. Hey don't you want my address?"It was too late. Velasquez had already hung up. Tom glanced at the clockand groaned. It was just after eight. That me...nt he had less than threehours to get an entire day's errands out of the way. How could he haveknown that his ability to perform under pressure would be put to the testseveral times over the course of the day"Velasquez, still in uniform, was knocking at the door, on time, at thestroke of eleven. Thinking he'd been called in to work unexpectedly,. I knew that for the hotel I would be going to I would need something sexy, but tasteful and elegant. I simply could not go into that hotel looking like a whore, even if I was about to become one. I immediately set to work selecting an outfit. My wardrobe had started growing a lot and it would explode very soon as I became a regular call girl with routine clients and even a few repeaters and one or two regulars. I contacted a t-girl friend of mine I knew who was an escort and who had visited. "Just... try to go along with it." I know I said before that I didn't remember much of the actual dialogue, and I don't. Just the general idea of what we talked about. That line, however, I remember word for word. Probably because she'd chosen her words so carefully to make sure they made sense in both the actual conversation and the unspoken one that had apparently been taking place for a minute or two now. She had stopped talking probably no more than a second or two ago, but when you're in. Soon he arrived at a cafe covered with purple bougainvillea blossoms around the entrance of the whitewashed stone building. Panos greeted him through the open door. The sound of Parisian jazz from the 1950s drifted seductively from the record player in a corner of the large room.He was Lorenzo's new compatriot of a certain age. They had a lot in common. For one thing both were writers. Lorenzo wrote romance novels under the pseudonym of Mabel Ethelreid. He was rather well known to English.