Rivers of Gold Read Free Page A

Grille at ten. A good spot for me, because it’s practically a straight shot across town from where he knows I’m heading to now, and because it’s high profile without being exclusive, and downmarket without lacking class. He’ll give me the new speak number, I’ll get the word out to my Special clients, and add a Fast Forty to the twenty I just signed up from Marcus Chalk. I love it when my legal and illegal paydays overlap.
    Having attended to logistics, I turn to the not-to-be-forgotten matter of pleasure. L desires some time off later this evening from the man who thinks he is her fiancé, and could we perhaps meet at our usual spot around ten thirty, ten forty-five?
    This is how it happens.
    The Friesian groans up Fifty-seventh, leans hard left on Seventh, throwing my erection and me into an uncomfortable configuration against the armrest, and we’re on the downtown glide path through the neon hell of Times Square.
    Capitale is a modern temple to indulgent exclusivity; how it survives is beyond me. From the moment you pull up in front of those fluted columns, those stately carved capitals spelling BOWERY SAVINGS BANK (a charming holdover from Gotham’s storied past—nobody actually saves any more, not with a zero-percent interest rate), past the stone lions and stone-faced security thugs into the glorious main chamber, all Corinthian columns and friezes and mosaics and gel-tinted spots.
    Here, the children of privilege giggle and pose and sniffle and flirt, lit up by a hundred flashbulbs, for the pleasure of the leering older crowd that can actually afford such a place. In here, every banker’s a pasha, every fund manager a khan. This is the domain of the hyphenated name, indoor shades, and hectares of pampered, succulent, magazine-quality flesh. It will either turn your stomach or make you hard. Or both.
    This is where I live, by choice as well as by necessity. I may not always be thrilled with it either, but I’ve learned to go with the flow.
    This is the great fluid confluence of endless possibility.
    Let the Games Begin.
    I’m needing some high-octane fuel after that meet at Shelley’s, so I join the horde by the long draped bar, behind a gazelle in sandals with straps reaching all the way up beneath her short pleated skirt. By the time we get our drinks, I’ve already forgotten her name. She waves a kiwirita around while I carefully balance a massive double Mumbai martini for the obligatory exchange of digital cards. Here, unlike the Outside, it’s permissible, even encouraged, to gawk (whereas Outside we all studiously avoid making eye contact at all costs; these days, it can get you killed). So my less-than-surreptitious appraisal of her décolletage and gluteal musculature does not earn me a kiwirita shower.
    It’s not long before I see the first familiar face, and the gazelle apparently doesn’t like the company because she’s gone with an audible Nice meeting you and a muted Call me before I sit down at one of the tables along the perimeter of the dance floor (deejays only tonight, but it’s too early for this crowd to achieve the requisite chemical boost for a floor show). It’s the usual rogues’ gallery tonight: here’s Luigi, and Chas, and Euan and Timo, and Joss and Tory and Dylan and Siobhan. These are my clients, for better or worse.
    â€”I didn’t think you’d all be out on a Tuesday, I offer from behind my Mumbai.
    â€”Tuesday’s the new Thursday, quips Tory.
    â€”Monday’s the new Friday, adds Chas.
    â€”Wednesday’s the new Saturday, Dylan puts in, eager to catch up.
    â€”And every hour is happy hour! they chorus, laughing and clinking glasses and inadvertently mixing ingredients. The happy squeals of adult children at play.
    â€”Here’s lookin’ at you, kids, I intone, finally starting to relax.
    â€”So, Dr. Feelgood, pipes Timo, got the new number yet?
    Timo’s a