The man at the desk gives you each two thousand dollars, cash.

Outside, on the street, a guard flags a cab for Angelique.

Getting into the back seat, Angelique hands you a business card. It's the phone number for a holistic-healing clinic. Under the number, handwritten, it says: “Ask for Lenny.”

The soft leather glove of her hand, the roses of her perfume, the sound of her voice, it all says, “Call me.”

People have a lot of reasons they get into giving foot jobs. The idea that you can give your family a better life. You can give your mom and dad a little comfort and security. A car, maybe. A condo on the beach in Florida.

The day you gave your folks the keys to that condo, that was the happiest day of your life. That day they cried and admitted they never thought their baby would ever make a living just rubbing people's stinky feet. That's a day you'll pay for for the rest of your life.

Don't laugh, but it's not illegal. You're doing a simple foot manipulation. Nothing sexual happens except your client has an orgasm that leaves them too weak to walk for the next couple days. Men or women, it doesn't matter. You work the right spot on their feet, and they come hard as a seizure. So hard there's a smell when they lose control of their bowels. So hard most clients can only look at you, drool running out one corner of their mouth, and motion with a trembling finger for you to take the stack of hundred-dollar bills on the dresser or the coffee table.

Lenny calls from the clinic, and you get on a chartered jet to London. The clinic calls, and you fly to Hong Kong. The clinic is just Lenny, a guy with a Russian accent who lives in a suite in the Park Hampton Hotel, and who you give half your income to. It's Lenny's accent on the phone, telling you what flight to catch, what hotel room or private island where the next client's waiting.

Don't laugh, but the downside is, you never have time to go shopping. The money just piles up. Your uniform is a fur coat. To fit into this new world, you get good gold and platinum jewelry. You keep a head of perfect, glossy hair. Sitting in the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton, you might see a few kids you went to reflexology college with, now wearing Armani suits, Chanel cocktail dresses. Kids who used to be vegan bicycle-commuters, now you see them climbing in and out of limousines. You see them eating alone at small tables in hotel dining rooms. Drinking cocktails at the bar in private airports, waiting for the next chartered jet.

What used to be idealistic dreamers, now lured into professional footwork.

These hippie dreadlocked earth mothers and goateed skaterpunks, you hear them on the telephone giving sell orders to their stockbrokers. Stashing money in offshore accounts and Swiss safety-deposit boxes. Haggling over uncut diamonds and Krugerrands.

Boys named Trout and Pony, Lizard and Oyster, now they're all called Dirk. Girls named Buttercup are all called Dominique.

This flood of people doing footwork, it brings the price down. Soon enough, instead of software billionaires and oil sheikhs, you're loitering in a hotel bar, wearing your last year's Prada and turning foot tricks for twenty bucks a pop. You're slipping under tables to manipulate the feet of conventioneers sitting at restaurant back booths. You're bursting out of big fake birthday cakes to do the feet of whole football teams, bachelor parties, just to keep up the payments on your parents' retirement home.

It's just a matter of time before you contract some incurable toenail fungus under your silk-wrapped French manicure.

You do all this just to pay the interest on money you borrowed from Lenny and his Russian Mafia. Money borrowed to buy stocks that tanked. Stocks recommended by Lenny. Or to buy the jewelry and shoes Lenny said you'd need to fit in.

You're in the lobby bar at the Park Hampton Hotel, trying to talk a drunk businessman into a ten-dollar foot job in the men's room. That's when you see her, Angelique, walking across the lobby, headed for the elevators. Her hair shining. Her furs dragging on the carpet behind her high-heeled feet. Angelique still looking great. Your eyes catch her, and with one gloved hand, she waves you over.

When the elevator comes, she says she's going up to Lenny's penthouse suite. The clinic.

She looks at you in your scuffed high heels, your fingernails chipped and jagged, and she says, “Come see what the next growth industry will be . . .”

The elevator stops on the fiftieth floor, the whole penthouse leased to Lenny, where two pin-striped suits full of muscle stand guarding a door. It's these goons you pay Lenny's cut to, half of everything you make. One guard says your names into a microphone pinned to his lapel, and the doors unlock with a loud buzz.

Inside, it's just you and Angelique and Lenny.

Don't laugh, but, lonely and isolated as your life is, doing footwork—Lenny's life looks worse. Locked up here on the penthouse floor, wearing a white terry-cloth bathrobe all day, counting his money, and talking on the telephone. The only furniture is a desk chair, the seat stained and dirty. A mattress is flopped near walls of glass that look out over the whole city. On a computer screen, stock prices scroll up without stopping.

Lenny comes to the both of you, his bathrobe hanging open, wearing wrinkled striped boxer shorts inside, white socks turned yellow on his feet. Lenny reaches both hands toward Angelique's face and says, “My Angel, my favorite.” He cups her face in his hands and says, “How are you?”

In her high heels, Angelique must be a head taller than him. She smiles, saying, “Lenny . . .”

And Lenny smacks her, hard, one hand across her face, and he says, “You're cheating on me, that's how you are.” He holds one hand up, the palm open and ready to smack her, again, and Lenny says, “You're taking outside assignments, aren't you?”

Holding one gloved hand to her cheek, hiding the red print of Lenny's hand, Angelique says, “Baby, no . . .”

And Lenny drops his hand. He turns his back to her. Lenny goes to look out the windows, the city spread out right next to his mattress.

“Baby,” Angelique says. “Let me show you something new.”

Angelique looks at me.

She goes to stand next to him, putting her gloved hands on his shoulders from behind, and Angelique says, “Let Mommy show you how much she still loves her baby . . .”

She steers Lenny to sit on the mattress. Then to lie back. She slips the yellowed sock off each of his feet.

“Come on, baby,” she says. Taking off her gloves, she says, “You know I give great foot . . .”

Then Angelique does what you've never seen before. She gets down on her knees. She opens her mouth, her lips stretched wide and thin, and runs her tongue along the bottom of Lenny's sole. Angelique cups her lips around Lenny's heel, and Lenny starts to moan.

Don't laugh, but there are jobs worse than the worst job you can imagine. A media mogul with no history of high blood pressure, he's found dead of a stroke in a room at the Four Seasons. A rock star in perfect health dies of kidney failure after a foot massage in the Chateau Marmot.

We have access to the feet of presidents and sultans. CEOs and movie stars. Kings and queens. We know how to make a paid hit look like natural causes.

This is what Angelique tells you on the way down in the elevator. After Lenny moaned and thrashed. After Angelique mouthed his foot until the one long moment Lenny sat up on the mattresses, clutching his chest in both hands and gaping his open mouth at her still sucking his heel. After his heart stopped, Angelique pulled the bedsheets up to his chin. She wiped the lipstick off his foot and smeared more around her mouth. She unplugged his phones and told the guards Lenny was taking a long nap.

On the way down in the elevator, Angelique tells you this was her last foot job. This kind of foot hit paid a million bucks, cash. A rival agency had hired her to bump off Lenny, and now she was out of the business for good.