“So it is. The business jungle. Debits are as deadly as vipers.”
Mayfair couldn’t read her eyes. He wondered what she thought of him. Usually he could tell when women liked him. Even now that he was past fifty, many of them still were receptive to him. His features remained boyish until a close look revealed the crow’s-feet and sagging eyelids. The deep lines swooping from the wings of his nose to the corners of his lips. His hair was streaked with gray in a way that made him look distinguished, he thought. He’d been lucky there, still had most of it, though it was thinning at the crown. He was dressed today in a dove gray Blass suit with a maroon tie and matching handkerchief, a white-on-white shirt, and black Italian loafers. Casual, but obviously a man with time and money to spend.
The waiter brought their coffee, placing the cups on the table with dramatic flair, then withdrew smoothly as if he were on rollers.
“Though we’re primarily concerned with design, inventory control, and payroll,” Mayfair said, “we gotta have a secure system. One that can’t be broken into by a computer hack with a compulsion for industrial espionage. Maybe a system only a few key personnel could access.”
“That can be done,” Allie said. She leaned down far enough for her left breast to brush the edge of the table when she drew a little leather-bound notebook from the briefcase propped against her chair leg. What did she carry in there? Schematics? Spread sheets? Was she wearing a bra?
He knew this: She was methodical and ambitious and overdrawn at the bank, and the account they were here to discuss was important to her survival.
Mayfair had ordered personnel to check her out thoroughly, and knew more about her than she thought. Knew she’d come to New York six years ago from the small town of Grafton, Illinois, and had no surviving family members. She was alone in the world, and she lived alone in the West Seventies. He also knew that two months ago she’d done an excellent job in setting up a payroll system for Walton Clothiers on Sixth Avenue.
She said, “I’ll need some basic figures.”
Mayfair pondered again the possible future with this woman who needed his business, what they might do for each other. It was a quid-pro-quo world; always something for something. She had to know that, if she had her own company. Beyond the Fortune Fashions account, what yearnings did she have? What fires that he might quench while finding the satisfaction that his former wife Janice had never given him? What interesting and possibly kinky drives? So many of these hot-shit female execs were intriguing that way. He’d find out about her someday, find out everything.
Then he concentrated on the here and now and satisfied her yearning for statistics, watching the way she cocked her head to the side to listen, the way the muted light played off her blond hair.
Thinking, while he paused so she could catch up taking notes,
Chapter 4
ALLIE was optimistic after her breakfast with Mayfair. He’d been all business, which was a relief. He looked like an aging lothario in his tight double-breasted suit and matching tie and handkerchief, his just-so hair style that was too young for him. Time held at bay by ego. But except for what might have been a few exploratory remarks, he’d stayed on the subject of the computer system Fortune Fashions wanted Allie to set up, and they’d had hours of involved and fruitful discussion. It was nice to know she didn’t have to worry about Mayfair in that regard, sex being an occupational hazard.
The account was a rich one, and when final payment was made, Allie’s monetary problems would be solved for a while. Meaning she’d no longer be financially dependent upon Sam; she wasn’t sure why that dependency bothered her, but it did. Perhaps because she was emotionally dependent on him, financial dependency as well left her with nothing.
Just before eleven o’clock, when she’d parted with Mayfair outside the restaurant, the clouds had drifted away and the sun had transformed gloom into light and hope. A dictatorial Hollywood director couldn’t have ordered it improved. Why not believe in omens? she’d thought, watching Mayfair wave to her from his cab as it pulled away.
Still buoyed by fate falling right, she wandered around for a while, window shopping. Then she strode from the subway stop to West 74th through the rare and sunny September day, her light blue raincoat with the white collar folded over her arm.
She realized she was hungry. The breakfast she’d had with Mayfair was delicious but hardly filling. That and a cup of coffee this morning with Sam was all she’d had so far today. I need fuel, she told herself.
She stopped in at Goya’s, a restaurant on West 74th three blocks from the Cody Arms. It was a large place with an ancient curved bar and a plank floor. A faded mirror behind the bar reflected shelves of bottles and an antique cash register. The waiters and waitresses all looked like hopefuls waiting for their big break in show business, though some of them were over forty. All wore black slacks and red T-shirts with GOYA’S stenciled across the chest. Allie hadn’t been in there before, but she immediately liked the rough-hewn and efficient atmosphere. If the food was good and the prices were right, she knew she’d come back, maybe become one of the regulars.
She ordered a chef’s salad and allowed herself a Beck’s to celebrate the way things were going with the Fortune Fashions account. Then she thought about how she and Sam would celebrate when he came home that evening. Sam. Scheming and ambitious as he was in business, he never resented her successes. Liberated man meets liberated woman.
When the waiter brought her salad, she realized he looked familiar. But she didn’t ask where she might have met him. Possibly she’d passed him on the street often when he was on his way to or from work at Goya’s. New York was like that; people making casual connections over and over, not really recognizing each other because their memories’ circuits were overloaded. So many people, an ebbing and flowing tide of faces, movements, smiles, frowns. Pain and happiness and preoccupation. Good luck and bad. Bankers and bag ladies. All in a jumble. Millionaires stepping over penniless winos. Tourists throwing away money on crooked three-card-monte games. The hustlers and the hustled. A maelstrom of madness. A world below the rabbit hole. If you lived here, you took it all for granted. My God, you adapted. And, inevitably, it affected mind and emotion. It distorted.
This man, the waiter, was in his mid-thirties, with one of those homely-handsome faces with mismatched features and ears that stuck out like satellite dishes. He wore his scraggly black hair long on the sides in an effort to minimize the protruding ears, but the thatch of hair jutting out above them only served to draw attention. The impression was that without the ears to support it, the hair would flop down into a ragged Prince Valiant hairdo. He was average height but thin, and moved with a kind of coiled energy that suggested he could probably jog ten miles or wear down opponents at tennis.
When he came back and placed her beer before her on the table, he did a mild double-take, as if
