He said, “Damn it, you confuse me. Every time you open your mouth, I get confused.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I’ve been putting on an act with you. I deserve your anger.”

“An act? What kind of act?”

Her hair swung forward as she looked down; it masked her face. She said slowly, with care, “Sometimes it seems an awful waste to think about where you are-it’s so much nicer to think about where you could be.”

“You’re not making sense.”

“When you came to my apartment this afternoon you were a total stranger, you didn’t know anything at all about me, and I liked you immediately-you seemed so nice and sensitive and so Goddamned normal. I don’t meet many normal men in my life and I gave in to the stupid fairy-tale wish that I could just meet a nice normal fellow and have a nice normal dinner with him, no strings attached, no front to keep up, no tired dreary thoughts of what would come after it.”

She still hadn’t looked up, and he didn’t speak; he waited for her to go on, and after a moment she drew breath sharply and said in a very low voice, “It wasn’t any good. I should have known that-I should never have come. But you asked me here without suspecting a damned thing and you haven’t mentioned a word about that NCI stock you tried to pump me about this afternoon, and I did come, and now, damn it I owe it to you-I’ve got to level with you.”

She tossed her head back and gave him, full face, a twisted smile. “Do you really want hear about me, the sad story of my life?”

“Do you want to tell it?”

“No. But I’ve got to, or you’ll keep phoning me for dates-you’ll keep after me until you’re satisfied, I can see it in your face, and I’d only have to turn you down. You deserve to know why.”

She peered past the bar to the front window of the restaurant. The lobby entrance of a small hotel across the street was lit. “Do you see the two girls in that hotel entrance?”

He turned to look. The girls were skinny and nervous, standing hipshot in the hotel doorway, wearing miniskirts and elaborate tousled hairdos which were probably wigs.

Carol said, “Ladies of Cypriot persuasion. They do a brisk business from lobbies like that one, all over the midtown area. This town is Mecca for thousands of teen-aged girls like that. Out in Queens and New Jersey the pimps recruit them in candy stores by promising them parties and expensive clothes. They’re stupid, backward, maybe already hooked on hard stuff, fourteen or fifteen years old. I mean the ones that cruise Times Square and hole up in flophouses on Ninth Avenue. Those two across the street work out of that hotel. They’re a little higher in the social order-they get maybe twenty dollars a trick, which they have to split with bellhops and cops and a pimp. They may gross a hundred and fifty a night, but they only keep sixty of it, and most of that goes to support their habits. They’ll snag a chief petty officer on overnight shore leave, or a typewriter repairman whose wife’s home pregnant and won’t let him touch her, but if you’re a district sales manager in town for a meeting, or a doctor at a medical convention, you want something better-a girl you can take to dinner at the Copacabana and show off to the other doctors at an after-hours hotel party. Someone who can make good conversation and look gorgeous and spend the night, provided you’re willing to shell out for it.”

Hastings’ eyes were squinted almost shut; his hands had become still. Carol said wearily, “Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

“I guess.”

“Then you do understand what the mystery was all about.” She met his eyes and said with brutal directness, “I see no reason not to believe I’ve been the principal player in more dirty locker-room stories than the farmer’s daughter. It’s part of my stock in trade-one of the reasons I can charge what I charge is that the johns want to boast about it later. It feeds their egos and their sagging libidos to brag to the boys in the club car that they just blew a stinking great fortune on one of the highest-priced call girls in New York City. A girl who only accepts johns with references, who looks innocent and gives them the illusion of glamour. A girl who shops in the best Fifth Avenue stores and likes paying two hundred dollars instead of nineteen-ninety-nine for a dress. By appointment only.”

She sat back and gave him a brassy stare.

He paid the check, drew back Carol’s chair, and took her elbow. Outside she disengaged herself and turned to walk away, her back stiff. He gripped her arm, saw her puzzled scowl, and held her beside him while the doorman smiled and nodded and summoned a cab. Hastings tipped him and got in beside her. He gave the driver the address of her hotel, and settled back. There was no conversation. It was a short ride. They got out of the cab and, on the sidewalk, Hastings said, “One question. Do you enjoy it?”

Her smile was twisted.

“My God, you’re rude. I suppose now you want to go up with me for a nightcap. No man’s got any conscience below the waist.”

He took her inside, his mouth making a pinched line across his face like a surgeon’s wound. They went up silently in the elevator, and he walked her to her door. When she inserted the key she said coolly, “I’d better warn you, I come damned high.”

“Sure,” he said. “I guess the fat ugly ones have to be extra generous if they want you.”

She opened the door and went inside, not barring his way. She said, “Misunderstood husbands, sweating little-boy men-I thought maybe you were a little different.”

“You’d be surprised,” he said. Then, shutting the door and going into the big room after her, he said, “What I’d really like is a cup of coffee.”

She froze. “What the hell are you up to?”

He shook his head. “I don’t honestly know. I was putting on a tough act, the same as you were, but I can’t bring it off, can I? The trouble is, once I make up my mind about someone, I resist changing it even when I get proof that I was wrong. I’ll be honest about it-you’re outside my experience, but then you’re probably outside most men’s experience. I have never understood men who were capable of buying sex. I’ve never been with a whore in my life-frankly, if there wasn’t some kind of emotional communication, I doubt I could get it up. So you see, I didn’t come up with you for that. I came because I’m intrigued. You tried to shock me right out of your life, and it almost worked-it would have, except I’m curious, and a little stubborn, and it seems to me you can’t just label somebody ‘prostitute’ and let it go at that. When you say the words ‘call girl,’ that’s fact, but it’s not truth. I still want to know the truth.”

“Truth,” she said, “is anything but beautiful. You’re babbling like a romantic idiot. Act your age.”

“Why not humor me?”

“Oh, damn it, Russ-if you’ve got any sense at all, you’ll walk out that door and never see me again.”

He said in a flat voice, “I might-if I knew enough about one thing.”

“Oh, God, now we’re back to those shares of stock.”

“That’s right. We are.”

“What the hell do you want of me?” She threw up her hands. “They were a gift from an admirer, all right?”

“A two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar gift? Come off it. I could get a subpoena, you know.”

She gave him a wicked small grin. “Now you’re trying to bluff me.”

“Bluff? Don’t you believe I have subpoena power?”

“You have the power to subpoena the records of corporations and insiders and control stockholders. I’m none of those. I own nine thousand shares of NCI common voting stock. That’s not even one-half of one percent of the outstanding stock. You couldn’t convince a federal judge I was an insider by any stretch of the imagination.”

He made no immediate reply. Only one lamp was lit. Carol stood highlighted in the center of the carpet, statuesque, shadows deepening the roundnesses of her high breasts, soft thighs, and long legs. He came to her, leaned forward, kissed her mouth. It was a long lover’s kiss but her lips were still and stiff under his. She slipped her face away. “Don’t be ridiculous-don’t get intense, Russ.”