He didn't like a thing about her.  From the very beginning.  But she haunted him, like a goddess, clothed in white light.  She rose from the mists of his lies and entanglements that he wove like snakes to deceive everyone:his wives, the lawyers, the judges, the two juries he had stood before, and his victims. She blinded him with that white light they had shared just as he had branded her.  Even now he remembered her as he stood in a crowded bar where he drank his peppermint schnapps and planned his last job. Then he would be free, to find her again, to give her what she wanted.

     "I love you," she had said.

     "Even 'though I kill people?" he had asked.

     "Killed," she corrected, in her innocence.

     Tony loved her because she knew. He had tried to bury her light as they moved their bodies in old rhythms and new rhymes. She knew where he was heading. She raced ahead of him, turned and threw open her palms. She declared she had been there too, that Vietnam had destroyed her youth and desecrated her innocence.  She had not seen the blood.... 

     "Ah, the blood was the pretty part," he had interrupted her. "It was the others: the guts, the squirmy green intestines, the oozing gray brain matter, the eyes swollen out and always so inhuman." 

     He had humbled her with his soldier reality. She matched his Vietnam to her family horrors, to Cain and Abel: that very first barbaric murder, and to other endless wars and battlefields, including the many present ones. 

     He was to bury these at her feet so they could live again, accept that murder was part of their lives and human heritage, but that didn't make it right. God and Life warred with the dark forces.  They tried to give birth to a new land, a new light, a new race of humans which learned its lessons and would evolve into something brilliantly god-like. 

     "The universe is too big to house only murderers," she  gasped between violent sighs. "If we could forgive those hell­ fires and forge wisdom...." 

     He loved how she rambled on while they made love, her words forcing him harder and harder to climb those rarefied mountains from which her visions sprang. 

     "We could recreate humanity into something fresh, a phoenix  of beauty fashioned from our lower natures...."  She screamed in joy as his fingers and muscled body launched her passed words, and lifted them both into a golden white light. There they floated as one.

     She had wanted too much, he told her and himself. Now in the Chicago bar, he looked for a woman to bed who would want only what he was willing to give. He didn't think he could fall in love, again. She had been the one accident in life he still cursed himself for allowing. Sometimes he wondered if his life would have been different had he met her when he came back from Vietnam and the ensuing ten years had never happened. But they had. He didn't deny it; she warred against it. He kept changing sides.  Sometimes he fought her hard in bed and sometimes he warred alongside her against his demons. 

     He knew what she was after, and he half-hoped she would win, but she left, too early in the war. She had almost won, he told himself now. Sometimes he liked to think she did win and see himself as she might have seen him.

     "We're cut from the same bitter stone," she had said.

     "Chiseled," he corrected her.

     He often saw his latest job and pounded it into her, trying to erase it from his memory but he knew later, when finished, he had rubbed it into her. He had used her huge, wondrous mind to cleanse his own in.  She knew it, then. She accepted it. She drew strength from him just as he still drew strength from his memory of her. That's why he loved her. Although she was small-framed, her body was bold, her stance gazelle to his panther. She had been a youthful Venus who did not fully know her physical powers. She knew her strength lay in her mind and that was where she bedded him.

     He shivered. Someone had opened the door. January freeze momentarily met the overly warm air of the bar.  No, he didn't think he could ever fall in love, not after all the women he had watched fall for him.  He knew why they thought they loved him.  He wasn't tall, blond or blue-eyed, but he made certain he was fit, tight and lean, just as he came home from Vietnam. Gray  eyes, five feet seven, curly black Italian hair with matching dark eyes, and all animal magnetism. He ordered another schnapps.

     It was all in the fucking, he told himself, but never them, not even the wives. Women forgave him for being short, Italian, occasionally poor and sometimes cruel. He knew what most men didn't: one night with a woman was no real notch on the gun. He loved being in control once he got them in his arms. He became the giver of ecstasy, their drug, the one man, as so many had crooned, who cared for their pleasure. He got what he wanted from them, then watched their descent as he enslaved them.

     He had maneuvered her by being devoted, passionate, but inconsistent. He had patterned his drunken craving for her with weeks of neglect and two a.m. phone calls. He insisted she must see him and not argue about work in the morning or obligations to friends and family. 

     "It's me, Tony, the man you love to fuck.  I'm coming over, so be ready for me, sugar." 

     She protested she was tired.

     "Don't give me that shit. You adore it and me. Let me come over now, or it's quits."

    He loved those moments when she resisted. He knew the command in his voice stimulated her. They would exchange ribald comments, she always alert and ready to respond to the power they would create in those sweaty hours when she cried "Yes!" to  everything he did, would do, or had ever done.

     He sensed the woman he had chosen ten minutes before. He saw her move towards him. He looked in the mirror over the mahogany bar.  He was no longer surprised that when he felt most angry, most ready to kill, even if it was the memory of a woman who had double-crossed him before he could double-cross her, he looked his most handsome. 

     He let his eyes light as he ravished the woman he would use that night, an old flame from two, maybe four years back. He still desired the damn artist, the one woman who had nearly ruined him: her calm eyes, her slim thighs, her laugh at the most inopportune moments in their lovemaking, and that moment she had said "No."

     "Hi, Tony. Haven't seen you in a while," the woman cooed, the ex-wife of one of his old buddies. She should have been home with a brood of kids, but birth control had changed a lot of things, too damn many things. 

     "Saving myself for you, Sugar."

     The artist would have parried with a double, triple entendre and he would have thrilled to watch her mind click away possibilities, probabilities and then smile carelessly, caress his inner thigh and suddenly ram the conversation into one of his  hidden spaces with her damn "artistic curiosity" as she called  it.

     She had an annoying habit while in the middle of a great  fuck of talking about absolutes and God and Christ and Orgasm, and then she'd lapse into Cain killing Abel, and how she and he were the same, telling him that Cain was the patron saint of all  artists: Cain, as the first artist, originated the idea that a  murderer could redeem himself by the creation of new life through  art.

     He fucked her harder, better, turned her over and taught her how Cain fucked in jail. He had leeched at her mind and she knew it because she did the same to his. That was why he didn't track her down when she double-crossed him. She had been his equal and he grudgingly admired her. But she hadn't redeemed him.

     He hugged the older woman next to him. He knew how to tease and make a woman grateful for what little he gave. This last job was important, subtle, complicated. He turned towards the woman and touched his shot glass to her wine glass. He smiled. He didn't have to do much else. He had already laid all the groundwork.  Just one roll in the hay and they were hooked on him for life.

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