The hulk led Travis-and Travis led Nora, holding her hand-through that dressing room toward the door at the other end. As they went, one of the topless dancers-a striking blonde-put a hand on Nora’s shoulder and walked beside her.
“Are you new, honey?”
“Me? No. Oh, no, I don’t work here.”
The blonde, who was so well-endowed that Nora felt like a boy, said, “You got the equipment, honey.”
“Oh, no,” was all Nora could say.
“You like my equipment?” the blonde asked.
“Oh, well, you’re very pretty,” Nora said.
To the blonde, Travis said, “Give it up, sister. The lady doesn’t swing that way.”
The blonde smiled sweetly. “If she tries it, she might like it.”
They went through a door, out of the dressing room and into a narrow, shabby, poorly lit hallway before Nora realized she had been propositioned. By a woman!
She did not know whether to laugh or gag. Probably both.
The hulk took them to an office at the back of the building and left them, saying, “Mr. Van Dyne will be with you in a minute.”
The office had gray walls, gray metal chairs, filing cabinets, and a gray metal desk that was battered and scarred. No pictures or calendars hung on the bare walls. No pens or notepads or reports were on the desk. The place looked as if it was seldom used.
Nora and Travis sat on the two metal chairs in front of the desk.
The music from the bar was still audible but no longer deafening. When she caught her breath, Nora said, “Where do they all come from?”
“Who?”
“All those pretty girls with their perfect boobs and tight little bottoms and long legs, and all of them willing to… to do that. Where do so many of them come from?”
“There’s a breeding farm outside of Modesto,” Travis said.
She gaped at him.
He laughed and said, “I’m sorry. I keep forgetting how innocent you are, Mrs. Cornell.” He kissed her cheek. His stubble scratched a little, but it was nice. In spite of wearing yesterday’s clothes and not having shaved, he seemed as clean as a well-scrubbed baby compared to the gauntlet they had run in order to reach this office. He said, “I should answer you straight because you don’t know when I’m joking.”
She blinked, “Then there isn’t a breeding farm outside Modesto?”
“No. There’s all kinds of girls who do it. Girls who hope to break into showbiz, go to L.A. to be movie stars but can’t make it, so they drift into places like this in L.A. or they come north to San Francisco or they go to Vegas. Most are decent enough kids. They see this as temporary. Very good money can be made fast. It’s a way to build up a stake before taking another crack at Hollywood. Then there are some, the self-haters, who do it to humiliate themselves. Others are in rebellion from their parents, from their first husbands, from the whole damn world. And some are hookers.”
“The hookers meet… johns here?” she asked.
“Maybe, maybe not. Some probably dance to have an explicable source of income when the IRS knocks on their doors. They report their earnings as dancers, which gives them a better chance of concealing what they make from turning tricks.”
“It’s sad,” she said.
“Yeah. In some cases… in a lot of cases, it’s damn sad.”
Fascinated, she said, “Will we get false IDs from this Van Dyne?”
“I believe so.”
She regarded him solemnly. “You really do know your way around, don’t you?”
“Does it bother you-that I know places like this?”
She thought a moment. Then: “No. In fact… if a woman’s going to take a husband, I suppose he ought to be a man who knows what to do in any situation. It gives me a lot of confidence.”
“In me?”
“In you, yes, and confidence that we’re going to get through this all right, that we’re going to save Einstein and ourselves.”
“Confidence is good. But in Delta Force, one of the first things you learn is that being overly confident can get you killed.”
The door opened, and the hulk returned with a round-faced man in a gray suit, blue shirt, and black tie.
“Van Dyne,” the newcomer said, but he did not offer to shake hands. He went around the desk and sat in a spring-backed chair. He had thinning blond hair and baby-smooth cheeks. He looked like a stockbroker in a television commercial: efficient, smart, as well-meaning as he was well-groomed. “I wanted to talk to you because I want to know who’s spreading these falsehoods about me.”
Travis said, “We need new ID-driver’s licenses, social security cards, the whole works. First-rate, with full backup, not junk.”
“That’s what I’m talking about,” Van Dyne said. He raised his eyebrows quizzically. “Where on earth did you get the idea that I’m in that sort of business? I’m afraid you’ve been misinformed.”
“We need first-rate paper with full backup,” Travis repeated.
Van Dyne stared at him, at Nora. “Let me see your wallet. And your purse, miss.”
Putting his wallet on the desk, Travis told Nora, “It’s okay.”
Reluctantly, she put her purse beside the wallet.
“Please stand and let Caesar search you,” Van Dyne said.
Travis stood and motioned for Nora to get up as well.
Caesar, the cement-faced hulk, searched Travis with embarrassing thoroughness, found the .357 Magnum, put it on the desk. He was even more thorough with Nora, unbuttoning her blouse and boldly feeling the cups of her bra for a miniature microphone, battery, and recorder. She blushed and would not have permitted these intimacies if Travis had not explained to her what Caesar was looking for, Besides, Caesar remained expressionless throughout, as if he were a machine without the potential for erotic response.
When Caesar was finished with them, they sat down while Van Dyne went through Travis’s wallet and then through Nora’s purse. She was afraid he was going to take their money without giving them anything in return, but he appeared to be interested in only their ID and the butcher’s knife that Nora Still carried.
To Travis, Van Dyne said, “Okay. If you were a cop, you wouldn’t be allowed to carry a Magnum”-he swung out the cylinder and looked at the ammunition-loaded with magnums. The ACLU would have your ass.” He smiled at Nora. “No policewoman carries a butcher’s knife.”
Suddenly she understood what Travis meant when he’d said he was carrying the revolver not for protection but for its value as ID.
Van Dyne and Travis haggled a bit, finally settling on sixty-five hundred as the price for two sets of ID with “full backup.”
Their belongings, including the butcher’s knife and revolver, were returned to them.
From the gray office, they followed Van Dyne into the narrow hall, where he dismissed Caesar, then to a set of dimly lit concrete stairs leading to a basement beneath Hot Tips, where the rock music was further filtered by the intervening concrete floor.
Nora was not sure what she expected to find in the basement: maybe men who all looked like Edward 0. Robinson and wore green eye shades on elastic bands and labored over antique printing presses, producing not just false identification papers but stacks of phony currency. What she found, instead, surprised her.
The steps ended in a stone-walled storage room about forty by thirty feet. Bar supplies were stacked to shoulder height. They walked along a narrow aisle formed by cartons of whiskey, beer, and cocktail napkins, to a steel fire door in the rear wall. Van Dyne pushed a button in the door frame, and a closed-circuit security camera made a purring sound as it panned them.
The door was opened from inside, and they went through into a smaller room with subdued lighting, where two young bearded guys were working at two of seven computers lined up on work tables along one wall. The first guy was wearing soft Rockport shoes, safari pants, a web belt, and a cotton safari shirt. The other wore Reeboks, jeans, and a sweatshirt that featured the Three Stooges. They looked almost like twins, and both resembled young versions of Steven Spielberg. They were so intensely involved with their computer work that they did not look up at Nora and Travis and Van Dyne, but they were having fun, too, talking exuberantly to themselves, to their machines, and to each other in high-tech language that made no sense whatsoever to Nora.