"How about they enjoy sex?" I said. The sun was warm on my back as I paddled slowly, letting the canoe slide along gently between strokes, listening to Susan. I had a pleasant sweat developing.
"Again it's hard to generalize, but I would guess that prostitution has little to do with sex."
"Patricia Utley says that the men and women involved in the transaction tend not to like one another."
The sun, as it got higher, reached more of the river and the dappling of shade contrasted more sharply.
"Sexual activity, unredeemed by love, or at least passion, is not the most dignified of activities," Susan said. "It offers good opportunities for degradation."
"For both parties," I said.
"For both parties.
"On the other hand," Susan said, "finding a way to satisfy pathological needs does not always make life untenable. Failing to satisfy the need makes it untenable. Many whores may be in a state of equilibrium."
"Meaning maybe they're better off being whores?"
"Sure, put that way, it's the decision we reached on April Kyle three years ago."
"But," I said.
"But," Susan said, "finding a way to fulfill a pathological need is not as satisfactory an answer as treating the need."
"But April wouldn't."
"Not then," Susan said. "Maybe not ever. Depends on how much pressure she feels."'
"Tough way to look at it," I said.
"Psychology is a tough-minded business," Susan said. "As tough as yours. Maybe tougher. There's not much room for romanticism."
"Noted," I said.
"Do you know where April is?"
"Not, yet, but I have hold of one end."
Susan smiled at the metaphor. "I'll bet you do," she said. "And when you find her?"
"We'll see. Depends on her situation," I gaid. "Let's eat."
We slid around a gentle meander in the river into a cove with a small strip of sand along the water's edge. I beached the canoe on the sand and Susan held it while I climbed out with the Igloo cooler.
We sat against the low banking together while I opened a bottle of white zinfandel. We each had a plastic glass of it and ate a smoked turkey sandwich on whole wheat. Our shoulders touched. There was no one on this stretch of the river.
"Do you think a natural setting enhances lovemaking?" I said.
Susan sipped a little of her wine. She ate a small wedge of Crenshaw melon. She gazed up at the sky, and pursed her lips. She looked at the slate-colored river.
"No," she said, "I don't think so."
"Oh," I said. I swallowed a bit of smoked salmon on pumpernickel.
"But it doesn't do it any harm either," she said, and leaned her head into the place where my neck joins my shoulders. I kissed her on top of her head. She put her wine down and put her arms around me and kissed me on the mouth. I could taste the wine and melon. I could feel the rush I always felt.
Getting her out of the bathing suit was a bitch.
But worth it.
20
The Crown Prince Club was located at the end of an alley off Boylston Street near the Colonial Theatre. There was a heavy dark oaken door with a brass crown canted at a rakish angle just above the peephole. An antique brass turnbell handle projected from the middle of the door. I turned it and a bell rang distantly inside. Beside the door was a slot for card keys so that the members could go right in without ringing. It was three-thirty in the afternoon and no members were in sight.
The door opened. The guy who opened it was at least six four and looked like a nineteenth-century British soldier in the King's African Rifle Brigade. He had on a red tunic and a white pith helmet and gold epaulets, and his round black face was shiny and severe.
He said, "Yes, sir?"
I said, "I'm thinking of joining the club. Is there anyone I can talk to?"
"I'm sorry, sir, club memberships are not presently available."
"Damn," I said. "Tony Marcus told me that there was an opening."
The doorman looked at me instead of through me. "Mr. Marcus?"
"Yes, Tony sent me over. Said he'd talked with Perry Lehman about it."
"Mr. Lehman?"
"Yeah, said Perry could fix me up. I'm new in town."
"If you'd step in, sir, I'll ask our marketing director to speak with you."
"Thanks."
I went into the foyer. It was paneled in the same kind of dark oak that the front door was made of, and lit by Tiffany lamps. On the right wall was a high, narrow fireplace, and above it a painting of a horse that might have been by George Stubbs. The doorman gestured- me to a large red leather chair near the fireplace. On a table beside the chair was a sandalwood box of cigars and a decanter of port, and several squat thick glasses.
"Please help yourself, sir," he said, "while I speak with Miss Coolidge."
I sat and the doorman disappeared through a door on the opposite side of the room. I poured myself a glass of port. The heft of the glass in my hand was masculine and weighty. There were two other paintings on the walls. One opposite the entrance door was of a black-and-white English spaniel curled up beside several recently shot partridge. The other, beside the door through which the Royal Zulu had departed, was of a British officer mounted on a red roan horse looking directly at me. A vaguely desert background rolled away behind him. The sun never sets on the British Empire.
I had drunk about half the wine when a brisk middle-aged woman appeared in the doorway with the big black man. She strode into the room.
"I'm Gretchen Coolidge," she said. "Would you come with me, please."
"Sure."
The doorman stepped aside and I followed Gretchen Coolidge out of the waiting room and down a short corridor to an elevator. She gestured me in and we went up five floors and stopped and the doors slid silently open onto a brilliantly sunlit glass-canopied space. Compared with the dark Edwardian elegance of the waiting room the brilliance of the fifth floor was overpowering.
I followed Gretchen out into a corridor of potted plants to a large circular pool in the center of the room. The plants were exotic flowering types that I didn't recognize, but the scent of them and the density of colors was intense. Beside the pool a man sat at an emerald cube of a desk in a silk bathrobe talking into a silver telephone.
Gretchen Coolidge said, "Please sit down." I sat near the desk in an angular chrome chair with green upholstery. Gretchen sat next to me. The guy at the desk continued to listen to the phone, nodding slightly. I looked around.
Gretchen Coolidge looked to be in her early forties. She had prominent cheekbones and short blond hair and large black-rimmed aviator glasses. She wore a double-breasted gray suit with a fine pinstripe in it and a lavender shirt with a narrow lavender-and-gray dotted necktie. A lavender handkerchief showed in her breast pocket. Her hose were a paler shade of lavender with very pale gray patterns in them. And she wore sling-strap three-inch heels of a deeper lavender. Her nails were short and painted pink. Her lipstick was pink. Her teeth were very white and even. Her breasts were large and looked as if, freed from restraint, they'd be even larger. She had slim hips and her ankles were small.
The guy on the phone was Perry Lehman. I'd seen his picture enough to recognize him. He was smallish and had long black hair. He wore a thick gold chain around his neck with a diamond-studded miniature crown suspended from it. The crown was hung to the same rakish cant as the trademark on the front door. He was darkly tanned. His small hands were manicured. He smoked a large cigar as he listened on the phone. Taking it from his mouth occasionally to study it, admire the pale greenish precision of the wrapper.
He had a big diamond ring on the little finger of his right hand. Where the silk robe gaped, there was a sprinkle of gray hair on his cocoa-butter chest.
He said into the phone, "Okay, bottom line is one million, no more. You crunch the figures any way you want to, but it's one million, no more."
He listened again, then nodded once and said "Yes," and hung up the phone. He let the chair tilt forward and touched a button on his desk phone. Actually desk phone didn't quite cover it. There were enough buttons and lights and switches to qualify it as a communications console. He leaned back again in his high-backed green leather swivel and put his feet up on the desk. He was barefooted. A black man even larger than the one downstairs came in from behind some greenery carrying a silver tray with a silver ice bucket with an open bottle of champagne in it. There was a tall fluted champagne glass on the tray. The black man placed the tray on a small glass table beside the desk and stepped back. He was wearing a regimental tunic with brass buttons and gold epaulets, like the guy downstairs. But this tunic was white. He was hatless, his hair cropped close to his head: He looked at me without expression.