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cook.”
    â€œShe showed up?”
    â€œShe came by around seven and we had a bottle of wine and we talked a lot. I want to see her. Please. Can I go see her?”
    â€œShe’s unconscious. She’s in a coma. They hardly let me in.”
    â€œWhich hospital is she in?”
    I told her. The waiter brought her coffee and I got the check. I scribbled my cell phone number on a piece of paper. “If you think of anything?”
    â€œSure.”
    â€œSo you don’t have any idea why Lily suddenly called you?”
    â€œYou asked me before. She was coming to Paris. She said she called on an impulse. I had a feeling there wassomething else.” Martha pulled her fat silver-colored puffa vest tight around her body. “Poor Lily. You seem like a nice guy, honey, you do, but it was always so hard for her. It always made her guilty. She always had to save the world. It’s why she became a journalist back when we all thought you could save the world by telling the truth.”
    â€œWhat was hard?”
    â€œBeing happy.” She looked at her watch. “I ought to get going.”
    â€œYou said you were a social worker.”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œWhat kind of work do you do?”
    â€œMostly women.”
    â€œWhat kind of women?”
    â€œIt’s not something I talk about much. It’s not conversational.”
    â€œI’m not making conversation. I’m trying to figure out who hurt Lily so bad she almost died. So bad she doesn’t know who I am. They broke her fingers, Martha. One at a time. They smashed them up slow, they hammered her so you’d hardly recognize her.”
    â€œI work with prostitutes.”
    â€œIs that what Lily wanted from you? Is that why she called?”
    â€œI guess I wanted to think she called because she missed me.” She drank the coffee. “Pretty insane, huh? I mean after twenty years. I mean, like, you don’t call someone up after twenty years because you suddenly miss them, or you see a black and white cookie in a store and you go all Proustian and you think, my God, I wonder how Marti Bumham’s doing, do you?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œThey were our favorites. You know, the big cookies you get in New York, half vanilla frosting, half chocolate? Never mind. What about the attack? Anything else? Any marks?”
    I told her as best I could. “You’ve seen this kind of thing?”
    â€œEven if I have, the women I work with are prostitutes.”
    â€œMaybe Lily had an interest. Maybe she thought there was a good story in it.”
    â€œIt’s possible.” Martha was rueful. “Lily could ignore people for years and then suddenly she’d turn up. Honey, she loved everyone.”
    â€œExcept you.”
    â€œShe needed a bigger canvas. A cause.”
    â€œWhat kind?”
    â€œWhatever was going.” She crossed her arms. “She was fabulous but she was a user. I remembered when I heard her voice. Out of the blue. She just assumed I’d be there for her after all these years.”
    Martha shifted her chair, turned her hands over and stared at them. There were no rings.
    I looked at the big, capable American hands and wondered if she could beat Lily up, but it was only the paranoia eating at me.
    I said, “I don’t think that’s really fair.”
    â€œI’m sorry. You don’t have to defend her to me.”
    She pulled her heavy brown leather bag into her arms like a baby, dug around inside with one hand and took out a tooled-leather wallet. It was stuffed with cards,money, pictures. From it she extracted a plastic package of photographs. She took off the red rubber band that held the pictures together and, the bag dumped on the floor next to her chair, started playing the photographs out like a deck of cards.
    I waited. Mouth sucked in, Martha concentrated on the pictures as, one at a time, she turned them up on the table in the middle of the