A Multitude of Sins Read Online Free PDF Page B

exactly what we want to now, aren’t we?” she said, distracted by the commotion.
    “I am,” Wales said.
    She looked at him and smiled tightly. He never knew what she thought. Possibly she was more like her parents than she realized. “It was just something to say,” she said and cleared her throat. “You shouldn’t take me so seriously.”
    “Wonderful,” Wales said, and smiled.
    “Believe it, then,” Jena said stiffly. “Everybody comes before somebody. Somebody always comes after.” She paused as if she wanted to say something more about that but then didn’t. “Why don’t we eat,” she said, and began to movealong toward the restaurant’s glass doors, which were just at that moment opening again onto the street.
    At dinner she talked about everything that came in her head. She said they should go dancing tonight, that she knew a place only a cab ride away. A black neighborhood. She asked if Wales liked dancing at all. He did, he said. She asked if he liked blues, and he said he did, though he didn’t much. She looked pale now in her black turtleneck with a strand of small pearls. She was wearing her wedding ring and a great square emerald ring he’d never seen before. They drank red wine and ate squab and touched hands like lovers across the small window table. Someone would know her here, but she didn’t mind. She was feeling reckless. What did it hurt?
    She talked about a novel she was reading, which interested her. It was all about an English girl who’d once been an ingénue. There had been an influential film in France, and for a time the girl was famous. Then one thing and another went wrong. Eventually she came to live in Prague, alone, older, a former addict. Jena felt identification with her, she said, thought her story could be set in America. Somehow her parents could be in it, too.
    After that she talked about her little girls, whom she loved, and then more about her husband, whom she’d asked him to kill and who, she said, was at his best a mild but considerate lover. She talked about scratching her cornea in Munich once, about what a bad experience that’d been—finding an ophthalmologist with American training, one who spoke English, one who sterilized things properly, one whose assistants weren’t heroin addicts or hemophiliacs. He realized that nothing he could do or say would have any effect on her now. Yet what kind of person would she be if he could so easily affect her. And being with her was such a pleasure. It made him feel wonderful, insulated. He wanted to see her again. Next week. Arrange something for then.
    Only, he recognized, she was just now talking herself out of the last parts of being interested in him. Somethingmust’ve seemed weak. Not being willing to kill someone, or at least say he would. She was raising the stakes, making it up as she went along until he failed.
    “Tell me something that happened to you , Jimmy,” she said. “You really haven’t talked much tonight. I’ve just chattered on.” She hadn’t used the name “Jimmy” before. She was pale, but her dark eyes were sparkling.
    “I was robbed tonight,” Wales said. “On the way out to my car at school. A black man stopped me in the parking lot and asked to borrow a dollar, and when I brought my billfold out he grabbed at it. Knocked it out of my hand. Scattered money all around.”
    “My God,” Jena said. “What happened then?”
    “We scuffled. He tried to pick up the money, but I hit him, and then he just ran off. He got a few dollars. Not much.” He stared at her across the table full of empty plates.
    “You didn’t tell me any of this before, did you?”
    “No,” Wales said. “I was happy to be with you and not to think about it.”
    “But weren’t you hurt?” She extended one hand across the table’s width and gently touched his.
    “No, I wasn’t,” Wales said. “Not at all.”
    “Did it scare you?” she said. Interest rekindled in her eyes. She liked it that he