The Face

unrealized, and time is the patient wind that will wither it away. Nevertheless, men and women have given great thought, effort, and care to making these rooms appealing, because they hope, against all evidence, that their lives have meaning and that in their talents lies a purpose larger than themselves.
        Until two years ago, Dunny never knew this hope. Three years of anguish over her loss, ironically, made him want to believe in God.
        Gradually, during the years following her funeral, an unexpected hope grew in him, desperate and fragile but enduring. Yet he remains too much the old Dunny, mired in old habits of thought and action.
        Hope is a cloudy radiance. He has not learned how to distill it into something pure, clear, more powerful.
        And now he never will.
        In the master bedroom, he stands at a rain-washed window, gazing northwest. Beyond the storm-blurred city lights, beyond the lushly landscaped and mansioned slopes of Beverly Hills, lies Bel Air and Palazzo Rospo, that foolish yet nonetheless brave monument to hope. All who ever owned it have died-or will.
        He turns from the window and stares at the bed. The maid has removed the spread, turned down the sheets, and left a tiny gold box on one of the pillows.
        The box holds four bonbons. Elegantly formed and decorated, they appear to be delicious, but he doesn’t sample them.
        [234] He could call any of several beautiful women to share the bed with him. Some would expect money; others would not. Among them are women for whom sex is an act of love and grace, but also women who revel in their own debasement. The choice is his, any tenderness or any thrill that he desires.
        He cannot recall the taste of the oysters or the bouquet of the Pinot Grigio. The memory has no savor, offers less stimulation to his senses than might a photograph of oysters and wine.
        None of the women he could call would leave a greater impression than the food and drink that, still settling in him, seems to be a meal imagined. The silken texture of their skin, the smell of their hair would not linger with him past the moment when, in leaving, they closed the door behind them.
        He is like a man living through the night before doomsday, with full knowledge that the sun will go nova in the morning, yet unable to enjoy the precious pleasures of this world because all his energy is devoted to wishing desperately that the foreseen end will not, after all, come to pass.

CHAPTER 36
        
        ETHAN AND HAZARD MET IN A CHURCH, FOR at this hour on a Monday night, the pews were empty, and no chance whatsoever existed that they would be seen here together by politicians, by members of the Officer Involved Shooting team, or by other authorities.
        In the otherwise deserted nave, they sat side by side in a pew, near a side aisle where neither the overhead nor the footpath lights were aglow, veiled in shadows. The stale but pleasant spice of long-extinguished incense perfumed air as still as that in a sealed jar.
        They spoke less in conspiratorial whispers than in the hushed voices of men humbled by awesome experience.
        “So I told the OIS team I went to see Reynerd to ask about his friend Jerry Nemo, who happens to be a suspect in the murder of this coke peddler name of Carter Cook.”
        “They believe you?” Ethan asked.
        “They seem like they want to. But suppose tomorrow I get a lab report that superglues Blonde in the Pond to that city councilman I told you about.”
        “That girl dumped in the sewage plant.”
        “Yeah. So the bastard councilman will start looking for a way to [236] get at me. If any guys on the OIS team can be bought or blackmailed, they’ll turn that homey hit man with the coke-spoon earring into a crippled choirboy who got shot in the back, and my mug will be on the front pages under the nine-letter headline.”
        Ethan knew what the nine-letter headline would be-KILLER COP-because they had talked about the power of anti-cop prejudice over the years. When a dirty politician and the sensation-hungry press discovered a shared agenda in any case, truth was stretched tighter than the skin of any Hollywood dowager with four face-lifts, and the blindfold over Lady Justice’s eyes was ripped away and shoved into her mouth to shut her up.
        Hazard hunched forward, forearms on his thighs, hands clasped almost as if in prayer,