Delights seemed less than delightful.
    Was it really only a season since he stepped out of Port Authority Bus Station and 
looked up 42nd Street towards the Broadway intersection? So short a time to lose so many 
treasured illusions.
    He was embarrassed now even to think of his naivety. It made him wince to remember 
how he had stood and announced aloud: "New York, I love you." Love? Never.
    It had been at best an infatuation.
    And now, after only three months living with his object of adoration, spending his 
days and nights in her presence, she had lost her aura of perfection.
    New York was just a city.
    He had seen her wake in the morning like a slut, and pick murdered men from between 
her teeth, and suicides from the tangles of her hair. He had seen her late at night, her 
dirty back streets shamelessly courting depravity. He had watched her in the hot 
afternoon, sluggish and ugly, indifferent to the atrocities that were being committed 
every hour in her throttled passages.
    It was no Palace of Delights.
    It bred death, not pleasure.
    Everyone he met had brushed with violence; it was a fact of life. It was almost chic 
to have known someone who had died a violent death. It was proof of living in that city.
    But Kaufman had loved New York from afar for almost twenty years. He'd planned his 
love affair for most of his adult life. It was not easy, therefore, to shake the passion 
off, as though he had never felt it. There were still times, very early, before the 
cop-sirens began, or at twilight, when Manhattan was still a miracle.
    For those moments, and for the sake of his dreams, he still gave her the benefit of 
the doubt, even when her behaviour was less than ladylike.
    
    She didn't make such forgiveness easy. In the few months that Kaufman had lived in 
New York her streets had been awash with spilt blood.
    In fact, it was not so much the streets themselves, but the tunnels beneath those 
streets.
    "Subway Slaughter" was the catch-phrase of the month. Only the previous week another 
three killings had been reported. The bodies had been discovered in one of the subway 
cars on the AVENUE OF THE AMERICAS, hacked open and partially disembowelled, as though an 
efficient abattoir operative had been interrupted in his work. The killings were so 
thoroughly professional that the police were interviewing every man on their records who 
had some past connection with the butchery trade. The meat-packaging plants on the 
water-front were being watched, the slaughter-houses scoured for clues. A swift arrest 
was promised, though none was made.
    This recent trio of corpses was not the first to be discovered in such a state; the 
very day that Kaufman had arrived a story had broken in The Times that was still the talk 
of every morbid secretary in the office.
    The story went that a German visitor, lost in the subway system late at night, had 
come across a body in a train. The victim was a well-built, attractive thirty-year-old 
woman from Brooklyn. She had been completely stripped. Every shred of clothing, every 
article of jewellery. Even the studs in her ears.
    More bizarre than the stripping was the neat and systematic way in which the clothes 
had been folded and placed in individual plastic bags on the seat beside the corpse.
    This was no irrational slasher at work. This was a highly-organized mind: a lunatic 
with a strong sense of tidiness.
    Further, and yet more bizarre than the careful stripping of the corpse, was the 
outrage that had then been perpetrated upon it. The reports claimed, though the Police 
Department failed to confirm this, that the body had been meticulously shaved. Every hair 
had been removed: from the head, from the groin, from beneath the arms; all cut and 
scorched back to the flesh. Even the eyebrows and eyelashes had been plucked out.
    Finally, this all too naked slab had been hung by the feet from one of the holding 
handles set in the roof of the car, and a black plastic bucket, lined with a black 
plastic bag, had been placed beneath the corpse to catch the steady fall of blood from 
its wounds.
    In that state, stripped, shaved, suspended and practically bled white, the body of 
Loretta Dyer had been found.
    It was disgusting, it was meticulous, and it was deeply confusing.
    There had been no rape, nor any sign of torture. The woman had been swiftly and 
efficiently dispatched as though she was a piece of meat. And the butcher was still loose.
    The City Fathers, in their wisdom, declared a complete close-down on press reports of 
the slaughter. It was said that the man who had found the body was in protective custody 
in New Jersey, out of sight of enquiring journalists. But the cover-up had failed. Some 
greedy cop had leaked the salient details to a reporter from The Times. Everyone in New 
York now knew the horrible story of the slaughters. It was a topic of conversation in 
every Deli and bar; and, of course, on the subway.
    But Loretta Dyer was only the first.
    Now three more bodies had been found in identical circumstances; though the work had 
clearly been interrupted on this occasion. Not all the bodies had been shaved, and the 
jugulars had not been severed to bleed them. There was another, more significant 
difference in the discovery: it was not a tourist who had stumbled on the sight, it was a 
reporter from The New York Times.
    Kaufman surveyed the report that sprawled across the front page of the newspaper. He 
had no prurient interest in the story, unlike his elbow mate along the counter of the 
Deli. All he felt was a mild disgust, that made him push his plate of over-cooked eggs 
aside. It was simply further proof of his city's decadence. He could take no pleasure in 
her sickness.
    Nevertheless, being human, he could not entirely ignore the gory details on the page 
in front of him. The article was unsensationally written, but the simple clarity of the 
style made the subject seem more appalling. He couldn't help wondering, too, about the 
man behind the atrocities. Was there one psychotic loose, or several, each inspired to 
copy the original murder? Perhaps this was only the beginning of the horror. Maybe more 
murders would follow, until at last the murderer, in his exhilaration or exhaustion, 
would step beyond caution and be taken. Until then the city, Kaufman's adored city, would 
live in a state somewhere between hysteria and ecstasy.
    At his elbow a bearded man knocked over Kaufman's coffee.
    "Shit!" he said.
    Kaufman shifted on his stool to avoid the dribble of coffee running off the counter.
    "Shit," the man said again.
    No harm done," said Kaufman.
    He looked at the man with a slightly disdainful expression on his face. The clumsy 
bastard was attempting to soak up the coffee with a napkin, which was turning to mush as 
he did so.
    Kaufman found himself wondering if this oaf, with his florid cheeks and his 
uncultivated beard, was capable of murder. Was there any sign on that over-fed face, any 
clue in the shape of his head or the turn of his small eyes that gave his true nature 
away?