Chapter One

A Quick End in Four-Four Time

Eli Rabbinowitz was shaped like a hamster, though larger and somewhat less furry. As Sonia Cohn Seltzer applied her long, skilled fingers to his rubbery white flesh, he squeaked and sighed—noises that reminded her of his rodentlike qualities.

Lying on his stomach, he reached around with his pale, stocky arm. “Touch it. Touch it,” he murmured. “I’ll pay extra.” Grabbing her wrist, he started to turn over.

Sonia freed her hand and smacked him with a towel, a hard blow with a limp club.

“Ouch! Gawd!”

“I warned you. Get out and don’t come back.” She exited the small room by what looked like a closet door but actually led to the rest of her apartment. Without her, the room looked antiseptic except for a Chagall print of a couple floating over rooftops. The door was slammed and locked and Sonia went back to her desk to work on her play about Emma Goldman, the anarchist, while her husband looked after their daughter in another room.

“Aayoych,” said Eli, blending several Yiddish and American expletives. Then he got dressed and left, turning down Avenue A, which was already a bit redolent as the early summer heat cooked the trash on the street. Furniture was placed neatly along the garbage-strewn edges of sidewalks—a special place where things were found and things were given away every day. The streetlamps in metallic paint were wrapped with paper flyers up to seven feet up the poles, like badly laid strudel dough, leaves dangling, advertisements for everything, some legal, including the exact time and place for demo