“Which leaves me up tight. I didn’t think he’d take them all but at least he could have turned me on to some other people who might.”
“I’m going to a party later on this evening”—he paused to gnaw on the wreck of his little fingernail—“where you might be able to sell them. Alexis Spinnel is having a party for Regina Abolafia at Tower Top.”
“Tower Top… ?” It had been a while since I palled around with Hawk. Hell’s Kitchen at ten; Tower Top at midnight—
“I’m just going because Edna Silem will be there.”
Edna Silem is New York’s eldest Singer.
Senator Abolafia’s name had ribboned above me in lights once that evening. And somewhere among the endless magazines I’d perused coming in from Mars I remember Alexis Spinnel’s name sharing a paragraph with an awful lot of money.
“I’d like to see Edna again,” I said offhandedly. “But she wouldn’t remember me.” Folk like Spinnel and his social ilk have a little game, I’d discovered during the first leg of my acquaintance with Hawk. He who can get the most Singers of the City under one roof wins. There are five Singers of New York (a tie for second place with Lux on Iapetus). Tokyo leads with seven. “It’s a two Singer party?”
“More likely four…if I go.”
The inaugural ball for the mayor gets four.
I raised the appropriate eyebrow.
“I have to pick up the Word from Edna. It changes tonight.”
“All right,” I said. “I don’t know what you have in mind but I’m game.” I closed the case.
We walked back towards Times Square. When we got to Eighth Avenue and the first of the plastiplex, Hawk stopped. “Wait a minute,” he said. Then he buttoned his jacket up to his neck. “Okay.”
Strolling through the streets of New York with a Singer (two years back I’d spent much time wondering if that were wise for a man of my profession) is probably the best camouflage possible for a man of my profession. Think of the last time you glimpsed your favorite Tri-D star turning the corner of Fifty-seventh. Now be honest. Would you really recognize the little guy in the tweed jacket half a pace behind him?