He had the right face for the job: long patrician forehead, aquiline nose, white hair, thin lips. The TV was over the bar and I stood drinking a beer, watching it, waiting for Lulu Fine in the pub off York Avenue. Fine was top of Mrs Pascoe’s list. Pictures of soccer stars lined the wall. I pulled some obits out of a file folder and put them on the bar. Thomas Pascoe was born in New York, 1920, he had English parents who took him home before he could talk. He looked good for going on eighty. He looked great. He came back to New York during the war, some kind of hot shot in the OSS. By the time he was twenty-five he was a hero. He stayed on, joined an investment bank. There was a brief first marriage, no kids. Then, later, Frances. They met on one of his trips to London, he brought her back to New York. She was a lot younger, but there were no birth dates. She’d covered her tracks that way. She’d been an athlete as a kid, played around as a journalist, decorator, hippie. The background bio was brief, but it read like she came from money.
