He straightened. His face was expressionless. “You’re damned beautiful, you know.”

“You’re forcing me to be cruel,” she said. “You asked me if I enjoyed it. The answer is, it’s the way I earn my living-it’s no more enjoyable than punching a clock, and no less.”

“Maybe-maybe. But you’re a good liar. How do I know that’s true?”

She only gave him the twisted smile he was getting used to.

He said, “You made a mistake, you know, coming back at me with that business about insiders and control stockholders. You were trying to prove it wouldn’t be any good for me to try to push you around, but all you did was convince me you’re involved in something. Whatever it is, you’re in it up to your gorgeous hairline. You’ve been too well briefed in legal technicalities for an innocent.”

She uttered a harsh laugh. “I have never pretended to be an innocent.”

“You know exactly what I mean.”

“Do I? You’d have to prove that, wouldn’t you?”

“Being top-priced in your line may be lucrative, but it’s not that lucrative. Why don’t you tell me who you’re fronting for?”

“Fronting for? I don’t know what you mean.”

“All right,” he said, turning toward the door. “I’ll keep digging until I find out.”

“Please don’t, Russ.”

“It’s my job-what do you expect me to do? You could make it easier for me.”

“I could only get you hurt if I did what you want me to do.”

“Don’t be melodramatic.”

“Melodramatic? You don’t know the kind of people I have to deal with.”

“Do you mean the Mafia?”

“No. That’s not what I mean.”

“I thought they were tied up in-your racket.”

“You don’t have to use that tone on me, Russ. The skin trade doesn’t pay enough to interest the Mafia anymore, they don’t bother to organize it. Oh, they force a lot of kids onto the streets by hooking them on heroin, and it’s true racketeers are like anyone else with money-they can get a girl when they want one. But it isn’t what you think. I’ve got no connection with them.”

“Then stop threatening me. It’s asinine. You’re only throwing raw meat on the floor.”

“No. I’m telling you the truth. I don’t want you to play boy detective in my affairs. There are too many powerful people who can’t afford to have that kind of thing going on.”

“Like the one you fronted for when you bought the stock?”

“Drop it right now, Russ. I’m not kidding.”

He gave her a long, slow scrutiny, as if to fix her image forever in his mind, and suddenly he put a chill smile on his face. “Ciao, then,” he said softly, and turned on his heel and left.

By the time he reached the street he was feeling hung-over and stupid. He lit a cigarette and walked east toward Fifth Avenue, his shoes thudding the pavement; took the cigarette from his mouth and dropped it into the gutter; lifted his shoulders defensively and put his hands in his pockets. He was angry with himself for his stupefying naivete. He had somehow ignored all the signs-they must have been there all along-and plunged ahead, his perceptions corrupted by an innocence so eager it must have been comical to her. It had been a shabby trick; he had made a fool of himself.

He turned downtown on Fifth and walked all the way home. By the time he got there, his thinking had undergone a series of subtle changes. Mounting the steps of the converted brownstone, he found himself remembering her radiance, the range of colors in her voice, the sincerity screened by her mockery. He had opened the gates of his mind to let her flow inside, and now, by the time he entered his apartment, her face and name raged in him like a fever. Incredulous, he sat down on the bed and stared sightlessly, filled with disbelief and a half-hysterical feeling that things had escaped completely from his control.

The more he thought about it, the more outraged he became. He was far too mature for this kind of silly infatuation. It was absurd. She was nothing but a tramp. A prostitute, a cheap Goddamned whore. How many thousands of men had gone through her as if she were a revolving door or a public rest room? It was epic to estimate. He tried to make the dirty degradation of it loom forbiddingly, tried to fill his mind with loathing and contemptuous disgust. And when that didn’t work, he went to his desk and began to write, in a fierce crabbed hand, a list of investigative gambits on which he would get to work first thing in the morning. But when he finished it and leaned back to stretch, he could hear her throaty, mocking laugh and see the twisted smile on her stunning face. He caught himself reaching for the phone to call her; he shouted an oath and slammed the receiver down and sat staring in amazement at his own trembling hands.

8. Mason Villiers

The great yawl of a limousine prowled smoothly and almost without sound at fifty-five miles an hour, surging toward the huge complex of buttressed flying concrete at the Hawthorne interchange. Villiers sat back with his eyes half-shut, too disciplined to reveal even in the dark privacy of the Cadillac his distaste for the idea of having to attend one of George Hackman’s parties. Sanders tooled the big machine through town and along a succession of curving drives. Here and there Villiers saw at windows the reflected blue glow of television. Shrubs and trees nudged the big ranch-style houses, each set off on its own acre of ground. Neat lawns, asphalt driveways, Early American mailboxes. Villiers detested the suburbs. For years Isher had tried to persuade him to buy a house, for the tax advantages inherent in ownership. He had bought one, in Grosse Pointe, but he had never set foot inside it. Either you lived on a forty-square-mile estate on your own Mediterranean island or you jetted from hotel suite to hotel suite; there was no point in half-assed compromises.

Tod Sanders found a space for the limousine amid the herd of big cars that browsed in Hackman’s crescent driveway. Villiers said, “Stay put and stay awake,” and walked up to the porticoed entrance, the slight pinching of his lips the only sign of his displeasure. He could hear the noise of a jammed crowd through the door. When he rang the bell it swung open immediately, and Ginger Hackman greeted him with a cry: “Mace, darling, why is it we never see you?” And added in a lower voice, “I’m so glad to see you, Mace.”

There was a lot of noise and restive motion in the smoky room behind her, but she stood blocking the entrance for a moment, smiling at him, an attractive, sad-faced young woman with sulky and sensuous eyes. She was sewed into a low-cut cocktail dress, so tight it revealed her buttocks and pubic bulge and the seam lines of her panties. She licked crumbs from her fingertips and thumb, casual and unselfconscious, frankly staring at him. Finally she sighed. “Well, come on in and face it.”

When he squeezed past her through the door, she turned to present her cheek for a ritual kiss of greeting; when he didn’t make the appropriate response, she said, “Oh, Mace,” and stepped back to shut the door behind him.

The room roared with a thick crowd. Villiers surveyed it with his piercing gray eyes and an unsmiling expression. Ginger came along behind him and took his arm with a proprietary air. “You ought to give lessons in how to do a dramatic pause,” she told him.

He made no answer. She took him around to make introductions; Villiers went with her, moving with languid grace and his unflappable ability of ignoring any obligation to acknowledge the existence of the people to whom he was introduced. The room was jammed full of women in Pucci prints, men of all ages talking about earnings ratios and defensive market positions, and the titular guest of honor, a red-headed Irish actress, oft-married, a photogenic female who had enjoyed a brief flurry of Hollywood popularity in swashbucklers and Westerns, the results of her pneumatic talent for taking very deep breaths. She smiled at everything she said and everything that was said to her; she seemed to have been programmed to smile incessantly. Ginger brought Villiers along to meet her, and they found Ginger’s husband staring at the lardy cleavage revealed by the actress’s scooped neckline, while a woman was saying to the actress with completely false affection, “Oh, my dear, how divine! That dress is you.”