“You’re incorrigible,” he said aloud to himself. The booze had hit him just enough that he felt the desire for a cigarette, and he got one from the pack on the table and, after thinking about it for a moment, went outside to smoke it. He descended the porch steps and stood on the lawn, one hand in his pants pocket, looking up and down the block. When he went inside, Kat was awake again, still in the chair and looking around her as if she’d woken up after falling asleep someplace else.
“There you are.”
She looked at him blankly.
“Can I get you something?”
“Did my phone ring?”
“Not that I know of.”
“She said she’d call.”
Kat got up and took her phone from her purse. She called Becky’s number and left a message on her machine. She strolled over to Mulligan’s bookcase and began sliding books off the shelves at random and examining them. Was this obscurity or her own ignorance she was encountering? Nice-looking new book after nice-looking new book, and she’d never heard of any of them.
“I have an idea,” Mulligan said. Kat stood facing away from him, studying the dust jacket of a five-hundred-page novel. On it, a girl stood, legs astride, holding a gun at her hip.
“Is this any good?”
“I couldn’t get into it.”
“But you brought it to Michigan anyway.” She replaced it. She remained facing away.
“I have an idea,” he said again. She turned to look at him and he put what he thought was an enthusiastic expression on his face.
“Yeah?”
“Let’s relax and not worry about it for five minutes.”
“How about this one?” Without looking, she reached for another book.
“Overwritten. It was up for an award I was judging.”
“Yet here it is.”
“They’re all terrible,” he said. “How about it?”
“I am relaxing.” Deliberately, she dropped the award nominee on the floor.
“Go for it. I don’t know what possessed me. We can take them all to the Salvation Army tomorrow.”
“I don’t care whether you keep them or not.”
“Maybe you’re right, though. Maybe it is absurd to have them, most of them. I’ll never read them. What am I trying to prove?”
“Will you stop questioning your place at the center of the universe for five minutes? I don’t care means I don’t care.”
“You’re still mad.”
“She should have called.”
“And she’s not picking up.”
“No.”
“If it’ll reassure you I’ll start listing the fifty possible ordinary reasons why she isn’t.”
Kat didn’t respond.
“I like the look of a lot of books, shelved books,” he said. “Maybe there’s something a little affected about it. I don’t know.”
Kat slipped her hand into the empty space where the fallen book had been. She pulled books down, widening the space. They tumbled to the floor, eight or ten books, paperbacks and hardcovers. “There,” she said.
“I actually have read some of those,” Mulligan said.
Kat daintily stepped out of the pile of books on the floor and sat down on the couch. “I need to go down there,” she said.
“She’s probably busy with the TV guy. Maybe the phone service was temporarily cut off as part of the installation. Maybe she needed to go out and adjust the dish. Maybe she had to run to the mall to buy a new TV stand.”
“She was supposed to call.”
“Call her again.”
“She’s not picking up.”
“Call the cops. Tell them your ailing mother isn’t answering.”
“I need to go.”
Mulligan shrugged and a little sheepishly went to pick up the books on the floor. He hoisted them individually, and carefully blew the dust off them before reshelving them. She couldn’t tell if he was doing it for comic effect or not.
“I’ll go with you.”
“Why?”
“What if you need me?”
“You have been,” she said, “zero help. All you’ve done is scare the guy off.”
Mulligan pouted, eliciting the same unwanted pang in her as Justin and all the others. “Don’t get all weird,” she said. She got up off the couch and put her arms around him from behind. He felt her sag into him a little, as if surrendering to her own gesture. It reminded him sharply and unexpectedly of something that had happened years ago, a few months after his arrival in New York. There was a girl, Rina. Sad-eyed refugee from the Tisch drama program. Coffee, they always went out for coffee. Dates, movies and museums, but the coffee was what stayed in his head, always at Kiev or Veselka. They had a tension to them, those coffees; always ending with Rina on her way home alone to her apartment on East Third and with him heading back to Williamsburg to beat off, but he made sure to stay patient, keep things upbeat, and finally one day, over coffee, he’d seen whatever it was that Kat’s involuntary slump now reminded him of, and within an hour he was fucking her on a mattress on the floor of her studio.
He breathed a laugh.
“What?”
Not something you shared. Tell someone that story nowadays and they’d call him a sexual predator. Grabbing her arm to keep her from moving away, he turned and ground his pelvis into hers. He heard her gasp slightly.
THREE DAYS AGO
There were a lot of websites for people who wanted to spy on other people, mostly the people they trusted the most. Spycams, real-time GPS trackers, keyloggers, voice mail and text message hacks, semen detection kits; it was all right there, like Omaha Steaks and gift baskets to send to the elderly and the ailing.
Argenziano worked on his own laptop because he knew perfectly well that this place, itself a kind of perfection of surveillance, was likely surveilling him in ways that he couldn’t begin to imagine. And the casino was, in turn, being monitored, audited, subjected to undercover investigations by authorities whose own internal affairs were undoubtedly subject to constant oversight, all the way on up. And in the end it looked like all any of them wanted was to go home, put their feet up, and check if their wives’ panties had some other guy’s splooge on them.
He typed in the address of the website where a reliable person had told him that he could obtain the password to any e-mail address. He entered the information the site requested, whistling a little. They asked for a credit card number. Argenziano stopped whistling. He reached for his wallet and then thought better of it. He stood up, left his office, and walked out onto the floor in his shirtsleeves. A waitress passed him carrying a checkholder that had a credit card sticking out the top. Argenziano stopped her.
“Let me have that.”
“It’s those people’s, Mr. A. They want to pay.”
He grinned and squeezed her upper arm. “How much are they down?”
“A bunch, I guess.”
He winked at her. “I’m going to comp them.” He took the checkholder from her and brought it into his office. He entered number, security code, and expiration date. Then he put on his jacket and returned the card to the guests, smiling graciously as he informed them that their refreshments were on the house.
He came back. Now it wanted a valid e-mail address, which he had to obtain at a second site, using fictitious personal information. Back at the first site a small window ominously ticked down the number of seconds until his session expired. He clicked to close it. A new window blossomed trying to sell him a system utility program. He closed that. He heaved a dramatic sigh: You never paid just once, you paid and paid.
He typed in the brand new e-mail address. On TV, they always had a guy the hero could go to, some dweeb — capable and efficient, but a dweeb — who did this stuff while the hero watched over his shoulder, the two of them bullshitting away at each other. He pressed ENTER and another window promptly opened: Fuck a Different Chick Every Night. He thought it was like talking to his ex-wife, always struggling to get back to the point. It was like talking to any woman. Sometimes you just had to hit her.