“Let me see, give me a little time, okay?” She wound a few strands around a finger and poked them in the corner of her mouth. “I don’t know,” she said through the hair in her teeth, “although it’s better than waitressing, and something to do till I get a new agent and make my comeback.” Her eyes behind the sequin-studded glasses were chary. For more than fifteen minutes now she had been wallowing in a fog of indecision.

“There’s nothing funny about this?” she asked.

“What could be funny?” Valerie said.

“I mean, I saw a piece in the National Enquirer about this prince, his family claimed the crown of Rumania or someplace, who wanted to marry a policeman. Nothing like that, eh?”

“Nothing like that,” Valerie assured her.

She turned to me. “What did you say he was? Tell me again.”

“An authentic Stone Age sovereign, with a certain rugged appeal.”

“And what did you say he wanted?”

“A movie star.”

“I’m a movie star?”

“Queen of the pornos, Val tells me.”

“Well, I once was,” Daphne said, “and, well, to tell the truth, I’ve always been kind of tender-minded toward royalty, and this…” She squinted at a photo Abdul had supplied. “Well, he’s definitely not a ringer for that king of Spain or the Prince of Wales, but he sounds a hell of a sight better than most of those stammering, limp-wristed, pointy-headed, rabbit-toothed, chinless inbreds I read about in the papers. So,” she took a deep breath, expelling hair, “what the hell—why not?”

TWENTY-SEVEN
THE JEWEL OF IRAQ

The first thing I learned, once we had rattled down the automatic walkway at Kennedy, boarded the big UGH jet, belted ourselves into our seats, and bounded into the precarious air, was that I could not sleep on an intercontinental flight. I knew that if I so much as shut my eyes, let concentration lapse—it takes no more than a moment—the pilot would plunge all of us into a watery grave.

Valerie beside me swallowed two pills and smiled warmly. “See you in Wherever-the-hell,” she said, and was off in balmy dreamland. But I found I couldn’t sit still. Something about the decompression system or the supersonic growl of the engines, something exposed a nerve. I got up, carefully, in order not to disturb her, and walked across the ocean, pausing along the aisle to stick my nose in card games and conversations, while at all times bending an alert ear and a peripheral eye to my responsibilities in keeping that big-assed bird aloft, a condition about which my fellow passengers seemed shockingly unconcerned.