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of exultation rose through his body. He was rid of her.
    He’d hated her for so long, watching her with her furniture and her rugs, her old paintings in the heavy carved frames, the inkwells and cruets and compotes and Quimper pots, the lopsided bottles dug from long-gone outhouses. She’d touch it, stroke it, polish it, move it, sell it. Caress it with her little piggy eyes . . . Talk about it, endlessly, with her limp-wristed antiquarian friends, all of them perched on rickety chairs with teacups, rattling on endlessly, Mahogany with reeded legs, gilt tooled leather, but you almost couldn’t tell under the horrible polish she’d absolutely poured on the piece, well, she obviously didn’t know what she had, or didn’t care. I was there to look at a Georgian tea table that she’d described as gorgeous, but it turned out to be really very tatty, if I do say so . . . .
    And now she was dead.
    He frowned. Hard to believe that she had had a lover. One of those soft, heavy pale men who talked of teapots and wing chairs . . . unbelievable. What did they do in bed? Talk?
    “Sir, I really think . . .” The undertaker’s hand on his arm, steadying him, not understanding.
    “I’m okay,” Bekker said, accepting the comforting arm with a delicious sense of deception. He stood there for another minute, the undertaker behind him, ignored. This was not something he’d want to forget . . . .
     
    Michael Bekker was beautiful. His head was large, his blond hair thick and carefully cut, feathering back over small, perfect ears. His forehead was broad and unlined, his eyebrows light, near-white commas over his startlingly bluedeep-set eyes. The only wrinkles on his face were barely noticeable crow’s-feet: they enhanced his beauty, rather than detracted from it, adding an ineffable touch of masculinity.
    Below his eyes, his nose was a narrow wedge, his nostrils small, almost dainty. His chin was square, with a cleft, his complexion pale but healthy. His lips were wide and mobile over even white teeth.
    If Bekker’s face was nearly perfect, a cinema face, he had been born with a body no better than average. Shoulders a bit too narrow, hips a little too wide. And he was, perhaps, short in the leg.
    The faults gave him something to work for. He was so close . . . .
    Bekker exercised four nights a week, spending a half-hour on the Nautilus machines, another hour with the free weights. Legs and trunk one night, arms and shoulders the next. Then a rest day, then repeat, then two rest days at the end of the week.
    And the pills, of course, the anabolic steroids. Bekker wasn’t interested in strength; strength was a bonus. He was interested in shape. The work broadened his apparent shoulder width and deepened his chest. There wasn’t anything he could do about the wide hips, but the larger shoulders had the effect of narrowing them.
    His legs . . . legs can’t be stretched. But in New York, just off Madison Avenue, up in the Seventies, he had found a small shop that made the most beautiful calfskin half-boots. The leather was so soft that he sometimes held the boots against his face before he put them on . . . .
    Each boot was individually fitted with the most subtle of lifts, which gave him an inch and made him as near to perfect as God would come with Nordic man.
     
    Bekker sighed and found himself looking into the bathroom mirror, the bathroom down the hall from his bedroom,the cold hexagonal tiles pressing into his feet. Staring at his beautiful face.
    He’d been gone again. How long? He looked at his watch with a touch of panic. Five after one. Fifteen minutes gone. He had to control this. He’d taken a couple of methobarbitals to flatten out the nervous tension, and they’d thrown him outside himself. They shouldn’t do that, but they had, and it was happening more and more often . . . .
    He forced himself into the shower, turned on the cold water and gasped as it hit his chest. He kept his