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thought I’d give you a chance to change your mind,” he said. She told him to drop dead and hung up on him.
    She told all three doormen not to send anyone up without calling first. That was standard policy anyway, but she impressed them with the need for extra security. She turned down a couple of dates with new clients, wary that they might be fronting for Motley. When she left her apartment she had the feeling that she was being followed, or at least observed. It was an uncomfortable feeling, and she didn’t go out unless she had to.
    Then a few days passed and she didn’t hear further from him, and she started to relax. She meant to call me, and she meant to call Connie again, but she didn’t call either of us.
    That afternoon she got a call. A man she knew was in town from the Coast, a studio executive she’d see every few months. She got in a cab and spent an easy hour and a half in his suite at the Sherry-Netherland. He told her all sorts of movie-biz gossip, made love to her twice, and gave her a hundred or two hundred dollars, whatever it was. More than enough to cover the cabs.
    When she got back to her apartment Motley was sitting on the leather couch, not quite smiling at her. She tried to get out the door but she’d locked it and put the chain on the minute she came in, before she saw him, and he had hold of her before she could get the door open. Even if she hadn’t had to screw around with the locks, she figured he would have caught her. “At the elevator,” she said, “or I’d have tripped on the hall carpet, or something. I wasn’t going to get away. He wasn’t going to let me get away.”
     
     
    He hauled her into the bedroom, ripped her clothes getting them off of her. He hurt her with his hands. The bruise he’d inflicted the first time was faded now, but his fingers went right to the spot and the pain was like a knife. There was another spot he found, on the inside of her thigh, that produced a pain so intense she honestly thought she was going to die from it.
    He went on hurting her with the simple pressure of his fingers until all her will was gone, all her capacity to resist. Then he flung her facedown on the bed, dropped his pants, and forced himself into her anal passage.
    “I don’t do that,” she said. “It’s painful, and I think it’s disgusting anyway, and I never liked it. So I don’t do it. I haven’t done it in years. But it actually wasn’t that bad this time because the pain was nothing compared to what he’d been doing to me with his fingertips. And anyway by this time I was sort of detached from it all. I was afraid he was going to kill me, and I was detached from that, too.”
    While he sodomized her, he talked to her. He told her she was weak and stupid and filthy. He told her she was only getting what she deserved, and what she secretly wanted. He told her she liked it.
    He told her he always gave his women what they wanted. Most of them wanted to be hurt, he told her. Some of them wanted to be killed.
    “He said he wouldn’t mind killing me. He said he’d killed a girl a while ago who’d looked a lot like me. He killed her first, he said, and then he fucked her. He said a dead girl was as good a fuck as a living one, maybe even better. If you got her while she was still warm, he said. And before she started to stink.”
    Afterward he went through her purse and took all her cash, including the money she’d just earned at the Sherry. She was one of his women now, he told her. She’d have to pull her weight. That meant he expected her to have money for him when he came to see her. And it meant she would never again refuse to see him, and she would certainly never again mouth off at him, or call him bad names. Did she understand that? Yes, she said. She understood. Was she sure she understood? Yes, she said. She was sure.
    He half smiled at her, and ran a hand over that funny cap of hair, then stroked his long chin. “I want to make sure you understand,”