"Hi," the girl breathed, causing her sweater to stretch almost beyond endurance. "I think you're just fabulous, Dr. Foxx," she whispered. Her lips quivered.
"Oh?" Foxx said. She looked like the sort of girl who could accommodate him. Not many could. The last had been a screamer. Screamers were out.
"Have you read my books?"
"No. I'm waiting for the movie to come out." She pushed ahead of her a frowzy redhead with a road map face covered by thick layers of pancake. "This here's my roommate Doris. We live together. She thinks you're cute, too."
"Really," Foxx said, aghast. As he signed more autographs, he contemplated the blonde girl's mouth. It curved upward, like a new moon. There were bruises on her neck. "Where did you get those?" he asked,
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brushing his hand languidly along her throat as the autograph seekers moaned in longing.
"Oh. My boyfriend," she giggled. "He gets kind of rough sometimes. It turns me on."
That was it, Foxx decided. She would do. "You'd better get a doctor to look at that," he said.
"Oh, it's nothing," the girl gushed. "Just a bruise. I get them all the time." Doris poked her in the ribs. "Oh. Did I say something wrong? Doris says I'm always saying stupid things."
"My dear, you're enchanting," Foxx said. "Let me look at those bruises."
Her eyes rounded. "You mean you're a real doctor? Like on 'General Hospital'?"
"That's right." He eased her through the crowd toward the Rolls parked outside. "That's all, ladies," he said charmingly to the throng. "I've got a small emergency to take care of."
The women sighed in disappointment. One of them shouted that she loved him. He took the woman's hand and squeezed it. "Be the best you can be," he said earnestly. The women squealed with delight.
Inside the car, Foxx offered the blonde a glass of champagne. "I just love this fizzy stuff," she said. "Once I broke my arm. I took an Alka Seltzer. It felt wonderful."
"Your broken arm?"
She laughed wildly. "No, silly. The fizz. The arm didn't feel like anything at all."
Foxx stiffened. "Wasn't there any pain?"
"Nope. A guy I knew once-he worked in a carnival-he said there was a name for people like me. You know, people who don't feel pain. It's weird, I was always like that. ..."
"A horse," Foxx said, staring fixedly at the girl. She
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was everything he wanted. Everything. And more.
"Hey, that's right. A horse. That's what he said. Maybe you know him. Johnny Calypso, the Tattooed Man."
"Mmm. 1 doubt it," Foxx muttered. It was going to be a wonderful evening.
The Rolls pulled up in front of an awning in the expensive section of Fifth Avenue, and a doorman strode forward to help them out. "Oh, by the way, my name's Irma," the girl said. "Irma Schwartz."
"Lovely," Foxx said.
Irma was a dynamo. Foxx started with clothespins and graduated steadily through needles, ropes, whips, chains, and fire. "Does it hurt yet?" Foxx wheezed, exhausted.
"No, Doc," irma said, swigging from the bottle of champagne she'd brought with her from the car. "I told you. I'm a horse."
"You're a sensation."
"So are you, Foxie. Running changed my life. Really. Last week. Before that, I was into roller skating, only I broke my nose. I couldn't smell too good out of it, so I got it fixed. Before that, I was into rolfing. And est. Only I quit that 'cause ! didn't like people calling me an asshole. I mean, getting beat up by your boyfriend's one thing, but when a total stranger calls you an asshole, you know-"
"Didn't the broken nose hurt, either?" Foxx asked, yanking at her hair.
" 'Course not. I told you, I don't feel nothing. Then before that, the est I mean, I was into Valiums. But I started eating a lot. Doris, my roommate, told me how the guys at the Metropole was saying I was getting fat."
"Metropole," Foxx muttered as he dug his teeth into Irma's shoulder.
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"That's where I work. I'm a go-go dancer. They couldn't believe it when I wrote down on the application how old I was. Bet you can't guess, either."
"I don't care." He was on his way to paradise again.
"Go ahead. Guess."
Foxx sat up with a sigh. "All right. Twenty? Twenty-five?"
"Forty-three."
Foxx inhaled deeply. "Forty-three?" There were no lines on her face, no trace that Irma Schwartz had been on the planet longer than two decades. "You really are a horse," he mused. "The rarest kind of horse."
"I read a thing about it once in Ripley's Believe It or Not. There's some kind of drug in me. Not that I put it there on purpose or nothing, it's just there. Doctors call it propane."
"Procaine," Foxx corrected abstractly. His mind was racing. Irma Schwartz was too good to be true. What she possessed was worth more than all the nookie in the world. It would be selfish to keep her to himself. She belonged to the world.
"Yeah, that's it. Procaine."
"You're very lucky," he said. "People pay thousands of dollars for what you've got. A lot of forty-three-year-old women would like to look like they're twenty. It's an age retardant. Procaine's been used by the military for years. In small amounts, it wards off pain. It's related to Novocaine and to cocaine, only the human body produces it. In larger quantities, the drug can slow down the aging process. Theoretically, it can actually stop aging completely, allowing people to stay young for their entire lives. Of course,.that's only theory. It's much too rare to use in quantities like that."
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"Well, how do you like that?" irma said, "i got something floating around inside me that's worth money."
"Lots of money," Foxx said. "Any clinic in Europe would pay a fortune for the procaine in your system."
"Yeah?" Irma brightened. "Maybe I can sell some. I mean, I got lots, right?"
Foxx smiled. "I'm afraid that would be impossible. You'd have to be dead to donate it."