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and I’d think about all the stories. The favorite tale among the boys at Club Tee Hee was about a New Year’s Eve party at a big penthouse in the city back during the war. She was the hot ticket back then and she shimmied with every hood in the place, making rounds, drawing all eyes on her. Finally, one of them asked her to put her money where her mouth was. Story was, she threw her head back and laughed, saying, “I’ll put my mouth where the money is,” and made her way to every man in the room, on her knees. On her knees.
    Word spread through the party and, after everything, one of the mobsters’ wives came up to Gloria, called her a whore. With the strongest arm this side of Rocky Marciano, Gloria slapped the wife around, grabbed her by the hair, and tugged her against her chest, growling, “I’m the best damn cocksucker in this burg, and I got the rocks to prove it. Your knees have rubbed plenty of carpets. Where are your diamonds? Where are they?”
    Or so the story went.
    Now that we were close, I thought maybe I could ask her about it, so I did. I must have been crazy, drunk on the low lighting, the hour upon hour of cigarettes and shoes off, legs tucked under us as we sat on opposite ends of the sleek mohair sofa. She looked at me like I was a goddamned fool.
    “That was Virginia Hill,” she said, stubbing out her cigarette.
    “Hillbilly tramp. I got better things to do with my mouth.”
    I wasn’t really sure what that meant, but it shut me up.
    I shouldn’t have believed it anyway. It was hard to imagine that much hot blood running through her. If she had a man in her life, I never heard tell. The job was the life. Four decades of carrying money, getting high rollers to place sucker bets, moving swag across state lines, and adjusting odds for the boys working the policy racket all through the east side. She herself was proud to say she’d never in her life laid down a bet on her own nickel. I’m no chump. I know the odds. I make them.
    So, I followed her example. I wore the clothes, I did the jobs, I followed orders. All business. And no matter how many shiny-haired swains pressed against me, I never played around. Be the lady, she told me. They beat their wives, they beat their whores. I never took more than three socks from one of these goons in all my years. That’s why. Be the lady.
    “But didn’t you ever fall for one?” I asked once, sucking on a swizzle stick and hoping for some sign of soft in the old lady, something beating under the finely pressed shantung suit. “Sure, kid,” she said, eyelashes grazing her cheeks. “There were a few. I lived this life, you know. But I watched myself and I never mixed business with anything else. There were men, but not these men. No. Straight men. Straight enough. Men who may not have lived by the book but lived by some book. In this life,” she said, crossing these glorious gams, shimmering in the filmy light, “you can’t let your guard down. If you can control yourself, you can control everyone else.” But then there he was, as if on cue.
    ∞◊∞
    It started with the furrier.
    Her name was Regina, a little five-footer with a perky chest, a beauty mark, and a funny twitter in her voice, like a comic-strip French streetwalker. The fur shop in the lobby of the Ascot Hotel sold her wares. And the Ascot Hotel was on my rounds. On its top floor, in a series of connecting suites, high-stakes poker and baccarat games drew big crowds of serious players seven nights a week. There was a bar, girls, the whole bit. I used to make pickups there and I’d see Regina now and then. She’d make her way upstairs sometimes, on someone’s arm or to appraise a fur piece someone was staking.
    One night she caught me in the powder room. Twitching her nose as the party girls sprayed themselves with Chanel No. 5, she slunk next to me and made a gutsy pitch.
    “I love the mink-lined gloves you were wearing last week,” she cooed. “I could make you a hat to go