Monica Kimball looked at the thumb for a long moment. Then she began to laugh, a dry, startled, crackling laugh, like somebody stepping on a stick in a quiet wood.
"I've been buying jewelry for twenty-six years," she said, "and every single person who has ever sat across a table from me has told me they've seen everything. Mr. Corso, I'll take the bus, the doughnuts, the trumpet bracelet, and this thing." She held up the thumb. "Six stores to start, spring catalog. We'll call it the Night Bus Collection. And I want her name on the card."
After she was gone, Aldo Corso sat for a long time at the conference table with his handkerchief in his hand. Then he stood up and closed the door.
"Theda," he said. "Sit."
She sat.
"I have been talking to my brother," he said. "Since last month. In New York. Sergio wants a designer in the Fifth Avenue showroom. Somebody who can talk to the buyers, because God knows Sergio can't, Sergio talks to buyers like a man selling a used Pontiac. I told him I'd find somebody. After this morning," he spread his hands, "I found somebody. More money. Your own assistant. A view of the Empire State Building if you lean out the window. You'd start the fourth of November." He smiled. "What do you say?"
Theda felt it coming up her throat again, the coin rolling down the chute. Naturally. She held it in her mouth a moment and did not let it out.
"I say I want to think about it," she said. "Until Monday."
Mr. Corso looked at her as if she had grown a second head, and then, slowly, as if he rather liked the second head.
"Monday," he said. "Sure."
She was at Fox Point Video at five forty, in her other shoes. Nicky was already there. He was standing under the awning out of the rain with the black case in both hands and his hair, this time, dry and combed and slightly too neat, as if somebody had done it for him, and when he saw her coming up Wickenden Street he straightened up in a way that made her heart do something she decided to ignore.
"How'd it go?" he said.
"I told the truth."
He looked at her with real alarm. "On purpose?"