Orpheus Lost by Janette Turner Hospital

point of choking. He had, for an instant, rendered her speechless.
    She recovered. “I guess you’ll just have to keep stalking me to find out,” she said tartly. “You’ll have to keep paying your goons to take photos with a telescopic lens.”
    “Oh, we have been,” he said quietly. “We’ve been making inquiries. We have quite a list of former lovers. You really could have been a porn star.”
    “Those relationships are far in my past.”
    “We’re well aware that your proclivities for sexual cruising changed quite suddenly once you picked up Abukir and bedded him.” He smiled. “I could, of course, post the recent erotic scenes on the net. Or I could mail them to MIT to demonstrate, let’s say for a tenure committee, how truly multi-talented you are.”
    “Clearly you are not restrained by a sense of decency.”
    “Clearly, neither are you,” he said with more bitterness and energy than he’d intended. “Of course, none of this publicity will be necessary if we have your cooperation.”
    “Oh, now we get to the point of all this. Now we get down and dirty. My cooperation in what?”
    “In our ongoing inquiries into the activities of Abukir.”
    She pushed the stack of photographs raggedly toward him. “Am I free to go?” she asked quietly. “Or do I spend the night here?” Her dignity was intact but strength was ebbing from her, switch-flow in full flood. He thought she might be in shock. He was aroused.
    “Abukir must be quite a fuck,” he said. “You don’t even cheat when he’s AWOL.”
    Leela met his eyes levelly.
    “I regret,” Cobb said, “that we can’t say the same for him.”
    “I don’t believe you.”
    “Perhaps you’d like to see some more photos?”
    “If you had any, you’d have shown them.”
    Cobb studied the clenching of her interlaced hands. Her white knuckles made his body heat rise. “I’m saving them,” he said. The words were husky, like a declaration of love. “A little treat for the next time we meet.”
    Slowly, he pulled off his glove and laid it on the table between them. She stared first at the glove and then at the thumb of his left hand, the nail of which was deeply scored by a blackened groove. Their eyes met and held above the photographs.
    “Cobb?” she said uncertainly.
    He pulled off the ski mask. He would have liked to fuck her violently.
    “Cobb! It is you.” Spontaneously she leaned across the table and touched or almost touched his wrist but malaise caught up with her unguarded pleasure and her hand wavered like a bird bucked by an updraft of air. Her body also wavered before curling back into the chair. “I often think about you. I often wonder…”
    He met her gaze with intense coldness.
    “From Promised Land, you know, the only news…” She looked behind her, as though hearing the click of a shutter. Cobb’s attention returned to his folder. He leafed through photographs, absorbed. He ignored her completely. “My little sister and I—you remember Maggie?—we talk on the phone. I hear your father’s quite frail.” Leela’s voice faltered and fell silent then rallied again. “Would you believe I had a call from Benedict Boykin not long ago? He was in Boston on leave and we met for drinks in Harvard Square. Hadn’t seen him since high school either.”
    Cobb extracted a black-and-white image from his folder and played it, without emotion, like an ace.
    “I see you knew about that already,” Leela said. She curled into herself the way a sea creature does. She looked smaller. She looked like a sand dollar, Cobb thought. She looked sick. She hugged herself with folded arms to keep herself warm.
    Cobb lifted the photograph and held it in front of her face and she saw a man and a woman in joyful embrace, the logo of the Harvard Coop above their heads. The man, who was black, was in uniform. His white teeth flashed. There was a small jagged scar, that showed pale, below his lip. Leela’s chin rested on his