East is East

Jane was a late riser—she needed her beauty rest, needed time to do her face peels and bust-building exercises, time to run a thousand brushstrokes over her pure white scalp and apply the foundation and concealer and hi-liter, the blusher, eyeliner, mascara and translucent powder that gave her that spontaneous girl-next-door-with-the-Gypsy-hair-and-outerspace-eyes look. And this was the chink in her armor. Ruth began getting up early, anticipating Owen’s knock. She dressed as if she were going on a date with a literary critic—hair, makeup, low-cut blouse, the works—and she made certain she was the first at the convivial table each morning and the last to leave. She was charming, clever and seductive, and she made as many oblique but devastating references as she could to La Shine, as they’d begun to call her. And when Irving Thalamus came down, pouches under his eyes, his face as rucked and seamed as the floor of the Dead Sea and a whiff of early-morning bourbon on his breath, she was his girl all over again. She touched him as she spoke, leaned into him, threw back her head to laugh so he could admire her throat and cleavage.

At cocktail hour, she gathered Sandy, Ina and Regina around her—and Saxby too, when he wasn’t off stalking the swamps for his pygmy fish—and formed a sphere of influence at one end of the room, while Jane Shine gathered her forces at the other. Sometimes, after cocktails, she’d take dinner with Saxby and his mother in Septima’s rooms—this was the real

inner circle, after all—and then, instead of fencing with Jane Shine in the billiard room, she’d watch an old movie on the VCR or stare for hours into the glowing green vacancy of Saxby’s aquarium. She’d preen herself around Septima, conscious of her favor, and she’d think about Hiro and count the days till Jane Shine took her literary freak-show home with her.

It was at the end of the week that Abercorn and Turco showed up again, as inevitable as junk mail. Turco left his boom box at home this time—things had gotten serious and he had a new method now, infallible, couldn’t miss. He’d pitched his pup tent in a patch of scrub beyond the north lawn, while Abercorn had been given a closet-sized room on the third floor (and how he’d ever managed to sweet-talk Septima into letting him stay on a second time, Ruth couldn’t begin to imagine). Ruth was just coming up the front steps, fagged but exhilarated after working through the shank of the afternoon and making what she felt was real progress on the novella, when she spotted Turco through the foyer window. He was in his fatigues and combat boots and he had Laura Grobian pinned up against the staircase, waving something in her face. Ruth hesitated—Hiro, she thought, but then she couldn’t very well back down the stairs without arousing suspicion, and so she steeled herself and breezed through the door as if nothing in the world were the matter.

Laura Grobian gave her a frozen smile. She towered over Turco, half a foot taller at least. “—And robotics,” Turco was saying, his voice dropping to a snarl, “how do you think our Japanese friends got the lead there? They’re cagey, is all. No doubt about it. But you’ve got nothing to worry about, lady, because we’re going to get this one, I’d say within the week, maybe sooner—”

“Laura,” Ruth said, gliding through the foyer to poke her head in the mailroom before swinging round to face them, “and Mr. Turco. Back again?”

Turco released Laura Grobian and fastened on Ruth. First he shifted his head, then swiveled his torso and pivoted his legs, and Ruth couldn’t help thinking of a chameleon drawing a bead on an insect. He paused a moment, as if trying to place her, and then he took a step forward and held up the object—it was cotton, she saw, a garment of some kind—he’d been waving at Laura Grobian. “I was just telling the lady here that this whole thing with the illegal is making us look pretty bad, but not to worry—we’ve got his number now.”

The veins stood out in Turco’s neck. The camouflage shirt clung to his chest and arms like body paint and he’d obviously worked on that penetrating stare, a little man striving for an effect. Ruth couldn’t help herself. “No Donna Summer?”

A flash of anger flattened his eyes, but it passed. He took another step forward, invading her space. “Leg snares,” he said, and he unfurled the garment in his hand: it was a designer T-shirt with a chic name splashed across the breast. “And this is the bait—this and a couple pairs of Guess? jeans, maybe some scarves and T-shirts with shit like Be Happy

and Keep On Truckin’ printed on them. Anything in English. The Nips are suckers for it.”

“Excuse me,” Laura Grobian whispered, and then she was out the door and into the golden embrace of the afternoon sun. Turco never even turned his head. He just stood there, inches from Ruth, veins jumping in his neck, his eyes locked on hers, “it’ll work,” he said. “Trust me.”