Beauty Queen

large pins were thrust through his nipples, from which thin rivulets of blood ran down his sides, thinned with sweat, to stain the rumpled sheet under him.
    Danny lay beside him with the next pin, devastated at being both the instrument and the witness of this passion. There was no desire to hurt Armando, nor pleasure in it. He was the flaming angel. He was almost God, willing it to happen and knowing it so intimately. There was envy too— he had hungered to know the feel of it, but once a year he had to pass a police physical, and there could be no suspicious scars or recent wounds on his body.
    Now and then, the slow progress of the rapture wrung a moan from Armando. And when the flaming seraphim bathed his fiery lance in Armando's heart, the big man uttered a long muffled cry that Danny had to hope the neighbors didn't hear.
    Needless to say, they couldn't do this every night, or even once a week. It had to be reserved for the now-and-then, and it had to be approached over a period of time. The choice of time was partly dictated by practical considerations.
    Afterward, they lay embraced, stuck together by the drying sweat, blood and semen, looking into each other's eyes in the light of the guttering candles. Armando's eyes saw clearly now, and they had the limpid look of a little child.
    For the first time, Danny spoke, but in a very low voice, almost a whisper.
    "You're the dream that I don't dare to dream."
    Armando's feverish lips moved, but no sound came out.
    In a few more minutes, they were falling asleep. Through the little door, they could hear the stillness in the little garden, the ivy sending new tendrils into the old bricks, the leaves on the gingko tree breathing, the wings of the moths beating in the dark like the wings of seraphim and cherubim.
    As he drifted off, it occurred to Danny that he had not thought about Jeannie Colter or the riot rumors for approximately five hours.
    Chapter 8
    As Mary Ellen had feared, the crime reaction to Jeannie Colter's anti-gay campaign was not long in coming.
    As she and Danny drove around, they were extra-alert to the radio dispatcher. With every passing day, they were more and more frightened of the idea of being assigned to break up a gay riot. But they were determined to respond to any scene that sounded like it had a remote possibility of being connected with violence against gays. They hardly even dared to sign out for a few minutes to snatch something to eat.
    So far, nothing of that nature had involved them when they were on duty.
    But they heard things around the station house, from the officers and from their chief. They also heard things from Jewel, who seemed to know everything. There had been a definite increase in assaults on gays during the nighttime hours, especially in areas of the city where there were a lot of gay bars. The assaults were usually on gay men. Rarely did straight punks think to beat up on lesbians.
    Then, a few days after Jeannie's second speech, it, happened.
    At midday, a call went out for assistance from a precinct farther uptown. There was a big fire at a midtown theater on Sixth Avenue and 44th Street.
    "Cruiser two-oh-four responding," she said into the radio.
    Danny flipped on the lights and siren, and they bored their way through the midday traffic.
    The block between Sixth and Seventh was a mass of fire engines and police cruisers arriving, a sea of flashing red lights. There were the usual gawking spectators getting their cheap thrills. The smoke and flames were rolling up from the theater, already making an angry dark pillar above the area.
    The moment Mary Ellen saw the name of the theater on the scorched marquee, she felt sick to her stomach. It was the Apollinaire, a theater specializing in all-male gay porno films.
    "It's gotta be arson," said Danny. He had voiced the thought that went through Mary Ellen's head just then.
    Splashing through puddles, showered by soot and falling sparks, they helped control the crowd, direct traffic, and interview witnesses.
    The badly shaken manager, Jim Stratford, said that the theater had been about to open for its 12 noon showing, the first of the day. He, the cashier and a scrub woman had barely escaped with their lives. When the fire was out, the arson squad moved into the still-smoking building. They found that a rear entrance had been forced. They found the gasoline cans, and other telltale signs of arson: walls blackened in a special way where the gas had burned so