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executioner. On the other hand, I won’t save him when he’s hovering between life and death either. Can I go and bathe?
    Yes, she says, your bath is ready.
    Excellent, he says, talking to him is like a roll in the gutter.
    Can I ask something else? Don’t call me Winnie? For you I want to be Melissa.
    Melissa, he tries out the name, why not?
    He goes to the bathroom, and when he starts to get undressed the phone rings again. Melissa looks at the display and says as if asking permission:
    It isn’t Tony. It’s a private client of mine. A pervert who comes over the phone, but he pays good money.
    You’re a free agent, he says. Do what you like.
    But my time is yours, she says carefully, trying to establish the nature of their agreement and the relations between them: You hired me for a week?.……
    I didn’t hire you, he says. I rented a room, not the landlady. If that’s okay with you.
    It’s fine with me, she says, still having difficulty understanding him.
    She picks up the phone and listens. Every now and then she says ‘Yes’. She covers the mouthpiece with her hand and turns once more to the nameless man whom she understands less and less:
    Are you sure you don’t mind me being on the phone while you’re in the bath?
    If anything bothers me, he says, I’ll tell you.
    He takes a glass, pours himself a double shot from the bottle of Jameson standing on the unpolished oak of the work counter in the kitchen, and goes into the bathroom.
    Are you naked? she asks in a nasal simper over the phone. Today I want you to take everything off and give me all your magnificent body. My pussy’s so wet, I want you in the raw.
    He strips off his clothes and gets thoughtfully into the bath. She opens a book lying on the little table next to the telephone, puts on a pair of reading glasses with narrow cats-eye frames, and as he sinks into the warm caressing foam he sees her through the open door, sitting opposite the galaxy of Manhattan shining in the window and whispering into the receiver, in a husky voice full of phony lust, a passage of hard-core porn which she reads from the book in her hand. He listens to the banal text professionally performed by this half-woman half-child, and he doesn’t feel a thing.
    Suddenly it seems to him that he’s playing a part in some scene from a script written by somebody else. Maybe that kid in the pub, Tyrell from the undercover unit. The director yells ‘action’, and he sees the assistant director signaling him to take a sip of the sweetish Irish whiskey and not to look at the camera. He reaches for the glass standing on the black marble slab at the side of the bathtub, which is apparently intended for uses such as this, raises it to his lips, and sips. He rolls the whiskey round in his mouth and now it is clear to him that he is indeed acting in a movie.
    This is a true story, he hears the voice in the trailer say, the story of the secret life of the undercover agent H.R., otherwise known as Billy the Bard, or Shakespeare for short. A story of desperate manhunts, daring assassinations, friendship between men, love sanctified in blood that won’t let our hearts forget. In his ears he hears the words of the song that for some reason, when sung by twenty-year-old girls in khaki uniforms, still thrills him to this day.
    No, none of this is real, he says to himself, this isn’t happening to you, you’re not in New York, this girl isn’t a whore, her name isn’t Melissa or Victoria, just as your name isn’t Bill or Shakespeare. All this is happening in some crazy Hollywood studio, but what can he do when the loathsome voice of that son of Satan goes on echoing in his head, and he feels his fingers moving of their own accord at the ends of his arms dangling over the sides of the tub, scenting action, itching to grip the handle of a pistol or a dagger and do what they do best.
    And when he raises the whiskey glass to his mouth again, he is suddenly sure that the mind making up the