“She’s always polite. But she’s just not there. The woman doesn’t relate. I’ve known a lot of johns who’ve gone over there. I’ve steered some business her way, as far as that goes. A guy’ll say he’s had fantasies about oriental girls, for example. Or I might just tell a guy that I know a girl he might like. You know something? It’s the safest thing in the world. They’re grateful because she is beautiful, she is exotic, and I gather she knows her way around a mattress, but they almost never go back. They go once and they’re glad they went, but they don’t go back. They’ll pass her number on to their buddies instead of ringing it again themselves. I’m sure she keeps busy but I’ll bet she doesn’t know what a steady trick is, I’ll bet she’s never had one.”

She was a slender woman, dark haired, a little taller than average, with precise features and small even teeth. She had her hair pulled back and done in a chignon, I think they call it, and she was wearing aviator glasses, the lenses tinted a pale amber. The hair and the glasses combined to give her a rather severe look, an effect of which she was by no means unaware. “When I take off the glasses and let my hair down,” she said at one point, “I look a whole lot softer, a good deal less threatening. Of course some johns want a woman to look threatening.”

Of Kim she said, “I didn’t know her well. I don’t know any of them really well. What a crew they are! Sunny’s the good-time party girl, she thinks she’s made a huge leap in status by becoming a prostitute. Ruby’s a sort of autistic adult, untouched by human minds. I’m sure she’s socking away the dollars, and one of these days she’ll go back to Macao or Port Said and open up an opium den. Chance probably knows she’s holding out and has the good sense to let her.”

She put a slice of cheese on a biscuit, handed it to me, took some for herself, sipped her red wine. “Fran’s a charming kook out of Wonderful Town. I call her the Village Idiot. She’s raised self-deception to the level of an art form. She must have to smoke a ton of grass to support the structure of illusion she’s created. More Coke?”

“No thanks.”

“You sure you wouldn’t rather have a glass of wine? Or something stronger?”

I shook my head. A radio played unobstrusively in the background, tuned to one of the classical music stations. Mary Lou took off her glasses, breathed on them, wiped them with a napkin.