Free Diablerie by Walter Mosley

hurt.
    "Are you sure of that?" I asked.
    "Oh, yeah. You said, 'that bitch Star,' about a hundred times. I guess that should'a told me it wasn't one'a your rambles. But otherwise you sounded sober as a judge."
    I wandered after that for some time. My head ached but the feeling was far-off, inconsequential. Barbara Knowland knew something about me that I myself did not know. I had called my brother and told him that it was a crime. But that was more than twenty years ago. How bad could it have been?
    I didn't know.
    I thanked God for my Lucky Strikes; without them I might have run out into traffic or down in front of a train.
    I woke up with her kissing my ear. She kissed it again and again, cooing softly. I had no idea where I was or whom I was with.
    "Ben?"
    I turned over to see Svetlana lying next to me.
    "Are you better?"
    "Better than what?"
    "Last night when I came in, you were in the bed crying." She reached out, cupping my jaw with her hand.
    "Did I say anything?"
    "Not that I could understand. But you were so sad. I held you for a long time."
    I sat up, hurting everywhere, it seemed: my face, my chest, my feet from all that walking.
    "What time is it?" I asked.
    "Ten, a little after."
    "Don't you have a class?"
    "I did not go," she said. "I was worried about how you felt." That set off my sobbing again. When I started crying, I remembered the night before; not why, but that I was crying, moaning, sorrowful beyond measure.
    Svetlana held me, humming along with the song of lament. Her strong hands were a solace to me but I could not tell her that: I couldn't speak. After what seemed like a long while, she put on her robe and prepared breakfast: cornflakes with skim milk and black coffee.
    When I lit a cigarette, she was startled.
    "What is this? You are smoking now?" she asked.
    "Oh . . . yeah. I need it. I need it bad."
    "But you have quit for so long," she said.
    "The stuff on my mind is from so long ago that only smoking and drinking can get to it," I said, realizing that there was more truth to those words than I had considered.
    "You are drinking too?"
    "Not until I'm ready to die," I said.
    "Ben," she said, a cry in that deep shadow of my dream. "Ben, why are you so sad?"
    "I don't remember."
    "What do you mean?"
    "My mind," I said. "Something happened a long time ago. Something that I've forgotten. There's a woman who I ran into who knows what that something is. She thinks I remember too. When I told her that I forgot, she got worried."
    "Can you ask her what this is?"
    "I'm afraid to."
    Svetlana's response was a smile, then a toothy grin.
    "This is funny to you?" I asked.
    "No, darling." It was the first time she had ever called me darling. "It is just that you are like a new boyfriend to me. Dark and filled with secrets, smoking at my table and crying in my bed. You are a new man for me, a second secret lover who throws me down on the floor and takes me."
    We made love after that. And when we were finished, she kissed me, got dressed, and walked out the door without saying good-bye. Ten minutes later the phone rang. I answered, certain that she was calling to mend the oversight.
    "Yes?" I said into the receiver.
    "Who is this?" a man with a heavy Russian accent asked.
    "My phone, your name," I said.
    The caller hung up. It was no wrong number, surely. The Russian accent meant that it was some &end or acquaintance of Lana's. While I pondered this, the phone rang again.
    "Yes?"
    "IS Svetlana there?"
    "Who's calling?"
    "Who are you?"
    "My phone. Your name first."
    "I am Sergei, Lana's . . . friend."
    "I am Ben. I pay for this phone." After these words, I hung up. There was a cold darkness in me. Not the darkness of race but the moonless night of a hunter looking for warm blood. There was no mistaking the thrumming in my chest. My fingers wanted to close on a throat, any throat.
    It wasn't that I felt jealousy. I didn't care if Lana had a "friend." She was young and very pretty. I was getting on toward the later