“Only you and I know about this place,” I said, and nodded, hopefully confidentially.
“f*****g hell. Lots of people know about this place, but I don’t mind them knowing. I want them to know. I don’t want the skinny cow to know, okay?”
“The skinny cow?” Sometimes I suspected he spoke in code.
“Cass-f*****g-andra”
“I understand.” Oh, I didn’t understand it all, but I understood enough to say I understand. He turned to the doors again, paused again and turned back to me, also again.
“And another thing.”
The doors were really quite impressive. They were obviously solid, but seemed even more so by being clad in a sort of crushed velvet and embossed with heavy brass buttons in a rigid pattern, to keep the velvet in place, no doubt. It couldn’t have been velvet, but it had the effect of vel
