“Go over to Shambles on Prince Street. You can get all kinds of stuff there. Get a hat, some blacks, some fingernails.” She cackled. “Get pierced, officer, then we’ll all just love you!”

“I’ll pierce you,” a voice called.

“Oh, shit,” another voice murmured.

Paul went over to the table. He wasn’t absolutely sure if he was talking to a man and a woman, two women, or two men. But he sat down anyway. He wasn’t planning to get in bed with them. Or get pierced. “I’m looking for Ellen Wunderling,” he said.

“Mistah Wunderling, he dead,” the most likely to be male said. His mouth was full of potato chips.

“Miss Wunderling.”

“You gotta go deep into the jungle, man—real deep. Try Hexion or the Hellfire Club—” The girl—and Paul was now sure she was a for-real female and that underneath all that Vampirella makeup, she was your basic Queens chick—shook her head. “Hexion is a cannibal place,” the girl said. “They serve brain soup.”

“It’s not real brains.”

“What’s the Hellfire Club?”

“A Catholic hangout. Run by former nuns.”

“Any Ellen Wunderling connection?”

“He should go to the Veils.”

“Him and the Count of Monte Cristo.”

“What’s the Veils?”

“Just the most exclusive club in Manhattan.”

“The world.”

“Same difference. But it was the last place Ellen was seen alive.”

FIFTEEN: Scorpion Dance

FIFTEEN

Scorpion Dance

Normally Leo was not much interested in the lesbian stuff that went on between Miriam and Sarah, but watching them this close, with Sarah going wild like that right in her face, was thrilling. When Miriam had kissed her before, she’d been polite about it and pretended, but it hadn’t really been a turn-on. This had been the most amazingly intimate, beautiful thing.

She’d been a lonely little rich girl before she came to the Veils, her main claim to fame being that she was the daughter of, like, the second cousin once removed of General Patton. She had a co-op loft in SoHo in an artist building that was full of lawyers. She had a Maserati and a little pocket yacht called the Y’All Come, but Y’all generally didn’t.

At, like, four o’clock one morning when she was so fabulously wasted, Miriam had said to her, “Come and follow me.” They’d laughed. But she’d been totally in wonder because she was not exactly the kind of super cool person who’d be invited into Miriam’s house.

Next thing she knew, she’d been given a little bedroom with cute curtains and a high brass bed. She’d had pretty much the run of this, like, amazing house. Gradually, she’d realized what Miriam did, Miriam and Sarah. They were lovers, but they also—well, wow, she was one of them now.