Dark Rivers of the Heart

even in the poor light, she saw the horror in his eyes. Worse, there was a bleakness that transmitred his chill deep into her own heart.
        He spoke urgently, though exhaustion and thirst had reduced his voice to a coarse whisper: "Nobody knows."
        "It's all right," she said.
        "Nobody. Nobody knows.
        "Easy. You'll be okay."
        "Nobody knows," he insisted, and he seemed to be caught between fear and grief, between terror and tears.
        A terrible hopelessness informed his tortured voice and every aspect of his face to such an extent that she was struck speechless.
        It seemed foolish to continue to repeat meaningless reassurances to a man who appeared to have been granted a vision of the cankerous souls in Hades.
        Though he looked into her eyes, Spencer seemed to be gazing at someone or something far away, and he was speaking in a rush of words, more to himself than to her: "Its a chain, iron chain, it runs through e, through my brain, my heart, through my guts, a chain, no way to get loose, no escape."
        He was scarin her. She hadn't thought that she could be scared any more, at least not easily, certainly not with mere words. But he was scaring her witless.
        "Come on, Spencer," she said. "Let's go. Okay? Help me get you out of here."
        When the slightly chubby, twinkly-eyed man stepped out of the elevator with Bobby Dubois into the windowless subbasement, he halted in his tracks and gazed at Eve as a starving man might have stared at a bowl of peaches and cream.
        Eve Jammer was accustomed to having a powerful effect on men.
        When she had been a topless showgirl on the Las Vegas stage, she had been one beauty among many-yet the eyes of all the men had followed her nearly to the exclusion of the other women, as though something about her face and body was not just more appealing to the eye but so harmonious that it was like a secret siren's song. She drew men's eyes to herself as inevitably as a skillful hypnotist could capture a subject's mind by swinging a gold medallion on a chain or simply with the sinuous movements of his hands.
        Even poor little Thurmon Stookey-the dentist who'd had the bad luck to be in the same hotel elevator with the two gorillas from whom Eve had taken the million in cash-had been vulnerable to her charms at a time when he should have been too terrified to entertain the slightest thought of sex. With the two goons dead on the elevator floor and the Korth.3 8 pointed at his face, Stookey had let his eyes drift from the bore of the revolver to the lush cleavage revealed by Eve's low-cut sweater. judging by the glimmer that had come into his myopic eyes just as she'd squeezed the trigger, Eve figured that the dentist's final thought had not been God help me but bat a set.
        No man had ever affected Eve to even a small fraction of the extent to which she affected most men. Indeed, she could take or leave most men.
        Her interest was drawn only to those from whom she might extract money or from whom she might learn the tricks of obtaining and holding on to power. Her ultimate goal was to be extremely rich and feared, not loved.
        Being an object of fear, totally in control, having the power of life and death over others: That was infinitely more erotic than any man's body or lovemaking skills could ever be.
        Still, when she was introduced to Roy Miro, she felt something unusual.
        A flutter of the heart. A mild disorientation that was not in the least unpleasant.
        What she was feeling couldn't have been called desire. Eve's desires were all exhaustively mapped and labeled, and the periodic satisfaction of each was achieved with mathematical calculation, to a schedule as precise as that kept by a fascist train conductor. She had no time or patience for spontaneity in either business or personal affairs; the intrusion of unplanned passion would have been as repulsive to her as being forced to eat worms.
        Undeniably, however, she felt something from the first moment she saw Roy Miro. And minute by minute, as they discussed the Grant-Davidowitz tape and then listened to it, her peculiar interest in him increased.
        An unfamiliar thrill of anticipation coursed through her as she wondered where events were leading.
        For the life of her, she couldn't figure out what qualities of the man inspired her fascination. He was rather pleasant