office so he could take a nap on the couch. The office had the newsroom odor of stale coffee and cigarettes, and the couch was too short. But the familiar hum of talking, typewriters, and the general bustle of the newsroom soon had him hovering in that irrational zone between consciousness and sleep.
His thoughts were of Nora, but not of trying to understand her or their relationship. Instead it was like finding a collection of random photographs and from them taking away an impression of the thoughts, lives, and attitudes of the people in them.
There was Nora, in a red, strapless dress, her hair dyed black, being introduced in the crowd at the opera house, standing and waving and smiling shyly. In his proximity to her, he felt the charge that came from the focused attentions of so many adoring people. He felt extraordinarily lucky to be the recipient of affection from this woman who was idolized by so many.
There was the hollowness in his stomach when he paid an unexpected visit to her during rehearsals with a new orchestra to find her cozied up with the bandleader, David Winter, laughing as he whispered something into her ear. She had played it quite unself-consciously, breaking away from Winter and embracing Frings and kissing him provocatively. But as he stood around watching the rehearsal, he caught looks from Winter. Looks that seemed to say, “I’ve had something of yours.” Frings had been too timid to bring it up again with Nora, but the queasy feeling was hard to shake.
There was Nora, sobbing irrationally to Frings during one of the few nights they had spent at his apartment. It was the first time he had seen her insecure side and experienced the privilege of being her protector. The cause of these episodes was never clear, and he eventually learned to provide general comfort, but on this first night he had desperately tried to find the source of her grief, only to find that it stemmed from her lack of certainty about anything. Nothing in life was certain, Frings knew, and he was comfortable with that—in fact, he felt it to be one of the encouraging aspects of life. But he didn’t tell that to Nora that night. Eventually he just held her until she fell asleep on his tear-soaked chest.
Another memory: Nora at a gala banquet celebrating the fiftieth wedding anniversary of the famous conductor Eli Hodge. She was wearing an ivory cocktail dress and a tiara and was an absolute distraction to the men attending. She was also not talking to Frings, who knew no one else in attendance. It was a virtuoso piece of humiliation. Frings stood mute in her shadow as she flirted and gossiped and became the focus of the party’s considerable energy. Afterward, her lovemaking with him had been saturated with desperation, and he found, to his disgust, that he could not harbor any anger toward her.
He and Nora out with a friend of hers, a movie actress named Greta Van Riepen, and her paramour, a dour, fey little man named Marco, who Greta claimed was some type of Italian royalty. It was a strange feeling to find refuge in conversation with Greta, whom he barely knew, as Nora and Marco chatted with troubling intimacy. It went as well as could be expected given the strained situation, until Greta glimpsed Marco rubbing Nora’s forearm with the tips of his fingers and the evening ended with Greta’s tearful departure, trailed, reluctantly, by Marco.
As Frings had instructed, the office boy woke him at half past four. Frings gathered his notepad and several pencils and stashed them in the pocket of his trench coat. An envelope had appeared on his desk during his nap. He yelled for Ed, who arrived with an aggrieved expression that Frings ignored.
“Where’d this come from?”
“Some skirt dropped it off for you.”
“Did you catch her name?”
Ed shrugged. “No. She was easy on the eyes, though.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear that,” Frings said sarcastically, causing Ed to stalk off in a huff. Frings was anxious to leave the office, but this could be another communication from the bombers, so he slit the envelope open with an ivory-handled letter opener that Nora had bought for him.
“God damn it,” Frings said aloud when he saw the contents of the envelope—four high-quality prints of Bernal naked and in bed with a woman who Frings was fairly sure was not Mrs. Bernal. He slid the photos back into the envelope, hidden