbed her hips, forcing her to take him. Tears burst from her eyes, and Ab came.

He rolled off, and the mattress gave one last exhausted whoosh.

“Dad?”

It was Beno, who certainly should have been in school. The bed-room door was halfway open. Never, Leda thought, in an ecstasy of humiliation, never had she known a moment to match this. Bright new pains leapt through her viscera like tribes of antelope.

“Dad,” Beno insisted. “Are you asleep?”

“I would be if you’d shut up and let me.”

“There’s someone on the phone downstairs, from the hospital. That Juan. He said it’s urgent, and to wake you if we had to.”

“Tell Martinez to fuck himself.”

“He said” Beno went on, in a tone of martyred patience that was a good replica of his mother’s, “it didn’t make any difference what you said and that once he explained it to you you’d thank him. That’s what he said.”

“Did he say what it was about?”

“Some guy they’re looking for. Bob Someone.”

“I don’t know who they want, and in any case…” Then it began to dawn: the possibility; the awful, impossible lightning bolt he’d known he would never escape. “Bobbi Newman, was that the name of the guy they’re looking for?”

“Yeah. Can I come in?”

“Yes, yes.” Ab swept the damp sheet over Leda’s body, which hadn’t stirred since he’d got off. He pulled his pants on. “Who took the call, Beno?”

“Williken did.” Beno stepped into the bedroom. He had sensed the importance of the message he’d been given and he was determined to milk it for a maximum of suspense. It was as though he knew what was at stake.

“Listen, run downstairs and tell Williken to hold Juan on the line until… ” One of his shoes was missing.

“He left, Dad. I told him you couldn’t be interrupted. He seemed sort of angry and he said he wished you wouldn’t give people his number anymore.”

“Shit on Williken then.”

His shoe was way the hell under the bed. How had he …?

“What was the message he gave you exactly? Did they say who’s looking for this Newman fellow?”

“Williken wrote it down, but I can’t read his writing. Margy it looks like.”

That was it then, the end of the world. Somehow Admissions had made a mistake in slotting Bobbi Newman for a routine cremation. She had a policy with Macy’s.

And if Ab didn’t get back the body he’d sold to White … “Oh Jesus,” he whispered to the dust under the bed.

“Anyhow you’re supposed to call them right back. But Williken says not from his phone ‘cause he’s gone out.”

There might be time, barely and with the best luck. White hadn’t left the morgue till after 3 a.m. It was still short of noon. He’d buy the body back, even if it meant paying White something extra for his disappointment. After all, in the long run White needed him as much as he needed White.

“Bye, Dad,” Beno said, without raising his voice, though by then Ab was already out in the hall and down one landing.

Beno walked over to the foot of the bed. His mother still hadn’t moved a muscle. He’d been watching her the whole time and it was as though she were dead. She was always like that after his father had fucked her, but usually not for such a long time. At school they said that fucking was supposed to be very healthful but somehow it never seemed to do her much good. He touched the sole of her right foot. It was soft and pink, like the foot of a baby, because she never walked anywhere.

Leda pulled her foot away. She opened her eyes.

White’s establishment was way the hell downtown, around the corner from the Democratic National Convention (formerly, Pier 19) which was to the world of contemporary pleasure what Radio City Music Hall had been to the world of entertainment—the largest, the mildest, and the most amazing. Ab, being a born New Yorker, had never stepped through the glowing neon vulva (seventy feet high and forty feet wide, a landmark) of the entrance. For those like Ab who refused to be grossed out by the conscious too-muchness of the major piers, the same basic styles were available on the side streets (“Boston” they called this area) in a variety of cooler colors, and here, in the midst of all that was allowed, some five or six illegal businesses eked out their unnatural and anachronistic lives.

After much knocking a young girl came to the door, the same probably who had answered the phone, though now she pretended to be mute. She could not have been much older than Beno, twelve at most, but she moved with the listless, enforced manner of a despairing housewife.

Ab stepped into the dim foyer and closed the door against the girl’s scarcely perceptible resistance. He’d never been inside White’s place before and he would not even have known what address to come to if he hadn’t once had to take over the delivery van for White, who’d arrived at the morgue too zonked out to function. So this was the market to which he’d been exporting his goods. It was less than elegant.

“I want to see Mr. White,” Ab told the girl. He wondered if she were another sideline.

She lifted one small, unhappy hand toward her mouth.

There was a clattering and banging above their heads, and a single flimsy facs-sheet drifted down through the half-light of the stairwell. White’s voice drifted down after it: “Is that you, Holt?”

“Damn right!” Ab started up the stairs but White, light in his head and heavy on his feet, was already crashing down to meet him.

White placed a hand on Ab’s shoulder, establishing the fact of the other man’s presence and at the same time holding himself erect. He had said yes to Yes once too often, or twice, and was not at this moment altogether corporeal.

“I’ve got to take it back,” Ab said. “I told the kid on the phone. I don’t care how much you stand to lose, I’ve got to have it.”

White removed his hand carefully and placed it on the banister. “Yes. Well. It can’t be done. No.”

“I’ve got to.”

“Melissa,” White said. “It would be … If you would please … And I’ll see you later, darling.”

The girl mounted the steps reluctantly, as though her certain future were waiting for her at the top. “My daughter,” White explained with a sad smile as she came alongside. He reached out to rumple her hair but missed by a few inches.

“We’ll discuss this, shall we, in my office?”

Ab helped him to the bottom. White went to the door at the far end of the foyer. “Is it locked?” he wondered aloud.

Ab tried it. It was not locked.

“I was meditating,” White said meditatively, still standing before the unlocked door, in Ab’s way, “when you called before. In all the uproar and whirl, a man has to take a moment aside to … ”

White’s office looked like a lawyer’s that Ab had broken into at the tag-end of a riot, years and years before. He’d been taken aback to find that the ordinary processes of indigence and desuetude had accomplished much more than any amount of his own adolescent smashing about might have.

“Here’s the story,” Ab said, standing close to White and speaking in a loud voice so there could be no misunderstanding. “It turns out that the one you came for last night was actually insured by her parents, out in Arizona, without her knowing. The hospital records didn’t say anything about it, but what happened is the various clinics have a computer that cross-checks against the obits. They caught it this morning and called the morgue around noon.”

White tugged sullenly on a strand of his sparse, mousy hair. “Well, tell them, you know, tell them it went in the oven.”

“I can’t. Officially we’ve got to hold them for twenty-four hours, just in case something like this should happen. Only it never does. Who would have thought, I mean it’s so unlikely, isn’t it? Anyhow the point is, I’ve got to take the body back. Now.”

“It can’t be done.”

“Has somebody already… ?”

White nodded.

“But could we fix it up again somehow? I mean, how, uh, badly … ”

“No. No, I don’t think so. Out of the question.”

“Listen, White, if I get busted over this, I won’t let myself be the only one to get hurt. You understand. There are going to be questions.”

White nodded vaguely. He seemed to go away and return. “Well then, take a look yourself.” He handed Ab an old-fashioned brass key. There was a plastic Yin and Yang symbol on the keychain. He pointed to a four-tier metal file on the far side of the office. “Through there.”

The file wouldn’t roll aside from the doorway until, having thought about it, Ab bent down and found the release for the wheels. There was no knob on the door, just a tarnished disc of lock with a word “Chicago” on it. The key fit loosely and the locks had to be coaxed.

The body was scattered all over the patchy linoleum. A heavy rose-like scent masked the stench of the decaying organs. No, it was not something you could have passed off as the result of surgery, and in any case the head seemed to be missing.

He’d wasted an hour to see this.

White stood in the doorway, ignoring, in sympathy to Ab’s feelings, the existence of the dismembered and disemboweled corpse. “He was waiting here, you see, when I went to the hospital. An out-of-towner, and one of my very … I always let them take away whatever they want. Sorry.”

As White was locking up the room again, Ab recollected the one thing he would need irrespective of the body. He hoped it hadn’t gone off with the head.

They found her left arm in the coffin of simulated pine with the Identi-Band still on it. He tried to persuade himself that as long as he had this name there was still half a chance that he’d find something to hang it on.