Interface

They ended up conversing for more than an hour. Cozzano had a penchant for anecdotes and he told several of them. Toward the end of the evening, Eleanor could tell that this was begi

Eleanor wasn't quite sure why. Cozzano liked to talk, but this was not senile rambling by any means. It didn't make Eleanor uncomfortable. He told his stories concisely and they always had a point that was germane to the conversation. But all they did was make Mary Catherine agitated.

It looked to Eleanor as though father and daughter had some talking to do, and so finally, a little after one in the morning, she excused herself, insisting that she could find her own way down to the lobby and back to her own hotel. She wanted to enjoy her last evening of freedom before her fulltime Secret Service contingent kicked in the following morning.

The elevator came quickly - demand was low at this time of the morning - and she climbed on and punched the button for the lobby. When the doors closed, she found herself alone in a room for the first time since Mary Catherine had come to see her earlier that day. She was exhausted. She dropped her tote bag on the floor, sagged against the wall of the elevator, closed her eyes, and heaved an enormous sigh.

This was the type of pressure she'd never known before. Since her first meeting with Cozzano earlier today, not a second had gone by without her photograph being taken. It boggled the mind to think about a lifestyle in which you could never pick your nose, never allow your hair or your face to get messy.

The elevator slowed. Eleanor opened one eye a crack and saw that they were passing the tenth floor. She closed her eyes again, content to spend another few minutes relaxing before she exited back into public life again - no doubt, photographers would be waiting on the sidewalk.

The doors opened and Eleanor sensed someone climbing on board. Remembering that she was now a role model, she forced herself to open her eyes and stand up straight. It was a thin man in a suit. He had very short hair and burning, hyperactive eyes. He was staring at her. His eyes dropped to her tote bag.

"Whatcha got there?" he said, brusquely.

"My stuff," she said, unable to come up with anything more eloquent at this time of the morning.

"What's this?" he said, bending over and reaching for it.

The tote bag was just a cheap freebie given to by her travel agent in Alexandria. Eleanor had brought it along precisely because it was so flimsy that it could be wadded up and stuffed into other luggage. Tonight it had come in handy for carrying a change of clothes. Right now she was wearing jeans and an old sweatshirt with TOWSON STATE printed across the front. Her party dress, jewelry, and purse were all in the tote bag. The purse was on top. As the man in the suit bent down, she followed his gaze, and saw that the strap of the purse - a heavy gold-plated chain, a la Chanel - was dangling out. His hand reached out, quick as a snake, grabbed the chain, and yanked, taking the purse out with it.

"Hey!" she said, and grabbed at the chain. But he yanked the purse away as her hand was closing around it, ripping it out of her hand and bending a couple of nails back.

She'd heard of these guys: well-dressed thieves who wandered around in posh hotels late at night, snatching purses and picking pockets. They'd be in the lobby any second and then this guy would be in trouble. "Goddamn it," she said, and kicked him in the knee.

"You bitch," he said. He bent down, got one shoulder into her solar plexus, and used the thrust of both legs to body-slam her into the wall of the elevator. Her head snapped backward against the wall, which didn't cause any serious damage but did leave her disoriented; she slid down the wall and collapsed to the floor with her legs sprawling, and realized that she could not draw a breath.

The man loomed in front of the elevator's control panel. He had pulled out a huge keychain, the kind that's attached to a spring-loaded reel on the belt, and shoved a tubular key into the switch at the base of the panel. He rotated the switch one notch and then pressed the button beneath the one for the lobby.

The door opened a moment later. This was not the lobby of the hotel: she saw barren concrete walls, harshly illuminated with cheap industrial lights, and steel doors with numbers painted on them. The man turned the key switch one more time and the elevator froze in position with the doors open. She still couldn't hardly breathe. This was the first time she'd had the wind knocked out of her since the second grade.

"Get out," the man said, reaching down to grab her wrist. He yanked hard and trudged out into the corridor. He wasn't so much helping her to her feet as he was dragging her over the floor. Eleanor hardly cared; the lack of oxygen was a more immediate concern than this guy's bad ma

Finally she drew in a breath. Her lungs had constricted, her airway was clenched shut, and the air passing through it made an ugly sobbing noise. But it felt good. She forced that breath out and drew in another one. Color vision returned. Her panic subsided.

In the meantime, a couple of other men in suits had stepped to the door, grabbed her arms, hauled her up off the floor, and dragged her into the room. They sat her down on a chair. The room contained four cheap steel desks, chairs to go with them, a couch, and a table with a coffee machine. In the corner was some kind of communications setup: a phone switchboard and a two-way radio.

Eleanor closed her eyes and just concentrated on breathing for a while. But when she closed her eyes, her head began to swim around; she was still dizzy from having been slammed into the wall. She kept her eyes open just enough to get a strong visual fix on one object: a cheesy pinup of a woman with huge breasts, dressed half in a cop uniform and half in sexy lingerie, a pistol stuck into the band of her fishnet stockings, dangling a set of handcuffs from her finger.

Finally she recovered enough to get pissed. "What the hell is going on here?" she said, and rose from her chair. But someone gripped the collar of her sweatshirt from behind, twisted it tight around her neck, and jerked her back down into the chair. "Shut up, sister," a voice said. "You should know better than to make trouble."

Then they grabbed her arms and pulled them around behind her back, behind the back of the chair. She heard a high zipping noise and felt something go tight around her wrists: plastic handcuffs. She couldn't move her arms.

"Would you guys mind telling me who the hell you are?" she said.

They ignored her. The man in the suit who had confronted her in the elevator went over to the telephone, punched a couple of buttons, and spoke: "Yeah, this is Moore in Security. We have apprehended a black female carrying a bag with someone's purse and some jewelry. She is intoxicated, violent and disorderly. Have you had any complaints of missing property from any of your guests tonight?"

He listened for a moment. "Okay. Well, it's possible she hit one of the other hotels on the block and just got here. You want to phone some of the others and see if they've had any problems?"

By now, the entire contents of Eleanor's tote bag had been spread out across the table, and the hotel dicks were pawing through them, making lewd comments about her underwear and appraising her jewelry.

Eleanor knew she should have been chewing them out. She should have been calling down the retribution of heaven above. But she was so stu