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'I have travelled widely', said Fielding Goodney, 'in the world of pornography. Always endeavour, Slick, to keep a fix on the addiction industries: you can't lose. The addicts can't win. Dope, liquor, gambling, anything video — these have to be the deep-money veins. Nowadays the responsible businessman keeps a finger on the pulse of dependence. What next? All projections are targeting the low-energy, domestic stuff, the schlep factor. People just can't hack going out any more. They're all addicted to staying at home. Hence the shit-food bonanza. Swallow your chemicals, swallow them fast, and get back inside. Or take the junk back with you. Stay off the streets. Stay inside. With pornography ...'

'... Yes?' I said.

I sipped my crimson drink. I lit another cigarette. We were in an Italian restaurant, well south of SoHo — Tribeca somewhere. Fielding said it was a mob joint and I believed him: brocade, matt light, as quiet as a church. I am a standard, no-frills Earthling, but Goodney, in his white suit, suntan and sliding blond hair, stood out like a pink elephant among the sin-sick funeral directors lurking and cruising against the blood-coloured walls. These guys, they seemed to walk without moving their legs. Just then, a middle-aged, blow-dried villain — the usual opera-star face, woozy with loot and mother-love — urged a neon redhead past our table, our good table, to which Fielding had been instantly and officiously steered.

Fielding looked up. He paused. 'Antonio Pisello,' he said, 'Tony Cazzo — from Staten Island. He was shot in the heart five years ago. Know what saved him?' he asked, and jabbed his own ribs with a long straight thumb. 'Credit cards — kept in a deck, with a band. Used to be a bad boy, but now he's pretty well totally legit.'

'And the girl?'

'Willa Glueck. Smart lady. A grand-a-night hooker, semi-retired.

For ten years she worked the streets — you know, giving head and hand at a dollar a dick. Then five years at the top, the very top. No one knows how she made the switch. It just doesn't happen. Look at her, the eyes, the mouth — superb. No evidence. I can't figure it. I hate it when I can't figure things.'

Indeed, lamentably under-informed, Fielding Goodney. He smiled in innocent self-reproach, then swung sternly and made the reverse V-sign at the watchful waiter. Two more Red Snappers were on their way. We ordered. Fielding held the crimson menu (silken, tasselled and beautified, reminding me and my fingers of Selina and her secrets) in slender brown hands, the wrists cuffed in pale blue and the gold links taut on their chains. Over dinner Fielding explained to me about the lucrative contingencies of pornography, the pandemonium of Forty-Second Street, the Boylesk dealerships on Seventh Avenue with their prodigies of chickens and chains, the Malibu circuit with the crews splashing through the set at dusk for the last degrees of heft and twang and purchase from the beached male lead on the motel floor, the soft proliferations of soft core in worldwide cable and network and its careful codes of airbrush and dick-wipe, the stupendous aberrations of Germany and Japan, the perversion-targeting in video mail-order, the mob snuff-movie operation conceived in Mexico City and dying in the Five Boroughs.

And I asked him, 'These movies — they exist?'

'Sure. But not many, not for long and not any more.' Fielding (I noticed) cut his veal in the normal way, but then passed his fork to the right hand to prong the meat. 'Come on, Slick, be realistic. If there was money there, it had to be tried... The girls were vagrants.'

'Ever seen one?'

'You understand what you're asking me? You're asking me if I'm an accessory after the fact to first-degree murder. Not me, Slick. This was organized crime, superorganized. No other way. Snuff movies— now this is evidence.'

And then his manner, the force field he gave off, it changed, not for long. He became pointed, intimate. He said, 'Clinching, no? Evidence that it