After I left my home and my family and my job, Elaine and I pretty much lost touch with one another. Then a monster from out of our shared past turned up to threaten us both, and we were thrown together by circumstance. And, remarkably, we stayed together.

She had her apartment and I had my hotel room. Two or three or four nights a week we would see each other. Generally those nights would end at her apartment, and more often than not I would stay over. Occasionally we left the city together for a week or a weekend. On the days when we didn't see each other, we almost always spoke on the phone, sometimes more than once.

Although we hadn't said anything about forsaking all others, we had essentially done so. I wasn't seeing anybody else, and neither was she- with the singular exception of clients. Periodically she would trot off to a hotel room, or have someone up to her apartment. This had never bothered me in the early days of our relationship- it had probably been, truth to tell, part of the attraction- so I didn't see why it should bother me now.

If it did bother me, I could always ask her to stop. She had earned good money over the years and had saved most of it, putting the bulk of it in income-producing real estate. She could quit the life without having to change her lifestyle.

Something kept me from asking her. I suppose I was reluctant to admit to either of us that it bothered me. And I was at least as reluctant to do anything that would change any of the elements of our relationship. It wasn't broke, and I didn't want to fix it.

Things change, though. They can't do otherwise. If nothing else, they are altered by the sheer fact of their not changing.

We avoided using the L-word, although love is surely what I felt for her, and she for me. We avoided discussing the possibility of getting married, or living together, although I know I thought about it and had no doubt that she did. But we didn't talk about it. It was the thing we didn't talk about, except when we were not talking about love, or about what she did for a living.

Sooner or later, of course, we would have to think about these things, and talk about them, and even deal with them. Meanwhile we took it all one day at a time, which was how I had been taught to take all of life ever since I stopped trying to drink whiskey faster than they could distill it. As someone pointed out, you might as well take the whole business a day at a time. That, after all, is how the world hands it to you.

AT a quarter to four the same Thursday afternoon the telephone rang at the Khoury house on Colonial Road. When Kenan Khoury answered it a male voice said, "Hey, Khoury. She never came home, did she?"

"Who is this?"

"None of your fuckin' business is who it is. We got your wife, you Arab fuck. You want her back or what?"

"Where is she? Let me talk to her."

"Hey, fuck you, Khoury," the man said, and broke the connection.

Khoury stood there for a moment, shouting "hello" into a dead phone and trying to figure out what to do next. He ran outside, went to the garage, established that his Buick was there and her Camry was not. He ran the length of the driveway to the street; looked in either direction, returned to the house, and picked up the phone. He listened to the dial tone and tried to think of someone to call.

"Jesus Christ," he said out loud. He put the phone down and yelled "Francey!"

He dashed upstairs and burst into their bedroom, calling her name. Of course she wasn't there, but he couldn't help himself, he had to check every room. It was a big house and he ran in and out of every room in it, shouting her name, at once the spectator and the participant in his own panic. Finally he was back in the living room and he saw that he had left the phone off the hook. That was brilliant. If they were trying to reach him, they couldn't get through. He hung up the phone and willed it to ring, and almost immediately it did.

It was a different male voice this time, calmer, more cultured. He said, "Mr. Khoury, I've been trying to reach you and getting a busy signal. Who were you talking to?"

"Nobody. I had the phone off the hook."

"I hope you didn't call the police."

"I didn't call anybody," Khoury said. "I made a mistake, I thought I hung up the phone, but I set it down alongside it. Where's my wife? Let me talk to my wife."

"You shouldn't leave the phone off the hook. And you shouldn't call anyone."

"I didn't."

"And certainly not the police."

"What do you want?"

"I want to help you get your wife back. If you want her back, that is. Do you want her back?"

"Jesus, what are you-"

"Answer the question, Mr. Khoury."

"Yes, I want her back. Of course I want her back."

"And I want to help you. Keep the line open, Mr. Khoury. I'll be in touch."

"Hello?" he said. "Hello?"

But the line was dead.

For ten minutes he paced the floor, waiting for the phone to ring. Then an icy calm settled over him and he relaxed into it. He stopped walking the floor and sat in a chair next to the phone. When it rang he picked it up but said nothing.

"Khoury?" The first man again, the crude one.

"What do you want?"

"What do I want? What the fuck you think I want?"

He didn't respond.

"Money," the man said after a moment. "We want money."

"How much?"

"You fuckin' sand nigger, where do you get off askin' the questions? You want to tell me that?"

He waited.

"A million dollars. How's that strike you, asshole?"

"That's ridiculous," he said. "Look, I can't talk with you. Have your friend call me, maybe I can talk with him."

"Hey, you raghead fuck, what are you tryin' to-"

This time it was Khoury who broke the connection.

IT seemed to him that it was about control.

Trying to control a situation like this, that was what made you crazy. Because you couldn't do it. They had all the cards.

But if you let go of the need to control it, you could at least quit dancing to their music, shuffling around like a trained bear in a Bulgarian circus.

He went into the kitchen and made himself a cup of thick sweet coffee, preparing it in the long-handled brass pot. While it cooled he got a bottle of vodka from the freezer and poured himself two ounces, drank it down in a single swallow, and felt the icy calm taking him over entirely. He carried his coffee into the other room, and he was just finishing it when the phone rang again.

It was the second man, the nice one. "You upset my friend, Mr. Khoury," he said. "He's difficult to deal with when he's upset."

"I think it would be better if you made the calls from now on."

"I don't see-"

"Because that way we can get this handled instead of getting all hung up in drama," he said. "He mentioned a million dollars. That's out of the question."

"Don't you think she's worth it?"

"She's worth any amount," he said, "but-"

"What does she weigh, Mr. Khoury? One-ten, one-twenty, somewhere in that neighborhood?"

"I don't-"

"Something like fifty kilograms, we might say."

Cute.

"Fifty keys at twenty a key, well, run the numbers for me, why don't you, Mr. Khoury? Comes to a mil, doesn't it?"

"What's the point?"

"The point is you'd pay a million for her if she was product, Mr. Khoury. You'd pay that if she was powder. Isn't she worth as much in flesh and blood?"

"I can't pay what I don't have."

"You have plenty."

"I don't have a million."

"What do you have?"

He'd had time to think of the answer. "Four hundred."

"Four hundred thousand."

"Yes."

"That's less than half."

"It's four hundred thousand," he said. "It's less than some things and it's more than others. It's what I've got."

"You could get the rest."

"I don't see how. I could probably make some promises and call in some favors and raise a little that way, but not that much. And it would take at least a few days, probably more like a week."

"You assume we're in a hurry?"

"I'm in a hurry," he said. "I want my wife back and I want you out of my life, and I'm in a big hurry as far as those two things are concerned."

"Five hundred thousand."

See? There were elements he could control after all. "No," he said. "I'm not bargaining, not where my wife's life is concerned. I gave you the top figure right away. Four."

A pause, then a sigh. "Ah, well. Silly of me to think I could get the better of one of your kind in a business deal. You people have been playing this game for years, haven't you? You're as bad as the Jews."

He didn't know how to answer that, so he left it alone.

"Four it is," the man said. "How long will it take you to get it ready?"

Fifteen minutes, he thought. "A couple of hours," he said.

"We can do it tonight."

"All right."

"Get it ready. Don't call anyone."

"Who would I call?"

HALF an hour later he was sitting at the kitchen table looking at four hundred thousand dollars. He had a safe in the basement, a big old Mosler that weighed over a ton, itself set in the wall and screened by pine paneling and protected by a burglar alarm along with its own lock system. The bills were all hundreds, fifty in each banded stack, eighty stacks each containing five thousand dollars. He'd counted them out and tossed three and four stacks at a time into a woven plastic bushel basket Francine used for laundry.

She didn't have to do the laundry herself, for God's sake. She could hire all the help she needed, he'd told her that often enough. But she liked that, she was old-fashioned, she liked cooking and cleaning and keeping house.

He picked up the phone, held the receiver at arm's length, then dropped it in its cradle. Don't call anyone, the man had said. Who would I call? he'd demanded.

Who had done this to him? Set him up, stolen his wife away from him. Who would do something like that?

Well, maybe a lot of people would. Maybe anybody would, if they thought they could get away with it.

He picked up the phone again. It was clean, untapped. The whole house was free of bugs, as far as that went. He had two devices, both of them supposed to be state of the art, ought to be for what they cost him. One was a telephone-tap alert, installed in the phone line. Any change in the voltage, resistance, or capacitance anywhere on the line and he'd know it. The other was a TrackLock, automatically scanning the radio spectrum for hidden microphones. Five, six grand he'd paid for the two units, something like that, and it was worth it if it kept his private conversations private.

Almost a shame there hadn't been cops listening the past couple of hours. Cops to trace the caller, come down on the kidnappers, bring Francey back to him-

No, last thing he needed. Cops would just fuck up the whole thing beyond recognition. He had the money. He'd pay it, and he'd either get her back or he wouldn't. Things you can control and things you can't- he could control paying the money, control how that went to some degree, but he couldn't control what happened afterward.