"There isn't?" Taylor asked.

Sebastian smiled, took her hand and led her through the crowd.

The drapery man was having a busy night.

He pushed a canvas cart ahead of him, filled with his props – draperies that needed to be cleaned but never would be. They were piled atop one another and the one on top was folded carefully, it hid his ice-pick weapon, resting near to hand.

This man had been in many different offices at all hours of the day and night. Insurance companies with rows of ghastly gray desks bathed in green fluorescence. CEOs' offices that were like the finest comp suites in Vegas casinos Hotels and art galleries. Even some government office buildings. But Hubbard, White & Willis was unique.

At first he'd been impressed with the elegant place. But now, pushing the cart through quiet corridors, he felt belittled. He sensed contempt for people like him, sensed it from the walls themselves. Here, he was nothing. His neck prickled as he walked past a dark portrait of some old man from the 1800s. He wanted to pull out his pick and slash the canvas.

The drapery man's face was a map of vessels burst in fistfights on the streets and in the various prisons he'd been incarcerated in and his muscles were dense as a bull's. He was a professional, of course, but part of him was hoping one of these scrawny prick lawyers, hunched over stacks of books in the offices he passed (no glances, no nods, no smiles – well, fuck you and your mother) hoping one of them would walk up to him and demand to see a pass or permit so he could shank them through the lung.

But they all remained oblivious to him. An underling.

Not even worth noticing.

Glancing around to make sure no one was approaching, he stepped into the coffee room on the main floor and took a dusty container of Coffee-mate from the back of a storage shelf. In thirty seconds he'd slid out the tape recorder, removed the cassette, put in a new one and replaced the unit in the canister. He knew it was safe in this particular container because he'd observed that the prissy lawyers here insisted on real milk – half-and-half or 2 percent – and wouldn't think of drinking, or serving their clients, anything artificial. The Coffee-mate tube had been here, untouched, for months.

Making sure the corridor was empty again, the drapery man walked across the hall to Mitchell Recce's office and, listening carefully for footsteps, checked the receiver of Recce's phone.

On Saturday night, when he'd been here to steal the promissory note, he'd placed in the handset of the phone unit an Ashika Electronics omnidirectional ambient-filtering microphone and transmitter. The device was roughly the size of a Susan B Anthony silver dollar. It was, however, considerably more popular and was used by every security, private eye or industrial espionage outfit that could afford the eight-thousand-dollar price tag. This bug broadcast a razor-clear transmission of all of Reece's conversations on the phone or with anyone else in the office to the radio receiver and tape recorder in the Coffee-mate container across the hall. One feature of the transmitter was that it contained a frequency-canceling feature, which made it virtually invisible to most commercial bug-detecting sweepers checked the battery and found it was still good.

When he was finished he spent another three or four minutes arranging the drapes so they looked nice. This was, after all, his purported job.

He peeled off the gloves and walked out into the halls, which greeted him once again with their silence and their real, or imagined, disdain.

"I suffer from the fallacy of the beautiful woman."

The Lincoln Town Car limo crashed through the meatpacking district in the western part of Greenwich Village, near the river. Taylor leaned sideways to hear Thom Sebastian over the crackly sound of the talk show on the driver's A.M. radio.

He continued, "Which is this that because a woman is attractive she can do no wrong. You think, Christ, the way she lights a cigarette is the right way, the restaurants she picks are the right restaurants, the way she fakes an orgasm – pardon my French – is the right way so I must be doing something wrong. For instance, we're now on our way to Meg's. The club. You know it?"

"Absolutely no idea."

"There, my point exactly. I'm thinking Jesus, I'm doing something wrong. Taylor is a primo woman but she doesn't know about this club. I've fucked up. I've got it wrong." Taylor smirked. "Does this usually work?" Sebastian paused then slouched back in the cab seat and lit a cigarette. "What?"

"That line? The one you're using on me now?"

Sebastian waited a few more seconds and must've decided there'd be no recovery from her busting him. "You'd be surprised at some of the lines I've gotten away with." He laughed. "The thing is women suffer from the fallacy of the man who knows what he's doing. We never do, of course." He gave her what might pass for a sincere glance and said, "I like you."

They pulled up in front of nothing. A row of warehouses and small factories, not a streetlight in sight, only the distant aurora borealis of industrial Jersey across the Hudson River.

"Welcome to my main club."

"Here?"

"Yep. I'm here six, seven nights a week."

Sebastian led them through an unguarded, unmarked door into what looked like a Victorian bordello. The walls were covered with dark tapestry. The tables were marble and brass. Oak columns and sideboards were draped with tooling and floral chintz. Tiffanyesque lamps were everywhere. The uniform for men was tuxedo or Italian suits, for the women, dark, close-fitting dresses with necklines that required pure willpower to keep nipples hidden. The rooms were chockablock with high-level celebs and politicos, the sort that regularly make New York magazine and Liz Smith's columns.

Sebastian whispered, "The three little piggies," and pointed out a trio of hip young novelists whom a Times critic had just vivisected en masse in an article called. "Id as Art The Care and Feeding of Self-Indulgence." Skinny women hovered around the threesome. Sebastian eyed the women with dismay and said, "Why are they wasting time with those dudes? Didn't they see the article?"

Taylor said dryly, "You assume they can read." And bumped into Richard Gere. He glanced at her with a polite acknowledgment, apologized and continued on.

"Oh my God!" She gasped, staring at the man's broad back. "He's here."

"Yes," Sebastian said, bored. "And so are we."

The music wasn't as loud as at the previous club and the pace was less frantic Sebastian waved to some people.

"What're you drinking?" he asked.

"Stick with R &C."

They sipped their drinks for a few minutes. Sebastian leaned over again and asked, "What's your biggest passion? After handsome men like me, I mean."

"Skiing, I guess." Taylor was circumspect about telling people her second career – the music – and was particularly reluctant to give a robbery suspect too much information about herself.

"Skiing? Sliding down a mountain, getting wet and cold and breaking bones, is that it?"

"Breaking bones is optional."

"I did some exercise once," Sebastian said, shaking his head. "I got over it. I'm okay now."

She laughed and studied him in the mirror. The lawyer didn't look good. His eyes were puffy and red. He blew his nose often and his posture was terrible. The coke and whatever other drugs he was doing were taking their toll. He seemed deflated as he hunched over his drink, sucking his cocktail through the thin brown straw. Suddenly he straightened, slipped his arm around her shoulders and kissed her hair. "Does anyone ever get lost in there?"

She kept the smile on her face but didn't lean into him. She said evenly, "It's true that I had date failure tonight. But I still do things the old-fashioned way. Real slow." She eased away and looked at him. "Just want the ground rules understood."