"I'll drop you off at Mac's. It's more or less on my way."

"Where doyou live?"

"Right here." They were indeed passing the entrance to the hotel in which he had a penthouse apartment.

"But you said-"

"I thought I'd give you a way out."

She walked along in silence for a while, then she squeezed his arm. "That was a nice gesture. Truly gentle."

"I'm like that," he said, and laughed.

"But it isa bit odd that you just happen to live two doors from the restaurant."

"Now wait a minute, madam. Youpicked the restaurant."

She frowned. "That's true, isn't it. Still, it's a troubling coincidence."

He stopped and placed his hands on her shoulders, searching her face with mock sincerity. "Could it be... fate?"

"I think it's more likely a coincidence."

He agreed and they started off again, but back toward the hotel.

The phone double-buzzed several times before an angry voice answered. "Yes? Yes?"

"Good evening, sir."

"Good Lord! Do you know what time it is?"

"Yes, sir. Sorry. I just thought you'd like to know that they just went into his hotel on Baker Street."

"Is there any trouble? Is everything prepared?"

"No trouble, sir."

"Then why are you calling?"

"Well, I just thought you would want to be kept in the picture. They entered the hotel at exactly... oh, my. I must get this watch seen to."

There was a silence on the other end of the line.

Then, "Good night, Yank."

"Good night, sir."

"Lord love us!" she said. "This is ghastly!"

Jonathan laughed as he passed on ahead, turning on lights as he went. She followed him through two rooms.

"Is there no end to it?" she asked.

"There are eleven rooms. Including six bedrooms, but only one bath."

"That must cause some awkward traffic problems."

"No. I live here alone."

She dropped into the spongy pink velvet upholstery of an oversized chaise longue carved with conchs, serpentine sea dragons, and bosomy mermaids painted in antique white enamel and picked out in metallic gold. "I'm afraid to touch this rubbish. Afraid I'll catch something."

"Not an unfounded fear. Nothing is more communicable than bad taste, as Ortega y Gasset has warned us. Look at pop art or the novels of Robbe-Grillet."

She looked at him quizzically. "You really are an academic, aren't you?" She scanned the pink marble fireplace, the harlequin wallpaper, the Danish modern furniture, the yellow shag rug, the burgundy-tinted glass sconces, the wrought-iron wall plaques. The saccharine profusion caused her nostrils to dilate and her throat to constrict. "How can you stand to live here?"

He shrugged. "It's free. And I have a little flat in Mayfair. I only stay here when I'm in this end of town."

"Goodness me. Impressive, sir. Twoflats in the midst of a housing shortage. And he reads Ortega y... whoever. What more could a beggar girl ask?"

"She could ask for a drink." He poured from a hammered aluminum decanter in the form of a wading bird. "The single advantage of this place is that it makes going out into the street a pleasure. And you need something like that in London. Cheers."

"Cheers. You don't find London attractive?"

"Well, it's made me reevaluate my aesthetic ranking of Gary, Indiana."

She took her drink and wandered into the next room, which was less tastefully appointed. "How did you come by this place? Do you have enemies in real estate?"

"No. It belongs to a film producer who took a twenty-year lease on it years ago to soak up some of the 'funny money' he had made in England, but couldn't take out of the country. He uses it as a pied-a-terrewhen in London, and he gives keys to friends who might be passing through. When I told him I'd be spending a year in England, he offered to lend it to me."

"Did he decorate it himself?"

"He used furniture and props from his films. The Doris Day/Rock Hudson sort of things."

"I see. Where do you stay to get away from the noise?"

"Come along." He led her through two rooms to one that had been left unfurnished. He had dragged in some of the quieter pieces and had hung his collection of Impressionists around the slate gray walls. It was in this room that he had first found MacTaint drinking his whiskey and admiring his paintings.

The canvases arrested her. She set down her glass and stood before a pointillist Pissarro in silence.

"I have a hobby of collecting the best copies I can find," he told her.

"Beautiful."

"Oh, yes. Even copies, they're capable of putting modern painting in its place."

"All right, sir," she said in a heavy brogue, "that will be enough of that altogether." She crossed to the tall windows and looked out on the pattern of lamplights in the park below. "Six bedrooms, is it? Choice of room must be an interesting cachet for the women you bring up here."

"Don't fish."

"Sorry. You're quite right."

"In point of fact, it occurs to me that I have never invited a woman up here."

She looked at him over the top of her glass, her green eyes round with a masque of ingenuousness. "And I am the very, very first one?"

"You're the first one I've invited."He told her about waking one morning to find a woman staggering about in his bathroom. Despite her sunken eyes and greenish look of recent dissipation, he had recognized her as a film actress whom cosmetic surgery and breast injections kept employed past her time. She had evidently gotten a key from the producer years before, and had come there drunk after a night on the town with a brace of Greek boys. They had dropped her off after taking what money she had in her purse. She hadn't remembered anything of the night and after Jonathan had given her a breakfast bland enough to keep down, she had tucked a straying breast back into her gown, bestowed a snickering leer upon him through bloodshot eyes, and asked him how they had done.

"And what did you tell her?"

Jonathan shrugged. "What could I tell her? I said she had been fantastic and it had been a night I would never forget. Then I got her a cab."

"And she left?"

"After giving me her autograph. It's over there."

She went to the mantel and unfolded a sheet of paper. "But it's blank."

"Yes. The pen was out of ink, but she didn't notice."

She folded the paper carefully and replaced it "Poor old dear."

"She doesn't know that. She thinks she's having a ball."

"Still, it makes me want to cry."

"If she ever found that out, she'd leave blank autographs behind her everywhere."

She returned to the window and looked out in silence, her cheek against the drapery. After a time she said, "It was nice of you."

"Just the easiest way out."

"I suppose so." She turned and looked at him thoughtfully. "What's your name?"

"Jonathan Hemlock. And yours?"

"Maggie. Maggie Coyne."

"Shall we go to bed, Maggie?"

She nodded and hummed. "Yes, I'd like that. But..." Her eyes crinkled impishly. "But I'm afraid I have some rather bad news for you."

He was silent for several seconds.

"You're kidding. This doesn't happen to good guys."

"I wish I were kidding. I really didn't mean to cheat you. But I didn't have a place to stay, don't you see?"

"I'll be goddamned."

"Pity we didn't meet a day or two later."

"Only a day or two?"

"Yes."

Jonathan rose. "Madam! It has always been my contention that the more subtle pleasures of lovemaking are reserved for those with daring and abandon. How do you feel about that?"

She grinned. "I have always felt the same way, sir."

"Then we're of a mind."

"We are that"

"En route."