I put my hands flat on the formica. They were shaking.
I made them stop.
For so long, I felt like I didn’t have a sex drive. Like I did not have a body, really, except as a thing that needed coffee and occasional protein. I had been invisible to men, and my needs—if I had them—were invisible to myself.
What I was, was a brain. Something that cataloged. Something that analysed.
That’s what I’d do right now. Ignore my body, my needs. Think about the details.
His watch.
I had notice it before I had even known he was looking at me. He had been holding his glass in his right hand and the watch had been on his left wrist, half-covered by his cuff, and the sliver I had seen had been enough. Patek Philippe. Steel case, blue dial, the small subsecond at six o’clock. I knew the model the way I knew several models, because in my prior life I had reviewed expense reports for men who bought watches with money that was not theirs, and Patek Philippe had appeared on those reports often enough that I had learned to recognize the silhouette from across a room. The watch was something between forty and ninety thousand dollars depending on the year. He had worn it pushed slightly down his wrist, the way a man wore a watch he did not think about, which meant he had owned it long enough to stop noticing it. Old money, or money that had been around long enough to act old.
The shoes.
I had only seen them in the alley, under the streetlight, when I had bitten him. They had not been polished. That was the thing about them. They had been hand-made, the cut of the leather across the toe was wrong for anything off a shelf, and the soles had been the kind of soles that cost more than my coat had cost—but they had not been polished. A man who owned shoes like that and did not polish them had ten other pairs at home. He did not have to make these ones last. He probably did not even own polish. He probably had a person.
The analyst made a small dry sound in the back of my head that, in another lifetime, might have been a laugh.
The accent.
He had spoken to me twice. Once in the corridor and once in the alley, and in both instances the syllables had been shaped by a mouth that had grown up speaking something else. Not Italian generally. Sicilian. I knew the difference because my grandmother had been from Palermo and had spent my whole childhood teaching me the difference between her dialect and the Italian of the schools, and his consonants had been my grandmother’s consonants, the soft scrape of the final vowels, the slight upward bend at the end of a question that was not Italian at all but something older and more local. He was from there. He had been there as recently as a couple of years ago, judging by how unworn the accent was on his English, which was otherwise good.
The staff.
This was the thing the analyst kept returning to. When I had come up the back stairs of the club following the bouncer’s instruction—when I had been moved through the side corridor by a staffer who had clearly been waved off by Mick on the door—the staff in that club had not looked at the booth I had eventually found him in. They had not looked at it the way a waiter did not look at a table that did not need anything. Theyhad looked at it the way the people in the courtroom had not looked at the partners’ wives in the second row. The look that was not a look. The deliberate absence of attention that was, in fact, its own form of attention.
He was somebody, in that club. He was somebody enough that the staff did not raise their eyes to him.
The violence.
The first man, in the corridor, had gone face-first into the wall and had slid down it. That was a thing. I had watched the second man—the bigger one, the one who had grabbed me harder—go down with no sound and no struggle, and I had watched him get up no better afterwards. I knew, because I had been in the back of the courtroom for the cross-examination of certain witnesses, what unprofessional violence looked like: messy, loud, three or four blows where one would have done. This had not been unprofessional violence. The second man had been a fully grown adult human in the middle of an assault and he had been disabled by something that, from where I had been standing, had looked almost like a courtesy. Quick. Precise. The arm around the throat, the angle, the wall, the release. The man on the floor had been breathing.
He had let the man breathe.
I picked up the coffee. It was already cold. I drank it anyway. The toast sat in front of me, two triangles on a white plate, the butter congealed.
The analyst sat down across from me in the booth, metaphorically, and looked at the file she had been compiling, and looked at me, and did not say what she was thinking, because she did not have to. I already knew.
He was exactly the kind of man I had spent eighteen months testifying against.
He was, in fact, almost certainly higher up the food chain than the men I had testified against.
And my body, the analyst noted, with the cool detachment that had served me so well in court, had already decided. I wanted him.
Mafia. Not adjacent to it. Not a man who had grown up in a neighborhood where mafia happened around him. Not a man who occasionally did business with someone who knew someone. The watch and the shoes and the staff who did not look at him and the violence that had been delivered like a service — he was the thing itself.
He was the category.
He was the species of man I had taken to a federal courtroom in a black skirt suit and a blouse buttoned to the throat and described, in a clear quiet voice, for thirty-one consecutive days of testimony, in language so careful and so unemotional that one of the partners had screamed at me from the defendant’s table on day seventeen and called me a whore and a rat and I had sat there with my hands folded in my lap and not answered him because answering him was not what they paid me to do.
I hated them.
I hated the way they took up rooms. I hated the way they assumed the rooms would shape themselves around them. I hated the wives. I hated the watches. I hated the careful soft soaps and the careful soft shoes and the careful soft voices that came out of mouths that, when the room was empty, said things to other men that ended other men’s lives. I had hated them on day one of the wire and I had hated them on day three hundred and ninety-three of the wire and I hated them now, in a booth in a diner on Lincoln Avenue at half past three in the morning with my hands flat on a formica that smelled faintly of bleach, and the hating of them was, at this point, less an opinion than a structural feature of my interior architecture.
I hated him.
And I wanted him.
