Discretion

The radio was playing something French with too many horns, and Belfie Amalfi was dancing to it in nothing but her pearls.

She danced with her arms up and her eyes half closed, hips keeping lazy figure-eight time, because a room like this deserved a show. The suite sat on top of a hotel famous for discretion, which Belfie understood to mean a hotel where the staff were paid handsomely to go blind. Past the open balcony doors, Monaco was doing its evening trick: the harbor laying out its yachts like rings on a windowsill, the casino lit gold, the sea holding the last of the sky. The night air drifted in smelling of salt and somebody else's party.

Conrad Ogeby danced too, if you were feeling generous about the word. He was seventy-four years old, naked as a statue and far less embarrassed about it, doing a slow rich man's shuffle on the marble: broad chest, silver hair combed back even now, a body that had softened everywhere except its opinion of itself. He turned her under his arm like the room belonged to him, which it did, for the week.

Someone knocked.

"Come in," Conrad called, in the voice he used on boards of directors, and did not reach for a robe.

Belfie laughed out loud. The door opened and a boy in a white jacket wheeled in the cart, eyes pinned to the champagne bucket as though the bottle might bolt. He was young and scrubbed and trained, and the training was losing. A blush climbed him from the collar up.

"Your champagne, sir," he said, to the carpet.

"Good man," said Conrad, still swaying.

The boy set the bucket down with great ceremony, bowed at nobody's feet, and made for the door at a speed just under running. Belfie struck a pose for the departure, arm up, hip out, a calendar girl wearing nothing but June, purely for the joy of hearing the door close faster.

"Mercy buckets!" she called after him, which was French.

"You're going to ruin that boy," Conrad said.

"He should be so lucky." She lifted the bottle out of the ice and turned it, dripping, to read the label, which was in more French. "He didn't even open it."

"He values his life. Bring it here."

"Leave it to me, Daddy." She carried it back toward him with the bottle held high like a torch. "I'll serve you."

The wire cage fought her nails, which were long, lacquered, pink as the inside of a shell, and useless against anything practical. The bottle was heavier than it looked and slick from the ice, and she wrestled it at the height of her chest, laughing, telling him meanwhile that in Kansas City she had once seen a bellhop open champagne with a saber, or possibly a letter opener, the story improving as it went — and her thumbs got under the cork, and the cork went off like a shot.

It caught Conrad over the left eyebrow.

He sat down on the marble — not fell, sat, like a coat slipping its hook — and then he lay back the rest of the way, gently, as if the floor had made him an offer.

"Conrad!"

The room went very precise. She was on her knees in the spilled ice without knowing how she got there, champagne foaming itself flat across the marble, the radio carrying on, all horns, horns, horns. His eyes were shut. His mouth was open. And for the length of one held horn note he was not Conrad at all — he was what a stranger would see, what the boy in the white jacket would see if she screamed for help: an old man down on a hotel floor, not moving. The lamplight found every line in his face at once. His chest looked thin. Belfie knelt over him with her heart slamming and understood, for three ugly seconds, exactly how old seventy-four was.

Then his chest heaved, and the laugh came up out of him like water finding a drain.

He laughed lying flat on his back on a marble floor with a lump rising over his eyebrow. He laughed until he had to hold his ribs. Belfie grabbed his hand and pressed it to his head and rubbed, hard, as if she could rub the whole minute backward.

"Are you all right?" she said. "Conrad. Are you all right?"

He took his time. The blue eyes opened, watering, delighted.

"What a rush," he said. "Again, please."

She slapped his shoulder. "You drunken fool." Her hand was shaking. She hid it by slapping him again.

She got him up, and the obscene thing was how easily he came, lighter than a man half his age. She steered him to the sofa and poured two glasses, hers to the brim. She pressed his into the big veined hand.

"Here. Drink some more champagne. It'll bring you back to your senses."

"That's your medical opinion."

"I'm very advanced."

He raised his glass to her. The lump over his eyebrow was coming along nicely, a small red opinion of the evening. "To surviving you," he said.

They drank, and then the horns swung into something slower, and he set his glass down and held out his hand, and they were dancing again, closer now. His hands went traveling: her waist, the flare of her hips, the long line of her back, every curve appraised and approved like he was walking a property he had no intention of selling. He kissed her, deep, and she came up on her toes into it, and somewhere mid-kiss the bottle got knocked from the table and landed on the carpet and lay there pouring itself out.

Neither of them saved it.

He walked her backward through the balcony doors and the night took them: warm air off the sea, the whole principality glittering below, wind lifting her hair off her shoulders and dropping it. He smelled of champagne and barbershop cologne and the sun he'd taken on the terrace that morning. He held her out at arm's length, taking all of her in, pearls to painted toes.

"You're so beautiful," he said.

He said it plainly, the showman gone out of his voice, and that was the version that always got her.

"Am I really?" She let the question swing on its hinge a beat, then let him off. "Thanks, handsome."

He lifted her — seventy-four years old and he lifted her, a grunt and a laugh and up — and set her on the wide stone rail of the balcony, ten stories of night underneath her and nothing behind her but air. She put her palms flat on the cool stone and did not look down. Looking down was for women who weren't being adored.

He kissed her throat. He kissed the dip of her collarbone, the swell of each breast, taking his time there, then her belly, then the crease of her hip, going down on creaking knees he made no apology for, and then his mouth found her pussy and Belfie stopped having opinions about anything at all. Her fingers wound into the silver hair. The moan she let go went out over the harbor with nothing to stop it. The wind gusted up and took her hair again, and she arched back over Monaco like a hood ornament, and Conrad held her hips in both big hands and was unhurried, and thorough, and seventy-four years old nowhere at all.

Somewhere on the rock above the casino, a searchlight was making its rounds. The long white beam swung across the water, climbed the hotel face, found them, and paused, as if the light itself had been trained in discretion and was failing badly. Their shadow went up the wall behind them, two stories tall and extremely specific.

Belfie lifted one hand off the stone and waved at the principality.

Conrad didn't even raise his head.

They made it to the bed eventually, the long way, by way of the doorframe and a knocked-over lamp that survived. He lay back across the wrecked sheets and pulled her over him, and there was nothing seventy-four about any of it. She sank down onto his cock with a long sigh of arrival, and rode him the way she'd been dancing all night: same lazy figure-eight, same half-closed eyes, slow and theatrical and in love with her own arms. She lifted her hair off her neck with both hands and let it fall. She posed. He gripped her hips like the last rail on earth and said her name once, hoarse, "Belfie," and gasped, mouth wide —

— and the toss of her hand sent something small and pink and lacquered spinning off the end of her finger, and his gasp swallowed it.

His whole body changed underneath her. He heaved up onto one elbow, coughing, and it was not a polite cough, it was a deep wrong machinery sound, and his hand went to his throat, and his face turned red, then darker, and his eyes came up to hers, huge, and he couldn't say her name. He couldn't say anything.

Belfie froze on top of him with no single useful thought in her head. Then she was off him and on her knees on the mattress, whacking him between the shoulder blades with the flat of her hand, and he waved an arm at her that could have meant harder, or stop, or help, there was no telling, and the coughing went on, and got smaller, which was worse.

She got to the telephone the way people get places in dreams, without any floor under her. Receiver up. Finger in the dial. Standing naked in the middle of a five-hundred-franc-a-night suite trying to compose a sentence for the operator: that a man was dying, that a man was choking, that a man was choking on a fingernail, that she —

Behind her, Conrad gave one enormous wrenching cough, and something small ticked off the headboard and skittered away across the marble.

The room went quiet except for his breathing, in long scraping hauls, and the radio, which had moved on to something with an accordion, very pleased with itself.

She put the receiver back with both hands, carefully, as if it were the dangerous thing in the room. Then she was on the bed with his face in her hands.

"Are you all right?" Her voice came out wrong. "Conrad. Look at me. Are you all right?"

He took his time, same as on the floor. He sat propped against the headboard, one big hand flat on his own chest, feeling what his heart was doing in there. She could see it for herself, the jump of it in his neck. His color came back down through the reds toward something human. Out on the water, a boat horn said something low to another boat horn.

Then he laughed. Calm, low, entirely to himself, like a man finding money in a coat.

"What the fuck," he said, "was that."

She held up her right hand and spread the fingers. Nine long pearl-pink nails. One naked nailbed, blunt as a child's.

They considered the hand together. Then they were both laughing, helplessly, horribly, her forehead dropping to his shoulder, his arm clamping her in, the headboard knocking the wall, the laughter of people getting away with something and knowing it. Her eyes were wet. She let his shoulder have that too.

He drew one long breath and let it go slow, a connoisseur.

"What a rush," said Conrad Ogeby. "Again, please."

She slapped him — same shoulder, harder — and he caught her wrist before she could take it back and kissed the bare nailbed, once, softly, like it was the finest thing she'd ever given him.

That was the whole trouble with Conrad. He could make almost dying in her hands feel like a gift.