"What day is it?" I muttered stupidly, wondering where I had gotten the unshaven feeling and the little corduroy tracks I could feel criss-crossing my cheeks."

"It's Friday, you big dope!" Lucky replied, shaking me from my foetal position on the couch, where an oversized cushion in brown cord had made my face look like a Nazcan roadmap. I remembered having carried her in into my bedroom, and that I tucked her in just as she was, except for her shoes, and staggering to sleep on the sofa, which is about eight inches too short for me.

"I think I realized what I learned yesterday, Mister Master Detective!!", she laughed, handing me a huge mug of black coffee.

"What's that??" I asked muzzily, wishing I could crawl back into my own bed. Don't go there, pal, a small thought whispered.

"There's two pieces we don't know. One of them is that WE don't know something. The other one is there's something Condolezza doesn't know. Don't you see??? She thinks she's in cahoots with the baddest bunch of dudes in town, and there's something totally UNREAL abouther perception of it!!"

"After listening to her sing, I'm not surprised," I answered, swinging my aching legs down to the floor and trying to slurp up some very strong coffee. "Great thinking! All we have to do now is go ask her what she doesn't know, and she'll tell us, and we'll have the whole thing figured out!!"

I ducked as a hairbrush flew across the room in my general direction, and quickly outgrew my preconception about girls not being able to throw. It missed my ear by inches and embedded itself in the thin plasterboard behind the sofa.

"Get up!!! Get dressed!!! Come on!!!!" she demanded. "We're going out."

Looking at the hairbrush sticking out of my wall, I figured I'd best do as I was told. I carried my mug into the bathroom and splashed cold water on my face and started to shave. I could hear Lucky slamming around cleaning up my kitchen, humming a song about "dreaming the impossible dream..." -- which come to think of it was pretty close, seeing it was my kitchen.

Forty minutes later we were munching some baguettes at a sidewalk table outside an economy model of a French cafe -- across the street from the Aubrey, watching the doormen scurry around changing shifts. The Aubrey, now, there is a hotel for you -- once one of the finest in the fair land, now thick with plaster dust, palimpsest, and decayed opulence that can't pull itself together anymore. The carpets are the same ones that Fontaine trod back when; Crosby, LaRue, Mix.... they were all here once. Now they're threadbare and mildewed. Past glories clinging to the present with a thin, nervous grip -- an appropriate pied-a-terre for a woman of Condolezza Schwartz' stature.

We sat and watched, sat and waited....