“Well, I don’t know if I believe in it either, but sometimes I think Chance and I knew each other in another life. Not necessarily as lovers or man and wife or anything like that. Like we could have been brother and sister, or maybe he was my father or I was his mother. Or we could even have both been the same sex because that can change from one lifetime to another. I mean we could have been sisters or something. Anything, really.”

The telephone cut into her speculations. She crossed the room to answer it, standing with her back to me, one hand propped against her hip. I couldn’t hear her conversation. She talked for a moment or two, then covered the mouthpiece and turned to me.

“Matt,” she said, “I don’t want to hassle you, but do you have any idea how long we’re gonna be?”

“Not long.”

“Like could I tell somebody it would be cool to come over in an hour?”

“No problem.”

She turned again, finished the conversation quietly, hung up. “That was one of my regulars,” she said. “He’s a real nice guy. I told him an hour.”

She sat down again. I asked her if she’d had the apartment before she hooked up with Chance. She said she’d been with Chance for two years and eight months and no, before that she shared a bigger place in Chelsea with three other girls. Chance had had this apartment all ready for her. All she’d had to do was move into it.

“I just moved my furniture in,” she said. “Except the waterbed. That was already here. I had a single bed that I got rid of. And I bought the Magritte poster, and the masks were here.” I hadn’t noticed the masks and had to turn in my seat to see them, a grouping of three solemn ebony carvings on the wall behind me. “He knows about them,” she said. “What tribe made them and everything. He knows things like that.”

I said that the apartment was an unlikely one for the use being made of it. She frowned, puzzled.

“Most girls in the game live in doorman buildings,” I said. “With elevators and all.”

“Oh, right. I didn’t know what you meant. Yes, that’s true.” She grinned brightly. “This is something different,” she said. “The johns who come here, they don’t think they’re johns.”

“How do you mean?”