She looks at you in your scuffed high heels, your fingernails chipped and jagged, and she says, “Come see what the next growth industry will be . . .”
The elevator stops on the fiftieth floor, the whole penthouse leased to Lenny, where two pin-striped suits full of muscle stand guarding a door. It's these goons you pay Lenny's cut to, half of everything you make. One guard says your names into a microphone pinned to his lapel, and the doors unlock with a loud buzz.
Inside, it's just you and Angelique and Lenny.
Don't laugh, but, lonely and isolated as your life is, doing footwork—Lenny's life looks worse. Locked up here on the penthouse floor, wearing a white terry-cloth bathrobe all day, counting his money, and talking on the telephone. The only furniture is a desk chair, the seat stained and dirty. A mattress is flopped near walls of glass that look out over the whole city. On a computer screen, stock prices scroll up without stopping.
Lenny comes to the both of you, his bathrobe hanging open, wearing wrinkled striped boxer shorts inside, white socks turned yellow on his feet. Lenny reaches both hands toward Angelique's face and says, “My Angel, my favorite.” He cups her face in his hands and says, “How are you?”
In her high heels, Angelique must be a head taller than him. She smiles, saying, “Lenny . . .”
And Lenny smacks her, hard, one hand across her face, and he says, “You're cheating on me, that's how you are.” He holds one hand up, the palm open and ready to smack her, again, and Lenny says, “You're taking outside assignments, aren't you?”
Holding one gloved hand to her cheek, hiding the red print of Lenny's hand, Angelique says, “Baby, no . . .”
And Lenny drops his hand. He turns his back to her. Lenny goes to look out the windows, the city spread out right next to his mattress.
“Baby,” Angelique says. “Let me show you something new.”
Angelique looks at me.
She goes to stand next to him, putting her gloved hands on his shoulders from behind, and Angelique says, “Let Mommy show you how much she still loves her baby . . .”
She steers Lenny to sit on the mattress. Then to lie back. She slips the yellowed sock off each of his feet.
“Come on, baby,” she says. Taking off her gloves, she says, “You know I give great foot . . .”
Then Angelique does what you've never seen before. She gets down on her knees. She opens her mouth, her lips stretched wide and thin, and runs her tongue along the bottom of Lenny's sole. Angelique cups her lips around Lenny's heel, and Lenny starts to moan.
Don't laugh, but there are jobs worse than the worst job you can imagine. A media mogul with no history of high blood pressure, he's found dead of a stroke in a room at the Four Seasons. A rock star in perfect health dies of kidney failure after a foot massage in the Chateau Marmot.
We have access to the feet of presidents and sultans. CEOs and movie stars. Kings and queens. We know how to make a paid hit look like natural causes.
This is what Angelique tells you on the way down in the elevator. After Lenny moaned and thrashed. After Angelique mouthed his foot until the one long moment Lenny sat up on the mattresses, clutching his chest in both hands and gaping his open mouth at her still sucking his heel. After his heart stopped, Angelique pulled the bedsheets up to his chin. She wiped the lipstick off his foot and smeared more around her mouth. She unplugged his phones and told the guards Lenny was taking a long nap.
On the way down in the elevator, Angelique tells you this was her last foot job. This kind of foot hit paid a million bucks, cash. A rival agency had hired her to bump off Lenny, and now she was out of the business for good.
In the lobby bar, the two of you have a cocktail to get the taste of Lenny's foot out of her mouth. Just one last, good-bye drink. Then Angelique says to look around the hotel lobby. The men in suits. The women in fur coats. They're all Rolfing killers, she says. Reiki killers. Colonic-irrigation assassins.
Angelique says, in gem therapy, just by putting a quartz crystal on someone's heart, then an amethyst on his liver and a turquoise on his forehead, you induce a coma that results in death. Just by sneaking into a room and rearranging someone's bedroom set, a feng-shui expert can trigger kidney disease.
“Moxibustion,” she says, the science of burning cones of incense on someone's acupuncture points, “it can kill. So can shiatsu.”
She drinks the last of her cocktail, and takes off the strand of pearls from around her neck.
All those cures and remedies that claim to be 100-percent natural ingredients, therefore 100-percent safe, Angelique laughs. She says, Cyanide is natural. So is arsenic.
She hands the pearls to you and says, “From now on, I'm back to being ‘Lentil.'”
That's how you want to remember Angelique, not the way she looked in the newspaper the next day, fished out of the river in a soggy mink coat. Her earrings and diamond watch taken to make it look like a robbery. Not with her feet fondled to death, but dead the old-fashioned way, with a hollow-point bullet to the back of her perfect French braid. A warning to all the Dirks and Dominiques who might jump ship.
The clinic calls, not Lenny, but some other Russian accent, trying to send you to clients, but you don't trust them. The guards saw you with Lentil. Up at the penthouse. They must have another hollow-point ready for the back of your head.
Your folks call from Florida to say a black town car keeps following them, and somebody calls to ask if they know how to find you. By now, you're already running from flophouse to flophouse,
