“Career not making you warm at night. Career not giving you no babies.”

“I don’t want babies, and the nights are warm enough already. Anyway, Freddie’s a dear, but I’m simply not interested in him that way.”

Veryl leaned forward. “I hear that Oakes girl got she own eye on that French fellow.”

“Nancy? And Freddie?” I laughed. “Veryl, Nancy Oakes is seventeen years old. She’s still in school. She’s at the lycée in New York City, for God’s sake. And he’s not French.”

“You meet this girl?”

“Just briefly.”

“She pretty, ain’t she?”

“Pretty enough, if you like that kind of pretty. But she’s a child.”

“She no child, Miss Lulu. She know what she want. She be wanting a big, strapping boss-man who take no sass from she father. And that Miss Nancy, she get what she want, just watch.” Veryl swept up the coffeepot and turned for the door. “You wear you red dress, Miss Lulu. Veryl said so.”

Now, let me make something clear about the nature of my business arrangement with S. Barnard Lightfoot. I think it’s important. Several months ago, when I sat before Lightfoot’s desk in my best dress—such as it was—begging for a job, he had given me a piece of advice. Listen up, now.

It was the second Monday of June, and eleven stories below us, a few thousand sweating shoppers pullulated along the sidewalks of Madison Avenue. Inside Lightfoot’s office, all was calm. A masculine sanctuary of dimpled leather chairs and trays of amber liquor, of wood the exact color and shine of maple syrup, an entire damned spectrum of brown. Except his suit, which was charcoal gray and pinstriped. Lightfoot lit a cigar, gave off a fulsome puff or two, and told me the Metropolitan’s Havana correspondent had been covering events in the Bahamas just fine, what could I possibly have to offer? I leaned forward and said there had to be something fishy going on, for God’s sake, couldn’t you just smell it. Everybody knew the Windsors had a soft spot for Hitler; everybody knew Wallis hated her in-laws like poison, and the venom was mutual; everybody knew that whatever differences in temperament existed between the royal couple, whatever mismatch in intellect or upbringing or what have you, they held this in common: they’d both sell their souls for a chest of gold doubloons. Besides all that. A Southern lady inhabiting the governor’s mansion of a British colony that was eighty-five percent Negro—wasn’t that rich, wasn’t there bound to be trouble?