He sat down next to her. He needed to get going. He ran his hand over her back. The little bit of her round ass he could see had skin tighter and smoother than most women, even really young ones, managed to have on their faces. Got to hand it to dancers, their bottom halves were something else. Finally, he just couldn’t take any more time for this. Johnny was just trying to be a good guy, but it was probably true he’d done her first and turned her head all around and gotten her to agree to do something that she wouldn’t have done in a million years back in whatever village in France she came from. “I got an idea,” he said.

She looked up at him. It looked like she’d gotten the tears under control.

“How much did Johnny pay you to come up here?”

“A thousand dollars.”

“Wait right here.”

Fredo went into the den, pulled back the hinged oil painting replica of the Mona Lisa, opened his safe, and got out two thousand-dollar bills. She’d probably never seen one of these before in her life, much less two. The government had hardly bothered to design it. The back just said ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS. And Cleveland on the front? What the fuck had Cleveland ever done? He folded the bills in half, came back out, and pressed them into her hand.

“Keep the thousand you already got,” he said, “and keep these, too. You don’t gotta feel bad you’re a whore, right, because how can you be a whore if we don’t, you know?”

“Fuck?” she said.

There was a hopeful tone in her voice that confused Fredo, as if fucking would cheer her up or something. He’d been trying not to even say fuck, since she was all bent out of shape about maybe being a fucking hooker. “Sure,” he said. “If we don’t fuck. Just one catch.”

She nodded, taking the money and slipping it into a pocket in the red dress beside her.

“All you have to do is go back to Johnny and, when he asks you how it was”-and he would, Fredo knew, that was just how Johnny was-“you got to promise to tell him”-Fredo paused to wink and flash her a grin-“that I was hands down the best you ever had.”

“Hands down,” she repeated, slipping on her underpants now. She seemed sad about it. “All right.”

“Attagirl,” he said.

The phone rang. It was Figaro, which is what he’d been calling the new bodyguard, whose name it embarrassed him not to be able to keep straight. Yes, Fredo said. He was fine.

As he watched her get dressed, he took off his shoes and socks and shirt.

He’d be up in no time, he said. Figaro said there were still guys up there. Fredo said that was good. Was Michael still there? He wasn’t. “Too bad.” Relieved, Fredo hung up.

He had stopped wearing undershirts a long time ago, after that one movie. After that, a guy wears an undershirt and these modern girls think he’s just off the boat. Only after he was standing there bare-chested in just his pants did it occur to him that if he was half the gentleman he was pretending to be, he’d either have waited for her to go or else himself gone into another room. Her dress was red satin. Somehow, with it on, seeing her like that and knowing about the cheap underwear underneath, he felt differently about her. He felt something.

“That’s a nice painting,” she said. She pointed to the Madonna in the small pine frame over his bed. The painting that had come with the room was a huge thing with an Indian on a white horse, slumped in the saddle, watching the sun set. “Did you paint it?”

“What? No.”

“Do you know the artist?”

“It’s just a painting, okay?”

“I had a long time to look at it. That model, she has no vanity. It’s a good piece.”

“A good piece?”

“I studied art.” She looked down. Her toenail polish was chipped. “A long time ago.”

“It is a good piece,” he said.

“Okay,” she said, grabbing her purse.

“Okay,” he said, walking her to the door.

She pulled out a cigarette. He reached in his pocket. “Shit,” he said. “I lost my lighter.”

“You’re sweet,” she said, tucking the cigarette behind his ear.

“Not really,” he said. He gave her back the cigarette. “Not my brand, honey.”

She leaned toward him. It had all the makings of a peck on the cheek, but something else Fredo had learned about these girls on the make in the west, a lot of things at three in the morning that have the look of something that would make sense by the rules of three in the afternoon turn into things the men asleep in their beds on Long Island would never believe. Her lips parted. His tongue obeyed, driving into her little wet mouth, sliding his hands through her coarse platinum hair. A tiny gasp came out of her that seemed to startle them both.

They looked into each other’s eyes. Hers grew wide, as if she’d just found an earring she’d lost. She was right, she wasn’t a pro. They don’t look at you like that.

“My life,” she said, “it is so fucking complicated.”

“Everybody thinks that,” Fredo said. “Probably you’re right, though. About you.”

This Rita had a crooked grin.

“Oh?” she said. “And what about you, eh?”

“I can’t complain,” he said. “Though I still do. I guess I got it all under control, though.”

“You think so?” With her index finger she touched his bare rib cage and did a little screwdriver thing.

They kissed again. Her mouth was sour from all that champagne, but he stayed with it.

“Fray-die Cor-le-o-ne,” she said.

If this hadn’t been three in the morning, it would have occurred to him right away that it was stupid to run the risk that someday this girl would blab about how she was bare-ass naked in front of Fredo Corleone and he paid her two grand not to fuck her. Why was he in any hurry to get upstairs? Anything worth being there for was over. “At your service,” he said.

“You dirty rat,” she said. She said it weird.

“Say what?”

“Nothing,” she said. She sighed heavily and reached for the doorknob. “See you in the funny papers, okay?”

Oh, right. She’d been doing an impression of some movie gangster. He put his hand on her hand. “Stay,” he said.

She screwed up that funny lopsided mouth. “I don’t know,” she said. “Will you take your money back?”

“I never paid you for that,” he said. “I paid you to give Johnny Fontane nightmares.”

She seemed deep in thought about this. “So I could just give him his money back, yes?”

Fredo smiled. “Perfect,” he said. “Tell him, you know, the thing I paid you to tell him. You want me to write it down or you got it?”

“Hands down,” she said. “Best I ever had. Got it.”

“And then tell him to take his money back,” he said, “it was that good.”

“I’m not sure about this,” she said. “Maybe-tomorrow? We could start over. A date or something?”

“Today’s tomorrow, baby.”

She still looked deep in thought. She put her finger in her mouth and sucked on it and ran it slowly down Fredo’s bare chest from his neck to his belt buckle. She kept her hand there.

“I love sex.” She said it like an admission of defeat. Her voice was small, too, not the husky voices people always talk about with French girls. She was still slurring her words. “It’s bad, you know, but like a man I love it.”

For a moment, the line-like a man I love it-went through Fredo like an electric shock. Though of course she didn’t mean it the way, for a split second, he was afraid she did. Then he snapped out of it and grabbed onto those little tits with both hands.

She moaned, but now she did sound like a pro. Trying too hard. It couldn’t feel that good, her tits.

They moved to the bed, and she undid his belt and yanked at his pants and his underwear. Fredo fell back on the bed. She stood over him and reached back to unzip her dress.

“Don’t,” he said.

She turned around for him to do it.

“Keep it on,” he said. “It’s dynamite.”

She shrugged and sat down beside him on the bed. They kissed for a while and she put her hand on his cock. He could have blamed it on all the drinking he’d done today-this morning and who knows how much he had waiting at the Detroit airport, though nothing since then. And also how tired he was, the jet lag. He didn’t, didn’t, didn’t want to think about the other thing. That never happened. And anyway he’d knocked up better showgirls than this here, in his sleep. Now that he was thinking about it, of course, he was doomed. So, okay, don’t think about my cock, he thought. He thought about her, kissing her and grabbing her tits and how great it would be to fuck her with that shiny dress on, which could happen in like ten seconds if he could just stop thinking about all the things he was thinking about. If he could just stop thinking at all. He really needed to go easier on the booze.