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great shape, girl. Go out and do your stuff.”
    â€œNobody’s called me a girl in twenty years.” She slipped on the black gloves and followed him to the platform, still carrying the blindfold. The hood was in place over her hair and neck. The clinging cat suit was basic black, but with red lightning bolts that gave her the appearance of some sort of comic book superhero. Miss Roulette, perhaps.
    The platform indeed was a huge roulette wheel, its diameter almost equal to a boxing ring. Close to a hundred players were crowded around it. Wanda stepped over thenumbered slots to a small turntable at the center of the wheel. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Judd Franklyn announced, “it is my honor to present the famed performance artist Miss Wanda Cirrus as the human roulette ball. She will blindfold herself, and while the wheel spins clockwise her little turntable will move in the opposite direction. She will roll off the turntable and reach her hands into one of the numbered slots. You have one minute to place your bets.”
    Wanda smiled at them and pulled the padded blindfold over her eyes. Then she crouched down, linking her hands around her knees, and waited. Almost at once the turntable began to move. She knew the wheel itself would be spinning, too. After several seconds, when she started to grow dizzy, she pitched forward off the turntable. As she hit the padded wheel itself her two hands shot out blindly, clasped together, and found one of the numbered slots.
    â€œTwenty-nine black!” Judd Franklyn called out.
    As the wheel slowed its spin Wanda pulled the blindfold from her eyes. “It is fate,” she told them with a graceful bow. “I’ll be back in fifteen minutes.”
    Dodson was waiting for her in awed amazement. “How often do you perform?”
    She gave him a smile as she pulled back the hood from her head. “Every fifteen minutes from nine till midnight, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday nights. The wheel action doesn’t stop, of course. When I‘m not on they use a white volleyball.”
    â€œThat’s unbelievable! Is this the wildest thing you ever did?”
    Wanda shrugged. “Once at a performance art festival in Boston I stayed curled up in a birdcage the entire day. And I crawled naked down a tube filled with glop. It was supposed to depict my birth. When I turned forty I decided it was time I kept my clothes on.” Remembering when she changed into her costume, she amended, “At least some ofthem.” She wondered why she was telling him these things that she’d never told anyone else.
    â€œIs this sort of work profitable?”
    Wanda shrugged. “I make a living. Off-Broadway I get a percentage of the gross. They work it a bit differently here, but it still depends on the business my performance brings in.”
    He watched her for the next hour, every fifteen minutes, as she rolled in a ball off the revolving turntable and stretched out her hands to blindly find one of the slots. Seven red, one red, twenty-two black, eighteen red.
    â€œThanks for your help,” he told her as he left.
    â€œI’ll watch for your article. If you need anything else, give me a call.”
    The rest of the night was routine. Thirty red, double zero, two black, seventeen black, another seven red, thirty-six red, eleven black, twenty-one red. Thirteen performances in all, nine to midnight. Five black, seven red, and the double-zero. Seven odd, five even. Only one repeat. She liked to keep track of the numbers and colors, seeking a pattern that didn’t exist. The big betting always came at midnight, her final performance, when Franklyn raised the limit from five hundred to five thousand.
    She performed again on Friday night, and this time after her ten o’clock appearance one of the bettors who was having a good night wanted to buy her a drink. “No thanks,” she told him. “I get dizzy enough doing this routine