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the physical attraction . . .
    Poole walked through their living room, sidestepping the books and newspapers stacked around the worn leather couch and chair that sat facing each other across a coffee table made from an old door. The kitchen was small but had an alcove at the end with a wooden table and two chairs. The window looked out on an alley that, over the past few years, had become the nocturnal domain of a clique of young prostitutes. Poole felt as though he had watched these girls grow up.
    Today’s paper lay open on the table with an article circled in red pencil.He sat down. The headline read “Bomb Blasts Block’s Building.” Next to the headline was a picture of the building, with a ragged hole with smoke billowing out from it. The press had not set the ink accurately, and the picture was a double image.
    The article itself was short, nothing much to report. The reporter, Francis Frings, wrote that the investigation would be a priority for the police department. Poole knew what that meant and knew, too, that the danger to Carla had just dramatically increased. Whenever the City’s capitalists were victimized, the suspects were always the same; at the top of the list were the Socialist union organizers.
    He considered calling Frings, whom he knew to be sympathetic to the City’s Socialists, but was interrupted by a knock at the door.

CHAPTER SEVEN

    Frings woke at nine, his head cleaved into two hemispheres of pain. Squinting his eyes, he took mincing steps to his bureau and opened a small drawer on the top left side, where a small tin held several hand-rolled marijuana cigarettes. He took one, along with a butane lighter, and moved to the window, which he cracked open an inch. He sat with his back against the wall under the window and lit the reefer. He filled his lungs, held the pungent smoke, then exhaled through the side of his mouth, directing the majority of the smoke out the window. It took him five minutes to smoke the entire cigarette in this fashion, and by the time he was done the headache had receded to a level of mild annoyance.
    From his seat on the floor he watched Nora Aspen as she slept. Nothing was more demystifying, he thought, as watching this normally glamorous creature with her mouth ajar, her face pale and swollen with sleep. The crimson silk sheets that she favored lay draped over her famous curves, and the idea that hundreds, if not thousands, of men would envy his situation right that second seemed somehow absurd. He, Frank Frings, the paramour of this jazz-singer pinup. It seemed so odd that he almost laughed. Almost.
    He stood up and wandered into Nora’s expansive kitchen, where he found a loaf of bread and some Brie. He ate quickly, as though she might wake at any moment and take it from him. His tongue explored the contrast between the firm, creamy cheese and the coarser, crumbly bread, and he eventually becoming consumed with fascination.
    He was brought back to the present by the sound of movement from the bedroom, and a moment later Nora appeared in a silk robe over what there was of a nightgown. Her shoulder-length blond hair was muddled, and she looked alluring without arousing in Frings a need to do anything about it.
    “Migraine still bothering you?”
    “It was.”
    “I wish you wouldn’t smoke in the bedroom. I don’t know how many times—”
    “I know, I’m sorry.” He smiled in spite of himself, knowing that it was just going to piss her off. “You know that when I wake up like that I just need relief as quickly as possible.”
    She glared at his grinning face and returned to her bedroom. “Make some goddamn coffee.”
    Nora was in the shower when the phone rang. Frings didn’t answer her phone normally, but somehow found himself with the receiver in his hand without consciously deciding to pick it up.
    “Frings?”
    “Yeah?”
    “It’s Merrick at the paper.”
    “Oh. What’s the rumble?”
    “Well, we just got a call from a guy. Wouldn’t