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out of the house. Sure, they had to get a little rough with the groundsman, had to crack him once and he lost some teeth, or so the papers said, but otherwise, it was as clean as they come.
    And my finder’s fee was a tidy treat. I bought myself a charmeuse dress but the rest I spent on her. I wanted to give her something. And I wanted to pay for it myself.
    I went to her favorite high-end antique store, the one with the green baize walls and full afternoon tea for customers. I wasn’t so flush I could match her tastes, but I knew I could find something and when I saw the letter opener, it said class all over to me. It was old, the guy behind the counter promised me that, and with his half-specs and his tweed suit, he looked like he knew what he was talking about it. He took it out of the case and set it on a velvet tray for me to eyeball. It was shaped like a sword with a sword’s sharp tip. But the handle had a fancy design in bronze, two heads crowning the handle tip, each with curly, snaky hair, facing each other.
    “Who’re they supposed to be?” I asked, touching the coiling curls.
    “It’s the same woman, looking at her reflection,” the man said. “Art
    nouveau. It’s an excellent choice.”
    “It might be two different women,” I said, squinting.
    “If you like,” he said, smiling as I took out my billfold.
    She was keen on the gift. Anybody else might not be able to tell, but I could. She looked at it a long time and a few days later I saw it in her bag in a pale gold sleeve she must have had made special for it. She used it every time she made her bank pickups, slicing through the paper and counting the bills out with fluttering gloved fingers. I knew I’d done it right.
    You see, I wanted to show her that I knew if it wasn’t for her, I’d still be stuck with my head over the ledger at the Tee Hee, postponing the inevitable roll in the sack with Jerome or Arthur for a shot at a bigger paycheck. She saved me from all that. She turned me out and you never forget the one who turned you out.
    But it wasn’t made for forever. I didn’t have her stuff.
    ∞◊∞
    The thing was, the whole deal with the furrier turned out to be bad business. It gave me a taste for more when all I could think about already was getting more, getting my hands on, and in, more. It’d been so easy and the paycheck so big. Why, I’d be a chump not to look for other chances, I figured. As much as she’d given me in the ten, twelve months I’d worked for her, I was already looking to up the ante. If I’d thought about it, I’d’ve been ashamed of myself. But I didn’t. I just kept going.
    Never fuck up, she told me once. That’s the only rule.
    “You’ve never made a mistake, not one, in all these years?” I asked. “Mixing up numbers, late to the track, one drink too many and you start talking too much to the wrong fellas?”
    She looked at me in that icy way of hers. Then, in a flash of the hand, she tugged open her crepe de chine jacket, buttons popping. There, on her pale, filmy skin, skeined over with thready wrinkles, I saw the burn marks, long, jagged, slipping behind her bra clasp,
    slithering down her sternum.
    “How—,” I started, my mouth a dry socket.
    “A state trooper pulled me over for speeding downstate,” she said, palm flat on her chest, patting it lightly. “Made me open the trunk, tapped the sham bottom, and found sixty K in hot rocks, each one a fingerprint.”
    “But that wasn’t your fault,” I said.
    “I should have been more careful,” she said. “I learned the hard way. The boss then, the big one, he watched while one of his boys did it. Pressed me against a radiator until the smell made us all sick.
    “I learned the hard way,” she repeated. “Now you’ve learned it easier. You don’t need this on your fine chest,” she said, fastening the mother-of-pearl buttons. “So don’t fuck up, baby.”
    “I won’t,” I said. “I won’t.” And I meant it.
    But he was the