“What?”

“I want to ask you something.” He was my absolute best source for what I needed to know. The prostitution ring was an open secret among flight attendants, but still a secret. Most would talk about it only in private, and none would talk about it with someone as new as I was. Tristan was the exception. He shared freely with me, partly because we were friends, partly because he liked to show off what he knew, and partly because he was an incorrigible gossip.

“Is that Sylvie over there with those other two women?”

He peered down the concourse. “Oh, Lord, it is, Reenie. And she’s standing with the Dairy Queen herself.”

“Be nice, Trissy.” Irene, on the other hand, had no use for gossip. She wanted to set an example, she always said, for her thirteen-year-old daughter.

“Dairy Queen?” I was confused. “Do you mean Angel?”

“Angela.” Tristan lounged back against the window with me. “No matter what she calls herself, her name is Angela.”

“Is Dairy Queen a mammary reference?”

He laughed. “That works, too, but no. She’s trailer trash from the side of a one-lane West Texas dirt highway, out where they have Dairy Queens at every other mile marker. She should be working at one of them serving up chocolate-dipped soft-serve ice cream in Styrofoam cones instead of trying to be one of us.”

“That is such a mean thing to say.” Irene finished a row, turned her needles, and started on the next.

“You know it’s true.”

Angel, Sally, and Sylvie gathered their gear and rolled through their boarding door and out of sight. According to the monitor, they were bound for La Guardia and then probably home to Boston, like us.

I shifted my attention to Tristan. “That’s an interesting perspective for someone who hails from the great state of Wyoming. At least Texas has Neiman-Marcus.”

“I beg your pardon.” He raised his chin in mock indignation. “Angela is trash because of what she is, not because of where she came from.”

“She should get involved in Toastmasters.” Irene looked up to find us both staring at her. “I think it would help her. It would certainly help build her self-confidence. Have you ever heard her try to give a PA? It would make her a better flight attendant.”

“Honey, Angelina might need to learn how to read, but she does not need any more confidence, and she certainly does not need to be a better flight attendant. She makes her money on her back.”

Irene sniffed. “Those are just rumors, Trissy. You shouldn’t spread them.”

He shook his head. “Go back to your knitting and purling, sweetie pie. We’ll let you know when the conversation turns to beagles or Birkenstocks.”

“Bassets,” she corrected. “Basset hounds.”

“What-ever.”

I checked the area. The only people near enough to hear were a man on a cell phone and a young woman reading a paperback. Still, I lowered my voice. “Are you saying she’s one of the hookers?”

“Angela is not one of them; she’s the queen bee. The madam. The übertramp.”

“I thought they were all just freelancers.”

“They were, until Angela came along and turned a ragtag bunch of disorganized whores into a lean, mean fucking machine. Sounds like the story line for a Broadway play, doesn’t it?Send in the Whores? Don’t Cry for Me, I’m a Hooker?”

“Tristan.” Irene did her own check around the lounge. “All you’re doing is encouraging a nasty and unfair stereotype. It’s like saying all Italians are mobsters, or all Muslims are terrorists.”

“If the Manolo Blahnik fits…”

“You have no proof.”

“That’s the nice thing about gossip, Reenie. The standard of proof is so very low.”

“For all you know, youare the source of all these rumors.”

“Tell me this. If you’re a flight attendant making forty thousand dollars a year, how do you afford a condo at the Ritz?”

“The Ritz?” He was teasing Irene and clearly delighting in it, but I was the one hanging on every word. Oh, for a microcassette, or at least a pad and pencil. “The new Ritz-Carlton?”

“Angela has a two-bedroom. Not even a one-bedroom or a studio, although I doubt they even have studios in those buildings. Do you know what she paid? Just under two million. That’s more than twelve hundred per square foot.”

“How do you-”

“Barry.”

“Oh, right.” I had forgotten his partner was a real estate agent in the city. “Is that a lot for that area?”

“No, but that’s beside the point. It’s a lot for a flight attendant, especially one who already owns a cottage on the Cape, where she keeps her second car, her Hummer.”

“Maybe,” Irene said, “she has another source of income.”

“She does, dear, and I just told you what it is.”

“Another source besides…what you’re saying.”

“No one seems to be able to locate any other source of income. Ditto for her slut posse. Sally and Sylvie and Claudia and Ava and the rest. You can often find them at the spa or working out at the LA Sports Club. Or having lunch in Paris.”

We all heard the boarding door at our gate close, which meant the aircraft was ready for us. It was time to pack up and go.

“You’re jealous.” Irene wrapped her doggie sweater around the needles and put the whole thing into her World Wildlife Fund tote bag.

Tristan stood up straight, shook out his slacks, and smoothed his jacket. “I’m quite happy with my life, at long last. Have you heard the latest rumors?”

He asked it in a way that was irresistible. I couldn’t wait to hear the answer. In spite of herself, neither could Irene. We shuffled a little closer together. “What,” she asked, “is the latest rumor?”

“Angela is trying to start up a West Coast shop. My sources tell me there are at least ten dirty girls on the transfer list to LA.”

This was news to me. “Is Angel herself on the transfer list?”

“Not that I’ve heard. She must be sending some minion of hers out there. Can you believe it? The woman has no shame.”

We were now at the point in our ongoing conversation on the subject where I was better off keeping my mouth shut. And yet…

“I still don’t understand why you don’t turn these women in.”

They both turned to blink at me. “Alexandra, you are so management. We’ll have to work on you.”

“You should talk. You were a flight services supervisor once.”

“That was temporary insanity, and it was only two years.” He squinted at me. “You spent, what…fourteen…sixteen years?”

“Fourteen.”

“I’m a union officer, Alexandra. My job is to protect union members, not help management fire them. They tried to terminate a bunch of them last year, but we got them all back.”

Irene found that amusing. “You’re full of baloney. They came back because the company couldn’t prove anything. They never can. That’s why they go on and on.”

“Would you defend these women,” I asked, “even if the company could prove their case?”

“Of course I would.” Tristan put a fatherly arm around my shoulders. “You’re union now. When you’re union, you stick together, no matter what. They might be hookers, but they’re our hookers.”

He glanced at Irene, who was already on her way. I glanced at Tristan, my friend, who had just declared himself my sworn enemy. I filed it with all the other bridges to be crossed when I got there. Right now, I had to serve cold muffins to eighty-five passengers who would want more from us than we could give them.

Tristan grabbed his bag and turned to me. “Ready for another day in the friendly skies?”

“I’m ready.”