“How’ve you been?” she asks, taking from the sack a flagon of beer and a battery-driven vibrator. “My bag of tricks,” she says, arranging her wares in the middle of the cell with a kind of fussy, impulsive zeal, as if they were invested with totemic significance.

“I’d get you out of here,” she goes on, “if I had half the clout I used to. But I don’t, so I’m here to do the next best thing.” She leans toward me, blinking behind the sequined glasses. “You ever go around the world?”

“Actually, this is the first time I’ve been out of the U.S.”

“No, I mean like when a girl starts at your toes and licks up and up until it becomes,” she grins, “heavenly.” She takes a swig of the beer. “What I thought,” she says, “I thought I might give you one last, sweet, fancy face job. Or a straight-out, old-fashioned stevedore fuck if you prefer, something you won’t forget if you live to be a hundred. So,” she clicks her spike heels and salutes, “at your service, sir.”

“That’s very thoughtful of you.”

“’S’nothing, Judd. Just a pit stop on our way to hell.”

We stand there a long time, uncomfortably.

“What’s the matter?” she says. “You think Valerie would mind or something?”

“Well, we do have this commitment. Not that I don’t appreciate…”

“It’s okay. I think it’s wonderful, being faithful and all that.” She takes another swill of the beer.

“Have you seen her?”

“No,” she says, “I’ve been kind of busy. She hasn’t been around?”

“Not lately.”

Despite their brevity, those two words were at best a varnished truth. I haven’t seen her since Abdul locked me up. Which starts me wondering—is the leash he holds her on so tight, so prohibitive that she can’t cut loose from it? Never before has she yielded to restraints, so why now from this power-nut of a pseudomonarch? Unless… not seeing me is her decision.

Daphne sees the worry on my face. “There’s no satisfaction, is there? Whatever you do. Here you got Valerie, she’s your main meal and she’s a no-show.”

“She has her reasons,” I say, “I’m sure.”

But I’m not at all sure. My doubts, my confusions burst on me like a flurry of Chinese firecrackers, as vivid, searing, haunting as my obsession with the ganching tower.

“Sure,” Daphne repeats. “Not that I mean to pry, but even when a person goes legit, gets really married, or zeroes in on a significant other, it still sucks. I know.”

“Have you ever been married?”

“Once. Come to think of it, twice. Didn’t work, so I went back to playing piggy games, but that didn’t work either. Hell of a life, right?”

She flops down on my rat-skin bed.