'It's your fault!' she hissed at him. 'All your fault! Why did you have to hit that stupid Gypsy cunt with your car? It's all your fault!'

He looked at her, incapable of speaking. Cunt? He thought confusedly. Did I hear Leda Rossington say 'cunt'? Who would have believed she even knew such a word? His second thought was: You've got it all wrong, Leda, it was Heidi, not me … and she's just great. In the pink. Feeling her oats. Hitting on all cylinders. Kicking up dickens. Taking …

Then Leda's face changed: she looked at Halleck with a calmly polite expressionlessness.

'Come in,' she said.

She brought him the martini he'd asked for in an oversize glass -two olives and two tiny onions were impaled on the swizzle stick, which was a tiny gold-plated sword. Or maybe it was solid gold. The martini was very strong, which Halleck did not mind at all … although he knew from the drinking he'd done over the last three weeks that he'd be on his ass unless he went slow; his capacity for booze had shrunk along with his weight.

Still, he took a big gulp to start with and closed his eyes with gratitude as the booze exploded warmth out from his stomach. Gin, wonderful high-calorie gin, he thought.

'He is in Minnesota,' she said dully, sitting down with her own martini. It was, if anything, bigger than the one she had given to Billy. 'But not visiting relatives. He's at the Mayo Clinic.'

'The Mayo -'

'He's convinced it's cancer,' she went on. 'Mike Houston couldn't find anything wrong, and neither could the dermatologists he went to in the city, but he's still convinced it's cancer. Do you know that he thought it was herpes at first? He thought I'd caught herpes from someone.'

Billy looked down, embarrassed, but he needn't have done so. Leda was looking over his right shoulder, as if reciting her tale to the wall. She took frequent birdlike sips at her drink. Its level sank slowly but steadily.

'I laughed at him when he finally brought it out. I laughed and said, “Cary, if you think that is herpes, then you know less about venereal diseases than I do about thermodynamics.” I shouldn't have laughed, but it was a way to … to relieve the pressure, you know. The pressure and the anxiety. Anxiety? The terror.'

'Mike Houston gave him creams that didn't work, and the dermatologists gave him creams that didn't work, and then they gave him shots that didn't work. I was the one that remembered the old Gypsy, the one with the half-eaten nose, and the way he came out of the crowd at the flea market in Raintree the weekend after your hearing, Billy. He came out of the crowd and touched him … he touched Cary. He put his hand on Cary's face and said something. I asked Cary then, and I asked him later, after it had begun to spread, and he wouldn't tell me. He just shook his head.'

Halleck took a second gulp of his drink just as Leda set her glass, empty, on the table beside her.

'Skin cancer,' she said. 'He's convinced that's what it is because skin cancer can be cured ninety percent of the time. I know the way his mind works – it would be funny if I didn't, wouldn't it, after living with him for twenty-five years, watching him sit on the bench and make real-estate deals and drink and make real-estate deals and chase other men's wives and make real-estate deals and … Oh, shit, I sit here and wonder what I would say at his funeral if someone gave me a dose of Pentothal an hour before the services. I guess it would come out something like – He bought a lot of Connecticut land which is now shopping centers and snapped a lot of bras and drank a lot of Wild Turkey and left me a rich widow and I lived with him through the best years of my life and I've had more fucking Blackglama mink coats than I ever had orgasms, so let's all get out of here and go to a roadhouse somewhere and dance and after a while maybe somebody will get drunk enough to forget I've had my fucking chin tied up behind my fucking ears three fucking times, twice in fucking Mexico City and once in fucking Germany and snap my fucking bra." Oh, fuck it. Why am I telling you all this?'

'The only things men like you understand are humping, plea-bargaining, and how to bet on pro-football games.'

She was crying again. Billy Halleck, who now understood the drink she had now almost finished was far from her first of the evening, shifted uncomfortably in his chair and took a big gulp of his own, drink. It banged into his stomach with untrustworthy warmth.

'He's convinced it's skin cancer because he can't let himself believe in anything as ridiculously old-world, as superstitious, as penny-dreadful-novel as Gypsy curses. But I saw something deep down in his eyes, Billy. I saw it a lot over the last month or so. Especially at night. A little more clearly every night. I think that's one of the reasons he left, you know. Because he saw me seeing it.

'Refill?'

Billy shook his head numbly and watched her go to the bar and mix herself a fresh martini. She made extremely simple martinis, he saw; you simply filled a glass with gin and tumbled in a couple of olives. They left twin trails of bubbles as they sank to the bottom. Even from where he was sitting, all the way across the room, he could smell the gin.

What was it with Cary Rossington? What had happened to him? Part of Billy Halleck most definitely did not want to know. Houston had apparently made no connection between what was happening to Billy and what was happening to Rossington -why should he have? Houston didn't know about the Gypsies. Also, Houston was bombing his brain with big white torpedoes on a regular basis.

Leda came back and sat down again.

'If he calls and says he's coming back,' she told Billy calmly, 'I'm going to our place on Captiva. It will be beastly hot this time of year, but if I have enough gin, I find I barely notice the temperature. I don't think I could stand to be alone with him anymore. I still love him – yes, in my way, I do – but I don't think I could stand it. Thinking of him in the next bed … thinking he might … might touch me . . .' She shivered. Some of her drink spilled. She drank the rest all at once and then made a thick blowing sound, like a thirsty horse that has just drunk its fill.

'Leda, what's wrong with him? What's happened?'

'Happened? Happened? Why, Billy dear, I thought I'd told you, or that you knew somehow.'

Billy shook his head. He was starting to believe he didn't know anything.

'He's growing scales. Cary is growing scales.'

Billy gaped at her.

Leda offered a dry, amused, horrified smile, and shook her head a little.

'No – that's not quite right. His skin is turning into scales. He has become a case of reverse evolution, a sideshow freak. He's turning into a fish or a reptile.'

She laughed suddenly, a harsh, cawing shriek that made Halleck's blood run cold: She's tottering on the brink of madness, he thought – the revelation made him colder still. I think she'll probably go to Captiva no matter what happens. She'll have to get out of Fairview if she wants to save her sanity. Yes.

Leda clapped both hands over her mouth and then excused herself as if she had burped – or perhaps vomited – instead of laughed. Billy, incapable of speaking just then, only nodded and got up to make himself a fresh drink after all.

She seemed to find it easier to talk now that he wasn't looking at her, now that he was at the bar with his back turned, and Billy purposely lingered there.