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I’ll buy you dinner tonight while I pitch you the story I’ve cooked up.”
    “Sure,” he said, trying hard to be cheery.
    “Stop by the hotel at eight-thirty. I’ll be in the bar.” As I put my hand on the door I remembered the half-finished crossword I carried under my arm. “Hey, you don’t happen to know who shot McKinley, do you?”
    “The American president?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Leon Czolgosz,” he said, as if it were obvious.
    “Spell it?” I said, pen poised over the grid. He did so, and the letters fit perfectly, providing me with a solid framework for finishing the puzzle once I got back to the hotel. “Thanks, pal.”
    •       •       •
    The lovely Annick was waiting for me in the lobby, thumbing through a copy of The New York Review of Books and looking like an impatient young queen awaiting an underling. I stopped by her chair and cleared my throat.
    “Would Her Majesty care for a refreshment in the Presidential Suite?”
    Her air of cool detachment, I was pleased to see, evaporated and she beamed at me. “Absolutely.”
    Half an hour later she was pulling on her sweatpants and giggling about how mad her boyfriend was.
    “Why, exactly, is he mad?”
    “Fucking typical double standard, he wants to bang every girl he meets, but me, I’m supposed to keep myself monogamous. Fuck that.”
    “And how, exactly, does he know you’ve been unfaithful?”
    She looked puzzled. “I told him.”
    I’ve never understood the compulsion to confess. To stray, of course, (this will come as no surprise to the reader at this point), but what’s the advantage in talking about it afterward? I said as much to Annick and she shrugged.
    “The other day when I met you and skipped the movie Bruno went anyway, and because he was mad he picked up the girl selling tickets and took her back to our apartment. I got home and found them lying there in our bed asleep, and I told him I didn’t care because I’d just fucked Dr. Crandall from Ventura County . He didn’t believe me until I showed him your picture from the park.”
    Jesus. “Sauce for the goose,” I said in English.
    “My mom was thrilled when I told her.”
    “You told your mother you slept with me?”
    “I told her I met you. Bruno was the one who told her I slept with you. What are you doing tonight?”
    “I’ve got a dinner meeting. Give me a call on the cell, though; it might end early.” By which I meant I might be bringing Marie-Laure back to the suite.
    “All right. I’ll call. But I’d better not find out you’re out with some other girl,” she said with a smirk that might have signified anything from actual possessiveness to a wry acknowledgment of the ridiculousness of a twenty-three-year-old feeling such a thing toward a man my age. If it was some sort of possessiveness I’d have to watch myself; something in those eyes told me Annick was a girl capable of mayhem, if the circumstances were right.
    •       •       •
    Waiting downstairs for Fred, I talked for a while with the lobby bartender, who was hip enough not to let on that he knew I was an actor. I imagined a lot of celebrities came through the hotel, bigger ones than me, and there was a protocol to be followed.Fawning was for squares, not professionals who dealt with the high and mighty on a regular basis.
    He was a thickset young fellow with a brushy moustache and a nose that looked as if it had been broken more than once. Turned out he was an ex-boxer.
    “I saw Tyson bite Holyfield’s ear,” I said.
    “No shit? That was a sad moment for the sport.”
    “It truly was.” I hadn’t seen it, actually, but I’d seen Tyson fight once, and Holyfield several times. It was just something to say to keep the conversation flowing, but it stopped anyway, and I ended up watching a good chunk of an episode of Ventura County on the television above the bar. It was funny as always hearing Nicolas’s voice coming out of my mouth, but as always I was