Immoral Certainty by Robert K. Tanenbaum Page A

asses in jail. Besides, I want him for Marlene.”
    The man and the little girl sat in the park together, not touching, on the broken bench, amid the flat bottles in their bags and the broken shards of glass. It was dusk. Boys were still shooting baskets on the other side of the playground.
    The child said, with a giggle, “You not the bogeyman. The bogeyman bad.”
    The Bogeyman said, “The bogeyman isn’t bad. It’s the children he comes to get that’re bad. Are you bad?”
    The girl shrugged. She said, “You got more candy? That gold candy?”
    The man smiled and brought out a small heart-shaped box covered in gold foil. He offered it to the girl. She took one of the chocolates and looked at the man. He nodded and she took another. She put one into her mouth and waited for the explosion of sweetness.
    The girl’s name was Brenda Meigs. She was seven years old, plump in an unhealthy way, frizzle-haired, plain. Her racial make-up was complex and obscure. It had given her a pale ochre skin, which was marred on the arms and the edge of the jaw by bruises, some fresh and livid purple, others aging to dull yellow. The man observed them with a practiced eye. He touched a long bruise on her forearm with a pale forefinger, gently. The child snatched her arm away.
    “You hurt yourself,” said the man.
    “I fell down.”
    The man smiled. It was the common lie, used by the child as well as the abusing parent, for who can believe at such a tender age that the source of love is also the source of death? He knew a lot about child abuse. He was a connoisseur of damaged children. He knew them in all their guises: the cringing ones, the broken in spirit; the violent ones, who acted out on the playground their harsh domestic dramas. He befriended them, gave them candy, toys and affection, and after a while he carried off a chosen, select group to a place where no one would be able to hurt them again.
    He looked happily down at the little girl, who was sucking on her second chocolate, her eyes closed in delight, scuffing her ragged sneakers against the concrete under her bench. It was getting dark, but he knew that no distraught mother would be out on the streets looking for this little one. Brenda’s mother, he had learned, was a pill-head, and she had a new boyfriend with a good connection.
    Brenda would wander the streets, popping in on friends and a few relations in the mean neighborhood, cadging meals, hoping to be allowed to sleep in a bedroom corner. If not, she would slip into a supermarket and steal something small and sweet, and then try to sneak back to her bed, praying that her mother had scored downers and was nodding off.
    He could supply her with food, at least, if not shelter. Not yet. He gave her candies and bought her meals at fast-food joints. He liked the same fast food that she did. In any case, it seemed to him that she was healthier.
    And of course, he could not take her to a regular restaurant, because people might remember. That had been drilled into him quite thoroughly, along with the rest of the specifications. The children had to be abandoned and abused. But there was nothing that said he couldn’t be kind to them. Or that he couldn’t feed their little spirits as well as their bodies.
    “Tell me, Brenda,” he said. “Do you think you would like a nice doll?”
    The bar called Larry’s on 48th Street west of Seventh was not the sort of place that Anna Rivas would ever have gone alone. She didn’t understand why Felix had brought her here. It was not the kind of place she thought a rising young executive ought to frequent.
    It was dark, for one thing, which was sort of romantic, but Anna suspected that the illumination was designed not so much to encourage romance as to conceal the stains on the red-flocked wallpaper and the carpet. The vinyl booth they sat in was cracked in places, and the cracks were roughly patched with masking tape. And the other people, what she could make out of them, were