One Cold Night

didn’t care how badly they hurt them. A little overripe, actually, the peak age being closer to eleven. He hated thinking this way about his own family, but after a shift at the precinct it was hard not to see criminals everywhere or to think of your loved ones as potential victims. It was a bitter, skewed view of life you constantly fought and never quite overcame. He took another deep breath, and opened his eyes to the mirrored kaleidoscope of himself.
    This elevator had always made him uneasy; someone’s bad idea to make a small space feel larger by installing mirrors everywhere, instead trapped you with the nagging crone of your own self-doubts. Faced with his multitudinous reflections, he wasreminded of how his good looks were fading as he neared forty. If a mirror didn’t lie, these mirrors were a funhouse of stark physical truth. His leanness was threatening to turn his face gaunt, and his eyes were becoming permanently underscored by dark shadows. In the bathroom mirror, he had dozens of gray hairs salting his short hair; here, hundreds. Like it or not, time was on the move. Forty years old, almost. How had he gotten to this moment on the clock of his life, this tipping point between youth and middle age, energy and fatigue, idealism and resignation? Lately, he had been thinking a lot about that, looking backward at the decisions that had set him on the road to the here and now.
    Just tonight, in the slow hours of an uncharacteristically calm city — after putting away his files on Becky Rothka, which he had combed for the umpteenth time with no fresh revelations — he had finished rereading Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. He had read it first in high school, then had chosen it as the subject of his senior thesis in college, and recently had decided it was time to read it again to see if he understood it differently now. Lolita, after all, was ultimately the reason he had become a cop. Though he had been born into a family of cops, college had broken most of his assumptions about his future; he had felt pulled to become a cop like his father and grandfather before him, and at the same time pulled not to become a cop so he could follow his more intellectual leanings. He had thought, for a while, that he might teach or even write or possibly both. But then Lolita clarified everything for him. Lo. Lola. Dolly. Plain Dolores. A girl charmed and manipulated and finally kidnapped, raped and heldhostage for two years by her handsome stepfather-monster Humbert Humbert (avowedly hiding behind that ironic pseudonym), Lolita was transformed by a cunning mix of authorial brilliance and morally ambivalent cultural interpretation into a “nymphet” at the center of a profound if indecent love story. “The great love story of our century,” touted a magazine quote plastered on the front cover of Dave’s copy. When he’d finished reading tonight, he’d flipped to the cover to see if the quote really called it a love story. Three reads in, he was still sure that was not what Nabokov had meant. In his thesis, Dave had reconstructed Lolita into, simply, a victim, received a middling grade and been told he had missed the point. Simplistic, his thesis adviser had noted. Remember that on page xx she seduces him. As if a child’s seductiveness could ever bear responsibility in the context of adult sexuality, particularly that of a pedophile. Frustrated and appalled, Dave had finished college with misgivings about the usefulness of literary interpretation, and became determined to stop the Humbert Humberts of the world, deciding it was more valuable to save little girls from the blind, narcissistic misogyny of a half-baked culture than interpret them into its fabric.
    Most people didn’t know that his college career had ended bitterly for him (good grades, bad attitude), and his Harvard degree certainly hadn’t hurt his ability to climb the ranks of the NYPD. He had worked the streets, made detective, gloried in heroics — and yes, he had managed to save some little girls and also little boys and women and men. Seventeen years into it and he was a bona fide old hand; it was a gratifying job when it went well and a genuine torment when itdidn’t. Failing to close the Rothka case had sealed that sense of torment into him; he studied her files at least twice weekly, and she was never, not for a single hour, far from his thoughts.
    He had tried to find her; how he had tried. One year ago, in the chilly days of October, he