Vy nodded. She didn’t actually like any of these women, but working alone was unbearable. It gave you too much time to think. For a while, after the last job fell through, she had been able to persuade herself that she was nothing more than an up-to-date, twentieth-century person, living and loving free. But when the money ran out and she began accepting “gifts,” she faced it squarely. If you’re going to take money, then you’re a professional, and you might as well work like one. It’s all you know how to do, anyway. You can’t type or take dictation, and you’re not pretty enough—in the light—to get by without it.

So she worked with Jewel and Sally and Irene, because that gave the customers a choice. A white girl was good for business.

Especially a peroxide blonde who knew how to wear furs and had smooth, clean skin.

But she had nothing in common with them. They were stupid and vulgar and hard. Sex was their line of work and that was how they regarded it.

When she’d been younger, Vy had read novels about sloppy old whores with hearts of pure gold, basically lovable creatures, and this had comforted her at first. But she had never met anyone in the profession who fitted that description. The whores she knew were frequently sloppy and sometimes old, but their hearts were shriveled and they were far from lovable. It was not so much that they were evil, merely that they were stupid. That, Vy soon found out, was the characteristic of the real professional. With the hundred-to-five-hundred-a-night girls, and the Holly­wood crowd she’d heard about, maybe it was a little different. She doubted it. In the years she’d worked she’d come into contact with a great many prostitutes, and they were all pretty much the same. They worked a few hours at night, slept most of the day, died poor. And she was no different. That was the important thing to remember. Despite the way she felt, her reasons, despite everything, she was no different.

“Well, it’s hot in this fucking place and I’m tired,” said Jewel. “I’m going to—”

“Don’t use that word, don’t use that word,” Sally said.

“Why not?”

“It isn’t ladylike.”

They sat over their glasses of Scotch and crushed ice and waited, and then three men came in and Vy could tell that they were marks. They laughed too loudly, and when they sat down, they looked around the place too hard, and they were not New Yorkers.

“See, now?” Jewel whispered. She smiled faintly in the direction of the men and returned to her drink.

A few minutes passed, then one of the marks got up from his seat and walked over. He was blushing fiercely, and Vy could tell that he was drunk. Not too drunk, maybe. But drunk.

“Hi,” he said.

Sally giggled.