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СКАЧАТЬ just fine. Swimmer, I understand?” Hef glanced to the television, where the skater twirled through her revolutions. “The agent said you’d hoped to compete in Melbourne, but dropped out.”

      “I pulled something in college,” Nick confessed, failing to mention that it was an ace.

      Hef swirled his cognac contemplatively. “Any chance you’ll represent us this summer in Rome?”

      “Doubtful.” The Olympics tested for the wild card, and while Nick’s ace didn’t help him in the three hundred meter, it would still disqualify him. And tip his hand that he was also Will-o’-Wisp, the Hollywood Phantom, mystery ace of the movie lots, and Hedda Hopper’s horror.

      “Can you lie?” Hef grinned. “I know you’ve done some acting, and it will stir up interest on Playboy’s Penthouse.”

      “I can lie,” Nick admitted truthfully.

      Hef glanced to the chauffeur. “Percy, take those to Mr. Williams’s room.” Hef swirled his snifter. “Care for cognac? Sherry? Port?”

      “I don’t drink,” Nick confessed, not mentioning that alcohol made it harder to control his ace, “but I do smoke.”

      “Constance?” Hef glanced to the brunette.

      She pulled open the drawer of the tobacco jar’s table, revealing it to be a humidor stocked with a wide assortment of cigars. She also lifted the lid of a porcelain box disclosing French Gauloises. Nick took one and allowed Constance to give him a light.

      It was good, and Nick took a puff while Hef gestured to the furnishings. “These used to be in the Everleigh Club’s Rose Room.” He took a puff of his own pipe. “Ada just passed away and we were able to acquire her whole collection.”

      “Everleigh Club?” Nick cocked his head and took a drag on the cigarette.

      “Chicago’s carriage trade brothel. Exceedingly exclusive, but gone half a century next year.” Hef took another puff on his pipe. “Of course, the Playboy Mansion’s my home, and our new Playboy Club will be a gentleman’s club, but it doesn’t hurt to have some of the gas lamp finery.” He took a sip of cognac, then handed the snifter to the blonde. “Thanks, Gwen.” Hef gestured to the foyer and the grand staircase leading up. “May I give you the tour?”

      “Please.”

      Plush carpeting secured with brass runners led the way to the next floor, which was nothing if not more opulent. “Got the place last year. Built for Dr. Isham and his wife, Katherine, in 1899,” Hef explained. “Supposedly Teddy Roosevelt visited. Let me show you the ballroom. We host our most swinging parties there.” He ushered Nick back up the grand staircase, Constance and Gwen fluttering after them like salt and pepper moths.

      If the second floor was opulent, the ballroom was beyond compare, the ne plus ultra in fin de siècle luxury, with tall Doric columns carved in rich mahogany instead of marble, matching paneling, a cavernous coffered ceiling with gilded rosettes and painted beams, a limestone fireplace large enough to walk into flanked with the sculpted visages of guardian lions, and, in the center of the sweeping parquet floor, a piano covered with a fortune in gold leaf, glittering like the hoard from Das Rheingold.

      “Ada’s treasure.” Hef looked slyly to Nick. “We had to have it. Do you play?”

      “Not one of my talents, I’m afraid,” Nick admitted. “Where is everyone?”

      “Oh, they’re around the mansion. Lots of bedrooms. Even rumors of some hidden passageways. Still discovering all the secrets.” Hef gave a wink as Constance and Gwen fluttered right and left around the dance floor in preordained orbits until coming to rest at the piano bench, starting a girlish duet of “Tea for Two.”

      Nick let his host escort him across the floor until Hef paused him midway, instructing, “Kick off your shoes. Just had it polished and it’s nice to get the full effect.”

      It was a bit odd, but Nick was not going to disappoint his host, and there was a certain childlike fun to sliding across the smooth wood in your socks.

      Nick’s ace was electrical, the wild card having saved him from electrocution by turning him into a human electrical capacitor. It mostly gave him the power to toss ball lightning, but along with that came an attunement to the electromagnetic spectrum. Nick sensed something: not electricity, but interference, a good bit of metal somewhere in the floor below them. He didn’t have time to make sense of it, his host beckoning for him to join him at the piano.

      Nick took a last puff of his cigarette, then stubbed out the butt on the plum blossoms of the cloisonné ashtray atop the Chinese smoking stand by the piano’s head. “Stand there,” Hef instructed, indicating a small Oriental accent rug by the crook of the piano a few steps back, “you get the best sound.”

      Constance and Gwen fluttered their lashes coquettishly, sharing some private joke as they continued their duet, but Nick did as he was told, stepping onto the accent rug. Constance winked, reaching up to turn the sheet music, but instead pulled a gilded lever.

      The floor fell out from under Nick, but not the rug, and he felt himself falling down a chute into darkness. He panicked, remembering stories of Chicago’s infamous Murder Castle. He lit up with a nimbus of electricity, but it almost as quickly grounded itself on the copper sides of the chute he was sliding down, the accent rug acting like the burlap sack at a carnival slide to speed his descent. Nick concentrated, letting his electric glow come only to his eyes, illuminating the chute but not grounding on it while his ace sensed something below him, not metal, not earth, but … water.

      A bell rang and not just in Nick’s head as he came to the end of the chute and another trapdoor sprang open, spitting him out into light and brilliance.

      It was instinct, Nick had felt this before, leaping from the plunge into the high-dive pool at the University of Southern California. Muscles tensed, hands placed together, not in prayer, but to part the water as he entered, steeling himself, pulling his ace taut so none of his internal reservoir would ground out.

      The water was warm and the pool was deep. Nick swam down instinctively, then up and over, surfacing at a distance to the strains of more piano music, this time from a black baby grand, and the sprightly chatter and laughter of a pool party.

      Women in bathing suits and a few men swam about or lounged poolside, the whole basement chamber decorated with African masks, dracaena, and birds of paradise till it resembled a mermaid’s grotto.

      The bell sounded again and the ceiling chute fell open, Hef coming down feetfirst, sans robe, slippers, and pipe, now wearing only swim trunks.

      He plunged into the pool, then came up laughing, swimming over to Nick. “Welcome to the Playboy Family. Thought a swimmer wouldn’t be too shocked with our initiation prank.”

      Nick smiled, teeth gritted with the realization of how close he’d come to electrocuting everyone. “Not shocked, no.”

      “You should have seen him dive!” exclaimed one of a bevy of bathing beauties floating like nereids nearby. “Didn’t even make a splash! Like an eel!”

      Electric eel, Nick thought but did not correct her.

      Hef laughed and the bell rang again, the trapdoor opening as Constance and Gwen entered the pool together, their diaphanous gowns shed like moth СКАЧАТЬ