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it had been in Lacosta’s trailer. Latour unbuckled his gun belt and took the gun from its holster and laid it on the night stand beside the double bed. Then, stripping, he showered and threw himself on the bed. It was too hot to wear his pajamas.
    He tried to sleep. He couldn’t. He was awake and staring at the ceiling when Olga climbed the stairs and came into the room. Despite her sincere effort to Americanize herself, she still had a trace of accent. At one time he’d thought it was cute.
    “I wondered if you had gone to bed. You had a tiring day?”
    Latour shrugged. “So-so. And you?”
    Olga pulled her dress over her head. “As they say on the television, it was a day like all days. And I was here.” She removed her underclothing and sat at her dressing table to brush her hair.
    Latour watched her with sullen eyes. He wondered how he could have been so blind. Even during the first months of their marriage, Olga had felt no real emotion for him. Her simulated passion, the frenetic writhings of her beautiful body, had merely been part of the merchandise she had exchanged for a wealthy husband.
    The chump had laid his money on the line. Give the sucker a good time.
    It had been years since her family had had money, but she’d been raised with the idea that her beauty was to be the aces that would put them back in the yellow chips.And when she’d learned that her wealthy captain was just another guy, a guy who had to grab the first job he could get to put grits and side meat on their table, her passion had run as dry as the oil wells on which he’d built his dreams.
    Jean Avart had seemed to feel almost as bad as Latour.
    “I’m sorry, so sorry, Andy,” Jean had told him. “But according to the geologists I’ve consulted, it seems such things do happen. The drillers are stopping work and dismantling their rigs today. With oil all around you, they’ve hit a dry pocket.”
    Latour covered the lower part of his body with the top sheet. It seemed to give Olga a sadistic kick to flaunt herself in front of him, smugly secure in the knowledge that except for the infrequent occasions when his need overcame his pride, she was safe from further unpleasant intimacies.
    She fastened her hair in a pony’s tail and came over to the bed. The revolver on the night stand puzzled her.
    “Why do you put your gun there?”
    Latour told her. “Someone tried to kill me today.”
    “That shot I heard this morning?”
    “That’s right. And again this afternoon.”
    For a moment he could swear there was quick concern in her blue eyes, then decided he was mistaken.
    “Oh,” she said quietly. “Oh.”
    Latour waited for the next scene in the farce. He felt that Olga despised him because in her eyes he’d cheated her, but she’d been born and raised in Japan, in the old Japan where a girl was taught from her cradle that her first duty was to please her husband, that no matter how distasteful the act might be to her, her body belonged to her husband to do with as he pleased.
    One hand on the switch of the lamp, she asked, “Is there anything you require of me before I go to sleep?”
    “No,” Latour lied. “Not a thing.”
    Olga switched off the lamp and lay beside him. “Then I will say good night.”
    Latour had never been less sleepy. First the red-haired girl, now Olga. He wondered how much a man was supposed to be able to take.
    He lay reviewing the day and thought of his meeting with Jean Avart. “Oh, by the way.”
    Olga’s voice was small and low in the darkness. “Yes?”
    “I ran into Jean Avart today.”
    “So?”
    “In the café where I ate. He wants to meet Georgi. So he invited the three of us to have supper with him some evening next week.”
    Olga was pleased, as he’d known she would be. “How nice.”
    “You decide what night you want to go.”
    The blonde girl made a production of the simple matter of naming a night, and decided the following Tuesday would be fine.
    Latour wondered why