"Is he here tonight?"

"Possible. Yes, is possible."

"Just tell me where he is. That's all you have to do. Two hundred bucks."

"Tatiana never works for less than five hundred."

Final figure: $250. Tatiana wanted it all up front, then half up front. She got nothing up front. She took her cosmopolitan and left to search for Misha, weaving through the crowd, her ass undulating in the tight dress, as if to show Eddie what he was missing. Paulie the Priest would have said her ass looked like two pigs trying to fight their way out of a sack. A gold lame sack.

For a half hour, Eddie waited. Forty-five minutes. In the strange world three floors below the street, the only song he recognized was from a Dave Matthews album Kate owned. He thought about an old movie filmed in New York where people descended into hell from a freight elevator that opened up on a Manhattan sidewalk. But if this was hell, he was home. The booze, the noise, the laughter, the music, ice tinkling in glasses, the smell of perfume-he loved it all, always had. He didn't know where heaven was, but hell was only a short elevator trip down from the sidewalks of New York, and that was fine with him.

"Your lover is in the VIP room," Tatiana said. "Three hundred you owe me."

"This is guaranteed?" Eddie said.

"Like everything in America."

Eddie peeled $250 from the roll he'd brought for the Parrot. Tatiana shoved the bills into her small gold purse. She told him the way to the VIP room, which was on the second floor, on the other side of the building, past the kitchen, up a back stairway. She blew him a kiss and went in search of another very important gentleman. He noticed then that her shoes were also gold.

Eddie knew all the big clubs kept a VIP room to draw some hot rock band or movie star, who, in turn, would get the place mentioned on Page Six of the New York Post-the kind of publicity money couldn't buy. The back stairway was farther than Eddie thought. He passed the smells of the kitchen and the whoomf, whoomf of swinging doors. No more carpet back here. The floors were rough concrete, the halls dimly lit. Garbage cans and beer kegs had been stacked inside the door to the alley. The area smelled of rotting vegetables. A standing ashtray was wedged in a corner, a squadron of butts facedown in the sand.

Eddie came out of the stairway into a well-lit hallway. From the opposite end of the second floor, the clamor from the dance floor was a dull roar. He could hear the sound of a TV, an NBA game, the announcer talking about Kobe and Shaq. No chance to get by without being spotted. He wondered how Tatiana had done it. Better to try to schmooze his way in first, rather than get caught sneaking past. He poked his head in the door of the security office. A huge black man in a short-sleeved white shirt sat behind a desk.

'The Knicks are wasting their time," Eddie said. "If Shaq wants to win it, nobody gonna stop him."

"You got that right," the man said a little warily.

Eddie smoothed it out. Introduced himself as a friend of Richie Costa and a retired NYPD detective. In five minutes, Lester and Eddie were asshole buddies. Eddie joked about how the room reminded him of his old squad room. Coffee cups and food wrappers littered the floor of a room jammed with six metal lockers, three unmatched couches, and a wooden desk Goodwill would refuse. A huge marked-up calendar hung on the wall. The smell of Tatiana's perfume lingered in the room.

"Nice system you got up there," Eddie said, pointing at the bank of TV monitors. Eddie told Lester he was out looking for security ideas. He was in the process of setting up a system for a new club. Lester ran down all the locations covered by their cameras. Eddie recognized some of the areas under observation: the dance floor, the bar, and the street. The kitchen was shown shutting down for the evening; another camera focused on a private office, where a uniformed cleaning woman slow-danced an upright Hoover.

"You guys have a VIP room?" Eddie said.

"Don't put in a VIP room, if you know what's good for you. They are one king-size pain in the ass."

"I figured, but the owners want one, draw all the big celeb muckety-mucks."

"I'm telling you, Eddie. Worst part of this job is dealing with those arrogant bastards. Scum of the earth. They piss on the floor, break lamps, glasses, all kinds of shit. One guy shit on the couch, then covered it with the cushions. Some nights we find condoms, needles, drug crap all over the place."

"What the hell is TAFKAP?" Eddie asked, looking at a notation on the wall calendar.

'The Artist Formerly Known as Prince," Lester said. "Can you believe it? His manager gave us a list of demands a mile long. Plus, he wants us to guarantee no press, no cameras, and then he'll honor us with his presence."

"Then he'll be pissed if the press isn't here," Eddie said. "You can't please these bastards."

"Amen, brother."

"Mind if I take a quick peek in the VIP room, Lester? See what it looks like?"

"It's right down the hall," the guard said, looking up at the bank of cameras. "Just let me check one thing. It should be empty by now. Hold on a sec; let's turn this camera on. One of the managers has a habit of sneaking his ladies in there. Don't want to embarrass anyone." He reached up and turned on camera three. The room came slowly into focus. The picture was dark. He could make out three people sitting around. "Nah, they're still there."

"Any big stars?" Eddie said, getting close to the TV screen. At first, the only big star he recognized was Richie Costa, standing with his back to the door. A young light-haired kid sat on a stuffed chair, across from a squat older guy in a dark sports jacket with wide lapels. The squat guy jabbed his finger in the kid's face.

"Is that Sergei Zhukov, the one with the tattoo on his neck?" Eddie asked, pointing to the guy with the wide lapels.

"You know Sergei?" Lester said.

"Some piece of work," Eddie replied.

"One of a kind, thank God," Lester said. "My panel here shows they got the door locked. Some kind of meeting, looks like. Maybe we better hold off, do it some other night."

"No problem," Eddie said. "Next time, I'll bring doughnuts. Is there a back way out of here?"

"The side door, but that's another sore point with me, Eddie. They lock all the exits. It's a fire violation, but they don't give a shit. You saw that garbage all sitting there, right? It's more important to them to make sure no uncool people sneak in. Until closing, only way out is the stairs you just came up, and out the front door."

No problemo. Eddie let the door to the stairway slam hard. He danced down the stairs, his leather shoes tapping the metal edges, the Gene Kelly of noisy exits. The kid being intimidated by Sergei was Misha. The kid was Borodenko's problem, and guys like Sergei knew only one solution. Eddie needed to get to him before Sergei got bored.

He went back to the swinging kitchen doors and peeked through the glass. Scrub-down was in progress. Eddie felt the ledge above the door. Kitchen help were always smokers. Paulie the Priest used to say the only difference between chefs and cooks was that chefs didn't have tattoos. Real cooks, forced to smoke out in stairways, left cigarettes and matches above door ledges, or wedged in a doorjamb. He found matches, then hit the garbage cans for a discarded copy of the Daily News.

Eddie crept back up the stairs, then climbed one flight above the VIP room and the security office. The hallway was dark. He had barely enough light to find the smoke detector. He took the newspaper and rolled it into a funnel shape. He lit the paper, waited until it was fully engulfed, and then held it directly under the smoke detector. It went off, a loud, piercing siren. Eddie dropped the paper in a burning pile on the concrete floor. He ran to the stairway and positioned himself so he could see the door below.