The Empress File

woman, with jet black hair and eyes that are almost powder blue; both her genes and her temper are black Irish. She does electronic engineering, specializing in miniaturization. She was one of the first to crack the new satellite-TV scrambling system and makes a tidy income on pirate receivers.
    She was lying on her side, facing away from me. I put my back against hers; the cat turned a couple of circles at my feet. Chaminade said, “Wha?” one time before we all went back to sleep.
    I LIVE IN a paid-off condominium apartment in St. Paul’s Lowertown, a few hundred feet up the bank from the Mississippi River. The building is a modern conversion of a redbrick turn-of-the-century warehouse.
    I have a compact kitchen, a dining area off the front room, a bedroom, a painting studio with north windows, and a study jammed with small computers and a couple of thousand books. I keep a brand-new seventeen-foot Tuffy Esox fishing boat and an older Oldsmobile in a private parking garage up the block. There’s another place, quite a bit like it, also paid off, in New Orleans.
    When I say the apartments are paid off, I’m not bragging. I’m worried. I screwed up. The run-in with the mob generated quite a bit of cash. I’d never been rich before, and when the money came in, I managed to ignore the annoying buzzing sound in the background. The buzzing sound was my accountant, of course, and she was trying to remind me that I lived in Minnesota, that 40 percent of every dime I earned went for income taxes, either state or federal, plus a couple of more percentages for Social Security and etc. The etc., I suspect, is something I don’t want to know about.
    Looking back, I shouldn’t have paid off the houses. And the trip to Paris and the Côte sometimesseems a tad excessive. I spent a lot of money on food, booze, and women and thoroughly field-tested a faulty baccarat system on the tables at Monte Carlo and what was left, I wasted.
    When I got back from France, I was still fairly complacent about the state of my finances. Then the IRS and the Minnesota Department of Revenue showed up. Neither exactly had hat in hand. Tch. I didn’t have holes in my socks, but I could use some cash. Soon. Very soon. Like before the fall quarterly estimate was due.
    “So what’s in Memphis?” Chaminade asked during breakfast, spreading marmalade on her English muffin.
    “Beale Street,” I suggested.
    “Last time I was in Memphis”—she rolled her eyes up and thought about it—“must have been ten or eleven years ago.”
    “A mere child.”
    She ignored me. “I went over to Beale Street, you know, because of the blues. I’d been listening to a Memphis Slim tape; it had this great piece called ‘He Flew the Coop.’… I don’t know. Anyway, I went over to Beale, and the whole street was boarded up for urban renewal. I found a big goddamned statue of? Who? Guess.”
    “W. C. Handy?”
    “Nope. Elvis. Right there at the top of Beale. They had a bust of Handy stuck away in a littlepark. Those Memphis folks got style.” She popped the last bite of muffin into her mouth, licked her fingers, split another muffin in half, and popped it into the toaster.
    “I don’t know the place very well. Seems kind of trashy, in a likable way. The food’s good,” I said.
    I pass through Memphis twice a year, eat a pile of ribs, and move on. From St. Paul to St. Louis is a brutal day’s drive. From there you can make it to New Orleans in another day if you don’t fool around in Memphis.
    When the muffins popped up, Chaminade spread a gob of butter on them, not looking at me. “When you get back…”
    “Yeah?” But I knew what was coming. I’d been brooding about it for a couple of weeks.
    “I’ll be out of here.” She said it in such a conversational way that we might have been talking about grocery shopping or new wallpaper.
    “We were getting along,” I said tentatively.
    “We were. Wonderfully. Up to a point. Then it stopped. The problem is, I’m something between number four and six on your list of priorities. The way I see it, there’s not much prospect of moving up.”
    “If you could wait until I get back…”
    “You could go to Memphis some other time.…”
    “I’ve got to go today.”
    She shrugged. “See?”
    “Obligations. A friend,” I said defensively.
    “I’m a friend, too,” she said.
    “You don’t need help.”
    “See?”
    Chaminade looked down the room at the cat, who was daintily picking his way