Katie’s future was in my hands. For the first time since this whole thing began, I felt truly helpless. And no amount of filmdom facts and figures would ease my pain.
“Look, if you put out,” Florent said, either impressed by my obdurateness or suddenly showing mercy, “there’s no reason for you to have to be involved.”
The plot was getting thicker. If I gave Katie up, Clown and I could go scot-free. What wasn’t clear was how that made me feel.
In the space of a second I had to know myself better than I ever had. I was like a computer trying to find a file, when the title of every document and program on its hard drive flashes by on its screen. I had to scan myself to see if I could find my priorities.
I hardly knew Katie, after all. And I’d been looking for Clown for a long, long time.
“Well, Milano? What’s it going to be?”
Swallowing deeply a final time, I made up my mind.
“Uh … well, here’s what I can do for you …”
I didn’t complete my sentence.
I just placed my shopping bag into Florent’s hands.
He looked at me a second, baffled. He rustled inside the bag. Then he looked back at me, incensed.
“A sesame bagel? What the hell do I want with that?”
“No, no, for God’s sake,” I impatiently searched for him now, “it’s this.” I jammed the tape into his grubby hands. “The Day the Clown Cried.”
Florent was silent. He just sat there, holding it.
“Be the first on your block,” I said.
The detective still didn’t speak. I started, ever so slowly, to sweat.
Florent had, of course, correctly characterized my sorry acquaintances. But he had at least professed to have a common interest with them. How deep, I wondered, did it go?
To my horror, was this about to be recorded as just the weirdest bribe in New York City history?
Then I had my answer. Tears of gratitude were forming in Florent’s eyes.
Some people yearn to be powerful, others to be truly trivial.
“Go on,” he said, his voice choked with emotion. “Get out of here.”
ALL I KNEW WAS: KATIE BETTER BE GRATEFUL.
That was what I muttered to myself, as I made the climb up my lousy stairs. She better know how much I had sacrificed. She better straighten up. She better start to live a different kind of life. Because people don’t get the world’s second-most-coveted lost film every day. And people who do don’t give it up.
The bitter words were about to spring from my mouth as I stabbed the key into my door and shoved it open.
The only hitch was: Katie wasn’t standing there.
Dena was.
“Oh, Christ,” I blurted out. “Of course.”
She was my cousin, too.
“I’m glad you’re here,” she said.
Dena looked better fed and rested than when I’d left her in Maine. The streak in her hair—had it last been green or red?—was gone. She was left with her natural shade, a mousy brown. She wore a simple, smocklike dress that suited her own age. It seemed to be her attempt to be an actual adult. I thought she looked better the other way.
She gave me a hug, one that was conspicuously short-lived.
“I lied to your super, and he let me in.”
“I’m sure he did.”
“By the way, some guy came to the door, snooping around. He didn’t say he was a cop, but I got the feeling that he was.”
“You were right.”
Exhausted, I found my way to my one chair and sat. I noticed the place had been straightened up.
“You really didn’t have to clean,” I said.
“There wasn’t much else to do. What happened to your head?”
For a second, I didn’t understand. Then Dena touched a tender spot on my scalp, which showed the mark of Abner’s bowl assault. Typically, Florent hadn’t even mentioned it.
“I got hit by a … never mind.”
